1 July 2022
By mid June Mama Possum looks very “pregnant” though it’s merely that her pouch is full of growing babies.
…and it looks like we may need to expand the spot where she scoots under the fence?
— Yard Gone Wild (@YardGoneWild) June 19, 2022
2/2 pic.twitter.com/KnNwl1maJK
Eventually the babies are too large to fit inside so they travel on top.
The whole family looks vulnerable. How can this be safe when a fox shows up?
Perhaps they all play dead.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons)
4 July 2022
Some Rules of Thumb for Nature are timed “by the 4th of July.” Here are three. Can you think of more?
Corn is knee high by the 4th of July. Or at least it should be. This year in Minnesota there was worry that it might not come true. KARE 11 in Minneapolis reports:
Native rhododendrons bloom by 4th of July in the Laurel Highlands. Cultivated rhododendrons bloom in May because they’ve been bred to do so.
Most songbirds stop singing around the 4th of July. Others will follow this month.
Birds sing to attract mates and maintain their nesting territories. Those that migrate to Central and South America are on such a tight schedule that they finish nesting and stop singing by early to mid July. Song sparrows, robins, and cardinals are still singing because they have new nests this month.
When is the last time you heard a Baltimore oriole sing? For that matter, when did you last see one? He won’t leave until September but he is far more discreet than he was in May.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, Kate St. John and Steve Gosser)
UPDATE 7 July 2022: Both young peregrines have been screeching. Silver Girl screamed all day on 6 July.
3 July 2022
By late June two of this year’s juvenile Pitt peregrines remained in Oakland. Sometimes they waited for their father Ecco to bring food. Sometimes they left campus to go hunting. Eventually I saw only the adult peregrines at the Cathedral of Learning.
Then on 30 June something changed. Michelle Kienholz saw and heard a noisy juvenile begging loudly. Yesterday morning my husband heard lots of peregrine begging from St. Paul’s Cathedral steeple.
By 4:30pm the falconcam showed that Yellow Girl had come home for a handout and Ecco was having none of it.
Here’s an edited sequence of events. I have spared you 8 minutes of screeching.
Ecco is letting Yellow Girl know that it’s time to fend for herself.
(peregrine photo and video from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh; St. Paul’s steeple and Cathedral of Learning photo by Kate St. John)
2 July 2022
Seen this week at Duck Hollow, listed in photo order:
I heard ravens calling in the distance while I took these pictures. Woo hoo!
(photos by Kate St. John)
30 June 2022
It’s that time of year again when yellow poplar weevils come out en masse for their courtship flight. I had a hint that they’d “bloomed” when I saw one on my window on 24 June. Today there are more.
This week they were clearly present when I walked through Schenley Park. I brushed off one that landed on my shirt while I watched northern rough-winged swallows wheeling overhead. Were the swallows eating flying weevils or something else?
Yellow poplar weevils (Odontopus calceatus) are harmless to humans but can show up in unexpected places. When I got home I sat down to eat lunch and a weevil jumped off my shoulder and landed near my salad. Dang! I smashed it before I realized I could have taken a closeup photo.
This weevil is not evil but is certainly annoying. Learn more about its lifestyle and what it eats in this 2018 article.
p.s. Years ago these bugs were misidentified in the newspaper as “billbugs.” Every year I forget their “weevil” name until I look them up in June.
(photos by Kate St. John)
30 June 2022
There was excitement on Sunday 26 June when both eaglets at the USS Irvin bald eagle nest fledged at the same time. The eaglecam showed that when the first bird fledged, it knocked its sibling off the branch. Fortunately the second bird could still be seen on the eaglecam.
By Monday “footage showed multiple failed attempts by the [second] eagle to fly” and expert opinion determined the bird was missing so many key flight feathers that it had to be rescued.
On Monday evening 27 June, a PGC Game Warden and USS employees teamed up to find and rescue the eaglet. See a photo of the rescued eagle and find out how the bird’s sibling helped in Mary Ann Thomas’ Trib Live article: Game warden, U.S. Steel employees rescue bald eagle; bird’s sibling helped rescuers find it.
The article mentions that the eaglet will be unable to fly until next year. That’s because the flight feathers of bald eagles grow on a prescribed schedule rather than immediately upon feather loss.
In their first year of life eaglets grow their original flight feathers while in the nest, then wait until the following year to molt into Basic 1 plumage. The molt begins in the spring of their second calendar year and finishes with the tail feathers in late July–early August. This eaglet will have to wait a year to make its first flight.
