Dec 30 2022 - Birds vs Windows

 

Birds hit the corner office windows.  Sometimes a light tap and sometimes a thump.  Mostly little sparrows surprised they can't keep flying.   This is the leading cause of death of birds - hitting windows rather than cats. I recently purchased  "strips" that go on my corner office window to stop this.  These are specially designed to make the birds aware of a barrier, so they don't hit the window.  When we looked at the instructions, the temperature outside needs to be 10 degrees for the strips to stick.   Who would guess that today is the day!  The end of December 2022. We used to put pictures of birds on the glass to warn them.  There's a site called WindowAlert and it has a range of decals - from snowflakes to leaves to birds flying.   But that's not the recommendation from the authorities. What I've purchased from Lee Valley is designed based on the recommendations of FLAP Canada (short for Fatal Light Awareness Program) to warn birds away from glass.  Applied to the glass, the 2" grid of small squares convinces fliers that there are no bird-sized gaps; human eyes, meanwhile, can tune out the squares, similar to the way you barely notice a window screen unless you focus on it.  It is a very precise system is get give tay a tape measure and a grid to apply the grid correctly.   Go to the FLAP.org  website and find out a number of techniques to protect the birds from your windows.  You can take the Homeowner Assessment HERE.  This is what the survey looks like.   What a multi-trunk birch this is.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Jan 29 2022 - Do Birds Get Cold Feet?

 

When I look out at the birds on the feeder, I see those tiny little legs and funny little feet and want to know how their feet don't get cold.  Various sources tell me that they do get cold feet. "In the winter, as feathered friends flock to your feeders, it’s hard not to wonder about what happens to their little, unprotected feet, especially when they cling to snowy branches and metal feeder perches. Do songbirds get cold feet in the winter, and if so, are their toes in danger of frostbite? Or worse? The short answer is yes. However, unlike humans and other animals, cold feet don't pose a problem for birds. In fact, birds' feet and legs are designed to offer them some protection when the temperature drops. There are two main reasons that birds aren't affected by cold feet: 1. Blood circulates through the legs and feet of birds very quickly, and blood vessels in this part of the body are positioned closely together. Because of this, blood doesn't have a chance to cool enough in their legs to cause discomfort or distress. Due to this quick circulation, their blood is quickly warmed in their core before being sent back to the feet. 2. Bird legs and feet have very few pain receptors and little fluid. The surface is dry and scaly, with no moisture, which means they don’t have to worry about their feet freezing and getting stuck to metal perches, even on a cold and snowy day." That's from lyricbirdfood.com I do know that birds don't pee - instead they poop that white pasty messy stuff - it is uric acid. And as we now from having received a bird gift,  it doesn't dissolve in water easily to wash off. It sticks just like white plaster. In the meantime, these fascinating facts about Hummingbirds attracted my attention:  The average man would need to eat around 285 pounds of meat per day if they had the metabolism of a hummingbird.   hummingbirds weigh less than a nickel.  Hummingbirds are so small that they have fewer than 1,000 features - compare that to the Whistling Sea with 25,000 feathers.   They are the only bird that can fly backwards but they can't walk or hop. A flock of hummingbirds is known as a bouquet, a glittering, a hover, a shimmer or a tune. A hummingbird and a scientist walk into a bar... Nah, just kidding, hummingbirds can't walk. Two colourful abstracts today to distract from our white winter wonderland.

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Jan 23 2021 - What time do birds get up in the morning?

 

What time do birds get up the morning?  This winter morning the sun is rising and no birds are singing.  But it is bitter cold winter, and birds don't do a lot of singing in January.   I find out that birds generally begin singing 30 – 90 minutes before the sunrise. That's around 4:00am in the spring time.  Different birds will chime in at different times. Blackbirds, robins, and thrushes are among the first to begin singing. Others will soon join them and this chorus will last until the sunrise fades.  Intensity of sunlight makes for earlier wake-up times.  It is winter now, so birds wake up at about 7:00am in winter. They will begin singing their dawn choruses, but not with so large a chorus.  Birds tend to wake up whenever they sense daylight. The time that birds wake up varies a lot among different species and different environments where there is light pollution and changing seasons. Yesterday, it was past 7:30am and there aren't any birds on the feeders out front.  At 7:50am a flock of sparrows come in to the feeder and start their chatter.  But then the sun was shining on the horizon.  Today is an overcast day, so it will be interesting to find out what time they come to the feeder. Yesterday I was alert to the visiting hawk.  I checked that it wasn't out there.  There was one the day before, and Baxter was at the office window staring up at it.  It flew off when it saw me come in  and sit in the chair.  Last year, a hawk was attacking the sparrows in the hedge next door.  It was jumping into the hedge from the ground.  Later that day, I watched Baxter who proceeded to repeat the technique.  Neither were successful - both get my admiration for ingenuity. These pictures are from 2014 - this is Jordan Harbour looking towards the Lake.  It froze over so smoothly that people were playing hockey and ice sailing.  I've not seen this since, although my sister said people were skating on the lagoon pond at Charles Daley Park.  That's just down the road a bit on the Lake side of the highway.

