Here is a timeline video of Noni, Buttons and Bows. http://youtu.be/2iUJ3AnsYnA I just finished live casting them from the apartment across the road. Noni has a nest hanging from a small ivy branch right over a barbeque on the patio of an apartment. Luckily one of the apartment managers saw it and pointed it out to the tenant so he didn’t start up his barbeque and smoke the little guys. It was fairly difficult to live cast because I had to set up my computer in the utility room and string the wires, but with helpful management, it was made easier. Being on the ground floor helped but I couldn’t leave my camera alone for too long lest it get lifted.
It went quite well and I didn’t think I would catch the fledge on video, but as I was filming, the tenant came out of his apartment, as he does every day, but this time Buttons and Bows could fly and they didn’t waste the motivation. They took off and became fledglings. They are now happily flying around the treetops and getting fed by Noni every half hour or so. It won’t be long before they discover the feeders on most of the apartment balconies and start sucking up the sugar. This time of year, there is lots to eat for little hummingbirds.
I should write more about Alaska because it was such an amazing time. One of the great things about it was meeting Bob Armstrong. http://www.naturebob.com/ Bob has been photographing Alaska Wildlife for about 40 years. He is one of the rare people who got to retire early and followed his muse. He lives in Juneau overlooking the Gastineau Channel and spends his days investigating nature. He has many books out, chronicling all sorts of wildlife, from birds to insects. One of his most interesting books deals with natural connections. He discovers and describes the connection between various unlikely animals, insects and natural processes. He uncovered the connection between hummingbirds and sapsuckers. The sapsuckers tap holes through the bark of certain trees, like cottonwoods, where they eat sap, but the sapsuckers aren’t the only ones eating from the well. Hummingbirds also grab a sweet snack when they can. Then there are things that you wouldn’t think of, like why do mink go into marmot holes? It turns out that the mink is eating the larvae that grow in the marmot’s dung and in eating the larvae, inadvertently cleans out the marmots den by dragging the dung outside with it.
It’s the kind of observation that can only come through years of spending hour upon hour in the forest watching the animals.
I was lucky enough to have Bob treat me to a walk around the mountain top in Juneau, which is accessed by a cable-car tram and is full of tourists. Bob has a free lifetime pass from the tram company because he has added so much interest to the top of the mountain by photographing the animals and wildlife. Many of his photos are on display at the Tram’s mountain top station. When accompanied by Bob up the mountain, I was treated like royalty or at least part of the royal entourage. I don’t have many photos of Bob because we were always pointing out lenses towards the wilderness, but he’s probably one of the most content people I have met, and someone to emulate.
I am going to have to tell you more about Alaska later. Meanwhile life races on like Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes.
I am live webcasting Noni, Buttons and Bows, which live in an ivy bush hanging off the side of an apartment entrance across the road. Buttons and Bows hatched about May 28. http://youtu.be/-GPji-_hKLQhttp://youtu.be/cYfNOsZC_Bk
I am across the road because Flowers nest in our yard got destroyed. Flower has some time off now and I am not sure what that means for her nesting in our yard.
I also found Dawn sitting right in the same spot as she has nested 3 times before. Right above the walking path, that means I’ll have a nice bench to sit on while I film the chicks. http://youtu.be/NL4ovSI4EHo
I have been unusually quiet for a reason. I just got back from Alaska and working with the BBC to find and film hummingbirds in Juneau. In this age of strangeness, I didn’t want to alert anyone to the fact that I was going to be out of town to protect my home and wife from those who may want to know that kind of thing. I had a great adventure.
I got flown up to Alaska to work with some of the most talented guys in the industry. Alex Lanchester has been everywhere in his 10 or so years with the BBC as a producer. He’s made films about Birds of Paradise in Papua New Guinea and met headhunters! It’s a good thing that the BBC finds his head more desirable to have around then headhunters do. Mark MacEwan was the cameraman and you will have seen his work in almost any BBC animal documentary. He has chased lions through the Savannah, drank the ceremonial blood drink with Masai and been rescued from a charging elephant by Pygmys in the Congo. Talking to these two guys was like watching an Indiana Jones movie!
Mark gave me a choice of his business cards with images from his work, lamenting that all the good ones were gone, but I got a mother elephant cuddling it’s young and that’s a great image.
One of the great things about Alex and Mark, who have seen so much of the world’s diverse wildlife, is the reverence with which they hold it. Having seen the most fragile and the most robust species of animals, their over riding purpose is to get people to see the fragility of the planet and to wake up to our overpowering influence. By showing these creatures, we get to know them. When we get to know them, we get to like them. When we like them, we want to protect them. And we have to protect them, especially now.
