Twin Cities Naturalist Podcast Pilot Episode

After a lot of planning and rescheduling, we're finally happy to present the pilot episode of the Twin Cities Naturalist Podcast. Thank you to those of you who have been reading the blog that accompanies the podcast. The blog will be updated far more often than the podcast. Our goal is to to have the podcast come out once a month. We've been doing some work on the technology end and the online podcast player should be working smoothly now. If you would prefer to listen to the podcast in iTunes you can subscribe in the reader on the right hand column. You can also sign up there to get emails with our blog posts and podcasts. Please, leave a message in the comments and tell us what you think of the show.

This month we discuss phenology, and then interview our special guest, Liz Harper. She shares her thoughts on listing and the crazyness of living her neighborhood after reporting a "rare" bird species. Click the little triangle on the player to listen. Thanks for stopping in.



Here are some photos we discussed on the podcast.

First up is a somewhat blurry photo of the Varied Thrush in Roseville.


This second photo was taken by our guest Liz Harper and shows the pretty typical street scene of birders looking for the thrush. Click for larger views.

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Michelle Bachmann is an Idiot

I struggled with the title of this post. Is that too strong? Is she really an idiot? I'll let you watch the video and decide for yourself. The woman is an embarrassment to:

1. The House of Representatives
2. The People of Minnesota
3. The Educational system.

I'll let her speak for herself.



~Kirk

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You're Being Watched

There are a few perks to being a professional naturalist. One of them is that you get to spend time outside. We had a "professional development" morning today and our director took us on a hike to the Falls Creek Scientific and Natural Area. There were tons of Pine Warblers around in the pines and we could hear them like mad but not a single one showed itself. This got me thinking about seeing birds and them seeing you back. Have you ever watched a bird and knew it was watching you back? How about when you know a bird is nearby but it knows to watch out for you? New research suggests that birds know when we're looking at them.

"Jackdaws seem to recognize the eye's role in visual perception, or at the very least they are extremely sensitive to the way that human eyes are oriented," said Auguste von Bayern, formerly of the University of Cambridge and now at the University of Oxford.

Check it out yourself at Science Daily.

There's also an article about birds watching you in general. They seems to focus on where you are looking and even the angle of your head. This makes sense if you have ever had to walk into a mew to catch a free-lofted captive raptor. Especially with our captive Barred owl, if I look at her when I go in to get her for a program she freaks out and flies around. If I casually come in and slide up to her sideways and never make eye contact, she let's me pick her up right away.

~Kirk

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Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas

The Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas Project sent out an announcement today that they are now ready to assign priority blocks. This is a wonderful citizen science project and I highly recommend getting involved. The project is new to Minnesota but has been done elsewhere. The project aims to create an atlas of where species breed in the state. To take part, you have to make a commitment to bird an area (you can take up to five years) looking for any and all signs of what species are breeding there. It is a lot of fun and a great way to help further our understanding of birds while having fun outdoors.

Get your blocks while they're hot!

Co-host Paul Smithson and I just selected the block that includes the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center where we work. We'll be sure to share some of the data we collect via the blog and the podcast.

Here are the instructions from coordinator Bonnie Sample:

Just head over to http://bird.atlasing.org/Atlas/MN to register, request your block and start entering data. All participants in the Atlas project must be registered on this site, developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology to support breeding bird atlas projects.

After you register, you will be on your My Home page. To request a Priority Block, enter the Priority Block ID in the Block ID field on the left side of the page and click Block ID. There is a link to “Request to own this block” on the Block Profile page which will send your request to the Regional Coordinator. A response will be returned to you by email. If you don’t know the block ID, you can use the maps on the Cornell site.

Be sure to read the pdf documents at the bottom of the Minnesota Breeding Bird Atlas homepage before you sign up for a block so you know what you are getting yourself into.

Good Luck!

~Kirk

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Friday Night Migration

I noticed over on the Minnesota Birdnerd blog that Roger captured a great still image of migration picked up by NEXTRAD radar on Friday night. It was such an impressive display that I knew I needed to create another radar loop of the migration. It took about an hour to build this loop by hand.

(Please allow a little time for it to load. The animation image is very large)

There is a little bit of a shake to the image because of the process I used. It would take a long time to get rid of it and would involve going through the 90 or so images that make up the animation by hand and modifying them.

There are some fascinating things to see in the loop. Click on it to open in a new window and view in a slightly larger size.


