A New Year and #BirdADay 1

A couple of months ago I was at the Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival. I hadn’t been for a few years. I hadn’t travelled as much the last two years to try and fix something that really couldn’t be fixed. 

I felt like the prodigal birder. “Sharon! OMG! We haven’t seen you in ages!” That’s one of the things that I love about the birding community, you’re always welcome. As I greeted a dear friend and we caught up he asked, “What’s Non Birding Bill up to?”

I paused awkwardly. “Um…well…he’s traveling the country right now. So, he’s…uh…good, I guess. You know we’re not together anymore, right?”

He looked surprised. I continued, “We made an announcement on my private Facebook page. You liked it and I think even commented on it.”

With shock on his face he said, “I thought that was comedy bit you two were doing…”

And that was a fair read based on the way Bill and I would post on each other’s social media. 

Repeat the scenario a few more times that day. Seven Hells, if people I know well couldn’t tell from our announcements that we split, how long will it take the rest of the world to hear the news and stop asking?

So yeah, there’s no easy way to make the announcement that you’ve separated from your partner of over 20 years. Non Birding Bill and I are no longer a couple. Things are amicable…well as amicable as they can be in a divorce. I’ve debated with myself about making any kind of announcement on public social media—that’s not what it’s supposed to be used for, right? And I want to be sensitive to Bill and our families. However, we’ve invited you to be part of our lives either through our writing, our banter on social media, and the podcast, you should know too. 

It’s strange time. I feel like I’m in this odd limbo as I navigate what my future is going to be. It will, of course, include birds. 

No. I will not be doing a “Divorce Big Year” no matter how much an editor thinks that’s an awesome idea. 

But some things will shift—how I tell stories for one. If you’ve seen one of my storytelling shows or heard me at a bird festival, you may have heard my nude beach story. It’s one of my best. But it included Bill. Will that story be funny again some day? I sure as hell hope so. And I hope we continue to be friends and maybe even work on some creative projects in the future. 

Eastern screech-owl at Estero Llano Grande State Park in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas.

And since birds bring me so much joy, I’m going to clear out my archives. So many articles started and unfinished. So many photos and videos taken that never even made it to Instagram. My New Year’s goal is to post a #BirdADay either here or most often on Instagram or the Birdchick Facebook page or Twitter feed. Some will be from the past, but there will also be birds in real time. Feel free to share your #BirdADay as well.

Birdchick Podcast 02-27-11

[Note from NBB: Fixed the echo on this one as well. Big thanks to Olga Nunes for her help.] The latest Birdchick Podcast is up!  In this, Non Birding Bill and I discuss teenage songbird song, eBird, the BirdsEye App, the Big Year Movie and Cornell's upcoming Young Birder Event (which I get whiney about).

Here are links to topics we discussed:

eBird

BirdsEye App

Teenage Bird Song

Young Birder Event At Cornell

You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes.

[audio src="http://media.blubrry.com/birdchick/p/birdchick.com/wp/podcast/birdchick-podcast-5.mp3"]

Drunk bees!

Hello all, NBB here. Yesterday was a pretty shining example of why, three (?) years into this process, I'm still the junior beekeeping assistant, the Barney Fife of the apiary world.

To get everyone up to speed: the bees needed to be fed, Sharon has to work, Neil is out of town, Hans is out of town, and Lorraine is sick as a dog. Which left me. Now, the last time I was sent off alone to check on the bees it was a comedy of errors, if by "comedy" you mean "it's funny because it happened to someone else."

This mission, however, was a simple one: feed the bees. I didn't have to switch boxes, combine any hives, or search for the queen. Just feed the bees by mixing sugar and water in a pail, then add the pail to the hive. A job so simple, an idiot could do it.

Which is why they sent me.

It was a cold day, about 44°, which meant the hives would be less active, they tend to stay inside and cluster for warmth. I got there in plenty of time, figuring to take about an hour to make the sugar water solution. Small problem:

The sugar, having been left in the garage all summer, was not so much as “easy pour” as more of a “solid brick.” After chipping away at the bags, I was able to produce several manageable chunks and also a large mess. So after about an hour I had five pails full of sugar water.

