BIGBY weekend birding update

Well, it's nice to know Clawsie's been holding down the blogging fort. I'm surprised she was awake long enough to type that post! I finally remembered my camera, so here is my weekend update -- with a BIGBY milestone!

I took a two-hour walk in the fog Sunday morning and though visibility was quite poor, I was able to notch enough birds on the walk to up my BIGBY list total to 80! Most are yardbirds, but I've been trying to take walks to get a little exercise.

The weather is definitely not cooperating; it's in the 40s today, so I will be keeping my new little tomato and green pepper plants indoors a little longer. I also bought some broccoli on a lark; I hope it turns out well. I think it should do well in this cooler weather now and later on the early fall. It's my first time to grow my own broccoli and I'm totally pumped! I hear the biggest problem with broccoli is WORMS, so I'll have to be diligent. Maybe I can crush up some eggshells and put a ring around each plant. Will those worms be deterred like slugs are?

Of course, any worms I find will make the birds happy!

Here are some pictures to show you how thick the fog was; here, on Rt 45 near the house, visibility is about 50 feet:
I left the house a little before 6 a.m., and if anything the fog worsened the longer I was out; here, on Shook Hollow Rd, we got down to about 30 feet of visibility:
I was hoping to see an indigo bunting on Shook Hollow--I've been lucky on that road with brown thrashers and indigo buntings--but I'm still bunting-less for the year. I did hear several ruby-crowned kinglets staunchly defending their territory as I walked by, and I was also treated to a near-collision between my head and a brown thrasher crossing the road. I wish I had photos of them, but it was hard enough to see and ID the birds as it was. The camera was almost useless in the opaqueness of the mist and the poor light under the canopy of trees that covers the road just before the open fields shown above.

I also saw some examples of the fungus among us:
Check out the size of those mushrooms! (note the dollar for perspective! I learned it on Forensic Files.) If only these were portabellas! Do portabellas grow here? Wild?

This old stump had lots of things growing on it and in it:
It's so wet here that mushrooms and moss grow EVERYWHERE. Nothing like the low-rain territory I'm from in Texas.

After Shook Hollow, I decided to check out the marsh, though the fog was still thick. I discovered that my marsh now has an official name!

That's the marsh owners' dog Max, who loved to play around in the mud. (Note: he is NOT the dog who fowled a Canada goose nest a couple of years ago; oh the horror!) Mary Kay, who owns the marsh and Cooke Tavern (a B&B) with her husband Greg, told me Max passed away last year, but he lived a long and happy life, and now he's immortalized in this sign and on the marsh. They have a bunch of signs all around the marsh now, including one that talks about the invasive purple loosestrife. Let's hope they can change that sign (and kill all the loosestrife) soon.

Here's a shot from my backyard--somewhere in that mist lies a marsh...

There's my little bare garden on the left, waiting for life to sprout.

It was pretty quiet back there, with only a few red-winged blackbirds to keep me company. Here's a female perched on the stupid loosestrife:
Check out my brushpile! One of our lilac trees dropped a big limb/trunk, so I broke it up and added it to my pile. The sparrows love it:

Note how green everything is. We've had almost non-stop rain this year, and today the temps are in the low 50s. Those seeds I planted in the garden are probably freezing their little coats off.

And now a word from our kitty

Hi folks -- Clawsie here. Just wanted to let you know that The One Who Feeds Me has all sorts of posts written up about her weekend birding and such, but she forgot her camera at home and thus has no photos to liven up the presentation.

She's like that sometimes; you know, forgetful. Like when she forgets that she needs to wake up at about 4 a.m. every morning and put some food in my bowl. She claims that feeding time is really 7 a.m., but come on, people. I gotta have food.

So I always remind her of this fact by walking up beside her on the bed and staring at her until she wakes up. Sometimes, though, I guess she's really sleeping hard or something, so then I make this weird smacking/breathing noise with my mouth. Drives her and Mommy up the freakin' wall!

If that doesn't work, I bite her, ever so gently, on her hands.

If that doesn't work, I go for the hair.

She calls me evil, but I don't care. You and I both know what's important: getting the food in the bowl.

The rest is just about the other kitties, including that weird one with no ears.

YES!

The polar bear has just been put on the endangered species list. Thank goodness.

Updates!

One of my worst habits is not making visible and documented follow-up on things, ideas, projects, etc. Instead, I tend to just DO things and then move on without really updating anyone on the status of said things. Needless to say, this trait annoys managers I've worked for....

