Birch Bark Baskets

The paper birch tree is widespread throughout Minnesota's deciduous forests. The bark of this tree releases itself from the trunk in paper thin strips. The strips are highly flammable. The paper birch can do more than start a fire. Anishinabe people used Paper Birch as a scrolls to document things on, as an easel for artistic bark bitings, and as a raw material for basketry. A 'makuk' is a style of birch bark basket that was used by the Anishinabe people. A few weeks ago I was taught how to construct makuk style birch bark baskets.
I undertook a challenging design for my first basket, which involved a lot of cursing. One may have thought I was of sailor heritage the way the words flowed from my mouth. It turned out nice, and I gave it to my mom for holiday. I made three additional baskets, for a total of four. Some lessons I learned: (1) the thinner the thread the easier construction will be, (2) if you are tired do not stitch your basket with twined basswood inner bark (the two together will bring on early on-set arthritis), (3) quality homemade gifts made my family happy, allowed me to work with my hands, and kept me out of the capitalist consumer nightmare of Christmas shopping.

Feeder Watch Brings Record Purple Finch Numbers

I got up unusually early this Sunday morning, perhaps a negative side effect of Saturday's even earlier morning. I was a tad bit groggy and not ready to tackle making coffee so I took Libby outside and made sure my feeders were nice and full. To my surprise the moment I went back inside I found my feeders being infiltrated by a hungry flock of 34 Purple Finches. If that wasn't enough, shortly thereafter, American Goldfinches attacked coming in as great of numbers as 24. Good thing these species are easy to distinguish from one another or I may have been SOL for counting them.

Other birds of interest was the female Pileated Woodpecker and the Male Downy Woodpecker (below)

I still hope for the return of the Dark-Eyed Junco for my final count next weekend.

Weather and Effort: December 20, 2009
When did you watch your feeders?	Day 1: morning Day 2: morning
Estimated cumulative time:	1 to 4 hours
Daylight temperature:	-9 to 0° C (15 to 32° F) low -9 to 0° C (15 to 32° F) high
Daylight precipitation:	None - -
Total depth of ice/snow cover:	5 cm to 15 cm (2" to 6")

Checklist for FeederWatch Minnesota Birds

Red-bellied Woodpecker	1
Downy Woodpecker	1
Pileated Woodpecker	1
Blue Jay	1
Black-capped Chickadee	5
Red-breasted Nuthatch	1
White-breasted Nuthatch	1
Purple Finch	34 Confirmed
American Goldfinch	24 (0 with eye disease)

Christmas Bird Count 2009

I took a Saturday off of Feeder Watch and participated in the annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) in the Duluth area. I rode along with an astute team comprised of: Hawk Ridge Educators Debbie Waters and Sarah Glesner and Hawk Ridge Enthusiast and Bird Whisperer Andrew Longtin. We started early, and I miraculously made it out of bed at 5AM in order to meet my team in Duluth. For those that are not privy to Christmas Bird Count, it is an international citizen science project where bird enthusiasts and their friends and family garner winter bird population data. The data collected will be added to historical records and then analyzed for trends in populations that can then be used to make conservation decisions. For more details about CBC check out: http://www.audubon.org/Bird/cbc/

My group was a lively bunch, a must in a Minnesota winter birding event. We dressed in our warmest 'quiet' gear (mainly fleece and wool, no swishy materials, see Sarah's below left) and headed out around 7:30AM.


Our region mostly comprised of residential area, the luxurious Duluth Airport, the Duluth Mall, and various woodlots. The most common bird observed was the Black-capped Chickadee (see above right); however we had some less common birds as well like the Cedar Waxwing, Barred Owl, and Brown Creeper. My birding highlights included:
(1) Flushing out a very irritated Barred Owl, because we had phished in a cluster-fuck of Black-capped Chickadees
(2) +/- 150 mixed flock of Cedar Waxwing and Bohemian Waxwings enjoying the berries that covered the Mountain Ash
(3) Spotting an adult Bald Eagle in the Duluth Mall Area at 14:10
(4) The Brown Creeper doing what it does best, creeping slowly head first around a lichen covered tree

My favorite non-bird specific highlights included:
(1) The teddy bear Hit-N-Run, who may or may not become a Hawk Ridge Mascot

(2) Andrew's premonitions about the birds we would see. i.e. A Swainson's Thrush and/or Tree Sparrow being flushed out by a late migrating Northern Harrier being acutely watched by a Great Gray Owl
(3) Debbie and Sarah's vocal imitations of many comedic acts

