Welcome back!  There is something of a learning curve...this new work 'puter is actually a couple of years old and very similar to my home machine, but I'm still being challenged.  And I'm laughing...your upgrade is to Win 7...mine here is from Win NT to Win XP!

I like Windows XP...Windows explorer in 7 is so weird. I'm messing with the stuff now. Change is so difficult! Good luck with yours.

[HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOT.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOT.

I'll get my card program up and running soon. Hope you have a great day.

Mother and daughters
Cali's wings

The wide tidal river carried the soft light of a half moon. The horizon was an inky silhouette, masking tawny marshes and the loblolly pines that rose behind them. As we stood in the deepening darkness, confusion about a chaotic world slid away on the gentle current.

We were tired, but the beguiling spring night had its hold on us. This sweet evening trumped even the lure of a relaxing shower and soft bed.

A solitary dog barked in the distance. Closer, a pair of barred owls started calling back and forth, "who, who, who cooks for you?" The constant low thrum of insects provided the background music. Much closer, in the oaks just across the one-lane road, a high-pitched whinny startled us. The image of a horse roosting on a sturdy limb caused us both to break into wide-eyed grins. The call came again-a distinct, downward-inflected whinny.

The Eastern screech owl (Megascops asio) has an unusual vocal repertoire for an owl. Whinnies, rasps, barks, trills, screeches, laughs and even an occasional hoot can be heard from these year-round residents of Chesapeake woods.

Like most owls, the screech is primarily nocturnal, conducting its life under the cover of darkness.

When the sun goes down, the air and earth gradually give up their warmth. The air calms, clouds dissipate, winds die. The marshes and woods are far from silent, but a quietness envelops them, making each sound distinct.

Owls are well-adapted to this dark and quiet world. Facial feathers form a characteristic disk around the screech owl's face. The rustle of a vole in the grass is captured by that disk and funneled to the bird's ears. A moment later, it will take to the air on short, rounded wings. The leading edges of the flight feathers have a soft, comblike shape that muffles the sound of the owl as it swoops in on its prey. Bright yellow eyes dilate fully in the dim light, allowing the bird to see the prey that its hearing detected.

Small rodents, frogs and even songbirds are parts of the Eastern screech owl's diet. The bird catches insects on the wing and eats a variety of foods as part of its omnivorous diet.

The Eastern screech owl often uses its sharply down-turned, yellow-green bill to bite through the spinal cord of its victim, then ingests its meal whole. The stomach compacts the inedible bones and fur or feathers into a dense pellet. Back on its roost eight hours later, the owl will regurgitate the pellet. A series of these pellets under a tree is a sure sign that it is a favorite roosting site.

Eastern screech owls are permanent residents in their range. They can be found in wooded areas ranging from forests and river bottoms to parks and even suburban yards. They live from Montana south to Texas and east to the Atlantic, including the entire Chesapeake basin. Its close relative, the Western screech owl, has a range that slightly overlaps in the High Plains.

At 8.5 inches, the eastern screech owl is smaller than a robin. It has the erect posture and ear tufts that are common to its family. The birds show significant variation in color, ranging from rufous to gray with an uncommon intermediate brown morph. They are heavily streaked, giving a mottled appearance that serves as camouflage.

A week earlier we had seen an Eastern screech owl in the middle of the day. It wasn't roosting in a tree, but sleeping contentedly in a wood duck box at a nearby wildlife refuge.

Screech owls don't build nests. Instead, they take over abandoned nests from other birds, especially cavity builders like woodpeckers, or use appropriately sized bird boxes. They use no nesting materials.

The female lays her eggs on the bottom of the box or in the abandoned nest. She incubates the eggs for about three weeks, with the male keeping her supplied with food. Once the chicks hatch, they will take several days to fledge.

They remain dependent on both parents for food and hunting instructions for a few months. By fall, the youngsters will leave their natal site to stake out their own territory. Screech owls are monogamous and produce one brood annually.

The whinnying had stopped. In the silence, I imagined the screech owl swooping stealthily onto an unsuspecting field mouse.

Eventually, I would yield to the pull of the bed and the black silence of sleep. For the Eastern screech owl, the night was just coming alive with a rich array of nocturnal sights and sounds. This unfolding dark and silent drama is a compelling counterpoint to the glaring complexity of my days.

Jacksonville, FL - On May 25, 2010, a team from the Savannah River Ecology Lab, Disney’s Animal Kingdom, and Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens banded 172 chicks from the Zoo’s wood stork rookery. A 40 foot all terrain lift was used for accessing the stork nests located high in the trees in the Zoo’s Plains of East Africa Exhibit. The Zoo team collected data on each stork, including size and health information, and then returned the chicks safely to their nests. The Jacksonville Zoo has been monitoring and banding the wood storks since they first started nesting at the Zoo in 1999. The Jacksonville Zoo monitoring and banding data is reported to the USFWS Wood Stork Recovery Group. The data is used for research purposes and to compare with other sites across the range of the species to determine how well the recovery effort is going.