So I thought I'd give you a few updates to close out and/or give you the status of ongoing Delia birdy stuff:
1. The fake birdjam project: So far, I've been able to get a sora to respond to my phone's playback of sora calls. I haven't had time to go out on the marsh and see if I can draw one out of cover, though; perhaps this weekend, or some evening when it's pouring rain this week.

2. The ping-pong egg: Status: still no ping-pong table, dammit. (This one's for you, Susan and Laura!)

Still looks the same, huh?

3. Digiscoping: nothing to report. I tried an adapter I bought through Cabela's; the adapter worked for the scope, but my current camera (the Kodak Z712-IS) was too big for the platform. I don't think it's a good digiscoping camera. So I tried going back to my old broken Nikon (lens error) and futzing with it, but I was still unable to fix it. If I'm going to digiscope, I'm going to need a smaller point-and-shoot. I may get one at some point, some cheapie one. But it's not a priority.

4. Marriage to The Kat: going swimmingly, thanks!

That's all the old business I can think of.

Really, this whole post was just an excuse to get in a picture of the ping-pong egg.

happy mother's day, mom, and thanks for having me!

Warbler correction -- and question

My birding friend from work, Hillel, just told me that the photo I'd labelled as yellow warbler was actually more likely a prairie warbler:
(Stupid branch! -ed.) I hardly even looked at the bird when I saw it, to be honest -- I just glanced at the yellow with the streaks and thought, "yellow warbler." But the yellow warbler's streaks are more russet, not black, and Hillel also says there's a "greenish color of the upper wing and shoulder" on what can be seen of my photographed bird that make it a prairie warbler -- which just happens to be a lifebird for me! Yippee!

Boy--was I ever mistaken on the yellow warbler ID. Here's a pic from another site:

My gosh, he's totally different! What a dummy I am! This is so awesome, though -- that makes my BIGBY list 54 birds, and my total lifelist inches up to 172! Getting closer to 200; that will be a real milestone for me. My 2008 yearlist is now somewhere around 80 (I need to update, I think). What a happy mistake!

OH WAIT--I can count this prairie warbler, right? Because I mean, I knew it was a warbler, and I got a photo --- can I count him? Help!

My listserv's so cool

By virtue of living in Pennsylvania and being enrolled on the PA Birds listserv, I get to read entries and comments almost every day from cool people like Scott Wiedensaul and Rob Fergus.

What cool and/or famous people are on your local listserv?

A belated thank you for a star

This post is long overdue; it took me a while to get it just right. Apologies for its belatedness. (is that a word?)

In celebration of my recent commitment ceremony with Kat, my good bloggy friend FranIAm was kind enough to give us the gift of a lifetime: a star!

I had always heard about these "name your own star" things and thought it would be cool; Fran must've read my mind or my memory and known how much we both would enjoy this gift.

Our star deed came from the Millennium Chronicle, a company that has a really beautiful logo:
Our star is located in the constellation Aquila--the Eagle--so appropriate for a birder! Its number is 105544 Aquila, and its new name is DeliaKaterina. For you big telescope owners, here are the coordinates: right ascension 20h 00m 54.91s, declination +11 degrees, 43'30.7". It's a Type A3 star, magnitude 8.7; its distance from our planet is unknown -- a fact which blows my mind a little. Man, the universe is a big place.

Here is the position of the constellation Aquila in the night sky (h/t to this site) :

That's Scorpio to the far right, and Pegasus to the left, of Aquila. Our star is just to the left of the brightest star in Aquila, Altair--that one on the left, at the crook there. Here's an easier-to-conceptualize view:

Wow, right? This is an illustration from Bayer's Uranometria (written in 1603!). According to this site, "Aquila flys (sic) across the Milky Way (which runs across the picture from upper left to lower right), the bright star Altair in its neck. The celestial Eagle is shown carrying Antinous, a figure from ancient Roman times, a constellation that is no longer recognized." Our little star would be at the leading edge of his upper wing, right near his scapulars (I think that's what it would be called). BTW, it would suck to be Antinous.

All kinds of interesting documentation came with the star deed, including a map with a circle around the actual speck that is our star. It's awe-inspiring to look up at night sky; as a kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut and an astronomer, travelling the stars and seeing the beautiful things in our universe--the Horsehead Nebula, the Crab Nebula, our own little galaxy. Now when I look at the sky, I will look at the Eagle and think of our little star out there, winking at me, in the remote blackness of space.

Thank you, Fran, for lighting a little candle in my imagination.