A Bird, A Deer, A Spider

We're going to be very busy over the next few days. So, we may just post photos of what we've been seeing lately, and not write so much.
The first Black-headed Grosbeak (Pheucticus melanocephalus) of the season showed up just the other day. We were delighted to see him. We saw the female on the feeder on Monday.
Our deer fencing really has worked to keep the deer out, but they still like to rest comfortably, on the outside looking in.
I spotted this Red-backed jumping spider (Phidippus johnsoni) on the window on Saturday. I went out to photograph it, but realized that the photo contained reflections of the backyard and me, and inside to the living room, all the way to the front door. Cool and multi-dimensional, but I wanted a better close-up.
So I grabbed the book that dpr is reading, The End of Faith by Sam Harris and put it in the window to cut down on the reflection. The result was the spider on the end of faith.

Backbone: An Impression

Through a rainy window

If I had to tell you the impression I have long held of myself, I would say that I thought that I was invincible. I wouldn't say that I lived in denial, although others have said that about me. That was their impression. I have my own. I live inside my skin, and that's what this is all about. I had an impression, a vague sense that I was not bound by the laws of human aging. I somehow planned to escape the ravages of time and the vagaries of biology. Not that I planned to live forever, but that I would just grow old, and never decline in health. It was a perfect plan.

Then I went to the doctor and just like that (imagine the snap of smart fingers here) she disabused me of these notions. I'm going to be 54 years old in a few days, and to celebrate I went and had a complete physical. What the heck. I feel pretty good. I eat well. I exercise (if taking long walks on trails and on beaches with a camera is considered exercise). I am doing all the right things, even the red wine and dark chocolate are consumed strictly for their healthful properties.

I had very little to say when the doctor inquired about my health. I had no real complaints. She looked at my stats and vitals. Heart rate 68. Blood pressure 98/64. Height 5' 1 1/2" (I'm shrinking), weight 110 pounds. Skin healthy, no moles. I appear to be in pretty good shape, unless you look deeper, inside.

The view is soft and muted

Come on in, come take a look at my bones. I'm small, really small. Most people think I am taller than I am, but that's because I walk on the stilts of gravitas and self-confidence. I have a tall presence, but I am very small-boned. I had a baseline bone density scan done in December 2000, and I was diagnosed with osteopenia. Some thinning of bone. But it could not be determined if my bones had ever been much denser because of my small size (a theory I latched on to and held as my truth), or if there had been actual bone loss. That's why a second bone density is done for comparison after a few years. I had that one done in April 2005, but never had anyone read the results (long story), until my complete physical.

The nice doctor looked at my bone density results and said, "Uh-oh. This does not look good." I'm as close to having osteoporosis as one can get without actually having it. The range for osteopenia is -1.5 to -2.4, and osteoporosis is defined as a density lower than -2.5 . In April 2005, my spine was measured at -2.4. That was a full .6 drop from December 2000. My hip density stayed the same. All that walking really did help, but since I do no weight-bearing exercise for my spine, it has been deteriorating. Holy shit. Quick! Someone give me something heavy to strap to my back besides the psychic pain of caring about the world. Because as heavy as that is, it simply has no real weight.

And vivid in the sun

Impressions change. I have to look at things more clearly, more deeply. I always thought that if I did all the right things with diet and a regular amount of exercise, I would maintain my health. Not so. As an advocate for getting all of my vitamins and minerals from food, I didn't ever follow the advice of doctors when they told me to take Calcium and Vitamin D supplements. Not smart. I just plainly thought it couldn't happen to me. Now I have to toughen up my backbone. It's funny, that's the one thing I always thought I had plenty of. So, how clearly do you see yourself? What's your secret impression?

This We Call Seeing

Don't write about nests
Or swallow's iridescence
They're not important

Close your eyes to this
Timeless dance, ancient rhythms
It's really nothing

How quiet it seems
Except for wind in the new leaves
And hawk camouflaged

This we call seeing
Human sight a trifling thing
Animals all laugh

Have a great weekend. We'll be back on Monday.

