The Daily R-r-r-ibbit

Recording signs of owls in the holler

Yesterday I found a great poster on the Walden's Puddle facebook page:

I was interested in this because I occasionally find owl pellets on the lane when I'm out with my dogs. Of course, it's possible that some of them may have been from hawks.

I know that we have barred owls in the holler. Because I know they are around, I chose barred owls as one of the species I observe for the Nature's Notebook project of the National Phenology Network. Here's a brief recording I got of one on May 7, 2012. The first call is near the beginning of the video, but the second one is toward the end, so hang in there:

 

In terms of pellets, I think I have seen evidence of more than one species, probably the barred owl and the great horned owl. I believe that I have heard calls of both species as well.

One time I saw an owl in my headlights as I returned home after dark. It flew ahead of me for several seconds before continuing on into the darkness of the woods. But most often I either hear them or see pellets. My dogs usually go out to bark at owls if they hear one.

You can compare owl calls at learner.org or at All About Birds on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. If you visit the Cornell site soon, you can download owl calls for Halloween uses for free if you sign up to receive emails from them. I just did this and got the 4.1 MB zip file with nine different owl sounds. The offer appeared as a pop-up on the main page and the browse-the-owls page...in fact it looks like it pops up on all the pages unless you tell it to go away.

I got a couple of good owl photos when I visited the Knoxville Zoo. This one is a barn owl -- I remember seeing and hearing these when I was a kid in Kansas:

[Photo credit: Cathie Bird]

By the way, Walden's Puddle is an organization in Tennessee that provides care and treatment to sick, injured and orphaned native Tennessee wildlife. They are the only professionally-staffed wildlife rehabilitation and education facility in Middle Tennessee. They don't charge for their services nor do they receive federal or state funding for their work. Check out their website for instructions on what to do and how to contact them if you have find a wild creature in Tennessee that may need help. Right now their Facebook page has lots of owl photos scattered about.

Global Oneness Day 2013

http://www.globaloneness2013.org/

Today I'm celebrating the oneness of all life in the holler, y el mundo!

 

 

Why I May Be Posting More Often

A bee on some goldenrod in the holler, 9/25/13 [Photo credit: Cathie Bird]

I used to use i-google for my home page. Google is discontinuing this option next month. I checked out other home page possibilities, but could not find any that had personalizing options I liked, not to mention too many ads all over the place. So I decided to use the R-r-r-ibbit as my new home page.

I figured this may help me to be more regular with new posts because I don't want to get bored seeing the same old thing every time I jump onto the 'net.

So, while I keep searching for other possibilities (see some of the links below) I'll keep updating  and re-widgetizing R-r-r-ibbit.

 

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Exhausted owl takes refuge on HMS Illustrious flight deck | theguardian.com

Lots of birds are on the move during the fall season. Migration presents a number of hazards for birds. For example, I found this article (via The American Bird Conservancy) today about a recent rescue at sea:

 

Lieutenant Chris Patrick with the Eurasian scops owl, which was found cowering under the ship's crane and later released to continue its migration. Photograph: Nicky Wilson/MoD/PA

A tiny owl was discovered sheltering on board the Royal Navy's helicopter carrier HMS Illustrious. The Eurasian scops owl was found cowering under the ship's crane on the flight deck while the Portsmouth-based warship was off the coast of Yemen during a training exercise.

Leading Airman Mikaele Mua picked up the exhausted bird and passed it on to be looked after by the ship's meteorology forecaster, Lieutenant Chris Patrick, who calls himself an avid twitcher and who belongs to the navy's birdwatching society.

Patrick, 44, from Weymouth, Dorset, said birds of the species would be migrating south towards sub-Saharan Africa around this time of year.

He said: "It was clear the poor little thing had literally run out of steam. It must have seen the ship and took refuge. It looked as though it was simply waiting to die." 

