Baltimore Orioles in the dead of winter!

A column in today's Evansville (IN) Courier & Press reports on some January Baltimore Oriole sightings:

http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/jan/31/extreme-weather-keeping-bird-watchers-on-their/

Wow. That's noteworthy! Brock's Birds of Indiana mentions just one January record for Baltimore Orioles:

"Although most winter reports occur in December (eight records), one January and four February records also exist."

Birds jamming on electric guitar

Birds jamming on electric guitar!

Cool YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kz8Nxb-Bg

My all-time favorite song about birding/birdwatching

There have been quite a few pop/rock songs about birds, but I can’t recall too many about birding/birdwatching.

When I lived in Urbana, IL, there was a local band called Hum. They had a national radio hit in the 1990s, a song called “Stars”. But my favorite Hum song is titled “Why I Like the Robins”. It’s about someone waiting for migrating birds to return from the south.

The song begins with the following lyrics:

The distance outside of you comes into focus, collapses away lovingly
Hands to the glass and eyes to the sky and glued to the south, she waits to see
She's looking for birds she met last fall
Who said they would come back different than all
She's waiting for six who know about sound
Who promised to come back upside down

Great band! Great song!!

If you’d like to listen to “Why I Like the Robins”, go to the following URL and click on the “play” arrow in the upper right hand corner:

http://www.last.fm/music/Hum/You%27d+Prefer+an+Astronaut/Why+I+Like+the+Robins

"Turkeys", a poem by Galway Kinnell

Wild Turkeys are one of my favorite bird species. There are a LOT of them near my present home in southern Indiana. And for two years there was a flock of turkeys in my neighborhood in Urbana, IL. I wrote a Thanksgiving essay about this latter group of turkeys that appeared in the 11/29/09 edition of the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette: http://web-miner.com/turkeys.pdf

Anyway, I was reading through the the January 18 issue of the New Yorker and stumbled across a poem about one of my favorite birds. Thought I would share it with you all:

"Turkeys", a poem by Galway Kinnell
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/01/18/100118po_poem_kinnell

UK's Big Garden Birdwatch to assess impact of harsh winter

This weekend the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds is conducting its annual Big Garden Birdwatch (http://www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch/). People across the UK will devote an hour to counting the birds in their gardens (i.e., yards), and reporting the results to the RSPB.

The big buzz in this year’s Birdwatch has to do with weather. The UK has experienced its worst winter in 30 years. The Birdwatch may show how the harsh winter has affected wildlife. As a writer in the Independent notes: “The results are likely to give the first true indication of the scale of winter mortality among the commoner songbirds which visit gardens, particularly the very small species which are especially vulnerable to cold, such as long-tailed tits and wrens, and perhaps robins.”

Here are a few newspaper articles that discuss this weekend’s Big Garden Birdwatch in the context of the UK’s harsh winter:

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/experts-fear-count-will-reveal-a-deadly-winter-for-birds-1880890.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/jan/27/rspb-big-garden-birdwatch

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/7102138/Woodcock-and-snipe-stray-into-gardens-after-cold-snap.html

British bird-feeders may be splitting species

From New Scientist magazine:

"The friendly bird-feeder could be an evolutionary force to be reckoned with. British people who feed birds are contributing to the evolution of a whole new species of blackcap, new research suggests."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427374.700-british-birdfeeders-may-be-splitting-species.html

If you think a crow is giving you the evil eye…

"Wild crows can recognise individual human faces and hold a grudge for years against people who have treated them badly. This ability – which may also exist in other wild animals – highlights how carefully some animals monitor the humans with whom they share living space."

See: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18429-if-you-think-a-crow-is-giving-you-the-evil-eye.html