Birdchick Blog
This squirrel has made a little sleeping nest on the window ledge in our bathroom. They do this every summer and only stay a few nights. They don't seem to be bothered by the light on at night or the early or late shower. Here's a video of him getting comfy:
More good conservation news:
LOXAHATCHEE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Fla., June 24 (Reuters) - The state of Florida announced on Tuesday it intends to spend $1.75 billion to buy a large chunk of Everglades land from U.S. Sugar, one of a number of sugar companies blamed for polluting the precious wildlife habitat.
U.S. Sugar Corp., one of the largest privately held U.S. agriculture firms, will abandon its Florida sugar plantations and go out of business in six years, handing over about 187,000 acres of farmland to the state's efforts to restore the Everglades, company and state officials said.
The purchase, lauded by environmentalists as the "missing link" in the restoration project, will be paid for with $50 million cash and $1.7 billion in certificates of participation, similar to bonds, that will be sold in public debt markets, the South Florida Water Management District said.
The land deal would revive an effort to turn sugar cane fields back into marshes and waterways that would help cleanse polluted Everglades water and carry it from Lake Okeechobee to the southern reaches of the Everglades and Florida Bay.
Read the rest of the story here.
Some Numb Nut at the Pizza Luce across from our apartment building thought it would be a fine idea to hire a crew to redo their parking lot at 3:30am last night. Non Birding Bill and I were part of a coalition of neighbors coming out to get the crew to stop. Boy, was I the old lady of the group--all the younger neighbors were shouting "This is unacceptable! Call the cops!" or "Dude, I can't believe this, you gotta stop!" (although add a few more colorful metaphors) and I was quoting the city's noise ordinance and shaking my fist.
I must say, the woman who came out to meet the tired/sleepy/irritated/slightly irrational gathering didn't give the best initial answer. When a business has suddenly awakened the neighborhood and angry neighbors come out, the response should be, "Oh wow, dude, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that using noisy paint scraping motorized equipment would be a bad idea in the middle of the night! We'll stop immediately! Oh, and here, why don't I give each of you gift certificates for a free slice for your inconvenience!"
Instead we got, "Uh, well, I didn't hear anything."
We did get them to stop, but I had a fitful night of very little sleep afterwards, couple that with working all day today and packing for Utah and an early flight in tomorrow morning, I'm feeling like a bit of an anti pizza cranky pants. Or, rather, a bit like this:
Okay, I'm having way too much fun with the jumping spider, I'll stop soon, I swear.
I do need some cleansing, so how about a cleansing American redstart (or as NBB calls them, sample sized orioles) who must be nesting near the feeding station in Mr. Neil's yard. Speaking of Mr. Neil, have you seen the baby raccoons he found in his yard (cute!). I know they nest down by the creek, but this one was singing all over the fallen oak and declaring his domain near the feeders.
Breathe in the redstart, breathe out, in, out, in out. Ahhhh. And now for some video:
Well, after all the heartbreak of the failed requeening of Olga, we decided to give her some eggs and see if she will queen herself. We checked her on Sunday and found 2 queen cells--those are the two yellow things pointing down on the comb. When workers sense the need for a queen, they will pick a fertilized egg and feed it nothing but royal jelly, place it in a larger cell to grow (workers only get royal jelly for three days, then switch to regular food). One of these queens should hatch sometime next week, kill off the other queen cell, go on a mating flight and hopefully will find a drone congregation area consisting of drones from the MimiKo and Bickman hives, mate and kill about 12 - 15 of them, come back and commence to layin' some eggs for this troubled colony...hopefully the queen will do this without being eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or swallow. I have no idea if this will work, but if there's one thing that beekeeping is teaching me, it's that the more I mess with the hives, the more likely they are to fail, so I'm gonna let the bees do their thing. If she's too weak going into the winter, we may combine her with Kitty.
Sunday night, a friend named Sabrina stopped by for an oh so tasty lamb dinner prepared by Mr. Neil. Afterwards she asked if I would mind showing her the hives. Would I mind? I love showing off the girls! I didn't really want to start up the smoker again because it takes so long to get going and asked Sabrina, "How much do you want to see, do you want to just walk by them or do you want to see the inside?"
"You mean I could actually look inside the hive?!?" Sabrina asked excitedly.
