Horned Lark

Horned larks a constant in my field work but it seems their numbers have bumped up recently. These birds are fairly common in farm field were I live, I hear them constantly. But I've been on bird trips where people have never seen one and they have been casually birding for a long time. Usually when you see them, they are flying away off the side of a gravel road as you speed past in your car. But since I am stationed on the side of the road for an hour at a time, I have occasion to see them up close.

All the farmers are combining right now and migrating sparrows and larks are grabbing the seeds on the side of the road. As I watched this horned lark nibbling a crush corn kernel, I wondered why we don't see these birds scrounging around under bird feeders. Even if you use the argument that the habitat isn't right, what about all the newly developed houses in former farm fields...surely some adaptable horned larks were be scrounging under those at some point?

I love the moments my job affords me. Even when things are seeming slow, if I pay attention to what's going on around me, I can find something exciting. This morning, some horned larks were getting into a bit of a fight.

These horned larks kept flighting up against each other. I wondered how well this plays out in migration. Wouldn't it be more energy efficient not to fight and focus on where the birds need to travel to? Although a peck order must be established, I suppose.

And once 2 are involved, everyone else needs to get a piece of the horned lark fight club action. Who needs to go on an African safari when wildlife fights can happen in a recently combined soybean field?

 

Camouflage

One of the joys of migration is that you never when something is going to show up. When I'm out doing my surveys, I have my usual suspects of species but every now and then a surprise hits.

As I was driving between survey points, I passed this field and a small flock fluttered away from the road towards the center. I knew they were shorebirds, but not exactly certain what they were.  I pulled over and got my scope out.

It was a flock of plovers in non-breeding plumage. And when they flew, there was no black in their "wing pits" that you would see on a black-bellied plover in non breeding plumage, so these were American golden-plovers. The birds soon hunkered down into the the soybean stubble and it was amazing how well their plumage mixed in with that. I wondered if they just blew in from their northern migration the night before and were hoping to catch a nap. The above was a shot taken with my iPhone 4s with my spotting scope.

This was taken with my Nikon D40 SLR and spotting scope. Some of the birds were still on high alert. Not the bird in front with a cocked head towards the sky? I looked up and that plover had its eye on a passing Cooper's hawk, high in the clouds.

These birds have one of the longest migrations out there. According to Audubon, American golden-plovers fly offshore from the east coast of North America and travel nonstop over the Atlantic Ocean to South America. Individuals may go more than 3,000 miles in one flight. Juveniles and birds blown off track will move  through river valleys and I wasn't too far from the Mississippi River when I got these shots. Amazing to think about how far these birds will go.

Bee Escape Board

We did a honey harvest last week. One of the challenges with that is getting all of the bees safely out of the honey supers so you aren't carrying a few thousand angiry bees back when you go to extract the honey from the frames.  We've tried a few things to get bees out of honey supers to varying degrees of success. Neil found something called Bee Escape boards or Bee Mazes as we call them and they work like a charm.  We ordered one and then Neil's groundskeeper Hans built one for each hive.

Essentially it's designed so bees can crawl out but find it undesirable to crawl back in. Above is my friend Brie who had visiting a bee hive on her bucket list, so I incorporated her enthusiasm into our honey harvest plans. She's holding the Escape Board so you can see all the bees that have exited from the honey super.

The board should go between the smaller boxes called honey supers where bees store excess honey (the stuff you harvest) and the larger brood boxes where they raise young and have honey stores for winter. You set the Escape Board so that they bees will leave the supers and crawl down into the brood box.

One of our hives had some feral comb between the brood boxes and honey supers and the excess wax blocked the exit holes in the maze. The workers didn't vacate the the honey supers, they got blocked in!

Then Neil had the brilliant idea of setting the honey supers chock full of thousands of bees on a table near the hive and placing the Escape Board on top of them, as if it were a ceiling. Sure enough, the girls began to exit immediately through the top and fly back to their hive.  It was so hypnotic, I had to get a video so you could see how quickly they were getting the heck outta Dodge:

 [youtube]http://youtu.be/Ba2w_giooss[/youtube]

Random White-throated Sparrow

As sparrow migration is blitzing around the US, I thought I put up these images of a white-throated sparrow chowing down on a snowy mountain ash. Even if you can't have bird feeders, sometimes having the right kind of trees can be very beneficial to migratory birds.

I got these images during a digiscoping workshop I gave at Hawk Ridge in Duluth, MN.

If you are curious, hawk migration is still going on at Hawk Ridge and there's plenty of time to catch some hot accipiter action.