News and Odds and Ends

So, I stumbled upon a really interesting blog called Pete at Midway, written by a man spending six months on Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean--who knew they had Internet access there? Anyway, he's got some great shots of the birds around there including albatross, fairy terns (also known as white terns), and tropic birds. He started his blog June 9 and you can easily catch up on his adventures. I love this photo of his front yard covered with albatross in his first entry.

In other news, I can finally get my favorite beer that I've had at birding festivals in the Twin Cities: Fat Tire! Whoot!! It's the best, and quite possibly could be the official birder beer. If you live in the Twin Cities and you have never had it, I highly recommend picking one up.

I got a press release today for the Midwest Birding Symposium that's happening September 13-16, 2007 to be held once again in the Quad Cities. The MBS happens every other year, so the last one was in 2005. It's held in an area twice, so this is the Quad Cities second go at it:

"We hope you enjoyed your time in 2005, and we have a whole new experience to share in 2007!

Highlights for 2007:
New venue - Stoney Creek Inn & Conference Center, Moline, IL. The hotel is a northwoods experience on the Mississippi River!
Keynote speaker: Kenn Kaufman
Expanded field trips
Earlier dates for migrating species.

Join us for a great time, free reception, and reconnect with the friends you made in 2005."

I went to the MBS in 2005 and had some fun, I'm not sure if I'm going to go again this year. It's good to see that they listened to feedback from last time and changed when they are having the festival and labeling which trips are boat trips. Although, I did notice that they are still promoting one trip by saying, "Participants may also see the Eurasian tree sparrow." I signed up for that trip last time just for the sparrow and when I was boarding the vehicle, I asked the guides where we were going to see one. They shook there heads and said, "There are no Eurasion tree sparrows where we're going." Hm, I wonder if they will be there this time?

The Loghouse and Homestead Bed and Breakfast

Yo, Mom, Terri--y'all are gonna want to pay attention to this entry. I think we need to do a weekend at this place!

Wednesday, Explore Minnesota started it's pilot project of Bed & Breakfasts & Birds (BBB). What we are trying to do is help teach bed and breakfasts how to market to birders who travel around looking for birds. We also want to help people become local bird guides. Many people guide, but very few are paid what they are worth (if at all). The goal was also to get guides a chance to meet bed and breakfast owners in their area so they could get more business. The B&Bs could offer birding packages to guests or have a guide list on hand for guests who visit and are looking for someone to take them out. The end of the workshop featured a short walk for the guides to show their birding skills.

Bobolinks were a hit with many of the B&B owners--many of whom hadn't really noticed them before. Man, I must say, this year has been the year of the bobolink for me. I remember being a kid and looking through my field guides thinking about how cool it must be to see and hear one of those.

The workshop was hosted at the Loghouse and Homestead Bed and Breakfast in Vergas, MN owned by Suzanne Tweten. This is the Loghouse, it was built circa 1889 by Suzanne's great-great grandparents! There are framed bits of newspaper throughout the loghouse that were found inside the walls, it's cozy and beautiful and perfect for a girlfriend getaway--or birding getaway.

When Explore Minnesota was making my lodging arrangements, they asked if I had a room preference. Being the wiseacre I am, I said that I wanted the least crappy room. So, I ended up in the Fredholm Suite--complete with hot tub, a box of chocolates, and the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in. Organic, fair-trade coffee awaited me in the room--at night I could hear loons singing off of Spirit Lake in front of the B&B. It was an almost perfect night--except for the lack of Non Birding Bill.

The property is loaded with ruby-throated hummingbirds, this male is flaring out his wings and tail fighting for his position on the feeder. A female hummingbird had taken hold of this feeder, and some males she allowed to feed and others she chased off. After a little flaring, this male was allowed to stay. Later on, they both retreated to a tree and he started a mating display, his flare up at the feeder must have appealed to her.

Here is the female chasing off a different male. Check out the differences in the tail. You can see white tips to the tail feathers of the female on the feeder. There is no white on the male's tail in the top left hand corner of the photo. Female ruby-throats are kind of little Murphy Browns. They mate with the males, drive them out of the territory, build the nest and raise the chicks completely on their own.

