So I'm watching these 3 and the one with the fish wants no more. Mom is checking out the leftovers and so is his sib. He is holding on to that last piece of fish for dear life, in his talons, (tight). He flew off with it and then came back with fish still clutched in his talons. Very greedy... Amazing to watch how they develop their own habits. The other 2 are drooling over that fish. Mom just took off, kids watching.

Mom and whiny kids in nest.  One has a fish and still whines. Cute though.

You know, there was a remake of Dark Shadows that I fell across not long ago while channel-hopping (and therefore still  needing something productive to occupy my mind...). Truly, there was! I knew what it was immediately, but it disappeared. Probably for the best - how could they have improved on perfection??? Haha!

We watched that show too Bobbie, it was back in 1991. Was on for 1 season and disappeared. Was called "Dark Shadows" with Ben Cross and Joanna Going. We actually liked that show. Then the War began, "Desert Storm" and all eyes were glued to that and not Dark Shadows. Even though it received good ratings, they decided not to bring it back.

(If that's the one your talking about). 

 

[WanderingFalcon (Carol P.):]

WanderingFalcon (Carol P.): C on HSBC top NW corner. Dana and Carol P cannot find M an K.

Link:
http://twitter.com/WanderingFalcon/statuses/19988555736

M and K.....a (freudian) slip? 

Callidora just stooped on a pigeon and missed. C'mon girl, catch that food. Where are A & B when you need them? (MAK). Carol and Dana out looking for A & B. Mak just left.

Hope getting some serious lift @ Blackwater....soon to fledge.  Hooper & Holland fledged already.

 All 3 there now

Was down Holland Pt. last night!     In fact, the Osprey family over on FB was north of HP.  I thing the Hooper Straight light is at St. Michaels Museum (I think).  Thanks, Donna - I'm headed up to Annapolis and will check on a few of my nests 

CWC? Atta girl Janet, you go girl. Hope you see some good flying. Good luck.

  Great old movie, "the Birdman of Alcatraz" - they don't make them like that any more

One of my favorites besides Escape from Alcatraz..(Clint Eastwood).  I also like Shawshank, the crow...Jake.

MAK,Dana,Carol: C on SW corner Chase Building.

Hope getting some serious lift @ Blackwater....soon to fledge.  Hooper & Holland fledged already.

 All 3 there now

I like to go up around the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center for lots of natural history reasons, and one of them is to watch the barn swallows that nest in the pavilion, the bus shelter, on the sides of the center itself, and sometimes on the kiosk. The insect-catching adults swoop high and low, sometimes playing 'chicken' with the numerous cars and buses, which typically exceed the posted speed limits. Most of the thousands of tourists are oblivious to these birds, but a few do pay attention.

In mid July, some of the nests had big chicks, either just leaving the nest or just about to do so. Other pairs still had eggs, in some cases because vandals had destroyed their first nests and these pairs had to begin anew.

Originally, barn swallows nested in caves, cliff crevices and hollow trees, but now they have converted to using human structures almost entirely. They build inside culverts, under bridges, and on buildings; use of natural sites has become unusual and noteworthy. Historically, as North American became more populated by humans, barn swallows also spread into new areas.

Barn swallows occur all over the northern hemisphere in the nesting season (but migrate to South America or Africa in winter), and they are among the most intensively studied songbirds. European birds have white breast and belly feathers, but in North America these feathers are rusty orange. It turns out that in North America, a dark rusty breast on a male is attractive to females, and females mated to dark rusty males produce more chicks than those mated to paler males.

In this species, the elegant tail is long and forked, and males have longer tails than females. A deeply forked tail is said to increase lift and allow tighter turns, and if the fork is symmetrical, maneuverability is enhanced. Long, symmetrical tails develop on males that have few external parasites. Females really go for males with long, symmetrical tails - the best fliers with the fewest parasites. So males with such tails have a high probability of getting a mate, they get better mates, and they indulge in more extracurricular copulations as well. Females that are socially bonded to short-tailed males actively seek extra-pair copulations with better-endowed males.

However, those studly males with big tails don't invest much time and energy in the chicks of their 'official' mate; they're too busy running around. The short-tailed males are more attentive fathers; they also reportedly build better nests, and females are also more attentive moms when they have better nests. So there is some compensation to females for not being mated to the studliest guy. But the nests of short-tailed males often contain some other male's chicks, so the short-tailed males end up investing effort in chicks that are not their own.