Overall, though my toes are still thawing out, I enjoyed my first CBC. Here are my team's results:

Species	Zone O	Zone N
Cooper’s Hawk	1	0
Bald Eagle	0	1
Mourning Dove	2	0
Rock Pigeon	0	4
Barred Owl	1	0
Downy Woodpecker	5	9
Hairy Woodpecker	4	1
Pileated Woodpecker	0	1
Blue Jay	5	2
American Crow	8	22
Common Raven	3	0
Black-Capped Chickadee	116	82
Red-breasted Nuthatch	7	6
White-breasted Nuthatch	2	3
Brown Creeper	0	1
American Robin	2	27
Cedar Waxwings	0	150
Bohemian Waxwings	16	8
Northern Cardinal	1	2
European Starling	4	169
Purple Finch	1	0
Dark-eyed Junco	0	7
White-winged Crossbill	26	35
American Goldfinch	15	0
House Sparrow	0	27

Sentimental

Definition: expressive of or appealing to sentiment, esp. the tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia

Can sentiment be escaped? I do my best to not get cheery eyed when true love beats the odds and conquers all. I don't know true love, and I do not know if it exists. I know joy, sadness, pain, pleasure, and a few others. I feel joy when I gambol through the woods or watch my niece play. I feel sadness when I don't get a job I want or when a tragedy takes a life sooner than I expect. I feel pain when a Bald Eagle pinches my skin through a glove or I touch a hot pan. I feel pleasure when I drink a well-crafted beer or a friend massages my shoulders. These emotions are easy to describe in simple scenarios.

True love is not so easy to describe. What defines true love. Many epitaphs and stories attempt to answer this question. Theories like: there is only one soul mate for each of us and we will know them when we find them. I am more enthralled by the lust of Pan's flute than this illogical search. I have heard the lyrics of love songs. They have been flooding into my head since my first Hank Williams record. The Beatles wrote, "All you need is love, dadadada." I want love, but I don't need the cookie-cutter kind. Love is all around me. I can love without true love.

So why this concept of true love?

Count #1 Complete

I have completed my first two-day count period. My species counts are as follows:
6 Black-capped Chickadees
6 Purple Finches
2 White-breasted Nuthatch
2 Red-breasted Nuthatch
4 American Goldfinches
1 Red-bellied Woodpecker
1 Blue Jay

10:30AM seemed to be a bustling hour at the feeder. The early morning and late afternoons were filled with squirrel antics. Including a red squirrel chasing a gray squirrel twice its size. I am going to construct buffers for the feeder to create an impasse for squirrels. Additionally, I would like to build a suet feeder. This might attract woodpeckers. I noticed the Purple Finches move about like a synchronized swim team. The banded female White-breasted nuthatch visited this morning. Her elegance caught my eye as she grabbed her seed perched upside-down. In short, I look forward to the rest of the feeder watch season and hope the Dark-eyed Juncos return.

Project FeederWatch

I am excited to participate in Project FeederWatch this season. The official start date is November 14th. I will be collecting my data at the intern house here at Audubon Center of the North Woods. I began preliminary observations this past weekend. I was delighted by the visits of Dark-eyed Juncos, White and Red Breasted Nuthataches, Hairy Woodpeckers, Fox Sparrows, and Black-capped Chickadees. Other visitors included: Blue Jays, Red Squirrels, Eastern Chipmunks, and Gray Squirrels. I will post a picture of the Fox

Sparrows soon. One of the White-breasted Nuthaches bore a small grey bird band. I suspect it was one that was banded here at Audubon, but I did not have the time to read the numbers.

If you are interested in Project FeederWatch,

check them out o

nline at: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/index.html

The Myth of Sisyphus, part 1

I have just begun reading Albert Camus's essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' In discussing the difficulty of understanding a man's thought pattern that leads to suicide Camus writes, "But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently." To me this means that the suicidal person, when they feel that even their closest acquntances place little value on their life, their mind equates this to suicide having little impact on their closest friends lives and also that they have little to live for.

Why I think this part hit me hard today...
Earlier this afternoon poignant greif stirred up inside me when I felt as though a person whom I care for deeply was post-poning responding to me. This has always bothered me. I find myself overcome by anxiety when I get the sense that someone that I assumed to care deeply for me would respond more quickly to a new acquiantance's request than my own.