Close Encounters

This is a post from both of us. We started photographing eagles about a year ago. In fact, we bought our new digital camera last June when we realized how much we loved our new hobby of photographing birds. For the past several months we've seen eagles in trees or flying. We had very little opportunity to see them doing any other behaviors. That all changed last Friday. Since then we've been having interesting eagle encounters that we'd like to share with you.
without considering reason or causality, i can report that we have seen quite a few eagles lately doing more than just flying or sitting. the eagles have been seen doing more. we just walk and watch. today we were walking along a very narrow and winding trail on the forested north bank of chimacum creek where it is a tidal estuary of port townsend bay. this is not a civilized path. it requires attention. we usually stop to really look at something, so as not to stumble and fall. RD was slightly ahead of me. we noticed at the same time that not 25 feet to our right, taking off from a fir branch, was a large bird. my first thought was blue heron, as we have seen them many times here. but no! a bald eagle, slightly below our position, flying away. i know they are big birds, but to see one that close is still stunning.we walked on down to the shore of the bay where we watched an (other?) eagle land out at the far reach of a low tide after grabbing something out of the water. it was a crab, which the eagle lunched on while trying to ignore the caws of some very pushy crows. as we watched, a juvenile eagle, no white head or tail yet, coasted languorously overhead. two days ago we checked once again a tree top in fort worden state park that looked like it had an eagle's nest. we had never seen any sign if life there, but even though the angle of view was so steep that we didn't have much hope of seeing anything in the nest, it was part of a favorite walk and we are bird optimists. well! two, not one, but two adult eagles were visible above the rim of the nest. are there eaglets up there? i'm not climbing that tree, but we will visit often to see what we shall see.

Eagle pair in the nest at Fort Worden

so, several days ago we decided to reverse direction walking along the shore because we knew, by observation, that the pair of eagles we saw ahead in or near their nest (at a different nest site) are wary of humans and fly away at our approach. we have many choices of interesting places to walk and can easily afford to change direction. in the few days after this we have seen, what seems to us, many more eagles in many more circumstances and doing more stuff than we have ever seen. it is beyond silly in the modern world to suppose for even a moment that we are somehow being allowed to be privy to more intimate observations, let alone relationships, with a species of bird because we honored what we thought was the privacy of two individuals of the species. yet i am the one who admits to a suspicion that consciousness is non-local.

"something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, mr. jones?"

Click to enlarge, you may spot the nest and one of the pair in an upper tree. This is the nest we turned away from.

I'll just add that my eagle dreams have been stimulated by these amazing close encounters. I said to dpr a few weeks ago that I really would like to see an eagle fish for food out of the bay. Not a half hour after we turned around from our intended minus tide walk, in the interest of not bothering a nesting eagle, we saw this eagle fish out of the bay. It's been like that for the past five days. Every where we look, we're having close encounters with eagles. We keep revisiting logical fallacy and quite frankly we're enjoying every minute of it.

Asleep and Awake

What was I dreaming? I was watching an eagle fly through a rosy-hued courtyard past an open door. I am sitting in the room with that open door to the courtyard. The eagle circles back. I watch it come close, I say shhh to everyone in the room because the eagle is coming back. I feel some fear as it closes the door with its huge extended talons.

The dream scene changes, and I am sitting in a different room, looking out a different window. The eagle flies low through the yard and I can see it has a large bird in its talons. I think the prey may be an owl. The eagle lands on the roof of an outbuilding in the yard. The clutched bird turns into a small young bobcat that cries out. The eagle takes it someplace else on the roof where all I can see is the eagle's fierce face as it leans down to eat.

The image wakes me up. It's probably 4:00 or 4:30 in the morning. I lie there thinking, Why am drawn to these raptors? They eat the other birds and critters that I love as much. It's not a nightmare, but the dream fills me with middle of the night dread. I roll over, reach out for dpr, and go back to sleep.
In the morning after tea, I go out to put food on the platform birdfeeder. I find a pile of feathers that was definitely not there late yesterday. An eagle has not been here, but I see the sign of a hawk. I gather the feathers. I remember the dream.
Later in the morning I am fully awake. I look out and see a silly raccoon running through the yard. Jeez, I think, it's 9:00 in the morning shouldn't the raccoons be down and out for the day? It makes a beeline for the fence, and goes up over the wooden post, and goes down butt first. I recall our tail-less raccoon visitor went down head first. Mmm. This visitor pauses to check us out. He's a fat, young whippersnapper for sure, and he's gone in a flash. dpr tells me that he found all the potted plants in the pond overturned this morning, too. Someone's been by looking for the fish that are long gone.

