Evidence

Pileated woodpeckers wuz here... Dryocopus pileatus calling card.

This fallen log is along the path that I've been taking to scout wildflowers. They bloom first on the higher elevations, and I've made the trek two or three times in the past week, with no luck. Nothing blooming yet. It's been an unusually cold winter, followed by an annoyingly tardy spring.

Since it's been raining in near-biblical proportions, I get to tromp through plenty of mud and standing water to reach the higher elevations. A good test for my new rain boots, I guess, but now I feel slightly guilty at how abused they look, so soon out of the box.

Plants are starting to emerge, at least. It won't be much longer.

Via my superior weather radar-sleuthing skills, I suspected that it would rain again before we got back. I was right. Next time, we're taking two umbrellas... I keep forgetting that somebody is a lot taller than me, for umbrella purposes.

Bobwhite

Colinus virginianus

Growing up, I knew this bird as "a Quail". Since there's only one type of quail in Alabama, there's no confusion. I also heard them called Bobwhites, and some people put both together: Bobwhite quail. The standard name is Northern Bobwhite, but you'll be considered an egghead if you go around calling it that.

Our place was so manicured when we first moved here, that we never heard Bobwhites. A few years of "the natural look" was more to their liking, and now it's not unusual to hear them singing. It never fails to make me a little happier, every time I hear one.

Yesterday my husband discovered one walking down our driveway. Between a fogged lens and zero cover between us and the quail, I never thought to get a photo, let alone one this close. But this bedraggled individual seemed almost as curious about us as we were about him, allowing us closer than almost any wild bird I've ever encountered. He wasn't stupid though - he walked off into the brush just as we reached him.

Bobwhites are in decline, and I suspect that their numbers here are probably hurt by the huge increase in armadillos in recent years. (They're ground-nesting birds.)

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Click here to hear a Bobwhite calling. We got close enough yesterday to hear an endearing little quiet chirping noise that he was making.

Visit the Friday Ark.

Gray day swallows

Flighty flibbertigibbets.

Zygodactyl Coccyzus & the cut direct

Yellow-billed Cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus).



Giving me...



The cut direct.

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Cuckoos are zygodactyl, like woodpeckers. Click that link for further bird-foot edification.

Friday Ark.

Long weekend

'Tis the season for baby toads.


Everywhere a nest, nest.


Woodpecker playground.


Top of the previous tree, now on the ground.


Somewhere behind these leaves, many warblers were cheerfully singing.
(Kentucky, Blue-winged, Common Yellowthroat, Northern Parula, Louisiana Waterthrush.)


Happy with "just clover".


Black Knot & the Cherry Tree.

Chipping sparrow

Poor little stunned Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina).

Birds do still occasionally fly into our windows, dirty as they are.

I found a sheltered spot in the woods and left him there to recover on his own. Later I googled, and it suggested that we should have kept the bird in a towel-lined, dark shoebox for an hour or two.

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Don't forget to visit the Friday Ark.

Armchair birding

Female Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius), eating berries from an Eastern Red Cedar (Juniperus virginiana).



As seen from our living room sofa.



Please excuse the dirty window glass. I don't wash the windows, so that the birds won't fly into them. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

I didn't actually know that Sapsuckers ate berries, until I saw this one doing it.

Further adventures in bad bird photography

Once again, my digiscoping skills leave a lot to be desired.



Enough, though, to say about our new yard bird: "Yep, that's a Wigeon!" (American Wigeon, Anas americana.)

When I first spotted him, I thought the Hooded Mergansers had finally returned. (We haven't seen them all season, and usually they've arrived by Thanksgiving.) But a new yard bird is more exciting, even if he didn't stay long.

According to the Cornell birds site, they're a species that's increasing. (They don't say why.) I haven't watched enough Wigeons to say whether its nervous-seeming behavior was normal, or whether this individual was just anxious at being alone. He darted this way and that, in an unsettled fashion, mostly in areas where the water was too deep for dabbling.

Judging by range maps, not a lot of Wigeons winter near here, though I've seen them several times at Wheeler Wildlife Refuge. Wheeler's bird list calls them "abundant". Oh boy, is that right - I remember once searching through what seemed like a million little green baldpates before finding the one little brown one belonging to the Eurasion Wigeon vagrant in the crowd. Then after moving the scope, I never found him again.

While searching for range maps, I came across this site that has transmitters tracking Wigeons. Fascinating! Such a high mortality rate though, so sad. I don't know why I was so surprised that the survivors all returned to the same North Carolina refuge they started from, but I was.

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P.S. Bonus points if you know why this bird makes me think of pineapples.

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Update:
In other birding news, it's almost an all-feathered NFL playoff! The Charger-Steelers game isn't over yet, but no birds there anyway. The others teams in the semi-finals though, will be the Philadelphia Eagles, the Baltimore Ravens, and the Arizona Cardinals. Or as we like to call them, the Arizona Pyrrhuloxias. (They don't actually have cardinals in Arizona, but the Pyrrhuloxia, which does live there, is a close cousin.)