(sometimes the image does not appear here or fails to animate. Follow this link to see it in motion.

1) The most obvious thing to see is that most birds choose to migrate at night. The loop starts at 0002 UTC which corresponds to 7:00 Central Daylight Time. The loop ends about midnight CDT. You can see the birds take off after sunset and you can watch he wave of take-offs start in the east and move west. They start first down by Georgia.

2) Look at the explosion of birds taking off from Louisiana at sunset.

3) Notice the birds tend to stick to land. One exception is that migration has now reached the Great Lakes. Look at Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Erie. Some migrants seem to be making crossings there. Birds don't seem too keen about crossing Lake Superior except for near Duluth where the crossing is short.

4) Look carefully at the coast of Texas. It is thick with birds early in the evening but by the end of the loop all the birds have pushed north and the coast seems pretty quiet.


~Kirk

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Migration Updates and Eastern Phoebe Webcam

The chimney swift migration pushes ever onward and upwards. Chimney Swifts have now been reported in Missouri and Illinois. You can track the migration at the Driftwood Wildlife Association Chimney Swift Migration website.

Another migration website to keep an eye on is the Ruby-throated hummingbird migration over at migration.net. I was pretty shocked to see that there are reports already of hummingbirds in Minnesota and up into Canada! Clearly though, the mass of birds is keeping to the south and east. Follow the migration here.

The 2009 Phoebe Cam is now officially up and running and the feed is available to the public. The Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center where Paul and I both work is a partner with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology on the Nest Camera project. Live images from our Eastern Phoebe nest are sent out around the world via the Cornell Nest Cam website.

Here is a live image from the nest. The blog automatically uploads the most recent image when you land here so to see the next image taken you'll have to refresh the browser window or go directly to our bird's page at Cornell. New photos are uploaded every 20 seconds on that page and you can leave comments in the forum about what you are seeing. You can also show the camera in self-refreshing Pop-up that you can leave on your desktop.



This is the same nest site used last year. A tornado came though last memorial day with 110 mph straight line winds and while the web feed went down because of a power failure, when it came back up in the morning all the birds on the nest were safe so this is a proven good location to build a nest. We keep the nest up each year and the birds re-use it. Enjoy!

~Kirk

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Red-bellied Woodpecker Excavating Nest Cavity

This female Red-bellied Woodpecker and her mate have been taking turns excavating a new nest cavity out at the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center. They started a few days ago and are making really good progress. Today the male was excavating for a while and then we saw the female come back. She landed outside the hole and did a few quick taps on the tree. This was a signal to the male who then came out and flew off. She took over where he left off. Here she is in some video throwing the bits of wood shavings out of the cavity.

A couple of other quick updates, no eggs in the phoebe nest yet, they were bringing in fresh nesting material such as moss all day though so they are for sure going to use this nest again. I'll put up the feed as soon as we see eggs. I'm also heading out tonight for the Bird and Beers which is on the road this month looking for Woodcocks. I'm bringing some night-vision video equipment so if I get any decent footage I'll be sure to post it.

~Kirk

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Muskrat

Signs of spring are coming on fast now. I've seen northern flickers everywhere, myrtle warblers are slowly showing up in small numbers. Bluebirds are already incubating eggs. I love all of these sights but one of my favorite signs of spring are all of the muskrats. Every little pond I drive by seems to have a happy little muskrat chewing away. I took a short hike the other day and couldn't resist taking a few photos.


Just an update on the podcast as well, we're getting together next week now to try to put together the pilot episode. Our schedules have been a little difficult to manage.

~Kirk

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Phoebe eggs in progress?

I checked out the internal link tonight to the phoebe cam at work. The feed is not yet live to the public. That's up to Cornell to decide on. They won't go live until we see eggs. Check this out though. At 9:00 tonight I went to the feed and saw this image.


What is that? It looks like a curled up red squirrel.

I went to the feed because I was curious if the female phoebe was spending the night on the nest. That would be a good indication that eggs might be in the works.

I refreshed the feed and it just twitched a little. Finally, after about a minute it switched to this.



Interesting, more bird like.
I refreshed again and finally I got this image.



Woo hoo! The phoebe is spending the night on the nest. I would not be surprised to see an egg in the morning. She quickly went back to sleep. I wonder what woke her up?

~Kirk

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Ready for the Phoebes

We've been seeing the Eastern Phoebe's around for a week or so and we thought it was time to get ready to fire up our nest camera. Each year, the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center tries to get a web cam set up on a bird nest as part of a partnership project with the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. We've been successful the past two years getting the camera set up on an Eastern Phoebe nest. The same nest has been used for a number of years so we haven't had to do much in the way of moving cameras.