*UPDATE ON THE EAGLE CAM*

A few people have commented on news that there seems to be some problems with eagle eggs in the nest on Hornby Island. Here is what I have just read:

Sad News:

April 30, 2006

Eagles and conservation have been the joy and occasional sadness of my life. This is a sad moment. It appears that the Hornby Island bald eagle eggs are infertile. The first egg should have hatched April the 26 and the second egg today. The first embryo, if it developed at all, is surely dead. The second embryo, could still hatch but I cannot see the proper pipping of the egg shell, where the chicks beak has broken through enabling it to draw in air, the precursor to the final struggle for hatching. It does not look good for this pair this year. In fact this is the second year of failure for this nest territory.

Reasons for the Failure to Hatch:

We cannot be sure. Some educated guesses follow.

The adult eagles are possibly old:

1. This is the 19th year for known nesting results from this tree. It could have been occupied for 50 or more years earlier. Was the same pair occupying the nest all that time? We do not know. Eagles could live that long.

2. If the birds are very old it is possible that they have simply run out of reproductive ability. Perhaps they simply can’t produce viable eggs any longer.

3. Alternatively, it is possible with very old birds that they have accumulated so many pesticides and heavy metals that their reproductive track is no longer able to function properly. This is not at all out of the question. I am told that orcas (killer whales) that now periodically die along the British Columbia and Washington coasts are so polluted and their bodies so loaded with poisons that it is illegal to tow their bodies out to sea or have them hauled to land fills. They carcasses have to be burned. A very sad statement on our polluted earth. Are these eagles, who also occupy the top of the food chain and eat the same basic foods as orcas, also contaminated. Very possibly. Maybe the reproductive success is going to be restricted to younger eagles that have not had so long to accumulated the poisons.

One or more of the adult eagles is young and inexperienced:

1. This is possible – but not liklely. Last year when the territory only hatched one young which died at 6 days of age and the other egg did not hatch, both adults were in full adult plumage – not even just newly matured at 5 years as this would have been indicated by the dark streaking in their white head or dark tail band. These birds appear to be fully mature both last year and this year. Furthermore, this pair appear to e very experienced in nest building that we got to witness in such marvelous detail, and in fullfulling the incubating duties. They hardly left the eggs unattended more than 12 to 40 seconds during any exchange that I witnessed. They are not just good, and I assume experienced parents, but so compatible with each other. I take this beautiful pair to be very experienced parents. So the loss again this year of their eggs I also view as most likely due to loss of fertility due to age or polution.

Other alternatives:

There are infinite options but none seem logical than my first option above. The pair are very used to human disturbance, constantly perching near houses and human activity with no noticeable alarm or concern. While I have received lots of concerned calls and emails at the sounds of power movers, cars, chain saws and dogs we have had an unprecedented opportunity to watch the eagles in the cam and correlate their behavior with disturbances. The noise of civilizations does not seem to phase them a bit.

I found one call from an irate and annoyed caller quite interesting. She heard the disturbance of barking dogs and instantly called me. I was actually calling Doug to question him about this. After many rings he answered the phone and reported that he delayed coming in to the phone until the herd of barking sea lions has passed by his porch. I hardly think barking sea lions would be a disturbance to bald eagles – and indeed barking dogs elicit no interest from the nesting birds either.

Survival:

Eagles like most creatures in the wild are constantly subjected to the test of survival. Can they find food and make a living? Can they avoid being killed and eaten. Can they avoid hurting and damaging themselves? If they can’t keep their feathers in good condition they won’t be able to fly efficiently and hunt effectively and they will die.