Too bad we have six beehives. Sigh... what can I say? Math is hard! Back to the house to make another pail, then back down to the hives.

Amazing, the bees were still alive by the time I got to them.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsJIUgrF0ws[/youtube]

We didn’t get as much honey as we were expecting this year. I wonder if the wetness of the season had something to do with this, or the fact that we had eight hives competing for pollen rather than two.

Regardless, the remaining hives seemed full. And thirsty...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAv3TBxv7-Y[/youtube]

For reasons that escape me now, I had to reopen one of the hives after I put the pail on. I noticed one of the bees had gotten splashed with the sugar water, making her the most popular girl at the dance.

Her wings were sparkling.

We’re heading towards the end of bee season. Soon we’ll be taking the hives down to two or three brood boxes (filled with honey, which the bees will eat over the winter). We’ll wrap the hives in insulation, put the entrance reducers on (to keep out mice and other pests that would make a honey-filled box a winter home), and that’ll be that. We’ll sneak down in the winter and press our ears to the side to make sure they’re alive, dreaming whatever winter dreams bees have.

Birds with Hats and Bee Stings

Hello all, NBB here. Sharon’s a bit swamped with deadlines, so she’s asked me to fill in with a blog post about all the exciting things that are happening in the birding world. But since I avoid knowing anything about the birding world with great vigor, I instead present you with Birds Wearing Hats.

Hilarious, I think you’ll agree.

I want to talk for a moment about the bee sting I got last week, mostly because it was the thing that made me most afraid of keeping bees, and is, I think the thing that causes most people to be terrified of them.

I was the last of our beekeeping group to get stung (heck, even the dog got one before me), partly because I’m not around the bees as much as the others (some of us have jobs that require us to be at the same place and time every week), but also because I try to give the bees as wide a berth as possible. Don’t get me wrong, bees are cute as all get out and I love looking at them up close... from the safety of my bee suit. I don’t stand around the hives without one on, I don’t walk through the “bee highway,” and above all, I don’t run and flail, especially while yelling “don’t run and flail! Don’t run and flail!”

So, here’s what happened: there’s a little piece of wood or metal that you put in front of the entrance to the hive to control the flow of bees in and out. It’s called, helpfully enough, an “entrance reducer.” You use this at the beginning of the hive to encourage them to stay inside and make it their home. After a while, you take it off so that the traffic of returning foragers isn’t slowed down.

The entrance reducer was held on with a screw and to get the screw off , we had to move the whole hive off the base board so that I could turn the screwdriver. This, understandably, caused some consternation, and one of the girls decided to register a complaint. With her butt.

I will tell you now, all in all a bee sting isn’t that bad, at least in the ankle, which is where I got it. It’s like stepping on a nail, there’s a shock of pain and a sudden urge to move away. Afterwards it was like a twisted ankle, but like I say the first thought it “I think something really bad has happened,” followed quickly by “hey, when they sting you, don’t they release a pheromone that makes others want to sting you?”

Remembering neither to run nor flail, nor to do them while yelling “Don’t run! Don’t flail!” I hobbled over to the work table and said a few choice words. Well, one word, over and over. Take a guess. As Sharon and Neil made sure I didn’t get stung again (and wasn’t, you know, dying from a bee allergy), I took a deep breath and stock of what my body was doing. Did my feet itch? No? Was I short of breath? No. Was I going numb? No.

Really the only thing I was aware of was a lingering pain like a stab wound and wait, what was the other thing? That pulsing sensation kind of like oh my god I can feel the stinger pumping venom.

How Neil was able to pull the stinger out of my ankle using his still-gloved hand I do not know. I can only assume that writing a Newbery/Carnegie winning book has given him the tactile sense of a dozen men!

And that was it. It hurt. It was sore. I saw the bee that stung me, and stepped on her, not out of anger but to put her out of her misery. Wasn’t her fault, I was the one who took her house apart. Poor bee.

Then we put the hives back together, hobbled back and grilled up some dinner.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you is that you don’t need to be afraid of bee stings. You should definitely avoid them but it’s not something to go through your life being terrified of. On the grand scale of pain I’ve experienced, hitting my thumb with a hammer or getting a really bad sunburn are worse and last longer. Keep in mind, though, I was only stung once, and I had friends with me who’d been through this.

