Okay, we need some cleansing after the Alaska post. There is an arbor in Mr. Neil's yard, it leads to his writing gazebo. A few weeks ago, Non Birding Bill told me that a bird flew away when he walked by it and it looked like a nest had been started. I checked a week later and saw what looked like a half finished nest. I wondered if the bird started the nest and then changed it's mind. Then Mr. Neil called two days later to report he saw a mourning dove on it--that made total sense, they build rather haphazard nests, it's amazing that any of the chicks survive at all. That's why it looked half finished.
When Kimberly Butler visited, she got the above photo of one of the adults on the nest. The birds will stay on the nest when you walk under it through the arbor, but if you stop or try to hold a camera, they bolt. Kim was lucky to get this photo, but hey if she can make celebrities comfy and at ease for a photo shoot, why not a mourning dove?
I was out the other day and found a position far from the arbor and the young are old enough to sit up high to where you can see them in a patch in the grape vines:
Thanks to the scope you can see the two chicks and part of the head and eye of the adult morning dove. All three stayed very still while I digiscoped them from a safe distance. It'll be interesting to see how much longer they will stay in there. The grapes will be ripe soon and once that happens, that will no longer be a secluded spot. Catbirds, robins and orioles will be in and out of there gorging on the fruit...and a few humans too.
"This past weekend, a delegation from the US Congress made a brief trip to Alaska, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The team was led by Ohio's Rep. John Boehner and includes ten other members of the US House of Representatives from a total of nine states.
Birders who hear about this trip are likely to respond with envy when we think about all the amazing species that the lawmakers will see, the abundance of nesting sandpipers, plovers, phalaropes, jaegers, Arctic Terns, Snowy Owls, Long-tailed Ducks, Steller's Eiders, Spectacled Eiders, and so many other beautiful birds. We might quibble about the timing of the trip -- after all, many of the Arctic-breeding shorebirds have already started to migrate south, with Pectoral Sandpipers and others already appearing in my area of Ohio on their way to South America. But still, most of us would jump at the chance to go along. I've been to the North Slope about a dozen times as a leader of birding tours, and it was always an amazing experience.
Unfortunately, the congresspersons may not get the full benefit of the birding experience, because they seem to be going with a negative mindset. In a July 15 press conference, Rep. Boehner said, "We're going to look at this barren, Arctic desert where I'm hoping to see some wildlife. But I understand there's none there. But I'm still going to look for it. If I find any, I'll let you know." Another member of the group, Ohio Rep. Bob Latta, was quoted by the Toledo Blade as saying that he believes the refuge is not as "picturesque" as some may envision -- that it's "not what they see on the news. We're talking about tundra." Of course, picturesque or not, coastal tundra is among the richest wildlife habitats imaginable during the brief Arctic summer. But at least some members of the congressional delegation seem to be going with the intention of proving that the wildlife refuge is not worth protecting."
After seeing Kenn's email, I got a note that Minnesota's own Michelle Bachmann was part of this trip and her report shows that she must not have had a pair of binoculars with her or even had her eyes open because she said, "It was flat arctic tundra with absolutely no trees in view. And, caribou and wildlife were nowhere near the possible drilling sites."
Um, hello? There were absolutely no birds there? Really, Michell, you didn't see any? Not a single thing? Okay, so maybe the tour was timed to be after the shorebird breeding, but still, there should have been birds. A lot of companies book tours to Alaska...have they been wasting birders' time up there?
So, any blog readers been to this area of Alaska? Would you care to let Ms. Bachmann know about the wildlife you have seen (202-225-2331)? I don't see this as a republican vs democrat issue. I don't even see this as a do we drill there or do we not drill there issue. I see this as an issue of--Did you actually have your eyes open while you were there issue. Don't tell the country that there's no wildlife just because it's flat and there's no caribou. That's like calling the prairie boring. There's more to wildlife than what is big and obvious and easy to see.
It's almost tempting to start a campaign of birders mailing her a copy of Sibley with Alaska birds highlighted.
Here's a list of all who went in case you want to check on your state's rep and their report.
John Boehner (R-OH) Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) Mary Fallin (R-OK) Dean Heller (R-NV) Jim Jordan (R-OH) Doug Lamborn (R-CO) Robert Latta (R-OH) Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) Steve Scalise (R-LA) Adrian Smith (R-NE)
UPDATE: Born Again Bird Watcher hit this before I did here and here. UPDATE #2: Ken from Rosyfinch Ramblings would like the world to know that he and FOX talked about this first. Here is his message:
"Not to steal any credit from Born Again BW, the scoop belongs to Fox News, which seemed to have been the first to report the story (from a more friendly perch), on July 16, and my Blog ("FLASH: Wildlife Have Disappeared from ANWR") provided commentary and a link to the article that same day, as did my July 16 post on BIRDCHAT."
