Non Birding Bill and I were over at Mr. Neil’s to do some fall beehive prep (for those who follow, the bees seemed to take my Ned Stark speech well and all but one of the hives actually bumped up production). After we finished checking the hives we were back in the house surfing the [ Read More ]
True to form, our great state of Minnesota received a dumping of snow yesterday. The nice thing about March snow storms is that they melt relatively quickly. Even the city gets slack about it, “Eight inches? No Snow Emergency or parking restrictions, it will melt, deal with it.” But many people wonder about those early [ Read More ]
And she’s still raising chicks! That’s right. According to bird banding records, a Laysan albatross on the Midway Atoll is now officially the oldest living (and breeding birds) in the wild! She’s at least 60, but most likely older than that, since she was already breeding when she was initially banded. According to the press [ Read More ]
First, an interesting news story that popped up over the Holidays: According to a story in The New York Times blog in the last week a red-tailed hawk was picked up in New York and eventually made its way to The Raptor Trust. Turns out that the hawk is over 27 years old! I was [ Read More ]
Alright, Non Birding Bill’s cartoon post and my pelican post may have been a bit much, so how about a nice, cleansing northern goshawk release shot to start Monday morning? Some of my family from Indiana came up for a visit last week and got a whirlwind tour of the hives and a trip to [ Read More ]
We were banding birds at Mr. Neil’s yesterday. I have quite a few photos of angry titmice–we got three in the nets. These are exciting birds for us because my buddies Mark and Roger band mostly around the Twin Cities metro area and we don’t have titmice there, it’s just out of their northern range, [ Read More ]
Twice a year I have some bird banding friends come out to Mr. Neil’s place to band the birds around the yard–once in spring and once in fall. On Saturday my buddies Roger (aka MNBirdNerd) and Amber (aka AvianImages) set up mists nets to collect data and got a GREAT cross section of spring bird [ Read More ]
Ah, Saturday started out so promising! We had spring bird banding planned at Mr. Neil’s, I found out that my nephew has an exhibit at the Louvre (yeah, baby, that Louvre and it’s part of an app that’s really cool called Augmented Reality Wallpaper), Non Birding Bill was frying up some maple bacon to get [ Read More ]
After doing a bit of birding this spring, I was heading home when what looked like a distant sandhill crane caught my attention. I pulled over to the side of the road and grabbed my Swarovskis…only to find a wood tick waiting for me right on the eye cup…ewwww! Ticks, the down side of the [ Read More ]
Last week I joined Mark Martell to aid in his quest to put more satellite transmitters on golden eagles in conjunction with the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. It was a lovely drive down along the Mississippi, the hoar frost was thick on the trees and glittered in the sun. He already has one on [ Read More ]