(logo from USS Irvin Eaglecam, footage of the Double Fledge embedded from Pix)
28 June 2022
This morning at around 10:30am Red Boy, the juvenile male from this year’s Pitt peregrine nest, was found dead on the runway at the Allegheny County Airport, apparently hit by a plane. Game Warden Doug Bergman called with his band numbers Black/Green 03/BZ and the fact that he still had the red tape on his USFW band that gave him the nickname “Red Boy.”
Red Boy was always inquisitive and ready to go. He was the first to fledge and the first to leave home around 17 June. On the map he flew 6+ miles due south and found a place with plenty of birds that are easy to catch when they fly across the runways.
Red Boy was already on his big adventure. Unfortunately, he had no idea how quickly a plane could overtake him.
Sad as this is it is not unexpected. Young peregrines have a 62.5% mortality rate in their first year of life. Read more at Musings on Peregrine Mortality.
p.s. The lack of news about equipment damage leads me to believe that the plane was fine after the encounter … but see the comment from Dick Rhoton.
(photos by Kate St. John and from the National Aviary snapshot camera at Univ of Pittsburgh)
28 June 2022
Back in mid-May I thought it unlikely that Pittsburgh’s Downtown peregrines would have a successful nesting season. Terzo was seen with a new unbanded female and Dori, at 16 years old, had low prospects for a healthy youngster. But I was wrong.
Yesterday morning Lori Maggio stopped by Third Avenue to look for peregrine activity and found three: Terzo, Dori, and a loud fledgling. The youngster had fledged to a safe zone across Third Avenue and was whining loudly.
Terzo whined back. (Read the captions for the story.)
Terzo picked up the prey and delivered it to the fledgling.
Meanwhile the female watched from one of the gargoyles on Lawrence Hall. Lori couldn’t get a photo of her bands but I can tell this is Dori. Her face and chest markings match this positive ID photo of Dori.
On 29 May I saw two nestlings through my scope from Mt. Washington. Yesterday Lori didn’t see a second youngster but it may have been silent.
Here’s hoping the loud fledgling did well on his next flight.
(photos by Lori Maggio)
27 June 2022
Solar-powered GPS tracking devices for birds can be so accurate that researchers can tell the bird’s location to within 100 meters. The devices keep transmitting even if they fall off, so when a beachcomber collected a discarded tag on a beach in Orkney it tracked him too.
Last winter researchers at University of Exeter attached GPS tracking devices to 32 Eurasian oystercatchers (Haematopus ostralegus) in County Dublin, Ireland to find out how the birds use the public lands. This spring one of the oystercatchers migrated to its breeding grounds on Sanday, Orkney Islands, Scotland. Its tag fell off on the beach on 7 April. The tracker kept transmitting.
At the end of May the tracker started moving again. It visited a campsite and a pizza shop, flew from Edinburgh to Heathrow and came to rest on a residential street in Ealing, London. Stuart Bearhop, Professor of Animal Ecology at the University of Exeter’s Centre for Ecology & Conservation, tweeted this plea for the tag’s return.
Twitter can you please help? We have a tag that has fallen off one of @mindtheTrapp‘s oystercatchers. Someone visiting Orkney in the last few days seems to have found it and taken it to London. Can you please RT and/or get in touch if you think you can help us get it back! pic.twitter.com/a2IoXzI02h
— Stuart Bearhop (@StuBearhop) June 9, 2022
“The tags are worth around £1,000 each, so pretty pricey!” said PhD student Steph Trapp who is carrying out the research. “Any we can get back will be really valuable for increasing our sample size and the amount of data we can collect.”
— ITV news: London home unwittingly tracked by GPS bird tag left on remote Orkney beach
News spread quickly. A BBC Radio Five Live listener volunteered to leaflet the Ealing neighborhood. The beachcomber learned what he had collected and was happy to return the tag. Read how the Mystery of Orkney bird tag tracked to London is solved.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
26 June 2022
Thirteen of us gathered in humid cloudy conditions to walk the Frick Park boardwalk at Commercial Street. While we were in the trail parking lot we saw and heard an indigo bunting and a scarlet tanager. The day was getting off to a good start.
The mystery flower that I posted on Thursday/Friday turned to be a false sunflower. I had to pluck and examine a petal to be sure.
I hoped for orchard orioles and they didn’t disappoint. We saw six of them, certainly two families and one feeding young.
Our fleeting glimpses of two yellow-billed cuckoos were close to “Best Bird” but Charity Kheshgi did not see them well so she and Connie went back to the area for a better look. They found a black-billed cuckoo that hung around for an hour!
We had a great time on a cloudy and not-too-hot day.
See our checklist at https://ebird.org/checklist/S113823266 and listed below:
(photos by Charity Kheshgi)
