Maggie's Farm

I saw a Killdeer with three teensy, just-hatched miniature Killdeer chicks running around a large gravel parking lot during my morning walk today.

That was a sight which gladdened my heart and sweetened my soul.

The Killdeer is found, either breeding or wintering, in all states of the US. It's a plover of open ground, and not particularly associated with water like most plovers.

You will never find them in tall grass or woodlands, but you can occasionally see them doing their run-and-pause bug-hunting technique on pebbly shorelines.

Their "killdeer" call, sometimes heard at night, and the rusty flash of tail, are distinctive.

You can read about this not-uncommon bird here. Every good person loves the Killdeer.

My Mom, an avid gardener and an avid reader, recommends Richard Mabey's Weeds: In Defense of Nature's Most Unloved Plants.

The WSJ said “Entertaining. . . . [A] sprightly journey through horticultural history.”

Once a common bird in New England and the Eastern seaboard but now gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon.

From Wiki:

Heath Hens were extremely common in their habitat during Colonial times, but being a gallinaceous bird, they were hunted by settlers extensively for food. In fact, many have speculated that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving dinner featured Heath Hens and not wild turkey. By the late 18th century, the heath hen had a reputation as poor man's food for being so cheap and plentiful; Thomas Winthrop related that they could be found on the Boston Common and that servants would sometimes bargain with a new employer for not being given Heath Hen for food more often than 2 or 3 days a week.

As the beavers becomes more common, the wonderful habitats they create - marshes and ponds, Alder and willow thickets, -proliferate. Wood Ducks, Black Ducks, herons, amphibians, snakes, turtles, songbirds, swallows, bugs. Everybody likes a beaver marsh. You can barely see one of their series of dams in the foreground.

�

Factory fishing, aided by helos, has crushed the population of Bunker. An excellent and thorough review of the politics of the plankton-eating Menhaden which, like the Herring, is the preeminent fish of the lower end of the Atlantic food chain:

A Fish Story - How an angler and two government bureaucrats may have saved the Atlantic Ocean.

Related: Save the Most Important Fish in the Sea

Gwynnie emails me that he saw a pair of these this morning.

A colorful, not uncommon finch-like, sparrow-sized bird often seen in the Eastern US during migration - which is right now. During breeding season, the male is dramatically-pigmented but, depending on the light, they can appear black.

You can read about them here.

Edward O. Wilson lectures on The Social Conquest of Earth in man and ants.

When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are listed as threatened in the Eastern US). They were more plentiful in the past, when Yankeeland was covered with pastures and hayfields.

As with the Bobolink and the Meadowlark, reforestation and suburbanization have taken their toll on these fine meadow dwellers in the northeastern US. The Upland Sandpiper also had to deal with heavy market hunting (as a substitute for the hunted-to-extinction Passenger Pigeon).

The Upland, like our Wilson's Snipe, Woodcock, and Europe's Jacksnipe are all members of the shorebird family Scolopacidae who abandoned the coasts and found a home in the uplands. These birds are still hunted, much as all shorebirds were in the past. However, they are difficult to find these days.

Our Upland Sandpipers winter on the Argentinian pampas. You can read more about the Upland Sandpiper here.

Here's a male Bobolink in breeding plumage, aka Ricebird. They do breed in one of our largest pastures. I still remember the first one I heard calling.

Seen any lately?

Spent a couple of hours on the Connecticut coast this weekend. A vast swath of Common Slipper Shells had washed up during winter storms, a couple of feet deep. People don't eat this mollusc.

(These limpets are different from the European Common Limpet.)

They attach themselves to rocks and other hard objects. Also, to eachother. They move, extremely slowly, if they want to. I tried to figure out whether they have any predators. Supposedly some crabs can eat them, and some of those little snails can bore holes into them. I wonder whether diving ducks can pry them off their attachments, as they do with mussels.

I've seen some migrating Ospreys in the past couple of days. Heading up along the lakes, rivers, and coasts to their summer cottages.

Ospreys are Fish Hawks. They can handle a big fish once they get to carrying it aerodynamically, but they have been known to be drowned by latching onto really big ones.

My blackbirds - mostly Red-wings, Cowbirds, and Grackles - arrived yesterday. It's always between March 12 and March 15. They empty out the bird-feeders and move on. Do they remember my feeders from last fall?

People are annoyed with Grackles because they like to poop in swimming pools. They don't bother me at all.

Here's an autumn migratory flock in Sipp's previous back yard:

Tyto alba, the Barn Owl, has a huge geographical distribution:

I think of them as the nighttime version of the Marsh Hawk, because they like the wide open spaces, grasslands, fields, and marsh edges. They are not woodland birds.

I know we do not have them at the farm, because we have a hundred acres of meadow and a perfect barn loft open for them to use, and they have never used it. Plus there are hundreds more acres of horse field and cow pasture nearby. I think we're at the northern edge of their range. For owls, we have only Great Horned, Barred, and Screech as far as I know. Probably Saw-Whet in winter, but I haven't seen one there.

The last time I saw a Barn Owl was when one flew across the road in front of me at night in the headlights, between a marsh and some large estate fields in lovely Lloyd Harbor, Long Island. Lloyd Neck, actually.

In Scientific American, The Wipeout Gene - A new breed of genetically modified mosquitoes carries a gene that cripples its own offspring. They could crush native mosquito populations and block the spread of disease. And they are already in the air—though that's been a secret.

Good, bad, or indifferent? It's a little creepy to me, like Ice-9.

