Hey BC try this link

http://cdin.us/blogsites/surya-the-orangutan-hound-dog/

maybe so!

Maybe tonight and maybe not.

[ONLY 3??]

ONLY 3?? This is gonna be a tough one Aafke!

I'm assuming Spirit is the one in the nest all the time now.

http://ornithologie.ca/faucons/  in the nest now

My sister sent me this: Big turtle but so sad.

JUNO BEACH, FL -- A disturbing discovery off our coast has many wildlife experts scratching their heads. A dead sea turtle was found floating a mile offshore. Now its body is in the hands of state wildlife investigators

The body of the six-foot, one thousand pound adult male leatherback sea turtle is in Gainesville at the University of Florida for a necropsy.

The leatherback was found floating on the surface just south of the Juno pier. It was in the vicinity of dredge work for a beach renourishment project.

Three divers from the dive boat "Narcosis" out of Riviera Beach Marina were dispatched to secure the turtle and bring it shore. A forklift had to be used to hoist the turtle into an FWC vehicle.

The cause of death remains a mystery however rescuers did observe bleeding from what appeared to be recent injuries.

While the bird suits may have prevented imprinting on humans, apparently it didn't stop this one from imprinting on a flock of really strange looking whooping cranes 

Exactly Ei...There's always one in the crowd.

What's going on in this crazy world? 

This very cool!  I'd guess that these mutations happen more often than we get to "see".

Most likely! 

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/unlikely-animal-friends-4317/Videos/07216_00#tab-Videos/07216_00   

Sticking out of the crowd like a sore thumb, this rare black penguin is causing quite a stir among bird experts.

The bird, which was spotted in Fortuna Bay, on the island of South Georgia, has been described as having a ‘one in a zillion mutation’ by ornithologist Dr Allan Baker.
Dr Baker, of the University of Toronto, said the bird had turned black because he has lost control of his pigmentation patterns.

He added: ‘That is astonishing. I’ve never ever seen that before…Presumably it’s some kind of mutation.

[Caption: David A. Bruzek, the lead environmental specialist with Progress Energy, launches a bald eagle to freedom on Wednesday near Brooksville. So far, the world has been unkind to the eagle, known as No. 512. It was the second time in her 19 years that she has been released after rehabilitation.]

BROOKSVILLE — For the second time in her 19 years, Florida Bald Eagle No. 512 was thrown into the wind, sent off again on Wednesday into a world that has been unkind.

The bird had spent the past three months at the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey in Mait­land, recovering from injuries she sustained last year in a fight to protect her nest in Palm Harbor.

A younger female eagle kicked her out in late November, held her to the ground, plucked her chest feathers and skewered No. 512 with dagger-like talons.

The usurper now has chicks with her ex-mate.

Whether the scarred eagle's maternal instincts will carry her back to the place where her latest troubles started is unknown, said Lynda White, Florida's Audubon Society Eaglewatch coordinator.

"She could fly home today," White said. "Hopefully, she won't."

White carried the blindfolded No. 512 in her lap for the drive from Maitland to the Ahhochee Hill Audubon Sanctuary, a preserve just outside Brooksville, on Wednesday afternoon.

David A. Bruzek, the lead environmental specialist with Progress Energy, was given the honor of throwing the eagle into the air. The company has been working with the society to make power lines safer for birds.

A crowd of more than 30 looked on as the eagle's leather blinder was removed. No. 512 nearly took a chunk out of Bruzek's chin with her beak.

Then, with a heave, he set her loose.

"Oh! Come on, get up! Get up!" a woman called from the crowd.

No. 512 clipped the branches of a small tree, then beat her wings and disappeared over the trees.

Flying over the woods around Brooksville may have been bittersweet for No. 512, if bald eagles felt such things.

It was near this same rural expanse that she was released back into the wild in 1998 after she had been shot with a bullet through her leg and wing two years earlier in Palm Harbor.

According to society records back then, the eagle's caretakers questioned whether she could be released and survive.

The hope is she will prove yet again to be as tough as eagles come.

"She's middle-aged, but hopefully she'll live for a long time to come," White said.

Caption: David A. Bruzek, the lead environmental specialist with Progress Energy, launches a bald eagle to freedom on Wednesday near Brooksville. So far, the world has been unkind to the eagle, known as No. 512. It was the second time in her 19 years that she has been released after rehabilitation.

[CAPTION: A white whooping crane has joined a group of sandhill cranes visiting the back yard of a home in southern Hernando.]

 Word spread quickly among birders about a chance for a once-in-a-lifetime sighting.

A whooping crane, the tallest and one of the rarest birds in North America, was reportedly frequenting feeders at a house south of Brooksville last week.

More than a dozen members of the Hernando County Audubon Society, including Sheila Wollam, drove over to catch a glimpse of the bird — and found that this wildlife encounter wasn't all that wild.

"We came into the driveway and this bird walks right up to us,'' Wollam said. "It was like a tame crane.''

A great amount of human time and money has gone into making these birds wary of humans. Tame is the last thing they're supposed to be.

This male crane, No. 1207, was reared by scientists wearing crane suits and using crane hand puppets to show him how to eat and drink. Even the pilot of the ultralight aircraft that led it on his first migration to Florida in 2007 wore the suit.

"We try to avoid all human acclimation at all costs,'' said Joe Duff, chief operating officer of Operation Migration and the lead ultralight pilot.

It might seem slightly ridiculous, all this human intervention in pursuit of wildness, except for the results it has produced.

The population of wild whooping cranes, down to 15 by the 1940s, has climbed to 384, including 108 in the eastern migratory flock.

