My flew into Edinburgh, Scotland, a few weeks ago and immediately took a cab to Dalhousie Castle and their falconry program. For a 9-day trip this was the one activity I went to the trouble of arranging beforehand. It was the thing my daughter was most excited about before and after the trip. And it was totally worth it.

Falconry Scotland offers you a chance to handle falcons, eagles, hawks and–get this–owls land on your gloved hand. We ended up showing up early, had coffee in the castle then came out to see the two falconers getting 37 birds out of their cages and boxes for the day. What was most delightful was how well the women knew each of the birds. Some birds wanted a cuddle, some keep-away from the keepers.

My daughter Ginger, 7, was particularly fascinated with a talkative barn owl. I mean, this bird chatted non-stop. I asked one of the falconers, Allie, if the bird was just hungry or what. No, she explained, that owl, named Jeanne, just likes being with people.

Eventually four of us went out in the field to do falconry. Again, the most amazing thing about this place is how much our falconer Allie knew of each bird and the back-and-forth she had with them. Allie explained the tail-swishing meant the bird was ready for flight. The Harris Hawk would easily–ever so delicately–land on each person’s gloved hand to eat the meat held between the fingers. Except when it came to Ginger. For Ginger the bird swooped around, every once in a while trying to steal the meat. Ginger laughed but held steady.

We gave up on Ginger doing falconry with that particular bird, who is sometimes afraid of children. Instead, Ginger got a fabulous consolation prize: she got to hold and feed the friendly owl Jeanne. I cautioned Ginger to keep her fingers away from Jeanne’s mouth, but Allie corrected me. This is a gentle bird and would only nibble affectionately. Which she did.

Americans don’t get to do a lot of hanging out with owls. Every once in a while you might see one at a falconry display (probably not flying) or, more likely, in a wildlife rehabilitation center. Birders have a self-important etiquette code of not revealing the location of owls in the wild.  But people are constantly wanting to see and even touch owls. (Japan meets this need with their peculiar owl cafes. Animal advocates say they’re skeevy because owls don’t want to hang out with humans or in cafes.)

Other places nearby like Elite Falconry actually go hunting. (They are mainly targeting game birds because rabbits are in trouble. Also, Elite Falconry breeds owls.) And there are even a few places in the U.S. where people can go do falconry (also usually at luxury hotels). But to get to become a falconer in the U.S., you have to go through many levels of training, permits and nonsense. So it is going to be a much stricter atmosphere. If you want to befriend an owl, best go to Scotland.

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Puffin swims by tour boat

Puffins are one of the oddest, most charming and hardest to see birds to see in the United States, but it’s getting easier. The birds spend almost all their time on the ocean, but for a few months they nest on three islands off Maine during the summer. Most of the action is about five hours’ drive Down East from Maine’s southern border. Eastern Egg Rock, by far the easiest island to see if you’re a human just an hour from Portland, now has enough puffins that it’s worth the trip.

Puffins once lived on six islands off Maine, but were nearly wiped out by people eating them and wearing their feathers. By 1901 there was only one pair on Matinicus Rock. Protection brought them back hundreds to the upper islands.  Since puffins return to the island where they hatched to breed, it seemed unlikely they would ever reclaim their old territory. But biologist Stephen Kress had the idea to transplant chicks from Newfoundland, where they were still all over the place, to Eastern Egg Rock. No one was sure what mechanism they used to find their way home or when it kicked in–was it when they hatched or when they swam out to sea?

Kress and the National Audubon Society started moving chicks in 1973 in what became Project Puffin.  The first adult came back started in 1977 and their numbers have climbed steadily to 148 nesting pairs as of 2014. That’s an all-time high, but it comes after an alarming dip for a couple years when higher water temperatures cut their food supply and nesting success dramatically.

Courtesy of Project Puffin newsletter

I’ve wanted to see a puffin in the United States, but didn’t really think I had much of a chance. When I went to book a cottage near Boothbay Harbor, even the guy who owned it and stood to make money off my visit tried to talk me into going further up north. “It is about a 5 hour trip from Boothbay Harbor, but it is so worth it.  You land on the island and get to go in blinds to [photographically] shoot the puffins,” he told me.  “The tours out of Boothbay will get you near to some puffins in flight but that’s about it.”