Winter thrush

The Hermit Thrushes have returned for the winter. They're silent here, for the most part — you only spot them from their movements.



(Nothing to see here, just a bump on the branch, move along, move along...)

They desert us in summer, breeding as far north as mid-Alaska.

Wood Thrushes have an opposite agenda:
1. Arrive in spring.
2. Sing like a lovesick fool all summer long.
3. Shuffle off to Panama once the days grow short.

Someone once told me: the Hermit Thrush is rusty on his tail, and the Wood Thrush is rusty on his head. I can never recall which is which in the field, though. There are easier distinctions anyway, especially when you aren't usually in a position to be peering down on their heads or tails. (The Wood Thrush's spots are much darker, for example.)

During migration it can get confusing, with the Veery, Swainson's Thrush, and Gray-cheeked Thrush also thrown into the mix. I'm afraid I may have fallen out of practice in telling them apart without having a field guide handy.

Should have known better

"Look! Something caught a rabbit!"



While I was bent trying to focus on the fur (proud of myself for spotting something so well-camouflaged and so small), my husband got the bigger picture.

"The rest of him's over here."



OK, ew.

"Did he escape, but get mortally wounded? Did he just crawl over there to die?" (Latent detective tendencies in high gear!)

"Well, probably not. His head is missing."

Had we blundered up and scared a predator away in mid-snack? Hubby moved the carcass a little, and it was stiff. So, no.

Jasmine discovered some strewn rabbit guts, and happily gobbled up several bits before we noticed and tugged her away. Yuck, Jasmine.

On down the path, I had an idea. "Hey, let's get the game cam and put it there, to see if any critter comes back later to finish his dinner." (Latent detective tendencies on fire!)

I'd been moaning about moving the camera for some time now. We were not getting anything interesting where it had been stationed for the past several months.

While hubby was setting up the camera, I found more evidence.



"Maybe if I put this on the blog, a bird expert could tell me what type of bird this feather came from..."

OK, so a raptor (owl? buteo? accipiter?) was probably not going to come back to finish off the rabbit, but surely we'd get some cool wildlife shot of hungry scavengers.

But I really should have known better.

The only one who came back to finish anything was Jasmine.



Bad dog!

Oh, well.

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If you want to see the Cottontail in full headless gory glory, you can click here. He's missing a portion of his side too. It's bloody. It's not for everybody.

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On the feather, I was thinking "owl" but I really have no idea. (So if you do, please post a comment.) It seems similar to the photo on this page titled "Great Horned Owl feather". That would be cool, since we've never seen one here before.

Surly beasts

Cheating a little - this was taken before the big freeze. (Click to see it larger.)

We stopped just in time to spot this flock rounding the corner up ahead. I wanted to talk turkey, but they were not agreeable.

The two on the right were torn between joining their friends on the open road, and turning back to the brushy path at hand. In the end, they remembered that saying about birds of a feather, and ran to catch up.

Bitternsweet

I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off (as usual), busy with last-minute preparations for a local craft show.

"Come look!" My husband was very excited. "I think it's a Bittern!"



My reaction involved trudging and muttering. I was busy. We had to leave soon. Not that I wouldn't love to see a Bittern; I'd only seen one once before, at the coast. They're secretive birds. But my husband, always a birding optimist, has a track record for thinking that other things are Bitterns.



He was right though. It was indeed an American Bittern, Botaurus lentiginosus.

"You can use the pictures for the triumphant return of Rurality!" I had to laugh, but it really was time to start back. It was October 4th, and I'd been rude for two and a half months already.

Then the next week I caught the crud that's been going around here, and was down, down, down, for way too long. I was in the clutches of a cold that had managed two years at Influenza Junior College. ("In the grippes of it," she said, going for the year's most obscure pun.)

And there was an insidious feature. Every day, I thought I'd be much better in just another day or two. I missed the trip to Georgia I'd been planning for months. I also missed the Native Plant conference that was the brightest thing on the calendar in five years, and that I'd already paid $100 to attend. (That I probably could have gotten a refund for, if not for the insidious feature.)

So anyway, when I finally could force myself to move around, I had a lot of catching up to do in a hurry, soapmaking-wise, before the last and biggest show of the year. So no time for Rurality. (All of this in explanation to those folks I told that I was just about to start back, and then didn't. Sorry!)

Chickadee nest

Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis) have made a nest in one of our bluebird boxes. It's apparently not an agreeable spot for bluebirds -- none have nested there in three years -- so I'm glad the chickadees found it.



I was surprised at the amount of cedar tips cushioning the nest.

There's a little blue feather on the lower right of the first picture, and I wonder where it came from. Did bluebirds start the nest, and the chickadees just finished it? Or maybe a bluebird stuck his head in to see what was going on, and left a calling card.

The chickadees could have just picked up a pretty soft blue thing as building material. We see swallows picking up duck feathers all the time, so I know some birds "feather their nest" with other species' feathers.

One of the first birdsongs I learned was the Carolina Chickadee's. A friend and I chased all over her property for a frustrating hour before we finally pinpointed the bird who sounded exactly like a rusty porch swing. You can listen to him here.