Non Birding Bill and I decided to take her to the more docile MimiKo and Bickman hives. They are still so new, so young, so friendly. Sabrina has an allergy to bee stings, so we made sure that her bee suit was fully secure and took her out. Both hives were INCREDIBLY docile, considering we were out there in the evening when all the foragers are back and we had no smoker. Some of the bees were even lapping up spilled honey off of our gloves. Their buzzing was so soft, so content. I really, really love beekeeping. I love birding, but I never really knew how much bees were going to take over my life and how much I would just fall in love with our fuzzy little stinging insects.
The best part of the day, was that both MimiKo and Bickman are in overdrive producing honey and comb. There's a bit of feral building going on that we need to scrape it away to make inspections easier. We all got to have our first bite of honey comb straight from the hive to your tongue. Honestly, there is nothing quite like soft, chewy comb, warmed from the summer sun in the hive. You bite into it and get these little bursts of sweetness of all the flowers within two miles having a party in your mouth. The wax is soft, similar to a taffy consistency. It's just the best. The honey tastes a bit different from Bickman and MimiKo which kind of makes sense, they are in a different area than Olga and Kitty--those have a more clover, fruit blossom flavor. MimiKo and Bickman still have a wild sweetness, but not the same delicacy. It's a bit more woodsy, perhaps because there's so much giant hemlock nearby?
Anyway, it was on this evening inspection that we found that weird jumping spider. It really did look like some strange demon man. See:
Can't you just see him shaking his tiny little fist in anger? I'm not too worried about a spider on the hive. Should it be foolish enough to try and go inside, the bees will ball it in short order.
Check out what we got in the nets on Friday at Carpenter Nature Center. No that's not a female cardinal tarted up with excessive eyeliner, that's a cedar waxwing. There are waxwings around Carpenter, and by their behavior, I'm sure they are nesting, but I am always too distracted to figure out where the nest is.
We were actually able to age this bird. Notice something missing? Check the wings--there's no "wax" on the wing. This is actually a second year bird (it hatched last summer). Waxwings do not get those red waxy tips until their second fall. The waxy tips are the result of a astaxanthin, a carotenoid pigment. We also had to measure the yellow tips on the tail--they are shorter in younger birds than they are in the adult birds.
Here's a female red-winged blackbird. These birds just look kind of like an overgrown sparrow when you see the flying around marshes, but they are quite pretty up close and in hand. Note that she also has reddish shoulder patches, similar to the male of the species.
The big excitement of the day was a male northern flicker in the net. You can tell he's male by his black mustache. I had actually just stepped outside with a male goldfinch that I had just banded and was thinking, "Oh, this would be a good picture for the blog, when I noticed something large in the net with a white rump. I immediately let the goldfinch go (we'll get more, so I can get a photo another day) and walked quickly to the nets.
The flicker started to fly and I noticed that it was actually on the other side of the net than I was on. Also, as it flew, I could see it was only caught by one foot. I heard more banders coming out of the building so I just reached through the net, and put my hand over the flick and secured it against my body. Our master bander, Jim Fitzpatrick got hold of the flicker on my side and I went to the other side of the net. In less than a minute, the flicker was out of the net, and Jim banded him.
The bird was a study in elegant design, beauty--not bad for an ant specialist. Check out the yellow feather shafts on the wing feathers that give this bird the old name "yellow-shafted flicker."
Check out that yellow when it flies.
Another interesting bird that came in was a recently fledged red-bellied woodpecker. It looks enough like a red-bellied woodpecker, but the red on the head is a little weird and doesn't match up with the coloration on males and females.
Another interesting bird that came in was a recently fledged red-bellied woodpecker. This bird just had a small red patch on the top of the head. So, we had to break out the Peter Pyle banding book to see if we could find a clear way to sex this bird. We could measure either the spikey part of the tongue, or the culmen--which is basically the upper mandible of the bird. Females have smaller culmens and tongue tips than males. We came up with female based on measurements.
I also pointed out the gape on the above bird. That's one way you can tell an immature bird in some species, that yellow corner on the bill. Keep your eye open for that with the birds that are showing up at your feeders.
So, we found this on one of the beehives tonight:
At first glance, it looks like some little scary demon man hanging out on our hives. What voodoo could it be up to? It's actually some sort of spider (although missing to legs on the left side).
It doesn't look any less scary head on. Yikes! After doing some googling, we think this is a jumping spider--Phidippus audax. Although, if anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be open to it.
Sure is a freaky little thing that looks like a little voodoo man when upside down.
How can I blog when the weather is perfect and field sparrows are singing?