If I were travelling alone on a puffin safari, fine, I’d make the trek to Machias Seal Island, which Audubon calls the “grandaddy of the puffin islands,” and get to see puffins from a blind. That’s if could swing a reservation. And if a dinghy from the boat would be allowed to land, which it often can’t in the rough seas. But I was travelling with a reluctant birding husband, a toddler and two beagles. The best choice for us all was Cap’n Fish’s puffin cruise, despite a name that is embarrassing to say. They even let you buy a $10 ticket for your dog–which is a huge deal because it means we don’t have to leave one adult behind or chance leaving the beagles alone in a strange hotel (lest Huckleberry should cry.)

In preparation for the trip I read my three-year-old daughter Ginger the kid’s book Project Puffin over and over. She was so excited to see them. On the way out she started fussing and we figured she was a little seasick. Then she mercifully fell asleep.

We got to the island there were plenty of birds to see. Puffins, terns, guillemots swarmed the island. They swam in the water near the boat. They hopped up and down on the rocks, where each pair took care of one chick, hidden away in a burrow. I tried to wake Ginger up, but she wouldn’t have it. A puffin fly just a few feet over out boat, where Pete Salmansohn, the education coordinator for Project Puffin, told us about the colony’s history. When seabirds were first protected, gulls took over these islands. Part of the project was to remove the gulls to make way for puffins. And terns. Ginger would have been delighted; he’s the co-author of her puffin book. At any rate, we saw plenty of puffins doing all kinds of puffin things: flying, flying with fish, swimming, hopping, hanging out together. We circled the island twice and got a good long look.

Ginger woke up as we neared the harbor. She thought we were just getting to the puffin island, then started crying when she realized she missed them. Salmansohn consoled her with puffin keychain. I asked him why Project Puffin doesn’t start reclaiming more of the old puffin islands (Western Egg Rock, Large Green Island) He must get asked that a lot. Puffins were never really in danger of extinction because there are so many of them in Canada and Europe, he said. Terns, now there’s a bird in trouble.

Yeah, I don’t think Project Tern will ever really catch on. Does that mean that the whole Project Puffin was just something to give Americans our cute and charming puffins back and make us feel good about fixing a past wrong? A symbolic win for the green team? And I’m just a typical American, excited about the cartoonish puffin while the serious tern is boring people to death? Well, maybe.

The biggest threat to puffins now may be climate change. As Mother Jones reported last year, the water temperature has been rising so much in the Gulf of Maine, the puffling’s favorite fishes (hake and herring) aren’t around. There isn’t enough plankton to feed the fish that feed the pufflings. In 2013 one-third of nest burrows went unoccupied and only about 10% of chicks survived long enough to fledge, or leave the nest, on Machias Seal Island. But in 2014 puffin numbers turned around: 85% occupancy and 75% success in fledging.

The water temperature rise may have been a fluke. Maybe. We hope so. Because, if not, there’s no easy fix. Transplanting an entire colony of elusive seabirds will seem easy compared with lowering the temperature of the ocean by a few degrees. So get out there and see those cute puffins while you can.

Puffins hop near their nest holes, where their pufflings are hiding, waiting for delivery of fish and to grow up.

Puffins and terns fly over their nests on Eastern Egg Rock.

Allan D. Cruickshank Wildlife Sanctuary on Eastern Egg Rock

Cap’n Fish’s boat cruise out of Boothbay Harbor lets you buy a $10 ticket for your dog.

For about four years I’ve been tracking the cardinals of Prospect Park, cultivating a friendship with generations of them along a path in the Ravine–and all the time hoping and scheming to get to see the Elusive Cardinal Nest. This year and last I’ve found cardinal nests that failed elsewhere in the park. But this year I got to see one of the notoriously well-hidden cardinal nests up close.