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June 13 2020 - Dawn Chorus

Which birds sing all summer long?  Robins do. They are singing this morning as though they just got back from the south.  Robins only stop singing while they are moulting.  While robins can sing all day long it is in the earliest hours, typically starting at 4:00am that they sing louder, livelier, and more frequently.  If we were to follow robins to their winter homes, they sing all winter too.  They only stop singing at night, and are one of the last to stop singing each day. Some birds sing more when it is cooler in the early mornings or after a rain.  Others prefer the hot weather - goldfinches are an example of this.   We can expect birds to go on singing into summer and to diminish around August when they are moulting or foraging widely as food is abundant. Many of us have really noticed the bird song this year.  With less traffic noise and fewer people about this year, it is easier to hear them and birds are more active. More irises today, again taken at the Royal Botanical Gardens Laking Garden.  This is a messy flower in my view.  Even if it was allowable to pick or cut off the dead flowers, there would likely be damage to the overall stem.  So it is hard to get a picture of a grouping or mass of flowers.  Mostly one takes portraits of individual flowers.

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Wright Said it's Wrong

Today is Orville Wright's birthday - he was born in 1871. He was the longest surviving brother of the famous Wright Brothers.  Their first flight was 120 feet and had five witnesses besides the Wright Brothers.  The second flight that day was 852 feet and 59 seconds.   Even though people came out to watch their experiments regularly, the record flight was disbelieved.  The American press reported it as a hoax with headlines something like like 'Liar not Flyer'.  They had to go to Europe to get financial backing - they were not taken seriously in the U.S.  The story of how the press distorted the first flight is outlined HERE.  The most devastating aspect of their invention was they created flight to bring lasting peace to the Earth. They thought that the ability of planes to do surveillance meant that ground combat would become irrelevant.  Instead, the military immediately had pilots throw grenades from the planes and shoot other pilots with rifles or revolvers.   Wright says: “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the Earth. But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end,” Orville said in an article with the St. Louis Post Dispatch on November 7, 1943. “No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I the destruction it has caused.” He wasn't the only inventor to find things not go well for his invention.  Philo Farnsworth invented the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device (video camera tube), and the first all-electronic television system. He felt that television was a gift of God, and would bring education and prosperity to the world. But he discovered otherwise, and refused to have a television in his house.  He said:  "There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet." There seem to be many inventors who regretted their inventions - here are historical figures: Anna Jarvis, creator of Mother's Day Albert Einstein, whose theories helped create the atomic bomb Mikhail Kalashnikov, creator of the AK-47 Recent regretters:  Victor Connare, who invented the top face Comic Sans (used here) Ethan Zuckerman, creator of the pop-up ad Wally Conron, creator of the Labradoodle John Sylvan, creator of the K-Cup Scott Fhalman, creator of the emoticon And finally poor Bob Propst - the inventor of the office 'cubicle' that has been perpetrated on most of us.  It started out as a fluid, organic office environment meant to generate creativity, and turned into rat-maze boxes of offices.  "The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity" he said.  Here's a more cheerful garden moment from the Buffalo garden Walk.

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The Loudest Sounds of Spring

Does every season have sounds?  What are the sounds of Spring?  They are bird songs!  You can find music to tweet to by the National Trust.  Or you can find websites that ask you whether you can hear these sounds and if not, it may mean you need hearing aids.  What are the sounds that are the signs of hearing loss? If human conversation is between 60 and 70 decibels, here are sounds that are the signals: 1. Birdsong  - decibels not available 2. Pattering rain - 50 decibels 3. Rustling leaves - 20 decibels 4. Spring peepers - decibels not available 5. Buzzing mosquitoes - 40 decibels 6. Noisy squirrels - 20 decibels  What is the decibel range of birds?  It turns out it is difficult to decide - some parts of their call are outside the range of human hearing. What is known is that the lyrebird of Australia or the American bittern are the loudest.  I would have thought  it must be over 135 decibels as that is what the Moluccan Cockatoo has been recorded at.  However, they are listed at 101 decibels. There was a Great Horned Owl calling in the night last week in our vicinity.  Did you know that the Great Horned Owl can be heard for over 2 miles? And if the forest turns out to be too quiet to hear, move to the ocean.  The loudest animal on earth is the blue whale and it can generate sound levels of 188 decibels. This can be heard for hundreds of miles underwater.  No hearing aid needed there. I haven't found any loud plants so far.  Here's an orchid.

Birds Above and Alligators Below

The Alligator Farm in St. Augustine has a natural bird sanctuary with many of the large birds nesting each year.   It is a beautifully landscaped zoo with wooden walkways, water ponds for all the alligators and crocodiles, and palm trees overhead, creating a tropical paradise experience.