A direction

My original intent for this blog was expressing factual behavior using poetry, I suffered writer's block and attempted to use it for short book reviews, but my recent chain of intellectual interests have veered off the scientific path. I am seeking to answer the age old question of "how should one live." I find myself being overcome by palpable waves of confusion in regards to what direction I want to go with my time. I enjoy time spent in the out of doors, but I do not so much enjoy exploring nature in a purely scientific manner or in a destructive manner. I feel most alive in matters of ethics. I do not like to watch children picking up toads with little concern for the treatment of it. I do not see myself finding joy in laboratory experiments on animals regardless of what discovery is to be discovered because of it. I am most content observing animal and plant-life in nature and then drawing or writing about what I have observed. I also enjoy exploring other writer's and artist's observations and creations. This is a working construction in hopes of finding answers to what it is I would be happy and ful-filled spending my time working on.

Stellaluna is sweet, but not quite stellar

Janell Cannon's "Stellaluna" was a sweet and simple tale about a bat that grows up with birds. The story is beautifully illustrated, but lacks wit and preaches good behavior while teaching little about bats. The story begins with Stellaluna and her mother being attacked by an owl. Stellaluna gets seperated from her mom and winds up in a birds nest with three baby birds.

Stellaluna is fed insects (even though she is a fruit-eating pteropodid) which she dislikes but have no health consequnces for her. The story misleads kids to believe that a fruit-eating bat would be okay if fed insects. When Stellaluna teaches the baby birds to hang upside down she is scolded. This part did succeed in teaching kids that baby birds do not hang upside down like baby bats can, but it came off as threatening to Stellaluna. It carried the mantra that if a child does something different from what a parent desires they will be thrown out of the house. Finally it ended with Stellaluna saving the baby birds after showing them how well she could see in the dark. In actuality it is unlikely that a baby bat would have the strength to fly around with three baby birds in hand. Bats are light-weight beings which is essential for their flight abilities.

Though this book is beautifully illustrated it does not provide the best messages for impressionable young minds. I would love to see this author illustrate a more meaningful book about bats!

Red-Tails in Love tells the epic tale of birdwatchers in NewYork City

It was a cold January morning in Petersburg, Pennsylvania, abnd I was receivinga crash course in common winter birdfeeder birds. Although it was not until 3 months later that I became enthralled with ornithology and the joys of bird-watching, I will never forget the excitement of watching a white-breasted nuthatch flying back and forth between a feeder and a tree on that bugar-freezing day. At the time, I pondered why the nuthatch ate that way when other birds chose to eat their seeds right at the feeder. Why did the nuthatch use up all that energy going back and forth? Since then I have become a birder, I find the august song of a winter wren or a sneak-in visit by a hermit thrush to be tantamount to or exceed any experience I have had at a zoo or circus. In agreement with me would likely be Marie Winn.

Marie Winn's "Red-Tails in Love" documents multiple years of bird-watching in New York City's Central Park. This story tells the tale of a group of multi-generation birdwatchers whose paths become entangled when two red-tailed hawks begin nesting in the heart of New York City. This book is a fluently written piece that documents bird behavior and diveristy in Central Park. Winn takes us not only through the nesting trials of a pale male red-tailed hawk, she also introduces us to the lives of many other Central Park birds. Winn succeeds where a field guide fails. Red-Tails in Love gives us an opportunity to get to know birds on a more intimate level. Winn doesn't always mention color, family, song, habitat, range, ect.; rather she writes about specific accounts of birds and their behavior.

Other features of this book include detailed maps of Central Park, species lists of birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, and excerpts from the official Central Park bird register. Red-Tails also touches on laws protecting wildlife and the need for citizens to take action if these laws (i.e. the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act) are going to be enforced. As a new birder, I would reccommend this book to anyone with an interest in birds or that is looking for a new hobby. As the summer is coming to a close, I am excited to observe the inflow and outflow of fall migrants through Southern Minnesota. My wishlist bird this winter is a snow bunting, or as I like to call it: thetoasted marshmallow bird.

"Sparrow Girl" shines as a children's book teaching about ecological importance

I was at the Wescott Library searching for children's books last weekend. I was looking at their just arrived shelf, and I was initially attracted to "Sparrow Girl" because of it's august cover. This was Yoko Tanaka's first attempt at illustrating a picture book, and I think she pinned the tail on the donkey with her illustrations in "Sparrow Girl". This book is more than just a treat for the eye.

