Shallow Thoughts : : birds
Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.
Tue, 05 Jan 2021
We were flying R/C planes at the soccer field at Overlook on Sunday
morning when somebody asked, "What's that bird doing there?"
There was a big bird sitting in the middle of the field.
It looked like some sort of raptor. I keep a
monocular in my flying case (it's not the first interesting bird
to show up at the flying field), so I pulled it out. The bird had its back
to me, but hmm, big raptor, all dark brown except for golden feathers
on the neck and a few light ones on the back ... "Hey, guys, I think
that's an immature golden eagle!"
Read more ...
Tags: nature, birds
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10:12 Jan 05, 2021
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Sun, 19 Apr 2020
I'd been delaying this entry, hoping the hummingbirds would show up.
I only have a couple of them right now: a male broad-tailed and a
male black-chinned. I hope things will perk up later: in midsummer
the rufous and calliope hummingbirds arrive and things usually get a
lot more active. But meanwhile, I have an H entry to write.
The black-chinned hummingbirds we have here now have a beautiful
purple throat. With, yes, a little bit of black there. Why womeone
would look at a bird with an iridescent purple throat with a small
black border and name it "black-chinned" is beyond me.
Unfortunately, this purple throat is even more sensitive to light angle
than other hummingbirds' colors, and I haven't been able to get a
photo that really shows it. Hummingbird feathers -- and
particularly the feathers of the males' colorful throats -- have a
structure that diffracts the light, creating beautiful iridescent
colors that only show up when the sun is at just the right angle.
If you watch a male black-chinned hummer at the feeder, its throat
will look black most of the time, with occasional startling flashes
of purple. You have to take a lot of photos and get lucky with timing
to catch the flash. I'll get it some day.
Meanwhile,
here's
a lovely black-chinned hummingbird photo from Arizona.
So instead, here's a photo of a male rufous
hummingbirds, which will show up later in the summer. Rufous are a lot
easier to photograph. Their brilliant copper-colored throats show up
from a much wider range of angles, and rufous males are even more
territorial than other hummers, so once one decides it owns your
feeder, it will pose in the sunlight for most of the day,
ready to chase any pretenders away.
Read more ...
Tags: nature, birds, hummingbirds
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20:02 Apr 19, 2020
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Fri, 06 Dec 2019
Last week, a flock of western bluebirds suddenly became fascinated
with my two bluebird houses.
First I noticed a bluebird clinging to the outside of the downhill
bluebird house. He would poke his head in the hole briefly, a couple
of times, flutter to the top of the house, flutter back down to
cling outside the hole and stick his head in. He never actually
went in, and eventually lost interest and flew away.
Then a few minutes later, there were several bluebirds fluttering
around the birdhouse that's outside the upstairs bedroom. I counted
at least five individuals; I think they were all males.
(The photos here are of a different, mixed-gender flock.)
They were taking turns perching on top of the birdhouse, clinging to
the outside and poking their heads in the hole. They attracted a
junco, a robin and a flicker who apparently came to see what was so
interesting; eventually the big flicker was apparently too intimidating,
though she wasn't doing anything threatening, and all the bluebirds departed.
Neither of my birdhouses has ever had a bluebird breeding in it;
they've had ash-throated flycatchers and a juniper titmouse during
breeding season. Neither of them has been cleaned out since the last
breeding season; I've been meaning to do that but haven't gotten
around to it yet.
Are they looking for a place to shelter in cold weather? Or
scouting out sites to have an advantage in next year's breeding
season? Should I hurry to clean them out so they'll look more
appealing during the winter? I posted to the local birders' list,
but nobody seemed to know.
I'd love to have more bluebirds around;
they usually only visit briefly to bathe and drink.
Alas, they haven't been back, but I put the heated birdback out
a few days ago and it should be popular once the days get colder.
Tags: nature, birds
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20:39 Dec 06, 2019
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Tue, 06 Aug 2019
Last month I wrote about the
orphaned
nestlings I found on the ground off the back deck, and how I took
them to a rehabilitator when the parents didn't come back to feed them.
Here's the rest of the story. Warning: it's only half a happy ending.
Under the good care of our local bird rehabilitator, they started to
feather out and gain weight quickly.
She gave me some literature on bird rescue and let me visit them
and help feed them. There's a lot of work and responsibility involved
in bird rehabilitation!
