I just checked in at The Raptor Center about the injured peregrine falcon our bird field trip picked up on Saturday and there's some optimistic news: she's still alive! She has gone through surgery to repair her broken leg. Dr. Lori Arent said that it's way too early to tell how she will recover, but so far she looks good. At the very least, she's not starving and is being well fed during her recovery.
Struggle For Life In Uptown
We interrupt the regularly scheduled report on last weekend's hawk banding to inform you of an urban Cooper's hawk observation that happened today. WARNING! This post is not for the squeamish. In Nature, the fight for survival can be brutal and this post is going to describe an incident between a hawk and a pigeon. If you would rather think of all the animals and birds getting along like a Leo the Lion cartoon, you may want to skip reading the rest of this post.
I needed to take care of some grocery shopping this afternoon before we were hit with a line of thunder storms. When we came back from Duluth last night, you could feel the humidity, I had a tough time sleeping last and the air felt heavier throughout the day today. I left to go shopping and I as I walked past the side of my building, I noticed an odd lump next the bushes that border the apartment building's property. It suddenly dawned on me that the shape was a Cooper's hawk mantling over prey. There was white flash and I realized it had a pigeon and it wasn't quite dead. So, I dashed upstairs to my apartment for my digiscoping equipment.
I came back down and the hawk had changed position and was facing me with the pigeon. This was a Cooper's hawk hatched this year based on the brown and white plumage. It's also a female based on her size compared to the pigeon--she's a big ole girl. The hawk seemed antsy, and had a tough time balancing on top of the pigeon. When I took the second photo, I found out why:
The pigeon was still alive and struggling to free itself from the inexperienced hunter. I have always thought that Cooper's hawk was one of the worst ways to go--especially a young one that doesn't quite know how to use all of its equipment yet. Cooper's hawks squeeze repeatedly, and since their toes and talons are thinner than a red-tailed hawk, it's kind of like a death by sewing machine needles. When a Coops starts to feed, prey isn't always dead. Experienced birds can kill quicker, it makes it easier to feed and they don't waste as much energy. I started to debate with myself as to how long I can watch this, let alone take photos.
And then the pigeon rolled and was free (I took a photo but all that was left was a few feathers floating), it took off like a shot right over my head, the Cooper's followed in hot pursuit at eye level with me to the right side of my face. I felt a slight breeze in its wake. The pigeon crossed the busy street right over the cars, the Cooper's gained quickly. The pigeon raced over a parking lot towards some trees, the hawk caught up and nailed it in mid air, there was a puff of feathers and both fell to the ground.
I crossed the street at searched the parking lot. The young Cooper's hawk had made it to a small yard at the other end of the lot. If you look between the dark gray car and the yellow garage, you can see a small lump on the ground. That's the hawk. Don't worry, I got her in the scope:
The pigeon was still putting up a fight, although not much. You could still see it breathing the scope. The young and hungry hawk could no longer wait and had to feed.
You will note in some of the photos that her mouth is open. She was panting hard. I could feel sweat dripping down my back under my rain jacket from the humid conditions, I can't imagine what it feels like when you can't sweat, have to fly hard and try and kill something half your size to survive. I didn't approach any closer to the hawk, she was having a tough enough go at trying to eat for the day and I could get good enough photos from this distance.
As she was feeding, the pigeon finally stopped struggling and breathing. A few times the hawk would mantle--spread out her wings and tail to look big and intimidating and hide the prey. I wondered what would cause that.
I soon had my answer. A gray squirrel was investigating the situation, squealing out its protest of the hawk near its tree. I could hear cardinals chipping a warning to each other and robins giving their high pitched warning whistles as well. No one was happy about the Cooper's hawk.
The hawk continued to feed and then mantled one more time. This time and older gentleman and small dog were approaching, both appeared oblivious to the feeding hawk.
The man and dog were too much and the Cooper's flew away with its kill. I'm always amazed at what I spy in our neighborhood. I always wonder if my other neighbors ever notice this. Did the people driving down the street notice the pigeon with the hawk in pursuit mere feet in front of their windshield? I did feel bad for the pigeon (I feed them off my window ledge), but also realized that they hawk had been having a hard time of it herself just trying to survive. Will she able to continue to navigate the busy Uptown area already populated with quite a few adult Cooper's hawks? Will she last the fall and winter?