That's the group of birds trained to fly every year from one national wildlife refuge, the Necedah in Wisconsin, to others in Florida: either St. Marks near Tallahassee or the Chassahowitzka, which straddles western Hernando and Citrus counties.

No. 1207 is supposed to winter in the Chassahowitzka or other nearby wild areas, wading in freshwater swamps or tidal flats and feeding on crabs, insects and just about anything bite-sized that swims or crawls.

Instead, he has fallen in with a flock of sandhill cranes, which itself isn't a problem, and adopting their habit of wandering among humans in search of food, which is a problem.

You could compare Duff to a teacher watching a promising student smoke dope and hang around with a bad crowd, as long as you made it clear this was a very expensive, exclusive school. About $1.5 million annually goes into rearing the cranes, leading the 20 or so young ones on their first migration and monitoring the species' population.

"It's a great loss not only financially, but because of all the effort that went into the rearing of that bird,'' Duff said.

And just as there was probably an anti-role model in your neighborhood, the one kid who went completely off the rails, so it is with these nurtured cranes. No. 710, also part of the migratory class of 2007, started taking handouts at a mobile home park in northern Hernando last year.

After returning to Wisconsin last spring, he began feeding on corn stockpiled at an ethanol plant near the refuge. When he led other cranes there, Duff said, scientists had no choice but remove him from the wild. He now lives in Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo.

No. 1207 and the rest of the whooping cranes in Florida are due to migrate north in a week or two, Duff said.

Hopefully, the bird will become reaccustomed to foraging in the wild, and maybe, now that he's approaching the right age, find a mate. That is what makes these birds so valuable, the potential for them to raise young and teach them to feed and migrate so scientists in crane suits won't have to.

So, it may not be too late for this bird, though Duff and others I interviewed said the less contact the crane has with people, the better his chances, which is why I'm not revealing the location of the property the bird has been visiting or even the owner's name.

This man is a birder himself, and realizes that feeding even sandhill cranes — the common ones with the gray bodies and scarlet heads — is illegal in Florida. His feeders are for songbirds, he said, and the sandhills and whooping crane showed up about a week ago to probe the ground beneath them. He thinks they are eating insects that eat the grain.

But along with serious birders like Wollam, who know not to approach whooping cranes (he approached her, she said) at least one man tried to lure the crane to the fence with a handout, the property owner said. He knows all this attention is not good for a rare, wild bird.

So what should he do? First of all, stop refilling the feeders, Duff said.

Later, if this bird can't break the habit of eating human food, scientists might try to scare him back to the wild with a trained dog or with a worker dressed up in yet another suit, a supposedly terrifying "swamp monster'' costume.

Though the owner said the cranes weren't feeding directly on his birdseed, that's exactly what No. 1207 was doing when I saw him Sunday afternoon — craning his neck (nice to know where that word came from) to reach a feeder on a post.

Disappointing as this was to see from such a magnificent animal, the fact that I was watching the only bird on the continent tall enough to pull this off — one that towered over the sandhills like a center among point guards — was itself magnificent.

Even more so was watching this bird lift himself into flight when the flock moved on.

I kept my distance and, as a reporter, I think I had a legitimate reason to be there. But even if I hadn't, I'm a birder too, at least a casual one, and I would have found it hard to stay away.

CAPTION: A white whooping crane has joined a group of sandhill cranes visiting the back yard of a home in southern Hernando.

[Estimates are that between 100 million and 1 billion individual birds are killed annually by collisions with windows in the United States alone —]

Windows take a toll on birds -- killing up to 1 billion a year in North America. Conservancy bird expert Dave Mehlman gives tips on how you can help stop this deadly problem. Birds just do not get the concept of “glass.� We’ve all surely had the experience of having a bird fly into a window at our home, office or school, usually with unfortunate consequences for the bird. But have you ever stopped to think about how widespread this phenomenon is and how many birds it might be killing annually?
Dr. Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College is one person who has thought about this problem and done much to bring it to the attention of bird conservationists in the United States and elsewhere. He has compiled an extensive amount of information, available at his Birds and Windows website.

Estimates are that between 100 million and 1 billion individual birds are killed annually by collisions with windows in the United States alone — I see no immediate reason why these figures would be erroneous. Klem has documented more than 270 different species of birds killed at windows in the United States and almost 800 species worldwide; the former represents more than 25 percent of the species known to occur in North America north of Mexico.
Potentially any bird species that occurs in urban, suburban or rural environments could be affected, regardless of age, sex or conservation status. Species occurring in wetlands, oceans or in areas far from human habitation are less at risk. Some of the more commonly killed species, as shown in Klem’s earlier work, are American robin, dark-eyed junco, cedar waxwing, ovenbird and Swainson’s thrush.
 
What can be done about this phenomenon? If there’s one thing to which “act locally� applies, this is it — we can all take action at our homes, offices and schools to reduce and eliminate this major problem.
 
It's not always easy and may involve some sacrifice of views out the window, but it’s worth it in terms of reducing this deadly menace to birds. Here are several things you can do to deal with window collisions:

   1.
      Move bird feeders, bird baths and perches to within 3 feet of your window — you’ll see the birds better and they can’t fly fast enough to get hurt.
   2.
      Collisions are caused by birds trying to fly through glass or because they see reflections from the outside — so do what you can to break up or eliminate this by placing decals or strings on the outside of your windows, separated by no more than 4 inches vertically and 2 inches horizontally.
   3.
      Use screens, films or other coverings on your windows that eliminate reflections — or use bird-safe glass.
   4.
      If constructing new windows, consider angling them 20 to 40 degrees from vertical.
   5.
      When installing new landscaping, consider placing trees, shrubs, water features, and other bird attractants well away from windows.