Let's Get Weird With Honey

Here is a curious article about an interesting hurdle faced by some urban beekeepers in Brooklyn...their honey is turning out bright red!  Guess what the culprit is: Red Dye #40 from Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company.  So people who want hives in the neighborhood to contribute to the whole slow foods/locally grown/organic/natural movement are being betrayed by bees who cannot resist heavy syrup no matter how many native nectar rich plants are around.

Speaking of weird honey, Lorraine and I finally got around to putting some of our extracted honey into jars.  Kind of fascinated by our honey colors this year.  We usually only have light colored honey, but this year we have both light and dark.  Both taste fabulous, the darker honey is a bit more...rich in flavor, while the light is delicate and subtle in its sweetness.

I was not having the best day.  A project I have been working on for some time received a setback yesterday.  Every time I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel with this project, I get the rug yanked out from under me.  This time it's a financial setback on the project. Lorraine and I had planned on bottling honey today, but when I saw the snow and ice as I got out of bed this morning, I texted Lorraine that I was bad company and decided to stay home to brood a bit about my problem.  She called and said, "No, that's not what you need to do, you need to come out here and help me with the honey and talk."

Well...how could I argue with that?

We have some honey that has been drained from comb and then we have comb with honey called Ross Rounds.  Both are safe for human consumption.  We decided to get a little arty with our bottling and put chunks of wax and comb honey in our jars.  We'd then pour extracted honey over it.  It looked cool and it gives our friends the chance to try comb honey if they want but still get plenty of the straight liquid variety.  As we admired how cool the wax comb looked in the jars...we wondered what else we could put in there...like the above Buddah.  We were quite pleased with the results and wondered how far we could go with this madness.

I noticed a Weeping Angel figurine and told Lorriane that I wished we could try that.  She said, "It's my figurine, let's do it."

The affect was cool and terrifying.  If you have seen the Doctor Who episode, you know why this is the most terrifying and dangerous honey ever.  If not...well...I guess Lorraine and I seem a little weird, but that's okay.

The shenanigans helped put my project in perspective.  I'm always thrilled to rediscover that no matter what life throws at me on a long project, friends and beekeeping are a great escape.

Hooded Crows vs Cats with a Twist #birding

Perhaps tired of the slowness of the Cats Indoors campaign to take hold, a pair of hooded crows appear to be starting some you know what with cats: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNqNfxo42J8[/youtube]

I love the Predator soundtrack that was added to this video.  This may become a meme, as I see that someone has also put this video to the music of West Side Story.  I applaud the hooded crows and see this as further proof of corvid intelligence.  If humans are not going to stop the scourge of cats killing birds for "play" it appears the birds have begun pitting the cats against each other.  Brilliant!  Well played, hooded crows, well played.

Stokes Field Guide to Birds of North America

There are some new photographic field guides coming down the pike, one is the newly available Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Donald and Lillian Stokes.  I've sat with it for a few weeks to get to know it before I gave my review.

So here it is, if you are a fan of photographic field guides--you'll really like this guide for reference.  If you are dedicated to using illustrated guides, you will not care for it.  Birders seem to be divided on this issue. Growing up, I always preferred photographic guides.  I think my issue is that illustrators pose the birds in a way that you can see as many filed marks as possible on the bird and birds are rarely that cooperative in the field.  There's something about a photo that communicates posture, shape and color very clearly to me that an illustration cannot.  I think it depends on how your brain works.  But the Stokes Eastern Guide was my preferred field guide growing up.  I liked it better than National Geographic or Peterson.

The one downside that people might find with this guide is the size--it's bigger and heavier than the Sibley guide making it unwieldy in the field.  Some birders would argue that you shouldn't be taking a field guide out birding with you anyway because you'd spend too much time with your nose in a book and not enough time studying the actual bird in front of you.  So, it's sheer size and weight will make you want to keep it at home.

You get a lot of great information and photos for the weight.  The photos are fantastic and a marked improvement over the previous guides put out by the Stokes. The front is especially helpful using up close shots of birds in various poses to teach the reader about bird anatomy and what the authors are talking about when naming field marks.