Read the whole story at www.theguardian.com

Here in the holler I'm starting to see and hear more of the year round birds as they look for nuts that are ripe or fallen. I saw eight blue jays yesterday, and I can hear chickadees. Coming back from our holler walk on Saturday I think I saw some turkeys fly up as the dogs headed up toward the house. The lane has plenty of beech nuts and acorns on it -- not to mention walnuts.

Some links on bird migration hazards:

Threats to Migrating Birds (About.com -- Melissa Mayntz)

Migration Is Dangerous (10000 Birds)

Migration (All About Birds/Cornell Ornithology Lab)

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Disappearing North American Moose Worry Experts -- Earthweek

Bye-Bye Bullwinkle?

A bull moose in Superior National Forest, Minnesota, USA [Photo credit: USDA Forest Service, EPA]

I found a troubling story at Earthweek yesterday about the declining moose population in several regions of North America:

One of Minnesota’s two distinct populations of the lumbering animals has dropped from about 4,000 to 100 since the 1990s.

The other population is down to fewer than 3,000 from 8,000 over the same period.

Wildlife experts say manmade climate change appears to be behind most of the declines.

Read the whole story at www.earthweek.com

The first moose I ever saw up close was in Ashley National Forest in the early seventies. Bill and I were camped there for a rafting trip on the Green River below the Flaming Gorge dam and a visit to some of Bill's old haunts around Manila, Utah.

Bill was off getting more gear out of the car, and I had just started cooking supper when I heard something -- a pretty large something, by the sound of it -- just beyond the edge of our campsite, maybe 20 feet away. When I looked up, all I could see was a long, dark brown back. It kind of looked like a horse until it raised its head. Then I recognized it as a moose. It was one of those good news-bad news moments: I was ecstatic to see a moose, but a little concerned about being that close.

In 1978, a few moose were transplanted on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park, just across the mountains from where Bill and I lived. I didn't live there long enough to see them migrate over to the east side, but my brother Bob has posted several photos of them in that same yard lately. According to a story in May in the Denver Post, that small group has now multiplied and migrated to other parts of Colorado. It's another moose population that is doing well, at the moment, rather than declining.

Moose are such awesome animals. Wise up, man of Earth, before we trash one more acre, one more stream, one more species.

Related articles:

Moose Die-Off Alarms Scientists (New York Times, 10/15/13)

States Initiating Research on Moose Declines; Minnesota Halts Hunt (Wildlife Management Institute, earlier in 2013)

Declining moose populations in some areas of Ontario puzzles biologists (Toronto Star, 10/16/13)

'Moose die-off' not seen in Yukon, where populations stable (CBC, 10/15/13)

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Editorial: The Disappearing Moose

Moose die-off is massive, and a mystery to scientists (+video) - Christian Science Monitor

Are we just numbers in the matrix? | COSMOS magazine

One of my Facebook friends shared this amazing article today. If the excerpt interests you, you can read the full (but long) version at the COSMOS Magazine link below:

The Higgs boson as simulated by one of the detectors at CERN

“Everything you’ve been told about physics is wrong.”

From his opening remarks to his punchline, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll knows how to grab an audience’s attention. And when Carroll talks physics, people listen. The “wrong” that Carroll is referring to is the widely held view that the world is made up of particles. Not so, he says. At the heart of it all, everything is fields – electric, magnetic and beyond. Even the celebrated hunt for the Higgs particle, which imparts mass to all the other particles in our universe, is actually a quest to nail down the Higgs field.

Over the past century and a half, field theory has come to dominate our understanding of the universe, from the cosmic to the subatomic. General relativity is a field theory that describes how gravity choreographs the elegant motions of galaxies, stars, planets and moons, while at the other end of the scale quantum field theory describes the chaos of the subatomic world. As physicists now see it, our universe is nothing less, and nothing more, than a collection of fields invisibly filling space with their powerful, generative effects.

via www.cosmosmagazine.com

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