I shouldn't have spoken
about spring yesterday, because this is what we got today. I do not mind it because I don’t have to drive, it looks beautiful and snow days always have lots of bird activity. Stay warm and be safe out there!
Winter has returned
with quite a bit of snow this morning, and it was awesome watching the Cardinal share the food bowl with a cheeky American Tree Sparrow and some Juncos.
There may not be
as much variety here this winter as in previous years, but the Juncos are making up for it with the coolest color combinations. The ones with lots of brown are sometimes almost looking like mini Towhees, they are youngsters from last season. Must have been a good year for them.
Happy National Bird Day
A new visitor this morning... The Birdsy AI identified and recorded the clip. I was in a meeting and only saw it later in my Birdsy account. What a magnificent bird! Apparently it is a she, a Sharp-shinned. And she left hungry.
A word about Birdsy... I have been using their cameras since 2019, and I love the convenience of using a camera that is AI driven rather than unsing motion detection. My photo setup is motion activated, and it takes me a lot of time and computer storage to handle and edit the photos. I have used security cams to get close to wildlife before too, but I found it very time-consuming to sift through the footage to see if they captured anything fun. The cool thing with Birdsy is that the AI is trained on wildlife and captures exactly that so you do not end up with tons of “empty” videos. You also don’t have to install emulators or wonky software in order to watch your clips or livestream. With Birdsy, you get an app as well as an online account in which all your videos are saved and sorted by ID and date. And you can share your clips and livestream with others or embed it on your website, like I am doing here as well. In my opinion, nothing beats the convenience of this system as opposed to trail cams or security cams. No SD cards needed, and you are not tied to a setup like the gadgety smart feeders that seem to be all the rage now. You can build your own setup. Check it out on their website birdsy.com. I am streaming there too 😊
Happy 2024!
May you be full of wildlife surprises! (I had a nice garland for this but it got lost in the pre-Christmas party cleaning spree 😆)
I hope everybody
had a wonderful Christmas time. On Christmas Eve, I put out some milk and (homemade) cookies to lure Santa here, and added some kitty food in case he brings his favorite opossums along. It seems like this plan has worked well 😂
Back for fall
After a week of battling with Covid, I have finally taken the jelly down and set up this little feeder again. The yard has been very quiet, almost eerily so. I am also waiting for a bird food delivery, so I sacrificed some untreated hazelnuts from my baking stash and look who came 😍 I haven't seen a Titmouse in months. I think this is going to be a nice fall.
Nestbox news: We are still mid-nesting season,
and activity is on the lower end because everybody feeds babies right now. The nestboxes have been the most exciting thing recently, so here is a little update on these. In the Bluebird box, all five eggs have hatched about a week ago, and the babies are looking good. Sadly, though, it seems like the male has gone MIA, I have not seen him in at least a day. I did see a male yesterday but he was sitting on the Chickadee box, and I am not sure if that is a different male or the old one. I also saw one youngster from the first brood but I doubt the female is going to recurit it for help because it never learned how to go underneath the wren guard. The female is working her tush off to feed these babies, and I am just happy that the weather is not scorching or too wet and that she is a good hunter. I have ordered some live mealworms to help her a bit if needed, and hope that all goes well or the male miraculously returns,
TheChickadee nest has been a source of constant joy, it is just so much fun to watch them do their thing. There was a little scare two days ago when suddenly a House Wren did go under the Wren guard and looked into the nest but at around 12-14 days, the babies should be too big already so the Wren can do no harm. They are starting to look and sound like Chickaddees, and the parents are some of the busiest bird parents I have watched. There is a constant stream of food coming in. Seven of the eight seem to have made it and even if there is a runt, it becomes less obvious by the day now. I have removed the Wren guard so the babies can start looking out and get ready for their big day.
Here are some of the most recent videos. I try to upload them to Youtube in a timely manner so I can embed them here, but most of the times it is quicker and easier to post videos on my social media channels.
Video: a new visitor
It is always funny to me how seemingly stunned hawks look to find nobody at the scene yet hearing all the scolding from the trees. At first I thought this young Cooper’s Hawk would take a bath, but nope. It has been very dry here, so maybe it will come back for more. Such a beautiful bird. (I know the lens is dirty, there are birds bathing all day and I go out to clean it with vinegar constantly.)
Video: Hatch day for the Robins!
The Robins started hatching today! Mom and Dad share feeding and diaper duties, and they are such fresh parents that they still seem to be unsure how to do it. You can see Dad bringing some food and Mom wanting to feed it to the baby but then letting him do it when he seemingly insists. She's eating the diaper instead. You can watch this cam live here in my livestream section and on my Birdsy channel.
