"Travelin' Soldier"

One by the Dixie Chicks for Memorial Day:



[Link to last year's Memorial Day post.]

New Zealand raptors

Rachel Stewart sent the following pictures from her farm in New Zealand:

Her garden of native plants.

The hill out back. I suppose a person could get used to seeing this every morning...


Australasian harrier or kahu (Circus approximans) on roadkill


New Zealand falcon or karearea (Falco novaeseelandiae)


The karearea appears on the NZ $20 bill [sorry for the tiny picture, but notice how nicely the green matches Rachel's photo!] and is endemic to New Zealand. The kahu is also found in the wetter parts of Australia and on many of the region's islands. Apart from an occasional Australian kestrel (Falco cenchroides), which occurs as a vagrant, there are no other living diurnal raptors in New Zealand.

New Zealand also has one owl, Ninox novaeseelandiae, called ruru in Maori and morepork in English; both names relate to its two-note call. [Photo below courtesy of the Maungatautari Ecological Island Trust.]

Rachel writes that it's frustrating to see such magnificent raptors on a regular basis knowing she'll likely never be allowed to fly them, due to New Zealand's ban on falconry: "You Americans don't know how lucky you are!! Actually, you probably do know how lucky you are and, indeed, it has been more hard work than luck. Praise be to NAFA!"

A few decades ago, when falconry was unregulated but not explicitly banned, a man named Rob Wheeldon enjoyed very modest success flying kahu at (introduced) rabbits. In a 1992 Hawk Chalk article, he recalled that 14 rabbits in a season had been his best record:

It goes without saying that the harrier is certainly not the ideal falconer’s bird. Nevertheless, this bird does provide a challenge to get the very best out of its limited potential and possibly that of the falconer as well, which when everything goes according to plan makes the sweet smell of success just so much greater.

The ban may very well have been enacted as a direct response to Mr. Wheeldon's activities, which is especially unfortunate since he seems to have been a typical falconer/conservationist. In addition to rehabilitating injured harriers, he and his wife ran a breeding-and-hacking project aimed at bolstering the population of the New Zealand falcon.

Karearea have been also captive-bred abroad, and are perhaps most notably employed by Nick Fox's mounted hunt in the UK, the Northumberland Crow Falcons. Sadly, they seem to be on the decline in their home country despite legal protection. But Dr. Fox, who wrote his dissertation on the New Zealand falcon, has embarked on an interesting conservation programme called Falcons for Grapes, the goal of which is to provide nesting sites in New Zealand's vineyards; the falcons in turn should reduce losses to depredating birds such as starlings, blackbirds, and thrushes.

Essentially we propose to use one wildlife problem—the conservation of falcons—to mitigate another one: bird damage to grapes. Conservation is a luxury; it costs more money than it generates. In this project we plan to generate funding from commercial beneficiaries—the wine industry—to conserve the falcons. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Unlike most bird abatement projects employing raptors, Falcons for Grapes does not require that the birds be trained or actively managed. But there are, I suspect, a few enthusiasts like Rachel who would love to have the opportunity to train and fly their native raptors at quarry. Given the negligible impact of well-regulated falconry on both raptor and game populations—not to mention the fact that so much of the likely quarry in New Zealand is non-indigenous anyway—I can think of no compelling reason they should not be allowed to do so.

I've encouraged Rachel to get together with Australia's Peter Nolan and other like-minded people to form an "ANZAC Falconers' Association" to lobby both governments for a change, and I'm sure that many NAFA members would be glad to share the benefit of their experiences in opening up previously closed states and provinces. Free the Antipodes!

Toli videos

From The Red and Black, the UGA student newspaper, a short video about the Flying Rats' recent visit to Conehatta on the Choctaw reservation in Mississippi. I wasn't around long enough to make the trip west, but I sure do miss the game—played here for fun and comradery.



Here's what it looks like played "for keeps":

Meet the Beetles, and other lacrosse miscellany

The season just ended

The Lincoln Rampage were knocked out of the Nebraska High School Lacrosse Association championships with a first-round loss, 14-3, to Millard West last weekend. The outcome was not altogether unexpected—our varsity team was winless through the regular season—but we did think that West displayed a certain arrogance and lack of sportsmanship by posting a Facebook invitation to their semi-finals game before their game against us was even played.

West went on to win the championship; meanwhile, we're looking forward to next season and beyond. We graduated just one senior, with two juniors moving up. The rest of our players are rapidly-improving freshmen and sophomores, so in two years we may be the team to beat. Thanks to a generous equipment grant from US Lacrosse, Brine, and Warrior, as well as a positive working relationship with the Abbott Sports Foundation, the club's existence is secure and success will come eventually.

* * *

My cousin Laura, a freshman midfielder for the Catonsville Cardinals, had a much better year. She had several multiple-goal games (although my search for video highlights has been unsuccessful) and Catonsville, the defending national junior-college champions, lost only one regular-season game. The Cardinals fell to that same team, the Onondaga Lazers, last weekend in the NJCAA semi-finals; Onondaga went on to win the national championship. I congratulate Laura and her teammates on a successful season—and if you have to lose, you may as well lose to the best.

* * *

The season just beginning

After playing for the Omaha Rhinos (West) last summer, some friends and I have started a new team, the Salt Creek Tiger Beetles. (The team is named for Lancaster County's endangered endemic—three guesses who came up with the moniker.) Despite being older and slower, we dealt the Rampage another loss, 8-6, this morning to claim the first annual (and very unofficial) Lincoln City Lacrosse Championship. Yours truly scored the first goal as well as the game-winner. Here's hoping that's not the high-water mark of my season... Regular-season play in the Great Plains Lacrosse League begins June 6th.

* * *

I've written before about my favorite professional team, the Baltimore-then-Washington-but-now-playing-in-Annapolis-so-let's-just-call-them-Maryland-or-maybe-Chesapeake Bayhawks. Last night they faced off against the MLL's newest franchise, the Toronto Nationals, in the first game of the season. Final score: Toronto 17, Bayhawks 16. Not the result I had hoped for, but here are three things to like about the Nationals:

• Their logo, which incorporates both the Canadian maple leaf and the Hiawatha Belt of the Iroquois Confederacy.
• The MLL may have contracted from ten teams to six, but the Nationals extend the league's geographic reach north of the border.
• Gary Gait, a near-contemporary of mine (with a birthday in April, he's a slightly younger 42) and arguably the greatest player in the game's long history, came out of retirement to play for them.

With all teams now playing in one division, perhaps it will come down to the Bayhawks vs. the Nationals in the finals. Something to hope for, anyway...

Deer mice

naked in a globe of twigs, springtime—
for now
it is the world

* * *

a dusty shed,
holes in the clapboard...
breathe shallow while sweeping

* * *

quiet as a mouse—
made that way
by owl and marsh hawk

* * *

dots in the snow,
a broken line between:
the larder is empty

* * *

held to the ground,
rendered asunder—
another life awaits?

American national treasure

I received an e-mail today from singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee of Athens, Georgia requesting that fans assist him with a little publicity. This is my bit. (I would have posted some of his music sooner or later anyway.)

Bill Mallonee is the founder, frontman, and one constant element of the Vigilantes of Love. He's also worked as a solo artist and dabbled with a quasi-separate band called Victory Garden; released major-label records and independent offerings. I've got a number of his records, and the name and label on the recording doesn't seem to matter too much: even as VoL, there are two distinct sides to his sound (one is British Invasion, the other with its roots in American folk); and his writing and voice guide whichever assemblage of musicians he happens to be recording or performing with. He's been compared to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Bruce Springsteen, as well as other musicians out of Athens (notably R.E.M.).

[Bill Mallonee (solo) covering Neil Young's "Out on the Weekend" (Harvest, 1971).]


I've seen Bill/VoL at several venues, including the 40 Watt and Allen's in Athens as well as the now-defunct 7th Street Loft here in Lincoln. He/they never disappoint.

[Latest incarnation of VoL playing "Blister Soul" from the 1995 album of the same name.]


[Video, directed by Marc Pilvinsky, for "Resplendent" from the 2000 album Audible Sigh. Best song about the Dust Bowl since Woody Guthrie, with backing vocals by Emmylou Harris.]


Much has been made of Bill's status as a "Christian artist". Rest assured you're not likely to find him on the mass-market "Christian music" compilations sold on cable TV. His approach is more subtle than that, and his appeal broader. I don't subscribe to Roman Catholicism any more than I do Rastafarianism or any other branch of Christianity, but I can enjoy music informed by spirituality whether it's Bill Mallonee or Bob Marley.

[Bill, accompanied by bassist Jacob Bradley, performing "Life on Other Planets". Studio version appeared on Bill's solo records Fetal Position (2002) and Perfumed Letter (2003).]


Enjoy the videos here, and if you want to hear more, check out the websites below.

• http://www.billmallonee.net/
• http://www.volsounds.com/
• http://www.MySpace.com/billmallonee
• http://www.MySpace.com/worksprogressadministration

And if you want to drag Bill in your direction, you can contact him through highhorsebooking@hotmail.com

Once again, doing my bit for the arts and decreased productivity...

Online voyeurism

If you're stuck indoors, logged onto the computer for hours at a time, you can lighten up by checking in on these streaming video sites:

• American kestrel nestbox at the Nebraska Game & Parks Commission headquarters in Lincoln, courtesy of Game & Parks.
• Peregrine falcon nestbox on the Nebraska state capitol building, courtesy once again Nebraska Game & Parks.
• Bald eagle nest in Sidney, British Columbia, courtesy of Hancock House Publishing. This one has sound!

If you're not careful, though, this could ensure that you get stuck indoors, logged onto the computer for hours at a time. Use in moderation.

New kid in town

Okay, the Obamas' new dog is now more or less official—welcome to the White House, Bo—and so I suppose I can now introduce our new dog, Mandie.


Mandie is a piebald mini, adopted about a month and a half ago through Nebraska Dachshund Rescue. She took to us right away, and after some hesitation was accepted into the pack by Max & Anya. This dog, however, does have some issues. Very affectionate toward us, she displays what appears to be fear-based aggression toward...well, anybody else. We're thinking of calling in Cesar Millan before somebody loses an ankle.

She's extremely active, very cunning, and her predatory drive is off the charts; it will take much slow, careful introductory work before I can even think about hawking with her—there's no way I would trust her near the hawk right now. Still, she's eager to please, and I have hope of eventually integrating her into the team. Otherwise, we'll have to find another job for her.

[Finally! It turns out she does sleep...]


We're maxed out on dogs now (Lincoln requires special licensing for more than three), so my idle dreams of a bird dog will have to be put on hold. On the other hand, my III Dachshunds Beer T-shirts are completely appropriate now!

Of spring, robins, and...other birds

The front page of the local section of the morning paper featured a lovely photograph of an American robin against a background of snow-covered crabapples, marred by the caption: "Being the first robin of spring was no picnic Sunday in David City. A weekend blizzard dropped 8 inches of snow in the region."

News flash, people: we have robins winterlong. Granted, you might have to go looking for them, since they're not hopping around in pairs on people's front lawns. (They form flocks and tend to winter in dense vegetation offering both food and shelter from the elements—I often encounter them in groves of red cedar while out hawking.) But Turdus migratorius is not completely migratory even at our latitude.

Common but erratic regular wintor visitor statewide....CBC data demonstrate the erratic winter occurrence of this species. In CBCs from 1983-84 through 1992-93, the total count of robins has varied from a high of 10,410 in 1987-88 to a low of 213 in 1986-87. The highest individual count total was 9500 at Calamus-Loup in 1987-88.

An amazing count was an estimated 20,000 flying over in Brown Co[unty] 11 Jan 1988; 4800 were estimated in 6 minutes, and the flight lasted for 30 minutes.

—Sharpe, Silcock & Jorgensen, Birds of Nebraska: Their Distribution and Temporal Occurrence (2001)

At least Nebraskans stand a fair chance of missing robins in a low winter like '86-'87. I used to hear this "first robin of spring" nonsense even when I lived in Georgia. Robin numbers in Georgia actually drop in the spring as northern migrants return to their breeding grounds, so maybe I'm a bit oversensitized on this score.

In my opinion, for an avian harbinger of spring in Nebraska, the place to look is up.

Spring arrivals appear in early and mid-Mar, but most arrive in very late Mar and early Apr, a little later in the west. Numbers observed rarely exceed a dozen, and thus no clear migratory peak can be established.

—Sharpe, Silcock & Jorgensen, Birds of Nebraska

What bird is this that brings the promise of warmer weather to the northern Great Plains? Cathartes aura, the turkey vulture. This unlovely (to most people) bird depends, of course, on carrion for its food. It locates carcasses through both visual and olfactory cues—it is one of a very few birds with a well-developed sense of smell—and since death is a constant presence in the natural world, it can count on a steady supply of food wherever sufficient "prey" exists. Assuming, that is, that said "prey" is accessible. The extended sub-freezing temperatures of a typical Nebraska winter create plenty of carrion but quickly render it inaccessible to the TVs by freezing it solid; a dead deersicle is more or less useless to a turkey vulture.

I coached three lacrosse games up in Omaha this past Saturday. When we started, the weather was fine, and I enjoyed watching a small kettle of TVs soaring over the Missouri River bluffs. (I pointed them out to some of the Lincoln midfielders, telling them that they'd better show some signs of life. We did get more hustle out of the kids this weekend, but I don't know if that was attributable to the vultures.) Later on, the weather turned cold and windy, and the second game of the day was interrupted by a storm that included heavy sleet. I shivered along with everyone else, but I knew for sure that spring was really here. We're not necessarily done with cold weather—in fact we cancelled this evening's practice due to temps in the low 30s and 20+ mph winds—but it will be short-lived. By their return, the vultures told me so.

"Birdman of JFK"

I have a few reservations about bird-abatement work with raptors—I'm uncomfortable with the blurring of the line between natural resource (emphasis on natural) and commercial commodity, for one thing, and it shouldn't be confused with actual falconry (gamehawking), for another—but this is a nice little film about Ron Rollins' work at one of the nation's busiest airports.



HT Rachel Dickinson at Falconer on the Edge.

Season's end

Officially, this is the last day of the hawking season, but I wrapped things up a couple of weeks ago as the weather got warm. (Not that it stayed warm...) The season ended well: instead of degenerating into a mouse hawk, as often happens this time of year, Stekoa remained focused on rabbits to the end. All we caught late in the season were bucks, no pregnant does, so no harm done to next season's population.

The last flight of the year was memorable, if not entirely visible. Stekoa took off in his "daddy was a goshawk" flight mode—he's very fast for a redtail—and disappeared, weaving into some fairly thick woods. Instead of the expected crash or squealing rabbit, though, there followed an unusual silence. When we caught up to him, he was in the creek, trying to drag his soaking wet, very dead rabbit up the steep, muddy bank. That cottontail went home on the roof rack instead of in my vest.

Below, a few "leftover" pictures from the season just past. The first two were taken by Pat Stull, the rest by me on a visit with Art Graves out in the Sandhills:

Maxine, Anya, and Stekoa

Stekoa on the fist


Jimi (gyr x peregrine hybrid)


Flint (gyr x saker hybrid)


Brody


Flint waits in the truck for a training flight to the kite


Readying the kite


Closeup of the reel


Sunrise on the grouse lek


Jimi on the wing


Jimi on a prairie-chicken

"La 2da Oracion" ("The 2nd Prayer")

Music from Cielo y Tierra (Earth and Sky) and Jon Anderson (the voice of Yes). Call it fusion, or world music, or whatever you like, it's the best thing I've heard all week.



HT Donna.

The big chill

Chas Clifton over at Southern Rockies Nature Blog dug up an old (1997) Outside magazine article, written by Peter Stark, on hypothermia. As Chas notes, "Cheery stuff." For me, it brought back memories of what could have been a fatal incident—one that took place south of the Mason-Dixon line, incidentally.

About twenty years ago, I was working in the Baltimore area and my fiancée, Susan, was still an undergraduate at W&L. I made the roughly four-hour trip down to Lexington every second or third weekend, usually traveling light. One particular weekend started off warm, so I brought only the usual jeans (32" waist; I was skinny then, which was about to work against me) and short-sleeved T-shirts, but I stayed an extra night and a cold front moved in Sunday evening. When I departed early Monday morning, it was in the 20s; I scraped ice off the windows of my poorly-maintained '77 Nova, shivering in my T-shirt, and set out on the road.

I forget whether the heater itself was on the fritz, or whether the fan had stopped working, but whichever component had failed left me with no means to counteract the ambient temperature, the frigid vinyl of the seats, and the drafts coming in around the door seals. My shivering grew worse and worse, but I stubbornly kept driving—I had to get to work, and surely it would warm up as the sun got higher.

By the time I reached the exit for Stuarts Draft, maybe half an hour down the road (north is down the Valley), my teeth were chattering violently and I could barely hold the steering wheel steady. I finally figured out that I was hypothermic when, despite the shivering, I started to fall asleep at the wheel. Not good. And yet there was a part of me that wanted to give in, to close my eyes and relax, just for a few moments...but of course I was still driving 65 or 70 miles an hour and that would have been the last nap I ever took. I convinced myself to be afraid, turned around at Staunton, and drove back to Lexington talking to myself in order to stay awake.

I arrived back at Susan's apartment pale, nearly incoherent, and still shaking like a leaf on a tree. She and her roommates put me to bed, gave me hot tea, and called me in sick. By that afternoon, both the weather and I had warmed up, and I was able to make it back to Baltimore.

Still, that wasn't necessarily the end of it. Having had hypothermia once renders one more susceptible to the cold—and even knowing this, I still slip up on occasion. A few weeks ago, for example, I made the mistake of going to lacrosse practice dressed for current conditions and not foreseeable conditions. There was snow on the ground, but when practice started at five o'clock I was fine in shorts and a fleece pullover layered over a T-shirt. By 6:30 it was nearly dark, the temperature had dropped, and I was in bad shape: my cleats offered little protection in the snow, my lacrosse gloves (heavily padded on the back as a defense against opponents' checks but with no thermal insulation) were completely inadequate for the situation, and even the fleece was not enough to keep my core temperature up. I ducked out as soon as practice was over, turned on the Subaru's seat warmers and blasted the heat all the way home, took a hot shower that fogged the mirrors but still left me shivering, then bundled up in multiple layers before going to bed under three Pendleton blankets—but I didn't feel warm again until I woke up the next morning.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: Hypothermia can be sneaky. Northern climes, high altitude, and the dead of winter are easy enough to prepare for. It's the mid-latitude Marches and Octobers—the sudden cold snap, the unexpected soaking rain—that are likely to get you.

Daylight Saving Time and the tyranny of tradition

Ask any falconer about Daylight Saving Time and the response is likely to be a groan. It's not the concept, necessarily, but the implementation—it's applied to the wrong part of the year.

Blame it on Ben−or maybe not

The concept of Daylight Saving Time (DST for short) is often attributed to American publisher, inventor, and statesman Benjamin Franklin. (See, for example, this recent piece in Scientific American.) According to this version of the story, Franklin (himself a wealthy man) originated the concept as a thrift measure: by setting clocks forward, an hour of early-morning darkness could essentially be traded for an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, thereby reducing demand for beeswax and other candle materials. In Franklin's own words, "A penny saved is a penny earned."

In reality, however, the operative proverb is "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise"—what Franklin actually advocated, while on a diplomatic mission to France, was that Parisians should get more accomplished during daylight hours by rising earlier in the day, firing cannons and ringing church bells if necessary to implement his plan. The suggestion may have been tongue-in-cheek, but even so it's a poor diplomat who accuses the local inhabitants of laziness—which probably accounts for Franklin's publishing his comments anonymously.

The actual inventor and foremost advocate for DST was an Englishman named William Willett. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the adoption of DST from 1907 until his death in 1915. In the end, the First World War accomplished what Willett could not: British lawmakers enacted DST in 1916, but not until the Germans and their allies had beat them to it.

The United States, late arrivals to the war, were late in adopting DST as well: DST went into effect in 1918, and was dropped the following year. The Second World War saw a revival of DST, but once again it was discontinued at the end of the war. DST was observed sporadically on a local basis until 1966, when the Uniform Time Act made DST more or less standard; since then, there have been minor tweaks to the system as states have chosen to opt out (or back in) and various localities have changed time zones, but American society has come to accept DST as routine.


An answer in search of a problem

Several justifications are typically given for implementing DST, many of them easy to discredit. It is often claimed, for example, that DST is beneficial to agriculture, but in fact most farmers work by the sun and not by the clock. Health and safety benefits are also claimed, but in most cases the evidence is ambiguous—or benefits at one time of year are counterbalanced by deleterious effects at another time, resulting in an overall wash. For example, a recent (2008) study in Sweden found that the incidence of heart attacks rose immediately after the "spring forward" but fell by a comparable amount after the "fall back".

The strongest argument for DST, dating back to Franklin and Willett, has traditionally been energy savings. But, as Charles Q. Choi notes in the Scientific American article, recent analyses indicate that changing patterns in energy usage, including increased use of personal electronic devices (this means you, bloggers!), may have rendered this argument obsolete. When Indiana implemented statewide DST for the first time in 2006, the result was "a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million."

The enemy wears plaid

Not all of the economic arguments have to do with energy. Quoting Choi again, "Retailers, especially those involved with sports and recreation, have historically argued hardest for extending daylight time." Chief among these, it seems, are purveyors of golfing equipment: The National Golf Foundation estimated that an extension of DST could result in a $200-300 million increase in equipment sales and greens fees. (Choi quotes the figure as $400 million, but who's counting?)

Even my friends, it seems, are out to get me. Greg McManus, with whom I coach high-school lacrosse, e-mailed me a practice plan for this coming Monday: "Wow! We'll actually have an hour and a half practice from now on. Daylight savings rocks!" It's true that our first few practices have been cut short as dusk falls, but the days are rapidly getting longer even without the help of DST. Which leads us to...

A modest proposal

Instead of applying DST to spring and summer, when daylight is naturally longer, how about applying it to the winter months instead, when it might actually do some good?

The sports retailers lobbying for DST to start earlier in the spring and end later in the fall represent warm-weather sports, golf being the prime example. But surely falconers aren't the only field-sports enthusiasts who find weekday afternoons too fleeting during the depths of winter—couldn't gunners (and their lobbyists) make a case for DST reversal?

There are economic and public-health arguments to be made as well. For example, many people, particularly in northern latitudes, suffer from seasonal-affective disorder (SAD) as a result of light deprivation: For a good part of the year, they commute to work before the sun comes up, toil inside all day, then drive home again after dark. If DST were instituted in the winter months, they would have the benefit of afternoon sun. A decrease in SAD could save millions in mental-health care—enough to offset golf's losses?—and perhaps even save lives.

Someone is sure to ask, as someone always does, "What about the children?" Wintertime DST would mean darker mornings, and yes, the poor kiddies might have to wait for the school bus in the dark. I have no answer to this, other than to say that I always enjoyed waiting for the bus in the dark: that's when we were likeliest to see white-tailed deer, or red fox, or owls headed off to roost. Sometimes I suspect that my affinity for wildlife stems, in part, from these early-morning encounters when the world was quiet and dark—imagination and wonder flourish under those conditions.

I'm not going to tilt too hard at this particular windmill—for one thing, I don't have William Willett's energy or enthusiasm—but I thought I'd toss the idea out there for discussion. Ultimately, I think the mnemonic "Spring forward, fall back" is too powerfully ingrained to withstand reversal. Ah, well...another good idea undone by a slogan.

Don't forget to set your clocks forward tonight.

Maybe they're Camel Lights

Clearly, I'm not getting as much use from my Subaru as I might. My '98 Outback hauls, at most, a couple of hawks and a few dogs—miniature dachshunds, at that. But an unnamed Bedouin from the Negev Desert got two camels in his much smaller Subaru:

According to the article from Ynet News, the camels were being smuggled to the West Bank for slaughter as food. Photographer Amir Abu Jamma noted that "It is less expensive than lamb. For the price of four sheep, you can buy one camel." The real money quote, though, is this: "Once, goods used to be smuggled on camels. Now we are smuggling the camels themselves."

HT remchick, previously cited as "my best source for strange news out of North Carolina" (see previous posts here and here) but now apparently covering the Middle East as well.

NFA field meet, February '09—more photos

Just in: Some more pictures from the meet, this time courtesy of Pat Stull.

Stekoa on a rabbit.

This was a tough spot to reach for me...

...but not for Anya, who gets a sharp look for wandering too close.

That noise in the chimney isn't Santa Claus...

...or even the Grinch. It took a concerted team effort as well as a bit of trial and error, but Elaine Bachel from Raptor Recovery Nebraska, Steve & Kim from Country Sweep Chimney Service, and I finally extracted this barred owl (Strix varia) from a residential chimney down in Beatrice. [Photo by Elaine.]

A falling limb knocked the cap off the chimney several days ago, and the owl evidently fell in while exploring the new cavity that had suddenly appeared in her territory. (The damaged tree itself is a potential nesting location.) Elaine and the homeowners had tried last night to pull the bird up with a rope, but couldn't get her past a narrowing of the flue six or seven feet from the top. Today we tried to push her up using the sweeps' brush, but again failed to get her past the chokepoint. Fortunately, she took a good hold on the brush and Steve was finally able to pull her down far enough so we could grab her legs and guide her out past the damper.

Despite being worked up and down the narrow confines of the chimney like a bottle brush, she emerged without feather damage (most cavity-nesting birds have very flexible feathers) or other injury. And despite having been inside for several days, she was in remarkably good condition—a bit thirsty, but nowhere near starving. She did some bill-popping, but otherwise handled the ordeal with equanimity.

Nothing in the world could be as soft as the body plumage of a barred owl...

NFA field meet, February '09

The Nebraska Falconers' Association field meet was held this past weekend in Grand Island. Plenty of falconers attended the business/policy meeting, but (for reasons ranging from perfectly legitimate to highly dubious) most of them left their hawks at home. No accipiters, no falcons, just three bunny hawks. So in the absence of any real story arc—we caught five rabbits over two days and then went home—I'll just post a few photos (taken by me unless otherwise noted).

Bob Noble flushing birds for Hannibal, a Harris' hawk trained by Mike Cox, in an unsuccessful flight out of the hood.


Hannibal flying off a rail car.


Hannibal cruises overhead in search of quarry.


Happy Bob, with Hannibal on the fist and a bunny in the bag.


Reunion: Mike checking Hannibal's keel after the flight.


Hannibal's sister, Clarice, atop a brushpile. (Yes, the names are from The Silence of the Lambs.)


Clarice, still with a footful of grass and fur from a previous flight, launches again from Karl Linderholm's fist.


Flight photos.


Go time!


"Which one is not like the others?"—Stekoa in flight. [Photo by Mitchell Renteria.]

Cryptozoology

Spotted at a farm pond west of Syracuse, Nebraska:

Around the blogosphere

Observant readers will have noticed a couple of recent additions to the blogroll. Rebecca has apparently discontinued Operation Desert Dove (but I highly recommend reading her final entries there) in favor of the new Operation Delta Duck. I'm flattered that Flyover Country is a charter member of the Delta Duck blogroll, and looking forward to more California adventures as only Rebecca can tell them.

Another new blog is Trevor Herriot's Grass Notes, a prairie blog from a Canadian perspective. (HT John at Prairie Ice.)

Excellent new post at Accipitrarius Sordatus, as well as from both Dan and Gervase at Cheyenne River Updates here and here. Also new tazi puppies at Querencia, so congratulations Steve & Libby.

Here in Lincoln they're making a big deal about the upcoming 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth; less so about Charles Darwin's, which of course falls on the same day. Patrick has a great collection of Darwinian cartoons at Terrierman's Daily Dose, missing out only the Northwoods t-shirt that depicts the final step as a falconer with a peregrine on his fist.

I'm highlighting my neighbours' work largely because I've not been writing much at all lately, but maybe I can at least post a picture later on.