Category: abiotic

Last week we had a string of really warm days. I took advantage of one of these gorgeous, sunny afternoons to take the power drill and the puppy and walk back through our fields to clean out the nestboxes of last year’s nests. (Raven came along too, but declined to help.) I’d done the same thing last year, at nearly exactly the same date. It really does take the nice spring weather to motivate me to go out and take care of the task, even though there isn’t really any reason I couldn’t do it earlier in the winter, or even in the fall.

I visited nine nestboxes, though we have twelve officially on our 30 acres: one of them I just plain forgot about, but the other two are in serious need of repair (or better yet, replacement) and I declared them out of commission for this season. The boxes are all, with the exception of two, ones that were already here when we moved in. In fact, they look like they’ve been here for many years already, weathered and covered in lichen as most of them are. It doesn’t seem to put the birds off, though, and until such time as I can get my spare cash and spare time to coincide, we’ll probably just make do with these.

The first one I opened is the above. It’s one that Dan put up for me halfway through the summer on a stake at the corner of my veggie garden. Being in a (relatively) high-traffic area, plus absent at the start of the season, it came as little surprise that the box’s inaugural residents were House Wrens. I love these little brown birds, so full of spunk and cheer. Growing up we never had them around our house. It wasn’t till I was in university and won a nestbox somewhere, and gave it to my parents to erect near their house, that we had our first wren move in. I don’t think they’ve been without one in their garden since, and the only year that I missed having one was the spring we were at the lake house. (We probably could have got one there, too, but simply didn’t have any boxes up.)

Box number three: another wren. (I’m going to take these out of order, because it tells a better narrative.) Wrens build very distinctive nests. They like for their cup to be at or just below the level of the entrance hole, so in deep boxes this means filling the box up with something. Their material of choice is coarse twigs. And they stuff the box with them. Sometimes they’re so tightly wedged in that you have to wrestle with it to get it out again, and when the material does come out, it almost invariably retains its cube shape. (The odd one falls apart. Must be a young bird: still learning.) Only at the very top, and usually tucked against the back wall, is there anything other than twigs: their small concave nest is woven with fine grasses.

Box number eight: a third wren. Surprisingly, there were only three wren-rented boxes among the group. I seem to have neglected to include the tally in last year’s post, but I think there were five, and our available rental accommodations didn’t include the veggie garden box at the time which, if not included in this year’s tally, leaves only two. There were definitely more, anyway. Possibly a couple of those from last year were re-nestings, second broods from later in the year, and so there really were the same number of wren pairs this year as last. Also, at least one wren moved up to by the house, where there weren’t any boxes last year. I find it interesting how the resident of a box isn’t necessarily the same from one year to the next.

Box number seven. This is a good example of that. Last year when I cleaned out this box the previous summer’s resident had been a chickadee. I was really hoping that the chickadees would reuse it this year, since I had heard a male persistently hanging around that area and singing. If they tried, though, then they were evicted before they could get building. Last summer’s tenants were Tree Swallows. They build shallow nests of thin dried grass, and almost invariably include one or more white or mostly-white feathers. The white feathers here are a giveaway, though I also remember there being nearly-fledged young in this box when Dan and I checked it late last summer.

Box number five: this one also fledged Tree Swallows last summer. But they were some messy swallows. In the previous nest, the nest structure, including the fluffy feathers, is still mostly preserved. In this one, there’s so much packed poop that the stop was just a solid crusty layer. Eeew. I’ve seen this in the occasional swallow box, and I’m not sure why some get like this and some don’t. Perhaps in boxes like this, the nestlings reach fledging age (which also happens to be the age when the parents stop removing the fecal sacs) just as the weather turns cold and rainy for a stretch, so they spend a few days stuck in the box before leaving?

Box number four belonged to one of our Eastern Bluebird pairs. This one also raised a full brood of chicks to fledging, which we got to see when we checked the boxes last summer. I sometimes have trouble telling the bluebird nests apart from the tree swallows, but the bluebirds are generally frugal with their feather use in comparison, and often make deeper nests – two or three inches of grass instead of just one or so.

Box number six: our other bluebird box. I was surprised and delighted to discover we had two bluebird nests on the property, since the previous year we’d just seemed to have the one. We found this one later in the season with eggs, which led me to believe it might be a second nesting. As with the previous nest, this one has a couple of inches of dry grass forming the base.

But the clincher was the blue-green eggs; as a member of the thrush family (same as robins), their eggs are robin-egg blue. It was by these that we knew for sure who was using the box last summer. Unfortunately, the eggs never hatched. Being a later nesting, with eggs at mid-June, I wonder if it simply got too hot for them and they died. There were four when we checked last year, but only three when I opened the box up last week. At some point, one of the eggs had been broken open; by whom, I don’t know. It would be difficult for any land vertebrate to get up to the box because the post has a wide baffle on it, and there aren’t any trees or shrubs nearby. We don’t have cowbirds or House Sparrows in the area that I might consider as possible culprits, either. Also, the other three remain intact. It’s a mystery.

Box number two had two residents last year. The top material is pretty obviously the work of a wren, while the bottom stuff looks to be from a bluebird. Bluebirds seem to be fairly non-confrontational tenants and don’t put up much of a fight when someone with a sharp tongue and quick beak (like wrens or House Sparrows) decide they want the space for themselves. This seems to have been what happened last year. When we opened this box up last June, the wrens had already moved in and had half-grown babies.

