Tasha Out, Pretty Girl Here, and No Redpolls - UPDATE March 18, 2022
In this 5:46-minute music video by "Taught",
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCx1zy51bkI, Tasha seemed bewildered by so much snow. Crow
Crow
By now, snow in her home state of Kentucky would be disappearing or gone. I suspect she is genetically wired to start roaming about now, but here she could hardly negotiate the snow to get on top of her rock den. Gray jay
Gray jay
She finally did, though, rubbed on some conifers, and sniffed the snow carefully—maybe for snow fleas on the surface now. They are the first food of spring (starts in two days) as they gather into clumps to mate around the time of snow melt. I didn’t see her lick the snow in the video, though.
On this video you can watch Lily, Hope and Faith foraging for snow fleas on April 22, 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy22Jz-d4B8 and here is a nice photo of snow fleas on a log that was taken on May 22, 2013.Colembola
Snow Fleas (5/22/13)
Tasha also had a hard time getting back down to her den entrance. I felt like I was reading her mind as she repeatedly backed down to the edge of the flat rock that covers her den but couldn’t bring herself to slide down backwards to the entrance. Finally, she found a way around the problem and disappeared into the darkness of her den.
At the WRI, Pretty Girl let me see her for the first time in a long time at 8:15 last evening. I had a drumstick and four little blueberry mini-muffins waiting for her as I waited at my desk to click her responses. To my surprise, she ate all four muffins, loving them, before touching the drumstick. She chewed them with her very white teeth facing me in good light—interspersed with periods of intense alert.
Pretty girl 1
Pretty girl 2
Pretty girl 3
Where did the redpolls go? Yesterday, they were a blanket out the window. Today it was crows, gray jays, and chickadees. Have redpolls started back for their arctic home?
Thank you for all you do,
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center