After fixing a minor technical communications glitch with the Cornell server we are now sending a still image of the nest every 20 seconds. Here's an example I pulled off the server at lunch. As you can see, the nest is empty.


This is the same nest site that has been used a few years running so we're hoping the birds will simply re-use it. A pair of phoebes has been seen checking out the nest and hanging out in the area so our fingers are crossed.

Around 2:00 today I saw a bird fly up toward the nest while I stood by the window talking to someone. I ran to the office and grabbed this image off the server. I'd say we have a very good chance of them using this nest.


In years past, people have been a little confused about the location and what exactly they are looking at in the image. The camera is pretty much directly above the nest and the pipe heading down to the nest in the lower right portion of the image is a disused electrical conduit that leads to an old junction box where an outdoor light used to be. We haven't used the light fixture in many years but it is a perfect platform for a phoebe nest. Here's what the set-up looks like from the side. The camera is an infrared equipped unit with a ring of IR LEDs around the lens so you can see in the nest even at night.

Here's the wide shot of the location. The nest is under the overhang of the roof and is quite sheltered from the elements. In the overhead shots it looks like it is really high above the ground but is is only about 8 feet high.


If and when the phoebes start to nest we'll be sure to post updates and let you know where they are featured on the Cornell site. Keep your tail-feathers crossed.

~Kirk

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Off Shore Wind Farms

There's been a lot of flap in the media saying that Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior in the Obama administration, has announced this week that Atlantic offshore wind power could "replace coal" as an energy source for America. Well, that's not exactly what he was saying. He was saying that in theory, the DOE has identified 1 million megawatts of potential wind power off the Atlantic coast and that this is five times the power generated by the coal industry. He was trying to draw attention to the enormous resource, not actually claim we could harvest 100% of the resource.

Here in Minnesota we're not a coastal state but we do have a lot of wind power located here. Minnesota is ranked 4th in wind power in the US. That number keeps changing from year to year as states build more and more wind generating capacity. The associated press coverage of Salazar's comments is most interesting because of the smattering of comments from folks who are pro-fossil fuels. As suspected, saying that we can get rid of our dependence on Coal (even if was just to illustrate a point about the potential of wind) has the coal industry in a panic. Even the oil industry is worried about a shot across the bow of a fellow fossil fuel.

From the AP article, "Skip Hobbs, a petroleum geologist from New Canaan, Conn., said oil and gas drilling has been shown to be safe." Apparently this comment was to show that we don't need wind power, never mind that his argument is a complete red herring but come on Skip, you're going to play the safety card?

How about Helicopter Crashes, Rigs crashing into platforms and killing workers, Oil rigs sinking into the sea spilling fuel, and oil spills? How about we ask the families of the 167 people who died when Occidental Petroleum's Piper Alpha offshore production platform exploded how safe they think the industry is?

Dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels and global warming are the real issues here but Skip must not want to get into a discussion about those. A bit of free advice, if you're going to play a red herring make sure it's at least a good one.

American Coal Council spokesman Jason Hayes put forward what on the surface appear to be real concerns. He said wind power plants, "face roadblocks including local opposition, concerns about their impact on wildlife, and problems in efficiently transmitting power from far offshore."

Pot calling the kettle black anyone? Wind farms certainly face local opposition but so do coal plants. Who is Jason Hayes to criticize? Do you know anyone (besides Jason Hayes of course) who wants a coal fired power plant in their neighborhood? I'm betting if the choice was a coal plant or a wind farm most people would prefer a wind farm. Concern for wildlife? Has Hayes ever heard of global warming? Coal is enemy number one in this department and global warming has a far larger impact on wildlife than wind turbines. Problems transmitting power from offshore? Certainly something that has to be done, but look how much trouble the Coal industry has had getting coal through Minnesota on something as simple as trains. I think people will be a lot more open to underwater transmission lines than they are about having them go over the roof of their houses and through their farms like with a coal plant.

The article points out the Salazar's estimate of 1 million megawatts would require a lot of turbines but fails to note that he wasn't saying we should or even could exploit all the the potential that exista. They don't give a number but some quick math says that if we used 10 Megawatt turbines you'd need 100,000 turbines. Of course that's a rediculous number of turbines for the Atlantic coast. His point was that there is the potential for that many and we've built a grand total of zero offshore farms in the United States. So far we've exploited only the marginal land based areas for wind power. Southwestern Minnesota is only rated as "good" for wind power while Lake Superior and the coasts are rated as Excellent to Outstanding. Click the graphic for more info.