I'd sometimes thought I wanted to be a rehabilitator; now I'm not so sure
I'm up to the responsibility.
Though the chicks sure were adorable once they started to look like birds
instead of embryos, sitting so trustingly in Sally's hand.
The big mystery was what species they were. Bird rehabilitators have
charts where you can look up bird species according to weight,
mouth color, gape color, skin color, feather color, and feet and leg size.
But the charts only have a few species; they're woefully incomplete, and
my babies didn't match any of the listings. We were thinking maybe
robin or ash-throated flycatcher, but nothing really matched.
Fortunately, you can feed the same thing to anything but finches:
Cornell makes a mixture of meat, dog food, vitamins and minerals
that's suitable for most baby birds, though apparently it's dangerous
to feed it to finches, so we crossed our fingers and guessed that they
were too big to be house finches.
As they grew more feathers, Sally increasingly suspected they were
canyon towhees (a common bird in White Rock), and although they still
didn't have adult plumage by the time they left the cage, that's
still what we think.
By about twenty days after the rescue, they were acting almost like
adult birds, hopping restlessly around the cage, jumping up to the
perch and fluttering back down. They were eating partly by themselves
at this point, a variety of foods including lettuce, blueberries, cut up
pea pods, and dried mealworms, though they weren't eating many seeds like
you'd expect from towhees. They still liked being fed the Cornell meat
mixture, and ate more of that than anything else.
I Get to be a Bird Mom For a While
At this point, Sally needed to go out of town, and I offered to babysit
them so she didn't have to take them on her trip.
(One of the big downsites of being a rehabilitator: while you're
in charge of babies, they need constant care.)
I took them back to my place, where I hoped I'd be able to release them:
partly because they'd been born here, and partly because the
towhees here in White Rock aren't so territorial as they
apparently are in Los Alamos.
With the chicks safely stashed in the guest bedroom, I could tell
they were getting restless and wanted out of the cage.
When I opened the cage to feed them and change their water and bedding,
they escaped out into the room a couple of times and I
had to catch them and get them back in the cage.
So I knew they could fly and wanted out. (I'm sure being moved from
Sally's house to mine didn't help: the change in surroundings
probably unnerved them.)
Sally advised me to leave the cage outside during the day for a couple
of days prior to the releasing, so the birds can get used to the environment.
The first day I put them outside, they immediately seemed much happier
and calmer. It seemed they liked being outside.
I Fail as a Bird Mom
On their second morning outdoors, I left them with new food and water,
then came back to check on them an hour later. They seemed much more
agitated than before, flying madly from one side of the cage to the
other. Sally had described her last tenant, a sparrow, doing that
just before release; she had released the sparrow a bit earlier than
planned because the bird seemed to want out so badly. I wondered if that
was the case here, but decided to wait one more day.
But the larger of the two babies had other ideas. When I unzipped the
top of the cage to re-fill the water dish, it was in the air immediately,
and somehow shot through the tiny opening next to my arm.
It flew about thirty feet, landed in a clearing -- and was immediately
taken by a Cooper's hawk that came out of nowhere.
The hawk flew off, the baby towhee squeaking pathetically in its
talons, leaving me and the other baby in shock.
What a blow! The bird rescue literature Sally loaned me stresses
that bad things can happen. There are so many things that can go wrong
with a nestling or a release. They tell you how poor the odds are for
baby birds in general. They remind you that the birds would have had
no chance of survival if you hadn't rescued them;
rescued, at least they have some chance.
While I know that's all true, I'm not sure it makes me feel much better.
In hindsight, Sally said the chicks' agitation that day might have
been because they knew the hawk was there, though neither of us though
about that possibility at the time. She thinks the hawk must have been
"stalking them", hanging out nearby, aware that there was something
delectable inside the cage. She's had chicks taken by hawks too.
Still ... sigh.
The Next Release Goes Better
But there was still the remaining chick to think about. Sally and I
discussed options and decided that I should bring the chick back
inside, and then drive it back up to her house. The hawk would
probably remain around my place for a while,and the area wouldn't be
safe for a new fledgling. Indeed, I saw the hawk again a few days
later. (Normally I love seeing Cooper's hawks!)
