You may remember me talking some time ago about the Great Blue Heron. I even painted one and talked about the one in my background image on this site.
But while my images are fine, the Great Blue Heron photos posted on 10,000 Birds yesterday are magnificent.
Meanwhile, I’m off to bird banding. I’ll probably see some GB Herons, but we don’t band them. We don’t even want them in the nets – our nets would be shredded by such a large bird. But they’re still wonderful to watch.
Both my plantar fasciitis and my cold/sinus thing have improved, although both are still hanging on. But I feel well enough now to resume most of my usual activities, including bird banding yesterday.
It was at the banding station (more specifically, in the shed of the banding station) where I found this little guy.
Me holding a young rat snake at Occoquan Bay NWR Bird Banding Station.
I’m not afraid of snakes. Nor of bugs. Nor of any other plant or animal that cannot hurt me. And I have learned how to recognize which ones to be careful of.
For example, there was a freakin’ huge European Hornet caught in one of the nets yesterday morning. He was around 2″ long and pissed off. I knew better than to pluck him out bare handed. One of my colleagues cut the hornet into segments with scissors, then another used a clothes pin to remove the pieces from the net. But I routinely, but gently, pull dragonflies and crane flies out of the net and release them.
In addition to the birds, of course, all of who get a complimentary health check and jewelry before their release.
I haven’t posted anything in the last 10 days because I haven’t felt like I had any solid ideas of things to blog about nor any time to devote to sorting it all out. As my last full-time semester of classes winds-down, I’m having to wind myself up to finish my commitments and meet those deadlines. It’s taking an extra effort because that’s not at all what I’d like to be doing.
I’d like to be bird banding more days per week. Or out birding in general. Or riding my bike more. Or hiking and photographing things.
Or clearing out months of neglected and piled clutter before my house resembles those on the TV show Hoarders, which it is beginning to already.
Or painting some new pictures. Or working on blogs, the revision of my novel, or any other writing that doesn’t involve citations to peer-reviewed journals.
There’s only a few more weeks of classes. Less than 30 days. I have several presentations, two research papers, and two final exams that have to be completed. I’m just focused on the finish line, trying to get to the end.
In other news….
We set up the BirdCam to monitor the hummingbird, oriole, and platform feeders on the deck.
So far, the BirdCam has only caught a few squirrels.
Then we discovered that the Robin has laid 3 eggs in the nest and is sitting on them. I got some still shots with my Canon, but we’re afraid that rigging up the BirdCam there now will disturb Mrs. Robin too much and she may abandon the nest. So I have to monitor that one myself now.
Mrs Robin on her nest. (Only two of three eggs are visible; one is hidden behind her tail) Blurriness is due to dirty window.
The coolest thing about it is that the eggs actually look exactly like the Robin Egg Candies that they sell for Easter every year. And they’re so tiny!
Like I didn’t have enough to juggle. Oh well. It is very cool that we’ll get to see baby robins in a week or so.
We’ll start with the basics… Whales are not fish. They are mammals, meaning they breathe air just as we do and they don’t have gills, like fish, to extract oxygen from water. Another giveaway that they are mammals is that their tails are horizontal, like dolphins and porpoises, rather than vertical, like fish, such as sharks and bass.
And, in fact, dolphins and whales are both in the order Cetacea, along with porpoises. And, while we’re on this tangent, porpoises and dophins are distinct because of differences in body size, the size of the snouts, and shape of their teeth. All three – whales, dolphins, and porpoises – are descended from ancient hooved animals. That’s a wild factoid you can use to amaze your friends. I’ll come back to it momentarily.
Image via savethewhales.org
The interesting thing that I just learned about whales is that Baleen Whales are probably the oldest animals on the planet. There have been whales found to be nearly 200 years old. That’s pretty amazing. Not as amazing as trees that are many thousands of years old, but still pretty amazing.
Of course, then I wondered what animal had the shortest life span. That’s probably the fruit fly which can have 25 generations in one year.
The latest evidence for whale evolution indicates that they are more closely related to the hippo than previously thought. This chart shows the entire clade for whales, dolphins, and porpoises. (A clade, by the way, is a groups of organisms with a common ancestor and their evolutionary relationship based on genetic/molecular data.)
I’ve seen dolphins in real life a few times - once at an aquarium and a couple times while on tour boats in the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a porpoise (although, like a good fish, I try never to go anywhere without one.)
My photo of a dolphin near Ft. Sumter. It's hard to get a good photo because you can't know exactly when or where one will surface. This is one of the few images I got that wasn't just the edge of the fin or tail disappearing back into the water.
But I’ve only seen a whale in an aquarium in Atlanta when I visited it with my daughter; there they have a Beluga Whale. (See it on a webcam feed.)
That shouldn’t be a surprise, really. Most people never get to see whales in their natural habitat. Their natural habitat is very inconvenient for us terrestrial mammals to access. They probably like it better that way.
Whales, dophins, and porpoises have a prominent place in American popular culture, however, despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that we don’t often experience the real thing. From the story of Jonah and the Whale, to Moby Dick, to Flipper, to the worst Star Trek movie ever made, cetaceans are all around us.
Just this week, my husband and I were watching an American Robin in our front yard as it picked up grass in its bill. We watched, amused, and wondering how much it could possibly carry and how much more it would try to pick up. Finally, it took to wing and flew… right into the hedge outside the window of our spare bedroom. It landed on something that looked like a nest.
We hurried to the spare bedroom and looked out. There was a nest. Not only one nest, but a total of three nests, although only one was close enough to see clearly. The other two were obscured by foliage.
So I broke down and ordered a Wingscapes WSCA02 BirdCam 2.0 with Flash
Now we have the complication of how to mount it in the window at an angle that gives us a good view. I’ve designed a simple hinged board thing that we’ll probably put together this weekend and I’ll post photos of it after that, as well as whatever images the BirdCam captures.
I’m a bit concerned now, however, because we haven’t seen any activity at the nest at all since then, so it may be a moot point. If the camera doesn’t catch any activity after we have been monitoring it for a while, I’ll just move it around to the back yard and watch Pancho and Inez, my bluebird couple who may have moved into one of my bird houses.
In the meantime, enjoy this live camera feed of Great Blue Herons At the Cornell Lab in Ithaca, NY. They also have a live camera feed on a Red-Tailed Hawk.