Category Archives: Birds

August 12, 2024 · 23:26

The Mourning Doves Return

While we’ve had plenty of house finches making nests on the back porch every year, last year was the first time that we had any nests out under the eaves of the front porch. Way over in the boonies by the garage, and well away from the front door, a house finch nest got built, but right next to the front door we had a mourning dove nest. (At almost the EXACT same time of year, too!) After they had a couple of eggs and fledgelings, they abandoned the nest, but I never tore it down or cleaned out the eaves. No doubt these mourning doves are members of the flock of a dozen or more that hang out to get fed every morning in the back yard, but they’re not wearing name tags, so it’s hard to tell.

Yesterday I noticed a mourning dove sitting in the nest. No clue if it’s one of them from last year, but that wouldn’t be the worst guess.

Today I noticed three of them perched up there. Unlike the house finches that freak out of their minds if you get anywhere near the nest, these dudes are pretty laid back. Or maybe it was just that it was hot.

Either way, they didn’t stir whenever I was going in or out, and even when I stretched way out and shoved my cell phone up at arm’s length and got within a couple feet of them, they just stared at me. Humans! Am I right?!

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Filed under Birds, Photography

August 11, 2024 · 23:46

High Thin Pink Clouds & First Quarter Moon

Just before 20:00 local time, about fifteen minutes after sunset, there were some high, thin clouds overhead that were tinged pink.

Also up high, just at the right here, was the first quarter, seven-day old moon.

Across the street to the right, the juvenile great horned owl was just starting to squawk. We’ll all be happy when it gets some experience and a couple of good meals under its belt. Well, all of us except for whatever rabbit, rat, gopher, or feral cat ends up being dinner.

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Filed under Birds, Photography, Sunsets

August 8, 2024 · 23:41

Begging Call

I’ve been hearing something flying around at night that had me stumped for a while. I’ll hear the great horned owls hooting fairly often, and I’ll occasionally see them. (They’re spectacular!)

But this isn’t hooting, it’s more of a screech, and a couple of different types of screeches. I finally got the Cornell Merlin app to hear enough of one sort of sound and identify it as a barn owl instead of a great horned owl. Fair, good to know, it would be great to see one, but so far I’m just hearing it.

But the other screeching sound? Not so much.

Until tonight. Our bird was right across the street on top of the power pole there, then later in our pine trees in the back yard. I was finally able to get a good recording for the Merlin app to chew on.

You can hear calls about every eighteen or nineteen seconds before it flys away and fades out on the fourth call. I got a glimpse of it as it flew off – it’s a large animal, must be fantastic to see.

Merlin ID’s it as a great horned owl, but instead of the normal hooting call, this is referred to as a “begging call.” You hear it from a juvenile that’s left the nest and is learning to hunt, but still used to screeching when it’s hungry so that mom or dad can bring food for it.

It’s the owl version of “Adulting sucks!”

The Long-Suffering Wife wants to help it out since she’s used to throwing out bird seed for the songbirds and having me fill the feeders for the hummingbirds. I explained that owls are carnivores – her solution was to give it some shredded chicken. I’m thinking that the owl is looking for something more alive and warm – obviously I’m not thinking outside the box properly, since it’s been explained to me that I could microwave some chicken and then go stand out in the back yard and wiggle and wave it around so that it looks alive.

The hungry, screaming, pissed off juvenile owl probably needs to just find one of the neighborhood rabbits and learn to catch its own dinner. Sorry!

 

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Filed under Audio, Birds, Critters

July 16, 2024 · 22:46

No Context For You

It was daylight! (Sorta) Why is it so blurry? (It’s handheld.)

1/25 second exposure?? It should have been no longer than 1/250 second at most, and 1/2500 second wouldn’t have been unheard of.

Oh, yeah. That really makes that much of  a difference?

Huh!

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Filed under Birds, Photography, Travel

July 14, 2024 · 22:11

Happy Bastille Day

Not because I’m French, or speak French, or have ever even been to France. (Someday…) Nope, just looking for any reason to celebrate, and having peasants rise up, overthrow the monarchy, and start beheading nobility sounded like a perfectly good cause today.