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Friday Ark is up!

Turkey trot time-lapse

11:06 (advance scout)


11:08


11:09


11:10


11:16 (always a straggler)

Hubby moved the game camera a little closer to the watering-hole action. Unfortunately the sun from this angle is going to be a little harsh - sorry about that.

The Game cam is set to take a picture every minute when the IR is triggered. (Don't know why it didn't take one at 11:07.) I wish it would cycle faster than that, but it's primarily made for deer hunters and I suppose they aren't as interested in multiple pictures of the same animal as I am.

Wild turkey, Meleagris gallopavo.

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For more wild critter action at our place, click on the game cam label just below.

And don't forget to visit the Friday Ark.

Red-winged blackbird

One of the early sounds of spring, for me.



Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) singing. You can't actually see him in the video, sorry.¹

There's also a Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) near the middle, and an Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)² at the end. You may need to turn the sound up to hear them.

I wasn't even aware of the background highway noise until I uploaded the video. I'm not sure if the camera is just sensitive to it, or if I've desensitized myself to the point I no longer notice it.

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¹That's my workshop, aka Handmade Soap General, that you see through the cedar. Hubby calls it the Soap Empire sometimes, especially when saying things like, "When is this Soap Empire is ever going to make us any money?"

²The bird formerly known as the Rufous-sided Towhee. He's the one singing, "drink your teaaaaaaa".

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P.S. To everyone who didn't call yesterday: we're fine. An F2 tornado came through the county in the morning, but didn't touch down too near us. We got a little hail though. And a lot of phone calls afterwards.

Cause and effect

The chain of events:



Early one morning, an otter is caught red-handed, gnawing on a freshly killed grass carp.



Attempts at closer otter photography only serve to scare him away.



Late the same afternoon, a juvenile Bald Eagle shows up, for the first time ever.



He flies over the fish several times,



before roosting nearby.



The next morning he's there again, and appears to be eyeing the fish. Harassed by hawks, he leaves before getting too close to the fish.



Later in the day, the cleanup crew arrives.



Jasmine has issues with them off and on throughout the day.



Black Vultures are more aggressive than Turkey Vultures, and kept their kinder, gentler cousins away from the kill for most of the day. The frustrated TVs performed a lot of posturing.



I presume this means "I'm bad" in vulture language.

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Cast of players:
Northern River Otter (Lontra canadensis), black-hearted fish-stealer
Grass Carp, aka White Amur (Ctenopharyngodon idella), triploid (sterile) pond-saver
Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), American icon
American Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus), raven-vulture clothed in black as for mourning
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura), misunderstood purifying one
Jasmine the Wonder Dog (Canis lupus familiaris), a Great Pyrenees

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American Black Vultures are the ones with white just at the tips of their wings. Turkey Vultures have white all along the bottom underside.

Internet searches agree that Black Vultures are the more aggressive, but seem to say that the wing-spreading is only for warmth. That did not appear to be the case in these birds. It looked more like dominance behavior among the birds who had not been allowed to eat.

Best. Yard. Bird. Ever.

My Yard List has a Bald Eagle on it, does yours?



Hee hee hee.

We actually got two new yard birds yesterday -- the other was a Eurasian Collared Dove (Streptopelia decaocto). But this immature Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) was the big surprise.

We are sometimes liberal in what we consider our "yard", but if we can see it (without binoculars!) from the kitchen table, there's no question.

This beautiful creature has visited us three times since yesterday afternoon. Twice, he was chased off by a pair of Red-shouldered hawks that persisted in dive-bombing the poor thing. He didn't appear overly worried until the actual body-slamming began.

The hawks looked so tiny next to him. They must have a nest nearby... I've seen lots of Bald Eagles, but have never seen them mobbed by hawks.

The Eagle chased off a Great Blue Heron this morning, before settling onto this perch to be poorly digiscoped. He eyed a large fish lying on the ground (more about this tomorrow), then was in turn driven away by the hawks (with Blue Jay backup).

More on this saga later, including why (I think) the Eagle came to call in the first place.

Early spring game cam

My husband's last idea for a game cam location didn't work out like he anticipated. The high altitude game trail was apparently not a path in current use. No critter pics at all for 3 weeks.

On the way up to check the camera, we did get a live-action wildlife treat though: a huge flock of turkeys. At least two dozen of them strolled calmly across the hill, shuffling through the dry leaves and making quite a racket.

We finally moved the camera to the spot I'd been whining about for some time: a low-level easy creek access. I have been hankering for a mink shot and I know they like water, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.



The Great Blue Heron was a surprise. They are frequently in the ponds, but I had no idea that they visited the creek too.



Isn't he pretty? Some turkeys were in the same spot just earlier, but they were moving too fast and were blurry.



There were four night shots, but at a distance. I am wondering, if we put the camera on a stake closer to the action, would the animals shy away from it? Or would they walk behind it, just to taunt us? I guess we'll try this spot a few more weeks and then see.



Coyote checking his smell-mail.

Coming up next: two mystery critters in the dark of the night.