I will say, she looked so big compared to all the tiny sharp-shinned hawks we banded this past weekend. Speaking of which, we will now return to our regularly scheduled hawk banding updates.
Black Swallowtails Growing Up
Howdy, peeps, I write to you from a hotel in the lovely state of South Dakota. Tomorrow starts our shorebird workshop. I'll blog when I can, but most of my time will be dedicated to unlocking the id secrets of tiny shorebirds.
"You can't see me!"Time to catch up on the swallowtail madness. Well, if you couldn't find the black swallowtail caterpillar in the last post, HellZiggy did a masterful job of pointing it out. Here's an up close view of the cat:
It's amazing that in less than two weeks it went from a tiny thing resembling finch poop to this big squishy thing. You can really see how the stripes work to hide its lardiness amongst the parsley stems.
Right before I left for Indianapolis, all of our swallowtails were forming chrysalises and Non Birding Bill had to help with the ranching as well as maintain the blog. I wanted to try and get a photo of the swallowtail chrysalis formation because they make such interesting little structures.
The first thing they do is find a place that looks like a good spot to hang for a couple of weeks, then they scatter silk all over to secure themselves in place.
After they have their rear ends secured, they somehow emit two silk strings from either side and use that to help attach to the stem or stick. They lean into it and eventually shed their skin to look like this:
This particular caterpillar decided to form its chrysalis on a milkweed stem and the green and yellow really blended well with the plant. There were times when I walked into the kitchen and couldn't see it right away. I was so fascinated by the silk strings and really wanted to try and see how those formed. I had one swallowtail cat left and kept close tabs on it. Alas, I lost it at one point when it decided to go on a walk about and went behind the radiator in the kitchen, it eventually reappeared on the table:
It made its way to a candle holder in the center of the table. Now, one of the upsides of having a camera with a great macro feature is that you get awesome detailed shots of small objects. The downsides is that you get more detail than you bargained for. The candle holder and cat is coated in a layer of dust. The cat picked up most of the dust behind the radiator the holder is an example of my contempt for house cleaning. But, ignore the dust and not the silk coming out of the black spots--must be a special gland that produces the string that will hold the cat in place. Eventually, this caterpillar shed its skin and if you read NBB's entries while I was gone, you'll know it looked like this:
Whoa! What happened? It's brown instead of green? This the massive amount of dust the caterpillar picked up in the kitchen cause it to turn such a dingy color? No! As someone pointed out in the comments, swallowtails can form their chrysalis into either green or brown--the color depends on where its made to keep it camouflaged. I had read about this, and was hoping I would get my cats to do this--one of the reasons I let them out of the Butterfly Garden and let them go where they wanted, to see if they would change color--and they did! I love it when a plan comes together.
When I came home, the chrysalises started to change color. Just like the monarch chrysalis, the swallowtail caterpillars darkened and you could make out the butterfly wings on the inside about 12 hours before they emerged. See the black and yellow through the green skin?
I put the chrysalis into the Butterfly Garden and the next morning the black swallowtail had emerged, ready to take on the world.
I got a chance to get some photos and really notice the splotches of color on the under wings--so beautiful! Something interesting about the swallowtails--when they first emerged, they smelled like moldy parsley--beauty does come with a price.
The swallowtails took their time to leave. We placed them on the ledge, they pumped their wings and eventually took to the air after about twenty minutes. I tell ya', after this, I'm gonna inspect my parsley a bit more closely from now on. I do wonder how many eggs and tiny cats Cinnamon has eaten.
We still have a few monarch caterpillars left, but I think it's time to be winding things down at the Stiteler Butterfly Ranch. Now, it's off to bed to get ready for shorebirds.
Swallowtail and Monarch Report
I just saw a promo for Mr. Neil's movie on tv. I can't believe I know someone who wrote a book that's being promoted as a mainstream summer movie. The "in a world" guy is even narrating the trailer. Ooooooo.
Poor Cinnamon, first she's losing blog time to birds and bees, now she's losing her parsley to the black swallowtail caterpillars.