I'm working on a bee book, but in the summer I find I get so easily distracted. Today, I arrived at the Science Museum to do some park rangering at the Mississippi River Visitor's Center and discovered that I was mistaken, I'm not working 8am - 4:30pm, I'm working 5:30pm - 9:30pm. I was going to take the bus back home to get some writing accomplished, but then realized that there's a back office I could work distraction free: no laundry, no "let's make an unneccessarily complicated dinner for Non Birding Bill, and sketchy internet access to prevent an hour or so loss of time while researching lost reunion scripts of the tv show Wings.
Meanwhile, I leave you with the cutest gulp in the world.
It's called City Birds/Country Birds and it helps you attract birds no matter where you live, whether it's out in a remote area like Mr. Neil or in a metro area like me. Cardinal Corner has offered to have the book release party and signing--I'll be at both stores (and will bring Cinnamon too) August 23, 2008.
Book Signing Times:
August 23, 2008: Cardinal Corner in West St. Paul Store (651-455-6556) 10 a.m. - 12 p.m. Cardinal Corner in Newport (651-459-3880) 1 p.m. - 3 p.m.
I haven't really talked about this book as much and I've been trying to figure out why. I think for one thing, I'm nervous. With my first book, Disapproving Rabbits, I really didn't have anything invested in it. It was a happy accident--or winning the Internet lottery. We had the site up for fun, Harper Collins emailed and bada bing, bada boom, it's a book. I am so grateful that so many people enjoy the book and the website, but it is not my passion the way birds are my passion. It's one thing to tell your peers you have a humor book out about rabbits, quite another that you have an actual bird book out that they could knowledgeably critique.
I did feel some relief when I was at the American Birding Association Convention a few weeks ago and they people who run the book store said that they plan on carrying it in their catalog (whew) and last week while out celebrating my birthday, Non Birding Bill and I found it at Magers and Quinn--which I felt a personal victory because they never carried Disapproving Rabbits. I also showed it to the banding crew at Carpenter and got the best compliment from the senior banders: "You did good."
The next Birds and Beers is Thursday, July 24 at 6pm 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, talk about why people get weird on bird listservs, ask about where to find target birds, share cool research projects you might be working on, ask a bird feeding question, share life lists--the sky is the limit. It's low key and it's fun.
Lorraine sent me this story: Apparent conjoined barn swallows found in Arkansas:
An apparent set of conjoined twin birds - an incredibly rare find - has been discovered in Arkansas, authorities said.
The bodies of the barn swallows, which are attached at the hip by skin and possibly muscle tissue, are being sent to the Smithsonian Institution for examination and confirmation, Arkansas wildlife officials said Friday.
"I can't even say it's one in a million - it's probably more than that," said Karen Rowe, an ornithologist with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission. "There's just very little to no records of such a thing."
The birds, found by a landowner in White County, fell out of a nest as a healthy sibling flew off to learn how to hunt with its parents, Rowe said. The birds first appeared to have only three legs, but further examination found a fourth leg tucked up underneath the skin connecting the pair.
Rowe said the landowner likely kept the birds for a day before calling wildlife officials. By the time officials arrived, the birds were not eating. One died early Friday and a veterinarian later euthanized the other.
Finding conjoined birds is rare because they likely die before being discovered, Rowe said.
X-rays of the pair found each bird was fully formed, Rowe said. She said the birds would have had to come from a double-yolk egg.
Barn swallows can live for several years, though the conjoined twins might not have lived that long even if they had been separated. Rowe said it would have been difficult to teach the birds to fly.
Downy woodpecker recently fledged from the nest and learning to eat off of the suet log. Note that unlike an adult male downy woodpecker, the young have red on top of their head instead of the back.
Mr. Neil has had an increase in oriole activity recently. It's typical to get a lull in oriole activity at a jelly feeder once migration is finished. Orioles appear to focus more on insects while raising their young. Once the chicks fledge, you get a second bump in oriole activity in mid summer as the adults teach the young how to feed at jelly and nectar feeders. I was out taking photos and saw a few young orioles like the one above at the recycled oriole feeder. This bird was feeding without the family group and appeared to be doing well at the jelly feeder...
That is, until an adult male showed up and chased the recently fledged oriole off the jelly. That's the way it goes in the bird world, older more experienced birds push around the younger ones. This young oriole must not have been from this male's family group.
The male Baltimore oriole gathered globs of grape jelly. I heard a young bird begging in the nearby trees. The male flew up, the begging calls stopped. I couldn't see them, but I could tell that the male must have been feeding a young bird. He flew back down to gather more jelly. I was puzzled because the begging calls did not sound like a young oriole. I spent two years volunteering in the avian nursery of the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center and one thing that stuck was the sound of baby birds. I never paid attention to those calls before, but now I'm pretty good at picking out eastern species begging calls. Begging orioles have a breathy, descending "eeep, eeep, eeep, eeep" sound. This wasn't it. As the male oriole grabbed more jelly, the young begging bird flew to the feeder pole and the male flew up to feed it.
