Morning Visitors - Breeding Plummage Edition

It's Still April 1 Centrall Daylight Time

Pre-snowstorm Visitors

It rained all day yesterday, & this poor little rooster got to thinking it was spring.

The object of all his fancy displaying.

Whopping Cranes

One flock is better than no flocks.

Travel

So I drove down to the Cities yesterday to see the Kid, Son-in-Law & The Twins. Also, I need to install the trim in the babies' room & the radiator cover/changing table. Of course, without my permission, they moved into the room, with all attendant furniture. That makes for a bit of a problem in installing the trim, it isn't that big a room in the first place. Kids, these days.

On the way down, I went past Crex Meadows, a wonderful wildlife area in western Wisco. There were, I believe, thousands of Sandhill Cranes in the harvested cornfields along the highway. Here are a few pics of the birds.

Bonecrusher

No, not a wrassler, but a great bird. I watched a PBS special that had this video of this bird dropping bones onto the rocks & then retrieving them for the marrow. It was one of those moments that joined many others in a file that showed humans are not the only thinking creatures on this planet. A tool using bird, I thought at the time, very cool.

Europe's immense bearded vulture, sometimes called the "bone crusher," boasts a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, plucks meals from avalanche debris, and breeds its chicks in the subzero temperatures of the wintertime Alps. Its gastric juices register a "1" on the pH scale, nearly pure acid. Seething belly bile is a necessity for a creature that subsists mainly on weather-bleached bones.
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Bone crushers are not especially amorous birds. The vultures are even more finicky about sex than food. They don't reach breeding age until age 5 or older, late for most bird species. They don't care much for one another's company, preferring lives of extreme solitude. They wheel in search of death over aggressively defended individual territories that typically cover 200 square miles of rugged range.
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"It's amazing to see these birds swallowing the big vertebrae of a cow, almost like people eating popcorn," Frey said.
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The bearded vultures lays eggs in mid winter in nests high above the tree line and densely insulated with tufts of wool plucked from the carcasses of mountain goats. The chicks hatch in March, just as receding drifts in Alpine meadows yield an abundance of winter's victims "packed in the snow like so many raisins in a pudding," as Frey put it. "This time of death for so many species is the time of plenty for the vulture."

Pretty Birds

Pretty bird found in Columbia.

We used to have a pretty bird in America, the Carolina Parakeet.

Maybe Woodpeckers?

Via RLK, thanks man, we get some potentially good news out of FL. It seems some researchers may have more info on the "extinct" ivory-billed woodpecker. Along with last year's maybe sighting, it's possible the bird, the Lord God Bird, may be living in places other than Cuba. Yeah, sure, how could a bird made extinct in the good, old, legal-to-torture USA still be living in Cuba, that evil, backward Communist state?*

After spending months in remote northwest Florida swamps searching for the ivory-billed woodpecker, researchers say they have seen and heard the rare bird once believed to be extinct.

But Auburn University ornithologists, who published their findings in Canada's Avian Conservation and Ecology journal online Tuesday, failed to capture a picture of the large woodpecker, which makes a distinct double rapping sound.

That lack of evidence means doubt about the bird's return remains.

*Infant mortality: USA - 7 per 1,000 (We rank 29th in the world.)

"According to the CDC, 75 babies die each day in the USA...."

Go here to check the numbers.

Cuba - 6.3 per thousand.

Life Expectancy: USA - 76.1 (year 2000)
Cuba - 76.2 (year 2000)

Literacy Rate: USA - 97%
Cuba - 96%

Go here for more interesting data on the two countries. Some of the figures in this link differ slightly from some of the ones cited above. They are minor difference, however. But the point is, the ivory-billed woodpecker has life in Cuba, albeit without a market economy.