Parrots and Palms

Christian churches throughout the world celebrate Palm Sunday by distributing palm fronds to the faithful. In Columbia, the palm of choice is the national tree, the Quindío wax palm. Harvesters typically cut down the entire wax palm tree, including some that are 200 years old. They then strip the palm of fronds, and sell the fronds for church use.

This is bad news for Colombia’s critically endangered yellow-eared parrots, which nest only in the Quindío wax palm and also eat its fruit. The yellow-eared parrot looks something like a green and yellow macaw. Its name comes from yellow ear patches that are part of a mask-like band of yellow across its head. There are only about 660 of the parrots left.

The conservation campaign to save the parrots and the palms may be the most successful in Columbia’s history. The country banned the harvest of wax palms, and even rebel guerillas enforce the sanction. Thanks to the palms and the parrots, in Columbia today celebrating the environment has become a part of Easter.

A similar campaign began this year in Ecuador to preserve that country’s wax palms and its increasingly-rare golden-plumed parakeet.

This year Palm Sunday is on April 1.

Snow Day

This winter, I have been treated to an amazing sight several times a week. A barred owl and a red-tailed hawk have been hanging out near one of the farms down the road from my house.

They perch in trees near the road or on the powerline that overlooks the pond. (I’m guessing that the fact that it overlooks a pond is just a coincidence. Fields surround the pond.)

I don’t recall seeing a hawk in my neighborhood over the winter, but this has been a very unusual winter: it was warm until the end of January. We had some snow, but it barely covered the ground.

I suspect the hawk hung around because the mice and voles in the field were easy pickings with not enough snow to hide under. Think about it – in winter, even the grass is mashed flat on the ground. There were not many places for even a mouse to hide.

And yes, after the Valentine’s Day Blizzard, that is “were easy pickings.” No more.

We had less than two feet of snow here, but that is still plenty of room for a mouse or vole to tunnel in and stay safer from hawks and owls than the bare ground.

It has definitely been a mixed winter for small rodents. There have been plenty of nuts and seeds for them to munch on, but until last week, few places for them to hide from their predators. I guess it’s been a good winter for eaters, but a poor winter for the eaten.

I have seen the owl since the big snow, but not the hawk. Perhaps I have just missed the hawk, since I’m not spending as much time driving up and down that road as I usually do. Or perhaps the hawk has flown off in search of a snowless field somewhere else, somewhere where the balance still favors the eaters over the eaten.

Pick-up Sticks, Bald Eagle Style

On a recent Sunday morning I found my self perched on the side of a hill overlooking the Connecticut River.

Two Audubon volunteers and two Vermont Fish and Wildlife employees were there to look for sticks. Specifically, they were there to look for sticks between one inch and three inches in diameter, and one foot to eight feet long. Sticks of this size are what bald eagles use to make their nests.

A pair of bald eagles had nested on the hillside last summer. They were the first pair of bald eagles to successfully nest in Vermont in at least 50 years, and possibly more. But in the fall, the towering pine that held their nest fell. Bald eagles can take an entire summer to build a nest. The Fish and Wildlife department was eager to keep the eagles in Vermont (tempting nest sites lie just across the river in New Hampshire) and to keep this pair nesting to help restore bald eagles to the region.

The two Fish and Wildlife employees used their chainsaws to remove some saplings. Raccoons had raided the previous nest, perhaps by climbing similar saplings. One Audubon volunteer scoured the ground around the nest site for sticks of the desired size. The other went to the top of the hill where fallen tree limbs had accumulated – partially due to logging, and possibly due to wind at the edge of a clearing.

It was time for a little participatory journalism.

I climbed the hill and found piles of tree branches of the correct size. But how to move them to down the hill to the nest site?

First, I tried the obvious. I picked up one branch, about six feet long and two inches in diameter and walked down the steep slope. It was tough going. The branch got caught in the trees I passed. Walking with the large stick threw me off balance.