Almost half of the eagles that start nesting loose their eggs or young. Surviving in the wild is not easy. Of those young that survive to fledging only a small percentage are likely to survive the five years to maturity. Once they have proven themselves as good hunters and they enter the breeding population they can produce young for 15 to 25 or more years. Now pause for a moment to contemplate how many eagle there would or could be it the adults were successful lin raising one or two young every year for 20 years! That could be that each pair produced 30 or 40 young – far more than necessary to keep the population stable. And stable would mean producing a new eagle for every one that died.

Therefore, with such a long live potential, their has to be a lot of nest failures or early deaths otherwise the world would be full of eagles – and no room for any other species. Not a balanced system.

So as much as I was very saddened to not see our beautiful pair of adult bald eagles produce eagles this year it is not an unexpected happening that they should fail. If, as I suspect, these are old eagles, they have already produced many replacements for themselves and they have been great contributors to the very successful and expanding eagle population that we have been experiencing the past 50 years. It is not a good thought that they have stopped reproducing because they have become sterile from pollution and this is also not confirmed.

We will hope and expect that other eagles will be more successful and they their young will be flying over our waters. If our adult pair is at the end of its reproductive life we can anticipate younger birds moving into the territory shortly and becoming the parents of the next generations.

David Hancock

Bugs, again

we noticed a little ball of tiny insects last spring, but didn't get pictures, and forgot about them. i noticed them again this year, in the same place. when they clump together they look like a blob of, well, something, maybe eggs. when disturbed, even by my breath, they wiggle like mad and spread out. they are almost certainly spiders. they are fascinating to watch. a day of rain has moved them on.

the spiders are about one and a half inches in front of the the wood. the vertical piece is one and a half inches thick.

the camera lens is about an inch from the spiders.

a closer view of the photo above

how about that stephen colbert? he was somehow allowed to address the white house correspondents dinner last saturday evening and used comedy and irony most effectively to embarrass the president, the vice-president, justice scalia, sundry other bad actors in the administration, and most of the press corps--for, in each case, their own public utterances and evasions, their contempt for reality and the constitution, and their general arrogance of position and power. the lack of applause was, in my humble opinion, the most potent indicator of the accuracy of his uber-subtle jibes. although i suppose "they aren't rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the hindenburg" is not so subtle. we happened, most fortunately, to check c-span and tuned in to the live broadcast of the event in the middle of bush's attempt at humor. then they introduced colbert. we laughed. we howled. we asked each other "did he really say THAT?" if you missed it, or want a rerun, click on stephen's picture above.


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spider update: our crack research team (RD) here at chez bums has discovered the id of the baby spiders. she used the arcane and esoteric method of googling "black and yellow spider." the pirate, that would be me, sez "doh!" i tried bugguide but quickly gave up in the face of a zillion spiders.

so, they are Argiope aurantia. my style manual is silent on the preference for the plural form for spiders, so aurantias or aurantiae. below is a picture of adults i found on bug guide, after i knew the name of the spider. an example of sexual dimorphism, and how often does one get to work that term into conversation.

copyright Troy Bartlett

Ten Beautiful Birds Meme

We were asked by Pam of Tortoise Trail, Endment, and Suzanne of As Time Goes By to do the Ten Beautiful Birds meme. We thought about it and tweaked the meme just a bit to name ten beautiful birds we have photographed. Eight of the following photos were taken in our yard. The bald eagle, which flies over our yard regularly, was photographed in a tree along Port Townsend Bay. The Western Tanager photo I had to download because I could not find the photo we had taken.

American Goldfinch Carduelis tristis

Bald Eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus

California Quail Callipepla californica

Cedar Waxwing Bombycilla cedrorum

Cooper's Hawk Accipiter cooperii

Mourning Dove Zenaida macroura

Northern Flicker Colaptes auratus

Red Crossbill Loxia curvirostra

Varied Thrush Ixoreus naevius

Western Tanager Piranga ludoviciana

Please click on any one of these photos to see how beautiful backyard birds can be. We don't usually do memes, but this one appealed to us and tugged at our hearts. We love beautiful birds. We invite Wayne at Niches, Bev at Burning Silo, and Floridacracker at Pure Florida to name their ten beautiful birds. If they've already been asked or if they, like us, think memes are crazy, then we just ask fellow bloggers who love birds to blog their ten beautiful birds.