And box number nine seemed to be the same. The poor bluebirds seemed to have gotten shunted around a bit before they were able to settle into one at last. I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to keep wrens from ousting the bluebirds once the bluebirds have picked a box. Perhaps all you can really do is put up more boxes, so there are more options for everyone.

One of the hardest things to photograph is a track or print in the snow. All the same colour, with virtually no contrast. But I did my best with this one, tweaking it a bit in Photoshop to help bring out the details.

Dan found this near the tractor shed while out with Raven a couple of days ago, before we got flooded with rain. The area is at the edge of the fields that surround our house, in a narrow strip of deciduous woods that separates our property from that of our neighbours.

It was obviously made by a bird, most likely swooping down to the ground to pounce on something, although I’ve seen marks like this made by startled grouse that pop up from the ground to take off. There weren’t any tracks leading up to it, though, and it wasn’t close enough to cover for it to have been a grouse asleep in a snow hollow.

The size of it (see next photo) and these circumstances led Dan and I to believe this print was made by a Northern Saw-whet Owl. These little owls are chunky birds, their bodies roughly the length and breadth of your flat palm. They’ve got relatively stubby wings, short and broad. And they typically forage from a low perch, pouncing on prey that’s traveling on or underneath the snow.

Lending strength to our hypothesis is the fact that on a couple of nights just recently we’ve heard a saw-whet calling from the woods bordering our property. While it’s possible that the calling individual might be one that’s passing through, there are patches of ideal habitat on the neighbouring land, and saw-whets were recorded breeding in the region during the most recent bird atlas. Saw-whets, like most owls, are also early breeders, though not quite as early as some of our local species, such as the Great Horned. Saw-whets would be starting to court now, and find and establish nest sites. Eggs will likely be laid in three to four weeks.

Though these little owls will take a variety of small vertebrates as prey, their primary food item is voles. We have no shortage of voles around here, which like the wide meadow habitat. When food is plentiful, saw-whets may catch more than they need and cache some instead of eating it immediately. When they’re ready to return to it, they thaw it out by holding it in their feet on a branch and sitting on it, tucking it into their belly feathers like they would do with an egg they were brooding.

A pretty neat find! We’ll keep our ears open in the evenings to see if we can determine where the bird has set up a territory, if it is indeed breeding here, and then in a few weeks try to locate its nest cavity.

We’re getting a puppy! For the last year or perhaps even longer, Dan and I have discussed getting a friend for Raven. While we lived at the lake house there was a beagle down the road who would occasionally come by, and the two of them got along famously. However, she has little opportunity to see other dogs now; the only one in the neighbourhood that we see much of Raven is ambivalent at best towards, and most of the time our walks don’t take us down the road anyway (we’ve got plenty of our own land we can roam, where I can let Raven off-leash). Perth has no dog park, and the nearest one is nearly an hour away. When she meets other dogs now it almost seems like she’s forgetting the language. We thought that adopting another dog would not only give Raven someone to socialize with, but would also give her a friend for company during the hours Dan and I are working and to play with when we go outside.

After considering the temperaments and traits of various medium-sized breeds, we settled on Boston Terrier as being hopefully the best match for Raven, and when a litter came up for sale not too far from us we put our name down for one. I went to met them last week. The little boy above will be coming home three weeks from now. It will probably take us a lot longer than that to settle on a name.

As anyone who’s adopted a dog knows, there are a lot of expenses that come with it. Besides the adoption price, there are also toys and accessories if you don’t already have them, shots and neutering/spaying if they haven’t already been done, and of course puppy food. Fortunately, we do have most of the dog accessories because we have Raven. To help out with the other costs, I’ve decided it’d be a good time to clear out some old artwork I have.

These are drawings I did in 2008 for the now-published book Niagara Birds by John Black and Kayo Roy. At the time they were planning on illustrating all of the accounts with black-and-white artwork, I suppose because the cost to print b&w was less than that for colour, and they had a tight budget. They asked me to draw all of the warblers of Ontario, plus the turkeys (the latter based on a sketch I included in an electronic Christmas card that they liked). Final tally was 38 drawings. Then sometime during the manuscript preparation process they decided to go with colour photographs for most of the accounts instead – I’m not sure if they were having trouble finding enough artists, or realized the cost for colour wasn’t as much as they were expecting, or some other reason. In any case, fewer than half of my drawings ultimately got used. The original plan had been for the book launch to also be an art show of all the contributing artists’ works, but given that the book was mostly photographs, that didn’t happen either.

So long story short, I’ve got 36 drawings that have been sitting in my portfolio for the last couple of years (I already sold two to friends – can you figure out which species?). They are all light-resistant, waterproof ink on acid-free paper (meaning they won’t fade or yellow). The paper dimensions are 9×12 inches, but the actual drawings vary depending on the image – measurements given in the caption as WxH. These are all original, not reproductions. Each one represents about 6-8 hours of work.

I’m offering these at the fire-sale price of 1 for $40, 2 for $60, 3 for $80, or 4 for $100. Etc. Price includes shipping/postage. If you are interested in buying any, leave a comment here or email me (canadianowlet AT gmail.com) saying which ones you’d like.

The ones that were included in the book are indicated below the image. Two drawings (Northern Waterthrush and Yellow-throated Warbler) are favourites of mine that I’d like to reserve for myself, but would consider selling at actual value for an 8-hour work ($120). Larger versions of all drawings can be viewed by clicking on the image.