I wonder if that’s what happens when mommy and daddy bald eagle leave the young-of-the-year birds to forage alone for awhile. Does this thought (or something similar) enter their heads? Nah, that would be a gross violation of anthropomorphism to even think such a thing. Still…
I couldn’t help but wonder last week when three were lined up like teenagers on prom night at the Fargo treatment lagoons.
Their place of origin is unknown. But smart money would put it at one of the known bald eagle nests in Cass County nearly within sight of where this photo was taken.
Like clockwork these ant-eating woodpeckers appeared en masse in the Fargo area last week. I happened to catch a number of them perched in some leafless trees. One of my recent posts mentioned the collective noun for herons being a siege. Well, I had to look this one up but the word for a group of woodpeckers is descent. I know, I had the same thought, ‘where in the wide world of sports did they come up with that?’
One question which remains unanswered and will remain so I would guess–it’s purely esoteric after all: How many woodpeckers do you have to have before you have a descent? I’ll take a stab and say five.
Anyway there are eight northern flickers here. Enough, I would submit, for a descent.
Just eight days ago we ran across a family of wild turkeys scampering through a residential area south of Fargo. The 16 youngsters looked to pretty darned young. I have only one question: Do turkeys pull off two broods here? I’m not sure.
Most young turkeys are full grown by this time and nearly indistinguishable from adults at a distance. Not this group. Check ‘em out:
Of course the smaller and more dependent the bird, the more likely the stresses of winter will have a significant say in the animal living or dying.
I saw this AP story and clenched my fist at the sheer absurdity of it. Sometimes I think this is a generation which is in need of a good spanking. Get a set would ya?
A Pennsylvania turkey farm is being sued by a family who claims their Thanksgiving was ruined when they found a turkey head inside the bird.
Gordon Kresge claims in the lawsuit that his daughter and guests found a severed turkey head in the bird’s body cavity after they ate the smoked turkey last Thanksgiving.
Kresge alleges that his guests who ate the turkey got sick afterward. He is seeking money for medical bills.
Farm manager David Jaindl said he could not comment until he reads the suit.
Where to start? First, I think we should be sending donations to this turkey farm so they don’t have to "eat" the cost (pardon the pun) of this insulting lawsuit.
Second, every family in this country should have to go out and kill an animal, dress it, then eat it. That way we can fully understand that it’s a gory and bloody procedure, no getting around it. We have become so removed from the realities of food processing that our modern selves now entertain some really stupid notions of what happens vs. what it "should" be like.
Third, this guy Kresge obviously has an attorney advising him. How else could we be asked to believe that everyone got sick from eating this bird? I hate to bring this up to the squeamish but the head is edible too.
Here’s the bottom line in my opinion (if indeed this is even true and not some money-grubbing fabrication): Would it suck to find a turkey head inside a turkey? Yeah, it would. But it doesn’t require a lawsuit. At most a phone call to the store for a voucher or something. Also–and here’s where the story’s veracity falls apart–why didn’t the family find the head before cooking the bird? Are you not supposed to clean and wash the body cavity? This is all a bunch of crap.
I don’t know who Dennis Stillings is. But he recently wrote an editorial in the Valley City (ND) Times-Record newspaper which is worth thinking about. He takes a swing or two at the still-nascent wind industry here in North Dakota but does it from a couple different angles.
He makes a case for the negative effect on hunting:
The presence of 400-foot wind towers dramatically compromises the image of North Dakota as relatively unspoiled hunting country. One of North Dakota’s great assets is its feel of authenticity. In my opinion, once thousands of acres of good hunting land have been disfigured by hundreds of wind turbines, all the fuss about “canned hunting” becomes meaningless. I find it hard to imagine that out-of-state hunters, looking for an authentic hunting experience, would be happy to pay to hunt on land dominated by monster machines.
We’ve got the windmills and more are coming. Add a few large clown heads to the mix and we can have the hunting experience equivalent of a round of miniature golf.
Then there is the argument that there is the possibility wind "farms" may be in violation of North Dakota’s anti-corporate farming laws. (A specious point in my opinion but worth a moment of pause to at least think about it).
The North Dakota Anti-Corporate Farming Act has been in effect since 1932. Until 1981, all corporations — whether foreign or domestic — were prohibited from engaging in farming in North Dakota. In 1981, the North Dakota Legislative Assembly amended the law, providing that all corporations and limited liability companies were prohibited from owning or leasing land used for farming or ranching unless they met certain exemptions provided in the law. I do not know whether corporate wind farms such as NextEra meet those exemptions, or if anyone has considered the possible relevance of North Dakota corporate farming laws to the operation of wind farms, but the possibility is there.
