I had lots of trouble with yesterday’s post, especially the photo. In case it did not come through on the first email you received, here is the link.
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Weekly Roundup – April 13th – For the Birds
Watching nesting ospreys in Colorado or eagles in Iowa via a live camera feed is Better than ‘Survivor’ according to recent a National Public Radio story. So, it seems I am not alone in my fascination with the birds. Last week when a a line of thunderstorms threatened the Midwest, I kept an eye on the Decorah nest and the weather forecast, picturing baby eagles being tossed from the nest or worse, but they came through unscathed.
The skies cleared over the weekend and a viewer who lives much closer than I, drove to the maple tree and spent a few hours watching the nest from her lawn chair. Her report with pictures is posted on the Raptor Resource Facebook page.
Back at my house I suspect that there is a nest or two nearby, but haven’t walked through the trees to investigate. From my desk I’ve watched two ladder-backs pecking at the seed cake and two robins sipping at the bath. They’re regulars, in both cases a male and a female visit daily, but I only see one of each pair at a time. Last night just before dark the robin with the bright yellow beak and showy red breast (the male) took a long bath. Splish, Spash: Why do Birds Take Baths? a post on The Nature Conservancy’s blog attempts to answer the question.
The lovely thing about birds is that we can observe them from almost anywhere, the country, the suburbs, even the middle of the city. This poem, Eye to Eye with a Hawk, about housework and a raptor on the fire escape, was posted on The New York TImes‘ City Room blog.
Enjoy your week and go outside!
Bluestem Pack – Summer 2014 Update
As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
Rudyard Kipling
Photo Credit: James Zeschke via Compfight cc
The Bluestem Pack still runs in the White Mountains of Arizona–twelve years after the original family of wolves was released into the wild. Last week a telemetry flight located the alpha pair, AF1042 and AM1341, and five pups born in 2013 a few miles south of Noble Peak. It appears they probably also have new pups, born in the spring of this year.
When I last wrote an update back in April, little was known about AM1341. A few months after the Bluestem’s prior alpha male, AM806, was illegally shot in the summer of 2012, an unidentified male began traveling with the pack. In January, 2014 he was captured, collared, and assigned a studbook number, but it took a genetics test to confirm that he was the father of last year’s pups.
The pack has gotten into some trouble over the last two months. One of the 2013 pups, f1332, has been traveling alone for several weeks and in June killed a calf. A second incident occurred in mid-July when a wolf injured two horses; telemetry reports confirmed that it was AF1042, the alpha female.
Most of the Bluestem Pack’s 2012 pups (the last litter fathered by AM806) have perished, but one, F1280, survives and has become the alpha female of the Hawks Nest Pack. The two wolves (AF1280 and AM1038) have established their territory in the north-central portion of the Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona and were recently located a few miles west of Gobbler Peak. In late July the field team documented the alpha pair howling accompanied by one or two pups.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted public hearings last week in Arizona and New Mexico to take comments on proposed changes to the rule that governs the management of the small population of Mexican wolves that live in the wild. Fish and Wildlife’s final decision, expected in January, will greatly impact the odds that today’s pups will be able to find mates and establish territories–to survive and thrive.
I attended the meeting in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico on Wednesday night and the comments mostly favored the lobos, but they still have a long way to go. I’ll write more about the proposed rule changes and the hearing in upcoming posts.