Doh! No wonder it didn't sound like a young oriole...it's a young cowbird begging for food. Oh, oriole, I expected more from you. And great, just what we need, cowbirds learning to feed at jelly feeders. Even though the young cowbird at what it was fed by the oriole, I watched it watch the birds at the seed feeders. When the male oriole flew away, the young cowbird flew over to the seed feeders and tried eating some of that instead of going to the jelly feeder. Perhaps jelly does not taste good to cowbirds? This is not the first oriole to raise a cowbird, so if jelly were a good food item to them, we would see more cowbirds on jelly feeders and I just don't see that very much.
Eventually, the young oriole flew back to the jelly feeder and resumed it's feeding:
Well, there have been some changes in the beekeeping operation. But first, let's start with the fun.
Can I say how grateful I am for the sweet natured temperament of the MimiKo bees? They are just a joy to visit and are still so friendly and easy going...which as you will read later, is much needed this summer. I love it when I open the lid of a hive and all is calm and a few bees that are at the top of the frames just kind of poke their heads up to see what is going on. They just hang there as if to ask, "Hey, how's it going? Did you see the dance about that aster patch on the south side of the fallow field--that's some good nectar." They're so fuzzy up close, you almost want to pet them.
My buddy Jody the Librarian came out with me for some of the hive inspections and I had her do some hand feeding. That is the cool thing to do this summer: come out to the hives and feed bees bare handed. Once you've had bee tongue on your finger, you never go back to life as it was before.
Above is a Bickman hive frame with some out of control comb construction. In a beehive, you have deep brood boxes with longer frames that bees put their brood and food stores. Then there are smaller boxes called honey supers that bees building excess honey in and you get to eat. We've been having a tough time convincing some of the bees to get out of their brood boxes and go build up inside the honey supers. So, I put a smaller honey super frame inside a deep brood box of the Bickman hive. The plan was to have her start to draw out comb on the frame and then I would put it back up in the honey super and encourage the girls to build up there. I left the frame in just a little to long and the bottom of the frame was covered in soon to be drone cells. I scraped those off and put the frame back in the honey super...honey should be packed in there by the end of this month. Whoot.
I will say this, the Bickman hive has low tolerance for shenanigans. While scraping off the drones cells, a worker tried to sting my glove. I didn't feel it, but I saw her stuck on the finger tip. I had Jody smoke my glove. When a worker bee stings you, she releases a pheromone that tells her sisters, "Hey! Something bad, right here, come sting too!" And soon more bees arrive. Sometimes it's instantaneous. You'll see the one sting you and three seconds later, five bees fly to the spot. If you use your smoker and puff it over the sting, that will mask the pheromone and prevent more bees from coming to join in the stinging fun. Jody smoked my glove, but this one bee pictured above was furiously trying to find the spot to sting. She kept angrily buzzing the glove, but couldn't find the exact spot to sting. Her stinger kept popping in and out of her body, but my camera was not fast enough to catch it.
Jody and I also checked the Kitty and Olga hives. Kitty is still going strong. Above is a frame with some early drawn out comb. Kitty is strong. We looked in on Olga, neither of the new queens had hatched yet. Damn. They should have hatched by now and it was clear that they just weren't going to. Olga was dying. The workers were in a slow death. What could I do? Well, there's the dump method where you take a brood box and dump in front of other hives and hope for the best that some of the workers will make it past the guard bees of other hives and start a new life there. We opted for the news paper method. I went back to consult an under the weather Mr. Neil. He agreed, it was time to combine the weak hive with a strong hive. I waited until later in the afternoon when more foragers would be back and could take Non Birding Bill with me.
NBB opened up Olga. She was quiet, not the robust busting of activity that she had been in the past. Even though we had two brood boxes on Olga, half the frames in each box were empty, so we took frames full of bees and combined them into one brood box.
We then went over to the Kitty hive, opened the roof and ceiling, placed down a layer of newspaper and set the Olga box on that. Since some Kitty bees were still coming back from foraging and using the top of the hive, we put another piece of newspaper on top of the Olga box, and then put Kitty's honey supers on top. The bees will chew through the newspaper in the next 24 hours and hopefully by that time, the workers will have absorbed the new queen's pheromone and acclimate to the hive. Mr. Neil wisely pointed out that pointed Kitty was simply Olga's daughter hive anyway (we divided Olga this spring to create the Kitty hive), so Olga was transforming back to herself..