I thought that the Tour de France was finishing today, but apparently it’s next week, on the 21st. But Wimbledon finished today, along with the Copa and Euro soccer tournaments. And MLB wrapped up the “first half” of its season, with the All-Star break and other festivities starting tomorrow. So that gave me lots of things to do other than pay attention to the news.

These guys made excellent role models for that plan, not caring one whit about the news and all of the stupid things that humans are doing. I suspect they would be happier if we would stop cooking the planet as we’re in the middle of another long summer heat wave, but even after we manage to destroy ourselves, they’ll do just fine I suspect.

They’ll miss the two-quart buffets that I keep putting up, but those will disappear when we move to our Forever Home. I have no idea if future inhabitants of this house will bother to feed the hummers, but I can only worry about so many things, and that’s outside of my pay grade. I’ll probably leave the feeders and if the next tenants/owners want to take up the task of refilling them periodically, great. I’ll be feeding a new group of avian minions about 100 miles to the northeast. I hope. Someday. Soon. Maybe.

 

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Forever Home, Photography

July 11, 2024 · 23:31

Mystery Neighbors

Literally overnight it looks like two new and strange bird nests have been assembled under the eaves of the roof outside of our front windows.

I’m guessing that they’re bird nests because they’re connected up underneath the eaves and I don’t know what other kind of critter might be doing that.

I’m guessing that the one on the right is more complete. It’s not 100% clear to me what they’re made of – some kind of grass, but I don’t recognize it as anything growing nearby.

The one on the left seems only partially finished, but it’s the same design structure. I didn’t see any birds (or any other critters) around either nest, even though I was looking for them once I noticed that these were there.

What’s so surprising is the speed with which they had to have been made. They’re not subtle, I saw the long strands hanging down from inside the house, and on the outside they’re ridiculously obvious. I didn’t see a thing on Wednesday, even when I came home from the gym about 19:00, so this ALL had to get done this morning, assuming they didn’t work at night.

I ran the pictures through Google Lens to see if it could ID anything, but came up blank. I also looked on a couple of bird sites, including on the Cornell site, but found nothing. In simply describing “basket-type bird’s nest made of grass” the main hit was for orioles, and I have seen the large black & yellow hooded orioles around, but I don’t see any way these nests, as big as they are, could accomodate them. They’re big birds, almost as big as crows or ravens.

I did get one site that said that possibility was a Black-headed Junco nest, and I know we have those in the yard and the size makes more sense, but that’s a tenuous clue at best.

I’ll keep my eyes open and see what happens.

Does anyone recognize the nest design or have any clues to share?

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography

June 28, 2024 · 23:31

No Context For You – June 28th

The trip to Vermont was a ton of fun, but it’s been a long, hard month in many ways.

I spent two hours in the dentist’s chair yesterday getting an old root canal  drilled out and re-done, with two more to come in July. That whole “minor discomfort” lie? I’m calling bullshit!

I’m trying to model my reactions based on the mockinbird. Nothing bothers him. Except for the squirrel. I don’t know what the squirrel did, but the mockingbird his harassing him mercilessly.

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June 22, 2024 · 23:07

Two Hawks

We have hawks all the time overhead, ususally red-tail hawks soaring overhead and sometimes getting closer, plus red-shouldered hawks in the pine trees on the hill below us, and the occasional Cooper’s hawk. Plus both great horned owls and barn owls.

The red-shouldered hawks seem to have taken over for the moment. There’s the one that can be seen or heard pretty much daily for the last several months. But since we got back home from our Vermont trip, the screeching of the red-shoulder hawks has been almost constant from before sunrise until after sunset. I do love the hawks, but it would be nice if they would shut up for a while every now and then.

There also seem to be more than just the one. Every day this week I’ve been able to hear at least two of them screeching from different directions, and once I could hear two while watching a third. I suspect there’s at least one nest being constructed somewhere in the neighborhood.

Tonight I saw one of them sitting in a tree just off of the edge of the hill, so I went to take pictures.

It was sitting in the shade (not stupid – it was HOT out there today) and about the time I started zooming in, I was surprised to see a second hawk sitting with it. Do you see it?

