Hey? Any Food In There?

I found this nuthatch meticulously searching beneath each shingle for insects to eat.  Woodpeckers aren't the only birds looking for insects off the sides of houses.

Useful Beekeeping Tools

The lone bee!

It's late fall and we are getting our bees ready for the winter.  As we were winding our bee season to a close, I thought I would bring up 2 different pieces of bee equipment that have been incredibly useful to use this year.  There's a lot of bee equipment equipment that is mediocre (or does not come with instructions so is about as useful as a Slap Chop).

This was a hive tool Mr Neil found...I think when he went to Australia.  Hive tools are needed to pry boxes and frames apart--especially after bees have propolised them together.  Our newest one is called an Australian hive tool. What separates this from your garden variety beekeeping hive tools (besides higher cost) is the little hook on the end--you can use it to pull out the frames from the brood boxes.  If you are only going to have one hive tool...I'd go with with this one.

The other really cool piece of equipment that Mr. Neil ordered for us is the escape board.  Every year when we extract honey, we have the not so fun task of convincing all the worker bees to leave those honey supers and join all the other bees in the brood boxes.  We don't always see eye to eye on this sort of thing.  We've tried other things to get the bees to leave like Bee Quick which is an essential oil that you spray that causes most of the bees to leave the super and go deeper into the hive.  You have to order a new bottle every year because it appears to be less effective after the first summer.  There's also Neil's shake the hell out of the box to flick the bees out method.

But I gotta say that this escape board works WAY better!

You place the escape on top of the supers or boxes that you do not want to remove and place it so the triangle side is on the inside of the hive.  The top has a hole, the bees crawl down that and out the triangle to join the rest of the hive at night.  The next day, when they try to return to the other honey supers, they can't figure out the triangle maze and don't go back.

You then place the box full of honey that you want the bees to vacate on top of the escape board and in a day or two you have a bee-free honey super--it's awesome.  More effective than the Bee Quick and the flick method.

You end up with happy bees and not angry bees lost and irritated in the honey super you are trying to harvest.  Bonus!

Digiduel 2 Results

Clay and I both posted albums of our five favorite photos from Digiduel 2 on the Swarovski Optik Facebook page.  You can vote on your favorite Clay photos here or my photos here.

This photo of rock pigeons balancing on thin branches of a hackberry to eat the fruit was one of the photos that didn't make it in to the deadline.  It's weird to for me to see pigeons in a tree--I'm so used to them on buildings and sidewalks.

My eventual goal with this Digiduel Project is that we can open it up for other people to play all over the world-you have a digiscoping set up and Twitter account--you can take a turn at a Digiduel.  Clay and I wanted to do a few against each other to work out some kinks...and boy were there kinks to work out this time around:  We usually use Twitpic to upload photos onto Twitter but it was down for a good portion of the day.  I switched to Plixi as a back up but eventually Twitter refused photos from any photo site.  I had about ten images (like the above rock pigeons) that never made it up to Twitter in time and Clay had a few come in after the deadline of 4pm Central time, even though he sent them in well before the deadline.

We also decided to add a new component to the competition.  There are now two ways to win.  You can try to take as many species photos as possible in the time allotted or you can go for "quality images" or really try to get the bird in a pretty pose with some nice fall color behind it.  By adding the photos to the Facebook site, people can vote on their favorites.  And the above European starling did not get uploaded to Twitter before the deadline and I didn't include it in the album on Facebook.  It's just as well, I don't see a lot of people voting for a starling, no matter how cool they look in their winter plumage.

If you are interested in participating in a digiduel, let me know.  Clay and I will try to work you in to the competition.  The keys are to find a spot where you can get photos of birds and have internet access.  It appears to work best if you can do it from or from a park with reliable internet access.  I tried doing it from a park and popping over to a coffee shop periodically.  Doable, but annoying and a waste of gas.

Hooded mergansers flying away.

Digiduel going on NOW

There's a Birds and Beers at Merlin’s Rest at 6pm this Thusday.  Birds and Beers is a friendly gathering of birders of all ages to get together and talk some birds. YIKES  DIGIDUEL IS TODAY!  If you saw this post this morning, I said the digiduel was tomorrow--it's today!

Clay Taylor and I are doing another Digiscoping Duel or "Digiduel" on Twitter today.  This time I'm going to take my spotting scope and digital camera to the Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge and use local coffee shops to upload images. The competition goes from 8am - 4pm Central Time.  Clay will digiscope someplace in Texas.  We're going to try for "pretty" images this time and then put up albums on the Swarovski Facebook Page.  People can vote on which image we like best.  There's no physical reward for getting the most votes, we're testing out the challenge idea.  My hope is that we can do the challenge in all sorts of ways and get other digiscopers to participate (if you are interested in being a participant or have an idea for a digiscoping challenge, drop me an email sharon at birdchick dot com).

Also, using Twitter, it's a way for people to follow the progress as we load a few images throughout the day.  If you'd like the follow Digiduel 2 then follow both me and Clay at or if you have a program like TweetDeck you can follow us with the #digiduel hash tag or the #birding hash tag.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFpDYR2snvw[/youtube]

What Is That Sharpie Carrying?

While exploring the trails at Hawk Ridge with my mom and sisters, we noticed a sharp-shinned hawk catching a thermal (a warm current of air that raptors glide on).  This hawk appeared to be carrying something in its talons.

I wondered what it was carrying and my sisters wondered why a bird that wouldn't be feeding chicks would carry food during migration.  I wondered if it had just killed it's prey and was looking for a safe place to eat it--but why would it catch a thermal to go so high up?  Usually these hawks tuck into a tree to eat.  I also noticed that the sharp-shinned hawk appeared to have a full crop--why would it hunt if it had already eaten.  Sometimes at the hawk blind, Frank Taylor will get in sharp-shins with full crops that fly in for the bait pigeon.  Frank said that even though the crop is full, the message hasn't hit the rest of the body that it's full of food and further hunting isn't necessary.  Sharp-shins are accipiters like Cooper's hawks and that's very much a group of hawks that tends to act before it thinks.

In this photo you can really see that full crop.  Also, it looks like it's carrying a wing--a robin's wing maybe?  I wondered if the sharp-shinned had just killed and eaten a robin.  Since this is a smaller hawk, it could have eaten its fill and have some leftover.  Perhaps it didn't want to leave the remaining food behind?

Cleansing Goshawk

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 Duluth.  On Friday, we stopped at Hawk Ridge to walk the trails (LOVE the Summit Trail) and when we arrived, I saw someone walking down from the banding station with a bird in a holder, ready for release.  I glanced at the feet and tail and said, "Is that what I think it is?"

Debbie Waters, the naturalist for the Ridge said, "Yep."

My mom and sisters asked what it was and I said, "What do you think it is?"  They've been to Frank Taylor's banding station a few times and they do a bit of birding themselves.  They all speculated goshawk and they were correct.  We watched the program and someone had adopted this goshawk for the chance to release it.  I got a photo and love how her arms mimics the bird's wings.

I just showed this photo to NBB and said, "Isn't this cool."

He looked over from his computer, pointed to the lady and said, "FAME!"

Which I guess means the immature goshawk in this photo is now lighting the sky like a flame.

Fame.

More Pelicans Eating Birds

I've linked before to videos of pelicans eating pigeons, but if you haven't seen on, watch the video below: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNNl_uWmQXE[/youtube]

The Daily Mail recently posted an article with some pretty incredible photos of the pelican attack.  I'll just link to the article so that way if you don't want to see a pigeon in a pelican beak, you can avoid it.  But if you love a good animal train wreck...follow that link.