I'm furiously packing and trying to tie up some details before I leave...did I mention I'm going to Guatemala.
I was clearing out my camera and found a photo I took of a fox sparrow from last Friday. We have a small flock that is bound and determined to spend the winter in the Twin Cities at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. They are for sure taking advantage of the native plantings that drop seeds all winter, but I think a case could be argued for the feeding station as well. Perhaps that is giving them the extra edge to survive? I've counted at least three, but I suspect there are four total.
By the way, I have to thank all the helpful followers on Twitter. Yesterday I had a sore throat. I suspected on Sunday that I was coming down with a bug, so I started to swab my inner nostrils with Zicam. When I wrote a Tweet about remedies, replies poured in. I tried almost all of them from honey, cider vinegar, honey, no dairy, honey, chicken ginger soup, honey, tea, honey, Emergen-C, honey, scotch toddy, honey, etc that I think they all worked (and left me with a minor stomachache). Sore throat is gone. I'm mildly stuffy, but no fever like yesterday.
There's still time to enter the Swarovski Guest Blogging Contest. You have until 5pm (Central Time) today to email you blog entry. Non Birding Bill and I are already sorting through some of the early entries, I can tell that this is going to be a tough decision.
The other day while we were doing a bee inspection, I kept an eye on Mr. Neil's finch feeder--they were chock full of common redpolls and pine siskins. You can see some of the tracking of pine siskins at Audubon's Great Backyard Bird Count website...interesting that they are calling it a winter finch invasion. I recall a few year ago when the thousands of great gray owls were in Minnesota, a couple of ornithologists' took me to to task for using the term "invasion" instead of "irruption" (apparently the proper term for ornithologists).
I did some digiscoping and digivideoing while at Mr. Neils and even set up a couple of different motion sensitive cameras. Check out some of the finch hissy fits I got with the Wingscapes camera:
Redpolls fighting!
More fighting!
And yet more fighting!
And even picking on a poor little junco! Here's a digivideo of some of the sqaubbling on our 36" long finch feeder:
Speaking of shorebirds, my friend Doug Buri is offering some of his great brown bird workshops again this year. One being a Shorebird Workshop, my buddy Amber and I went to this a few years ago, if you feel completely lost on basic shorebird id, go with Doug. You'll spend three days in South Dakota learning the 6 - 8 most common dudes in the midwest. The best part is that they are up close, so you can really focus on the birds, we had least sandpipers within five feet us. Doug does a GREAT job of making it fun and approachable and if you miss id a few birds, he works you through it as opposed to making you feel like an idiot. You'll learn that happiness is a summer mudflat in South Dakota.
Doug is also offering a Sparrow Workshop which I hope I can go to this year. He had it last year, but I was out of town. And after reading about Hasty Brook's adventures here and here, I really want to go. Looks like a brown bird bonanza.
Here's a video from Mr. Neil's feeders yesterday. You can see goldfinches in winter plumage, common redpolls, and pine siskins. The most fun is the sound of the hundreds of finches in the trees waiting to come down to the feeders. I love the up slurred, "shreeeee" of the siskins! They are all over the Finch Flocker!
DON'T FORGET:There is still time to get your entries in for the Swarovski Guest Blogging Contest. A chance for you to have a blog entry posted here for the day (and getting some of my readers a taste of your writing) and a cool prize while I'm birding in Guatemala!
Well, the weather has been above freezing and all of us just happened to be in town for a moment so Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill, Fabulous Lorraine and myself decided that it was time to do a winter bee inspection to determine how many bees and supplies to order for this spring.
Since we would be digging about inside the hive to check the food stores the hives had left, we decided to go with our bee suits on. With his hat and bee suit, NBB almost looked more like seaman from the movie The Life Aquatic than a member of a team of award winning beekeepers.