I had timed my travel to this meeting to get some digiscoping done. The meeting and workshop started at 10am on Wednesday morning and was about three and a half hours from where I lived. I drove up Wednesday before the meeting, so that way I could spend the night and digiscope like crazy Thursday morning and take my time driving back to the Twin Cities. Above is Chloe, the Suzanne's spaniel showing me that my breakfast was ready. The food served at this place is FANTASTIC. Suzanne served me a broccoli, cheese, ham and egg dish with olive bread. My favorite part was the warm blueberries with cream cheese. Not only is the food tasty, they also grow some of the ingredients right there on the property and try to buy food locally as often as possible.

Suzanne does what she can for birds on her property, like providing housing for bluebirds (above), being careful with land management and taking dropped off cats to the local shelter.

Chipping sparrows nest in many of the trees. This one was preening his feathers and I have so many weird photos of him--but he was in great light, so I had to post them. Kind of reminds me of Audubon paintings--he was always posing birds in weird ways. Seriously, has anyone ever seen an egret pose like this?

Cedar waxwings acted like they were nesting right out side my window, but I was unable to find it.

The highlight bird for me was this male golden-winged warbler. This was the mellowest warbler I have ever seen. One of the guides had noticed him during the walk and saw that he was carrying a caterpillar around--as if on his way to feed chicks. When I saw him, he was singing on territory and not bothered by me in the slightest.

He was even stretching! Warblers are tough birds to digiscope, so I couldn't believe my luck in this one being so relaxed and easy to see. I think I took about 92 photos of him in all different kinds of light. I was even able to get a video of his song:

Isn't that just a weird song for a bird that looks like that? Many associate warblers with musical twittery calls, and this guy sounds like Froggy from The Lil' Rascals.

The trails are well maintained and you can do a prairie loop or walk though woods. I will warn, it's quite tick heavy this year in Minnesota. Something interesting that I'm noticing is that when I wear fruitier smelling lotions, I get fewer ticks on me. On Wednesday when I was walking around, I had on "Juniper Breeze" and had three ticks--three wood ticks and one deer tick (all attached). Thursday, I wore "Cherry Blossom" spent way more time in tall grass areas and found only one wood tick and it was not attached, but crawling around on my hip. I started noting this at the Detroit Lakes festival when people were really getting ticks, and I was getting very few. I was wearing Cherry Blossom then as well. Something to think about.

And, I have to end this on another bobolink photo. If you're going to be up and around the northwestern end of the state, I highly recommend staying at the Loghouse and Homestead, there's great birding on the property and there are quite a few birding areas nearby including Rothsay Prairie, Fergus Falls, and Tamarac NWR just to name a few.

Okay, I forgot I had a bobolink video, so I'm going to end with a singing bobolink:

A Reason To Visit Fergus Falls, MN

Just came back from a magical experience in Vergas, MN--more on that later, for now, I present Fergus Falls, MN.

And I don't just mean the giant otter statue in the park...at least I think it's an otter since it's in Otter Tail County. But to me, this looks like a weasel. Whatever it is, it's the animal statue in the city park off of State Hwy 59 in Fergus Falls. Anyway, it's not the reason I'm talking about to visit Fergus Falls.

Okay, and this isn't the reason I'm going to point out either, but I did get a kick out of the idea that a local church in Fergus Fall is bribing members to show up with the promise of free coffee and donuts.

This, my friends, is the reason to visit Fergus Falls. It's a little island in the city park. What could be so cool about that?

It's chock full of great egrets, they use it as a nesting rookery. I have never stopped at Fergus Falls--even though I pass quite a bit in my travels, but my buddy Carrol Henderson told me about the rookery in the city park that I stopped by today for lunch, gas, and to digiscope the nesting egrets.

The island is so close to the parking lot, that it's easy to get up close shots or just casual views of all the nesting great egrets. And in case you haven't noticed yet--take a look at those toes, hanging out over the side of the nest! Cute...in an extra terrestrial kind of way.

I loved watching the adult fly in. At first approach, they looked very dignified and heron-like with their necks tucked in, but in the final descent, their necks shot out, their long legs would splay, and they just looked out of control as they tried to land on a branch.