Today it's a powerful and majestic predator, which comes to mind
because our friends who cover hawk migration in New Haven, CT, have seen a few of them passing through recently.

Lucky them. I have never seen a Golden Eagle in the Eastern US, but have seen them in the West, where they are not uncommon. Medium-sized mammals are their main prey, and the wide, open spaces are their dominion.

Read more about this handsome raptor here.

Picture by J. J. Audubon, as can be easily recognized by the awkward and un-lifelike pose of the animal. Audubon typically painted from dead specimens - he was a famous shot with a rifle, and he liked to get a good, close look at the animal he was painting.

Somewhere in either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky there is a comment about the remorse of the hunter when holding a Woodcock in hand. You have noticed that our head image on Maggie's now is Woodcock hunting.

John Stuart Skinner in his classic 1883 The Dog and the Sportsman put it this way:

I have frequently felt something like remorse, when, on picking up a wounded one, I have met the forgiving expression of its full and bright, yet soft hazel orb. How many of the beauties who dazzle and enslave us would be proud of such an eye.

Sow Bugs, Woodlice - they have lots of names, and there are over 3000 species of these little guys. I think I sacrifice a few of them to the gods every time I toss a log on the fire.

They are arthropods, in the subgroup of the usually-aquatic Crustaceans. They look like tiny Trilobites.

I am always happy to see these little bugs under logs and rocks. Arthropods own the world, even though we don't give them a vote.

I took a few photos at the farm in the Berkshires. Last year, a nor'easter took out our foot bridge over the stream. This week, the storm destroyed the big tractor bridge, steel I-beams, cement posts, and all. This is not good at all.

We saw this big male Eastern Box Turtle in the woods on the edge of the field, near the beaver marsh. My favorite reptile except for maybe the Black Snake, even though this was a cranky old guy:

Here's the old well:

And here's the old hitching post:

More photos on continuation page below -

The first Barn Owl I ever saw was in the headlights swooping low over a marshy field on the North Shore of Long Island. It did, indeed, look spooky in its whiteness.

Barn Owls have a worldwide distribution, but they stay away from the colder regions. In North America, they aren't found much north of southern New England.

Barn Owls are prodigious mouse and rat killers. As such, they are birds of farms and meadows, not of woodlands nor of suburbia. In the Northeast, their numbers were surely higher when the countryside was filled with small farms and cow pastures. Midwestern industrial-scale farming offers them little of interest. I suppose they are the night-time analogue of the Marsh Hawk. The rodents never get a break.

I have never seen or heard one at Maggie's Farm, which would seem to be perfect habitat for them, but which might be towards the northern edge of their range. We even have an open shed with a loft which would be perfect for them to raise a family in. (The Barn Swallows think they own it, though, so maybe they would pester the owls too much.)

The subject of Barn Owls came up because Samizata, of all places, posted a piece on Barn Owl nest boxes. Nobody is going to make a lot of money producing these, but it's a great idea as the wooden barns and silos of the past are falling down.

Here's the CLO bit on the Barn Owl. Wiki has a more extensive write-up.

Photo is a Barn Owl family in an old silo.

From our archives, because the sound of saws may be constant around here this weekend, if Irene hits us in Yankeeland:

Burning carbon to kill trees! Good work and good fun.

The gasoline-powered chainsaw is one of the finest inventions since the wheel and the plow. It's really just a mechanized stone axe like my Indian sncestors used, and I am eagerly awaiting the laser saw to bring wood cutting into the 21st Century.

While the engineering principles of the chainsaw may go back to surgical instruments of the 1800s, the modern concept dates to the 1920's with bulky and impractical designs until the German engineer Andreas Stihl developed his "tree-cutting machine" around 1929. The one-man saw dates to around 1950 and was perfected by Stihl and their main competitor, the weapons manufacturer Husqvarna. The Stihl family still owns their company. Check out their saws here. (No, this is not an advt.)

I have always enjoyed power saws: my godfather's father started the Wright Saw Company in CT, which produces a reciprocating power saw - an anomaly in the development of power saws which never really caught on except for special uses.

Of course, the famous and indispensible Sawzall is a reciprocating saw.

Here's the interesting weather we have to look forward to, up here. Think I'll go get some gas for my Stihl Farm Boss.

Here. In one of the scenes, he nails a fish which is almost too heavy for him to lift.

I have read that Ospreys sometimes drown by being overly-ambitious with big fish.

With advice for singles:

Fiddler crabs check out at least 100 potential mates before making a decision. While we acknowledge that figuring out how to get along with difficult people is a big part of marriage, how can it hurt to decide carefully - even though it's guaranteed that you will end up with a flawed human - or crab? (Hopefully, not with crabs.)

I didn't realize we have three species on the East coast. I guess I am mainly familiar with the ubiquitous and delightful Atlantic Marsh Fiddler of the Cape Cod salt marshes and tidal flats. It always cheers me up to see them.

These cute mud-eating crabs with their little holes all over the high tidal mudflats are all bark and no bite, have gills but breathe air, do not make good bait, and live in colonies in which they seem to spend most of their time threatening eachother. At high tide, they retreat into their burrows and shut the door. Up here, they hibernate down there all winter.

Egrets and herons will eat them. Raccoons, too.

Name the two species, and explain what is happening:

Ans: Yes, it is a King Snake constricting and preparing to devour a venomous Copperhead. It will take him quite a while to get that big Copperhead into himself, but he'll do it. Snakes stretch.