Well, the black swallowtail caterpillars are proving to be very exciting compared to the monarchs. If you recall from the last entry, I was having trouble initially identifying the cats because they didn't look like the photos of black swallowtail caterpillars in my books. That has changed in the last twenty four hours. Here is one of the caterpillars from yesterday.
Here they are today! Some of the cats are finally looking like they do in my caterpillar field guides. Two still look like bird poop, but they're growing up so fast. Another exciting development is that I thought I only had four, but discovered that I in fact, have five swallowtails to watch grow.
I broke out my Nikon 4500 to get some macro shots of the caterpillars. The bird poop looking ones do have some color when you look at them up close--little dark orange spots with spikes coming out of them. I think since the young caterpillars spend so much time on the top side of the leaf, the bird poop look helps them avoid predators (no one wants to eat that).
Then compare that to the more colorful older ones. They are very garish and look as though they would stick out like a sore thumb. However, I noticed that they tend to stay on the stems of the parsley and if we were looking at parsley bunched together, the yellow, white and black stripes would help them blend with the stems.
Even their little caterpillar toes are cute!
While I was taking macro photos, one of the bird poop looking cats, shed its skin to reveal the older cat coloration--it happened too fast for me to get a photo, but you can see the old skin right behind it. Freaky.
The photos might make the caterpillars look much larger than they are at the moment, so I used a pen as a size comparison. That is one of the older cats munching on some parsley--still quite tiny. I bet next week it will by ginormous.
The monarch caterpillars are still going strong. Almost all of my eggs have hatched. This tiny egg was showing signs of getting ready to hatch yesterday. You can see the dark head showing through the top of the egg.
This morning the egg was empty, the cat was out and about.
It had already fattened up quite a bit by noshing on some milkweed and leaving some frass (caterpillar poop). Monarchs are cool, but it's fun growing caterpillars that change color.
New Caterpillar Madness
I've been monarch ranching for awhile, but I've always wanted to ranch some swallowtails. Some species of swallowtail caterpillars feed on parsley. Earlier this spring, I found out that we had accidentally had a black swallowtail living in our apartment (we guess it came in as a caterpillar on some of Cinnamon's parsley) but I wanted to it right this summer, and find the caterpillar and watch it grow. Mr. Neil has some parsley (above) in his garden, so I decided to see if I could find swallowtail caterpillars on that. I find that locating caterpillars takes a long time the first time you look for them, but once you find them, your eyes become trained and in the future, they are easier to find. I sat down and studied the parsley.
After a good ten minutes of study, I found six small caterpillars. They looked nothing like any of the swallowtail caterpillars in my books. I looked up the general characteristics of the black swallowtail: caterpillars are found on parsley (check), on the top side of the leaf (check), and early stages resembles bird poop (check). But still, if you look at what a large black swallowtail looks like, the books show you this. This tiny thing doesn't look like that at all. Fortunately, with the magic of google, you can narrow your search of images on the internet and I found photos of young black swallowtail caterpillars and they look just like what I found in the above photo--success, we have swallowtails!
I took four of the six swallowtail caterpillars and put them in my butterfly pavilion. You can see a water bottle inside, holding a bunch of curly parsley for them to feed off of, right along side a water bottle full of milkweed and monarch caterpillars. Next to the pavillion is a bunch of milk weed in a different water bottle--those are plants with monarch eggs on them. I keep the eggs separate until the caterpillars hatch so I don't confuse leaves with eggs with the leaves for feeding. Should be an interesting couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, we've had an early sampling of our dangerous honey from the Olga hive. Mr. Neil told us to mix some of our honey and comb with some plain Greek yogurt. YUM!
It's like a decadent dessert, only it's yogurt...and honey... from our own bees--that's got to be healthy, right?
Young Porcupine On Solid Foods!
Unexpected Life Dream Realized: A young porcupine crawled into my lap--I didn't even know that was a life dream until it happened. This totally made up for the unexpected, pricey, yet oh so needed, costly vehicle repair today. His handler can now hold him without gloves and as I was taking pictures, he crawled my way. She said, that if I wanted, he would probably crawl on me, and well, he just crawled on my lap...I let him call the shots. No quills were fired. Whew!
The wee porcupet is about three times larger than the last time I saw him. We had the video of him nursing...now brace yourself for him eating solid foods! Today, the woman who is rehabbing him, gave him a piece of banana. You will hear some minute squeaks at the start of the video--are you ready for this? Those are porcupet hiccups!! Wahhhhhhhhhhh!
