Eat more cookies

Crossbills have arrived!  

They dine on cones and pecans.  

How long will they stay? 

Congrats to the team and to fans far and wide on a great comeback win in hostile territory!

Connor, you are The Man - thank you epitomizing the character and class of Penn State football.

Rodney Kinlaw - great game. He looked really sharp. Power and speeeed.

Morelli? Ah Morelli. It’s easy to beat up on him for the inevitable pass into coverage or the inability to get out of his own way when pressure comes. But, for every low these past couple of years, he’s also catapulted us to tremendous heights with those flashes of brilliance from that rocket of an arm. Godspeed Anthony!

Clark & Royster? We fans are already chomping at the bit for 2008 . . .

Joe Pa - We realize that you’re not actually immortal, and the day will come when there is no Joe in college football. That day is really gonna suck.

We knew back in September when Red-breasted Nuthatches descended upon us en masse that this was to be an exciting winter for irruptive finches from the North. (I suppose in Canada they call them “eruptive” species, because they leave there to come here - which makes them “irruptive” from a lower 48 point of view.) Now it looks as though one of the grand prizes of a good irruption year has made its way to our little hamlet in the crosstimbers prairie. . .

I didn’t really want to go birding this morning - I’ve got a headcold and almost no voice. For us it was pretty danged cold too - 21F when we gathered at Couch Park in Stillwater at 8 am. I’ve certainly gone out when it’s colder than that, but I was in no way looking forward to that numbing pain in my fingers that I predicted would take about 5 minutes to kick in. (I was right about that.)

But I wanted to make sure we had a good showing for one of our Payne County Audubon Society weekly bird walks we’ve been trying to kick start. I knew some students and other interested folks would be out of town, so I made sure to drag myself there just to be another (temporarily) warm body.

As it turned out, we had three trip leaders but no new folks show up. Except, that is, for two guys from the newpaper who, entirely of their own accord, decided to come check us out. They were nice fellas - way underdressed for the cold - but we had a good time with them. The first hour of birding was slow, so we sent them on their way after that. Then, as soon as they were out of earshot, it seemed that the Earth burst forth with birds from every tree! (It is an inerrant law of nature, on par with that of gravity, that birds will appear for you immediately after the beginners on a trip leave - especially if those beginners include journalists and photographers.)

I was ready to leave too - my head was pounding and my fingers ached. But I noticed some movement on the ground ahead of me, down a path we hadn’t yet taken, so I stuck around a little longer.

It was a flock of goldfinches, juncos, 2 bluebirds, 2 yellow-rumped warblers, and a purple finch, feeding amidst fallen pecans on the trail. Odd bedfellows, we thought, but apparently the pecans themselves were a source of food for some, while insect larvae in the rotten nuts attracted the others. Over the next hour, that same patch of pecans on the ground hosted both red- and white-breasted nuthatches, and a red-bellied woodpecker.

white-breasted nuthatch on pecans:

see the brown creeper?

Then my attention was drawn to some yellow-rumps in a pine grove off the trail. There were just enough pines to consider a pine warbler for the grove, so I stopped to check it out. While I was in that grove, however, I heard something about 150m away that made my heart race: “jip! jip! jip!”

Could it be?

It was! A flock of about 20 Red Crossbills - a species I hadn’t seen in a good 10 years - were working over some trees closer to the creek. About half of these birds were doing what they were supposed to do - use their amazing crossed mandibles to extract pine nuts from closed cones. The other half apparently failed Crossbill 101 - they were feeding on pecans that were still on the trees!

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What a treat for having persevered this morning! The other birds were a delight as well, but it will be the crossbills that will keep drawing me to this city park over the next several weeks.

Today’s list for 8 - 10 am (#s approx):

carolina chickadee - 4
tufted titmouse - 2 (1 singing)
white-breasted nuthatch - 3 (2 singing)
red-breasted nuthatch - 8
winter wren - 2
carolina wren - 3
northern cardinal - 4
american goldfinch - 50
american robin - 50
dark-eyed junco - 20
yellow-rumped warbler - 10
blue jay - 10
american crow - 4
american kestrel - 1
red-shouldered hawk - 2
canada goose - 10
yellow-bellied sapsucker - 5
red-bellied woodpecker - 2
downy woodpecker - 2
common flicker - 2
cedar waxwing - 12
mourning dove - 1
eastern bluebird - 4 (1 inspecting a potential nest hole)
purple finch - 1
ruby-crowned kinglet - 6
golden-crowned kinglet - 1
brown creeper - 3
red crossbill - 20

 . . . and a fun time was had by all.

Our “midnight” mass on Christmas Eve started at 10, but be still didn’t manage to nestle snug in our beds ’til nearly 1 in the morning. We were thrilled to have the kids sleep in ’til 8:30, at which point James burst into our room and yelled something to the effect of “Wake up!! It’s Christmas!”

So we got up, opened some presents, had some breakfast, assembled things, took Ginger for a long walk, had a snowball fight, shot some hoops outside, went to dinner with friends, ate too much, drank too much, sang some songs, came home, and camped out in the living room before a crackling fire. Not too shabby.