Luckily for me this cardinal pair–one of three along the path behind dog beach–built their nest in a thorny shrub easily seen from the path instead of the vast area of fenced off woods. This is the first year I didn’t see George–a cardinal we’ve known for years for his jutting white wing feathers and eagerness for sunflower seeds. I whistle. George comes and gets sunflower seeds. And eventually, George, George’s wife and several neighboring cardinals, whom I think are George’s sons. He would castigate them for invading his territory and they would submit to him. But this year, no bird with white wing feathers. I don’t know if they fell out or he died. But now there are several cardinals in the area who know the routine.

Whoever the cardinals are that built this nest, they are part of George’s clan. I whistle, they come for sunflowers. Or, if I’m busy talking, they come and demand them by chirping loudly and jumping around. I saw one go to the nest, which is still pretty hidden despite being just five feet off the path. I’d see mommy cardinal on the nest. The dad would eat sunflowers and sometimes the mom would take a break and get some.

I didn’t get to see the babies until this week when they were almost ready to fledge. There are at least three. The parents preferred to feed them freshly caught bugs while they ate the sunflowers themselves. One day the mom was missing for a long time and the dad kept calling for her. Finally she came back. I guess she needed a break. By then the babies were stretching their wings and getting ready. And then this Friday they were gone. Good luck, cardinals.

A mother cardinal feeds her babies a juicy green bug.

Meet my friend, the pushy cardinal of Prospect Park …

One of the biggest points of the film is that Leonardo was born a bastard and therefore outsider. If he had been in a conventional family, maybe he would have gone to a fancy school and bought into the system. Instead, he taught himself from nature–watching animals–and experience and viscerally hated men who had wealth, standing and education but none of his creativity or charm.

The nature part of his thinking explains why Leonardo was so into animals. In the film he also speculates why dogs sniff each other’s butts (to see the class of food they’ve been eating, he guesses.) He looks at birds to figure out how humans might fly. And, though not in the film, Leonardo was a great lover and sometimes liberator of animals. According to one of his earliest biographers, he would buy caged birds in Italian markets just to set them free (and wrote animal fables, including one of a goldfinch who poisons her offspring so they won’t live life in human captivity.)

If you’re looking for some guy to play the smartest guy on the planet, Peter Capaldi is a fantastic choice, given his experience on Dr. Who and The Thick of It. Capaldi lets him be angry, funny and more human than you are used to seeing him. The documentary comes close to saying that he was probably gay and did religious paintings so as to stay in the church’s good graces after a brush with the moral police. Oddly, there have been a bunch of Leonardo movies lately, some of them action movies. Capaldi as Leonardo doesn’t fly, dance with fireworks or even paint. He just sits in a flouncy shirt and coolly delivers da Vinci’s own words from his diaries, written in a mirror that the Vatican recently revealed. The effect is that,  regardless of what you knew or didn’t know about da Vinci, you come away impressed and maybe a little creeped out.

Written ostensibly by “the mincing mockinbird”, illustrator Matt Adrian paints pictures of birds with a mean or crazy gleam in their eyes. He draws on their cunning and personal scheming. On owls: “A barn owl…once successfully impersonated a mailman for several months in St. Charles, Illinois. If you see an owl, or suspect someone may be an owl, play dead immediately…”

Sure, some of the birds are in nice stable relationships–until their brutal death. But most in the book are demanding, greedy, nasty, selfish, narcissistic. It’s more fun–and maybe more realistic–to see birds as individuals with creepy personalities than as automatons that can only be differentiated by their feathers.

It’s a short book that I laughed all the way through. And when my young daughter picked it up, fascinated  by the pretty pictures, I found there was virtually nothing I could read to her that wouldn’t scare the crap out of her.

Wood duck mother and duckling

Something is going on with nests in Prospect Park this season. They’re everywhere. You can’t walk 50 feet in the park bumping into some adorable tableau of chirping baby birds. Half the trees in the park seem to be brimming with exhibitionist robin families.
The big unusual nests this year are green herons and wood ducks (which are living somewhere near dog beach–but where they nested, I don’t know.)

Green herons are nesting on the lullwater and near the less-fancy bridge by the boathouse.

Green heron on nest by the boathouse. Babies are tucked under her wing.

Green heron feeds her creepy-looking babies.