I went back to where Olga had been. We missed some bees. Foragers were still coming back and landing on the bottom board of where their hive had been. I looked at the frame with the two queen cells that didn't hatch. Did I do this too soon? Was there any chance that the queens might hatch really late. I needed to open them to know...but what would I find. I couldn't open them. NBB took the frame and offered to open the queen cells and tell me. I was a coward and agreed. He said that the larvae in both cells was shriveled and dried up. Something had gone wrong.
I watched former Olga foragers landing on the board and furiously running around. Guilt knotted up in my stomach. A lump formed in my throat. The sound was awful and full of panic:
It was early evening, it was cool, and it would be dark soon. Where would these bees go?
I took all the frames out of a brood box but set it up with an entrance and roof so they would have someplace to hang out in at night, some sort of shelter. Maybe some of them would fly over to the Kitty hive and the guards would let them through. Otherwise, what else would they do? NBB had to drive the vehicle with the remains of the Olga hive back to the house, I opted to walk. I felt terrible. As took the path, I saw a honey bee foraging on some clover. I wondered to myself if it was an Olga bee, and tears filled my eyes, she's gathering pollen and nectar only to head back to hive that no long exists. I thought back to all the lessons in beekeeping the Olga hive had taught me: how I freaked out big time because she was my first time putting new bees in; she gave my only sting thus far, we got comb honey from her last year, we listened to her in winter.
And now she is gone. She's very much a part of the Kitty hive and perhaps it's appropriate that the two hives we started with last year are combined into one hive this year. I didn't think I would feel this bad. I tearily met up with NBB and he patted my back and agreed that he too felt bad, but really at the end of the day, they are just insects. I tried to listen, but found that my typical anti anthropomorphic resolve was failing. These are just bees, they only live for like 21 days anyway.
So, days when you make the decision to end a hive, it's good to have a friendly hand feeding hive as a back up.
No, I'm not too attached to my bees. I can quit beekeeping at any time. Really, I can. It's not a habit. So what if I broke down in my hair stylist's chair yesterday as I related the story? I'm not in too deep, really. I can totally handle this.
Actually, I've had a few days to chew on this since it happened, so I am over the loss of the Olga hive and can chuckle at myself for being so wrapped up in my bees (and looking at the calendar, I'm sure hormones had something to do with it too). Meanwhile, there have been other happy and cool things related to beekeeping on:
MimiKo (hive namesake) sent me a kickin' shirt for my birthday--it's an Eddie Izzard shirt and much like his routine, I'm a beekeeper who is happy to be covered in bees. And, unlike a majority of bird shirts out there, this is actually designed for a woman's body and looks cute--bird manufacturers, please take note--you don't have to sell only men's sizes or the unisex sizes.
And another artist has been inspired by our bees (some may remember the Lisa Snellings art). Well, this really cool photographer named Kimberly Butler made a series of photos based on our beekeeping adventures--that's one above them. She gave us a signed copy. I was speechless when she showed it to us, it was so weird and reminded me of calm, happy bees poking their heads over frames to see what you are doing. So, in many ways, old hives do live on in really weird and wonderful ways.
Audubon Minnesota seeks a full-time Project Coordinator for the recently funded state-wide Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas (BBA) project. This project is a partnership of multiple agencies, non-profits, and universities, and will be housed in Audubon’s state office. The Project Coordinator will be responsible for coordinating the day-to-day activities of the project, providing materials and assistance to volunteer Regional Coordinators, recruiting volunteers, overseeing data gathering, editing and updating the Atlas website, along with other aspects of Atlas coordination as needed.
The Project Coordinator should have strong organizational and interpersonal skills, and be able to work effectively with diverse partners, volunteers, and the public. A passion for conservation, and knowledge of Minnesota birds, are highly desired qualities. Applications will be accepted until August 15, 2008. Contact Audubon Minnesota for a full job description. Please send a cover letter, resume, and name of three references to mmartell@audubon.org.
Audubon offers a competitive salary and benefits package, and is an EOE employer.
When Kimberly Butler visited, she got the above photo of one of the adults on the nest. The birds will stay on the nest when you walk under it through the arbor, but if you stop or try to hold a camera, they bolt. Kim was lucky to get this photo, but hey if she can make celebrities comfy and at ease for a photo shoot, why not a mourning dove?
I was out the other day and found a position far from the arbor and the young are old enough to sit up high to where you can see them in a patch in the grape vines:
Thanks to the scope you can see the two chicks and part of the head and eye of the adult morning dove. All three stayed very still while I digiscoped them from a safe distance. It'll be interesting to see how much longer they will stay in there. The grapes will be ripe soon and once that happens, that will no longer be a secluded spot. Catbirds, robins and orioles will be in and out of there gorging on the fruit...and a few humans too.