Video: The salad bar
I got a lettuce flower pot on sale this weekend, and made a little salad bar for the Groundhog family that lives under the shed. We still need to patch some parts of the veggie fence, and I hope that and the copious amounts of clover and dandelion on our lawn will keep them busy. Mom explored first, but the babies later came by themselves.
Video: Baby Blue!
The Bluebird couple has been bringing their babies from brood 1 that they raised in a different spot down to the backyard recently to introduce them to feeders and bath. The female is spending a lot of time in the box but I don’t think she is done laying yet. As of this morning, she has four eggs. This was an early morning scene at the pond, first she comes in, then a baby. You can hear the others faintly in the background. It is kind of neat to have them here without all the worry during their nesting.
Video: FOY Grack baby!
Very early this morning, the first baby Grack appeared at the pond. The parents seem to like "parking" the babies there while they forage, and it always reminds me of childhood days at a public swimming pool or lake, with lots of swimming and the occasional snack. The bird you can hear in the back is a Baltimore Oriole.
Video: A Rubythroated surprise
I have put out the pretty Allura feeder again, and yesterday in the evening as a late surprise for my birthday, a Rubythroated Hummingbird came to visit. He needs to figure out how to sit down but I am sure he will learn.
(I am livestreaming this camera in my channel on birdsy.com. The feeder is made by Perla: www.allurafeeders.com.)
Video: Robins sharing duties
The Robins have three eggs now, and since the female did not lay another today, I am assuming that the clutch is complete. It is very interesting to watch them do their thing in the apple tree. The female sits on the nest most of the day, turning the eggs to incubate them evenly. Whenever she leaves, the male stands guard on the edge of the nest. I am livestreaming this nest on here and also in my birdsy.com channel.
Video: The nesting material station
Like every spring, I put out a little nesting material station this week. The cement bowl contains mud mixed with leaves and grass. Behind it is some moss and alpaca wool. Several visitors have come to check it out, so I created a little clip (this is edited, they did not come by in such rapid succession). You can see a Grackle, a Blue Jay, a Chipmunk, a Chickadee, a Cardinal, a Flicker, a Groundhog and eventually someone who takes nesting material 😃
Nestbox news: The spell is broken!
The Bluebirds must have seen my complaints, because yesterday, they finally started nesting season in the yard. It may have been that the grid I placed in there bothered her so much that she was hesitant (she did accept it last season though but maybe the first nest is different). I removed to see what would happen and added some pine needles, dried leaves and bark. Here you can see the male coming in to “clean up”, and then she comes in to start the nest with the first strategically placed twig. By the endof the day, she had built the nest you see in the second video. This feels like the fastest I have seen her build a first nest of the season.
I am so happy they finally started, as you know I was getting a bit nervous. Here’s to a happy and successful nesting season!
The garden
is getting soaked with heavy rains, and last night there was even a thunderstorm. Spring continues to march into the area. The Bluebirds have still not started their nest yet but with these temperatures, I am not too sad about it. And there continue to be little surprises every day. When I saw him, I was just wowed! I am not even sure I have read about that variety before. A rare blue-morph Cardinal! He was only here briefly last night and has not returned yet. And a Flicker has also found his way to the yard and loves the bark butter by the tree cam.
Nestbox news: Bird talk
The other day while playing around on TikTok, I found out that there is an auto-caption feature that looks through a video to detect speech. You can set it to whatever language you like and it will scan the video to see if it picks anything up. Now since a couple of days ago I saw it interpreting BB talk into a phrase, I am trying with every BB video I have to see what comes up. And this morning, there was a whole cute little dialogue going on. It is so cute. As somebody who is a professional subtitler, I find this highly interesting but also amusing. AI subtitling may have improved a lot recently, but if you are being serious about it, a human subtitler, interpreter and translator is the way to go.
Nestbox news: Doing the shuffle
The Bluebirds have been doing a lot of nestbox visits to inspect and clean up recently. This year's couple is named Johnny and June, and here you can see her doing her little shuffle for the first time this season. She has not actively started building yet but given that last year she begun March 1, we may be close to that.
I am again using the 6 inch diameter PVC box that I made last year. The little grid you see on the bottom is just the lid of a suet cage on which I bent the corners to fit. It is in there to elevate the nest from the bottom to help with ventilation and also to help prevent harm from Blowfly larvae (they hide in the bottom of a nest and only come out at night to feast on the babies. The female is usually aerating the nest, and in my thinking, the larvae will fall down and end up on the floor underneath the grid from where they cannot climb up to the babies.)
Also - a happy Women’s Day to all on this March 8th.