Author, Sara Pennypacker, takes her reader back to 1958 during the Sparrow War in China. The war shows a classic example of what can happen when humankind attempts to control nature. In 1958, many Chinese farmers believed that the large sparrow population was desiccating their crop production. As such, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung declared war on the sparrows. Over a period of 3 days farmers and school children alike roamed the country to make as much noise as possible in order to scare the birds to death. Their plan worked and most of the sparrows died. Unfortunately for the farmers, the sparrows played an important role in pest control. These birds were one of the main predators of the locust and other insects. As a result of the war, China suffered famine for 3 years killing almost 40 million people. "Sparrow Girl" tells the story of a young girl who tried to save sparrows during the Sparrow War. The book is one of the few children's books I have come across lately that teaches history, food chains, and ecological cycles to kids, but still remains a captivating story.

Caring for an Oil/Grease Covered Duck

Someone brought a pigeon into the nature center today that had accidently flown into a bucket full of used cooking grease that an Uptown resturaunt had left un-covered outside.

(This is the procedure used by the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center to care for ducks that have been coated in grease/oil. The procedure should also work for larger songbirds, but I am not sure about very small birds)

Requires: 4 tubs: fill two tubs with water that is 104 degrees F, fill the other 2 tubs with water that is 104 degrees F and has about 1 percent dawn dish-soap mixed in and is very sudsy (bubbly)

Procedure:
Step 1: Place bird in the first soapy tub and massage in the water
Step 2: Repeat step 1 in the other soapy tub
Step 3: Place bird in the water filled tub and rinse
Step 4: Repeat step 3 with the other water filled tub

Do these steps once per day until the bird is no longer greasy. They say to avoid doing more than one bath a day because this will stress out your bird too much. Also be sure to monitor the health of your bird. Make sure that it is eating and drinking. If you suspect dehydration give your bird pedia-lite. You can feed with a syringe if you feel your bird is not eating, just be sure to put it far enough down the bird’s throat so that it will not choke on the liquid. Also be sure to store the wet bird in a warm, dark, quiet place to avoid hypothermia and further stress.

Take me home, country roads

I have just finished my second Tom Robbin's novel, Still Life With Woodpecker.  Reading this book was like being on a cyclical-emotional and somewhat bipolar journey. Parts of this book elated me, impassioned me, and left me feeling like life had a purpose.  Other parts brought on feelings that were like polar opposites of those feelings.  I appreciate literature that has a demigod-like ability to reach feelings inside me that are beyond the ostensible.  

I would discourage a reader to read the next part of my blog, if the reader has not read the book and desires to read it without the ending being spoiled.

In the end of the book, the main characters end up going home to Seattle and find comfort in the blackberry brambles that have grown an entrapment around their home.  I have recently returned home after being away for a short while.  When I was gone I missed home.  Now that I am home I miss being gone.  Sometimes my thoughts begin to contrive a journey back to Pennsylvania.   Minnesota may be the keeper of my hometown and close family, but I think Pennsylvania is the current keeper of my heart.  

I am not sure where my future will take me, but I will remain cheerful and enjoy the ubiquitous opportunities for joy that surround me in my current home.  Only the future will tell if this itch to return to my heart cannot be cured with calamine lotion and time, so for now I will not spend time analyzing it any further.

The Tempest

I must admit that, prior to this summer, I knew of Shakespeare only through play titles like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.  However, I have recently discovered a great appreciation for his august plays and sonnets.  Shakespeare does for language what a winter wren does for bird song. Let me take this moment to commit to writing sonnets about the love stories of the animal kingdom.  To begin this process I will first read and research the sonnets of Shakespeare and others.  Then I will attempt to write some of my own to share.

Why sonnets, why love stories, why am I doing this?

I am a whimsical being.  I am a passionate being.  I believe in the importance of love to help humankind bring more meaning to his or her life.  I believe that the link between humans and the natural world has been broken.  By bringing to light the trials and struggles that love has brought to the animal kingdom, perhaps mutual understanding can be accomplished.  And besides this, the love lives of animals can be tragic, shocking, humorous, and/or touching.

But back to the title of this blog.  Tonight I had the great pleasure of attending Caponi Art Park's presentation of The Tempest.  This play was humorous and it touched on the moral f forgiveness.  And, not to mention, it is considered to be one of Shakespeare's late love stories.  I got to view Shakespeare's work as it was meant to be viewed: in an outdoor, round theater in the woods.  It was a beautiful Saturday evening and tall oak trees provided cover from the busy street of Diffley and the fiery heat of the setting sun.  I highly recommend this theater to any who are looking for an authentic experience.