Winter guests arriving
Submitted by Looduskalender on 7 October 2009 - 8:17am
Photo: Arne Ader
Translation: Liis
 
Snow bunting.

Winter guests such as the snow buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis) are slowly beginning to arrive to us. There isn’t a very large number of snow buntings wintering in Estonia, but during migration – to the south in autumn and to north in spring – they are many. Flocks of these "snowball birds" can be seen in many places, even at the seashore, where they enjoy the seeds of the knotgrass, to store as many calories as possible before cold comes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2009/may/13/penguin-football

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/15/whistling-orang-utan  Bonnie, whistling Orangutan 

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20091012/NEWS08/910120315

Delaware Bay's most productive horseshoe crab spawning beach -- and also the area with last spring's highest concentrations of migratory shorebirds -- was washing away, inundated by each high tide.
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But late last month, the Army Corps of Engineers combined a maintenance dredging project in the Mispillion Inlet and Harbor with a beach renourishment project to hold off the erosion of the narrow sand spit, at least for a while.

The maintenance dredging cost $650,000. Fixing the federally owned jetty and restoring the beach cost another $186,000.

"For me, the critical thing was just to be able to save that spot," said Kevin Kalasz, a wildlife biologist with the Delaware Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. "Mispillion Harbor routinely has the highest horseshoe crab egg densities in the Delaware Bay, attracting the greatest concentrations of red knots and other shorebirds to its shores. This makes the area one of the most important sites for shorebird conservation not only in Delaware, but also in the entire Atlantic Coast flyway."

Ironically, the sandy spit of land is manmade, but in recent years it has become the hot spot for the spawning crabs and migrating birds.

The area is sheltered and even in strong winds provides the crabs a spot to lay their pearly green eggs.

A bounty of eggs draws the migratory birds.

Kalasz said he noticed an erosion problem there after the Mother's Day weekend storm in May 2008.

Then, this year, as scientists were monitoring the crab spawning and bird migration, they discovered that there was little dry sand at high tide at one end of the sand spit. A breach in the rock jetty allowed water from Delaware Bay to flood the beach.

While shorebirds feed most heavily at low tide, they also need roosting areas to rest and digest their food between the low-tide feeding frenzies.

The biologists noticed the problem during the May shorebird migration, but things got worse a few weeks later when the area was pounded with wind and waves in late-season storms.
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"It was really surprising to all of us," said Charles Myers, Mispillion Harbor project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers.
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Myers said he had been in the area in May and had seen all the shorebirds flying around. A month later, he was contacted by state environmental officials because of the rapidly escalating erosion problem.

The corps was already going through a state permit application to do maintenance dredging in the inlet.

So state and federal officials sat down and brainstormed.

The corps was planning to remove two shoal areas -- one from Mispillion Inlet and the other from Cedar Creek, he said.

The problem, though, was that the material on the two shoals wasn't suitable for beach renourishment.

It was fine sand, mud and silt -- not the coarse-grained sand and pebbles that made the sand spit such an attractive location for spawning horseshoe crabs, said Bartholomew Wilson, a geologist with Delaware Coastal Programs.

In recent years, the state coastal programs office has made detailed maps of the Delaware Bay bottom.

The idea was to be able to use them to protect critical habitat on the bay floor and to pinpoint resources like sand, he said.

Wilson, who worked on the mapping project, set out to see if there was a nearby sand source that could be tapped for the beach repair project. They used the maps, followed by core sampling.

They found one spot, but it turned out to be near an old bombing range. Another spot had a muddy bottom.

Then, on the south side of the Mispillion Inlet, Wilson found a spot with coarse sand and gravel.

"It wouldn't be good for a recreational beach, but for horseshoe crabs, it was perfect," he said.

The state and federal agencies worked together. Myers found some additional money to add to the maintenance dredging project -- money that paid for the sand to be pumped onto the beach for restoration.

"This essentially is two projects for the price of one," said Lt. Col. Thomas Tickner, Philadelphia District commander for the corps.

While the work cost a little more, it was less expensive in the long run because state and federal officials didn't have to pay to remobilize the dredge, a significant cost savings, Wilson said.

The corps contracted with Southwind Construction Corp. of Evansville, Ind., to do the maintenance dredging and jetty and beach repair work.

The silt and mud from the dredging were placed on the northern end of the island.

Wilson said it will migrate to the north and provide sediment to naturally rebuild eroding marshes along the bay shoreline.

Wilson and Kalasz said the beach repair is a temporary solution.

State and federal officials are looking into a long-term fix.

In the meantime, Kalasz said, there also is interest in creating other horseshoe crab spawning habitats along the Delaware Bay shore.

Scientists and volunteers prepare a net to capture red knots on the Mustang Island beach. The Texas coast is a stopping point on the birds' long migrations and a possible wintering ground for birds not old enough to make the entire flight.

MUSTANG ISLAND — The cannons were loaded. The trigger woman was crouching behind a Jeep. The net was in position.

The volunteers were told to start “twinkling,� a herding maneuver designed to move birds up the beach.

“They may call it twinkling,� David Newstead, an environmental scientist at the Coastal Bend Bays and Estuary Program in Corpus Christi, said of his British and East Coast colleagues. “But we call it the Texas red knot roundup.�

Red knots are robin-sized birds with 20-inch wingspans. For the past week, ornithologists from England and New Jersey have worked with local scientists, wildlife managers and birders to trap and tag 200 of them on the Texas coast.

Each year, red knots fly from the Canadian Arctic to the southern tip of South America. The 20,000-mile round trip is one of the longest and least understood migrations in the animal kingdom.

The Texas coast is one of the known stopover points and possible wintering grounds for immature birds not old enough to make the entire two-continent flight.

Red knots have been intensely studied on the East Coast, but little is known about where the birds that stop in Texas are coming from, how long they stay and where they go.

Thus the tagging. But to do that, the delicate birds have to be captured.

That's where the three cannons come in.

First, the team digs a shallow foot-wide trench in the beach about 20 yards from the water's edge. They place a folded 23-by-12-yard net inside. The end of the net is attached to three weights; each is loaded into a cannon facing the water. A car sound system attached to a battery is then buried nearby; it plays the red knots' roosting call, which sounds like hundreds of kids squeaking their shoes on a basketball court.

Everything is hidden under a thin layer of sand and scattered seaweed.

The team then breaks into groups, one to keep the public away, one to trigger the artillery and the other to try and “twinkle� the birds toward the net.

“It's about the least manly thing you can herd,� said Rafael Calderon, a biology graduate student at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, who was using his pickup to do it.

To get the birds into the “capture zone,� Calderon and Newstead slowly drove their trucks, sometimes into the water, getting as close as they could without scaring the birds into flight. Newstead got stuck once and had to be towed out. Eight birds made their way toward the net.

Habitat loss and overharvesting of horseshoe crabs, one of the bird's favorite midmigration foods on the East Coast, has driven the known populations of red knots down as much as 80 percent in the past 15 years, said Larry Niles, who is leading the research of the bird in the Americas under federal and private grants.

Red knots also migrate from the northern reaches of Asia and Europe to the southern tips of Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Because the birds depend on the ecosystems of two continents, any change in their behavior and populations can offer insight into what is happening, not only for other shorebirds but also larger changes, such as global warming, Niles said.

“Shorebirds become an indicator for where we are headed with that,� he said.

Finally, the birds were in place. The countdown came over handheld radios, and with a “bam!� and a cloud of sand, the net flew over the birds.

Team members ran to gather the birds and put them into padded plastic totes. Sitting in a circle, they weighed them, took measurements and feather samples, placed the tags and then set the birds free.

Each bird scrambled back to the water's edge. Kicking its legs several times, each one got used to the bright plastic around its leg, then got back to looking for clams.

They had a long flight ahead of them.

A few months back I posted a pic of my sisters rescue Dalmation Seth. He smiles for her every time he greets her. Well I say this is one BIG smile.    For real, this is not a growl or a snarl, it's a SMILE.

Ok so I took her pic and adjusted it a bit....sent it to my sis and she freaked out. Don't look like no "SMILE" no more.     

Very cool Joyce. 

    They were ....Thanks Joyce

Posted on 11 October 2009

They shot out of the carrier and into the wild like rockets. Four mallard ducks – that once had a feather duster as mom – now dabble and splash in a fine pond. Next year, they’ll pair up and make more ducks. They have no clue they owe their lives to the kindness of Sag Harbor’s finest – our police force and highway department.

I suppose I’ve been living in and working out of Sag Harbor for the Wildlife Rescue Center of the Hamptons too long, because this is the time of the year when I think of us all as Meerkats. We who remain can stick our heads up out of our holes, look around, and see if it’s safe to come out again. I easily parked on Main Street this week.

So now my mind wanders back over this summer, and into the past, to contemplate the extraordinary kindness Sag Harbor demonstrates toward its wild neighbors. We should all know the unsung little things our village workers do for us.

Take the above-mentioned ducks. Now it could be argued that in the scope of things, four mallards don’t count for much. Yet these four, who had fallen eight feet into storm drains on Jermain Avenue, surely didn’t want to die the same week they had hatched. It took a miracle and hard work to save them.

The miracle was that some people were walking around the Otter Pond – neither talking on cell phones nor listening to I-Pods – and heard three fluff balls peeping beneath the busy street.

They called the Wildlife Rescue. I drove there and commenced what I call the “Ducklings Down the Drain Drill.� This starts with a call to the police, who faithfully respond.

On this day, we had extra drama when a well-meaning citizen, in the excitement of the moment, tried to lift one of the 200 pound iron grates. He succeeded only in dropping it way down into the sewer. The ducks were okay, but Jermain Avenue was not, now having a 2×4 foot hole in it. By the time Sergeant Paul Fabiano and Officer John Natuzzi arrived to assess the situation, a fourth duck was found in another drain.

It was Memorial Day Sunday morning. So we could only imagine how happy Village Highway Department Superintendent Jim Early would be to get this call on his day off. He’d be even happier when he learned he would need heavy equipment to put the street back together.

And yet, like always, he was there for us. Soon a crowd had gathered, and traffic was slowed. Highway worker Kevin O’Brien, obviously once an Olympic gymnast, was able to lower himself in and out of the drains with great agility, coming up with a duck or two each time. So maybe he did mutter a little bit, but he was there, our hero.

Within the hour, the four little ducklings were being warmed and rehydrated at the Wildlife Hospital in Hampton Bays, sitting contentedly under a feather duster, which substituted for mom.

Last winter, after a nighttime car-duck collision on Route114, a panicked driver found one of our street ducks, with a fractured leg, wedged into his grill. Our police carefully remove the female mallard. She was in a cast for six weeks and returned to the Harbor.

A number of animals find their way into our authorities’ hearts. Officer Barbara Mott once kept an injured squirrel in the office trash can until I could pick it up. The Chief has called about a baby catbird in distress, his brother, the Detective, alerted us to a crippled seagull. One night, I was most touched by a call that the police had a woman in the station’s lobby with a dying duck. When I got there I found her, crying softly, holding its bloody body against her pink, crocheted sweater. She was whispering comfort in Spanish.

Another time police called when a six-month-old fawn had been hit by a car and fallen on Jermain near Main Street. His little legs were fine, but he had serious head trauma. Quick treatment with anti-inflammatory steroids and IV fluids, and he was up the next morning, back in the wild the next day.

Maybe the most dramatic rescue I recall involved a Southampton Town officer who called for assistance at a residence on Ferry Road near the Haerter Bridge. When I arrived, a young doe, trapped in a “deer-proof yard,� had sprung back off a fence and impaled her entire body on a metal post. The outline of the post could be seen poking up beneath the skin on her back. She just stood there, with those big doe eyes, looking back at us. “I don’t really want to shoot her,� the officer said. “Just look at her.� He added that if the shot did not go well, the bullet could travel to the neighbor’s yard.

I tranquilized her, and in a burst of adrenaline, my husband and I lifted her body up off the post. It was almost a scene from a Woody Allen movie. The entire time, the homeowner talked about his investment strategies.

After antibiotics and minor surgery, this deer too had cheated a horrible death.

Over at the hospital we have two posters that I love. One, features our largest local pelagic bird, the Northern Gannet, with 60″ outstretched wings. Beneath it a 1965 quote from Chip Taylor of the Troggs: “Wild Thing. You make my heart sing.â€� Another poster is a Peregrine falcon — which can occasionally be seen in the village — pictured over a quote from 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant: “You can measure the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.â€�

We are blessed here with strong people with big hearts.     