We really got in the spirit this year thanks to Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” which we read by the fire over several days the past week. At 9 and 6, the kids are just getting old enough to sit in rapt attention at the tale, and it’s a tradition we hope to continue for many years to come.

Merry Christmas, and God bless us, everyone.

It’s been pretty busy around here lately, and one big event for the week was our annual Christmas Bird Count. I was in the field with 6 newbies last Saturday, and we did our best to find as many species as possible despite some deplorable weather.Our forecast was for 4-8″ of snow in Stillwater, and we seriously considered canceling the count to keep people safe.  But it got warmer overnight, and by dawn it was about 37 degrees with mist and fog.  But the bottom fell out soon after that: by 8 am, we were stung in the face by horizontal sleet at Lake Carl Blackwell, and by 9:30 we found ourselves in wind-whipped snowflakes that stuck around all day. But we kept plugging away, and did what we could from the van.  In the end, we didn’t have such a bad day: western grebe and lapland longspur were great highlights!  Here’s the total:   Brewer’s Blackbird  
200 Red-winged Blackbird 200 Mallard 124 Brown-headed Cowbird 120 Dark-eyed Junco 83 Horned Lark 50 American Goldfinch 46 Cedar Waxwing 40 Canada Goose 38 Yellow-rumped Warbler 33 Lapland Longspur 30 House Sparrow 20 Blue Jay 16 American Robin 16 American Crow 15 Northern Cardinal 14 Eastern Meadowlark* 14 Ring-billed Gull 12 American Coot 10 Common Flicker* 9 Double-crested Cormorant 8 Carolina Chickadee 8 Eastern Bluebird 6 White-throated Sparrow 6 European Starling 5 Ruby-crowned Kinglet 4 Red-breasted Merganser 3 Northern Harrier 3 Red-tailed Hawk* 3 Fox Sparrow 3 Pied-billed Grebe 2 Great Blue Heron 2 Northern Bobwhite 2 Tufted Titmouse 2 Red-breasted Nuthatch 2 Hermit Thrush 2 Eastern Towhee 2 Gadwall 1 Western Grebe 1 Belted Kingfisher 1 Red-bellied Woodpecker 1 Hairy Woodpecker 1 Winter Wren 1 Carolina Wren 1 Pine Warbler 1 Orange-crowned Warbler 1 LeConte’s Sparrow 1 Song Sparrow 1

flurry of blackbirdswestern grebe (L) and American coot

It’s just an unusually well preserved hadrosaur fossil, and it’s exciting enough without journalists mis-representing it as a “mummy”:  Hadrosaur fossil story. To learn more, check out the Marmarth Research Foundation.

What better reward for a couple of kids who got their flu shots without incident than to take them to the movies?

A great way to gauge a movie is to determine if the commercials and previews show the best parts. If they do, then the movie will be lame. If they don’t, you’re in for a treat. The latter was definitely the case for us with Disney’s Enchanted. It was funny, sweet, and exciting.

The humor was both self-deprecating to storybook fantasy (and its Disney adaptations) and the classic “fish out of water aspect” of placing those fantasy characters in the Big Apple. The chipmunk Pip was a spunky hero, more likeable than I expected.

Giselle’s innocence and optimism were exquisitely portrayed by Amy Adams. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to truly act like a Disney princess on screen, rather than “merely” voice one. In the audience, I was putty in her hands from the moment she appeared on screen.

The ladies will likely appreciate the opporunity to see Prince Edward (Stillwater native and Oklahoma State University alum [?] James Marsden) on screen, both dashing and comical at the same time. And that dude can sing!

Speaking of singing, one great surprise for us was the “You’ve got to Show Her” number. It just kept building and building from its spare and simple start. Great stuff! Disney fans will also recognize snippets of music from previous films, as well as cameos by former princesses Ariel, Belle, and Pocahontas.

And Susan Sarandon? Yeah, she’s still got it.

So if you need a pick-me-up - if you could use a good laugh, if you like to walk out the theatre singing and tapping your feet - go let yourself be enchanted by Enchanted.

This story on topi is a fascinating bit of insight into polygynous mating systems.

Topi are large African antelope that practice a form of “lek polygyny.” That is, males establish small territories distinct from the rest of the herd during a highly synchronized breeding season. The males jostle and spar with each other continuously for days, each competing for access to the most choice locations in the interior and access to females. The males apparently neither eat nor drink during this time, lest they lose their hard-won spot, and severely exhaust themselves in the process. There is an amazing bit of footage on this in Attenborough’s “Life of Mammals” DVD in which some of the topi males become so exhausted during the mating season that they fall prey to marauding hyenas.

This recent story describes how males fight each other for access to females, but in an odd twist, some males end up fighting females for access to females! It seems that males remember those females with whom they have mated and, if a previously mated female comes back for more, the male is likely to drive her away - if she potentially distracts him from courting a new female, i.e., one to which he has not bred.

This is new ground - as far as I am aware - although there is literature relating to males being more sexually interested in multiple mates than in mating with the same individual multiple times. The aggressive displacement of females coming back for more is really unusual.

Kudos to the lead researcher Jakob Bro-Jorgensen for bringing this work to light!