I'm a Door Knob

I left my digital camera at work so all the cute photos I got of hatching mergansers are sitting safely in the digital camera on my desk (doh). I did remeber to bring home the video camera and Non Birding Bill was able to capture a still of the young mergansers:

Cute, freshly hatched hooded merganser chicks...that smell like stinky fish.

What was interesting was that this morning when I went to check the box, I heard some rustling and worried the hen would bolt I froze. I suddenly heard low, gutteral sounds. I recognized it from all the birding cds we listen to in the store. It was the hen, and I had read somewhere that hen ducks will make noise right before and during hatching so the chicks will recognize the call. When the female leaves the box, she will make the sound in the water to get the chicks to follow.

I checked the box at 11am and found two hatched and two more eggs with holes. Further reading revealed that when hooded merganser eggs hatch, the whole clutch usually hatches within four hours. The above photo was taken at about 2:30pm, towards the end of the process.

More photos will be posted tomorrow as well as a tasteless baby chickadee one liner.

HATCHING!

The hooded mergansers are hatching at the store!! I took some photos inside the box and will put those up tonight and have set up the NovaBird camera. Hopefully there is enough battery juice left.

Carrol Henderson on MPR

My good friend Carrol Henderson was on MPR this morning which missed, but you can hear it and read it on the MPR Website--there are even photos. He gave this program at the MOU Paper Session in 2004 and it's just facinating, it's about oology or all the egg collecting that happened in the early 1900s. Though we now look back and think "my word, how barbaric!" at the time it was not only a hobby but valuable scientific research. Makes me wonder about what we do today, like maybe bird banding that in 100 years will be considered barbaric. Anyway it's a great program and for a bird speaker, Carrol is very engaging so I can't recommend listening to it enough.

70 Bird Day

Today was a great noisy bird day. The woods that were so quiet three weeks ago were alive with sound. Rose-breasted grosbeaks were trying to sing above Nashville, Tennessee and yellow warblers. Yellow-throated and red-eyed vireos were lurking in the tops of the trees with one scarlet tanager following behind. Oddly enough there was blue-winged warbler that just seemed to be following me around and at one point I found a lone male turkey strutting alone on the top of a hill who flew off as soon as it realized I was watching. He was all puffed up in his glory and kind of froze when he found me as if he were thinking, "Oh crap, I'm being watched!' I ended up seeing over 70 species and the highlights include a sandhill crane pair feeding along a road in farm field, a flock of male bobolinks competing with each other and of course an indigo bunting feeding below the finch feeders.

The Nova Bird camera got a workout today:

A black-capped chickadee hangs upside down to get some no-melt peanut butter suet. The orioles were will all over this as well today.

A male hairy loads up on some no melt peanut butter suet on a log. He kept coming up and stuffing his beak full and suspect there are already some young hairys in a hole somewhere nearby.

The ruby-throated hummingbird male found a quiet moment without orioles at the hummingbird feeder. I really don't care for hummingbird art but I'm always excited about them in real life. How can that be a bird and not a bug!! It baffles my little budgie mind.

The orioles were either eating or chasing each other today. This time of year you just can't seem to put out enough grape jelly. There's a huge recycled orange jelly feeder just to the left of this feeder and it was occupied.

Oriole Got a Hummer

Put the camera on a Mini Humzinger this morning (which is one of my favorite hummingbird feeders--they are easy to fill and to clean and they don't drip, I really dislike fancy hummingbird feeders that drip). Anyway, I filled the ant moat with some grape jelly and mealworms and of course the orioles have found it so now we have one of the sissiest bird fights going on. A beautiful oriole descends to the feeder to eat and in zooms the cute little hummingbird twittering angrily for it to leave, the oriole tries to whistle it away to no avail. This contest isn't very macho let me tell ya. Kind of like watching Liberace and Tiny Tim in a fight.

Baby Goosen

So there has been a baby Canada (not Canadian) goose 'splosion behind the store. Of course, I thought to myself, "What kind of mischief could I get in with a scoop of corn and the Nova Bird camera?" Here's the results:

Now, I'm off to a certain Mr. N____'s house for more techno birding fun and possibly another tit sighting.

More fun with the camera

I set up the Nova Bird camera at our store's oriole feeder today. It was tad windy so I have lots of shots of the feeder swaying back and forth so I need to remember to adjust the number of shots when it's windy. I did manage to get a couple of oriole shots:

This feeder is new, it's made of recycled plastic and has two dishes for grape jelly and mealworms. It also holds two orange halves. I like it because recycled plastic lasts for a long time and the color really gets the orioles' attention. The roof keeps the jelly from turning to soup. It's been our most popular oriole feeder at the store too. It's odd, when I saw it at Bird Watch America last January, I thought it was a neat idea, but I had no clue that it would be so popular a feeder this year.

I also checked on our hooded merganser nest:

According to A Guide to the Nests, Eggs, and Nestlings of North American Birds by Paul Baicich and Colin J. O. Harrison hooded mergansers incubate for 31 days. I believe this bird started to incubate on April 20 so May 21 should be hatch day. I'm working at the store Friday, Saturday and Sunday so I should be able to see it. For safe measure, I'm going to try and set up the Nova Bird Camera on Friday so hopefully that will catch the chicks jumping out.

My blue tit

Here is a still from the video I took:

Caught on tape--a blue tit gone wild. A special thanks to Sam Crowe of Birdzilla who loaned me a video camera for some segments. Without it, I wouldn't have been able to prove that I wasn't making up a bird.

I found a blue tit!

So, today at my friend's house I was testing out oodles of bird feeder cameras and recording birds for my birdzilla.com segments. At one point I walked past the window and noticed what looked like a blue and yellow chickadee with a white eyebrow on a peanut feeder. I immeadiately thought "british tit" but it was so unlikely that I didn't say it out loud. Instead I yelled for Bill to get the camera while I rushed around to get a video camera. I got a few seconds recorded and it was in fact a blue tit.

The really wierd part about this is that the guy whose house I was staying in is British. I don't think he fully understood how really, really wierd and unlikely this was since he grew up with blue tits and I almost for a second thought, "did someone release this bird to get my goat?"

A quick call to someone from the Minnesota Ornithologists' Union revealed that the chances that this bird actually flew across the Atlantic here are slim to nil and that chances are high this bird is likely the result of a released cage bird but should be documented non the less. I'm going to see if I can get a frame of the blue tit off of the video and post it to the site.

Birdchick's new Toy!

So, I've been testing out a new toy today and I LOVE it! It's a motion sensitive camera that you can set up at your bird feeder created by a company called Nova Bird. I've just started playing with it this afternoon and have had some fun results: