As charlotte just mentioned in her post, we have been very busy doing veg surveys and some low tech bird censusing around our site. A few days ago we were strolling around in the Ash forest part of our site, near net 2, and we noticed a couple of house wrens getting very annoyed with us and making their funny “stay away” noise, which is a combination of a chirp and a rattle.
house wren nest with no fewer than five fledglings!
Charlotte though they were probably trying to scare us away from their nest, and so we started searching for it. What we found was an old dead ash trunk that looked like a house wren apartment complex! the one trunk had three nest-sized holes in it, but sadly two of them were too high up for us to get a good look into. however, the one that we could see into was chock full of little house wrens! these birds have pretty much full juvenile plumage, and will probably be leaving the nest soon, so we were glad to catch them while they were still there. at first glance, we only saw four birds, but when we returned today we counted five little beaks in this hole. Charlotte noticed the mother in a nearby tree with something in her beak, so we backed off and let her go back to the nest. we sat back and watched her feed these little guys for a good five minutes or so before continuing with our census.
mother housewren feeding fledglings.
House wrens are not the only birds breeding at our site. We also found a western meadowlark nest, which I posted photos of a few days ago. When charlotte and I returned to the nest yesterday, they had hatched! We went back again today and it was very cold, so these guys were huddling together for warmth and moving around, crawling on top of each other. Newly hatched birds are not the cutest things in the world, so I won’t put up the super close-up I have of these guys.
Western meadowlark hatchlings!
Charlotte also mentioned that we’ve been seeing a mother sharp tailed grouse with seven of her juveniles around our site. Before we saw them over the past week, we had only seen adult sharp tailed grouse, and they were always up on the prairie out of the coulees, so we were pumped to see them in our riparian corridor. These guys are very hard to catch on film, because they sit in the grass until you stumble upon them and then fly away very fast. I did manage to get this picture of them though:
One of the juvenile sharp tailed grouse.
Well, that’s all for now, folks. But stay tuned for more posts!