We have two hives that we are over wintering. Above is the Kelli hive. She is three deep brood boxes, wrapped in insulation, with two moisture boards (stuff they use in your bathroom walls to absorb moisture), and some newspaper. You worry more about your hives getting wet in winter than you do the cold. The bees can take the cold, but moisture in a hive just messes everything up. Kitty is two boxes without insulation and just newspaper for moisture. We were running a couple of experiments: for overwintering, do we want to do three boxes instead of two and do we want to use insulation or not. There are arguments for both. It's possible for bees to survive with only two boxes--fewer places to go and therefore the cluster won't be at risk of being too far from food. Insulation on the hive could fool the bees into thinking it's warmer outside than it really is and they fly out too soon and die.
Before we opened them, I put my ear up to each hive to see if I could hear them buzzing. I could! Kitty was not as loud as Kelli, but both hives were totally alive and had survived the harsh January temperatures so far! After we opened the Kelli hive, I held up my camera to the open frames so you could hear a hive buzzing in winter (you can see the green Kitty hive in the background):
We didn't dig too deep in Kelli, she was loud, just glancing at the top frames, she had plenty of food, and if we have learned anything, it's that the more you leave your bees alone to just bee, the better off they are.
We did make sure that bother bottom and top entrances were open for good ventilation. She was incredibly dry. Even her news paper was bone dry. The moisture board was working well and there weren't too many dead bees at the entrance and we could see a couple come in and out. The three box system, with insulation, and the moisture boards appeared to be working very, very well.
Kitty was a different story. She was alive, but her cluster was very small. If you look between NBB and Mr. Neil in the above photo, you can see part of it. Mr. Neil is holding a spray bottle, he sprayed some homemade bee nectar around them and we made sure that the frames closest to them were full of food, so if the cluster ran out of food where they were, they would not need to go far.
The cluster of bees stays together to stay warm. If it gets so cold that they cannot move far and they have eaten all the nearby food, they may starve before they can move to where there is food in the hive. As we moved the frames around, the hive was incredibly wet.
Even the newspaper on top was wet. There were thousands of dead bees on the inside. We took out a bunch of the dead wet bees. We have some concerns about this hive. Her cluster is small. If the rest of the winter is mild, she should survive. If we get some more subzero days, we're afraid that the remaining cluster of bees is so small it won't be able to stay warm enough. There's not much more we can do at this point.
So, I think two things to take from this are: 1. That white moisture absorbing material used for bathroom walls helps to keep a wintering hive dry. 2. That a two brood box hive probably could survive, but I don't know if we would do it again without insulation. We want to have six hives going this summer and we think what is going to happen is that we will split the healthy Kelli hive into two hives and that Kitty will most likely die and we will need to restart her.
Some good, some bad with the hive inspection, but it was fun to get a taste of our beekeeping operation. I really do miss it. I love birding and I love travel, but I think beekeeping is one of the coolest things you can ever try in life. It's more fun than I ever realized.
After we were finished we had to put the hives back together and put the bricks back on to make sure a strong winter wind didn't knock their covers off...and I can never resist working a Father Ted reference:
There's so much birdy goodness on right now, I'm too distracted to blog. I am currently surrounded by an explosion of winter finches which I started calling Redpollapalooza and another reader calls Siskagogo. I'll have more photos of that later.
As a matter of fact...I have started this particular blog entry about five times, but keep getting distracted by the winter finch activity. Focus, Sharon, focus!
We have had an unusual bird show up near where I volunteer at The Raptor Center. A neighborhood full of crab apples and cherries that several flocks of robins have been feeding on. Mixed in with those robins is a bird called a varied thrush.
This is a bird that is typically found in Pacific Northwest--it's a common bird for Born Again Bird Watcher (it's on the homepage of his redesigned site). But every winter there are reports of them popping up all over the US. It seems we always have at east one in Minnesota, and since this one was so close to where I live, I took a jaunt out to see it.
When I first arrived the trees were full of birds like the cedar waxwing above. We also found redpolls and pine siskins and after waiting about a half hour, the varied thrush showed up.
While waiting, I got to meet Michael who started the Facebook Twin Cities Birding Group. He seems like a cool guy and certainly has the best groomed facial hair of any birder I have ever met (sorry, Kenn).