Some interesting news from Science Daily sent in by Reier:
Birds Communitcate Reproductive Success In Song:
Some migratory songbirds figure out the best place to live by eavesdropping on the singing of others that successfully have had baby birds -- a communication and behavioral trait so strong that researchers playing recorded songs induced them to nest in places they otherwise would have avoided.
Read the rest of the story here.
My Pigeon Superior To Your Three Year Old?
Keio University scientists have shown that pigeons are able to discriminate video images of themselves even with a 5-7 second delay, thus having self-cognitive abilities higher than 3-year-old children who have difficulty recognizing their self-image with only a 2 second delay.
Read the rest of the story here.
And here is a hot topic from Birds and Beers last night:
From the Star Tribune:
St. Paul is experimenting with pigeon birth control to reduce the population and lower the fowl output.
An automatic feeder atop the Lowry Building is poised next week to begin mixing in the contraceptive, OvoControl-P, with the cracked corn and grain that has been scattered about the rooftop of late. The pellets do not harm the birds, but prevent eggs from hatching by impeding development of the layer between yolk and egg white.
The birth-control plan has the backing of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and is producing results in Hollywood, which found itself overrun with pigeons as result of frenzied feeding by a well-heeled seamstress dubbed the "Bird Lady."
Neighborhood leaders there estimated that the woman put out 112 tons of bird feed a year, in turn yielding other unsettling numbers. If a bird metabolizes two-thirds of what it eats, one-third becomes waste, and one-third of 112 equals 37 tons of pigeon excrement, said George Abrahams, second-in-command in Hollywood's pigeon offensive.
They first learned of OvoControl-P from a PETA biologist who attended a pigeon summit last year with downtown building owners. The birth-control method, combined with a gradual reduction in people feeding pigeons, is a humane approach to controlling the population, PETA contends. The St. Paul project, Kessler added, is a pilot effort to prove to building owners that they, too, should install the contraceptive feeders. The pilot is costing a couple of hundred dollars, he said.
For the contraceptive to kick in, a pigeon must eat the kibble for five consecutive days. Predators who consume pigeons are not vulnerable to its effects.
In Hollywood, the pigeon population has shown a 90 percent decline in some areas, a reduction that Abrahams attributes not just to OvoControl, but also to the arrests of people who were killing hawks and falcons and to a sharp cutback in the Bird Lady's largesse.
My friends, I'm sad to report that the outlook of the Olga hive is not good. Mr. Neil, Non Birding Bill and I headed out to do a quick bee inspection...Olga has no eggs, no brood, nothing. And the overall buzzing sound is just sad--dissonant. The new queen didn't take. We're not sure what happened. We purchased a new queen to replace the one missing in action, and Lorraine made sure to release her and it didn't work. There could be several reasons: was the new queen not fertile (doubtful) or did she get released and not all the bees in the hive accepted her and at some point killed her? Is there democratic movement going on and the workers have decided to ditch the monarchy system?
We decided to make one last ditch effort by putting in a frame with some eggs from the Kitty hive to see of the Olga bees will grow a queen, but that's going to take another 16 days and then if they get that far, she has to go on a "maiden voyage" and will she find drones to mate with? Will she get eaten by a great-crested flycatcher or purple martin? It's just time to let go and let bee--see if they can sort it out themselves, we've done all we can.
After we checked Olga, I began to understand why so many people I meet and find out that I keep bees say, "Oh yeah, I did that once." Last summer was so fun, something new to discover every week, bees mostly following the books and doing some cool things on their own. I was feeling down and getting irritated with my junior beekeepers. When NBB and Mr. Neil went to retrieve a frame of eggs from Kitty for the Olga hive, Mr. Neil dutifully came over with a frame full of eggs...and Kitty bees. "NO!" I shouted. "We can't have bees, and the queen could be on there, you can't put Kitty workers in with Olga workers! The Kitty Queen could be on there!"
NBB insisted that they both had checked for the queen and would brush the Kitty bees back into their hives. I was feeling the pressure and felt bad for snapping at them. Two hives not doing super great. The unhappy buzzing of Olga just made me question the whole beekeeping operation. Sure, even if Olga dies, we'll still get her honey, but what went wrong? Was it something we could have prevented? Is this spot too shady for the bees? We had to move Olga over a little bit this spring, did we move her too close to a tree trunk? Also, like last summer, I found that we were trying all sorts of things to try and save her and it seems to be postponing the inevitable.