“The zoo is all about connecting people to nature,� said Tony Vecchio, executive director of Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. “To have visitors experience a thriving colony of a native endangered species is an incredible and unique opportunity for any zoo. We’re thrilled the wood storks have chosen to nest here annually.�

The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens’ rookery is unique in its accessibility, and the Zoo is one of many entities involved in a cooperative effort to monitor the endangered wood stork. Each year, leg bands are applied to several baby storks. These numbered bands allow researchers to identify individual storks as they move throughout the state and across their range. This year stork chicks first banded at the Zoo in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2008 have returned here to nest -- some probably for the very first time.

The wood stork rookery at the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens has had the highest productivity rate of all the colonies in Florida since 2003. Since 1999, 1,241 endangered wood storks have fledged, and another 260 are expected to fledge this year at the Zoo’s colony. The rookery has grown from seven nests the first year to more than 116 nests this season.

For over 90 years, the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens has been dedicated to inspiring the discovery and appreciation of wildlife through innovative experience in a caring environment. Starting in 1914 with an animal collection that consisted of one red deer fawn, the Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens has grown to house more than 1,400 rare and exotic animals and over 1,000 unique plant species. The Jacksonville Zoo is a non-profit organization and is an accredited member of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). It is open year-round, seven days a week, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and is located on Jacksonville’s north side at 370 Zoo Parkway, one-half mile east from I-95. The Zoo is open until 6 p.m. on weekends and holidays from March to Labor Day. For more information on the Zoo, log on to www.jacksonvillezoo.org

To view Jacksonville Zoo's web page on Zoo and Aquarium Visitor, go to:  http://www.zandavisitor.com/forumtopicdetail-97-Jacksonville_Zoo_and_Gardens

Hi everyone. We are very busy here in Louisiana at the gulf oil spill, but doing well. We are washing the very oiled pelicans and other birds that you have seen on TV and most of them are doing very well. More on that aspect of our work later. I want to address a few issues that have come up in the media recently. First of all, let me say that this is the time during an oil spill that the skeptics come out. These “experts� are quoted and their opinions, no matter how ill researched or biased they are, become controversial and newsworthy. I spent much time during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, 21 years ago, and in every other oil spill since then addressing them and I now just consider this a part of the politics of an oil spill.

For those who are concerned about the survival rates of oiled birds, based on recent news coverage (or the outdated studies they cite), I’d like to address the topic head-on. I am writing from personal experience, as a veteran of more than 200 oil spills, and as a representative of one of the foremost oiled bird rescue and research organizations in the world. IBRRC and Tri-State Bird Rescue--who is leading the Gulf response effort--host a bi-annual conference on the Effects of Oil on Wildlife, and, as such, are well versed in the latest science. The “experts� that I am referring to rarely, if ever, attend this global forum for oiled wildlife professionals, nor do they attempt to learn about advancements and successes in oiled wildlife rehabilitation.

How well do birds survive in the wild when they have been oiled and rehabilitated?

Recent studies (a few of which are listed below) indicate that birds can be successfully rehabilitated and returned to the wild, where many survive for years and breed.

The papers cited by opponents of oiled bird rehabilitation—like Oregon’s biologist Brian Sharp’s infamous 1996 report "Post Release Survival of Oiled, Cleaned Seabirds in North America" Ibis. Vol. 138:222-228—tend to rely on anecdotal band returns (meaning there is no daily tracking method for individuals released and no control groups observed.) These surveys are misleading because they fail to consider some important variables: the protocols used to care for the birds in question, the experience of the organization caring for the oiled birds and basic things like how the bird’s health and water proofing were assessed prior to release.

Simply put, one would not lump together the survival rates of human patients receiving emergency trauma care between two hospitals like Mogadishu's Madina Hospital and New York's Bellevue Hospital. Yet surveys like Sharp's do just that, they lump together released birds treated at various centers, under different conditions, with different resources and experience levels.

Studies support oiled, properly treated sea birds

A growing number of studies using radio telemetry, satellite tracking and long-term breeding colony observations are more accurately illustrating the post oiling survival of sea birds:

Wolfaardt, A.C. and D.C. Nel. 2003, Breeding Productivity and Annual cycle of Rehabilitated African Penguin Following Oiling. Rehabilitation of oiled African Penguins: A Conservation Success Story.