Here is the video, and trust me, it is SO worth all one minute and twenty-four seconds. This is safe for work, and as a matter of fact, I insist that you show it at work--who could have a bad day after seeing this? It may even prevent a firing.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y4cQEEyuTw&feature=channel_video_title[/youtube]
UPDATE: as of the end of 2007 he is now living at the International Wolf Center in Ely, Mn and goes by the name Clover. His videos are still a sensation on YouTube.
Caterpillar Parasites
This post is going to get kinda gross. You may not want to read it during a meal if you have a sensitive tummy.
"Sigh, will I ever be that big?"
Last week, I did my segment on Showcase Minnesota about the Monarch Ranching Class that I'm doing at Staring Lake Nature Center July 7. Non Birding Bill and I grabbed some milkweed plants at Loring Park and they were loaded with monarch caterpillars of all sizes.
Here is a leaf with small, medium, and large monarch caterpillars. I generally don't like to get a caterpillar as large as the one on the right--too much of a risk of a parasite but I needed cats for all sizes for the tv demo. Wasps and flies (and who knows what else) will lay their eggs in caterpillars. The wasp or fly larvae will feed on the inside of the caterpillar and about the time it forms a chrysalis, it will pop out. Yeah, it's as gross as it sounds.
After I finished the segment, I brought the milkweed home and set it in a glass full of water. I normally don't like to put milkweed in a glass of water, on the off chance that a caterpillar could fall into the water and drown, but this time, I'm glad I did.
The next day, one of the monarch caterpillars went on a "walk about"--a long journey to find the perfect place to form a chrysalis. It stopped at the top of our living room window frame and we thought, not the place we would pick, but safe enough in our apartment to chrysalize.
That night before we went to bed, he assumed the "J Position" and worked to shed his skin. We noticed another monarch caterpillar J-ing out on a monarch leaf. We tucked ourselves into bed, excited to find chrysalis the next morning.
Alas, I found one of our caterpillars shriveled up. It was dead--my fears were confirmed. If you look up at the third set of legs, you will see a bit of film--the left overs of fly larvae that had emerged from the caterpillar.
I looked up to the caterpillar that had been at the top of the window frame and found it had made it as far as forming an actual chrysalis, but the slimy rope hanging from it, showed that fly larvae had emerged--ew. All that milkweed chewing for nothing! The maggots emerge form the caterpillars when they are ready to pupate.
Since the larvae dropped straight down from the caterpillar and chrysalis, they ended up in the bottom of the glass of water and drown! Too late for the caterpillars I had, but at least they won't be getting future monarchs. Take that, you nasty maggot. I know you have to survive, just not on my monarchs.
Color in North Dakota
There appears to be a general lack of comments after the last entry. Non Birding Bill said the reasons was that all the birds were just brown, brown, brown, brown.
After all the brown birds in the previous entry, I wanted to post some of the colorful things we saw. This red-winged blackbird was in full on mating mode. A female was working her way through the cattails and he wanted her attention in the worst way.
Yellow-headed blackbirds were all over the place. I never get tired of these guys, they are just so cool. Their song isn't that musical, but I still enjoy that throaty screech.
Any farm that had a shelter belt of trees was just covered in birds like this yellow warbler. When trees are few and far between, a shelter belt is prime real estate.
Not all the color came in the form of birds. This sphinx moth was covered in a delicate blushy pink. Incidentally, this is the same type of moth that the eastern kingbird was trying to eat last week.
All the brown on many of the bird species serves an important purpose--they blend in very well with the surrounding vegetation. There's a nest here, can you see it?
Move the grasses and it there are two eggs. A mourning dove flushed from this spot as we were walking along. I've never seen one nest on the ground.
On Sunday, I did do some driving around before I hit the highway home. I was meandering down this gravel road following the map--passing some great birds. I kept following the map, came to an expected intersection and then noticed that the condition of the road seriously deteriorated...
According to the map, this goes on for at least another five miles. I decided to head south instead of continuing east.