I tried to imagine myself as an eagle, trying to fly with this strange load. Would my grip be stronger as an eagle than as a human? I suspect it might be, to grasp flailing fish. How difficult would lifting this stick in the air be, even if I had a seven foot wingspan? I could only imagine myself in need of a snack and a nap when I was done.

It’s no wonder to me that the eagles can take an entire summer to build their nest.

Top of the Mast

I was jogging not too long ago, when I saw the road was covered, in one small section, with small, triangular nuts. I stopped and scooped up a handful. Beechnuts. I put them in my pocket to show my children.

There are plenty of beech trees in this corner of the world, but mostly what I see on the ground are their prickly, three-part husks. The nuts themselves are too precious. They are gobbled by bears and turkeys, stored away by squirrels and mice.

The only time I ever see a handful of beechnuts is when I discover the food cache of some mouse that has gotten into my house. (Unfortunately, the caches I find are usually in the pocket of shorts that I’m taking out of winter storage.)

Piles of beechnuts on the road? Surely, this is a good mast year.

Mast is the berries and nuts eaten by forest animals. The berries are “soft mast.” The nuts – acorns, beechnuts, butternuts, even maple keys and pine seeds – are called hard mast. When you hear or read just “mast,” it usually means the nuts.

Most years trees produce a few seeds. Some years they produce almost none. But every few years there is a bumper crop. In a good mast year bears don’t raid garbage cans as much. Populations of mice and squirrels boom. Living is easy for nut-eating forest creatures, and the impact ripples throughout the ecosystem.

But squirrels also have a taste for eggs and young birds. When their population booms, bird populations suffer. You can read more about this phenomenon on the Vermont Institute of Natural Science blog. The scientists there have observed this first hand.

Life pulses through the forest with good mast years and bad. The scary thing is that tree diseases are taking a big whack at nut-bearing trees. The American chestnut is all but lost, wiped out a blight caused by a fungus that was probably imported to this continent through human trade.

Back in the day the chestnut was a vital source of mast for forest creatures. A keystone species. Now it’s the butternuts, who suffer from a canker, also caused by a fungus, also believed to be imported, that are being wiped out.

Beeches are prone to beech bark disease, which doesn’t kill them, but may cut down on the number of nuts a tree produces.

I seem to have written myself into a corner. This post has sat on my harddrive for two weeks and I haven’t been able to come up with a good ending. Consider this the end for now, with a good ending to come later.

Parliament of Owls, Adjourned

We started hearing the owls about five or six years ago. I’m not talking about a single owl, hooting in the distance, briefly. We had always heard those.

There was an owl hooting near the kitchen window. Another on the other side of the house, beyond our bedroom window. An owl behind the house. We would hear at least one of them hoot at least once a week.

We heard them in all seasons: winter, as expected. Barred owls stake their territories and mate during what in the rest of the world is early spring, but what is still winter on this hill. But we also heard them as the trees leafed out in spring, in the heat of the summer, as the leaves changed in the fall, and in the dreary “stick season” between leaves and snow.

We would hear a single owl hooting. Or they would call to each other from each side of the house. Or we would hear the one near the bedroom calling to an owl farther off – on the other side of the road.

They were barred owls. Once I heard a hooting that I thought could be a great horned owl, but just that once. The rest were barred owls giving their, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all,” call in all its variations.

One night this summer it sounded like all the local owls had gotten together – for a party or a fight, I’ll never know. There was hooting, howling and screeching. They sounded as much like monkeys as they did like owls.

After we had had owls as our nightly companions for a few years, my husband noticed that the red squirrel that nested in our yard had gone. No other red squirrel had taken over her territory.

Had the squirrels become a snack for the owls? It seemed possible. We could only hope that the owls had reduced our abundant mouse population as well.

Then the blue jays returned. I have not heard so much as a single hoot since. Blue jays will mob owls and hawks, surrounding them, calling at them, and chasing them away.

Have the blue jays run the owls off?

Also, along with the blue jays, we now seem to have a red squirrel again as well. Could it have happened so quickly? The jays pestering the owls into leaving, and a red squirrel retaking the old territory now that it is safe from owls?