Newman, S.H., Golightly, R.T., H.R. Carter, E.N. Craig, and J.K. Mazet 2001, Post-Release Survival of Common Murres (Uria aalge) Following the Stuyvesant Oil Spill.

Golightly. R.T., S.H. Newman, E.N. Craig, H.R. Carter and J.K. Mazet. 2002, Survival and Behavior of Western Gulls Following Exposure to Oil and Rehabilitation.

Anderson, D.W., F. Gress, and D.M. Fry 1996, Survival and dispersal of oiled Brown Pelicans after rehabilitation and release.

rehabilitation process successfully returning to their wild condition. And in some cases (when birds are located and observed in breeding colonies) have been shown to breed successfully for many years following their oiling, rehabilitation and release. These studies show that a bird’s survival is often based on how a specific species can cope with the stress of the entire process from oiling to rehabilitation, and that their overall survivorship across species is far greater than Sharp’s assertions. As survivorship may be correlated to individual species it is irresponsible to draw conclusions of survivability from one species to another, rather, in depth studies must be conducted for each species considered if we are to begin to answer this question with any measure of reliability.

Pelicans handle stress better than most birds

In regards to pelicans specifically, IBRRC works year-round with brown pelicans at our two rescue centers in California, treating, on average, 500 injured, sick and oiled pelicans every year. Our release rate on these animals is 80% or higher for general rehabilitation. Pelicans, like penguins, can tolerate the stress of rehabilitation much better than birds like loons and murres for example. All of our birds (including pelicans) are federally tagged upon release. Sightings and band recoveries indicate that a high percentage of them survive. One recent example was a brown pelican, oiled and rehabilitated, during the American Trader spill in 1990 in Southern California. This bird was sighted still alive in Newport Beach earlier this year, 20 years on, and is considered one of the oldest brown pelicans ever recorded.

While this is just one bird it is a good example of the type of band returns we see from oiled and non-oiled pelicans. Of course it’s important to also remember that it is these individual birds that make up populations. At the ‘New Carissa’ oil spill in Oregon in 1999, the snowy plover population in Coos Bay was 30-45 birds. We captured 31 and rehabilitated all of them. They are an intensely studied bird and each one is considered valuable to the species. Studies of the birds showed that there was no difference in the mortality of these previously oiled birds to those never oiled.

Cali's not happy this morning.
Waiting for food!
Food arrives.

Didn't her class name another one of MK's kids? I know they followed for a long time on Yahoo. Hmm, seems like yesterday she was on.

I received my new Laptop yesterday, a few hours shy of banding. I'm loving it so far. I tried last night to restore my files on "Mozy" Why does it take a few minutes to backup and hours to restore? I finally had to stop it half way through as it was late. Took 4 hours to restore 875 files out of 1876. I never knew I had so many pics on my old laptop, (no wonder it was slow as Molasses). The 1 program I thought I backed up was PSP 2, I need that for my card making and it wasn't backed up. My daughter has a CD for an older version, so when she wakes up, I'll install it. Not sure how to use this Windows 7 yet. Says you can have a split screen up with 2 tabs open and I've yet to find out how. I'll get around to figuring it out. I should know, I'm Donna, I'm a PC and Windows 7 was my idea!  I had to throw that in! 

Great pics Jim, I tried to leave a comment on your site but it timed out when I went to preview. That never happened before. Was that Joyce in Mark's office window? And the "cookie" of the day was? I hope the TS building peeps had a good 1st banding show. 

Beauty back on Main cam...kids are chillin...all is well at the nest. I'm sure all are tired after today.

Two Peregrine falcon chicks on top of the Times Square Building in downtown Rochester have some new jewelry.

Today, the state Department of Environmental Conservation placed ID bands on the month old chicks. The bands will help the DEC track them.

They were also given names – Callidora and Jemison.

For more Rochester, N.Y. news go to our website www.whec.com.

That's it!

All I can say is Mariah successfully raised 43 eyases with fireworks at Frontier Field and High Falls, concerts at Frontier Field, music festivals at High Falls, a firehouse nearby, and a major freeway and railway next door.

I don't think noise pollution bothers them that much.

And the gorge had some cool fireworks too!

That's wonderful news for the Toronto kids...thanks Kris for posting this and thank you Linda for your observations.  I wish them no injuries.

Thank you to Aafke, Donna Ei, and Jeanne for doing the play-by-play on today's banding. Great job, ladies! I expect you'll be contacted by one of the major networks to cover the 2012 Olympics.

Thanks, Shaky!  I have to say that you , Kenn and Jim were amazing on the technical skills that brought this all together.  It was amazing to watch you all in action!  I think the 2012 Olympics need to contact all of you!

I agree jeanne, they did a wonderful job putting this all together. We can share the duties at the Olympics...I'm not greedy!