The Stokes did a great job of using the photos for comparisons of difficult birds like greater scaup versus lesser scaup. I especially appreciated the field marks shown on the wing, as this is what I need when we do our aerial surveys. This

They even went the extra mile and included a colorized image of an ivory-billed woodpecker next to the pileated woodpecker.  This is definitely the most comprehensive photographic guide available.  The guide includes 853 North American bird species (unlike the previous guides which were divided into Eastern and Western regions) and also includes a CD of bird calls of 683 species in the book.  It's incredible how much birding bang for your buck you can get in a field guide now.  To get all of this info in the year 2000, I would have had to have purchased both the guides and the separate CDs for each region totaling close to $80.  Now, I can get it all packed in this guide for $24.99 or less.  Amazing.

This is a very good guide, I do not know that I would call it revolutionary. Revolutionary would be turning this book into an iPhone or iPod Touch app or even better, I'd love for this guide to be available on an iPad. This book might be intimidating to a new birder, but for someone who already has their toes in the water with a state birding guide, this would be a good "next step" guide. This is also idea for the hardcore birder who is forever searching for another guide to use as reference--you can never have too many field guides.

Do You See That Pauraque?

I'm going to start this post off with landscape shots that have a brown bird called a common pauraque in them.  See if you can find the bird(s) and at the end of the post, I'll put up the photos pointing out where they are and you can see if you were able to find them.

Let's start with an easy one, there's one common pauraque in this photo.

There's one pauraque in this photo.

There's one pauraque in this photo.

This is the hardest one, but there sure is a pauraque in this photo.

There are actually 2 pauraques in this photo, one easy...one almost impossible.

Most of my birding time during the Rio Grande Valley Birding Fest was spent at Estero Llano Grande State Park.  Partly because I love it but also because some of my other favorite birding sites in the area were closed due to flooding.  I went there several times with both Birdspot and WildBird on the Fly.  One of the target birds on the trails is a common pauraque, a nightjar that is similar to nighthawks and whip-poor-wills.  I've heard them and I've seen them flushed on roads at night in Central America, but I've never seen a roosting pauraque.

I knew people were seeing between 1 - 3 at a time and I was hopeful we'd find more than one.  We sure did, above is one of the pauraques.  With that cryptic brown plumage, you can understand how they might be easy to miss.  They are active at dawn and dusk and fly around to catch insects with their mouths wide open.  Don't let that tiny beak fool you, it belies a mouth worthy of any mother-in-law.

The park rangers and other birders were very helpful to point out the general areas of where the nightjars were being seen, but you still had to some work.  Here's the trail near alligator lake where they typically have been found roosting.  Note the white sign, it warns people to stay on the trails so the pauraques do not get flushed.  Note the pile of brush on the left side of the trail, that's where the pauraques were.  I suspect the brush was placed there to encourage people to stay on the trail and not wander in looking for the birds and inadvertently flushing them.

Check it out: Disapproving Pauraque! We found one right away and I was happy for that.  These nightjars were a challenge to digiscope.  Number one: they were in the shade.  I could get around that by using the timer on my camera and minimize camera shake for a long exposure.  However, the second and the most challenging problem was that the birds were too darned close to focus in my spotting scope!  The sticks that were protecting the pauraque roosting location blocked some angles and I wasn't about to move the sticks, they were there to help the pauraques. But with patience and creative angling, I managed to grab some shots.

As I was setting up the above digiscoped shot, I found a second and then a third, each closer than the last.  The third pauraque we found was literally three feet away from the trail. Finding the pauraques reminded me of morel hunting.  Once you find one, you instantly see all the other mushrooms surrounding you.  It was the same with pauraques, once you found one, the other popped out like an image in a magic eye painting.

Many of the pauraque photos like the above bird were not digiscoped because they are just too close.  I always wonder how many owls I pass under on a regular basis, not I wonder how many pauraqes, poor-wills and other nightjars I have almost stepped on in my birding travels.  The pauraques did seem to be everywhere in South Texas.  Birdspot and I were wandering around Frontera Audubon, watching a brown thrasher that was working some leaves, when all three  of us--especially the thrasher jumped with a leaf toss flushed a pauraque.  I wonder how often other birds flush nightjars.  And I wonder if they are irritated because of the scare?