Then we left the Kitty and Olga hives and went over to the new Bickman and MimiKo hives and the world shifted. These were happy, healthy hives! And MimiKo was getting creative with her comb. Mr. Neil and NBB took off the top brood box and we found this:
They drew out some funky comb! Go MimiKo. One side had eggs and the other side did not, so we decided to smoosh it onto another frame without eggs. The buzzing at these hives was much happier, much more in harmony. Despite the fact that a couple of weeks earlier when I stole a frame of brood from this hive and angered them, they were still pretty cool with us and we barely needed the smoker.
The Bickman hive was just as happy and friendly. Here is the sound of a happy Bickman bee with full pollen baskets waiting for another worker to help her unload. Watch her little butt bouncing in expectancy:
Hear that happy buzzing in the background?
Another worker approached and started to get the pollen. Check out the bee with the pollen baskets. Notice anything strange in that photo? It looks like she has not wings. I think she was moving them so quickly that my camera couldn't pick them up at that setting. The happy buzzing sounds, the friendly bees, the industrious drawing out of comb, the healthy harmonious sounds--now I remembered why I love beekeeping. I looked at NBB and Mr. Neil and was overcome with joy. Though Olga might be failing, Kitty isn't doing so bad and MimiKo and Bickman are going like gang busters. The beekeeping life is good.
Mr. Neil and I have made the leap from newbie to true beekeepers. The one thing that is a constant among all beekeepers is disagreement. You ask 5 beekeepers a question, you'll get 5 different answers, all thought out and with reasons (good or bad) for the madness. I learned from the Beekeeping Short Course that in northern climates like Minnesota, you should do a three deep brood box systems so your bees will overwinter. The bottom two boxes have brood and honey, the top is all honey. Mr. Neil has been reading online about a two deep brood box system that some people in Wisconsin have tried and think that it helps to keep your bees clustered and warm. We were "discussing this" and in the middle we suddenly stopped and realized--"Hey, we sound like beekeepers! We're arguing over method! Sweet!"
Now I think we can truly call ourselves beekeepers and not "I'm a new beekeeper."
On Saturday morning, I woke up at 4am, got my stuff together and headed out to Rapids Lake Education and Visitor Center for the Minnesota BioBlitz (you try to see document as much wildlife as you can in a 24 hour period). It's southwest of the Twin Cities on a bluff along the Minnesota River. It's relatively new and I was excited to find an adult lark sparrow feeding young as soon as I stepped out of my car.
This was a catbird that we banded that morning. There was a band of park rangers on hand to help out with the BioBlitz. I was there to lead a bird walk at 6 am and then we helped out with the center's banding demonstration. There are nesting blue-winged warblers and prothonotary warblers along some of the trails--I was excited to see them...but was defeated by mosquitoes. The staff at the center warned us about them.
I've been around the block in this state, mosquitoes are ravenous here. But usually some appropriately placed DEET products keep them at bay. Not these. The staff advised us to use mosquito netting, but I foolishly declined since I really can't see well through my optics with netting. The bug spray I applied did not create the bug barrier I hoped, but instead seem to serve as a nice hollandaise sauce for the insects. We heard and glimpsed some great birds: blue-wings, prothonotary warblers, black-billed cuckoos, but alas, did not stop to watch them well--the mosquitoes were so bad, I ceased worrying about West Nile and focused on anemia. They flew into my ears, my nostrils, I had so many on my hand, it felt like a soft paint brush dabbing my skin. It was brutal. I still trying to decide if all the bites are some strange poem written in pink Braille or a connect the dot puzzle in the shape of Alaska.
We only banded three birds that day, but the biggest highlight was a male indigo bunting! Talk about a crowd pleasing bird! I didn't plan it, but my nail polish ended up matching his plumage. After I finished with the BioBlitz, Non Birding Bill and I headed out to Mr. Neil's to enjoy some beer butt chicken and check the bees (more on that later). I noticed he had an indigo bunting singing in his yard.
He's had indigo buntings around his property (last year a male would sing right over the Olga and Kitty hives when we would do inspections). This is the first time that I had ever noticed one nesting right in the backyard. He sang as we ate dinner outside and when I headed towards where he was singing, he valiantly defended his territory. Awesome! Here is a a video of him singing his song. Some birders think that they are saying "Fire! Fire! Where? Where? Here! Here! See it? See it?"
Do you hear that?