If all that were not enough complexity, barn swallow nests are sometimes subject to hostile takeovers by intruding males. The marauding male may belong to another species, such as a wren, or house sparrow, or cliff swallow. And sometimes the intruder is another barn swallow. If the intruder pushes out the original male, he generally destroys any eggs or small chicks, and then mates with the widowed female.

Nests are built of pellets of mud, cemented to the wall or beam, and lined with grass and especially feathers. Both parents incubate the eggs, although only the female has a featherless, highly vascularized brood patch on her belly. Incubation takes about two weeks and chicks are in the nest roughly three weeks. After leaving the nest, the juveniles are tended by their putative parents for about two more weeks. Chicks in a second brood are sometimes also tended by older siblings from the first brood. Parents (and older sibs) can recognize their fledglings, not by voice, but by variation in plumage color patterns on the chest-no two chicks are exactly alike.

Barn swallows nest in several locations in Juneau and are easily seen. Next time you see one, just think a moment about how complex their lives are.

I  their faces.

Alcatraz may not be the first place that comes to mind for bird-watching, but the authors of the birding blog Maganrord  aren't your typical birders. KALW's Molly Samuel spoke to the bloggers and bird enthusiasts at Alcatraz and brought back signs of life from the long abandoned island.

*     *     *

MOLLY SAMUEL: Alcatraz Island is famous mainly for one thing: its prison.

            FILM CLIP FROM "THE ROCK": Welcome to the Rock.

But it's also a good place to lay eggs.

            FILM CLIP CONT.: Sir, the eagles have reached the tunnel system.

OK, the movie The Rock isn't completely accurate. There aren't eagles here. But there are gulls, cormorants, ravens, and even peregrine falcons.

MARIE CERDA: A lot of nesting goes on in this one area where you have black crowned night herons in one thicket, snowy egrets in another thicket, and you have western gulls in much of the brush under that.

Marie Cerda works in customer service for the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, a non-profit that operates on Alcatraz. We're standing with our backs to the prison looking down at hundreds of birds.

CERDA: I always call this Fern Gully because that's what it reminds me of. It's so lush down there.

SAMUEL: except for the pile...

CERDA: Yeah, except for the pile of rubble that is a demolished building.

We're with Cerda's coworker Logan Bartling and his girlfriend Danielle Ricci, watching birds build nests, eat, and fight. It's nesting season, which makes for a busy scene. Bartling points out some of the drama.

LOGAN BARTLING: There's a night heron battling a gull over there.

CERDA: Oh yeah. Oh, epic battles here.

Bartling and Cerda have both worked here for about two years, up in the cell house. They hand out audio tours to visitors and answer their questions. They both like the job, but Bartling points out that it's hard to get out of the shadow of Alcatraz's past.

BARTLING: People want to get their picture taken in Al Capone's cell and that's great, that's part of history.

But after the millionth time pointing out that cell, it gets old. What Bartling's really excited about is the island's ever-changing ecology.

BARTLING: Out here it's different every year, it's new every year. And there's always something new to discover, to figure out, or study.

So Bartling and Cerda started watching the birds that nest on Alcatraz. Then they began writing about them.

With the help of Ricci, they launched their Alcatraz bird blog, called Maganrord. Another friend helped them think of the name. It combines their names, Marie and Logan, with the words "rock" and "bird."

Maganrord's a pretty good read, even if you're not a metalhead or a birder.

BARTLING: This is a blog post we recently added to our website and it's called "update on our brave young falcon and raven news." Our resident falcon needs a name and we've come up with the following possibilities: One: Greg...

Bartling and Cerda are close observers of the lives, loves, and occasionally grisly deaths of the birds on Alcatraz-they were the first to notice that peregrine falcons had moved here. But the blog is not just a checklist of birds.

BARTLING: One Alcatraz regular speaking to us in a thick Irish accent convinced us it would be dramatic and rad to have a peregrine falcon named Judas marauding around a lonely and decommissioned island prison at over 200 miles per hour chewing the heads off of invasive European starlings left and right. We found it hard to argue.

We walk around to the other side of the island, toward a huge tree near the path up to the cellhouse.

BARTLING: This tree on the right, that's where the ravens live.

Since ravens aren't native to Alcatraz, the Park Service tries to keep them from breeding by oiling their eggs, which prevents them from hatching.

BARTLING: Last year they did oil the eggs, but the ravens laid a second clutch and unexpectedly there were juvenile ravens. They're actually pretty cool. They have a beak that looks way to large for their head and they just hop around because they don't quite know hot to fly yet.