So this was one of the greatest adventures I have ever had. I spent 11 days with a BBC Wildlife camera crew filming hummingbirds in Alaska. That’s my dream vacation!
I had sent up nesting balls for people to put out to enrich the nesting area for the hummingbirds and to see if there was any nesting action. We had a report of nesting activity a few days before we arrived by Don and Darcy so we went right there to look when we arrived. I set up the camera and upon review of the tape, saw quite a nice Rufous female pulling nest material off the ball. I watched that bird for a day, but given the impenetrable forest, decided to move to our next place, the Arboretum.
It was a city arboretum located a few miles out of Juneau and was home to a wide variety of plants in a beautiful public garden kind of way. Kelly and Meryl crafted it into a beautiful showcase of natural and imported plants, like primroses. It was a beautiful spot right on the water and it was home to about 4 or 5 hummingbirds and a sapsucker. It turns out that hummingbirds follow sapsuckers sometimes and feed at the sap wells that the sapsuckers drill into trees. It’s one of the ways that hummingbirds survive up here.
There were not many hummingbirds at the Arboretum, and I searched an entire two days in the woods and only heard one. Mark was set up to film them at a feeder but he was only getting one an hour. Finding a nest seemed doubtful.
Then we got a call from Anisa who told us that she had a lot of hummingbirds at her house. I went to investigate. Her balcony overlooked Gastineau Channel and offered a great view of Douglas island. Her balcony was about 10 ft by 30 feet faced south. And there were hummingbirds!!! More hummingbirds then I had seen since Costa Rica. Now we had a chance to find a nest and film some birds! I set up a nest ball and when we all arrived the next morning, it was nearly picked apart. Birds were flying in from deep in the rainforest to feed here and now, to get nesting material. I set out to find one. The forest consisted mostly of very tall mossy Hemlocks and Sitka Spruce. Lichen and moss covered all the branches and the ground. Trees and branches had fallen on this ground for millenniums and it showed. Many places, the moss hid deep holes or rotting wood which would grab my leg and pull me down. This was going to be hard. I tried to follow the direction of the birds from the nestball, but I could only follow them for 50 ft before losing them to the trees. I tried to find lower ground cover, like alder or ocean spray, with mixed success. Devil’s club covered most of the ground in devious ways. Devil’s club is a spiny plant that stretches long tendrils with spikes that whip up when you step on them. To top it off, the barb on their thorn has some kind of hook and toxin that causes things to stay under your skin and fester till you give in a dig it out with a needle.
Finally on the fourth day I found a nest. I was elated! I proudly showed Alex and Mark and set up the camera to monitor and see Mama. Unfortunately she didn’t show up. It was a new nest, not stretched out or weathered, but after a couple of days of hoping, I took a look and saw there were no eggs. They had probably been eaten by some other bird. Crestfallen, I continued looking. I tried everything, listening, watching nest balls, following and just plain walking in the woods hoping to randomly come upon one. I knew they were nesting, I saw them picking nest material. I never did find another. I think the large majority of them nest high in the trees. Also, the Rufous is a very quiet bird compared to the Anna’s that I am used to. They are migratory, instead of resident so they don’t seem to set up territories. They just seem to pull into town and set up camp. There was very little squabbling to be heard. Plus, I think the Rufous is overall a quieter bird.
Instead we focused on the story of the hummingbirds following sapsuckers. Hummingbirds in Alaska sometimes survive by eating the sap from wells created by Sapsuckers. This is a very valuable food source for them when the weather is cold and flowers are not around. In order to tell that story, Mark and Alex set up stumps on a table on Anisa’s balcony to mimic trees and designed a path for the hummingbirds to follow to get to the feeder. It’s like they had to run a maze to get their sugar fix.
Mark and Alex’s standards are amazing. Mark would shoot all day for 5 seconds of film. He told me once he trekked for 5 weeks through the Congo to capture 3 minutes of chimpanzee behavior.
Their cameras cost in the upper 5 digits and can be set to record up to 10 seconds prior so you can wait for the action to happen before you have to push record.
Everything is shot at frame rates like 1000 per second or 1500 per second and the clarity is amazing. Even on a sunny day, you would see Mark with a fill light positioned on his lap to make sure it was the richest image he could create.
On our last day, we had a treat by a sapsucker. Having followed directions to a sapsucker tree which long time naturalist, Bob Armstrong told Alex about, we found the friendliest sapsucker. He came around every 30 minutes and by the end of the day, we were able to be within 10 feet of it and it paid us no mind. It stayed around so long that Mark has year`s worth of footage should the need for sapsucker footage come up.
It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot. I am a richer person for having met Alex and Mark.