Salazar's point was that we have an incredible untapped resource that could help us become a greener country. The fossil fuel lobby seems hell bent on keeping that resource untapped. Offshore movable oil drilling platforms? Safe and logical. Stationary offshore wind turbine? Preposterous!

We've heard this all before.

~Kirk

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Project BirdSafe Volunteers needed

There's a great opportunity this weekend for people interested in helping birds. Project BirdSafe needs volunteers to be part of a collaborative effort to monitor the extent of bird collisions with buildings in downtown areas. The data collected will help design and implement potential solutions. Volunteers survey buildings during migration season for fallen birds by walking a designated one hour route weekly or as their schedule permits.

Alternatively (or in addition), Volunteers may take part in a short term “focus week” that will intensively survey a subset of buildings for a week(+) in May and again in September.

Volunteers have an opportunity to see a variety of birds up close and help release many of them safely out of the city. Beat the commuting traffic and arrive early to walk the morning route! Opportunities to walk at lunch or in the afternoon may be available.

The training event is this Saturday
Saturday April 18th (10:00 AM -Noon) at the Ecology building at the U of MN
St Paul Campus.

Training sessions are required and will provide an overview of the program, updates about the most recent data that has been collected, and an opportunity to meet your fellow volunteers. Current volunteers are welcome and encouraged to join us as well.

If you are unable to make either of these dates it may be possible to arrange alternative training.

Please RSVP to Tom Ibsen, National Park Ranger / Volunteers-In-Parks Manager, ASAP (651.290.3214, Thomas_Ibsen@nps.gov).

More information and directions will be sent out via email immediately before each training session.

For more information on bird building problems during migration see the Fatal Light Awareness Program website.

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The Podcast is Coming...i promise.

I've been slow in blog posts lately as I work on getting the podcast up and running. We had a scheduling setback and had to reschedule the pilot episode. In the mean time. TURKEYS!


Turkeys have been strutting their stuff lately and I brought my camera into work last week to catch the early morning show. A male turkey was spending the early hours of the day strutting near the building. I'm guessing he figured the close proximity to water and the bird feeders was a good location. Most of the action seemed to be about a quarter mile away in a corn field though. One morning he did have two females in the area but they were doing their best to look uninterested as he puffed himself up and fanned his tail. I didn't get a good shot of the tail fanned out as he was between me and the female and always kept the tail displayed directly in her direction.

Notice how his wing feathers drag on the ground? Check out the interesting pattern made on the ground as he struts back and forth.

In keeping with the turkey theme, later that day I went out into the prairie and a Turkey Vulture flew overhead allowing me some nice shots.


Thanks for reading the blog and hopefully the podcast pilot episode will be with you shortly.

~Kirk

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Supreme Court Ruling on Fish and Power Plants

The supreme court ruled in favor of power utilities this week. The decision essentially means power companies can keep doing business as usual and do nothave to put into place systems that would reduce the number of fish killed from being sucked into the cooling systems of the plants. The EPA estimates (probably conservatively) that power plants kill 3.4 billion fish and shellfish each year in their cooling systems.

This all reminds me of a school field-trip we took to the Northern States Power High Bridge coal fired power plant in St. Paul. I don;t remember exactly how old I was. Maybe 6th or 7th grade. I do remember in 6th grade that the energy curriculum we studied was provided by the coal industry. Nice.

On the field trip we saw the boilers, the coal field, etc. and I clearly remember our female tour guide telling us that the plant was cooled with water from the Mississippi River. She proudly told us that all the water taken from the river was put back and that they monitored the temperature of the water going back in because if it was too warm when it went back in it would be bad for the fish. She neglected to mention the thousands of fish that got sucked into the system in the first place.

As a little kid I thought about it for a second and then asked what I thought was a logical question given that she had just told us they constantly monitored the water temp. I asked, "What do you do if the water temperature is too high? Do you shut down the plant to prevent hurting the fish?"

The woman stared at me, paused, then said, "let's continue the tour." I realized right then and there that you can never expect to get a straight answer from power companies.

I was satisfied this past year when the high bridge coal plant was taken out of service. I would have liked to have been there when they knocked down the smoke stack.

~Kirk

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