Swans in the park, as if in defiance of a potential plan to wipe them out, are multiplying. They have two nests, one helpfully placed on an island by the ice rink to make for easy viewing.

The father swan normally spends his days chasing off other waterfowl, but he came and sat on the eggs with his wife. Apparently he was alarmed by a mommy mallard and her ducklings nearby.

Baby Swans

I havent’ seen barn swallows build nests on the boathouse yet, just in the tunnels.

Barn swallow nest

These robins are so desperate for attention they build nests at eye level, sometimes below. Still, they’re fun to watch.

Robin nest

Robin’s Nest

It’s treat to see any bird who isn’t a robin building a nest.

Catbird nest

Blue jay nest, sort of sloppy

Sparrows mating in the traffic nest pole.

Mystery Egg

Always a crowd pleaser, mallard ducklings.

Mommy mallard teaches babies to dive

Snapping Turtle digs nest

Cardinal nestlings

DAY ONE The first day I saw the cardinal nests. It took me 10 minutes to find the nest in a bush about the size of a small car.

Cardinals are about the easiest birds to spot and identify, but their nests are about the hardest to find. And I’ve been trying hard for a couple years. I befriended two cardinal pairs in Prospect Park, wheedling my way into their trust by whistling for them and giving them sunflower seeds. I call them my friends, but they have never revealed their nest to me, about 50 pounds of sunflowers in. (Mainly because their nesting area is over a fence I’m not supposed to cross.)

I read in a field guide that to find a cardinal’s nest you should just track the parents. No, really? What kind of useless tip is that? If that option were readily available and I was looking for a cardinal nest, wouldn’t I have done that?

But then a couple weeks ago walking in a different part of the park I saw a female cardinal screeching and heading towards a bush. Somehow not fleeing something. I searched the bush–about the size of a Cooper Mini, for ten minutes before I found it–and then only because the father came home.

Can you see the cardinal nest? It’s one foot in front of you. That’s how good they are at hiding their nests.

I had read that cardinal nests were hard to find because they are in the middle of dense bushes. That doesn’t even begin to describe it. I kept losing the nest even though it was at eye level. The babies got fuzzier and a little bigger.

DAY FOUR: Cardinal babies getting fuzzy and asking for food.

DAY FIVE: Cardinal babies getting pronounced crowns and feathers.

By the sixth day their eyes were starting to open. Now, I don’t know if this was the sixth day since hatching or just the sixth day since I found them. I would take fleeting pictures when the parents went away–often for stretches of 20 minutes.

DAY 6: Eyes just starting to open

I planned to go every single day until they fledged. But one day I couldn’t make it. The next day I came back and they were gone. It seemed to me that they were WAY too young to leave the nest. But the Princeton Field Guide says it can happen in just nine days. So maybe they made it. Meanwhile I’ve found another nest nearby with small, speckled eggs.

DAY SEVEN: Empty nest. Babies, who were clearly not ready to fledge, are all gone. Who ate them? Poor things.

Ms. Rueb never quite articulated the position of dog people of the park, so let me try. I’m a birder and dog person. If I could say one thing to birders in the park, it’s this: dogs don’t chase birds and birds know that.

Tracker Jon Young explains this in his recent “What the Robin Knows.” He can figure out what animal is chasing a bird by seeing how far and in which direction the bird flees. That’s because birds don’t flee more than is absolutely necessary–they can’t afford the wasted energy.

“The towhee, the catbird, the robin–all your local birds–know the difference between the housecast seriously on the prowl and the housecat simply walking home,” Young writes. “The birds easily pick up the difference in body language between the furtive cat and the rambunctious, definitely bothersome, but relatively clueless and harmless dog…One of those animals habitually hunts and kills birds; the other doesn’t. Taking into account the evolutionary pressures exerted down through the ages, the resulting instincts, the baseline issues and energy conservation, how could the robin not know the difference?”

The Brooklyn Bird Club put up deliberately misleading signs throughout Prospect Park trying to keep all dogs out of wooded areas.

Also, birders, please stop using the excuse of ground nesting birds. What birds are you talking about? It’s not like piping plovers are nesting at the boathouse.