I’m curious to see how I act the next time I go out to the hives. I’ll probably wear boots--the ankles are the only part the bee suit don’t protect, after all--but I don’t feel any more afraid of them than I did last week. They’re still these fascinating, cute creatures, and I like to think that we’re helping them survive. But we have to be careful.

West Bound and Down!

WARNING! SOMEWHAT GROSS PHOTO AT THE END OF THIS POST!

I'm wrapping up my time in Atlanta and I wait for my flight home to Minneapolis. I have to say that the trade show that I went to was smaller than usual and one had to really search to find something innovative and not just a bird feeder that's been around for over a decade (or in at least one case, close to 50 years) and call it new. But I did find a few gems that I'll post later.

In the meantime, I see that Non Birding Bill took my advice and blogged a birding even he and Mr. Neil witnessed yesterday at the feeders. I love it, I'm in the middle of a trade show, busy looking for article ideas and potential new products for the OpenSky Store and NBB calls, "Okay, don't get mad."

Knowing that he and Mr. Neil were free-wheeling boys while each one's special lady friend was out of town I was a tad concerned when the phone call starts with that. I immediately inhaled a calming breath bracing myself for something like:

"We decided to move the beehives to a sunnier spot...and ended up with a broken spleen."

or

"We thought of a new bird food recipe involving chocolate a millet and the birds are eating it like mad!"

or

"Neil and I decided to shave our initials into our hair and now we look totally rad!"

or

"We chipped in and bought a boat to sail the Mississippi when the ice is out this spring, it's shaped like a coffin!"

You know, the typical shenanigans men can get into when sensible feminine counterpoint is no longer available. But no, it was that they saw some sort of raptor try to take a squirrel and they didn't know what it was or get photos. Bill wrote an epic blog entry to the harrowing tale.

Between you and me, the story during the phone call from the two shifted a bit (I used clever questioning techniques learned from watching Adam-12 all last week). It started that they saw a bald eagle take a squirrel, well maybe not a bald eagle, but way bigger than a hawk, possibly and owl, and well the squirrel did get away and we're trying to find it and it could have been a golden eagle or just a really big ass red-tailed hawk.

Golden eagle would not be out of the realm of possibility. When Golden Eagle 42 was working his way south from the Arctic Circle this fall, he actually flew over Mr. Neil's. He actually roosted within a quarter mile of our beehives one night. I even got a terrible photo of him flying--holy cow, did I ever post that photo? I need to dig that up, that was a cool tale.

However, this morning as I wait for my flight back to the Twin Cities I see Mr. Neil has sent me further (somewhat gruesome evidence of their raptor adventure yesterday).

Here is the squirrel that suffered the apparent attack. Mr. Neil writes, "This was the only squirrel around after the eagle left and we came out with cameras. I wasn't sure if it was the one attacked or not, as I thought the atacked one was a short-tailed guy who had been hanging around that feeder all morning. But looking at the photo, I think it was this one after all..."

Mr. Neil also sent a closer image of the squirrel's head:

I'm not sure that this squirrel is long for this world and I wonder if the raptor in question will be back for it soon? Now I think I have answer to how some squirrels lose their eyes.

Well done, boys, well done.

Rock Dove! Down, down, down...

NBB's Guide to that Bird You Saw: Pigeon

The Finale of our adventures with all the birds you really need to know, is, of course, the humble pigeon, or "Rock Dove" (which was a lesser-known single off Fred Schneider's solo career. He doesn't talk about it much), which is another bird that people hate because they've adapted to human civilization so very well. "Filthy things! Look at them, eating garbage!" as if their food supply, you know, fell off great orchards of invisible Garbage Trees, or simply blew into town like tumbleweeds made of Big Mac wrappers.

You gonna eat the rest of that?

But enough with the social commentary, let us consider the pigeon in and of itself.