The chick was obviously unhappy, whether because of being brought back
inside, loneliness, or remaining trauma from hearing the attack --
even if it didn't understand exactly what had happened, I'm sure
the chick heard the "towhee in mortal peril" noises just as I did.
So the chick (whom Dave dubbed "Lucky")
had to wait another several days before finally being released.
The release went well. Lucky, less bold than its nestmate,
was initially reluctant to leave the cage,
but eventually fluttered out and flew to the shade of a
nearby bush, where we could see it pecking at the ground and
apparently eating various unidentifiable bits.
It looked like it was finding plenty to eat there, it was mostly hidden
from predators and competetors, and it had shade and shelter --
a good spot to begin a new life.
(I tried to get a video of the release but that didn't work out.)
Since then the chick has kept a low profile, but Sally thinks she saw
a towhee fledgling a couple of days later. So we have our fingers crossed!
More photos:
Nestling Rescue
Photos.
Tags: birds, nature
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Fri, 10 Mar 2017
We live in what seems like wonderful roadrunner territory.
For the three years we've lived here, we've hoped to see a roadrunner,
and have seen them a few times at neighbors' places, but never in our
own yard.
Until this morning. Dave happened to be looking out the window at just
the right time, and spotted it in the garden. I grabbed the camera,
and we watched it as it came out from behind a bush and went into
stalk mode.
And it caught something!
We could see something large in its bill as it triumphantly perched on
the edge of the garden wall, before hopping off and making a beeline
for a nearby juniper thicket.
It wasn't until I uploaded the photo that I discovered what it had
caught: a fence lizard. Our lizards only started to come out of
hibernation about a week ago, so the roadrunner picked the perfect
time to show up.
I hope our roadrunner decides this is a good place to hang around.
Tags: roadrunner, birds
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14:33 Mar 10, 2017
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Sun, 05 Mar 2017
Dave called from an upstairs bedroom. "You'll probably want to see this."
He had gone up after dinner to get something, turned the light on, and
been surprised by an agitated junco, chirping and fluttering on the sill
outside the window. It evidently was tring to fly through the window
and into the room. Occasionally it would flutter backward to the
balcony rail, but no further.
There's a piñon tree whose branches extend to within a few feet of the
balcony, but the junco ignored the tree and seemed bent on getting
inside the room.
As we watched, hoping the bird would calm down, instead it became
increasingly more desperate and stressed. I remembered how, a few
months earlier, I opened the door to a deck at night and surprised a
large bird, maybe a dove, that had been roosting there under the
eaves. The bird startled and flew off in a panic toward the nearest
tree. I had wondered what happened to it -- whether it had managed to
find a perch in the thick of a tree in the dark of night. (Unlike San
Jose, White Rock gets very dark at night.)
And that thought solved the problem of our agitated junco. "Turn the
porch light on", I suggested. Dave flipped a switch, and the porch light
over the deck illuminated not only the deck where the junco was, but
the nearest branches of the nearby piñon.
Sure enough, now that it could see the branches of the tree, the junco
immediately turned around and flew to a safe perch. We turned the porch
light back off, and we heard no more from our nocturnal junco.
Tags: nature, birds
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11:27 Mar 05, 2017
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Sun, 05 Feb 2017
Los Alamos is having an influx of rare rosy-finches (which apparently
are supposed to be hyphenated:
they're rosy-finches, not finches that are rosy).
They're normally birds of the snowy high altitudes, like the top of
Sandia Crest, and quite unusual in Los Alamos. They're even rarer in
White Rock, and although I've been keeping my eyes open I haven't seen
any here at home; but a few days ago I was lucky enough to be invited
to the home of a birder in town who's been seeing great flocks of
rosy-finches at his feeders.
There are four types, of which three have ever been seen locally,
and we saw all three. Most of the flock was brown-capped rosy-finches,
with two each black rosy-finches and gray-capped rosy-finches.
The upper bird at right, I believe, is one of the blacks, but it
might be a grey-capped. They're a bit hard to tell apart.
In any case, pretty birds, sparrow sized with nice head markings and
a hint of pink under the wing, and it was fun to get to see them.
The local roadrunner also made a brief appearance, and we marveled at
the combination of high-altitude snowbirds and a desert bird here at
the same place and time. White Rock seems like much better roadrunner
territory, and indeed they're sometimes seen here (though not, so far,
at my house), but they're just as common up in the forests of Los Alamos.