But, when the adults got to the nest, it was all business feeding the chicks and then just standing guard over them for awhile. The chicks actually made quite a bit of noise. It almost sounded like locusts trilling, with their monotonous buzzy, nasally begging calls. I tried to get a video with sound, but the wind was too high and interfered with the mic on the digital camera.

As I was digiscoping the great egrets, I noticed that I could hear some sounds behind me. It was a little different than the call the young egrets were making. I decided to go investigate.

A quick scan of the pine trees in the park revealed dozens of black-crowned night-heron nests. Perhaps the night-herons found the great egrets too noisy, or preferred to be along the shores of the park, as opposed to the islands, but any conifer in the park that was next to the lake had one, if not more black-crowned night-heron nests.

While I was at the city park in Fergus Falls, quite a few vehicles pulled up to watch the egret rookery. Many of them obviously hadn't noticed the night-heron nests---otherwise they wouldn't have parked directly underneath them like the car in the above photo. I love birds, and I know bird poop getting on cars is a fact of life, but when it comes to a bird the size of a night-heron, I would not want to tempt fate by parking directly beneath a couple of nests.

Scanning the ground directly beneath the nests revealed several night-heron egg shells and a few dead night-heron chicks (and poop). From my experience going out to heron and pelican rookeries for banding, I'm always amazed that any heron (or pelican) survives beyond hatching from the egg. Survival is tough--older siblings or other birds try to kill and eat you, if you fall from the nest too early your parents will ignore you and you will starve, all the nests are piled above each other, so birds are pooping all over each other--it's just a mess. But survive, they do...somehow.

So, if you find yourself in Fergus Falls, check out the city park for herons and egrets. It's an easy photo opportunity and one of the most easily accessible heron and egret rookeries I know of in Minnesota.

Still A Bird Blog

Just to keep the bird stuff going around here, I found some photos that were sent to me last month, that I haven't had a chance to post yet. Aaron sent these photos of woodcock chicks. Can you see it in the above photo? If not, here is an up close view.

Can yo see the chick? It's running away in the upper left hand corner. If you still can't see it, Aaron helps us out in the next photo.

Aaron says, "I wanted to send you this photo of some woodcock chicks I found while out looking for Goshawk territories. I know you dig the courtship flight of the woodcock. Have you ever seen the mothers broken wing routine? It's the same kind of thing as a momma mallard dose but weird and I fell for it too. I was just walking threw some open woods at about 6 AM and this wood cock takes off but instead of flying away from me like they usually do she flew at me and over my shoulder kind of appearing to have a tough time of it and then landed very close by. Then just as I was thinking to myself, "hum, maybe there's something wrong with that bird", I heard the peeping cheeping at my feet. I looked down and three little chicks were scattering like a good break on a pool table."

"It was the strangest flight. Like a bird from Mars. Loopy and like a Dr. Seuss cartoon. She flew and flopped/flapped her way around in the air and just plopped down in the grass in front of me and starred right at me several times. I put the chicks down and got out of there and a few moments later I heard her fly over and join them."

Thanks for the photos Aaron!

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.

Bee Update and Misc. Bugs

Warning: there is a spider at the end of this post. I used to be scared of spiders, not so much now.

We checked the hives yesterday and we had one of the hive namesakes to help out (Olga). We currently have three bee suits, which Mr. Neil, Olga, and I wore. Non Birding Bill came along too, but he wore the pith helmet with a net and a set of gloves. The rest of his outfit was a red t-shirt and gray sweats. I admired his bravery (or foolhardy attitude), although he wasn't digging around in the hives like I was, only staying back and taking a few photos.

Here is Mr. Neil showing a frame of burr comb from the bottom brood box of the Olga hive. Olga is giving the frame a puff of smoke. She still prefers to think of her bees as striking out new ground and innovative design as opposed to being problem bees. Actually, since I've started using the frame spacing tool, we haven't had too much of a problem with bees making the funky come.