During nesting season, the rocky island is covered in lush vegetation...and in birds. Entire sections, usually open to the public, are closed. They're taken over by western gulls, black-crowned night herons, pigeons guillemots, and geese. There's a cacophony of squeaks, squawks, honks, and rattles as the birds fight for food, for space, and for water.

Bartling and Cerda aren't the only ones on the island who are interested in birds. There are biologists who monitor them, especially during nesting season. And there are some docents who lead bird tours.

And there was a certain famous prisoner.

SAMUEL: So are you the birdman of Alcatraz?

BARTLING: No, no. Although anybody who becomes interested in birds, inevitably they point to that person and they're like, the birdman of Alcatraz, that's you!

The real birdman of Alcatraz was Robert Stroud. He didn't even have birds on Alcatraz. He raised birds and wrote about them while he was at Leavenworth Prison, before he was transferred here in 1942. The nickname Birdman of Alcatraz came from the title of a book and a subsequent movie about him. It was a marketing ploy.

As Cerda and Bartling head up to the cell house to go to work, we check on the raven's tree one more time and see something new.

CERDA: But look, but look! Logan, turn around.

BARTLING: Oh my god.

There's a young raven in the tree. The adult ravens have successfully hatched an egg, again foiling the rangers' attempts to keep them from raising young.

CERDA: That's awesome.

From Alcatraz Island, I'm Molly Samuel for Crosscurrents.

6:54 MAK/Dan and Dana just arrived. Going to look for A and B. C just flew in and landed on NW side of OCSR.

800 lb nest.

HOLIDAY — The bald eagles have flown north for the summer, but they're expected back in the fall. However, the pair will arrive to find their 800-pound nest gone, along with the dead pine tree that once supported it.

During their absence, county officials and representatives of Progress Energy are trying to figure out a way to offer them a new home near the original one on the utility's property off Anclote Road.

"It's a shame the nest came down," said David Bruzek, lead environmental specialist for Progress Energy. "But the silver lining is it came down outside of nesting season when we didn't have any eggs in there."

The nest, thought to have sheltered the same pair for seven years, had evolved into a tourist attraction. Motorists would sometimes park along the side of the road to catch a glimpse of the birds and their young.

County and utility officials say they and others have been mulling over whether to build a home on a platform or a nest in another nearby tree in case the eagles return. Though the birds tend to return to the same places, there's no guarantee.

"We're looking at various possibilities to providing an alternative nest," Bruzek said. Now the best bet is building a nest of natural materials in an existing tree.

A platform was considered but Bruzek said he feared an artificial structure might create an imprint and limit the younger birds to rely only on artificial nests.

Officials also want to make sure any tree that is used is healthy and won't immediately suffer the fate of the previous one.

Progress Energy officials also want to make sure they're balancing the needs of the birds and their enthusiasts with the needs of the nearby power plant. And they want to make sure no laws are violated.

"You're not supposed to have any activity within a 330 (foot) radius of an eagles' nest," Bruzek said. Whether building a new nest for the birds counts as activity also will need to be determined. Bruzek plan to get any plans okayed by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Birders and other experts say the nest, between the entrances to Anclote Gulf Park and Anclote River Park, was highly unusual because of its visibility to the public: Eagles' nests are usually either hidden from view on private property or else located deep in the woods.

Bruzek said the adult pair, if they have survived, will likely return to the area.

"If we build a nest out of natural materials, they might choose to enhance that and do the breeding cycle in that one."

However, the distractions of the highway and the fact that the original nest is gone may send the birds looking elsewhere. Eagles typically build nests deep in the woods. But some have adapted as more forests are cleared and replaced with shopping malls and tract homes.

"The urbanized birds are much more tolerant," Bruzek said.

As for the cost of building a new home, Bruzek doesn't expect to have to spend too much.

"I'm sure we'll have lots of volunteer help," he said.

Indeed, Pasco County officials, who have promoted the county as an alternative to beaches and theme parks, would love for the birds to return.

"There's a lot of enthusiasm for doing something in that area," former communications specialist Amy Ellis told Tourist Development Council members last week before resigning to begin a similar job with the Tampa Bay Regional Transportation Authority. "We've looked at an education kiosk, a webcam so people could observe the birds. There was a lot of excitement when these birds had their offspring."

6:40:  M/D:  C just stooped on a crow after flying around Xerox....yay.