Lucky and Tasha Looking Great - UPDATE May 2, 2023
Lucky
Lucky is finally up and at ‘em, looking great with a nice coat. Same for Tasha who knew it was time for a bath but was a little hesitant about immersing in ice water. "Taught" caught her testing the cold and finally throwing caution to the wind in this 3:46-minute video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiHFkEcg__cRaven
Raven
Out the window, the raven that checks whether I’m at my desk and decides whether to come back later or do a quick grab ‘n go stayed a few seconds longer than usual this time with the sun on him in a way that I’ve been wanting to click. Thank you Raven. At a distance, a person sometimes has to look twice to see if it’s a raven or a crow, but up close you see that a raven is about triple the size (close to three pounds versus one pound), has a thicker beak that is nearly as long as its head, and has shaggy throat feathers and a longer wedge-shaped tail. Or very close, the big head says it at a glance.
Beaver lodge with male mergansers
Beaver lodge with male mergansers
Woods Lake out the window is the first lake in the area to open up each spring. Today, it is 95% ice free while a check on the other lakes in the area showed darkening ice but no lake was thawed more than a few feet from shore from what I could see. That left Woods Lake as the only lake to land on for the first loon I’ve seen this year and for common merganser males that suddenly were cruising past the beaver lodge and a pair of hooded mergansers.
Now that herring gulls are back in number, pecking on the window, catching slices of bologna, and doing their usual individual behaviors, I saw who the suet has been disappearing to.
With the goldfinches and most of the pine siskins now gone from here and junco numbers tumbling, the few red-winged blackbirds turned into a flock today. All were males that soon will be showing their red shoulders as part of defending territories that they want to fill with females. A male with a big territory can house many females and mate with up to 18 of them. But for now, when they are peacefully together in a migrating flock, they hide the red and only show the yellow stripe as in this picture.
Red-winged blackbird
Red-winged blackbird
Herring gull w/suet
Herring gull w/suet
Spring is here with temperatures forecast to be in the 50’s and 60’s for the next week and probably warming after that. Spring is exciting with all the changes and the forests filling with song and the birds that call this their mating range.
Oh, and Spanky is here a lot, eating slowly with a lot of it falling out of his mouth half-chewed but gaining weight. On April 27 he was 263 pounds and yesterday was 274. That’s up eleven pounds in four days, so he’s doing well.
Thank you for all you do,
Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center