Now that was an amazing video Joyce. I watched it again. I loved the part where she tested out the nest. Just laid down in it. 

Thanks

Daddy brings more food!!

Where is this at? Dumping a parrot at this time of year would be a death sentence. Poor bird.

This happened in the UK.....it's horrible and I'm glad they didn't have a pic.

Feeding time       

Looks like the final count is three and one unhatched egg





Going walk about

Sooooooooo funny Ei and soo cute.

 

BIRD life has been devastated in a Sydney park where Lord Mayor Clover Moore has allowed dogs to roam without leashes, it was claimed yesterday.
The latest victim in Sydney Park at St Peters is a female black swan, mauled so badly by a dog the RSPCA immediately put the bird down.

The swan was attacked in front of its two cygnets, now in RSPCA care, and its mate, which has been left "forlorn and alone" in the park's wetland area, The Daily Telegraph reports.

A dog killed another black swan earlier this year, an RSPCA spokesman said yesterday.

Dog-loving Ms Moore announced in April last year that canines would be allowed off their leashes in 30 parks throughout Sydney.

Her decision, opposed by then deputy Sydney Lord Mayor Tony Pooley, who predicted problems at Sydney Park, sparked an ugly war between dog lovers and those who feared the leash-free parks would be too dangerous for other people and particularly young children.

Threats were made to put dog food laced with crushed glass in some parks amid claims the leash-free advocates believed dogs had equal rights to children.

Dogs are meant to be put back on their leashes near the wetlands area in Sydney Park, which was home to the swan family and other native birds. Yesterday, Sydney Park regular Rena Svans said that owners regularly let their dogs harass the wetland's resident birdlife.

"Since the park went leashless the number of birds in the park has plunged," Ms Svans, from Alexandria, said.

"The ducks have stopped breeding, parrot numbers are down, magpie numbers are down. Just a day ago I watched as a dog ripped apart a moorhen's nest while its owner just watched. They even throw sticks and balls into the water for their dogs to fetch despite all the warning signs."

Ms Svans said she was devastated by the death of the female black swan last Friday.

"It was beautiful to watch them finally breed successfully after they had failed before and the male had finally started to trust people," she said. "Now he's rarely there and he looks so sad and lost."

RSPCA Inspector Slade Macklin and a colleague were forced to swim through the wetland's weeds to rescue the swan after the attack.

"Her wing had a compound fracture, the bone was exposed and we had to euthanise her immediately," Mr Macklin said. "I understand a member of the public jumped into the water to try to help the swan and was also bitten."

The dog, described only as white and medium sized, is being sought.

1:00pm Thursday 8th October 2009

A sick parrot dumped in woodland may never fly again.   

The bird, which was found by a dog walker in Hangleton Copse, was so traumatised by its ordeal it had pulled most of its own feathers out.

The woman was walking her dog when she heard a squawking noise and found the Blue-fronted Amazon in leaf litter.

The exotic parrot, named Forrest by staff at the RSPCA in Braypool Lane, Patcham, Brighton, has not yet been sexed.

Staff member Jenny Wells said the bird was slowly starting to recover from its ordeal.

She added: “It had taken a lot of its own feathers out and that is probably down to the stress of being dumped.

“Somebody decided they did not want a parrot and abandoned it in the woods. It's lucky to still be alive because a fox or anything could have got it."

The bird, discovered on Friday, should be covered in green feathering with blue, orange and a bit of yellow round the front of its head.

Ruth Riseley, another staff member, said: “He cannot fly because his flight feathers have been destroyed. It depends how much damage it has done to the shaft of the feathers.

“Having a parrot is like having a three-year-old child. It needs attention all the time and can be quite demanding.â€�   

<a href="http://shakymon.com/thruway/archive/MainCamera_HighRes/20091011/MainCamera_HighRes_20091011-1001.jpg?" target=_blank><img src="http://shakymon.com/thruway/archive/MainCamera_Thumbnail/20091011/MainCamera_Thumbnail_20091011-1001.jpg?" >[/url] Finally, after a 2 day hiatus, Archer and Beauty stop by.
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