According to Cornell Lab of Ornithology, six species in the east are potential ground breeders, but none of them exclusively and all classified as of “least concern” by the IUCN red list. Two, the robin and mourning dove,  even basic birder like me know, almost always nest about eye level or higher. Neither the junco nor towhee are in Prospect Park during breeding season, according to the data on ebird. The song sparrow rarely summers in the park. That leaves the brown thrasher, which only occasionally nests on the ground.

Part of the defiance of dog owners stems from the silly strategy used to enforce park rules. If there is a problem with dogs bothering birds in the woods during migration or breeding, then that’s where signs and enforcement should be. Instead, police flash their lights and sirens on the meadows at 9:02 a.m. in the winter when there is not another soul around. That’s like pulling someone over for going 55.5. That’s the easiest way to enforce the rules, but also the least helpful.

I’m trying to follow the rules and I always feel like I might get busted for a mistake. I didn’t even drop–let alone unhook–the leash with my two beagles for our first year in the park. They never go out of sight, nevermind offleash in the woods. Like most dog owners, I don’t do it because it’s dangerous for dogs. Park workers have yelled at me attaching the leash to something while I go to throw out a poop bag. I’ve had birders lecture me on rules I wasn’t breaking. Birders who glare at me just because I have a dog–on leash, mind you–are not improving their image as misanthropes.

The park is a shared space and dog people have to follow the rules. But I can’t be responsible for birders’ irrational fears. Bird guides say they want all dogs banned from the park–even though the vast majority of woods in the park are fenced off, so dogs can’t get in. I think Prospect Park is one of the worst places for the birder-dog people conflict not because of anything going on here, but because a few of the individuals in the birding community here don’t like dogs and conflate their phobia with damage to wildlife. 

The real threats to the birds in the park are fishing line (which ensnares about a bird a week, according to park staff), a feral cat colony, round-ups  by the the USDA, rat poison–all of which have been documented. How many dog-related bird deaths have their been?

Do you know what actually does scare birds? Large groups of people. People pointing long lenses at them. Birding group leaders yelling at dog owners. (Young says wildlife regularly flee from an area where people have emotional flare-ups.)

Birders who are great at identifying obscure species don’t necessarily watch animal behavior. Birders are continually amazed that ducks swim a couple feet from my beagles. Some birders threatened to call 911 when a puppy jumped the dog beach fence, showing naivete of both animal and police behavior. (The dog owner swam out to get the dog.)

Perhaps birders are confused by the idea of “bird dogs,” but dog is trained or bred to hunt songbirds. A few dogs (labs, goldens) are bred to retrieve dead ducks without harming them. Some breeds are trained to flush (spaniels) or point at (pointers) gamebirds birds. All these dogs are bred and trained specifically not to harm the birds.

Dogs chase squirrels. As a wildlife rehabilitator who treats squirrels, I feel extra outrage at people who let their dogs kill them for fun. There are only a handful of dogs in the park who have actual hunting experience. Here’s how one coonhound named Smokey showed it: he frantically uncovered a hole where a family of rabbits hid. He seemed annoyed no one wanted to do anything about them. I’m sure there are some dogs–whose prey drive is excited by birds birds who bouncing on the sidewalk–mainly pigeons. 

The Brooklyn Bird Club is rallying for more signs. Years ago they installed intentionally misleading signs throughout the Ravine woodland–a dog with a slash through it–that only in small print said dogs must be off-leash. This is the worst kind of nature lover–the misanthrope who pushes other people away from wildlife, claiming it as their exclusive domain. I’m all for people self-policing the park and keeping wildlife safe.

The cost of this absurd obsession isn’t just to dog owners. The police and Prospect Park Alliance are wasting what little resources they have on leash laws while, as a parent, I regularly have to battle with cyclists who won’t stop a the park’s red lights even for a mom with a stroller.

Some moms and I started a petition to get better bike signs and enforcement. The Prospect Park Alliance is reluctant to put up any signs telling bikers to stay off sidewalks because, Eric Landau, says they have to balance the needs of everyone.

I’m teaching my young daughter Ginger to be a birder. She already knows many birds by sight and sound and knows that blue jays like to squawk at hawks. She knows individual birds and gets excited to see “my cardinal friend.” I want her to be like the best birders in the park–the ones that get other people excited about what’s out there.