The terms “farm” and “farming” are not confined to food crops. One definition of a farm is “an establishment at which something is produced or processed: an energy farm.”
Wind farms are energy farms. Wind farms transform a natural form of energy — wind — into a controllable and transmittable form of energy — electricity. So do food farmers transform the natural substances of soil, water and seed in the presence of light-energy into another form of energy — food.
Yes, corporate wind farms are indeed farms, but are they legal?
Great tits (cue the laugh track) are birds of the Old World very similar to our New World chickadees. Similar enough to be in the same family–Paridae.
(great tit)
I can’t imagine our chickadees (any of the the species found here like black-capped) being particularly carnivorous. But their cousins have proven to be so. From Newscientist.com:
It sounds like the avian equivalent of an Ozzy Osbourne legend. Great tits have been discovered killing and eating bats by pecking their heads open.
Although bats have been reported preying on songbirds before, this is the first time great tits have been observed to prey on bats.
Péter Estók of the Max-Planck-Institute for Ornithology, Germany, first saw a bat being captured by a tit in a Hungarian cave in 1996.
Ten years later, he and fellow bat ecologist Björn Siemers recorded 18 examples of pipistrelle bat predation by great tits, over the course of two winters in the same cave in the Bükk Mountains.
I wondered how the birds got away with this until I saw the word "winter." Aha…
As the bats are still very cold, only a degree above ambient temperature, they are extremely slow and easy for the birds to subdue. Nevertheless, it is a considerable feat for the tits given that a pipistrelle weighs approximately 5 grams and a great tit only four times as much.
And yeah, it does seem rather gruesome…
"The birds don’t kill the bats before they start eating them," says Siemers, "but the bats eventually die when the birds peck open their brain case."
We’ve all heard of that one. But how about "bird in the bingo parlor?" Both, it turns out, warn of impending consequences after something negative has occurred.
It happened in Myrtle Beach, SC., recently and goes something like this (from the Sun News)…
A bird flying through Myrtle Beach Bingo alerted an employee closing the business that someone had burglarized it, according to a police report.
The employee told police Thursday that as she closed the business she was startled by a bird flying through the store at 700 South Kings Highway, police said. The woman said she went into the front office of the business and found a window broken.
The woman then found a monitor for the store’s security system and a paper shredder were missing from the office, according to the report. A large stone was found near the window and the items were valued at $375.
Figure out your own lesson from this, I can’t think of one.
So I get a phone call late one day last week from a friend who lives in south Fargo. He tells me he’s watching an osprey sitting in a spruce tree near his backyard, which abuts a manmade urban lake. Hmmm. Having missed this fish eagle during the spring migration I was hoping to find one in the fall. So I hopped in the car and drove to his place a mere 15 minutes away. Of course by the time I got there the bird had dove down to the water, taken a fish and flew away with it. One beer and one hour later I drove home osprey-less.
The next day a similar thing happened. Another friend called and said he was watching an osprey flying on the north side of West Fargo. This one was closer and I had a reasonable shot at seeing it. Once again I hopped in the car and headed in that direction. I never got there. Via cell phone, the caller was telling me the bird was high and heading south. Given the traffic, the road construction, and the purported position of the bird, I pulled into a parking lot. Moments later with binoculars in hand, I spotted the osprey soaring high over West Fargo giving me 240 birds in Cass County for 2009.
While I get the putout, Dean gets the assist. (A little baseball lingo)
Already famous (at least among bird folk) for a common murre nest earlier this year, a remote rocky island of the coast of Maine called Matinicus Rock was host to the first ever documented Manx shearwater fledgling in the country. Amazing.
The Bangor Daily News has the whole story (with photo) here.
A smaller relative of the albatross, Manx shearwaters typically are found in Great Britain and elsewhere on the eastern side of the North Atlantic. The birds were discovered on Matinicus Rock 12 years ago, but the chick found last week is the first documented fledgling of a Manx shearwater in the United States, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It’s been said that most myths and legends spring from a least a kernel of truth. I doubt many folks gave the Maori (the native people of New Zealand) legend of man-killing birds much stock. But maybe, just maybe, it is true.
As reported by the Independent, the bird in question may be the Haast’s eagle, an extinct creature which shows very impressive measurements via fossil record:
Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.
But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.
With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. "It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child," said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. "They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine."
Here’s the take-away quote:
New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other continents in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. "Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird," said Dr Scofield. "It was the equivalent of a lion."
Yikes. Taking a stroll back then through the hinterlands of what is now New Zealand must have been just a hair exhilarating.