Which I was so glad that I did! I came upon the uber colorful ruddy duck! I love these ducks and the boys were close to the road and displaying for a female lurking nearby. I think the male in the middle totally embodies this description by Arthur Cleveland Bent:
"He knows he is handsome as he glides smoothly along without a ripple, his saucy sprigtail held erect or even pointed forward till it nearly meets his upturned head; he seems to strut like a miniature turkey gobbler."
Bent continues, "His mate knows that he is handsome, too..."
"...he approaches her with his head stretched up to the full extent of his short neck and his eyes gleaming under two swollen protuberances above them like the eyes of a frog; with his chest puffed out like a pouter pigeon, he bows and nods, slapping his broad blue bill against his ruddy breast; its tip striking water and making a soft, clucking sound."
Hoo-wee. Is it me, or is it getting hot in here?
Anyway, as you can see, there were some very colorful birds in North Dakota.
Dopey Deer
While birding near Chase Lake in North Dakota, a white-tailed deer was running down the gravel road towards our group-completely oblivious to the group of birders watching it. It was trotting straight at us when it suddenly noticed the group with all the cameras--had an "Oh Crap!" moment and then ran away like a little school child.
I must admit, that's the dopiest deer run I have ever seen.
Colonnade Peregrine Banding
Yesterday they banded the peregrine falcon chicks at the Colonnade Building in Minneapolis. This week has been so insane--I just can't seem to keep up with the schedule. I had a business meeting this week and the poor woman and I were trying to get our schedules to sync up, I finally asked, "Dawn, do you want to meet at a peregrine falcon banding event?" Lucky enough, she did! I wasn't sure, she's one of Non Birding Bill's friends.
Here is Bud Tordoff, holding up one of the four chicks that got bands yesterday. There's a video of it here, you can see one of the adults flying around the nest ledge above Bud. You can also hear the adults screeching in the background of all the chick screaming noises.
There were two males and two females (researchers can tell them apart by size--even at 21 days old). Dawn and I watched a couple of the chicks being banded and then went inside to go over our actual meeting. As we were wrapping things up, the banding crew were coming back into the building. The person in charge is Jackie Fallon, who I know through The Raptor Center so I begged, "Hey, Jackie, can I come up to get photos of you putting the birds back from the floor the nest box is on?"
She said yes. Dawn gave an understanding look and I dashed into the elevator with the peregrine banding posse.
There were some maintenance people taking advantage of the absent chicks to do some minor repairs around the nest. Even though the chicks were gone, the female adult peregrine falcon was giving him the hairy eyeball:
Note the woman in the window well with the padded stick--to keep the falcon from nailing the repairman. There were some interesting leftover prey items around the nest:
This is a chord from the repair man, but under it is a rail head. I'm thinking Virginia rail.
There was also this pellet and I'm so bummed that it didn't turn out so well! There's a hummingbird bill at the top of it! Peregrines--eating hummingbirds? How? I know they are fast, but hummingbirds? Why? Wouldn't it be too much work for so little food? It's gotta be like eating a jolly rancher. I begged the banders to bring it in, but their priority is getting the banded chicks back in the nest swiftly and not getting hit by the adult falcons. It was not in an easy to grab area from the window well, and really, I was lucky just to be there watching the nest platform.
Which reminds me, I ran into HellZiggy and Hasty Brook at the banding. I got this photo of them while I was upstairs. Hi guys, sorry I didn't have more of a chance to chat.
While I was getting their photo, the male came up to see what was going on and to look for the chicks. The repairs were finally finished at the nest...
And the chicks were put back on the nest ledge. As soon as they were put down, they scrambled to the back corner of the nest and screamed together. The female falcon swooped back and forth as she could hear her chicks screeching.
As soon as the window well went up, the female flew in. Both the chicks and the female are looking up towards the well like, "What the heck was that all about?" Here's a video of the female looking over the chicks:
You can almost see her trying to work out in her tiny little brain what just happened. You can also see that she has an urge to feed the chicks. That begging cry stimulates the adults to hunt and feed the chicks.
We left the female alone with her chicks to get back to the business of rearing them. Ultimately the birds get a sense of "I won". They kind of are thinking, 'This big scary thing came in, took the chicks away, but all the falcons screaming and swooping frightened the big scary thing so much, the chicks are back."
Okay, now I have to load up the car and hit the road to North Dakota.