UPDATE: The Prospect Park Alliance now says they put up the signs of the dog with the Ghostbusters-like slash through it. Contrary to what a BBC member claimed proudly. The Alliance says they’re putting up new signs that clearly show a green circle with a dog on leash compared with a slash-circle with a dog off-leash.

Peacock runs away from zoo workers in the Vale of Cashmere

Two peacocks broke out of the Prospect Park Zoo overnight and explored Brooklyn’s biggest park, setting off a footchase and spectacle that led them across busy Flatbush Avenue and into the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Zoo workers said the naughty peacocks had just been given the chance to go free range at the zoo, which had been keeping them penned up in the smallish aviary. Also, it’s breeding season, so the males are showing off and looking for ladies.

The morning census showed two (male) of the nine peacocks were missing. Someone called in after spotting them in the park. Around 9:30 crowds gathered around to see one peacock in a tree on the Long Meadow and one in a tree by the natural play area. People stayed back, especially if they had dogs.

One peacock flew over cyclists and runners to the play area, where children were delighted. Oddly, other birds paid no attention. No blue jays or crows mobbed them. The zoo workers didn’t have any special equipment, thinking that it would be easy to catch the birds once they were on the ground.

Nope.

Once one bird flew, it walked into the Vale of Cashmere. Only fitting the ostentatious bird would be drawn to the fanciest part of the park. Two workers tried to pen in the peacock with their jackets. He got away.

At some point I ended up face to face with a peacock on a path. I stopped, not wanting to move him further. But then a zoo worker came and he was on the run again. I got worried because it was just one worker following the bird on foot, heading down a path that would cross the out-of-control cyclists on East Drive. So I tried to head him off, but he turned another way anyway. Two workers almost caught him near a fence, but again that peacock was too fast. And they had no net.

I worried he would end up in traffic at Grand Army Plaza, but then I saw people excitedly taking pictures and pointing at trees across Flatbush Avenue in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And this wasn’t just the usual crowd of serious birders, who were out in force for warbler migration, but, as usual, pretty much unmoved by a big fun bird.  Zoo workers saw them in the garden, too, so I assume the chase continues.

The birds should be fine–so long as they stay away from traffic, cats and dogs. A few roam around by St. John the Divine and do just fine.

At first things did not look good. A ranger said no one had seen any of the snowy owls since Thursday when a group of birders got too aggressive and scared two owls off. She said the grassy areas off the closed runways were the most likely place to see one. The fields have a depressing lot of white plastic  bags blowing around, all of which can be mistaken for owls.

No, don’t worry, there was no one out there to shoot them. The airport itself is only sort of in use as a training ground; it’s mainly a park. So they’re pretty safe here from planes and the Port Authority, which had taken up blowing them to bits with a shotgun last month, the Daily News Reported. The killed three of these almost mythical birds before the ensuing outrage got them to stop. A record number of snowy owls are spending the winter all down the east coast; the leading theory is that the owls population surged along with the lemmings’ population.

The park workers seemed quite protective of the owls. The ranger warned me not to walk on the grass and park my car away from whatever side they might be on. My husband, daughter and I walked around for an hour or so, seeing nothing more interesting than a couple dozen Brandt geese. We saw plenty of people cruising around also looking for the snowy owls. Then we gave up and turned around.

As we were leaving I saw a white blog on a a field right off the old runways. I kept expecting the blog to turn into a plastic bag or gull, but as we got closer it reashlly started to look like an owl. Just as I got out of my car, a car and van full of birders with showy cameras pulled up. Then other cars, realizing what was going on, pulled over to get in on the show.

We all gleefully watched the owl until we got too cold. All About Birds says they “do a lot of sitting.” They certainly do. This bird, I think a grown female from her brown feathers, did not move her feet in half an hour. She turned her head. She looked that the police helicopters that kept buzzing over. She bobbed her head and groomed herself. But she sat put.

So if you count just the last five days, you had a 40% shot of seeing one of if you went out there. If you’re there when someone else knows it’s there, odds are you’ll see it.