We did have a great moment with a UPS guy while watching the thrush. He pulled up to ask what we were looking at. I let him see the thrush through my scope--he was impressed. He then asked how much longer we were going to watch because he had to turn his truck in front of us and it might scare the bird. We told him that we appreciated that he asked, but we realized he had a job to do and could go ahead. He moved slowly in his turn and the thrush shifted its position in the tree, but stayed.
Thank you, random UPS man, for being so thoughtful to birders!
Hey, great news for all you Birds and Beers fans. The regulars are going to host one in my absence!
The next Birds and Beers is Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 6:30 pm at Merlin's Rest!
Birds and Beers is an informal gathering of birders of all abilities--if you're interested in birds, you're invited. You can meet other birders--maybe find a carpool buddy, ask about where to find target birds, share cool research projects you might be working on, ask a bird feeding question, share life lists, share some digiscoping tips, promote your blog--the sky is the limit. It's low key and it's fun.
Curt from National Camera Exchange in Golden Valley organized it (a great place to get cameras and optics). What a great staff who are happy to help me keep Birds and Beers going while I'm in Guatemala! Thanks, Curt, you rock!
While I was in Florida, common redpolls were being reported in the Twin Cities metro area. Last winter they were showing up in good numbers up at Sax Zim Bog and Mr. Neil even had one at his feeders.
There have been a few hanging out at Carpenter Nature Center. When we were trying to band birds last Friday, we saw a flock of about nine birds. We were almost completely skunked, we only trapped one lone junco and it was a retrap. We would see a redpoll fly into the traps, but one was too light to trip the door closed, so we got completely nooged on banding any redpolls.
I just love the little redpoll goatee--combined with the little red spot on the head that resembles a beret, they look like their about to break out a set of bongos in a 1960's looking coffee shop at any moment. I went back to check what the Winter Finch Forecast had been for redpolls: "The Common Redpoll is a white birch seed specialist in the boreal forest in winter. White birch crops are poor in the northern two-thirds of the boreal forest, but seed abundance increases southward. In central Ontario, such as Algonquin Park, crops on white and yellow birches range from fair to good. It is uncertain whether the birch crop is large enough to stop the southward movement in central Ontario about latitude 45 degrees. Some redpolls, including a few Hoarys, may get south to Lake Ontario if birch seed supplies run low."
I guess the birch seed supply ran low.
We even got to see some redpolls at Warner Nature Center during Non Birding Bill's Winter Survival Birthday party. His non birding friends also found them cool when pointed out. What was interesting was that unlike all the common redpolls in the photos of this blog entry (which were all taken at Carpenter Nature Center), the redpolls at Warner stayed below the feeders. They only ate on the ground. I wondered if that flock had come from such a remote region that they did not know how to use a bird feeder.
After our time banding was over, I headed to a nearby spot where the St. Croix River meets with the Mississippi River. It has been a bit warmer and the water usually opens up when that happens. You can sometimes see some fun ducks. As I scanned, I only saw some bald eagles jockeying for position for some food on the ice. Suddenly, some friends drove up behind me, shouting. I had them reenact what they did:
Thanks to Jed and Linda who were the great to reference the blog post about my amusement of people who point out eagles when I'm after some small bird that does not seem as exciting. But I did actually look out and the eagles were doing something kind of interesting:
They were eating a Canada goose. There, are you happy? I took a photo of a bald eagle. lol
I joined Jed and Linda a little further down the Mississippi River to search for waterfowl and we found some coyotes on patrol across the river. There was a third, but it was further back in the woods. We got to watch the two above poop and since they were in the boundaries of the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, I guess we know who pooped in this park.
I was clearing out my camera and found a photo I took of a fox sparrow from last Friday. We have a small flock that is bound and determined to spend the winter in the Twin Cities at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. They are for sure taking advantage of the native plantings that drop seeds all winter, but I think a case could be argued for the feeding station as well. Perhaps that is giving them the extra edge to survive? I've counted at least three, but I suspect there are four total.