And now to see how you did with finding the pauraques in the first five photos:

Here's common pauraque number one.  This one may have been too easy, that eye sticks out.  But I walked past it at least twice before I finally realized it was three feet from the trail.

Hidden pauraque #2.

Pauraque nestled all snug among sticks.

I realize that even though it's circled, this pauraque is hard to see, so here is a zoom in of the cryptically plumaged nightjar:

Even up close, you can see how well their feathers work in their habitat!

The one in the front is fairly obvious, but the one in the back is really hard to see.  Here's a close up:

See, there really is a parauque by those sticks!

Ah, nothing makes me as happy as looking for brown birds!

South Texas Redheads

These are some redheads bathing and splashing against the sunset at Leonabelle Turnbull Birding Center in Port Aransas, TX.  I took this particular photo through my spotting scope.  The redheads were not at the best sun angle, but with the splashing, I thought it was an arty shot.

It was a huge flock of birds.  At first glance I would have guessed 1500, but in the scope, the redheads just kept going.  We estimated that there were close to 4000 redheads were in this raft.  I half wondered if any of these birds had been counted on our aerial waterfowl surveys on the Upper Mississippi River.

Suddenly, the flock of redheads took off.

Something must have spooked them.  There are warning signs about alligators around the boardwalk, so my guess is that an alligator went for a duck.

One of the benefits of being one for 4000 is that you are less likely to be the one nailed by a gator.

Once the flock what in the air, you could really get a sense of the size and agree that yeah, there must be close to 4000 birds there.

I couldn't help but notice other species mixed in with the flock and making mental notes.  In the above photo there are a couple of scaup mixed in--can you pick them out?  I still crack up that even though I was on vacation from my waterfowl surveys, I'm still attracted to ducks in large numbers.

MRVAC Action Tonight!

I can't remember if I have put this in the blog, but tonight I will be at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center at 7pm in an auctioneer capacity for the Minnesota River Valley Audubon Chapter.  This fundraiser helps MRVAC with their educational programs.  I'm a big fan of this Audubon Chapter, when someone new asks me about a birding club with fun field trips--this is the group I steer them towards.  Nice, easy going folks, especially for those new to birding.

Bird ID Webinar Tonight!

My Beat Writer post is up over at 10,000 Birds.  It's about an interesting Cooper's hawk in my neighborhood.

And if you are asking yourself how did I know that the above birds was a Cooper's hawk and not a sharp-shinned (or any other hawk) there's a webinar that you might be interested in!  My buddy Clay Taylor from Swarovski Optik and I are guests on Johnathon Robinson's Identify Birds by Sight and Sound webinar.  Clay and I will discuss different birding tips (probably argue a bit) and you can ask us questions on identification.  It's a fun way to spend a Wednesday night, I think there will even be some sort of giveaway.

FourCast Interview

Man! A lot going on this week!

I flew in from South Texas (aka the land of the above green jay) Monday afternoon and hit the ground limping!  The limp was from the closing party at the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival...I twisted my knee while singing karaoke--yes, that's right, that's how hard I bring it to fake singing!  Boy you know it's a good vacation when you come home slightly injured.  I think I aggravated the injury I got banding birds in May, or perhaps my body is trying to subtly tell me that my table dancing days are over?

Monday evening I recorded a podcast with one of my fellow Geek A Week cards, Tom Merritt.  He is cohost of a podcast called FourCast.  They have guests on and we discuss future predictions.  First we discuss something that will happen soon, something in about a 100 years and then a bizarro one that could be millions of years away.  You can listen on their site or even watch it on YouTube (it's about 52 minutes long):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRL8Bc57AE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

It was a fun way to spend an hour.  When I posted on Twitter that I would be doing this, one of my nieces was excited and knew of the podcast, so I was honored to do something she thought was cool.