Our host said he only sees them in winter; in spring, just as they
start singing, they leave and go somewhere else. How odd!
Speaking of birds and spring, we have a juniper titmouse determinedly
singing his ray-gun song, a few house sparrows are singing
sporadically, and we're starting to see cranes flying north. They
started a few days ago, and I counted several hundred of them today,
enjoying the sunny and relatively warm weather as they made their way
north. Ironically, just two weeks ago I saw a group of about sixty
cranes flying south -- very late migrants, who must have
arrived at the Bosque del Apache just in time to see the first
northbound migrants leave. "Hey, what's up, we just got here, where ya
all going?"
A few more photos:
Rosy-finches
(and a few other nice birds).
We also have a mule deer buck frequenting our yard, sometimes hanging
out in the garden just outside the house to drink from the heated
birdbath while everything else is frozen. (We haven't seen him in a
few days, with the warmer weather and most of the ice melted.) We know
it's the same buck coming back: he's easy to recognize because he's
missing a couple of tines on one antler.
The buck is a welcome guest now, but in a month or so when the trees
start leafing out I may regret that as I try to find ways of keeping
him from stripping all the foliage off my baby apple tree, like some
deer did last spring. I'm told it helps to put smelly soap shavings,
like Irish Spring, in a bag and hang it from the branches, and deer
will avoid the smell. I will try the soap trick but will probably
combine it with other measures, like a temporary fence.
Tags: nature, birds
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Mon, 08 Feb 2016
For the last several days, when I go upstairs in mid-morning I often
hear a strange sound coming from the bedroom. It's a juniper titmouse
energetically attacking the east-facing window.
He calls, most often in threes, as he flutters around
the windowsill, sometimes scratching or pecking the window. He'll attack
the bottom for a while, moving from one side to the other, then fly up
to the top of the window to attack the top corners, then back to the bottom.
For several days I've run down to grab the camera as soon as I saw him,
but by the time I get back and get focused, he becomes camera-shy and
flies away, and I hear EEE EEE EEE from a nearby tree instead.
Later in the day I'll sometimes see him down at the office windows,
though never as persistently as upstairs in the morning.
I've suspected he's attacking his reflection (and also assumed he's a "he"),
partly because I see him at the east-facing bedroom window in the morning
and at the south-facing office window in the early afternoon.
But I'm not sure about it, and certainly I hear his call from trees
scattered around the yard.
Something I was never sure of, but am now: titmice definitely can
raise and lower their crests. I'd never seen one with its crest lowered,
but this one flattens his crest while he's in attack mode.
His EEE EEE EEE call isn't very similar to any of the calls
listed for juniper titmouse in the Stokes CD set or the Audubon
Android app. So when he briefly attacked the window next to my
computer yesterday afternoon while I was sitting there, I grabbed
a camera and shot a video, hoping to capture the sound. The titmouse didn't
exactly cooperate: he chirped a few times, not always in the group of
three he uses so persistently in the morning, and the sound in the
video came out terribly noisy; but after some processing in audacity
I managed to edit out some of the noise. And then this morning as I
was brushing my teeth, I heard him again and he was more obliging, giving
me a long video of him attacking and yelling at the bedroom window.
Here's the
Juniper
titmouse call as he attacks my window this morning,
and yesterday's
Juniper
titmouse call at the office window yesterday.
Today's video is on youtube:
Titmouse attacking the window
but that's without the sound edits, so it's tough to hear him.
(Incidentally, since Audacity has a super confusing user interface and
I'm sure I'll need this again, what seemed to work best was to
highlight sections that weren't titmouse and use
Edit→Delete; then use Effects→Amplify,
checking the box for Allow clipping and using Preview to
amplify it to the point where the bird is audible. Then find a section
that's just noise, no titmouse, select it, run Effects→Noise
Reduction and click Get Noise Profile. The window goes
away, so click somewhere to un-select, call up Effects→Noise
Reduction again and this time click OK.)
I feel a bit sorry for the little titmouse, attacking windows so frenetically.
Titmice are cute, excellent birds to have around, and I hope he's saving
some energy for attracting a mate who will build a nest here this spring.
Meanwhile, he's certainly providing entertainment for me.
Tags: nature, birds
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