After making more racket, the one on the left, in the deep shadows near the tree trunk, flew off to perch on the other side of the canyon. This one stayed here as sunset progressed and its perch spot moved into the sunlight.

I don’t know if there are distinguishing features or patterns that might tell me if one is male and another female.

Given that there are at least three in the area, there may be some competition for a single female and that could explain some of the noise levels.

We also have our annual infestation of gophers or moles chewing the crap out of the hillside and lawn. All of the hawks are cordially invited to keep well fed on that particular food source!

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography, Video

June 9, 2024 · 23:23

Frantic Hummers

A new reader, Victoria, stumbled on an old post which had the audio from the hummingbirds “clicking” as they flew around. She was wondering what they looked like.

Funny you should ask.

It turns out that this weekend, while I was trying to get some peace and quiet sitting in the shade in the back yard and reading, a rough and rowdy band of three hummingbirds decided that I was an idiot who didn’t know that their feeder (which I was sitting near) was empty. They buzzed me repeatedly, and would hover right in front of my face within an arm’s length, then zoom up to hover next to the empty feeder, then zoom back down into my face, and repeat two or three more times before zooming off into the trees. The message seemed pretty obvious.

“Look, stupid human who’s supposed to keep the feeders filled! This one’s empty! See! Hey, look at us! Hey, look at the empty feeder!”

After they did this two or three times and I was too surprised and stunned to get my phone out, two of them came back for one more pass.

I haven’t played with the audio to clean it up and the YouTube compression algorithm butchers the sound a lot, but you can still hear them zooming.

For having a brain that’s smaller than a walnut, they sure can fly, and apparently make the connection between me (or at least, people in general) and their feeder being refilled. They’ve watched me do it enough times. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible or likely, but I’ve been wrong before.

Or I’m wrong now, anthropomorphizing the crap out of the situation, and just feeling guilty about letting the feeder get empty. (There are other feeders, the trees are in bloom and covered in pollen, and the place is lousy with flowers in bloom. None of them are starving to death.)

It also reminds me that the Forever Home, wherever it might be, needs to have lots of birds in general, hummingbirds specifically. I live for this particular style of abuse.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Forever Home, Video

June 4, 2024 · 22:41

Six Lessons Learned On The Grass

Last Friday, while having my telescope set up at my daughter’s school, we saw what I believe to be a Falcon 9 upper stage venting excess fuel on its first orbit around after a Starlink launch from Florida. Tonight there was a very similar launch at a very similar time on a very similar mission, so about 80 minutes after the launch I sat out on my front yard with a camera for a while just in case it happened again. It didn’t. But there were still six lessons I learned.

  1. With the multiple flood lights set up by the new neighbor across the street, it’s tough to see anything more dim than a 737’s landing lights going into Burbank. DAMN! In the search for the Forever Home in the High Desert, I’ll have to keep that in mind.
  2. When it’s quiet, you can hear the train whistles from the Santa Susanna Pass, about two miles away as the crow flies. Funny, I would have guessed it was closer to ten miles, but Google Earth says otherwise.
  3. The rabbits out on the front lawn freak out when I go and sit down on the grass – that’s their grass and there was a lot of leporine side eye going on. I didn’t know I needed an invitation.
  4. In addition to the trains, there were repeated calls from what I’ve always referred to as a “night hawk” or “screech owl.” Turns out the latter guess was closer – what I’m hearing is the screech of a barn owl. Given the Great Horned Owls we hear almost every night, I guess I’m not surprised to hear another kind of owl around as well. But I’ve never, ever seen one, I just hear them once or twice a night, and several times tonight.
  5. The rabbits would be a lot healthier if they spent less time giving me the stinkeye and more time watching out for those barn owls.
  6. The sprinklers turn on at 8:00. With little or no warning. Good thing I’m wash & wear, even at my advanced age.

The Forever Home definitely needs to have dark skies, trains, owls and hawks, and probably rabbits. Although I suspect in that environment (and sort of here as well) the coyotes will be more of an issue for the rabbits than the owls and hawks.

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Filed under Astronomy, Birds, Forever Home, Space