The pigeon has two things going for it: one is their coloration. Pigeons have a remarkable color ranges: you see it a lot in our neighborhood, where I think the wild population has been cross-breading with racing birds. But even the normal, garden variety pidge has that remarkable iridescent ring around their neck and the blue-gray coloring.

It's in flight that pigeons are really fantastic, that ungainly body swooping in large circles, great flocks of them covering the sky. Did you know that pigeons can out fly Peregrine Falcons? It's true. And the reason why they're so slow to get out of the way of cars is that they see things much faster than we do: it's like you're moving in slow motion—that's right, it doesn't occur to a pigeon that you might be a threat to it.

But I'll grant you that the Pidge may not have the most well-thought-out shape in the avian world. It lacks the sleek sharpness of a Blue Jay or the petite uber-cuteness of a Titmouse. It seems to be made up large of bumps, like a stack of bowling balls in a burlap sack, jostling over each other. Walking, a pigeon's body can't quite seem to agree which direction it's going: chest forward, tail back, head in a complete panic of falling over. And then there are the feet, with all the design elegance of a Soviet automobile.

So, you should give a bit of credit to the common Rock Dove. It's bird you should know. But just make sure you never, ever let anyone know you admire it. They'll give you dirty looks out of the side of their eyes, and walk quickly away, muttering... much like a pigeon.

The Crow: A Reappraisal

NBB's Guide to the Bird You Saw: Crows

Okay, so hopefully you've gotten the identification of Sparrow down pat. If not, there's no hope for you, and you're destined to lead a lonely, sheltered life, fearing the companionship of your fellow man. Which, ironically, makes you a perfect candidate to be a bird watcher. But I kid the birders.

Let us now move briskly on to the other type of bird you just saw, the Crow. In contrast to the Sparrow, which is vile, corrupt mockery of all that is righteous in the world but which is extremely popular—the Internet Explorer 6 of birds, if you will—the Crow is, in fact, a fairly awesome bird which people hate. People hate Crows so much you'd think they horked in the back of their car, or had a reality show.

This is not an unreasonable reaction. Crows have several things working against them, the first being is that while Crows are cool, they know it. Crows don't walk, they strut, making sure that you notice them without acting like they're making sure you notice them. I don't think that anyone would disagree that Crows have what Vice-Principals the world over would describe as "an attitude problem," before adding "Mister" with a very significant period at the end, because Crows are basically the teenagers of the bird world. You'll often find them hanging around behind feeders, sneaking a smoke. Chase them off and they'll simply fly off—slooooowly—to the nearest tree, glaring at you without looking like they're glaring at you. You can almost hear them mutter "bogus," and "whut-evah, grand-dad."

Yeah, I'll get right on that. Watch me go. Zoom.

I can hear my wife cringing from across town as I write this, because she can't stand anthropomorphization of animals. But it doesn't really apply to Crows, because I feel they are so very human, which is, again, part of the reason why people don't like them. They're cooperative, family-based, and part of the reason they've been so successful is that they've adapted to humanity, eating the roadkill (created by us) and garbage (likewise).

So, it can be easy to hate on Crows, but nonetheless I urge you take another look at them: I honestly really like them. Crows can be a lot of fun to watch, provided they don't know you're watching them: they play pass-the-stick and have this weird cartwheeling game they play in the park in the winter. And winter is the best time to watch crows, because that's when they lose some of their smugness and are, like the rest of us, just trying to get from A to B. Their strut becomes a trudge as they try to make their way through the snow, and they'll hang in the trees, wrapped in their feathers like trench coats. They hang out at my bus stop, probaby waiting for the cross-town to take them to the U. campus, where they are no-doubt studying Russian Formalism and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. And as we stand there, both freezing our butts off, they'll shake off the snow with a shudder as if to say "this weather is b.s."

Yes, yes it is.

---

Sharon tells me that the Crows we have around our house are notoriously hard to take pictures of (again, like teenagers), so your best bet is try try and snap a picture with a motion-sensitive camera like the  Wingscapes Birdcam. Both items are available at the Birdchick’s OpenSky Store, and 20% of the profits are donated to the ABA’s kids programs.

As an added bonus, if you enter the coupon code Sharon1009, you’ll get an additional 10% off your OpenSky order.