Here's an up close look at the comb. If you recall, when I first posted a photo of Olga's odd comb, it was light in color and now looking at it above, it has darkened quite a bit. All normal and to be expected as the wax ages. Most of the worker brood has hatched on the above frame and there are quite a few drone cells.

We wanted to check both the top and the bottom boxes to make sure that all looked healthy and happy, see if we need to reverse the position of any of the boxes to encourage more brood. Some brood cells had been built between the two brood boxes and we exposed some larvae. We had to scrape them off and I felt awful about it, but the comb couldn't stay there. That is one tough part of beekeeping--you will kill some of the bees. Every time you go out, some of your colony will perish--some workers will sting your gloves and die, some bees just will not get out of the way when you put the hive back together (I hate crunching sound), or you have scrape away brood cells that are not in an appropriate area.

Despite some of our killing we did see new life. If you look at the above photo (towards the top and towards the left corner), you can see a new worker who has just finished pupating, chewing her way out of her cell--new life emerging into our hive! That was really exciting. Int he lower right hand corner is both a worker bee and a larger drone.

Here's a great frame shot! On the bottom is bright yellow capped brood (pupating into new workers) and some uncapped brood still growing. Above that is a layer of workers tending to the uncapped brood and feeding on honey. The top is the lighter colored capping is honey--all honey--properly aged and everything! Mr. Neil got some of it on the hive tool and we took a taste. Earlier in the season we had tasted the uncapped honey, which basically means that it had more moisture in it and wasn't true honey and could ferment. After the worker bees regurgitate the nectar into the cells, they fan it, evaporating the water from the regurgitated nectar and raising the sugar concentration. When the nectar has evaporated to less than 18.6% moisture, it will not ferment and that is when the bees cap it. When there is capping, you have true honey. We tasted it, our first true honey from our hives. Before we had tasted promise, this time, we tasted perfection. I was so proud of my girls.

All looked well, Olga had filled both brood boxes and was ready for a third brood box. I remembered from my notes in the beekeeping short course that three brood boxes were essential to overwintering our bees to insure that they would have enough honey and pollen stores--however, I couldn't remember if I needed to use the queen excluder at this point to that it would only be filled with honey and no brood. I reread my manual and couldn't figure it out, so I emailed the professor. She said to not use the queen excluder until I would put on our honey supers for our own consumption, that the queen have access to the the third box. So, no queen excluder for the moment. Kitty is now about three frames behind Olga, so we did not add a third brood box to her. We'll check again next weekend and then let them go. Hopefully, by mid July, we might be able to add our own honey supers and then use the queen excluder.

And since we're talking about bugs at Mr. Neil's house, I thought I would add a few more. I don't know about where you live, but around here I am noticing a TON of red admiral butterflies. The drive way was covered with them yesterday!

I even found a few flitting around in the education bird courtyard at The Raptor Center this year. I think their larvae like stinging nettle, must be a good year for that plant too. Yippee.

This isn't a painted lady, but a giant leopard moth near the trash bins. As if this moth isn't cool enough on the back, check out the front side:

Check out those crazy blue mandibles. I'm not sure if they make it look scary or incredibly wise. Speaking of scary...brace yourself:

Ewww! Spider--with an egg sac. At first glance, I thought this was a wolf spider. Someone else speculated garden spider. I remember once seeing a wolf spider with her back covered in babies, but some quick Internet research showed that wolf spiders carry their egg sacs in back and this girl was carrying her eggs in front.

Also, looking at the photo, this spider has very thin legs compared to wolf spiders. What could it be? Well, I googled "spider egg sac" and quickly found the answer. Turns out, this is a nursery web spider who carry their eggs sacs in their jaws (in front) as opposed to wolf spiders who carry them on their spinnerets (in back).

I don't know if this photo does the spider justice--it was quite large. And now we return to our the regularly scheduled bird updates to the blog...and quite possibly another porcupet post is in the works.

Oh, Animal Planet!

I'm getting some work done while having Little People Big World on in the background. A promo just came on for Animal Planet, they are going to show Winged Migration next weekend. In the promo, they showed the bald eagle from the movie landing...and what sound did I hear dubbed over?

Red-tailed hawk.

Is it too much to ask for a little accuracy from Animal Planet?