Clickers

The wildlife refuge was demonstrating a couple of hawks, one of which wasn't entirely thrilled with being indoors out of her cage. But they'd been trained (injuries meant they'd never be released to the wild again), and she settled down. The trainer clicked a clicker on her belt when the bird calmed down.

Why a clicker?

I asked. Because different trainers had different voices. They wanted a consistent sound to indicate "Good job", and they settled on clickers.

The trainer still used words "Good bird," but that was probably for her and our benefit. The clicker was for the birds.

Merlin

The Merlin app has become popular in our family, and sees quite a bit of use. It isn't infalible--on one outing a woman a hundred yards away shouted for her daughter to come back, and Merlin promptly said it heard a trumpeter swan.

We were in Door County, and my eldest wondered if Merlin could be fooled by mimics. Within the minute, a strange call was identified as a ruffed grouse. There was nothing in that tree but bluejays. Quick answer(*).

FWIW, the dawn chorus isn't all the birds all at once. They have their entrances and their exits, as it were. First up were the cardinals; though I'm not sure why. Maybe they roost higher in the trees (they like thick bushes and tall trees), in line with the suggestion that the higher birds see the sun first.

(*) FWIW, we had a bluejay land on the birdbath on the back deck, and give a redtail hawk call--presumably to ensure privacy.

sometimes you wonder how the species survives

Birds

We have a birdbath in back. Adult robins splash enough to almost water the nearby flowerpots for us. Generally they perch, hop in, splash like mad, hop out, and then fly somewhere to preen.

Not the teenagers. They monopolize the birdbath for maybe three times as long, as they stand there preening in the bath.

At least they don't use all the hot water.

He must have wanted privacy

We heard the cry of a red-tailed hawk on the back porch yesterday. I wondered if the bird feeder had attracted a different kind of bird feeder. When we looked, a blue jay was splashing in the bird bath. He jumped out and gave a red-tail's cry, and jumped back in. Lather, repeat, until the water level in the bird bath got too low.

Never stopping for breath

Birds warble without taking breath. They need lots of oxygen to fly--how do they manage?

SciTech Daily has an article which shows how air gets pushed through their looped lungs. ("Rectification" in this case means making things flow in one direction.) "back-and-forth motions generated by breathing were transformed into one-way flows around the loops." This lets them use the whole lung loop efficiently, with no dead air areas.

Eat your heart out, Frank Sinatra...

Just looking

Odd that I've never seen it before: A chickadee perched on a lattice, bent down under it to sip from a drop dipping below the wire. I suppose the water drop is handy, and drinking while perching lets the bird watch for danger in all directions. The birdbath blocks more of the view.

I guess the natural equivalent would be sipping from water drops on twigs, and those are generally high enough that I can't see what the birds are doing.

The view from the home office

In the recently-turned garden outside, a bluejay is having a territorial dispute with a robin over who gets to find nesting material in the garden. At one point the jay perched sideways on the fence attempting to pull chickenwire loose.

Ring neck doves

In Sheridan, Wyoming we heard a curious creature. When we got binoculars on the bird it was plainly a ring neck dove. But, contrary to the bird books, its call sounded like it was taking cooing lessons from crows. OK, sometimes it cooed, but sometimes made a sound halfway between a coo and a caw. Yes, there were several of them, so it wasn't a weird individual.

Has anybody else heard this?

Goose

Somewhere along I-74 east of Urbana there must be some open water, despite the cold. It's quite a bit south for Fermilab's cooling ponds, and a bit far east for the Clinton Power Station. There was a solitary Canada goose flying over the highway, presumably looking for a place to land and eat. Must have missed the memo about migration...