Monk parrot hanging out in Park Slope. This picture would have been better if he was at PS321 or a stoop sale.

About a year ago some monk parrots discovered someone feeding birds on the roof of their brownstone on Third Street, near Seventh Avenue, my neighbors tell me. Now the birds are flocking to a tree on the corner of 3rd Street and 8th Avenue. Not building a nest, mind you, but they’ve been hanging around. (When I was looking and pointing at them, talking them up to passerby, a woman from the building across the street came down to talk to us about the parrots. She says they’ve been in that tree for five days. Another birder says they’ve been hanging around the Beth Elohim Temple a few blocks away.

In maybe 15 minutes I saw at least five birds. There are big colonies at nearby Greenwood Cemetery and Brooklyn College and all around the boroughs–and for that matter the US. Brooklyn Parrots keeps track and gives great tours (the next one is June 2) of the flocks, tracking the mystery of their appearance. The general theory is that they escaped from an airport shipment, but the problem is, this cartoonish shipping crate mishap is cited wherever the parrots live around the country.

Neighbors of the bird feeder were not at all delighted, like people usually are, with exotic green birds flying around their neighborhood. They were annoyed with the screeching. I pretended not to know that there are some people out there who hate the parrots and just celebrated their arrival with enthusiasm.

Where to SEE PARROTS

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Wet great horned owl chick braves an assault from a robin in Prospect Park

The pair of great horned owlets in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, are now flying around the Ravine, somewhat awkwardly. I hadn’t seen them in more than a week and thought they might have moved on, but yesterday, thanks to a bunch of crows, I got to see them again.

The crows pointed me in the right direction–several hundred feet away from their nesting tree. I saw one soggy owl perched on a branch, trying to put on a brave face to the mob of screaming birds. The crows took off, but he was still left with a robin–of all birds–yacking at him from a few feet away. He put up with it a while, then got spooked and flew. My nine-month-old daughter Ginger bounced and giggled as he flew; he’s big enough that even a baby can see him. But not big enough not to be scared by a thrush.

He moved over to another area, where he was still plagued by songbirds and started bobbing and weaving, as if to get a better look.

• Prospect Park owls fledged; Hawk parent nabs a pigeon …
• Great horned owl pair hanging around in Propsect Park …
• Brooklyn hatches its first native great horned owlets in a century

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Doss has some serious, boring inventions and then a side-line in goofy stuff like the face feeder, which he came up with after a hummingbird hovered in front of his red bird.  ”A hummingbird came out of nowhere and just hung there, two inches from my nose,” he says. “My immediate response was, I froze. I never forgot the experience. It was such a magical type of thing.”

Decades later, Doss took a professional welding face shield and covered it in a red pattern that hummers love. Then he put a rubber tube between the eyes to be filled with sugar water. The birds came. This isn’t the first attempt at a hummingbird helmet. This adorable video shows a little girl watching hummingbirds in the more popular variety–and initially flinching and scaring them away.

The face shield serves to draw hummers in (they love red) and to make humans confident they won’t get their eyes poked out. Hummingbirds are so agile, they’re not going to go bumbling into your face.

Doss says the tube was the hardest part to figure out. During the northern California spring, when three or four hummingbirds may be buzzing the helmet, he may refill it more than once a day. In winter he can skip a day.

The reason people are both fascinated with hummingbirds and frustrated in seeing them is their speed. They may only be there 15 seconds, but if they’re an inch from your eye, you can really drink up the details. ”You can actually look into their eyes. You can appreciate their tiny little feet. They have the smallest feet because they never walk. You see markings, so you can see this one’s not that one. You see them feed, then back up and look left and look right.” While the person wearing the hummingbird helmet can distinguish between individual hummingbirds, the birds are oblivious to which person is behind the mask. That means, once the birds in your yard get used to eating from a red helmet, they’ll feel at home when your visiting friend wears it or they see some other guy wearing a helmet 100 miles away.

As he nears 700 of the $80 feeders sold–mostly in the US and Canada, although most hummers are in Latin America–there’s getting to be a chance that hummingbirds will start to recognize the feeders, which will make them even more fun to own.

Check out the “face to face” feeder

Gillibrand says she is pushing for the goose cull this summer because ”according to recent news reports, LaGuardia and JFK airports saw increases in bird strikes of 28% and 53%, respectively, between 2009 and 2011.” Notice what’s weird here? Why is the government relying on news reports instead of their own data?

Unlike Sen. Gilibrand and her staff, I bothered to look up the FAA’s birdstrike numbers at JFK.

Bird Strikes at JFK

2008:  147, 2 involving Canada geese

2009: 165, 1 involving Canada geese. The mother of all birdstrikes, the “Miracle on the Hudson,” was from LGA.

2010: 220, 2 involving Canada geese

2011: 257, none involving Canada geese

2012: four, zero involving Canada geese

To put it in the terms Sen. Gilibrand uses, from 2009 to 2011, Canada Geese strikes at JFK have declined 100%.

The last Canada Goose strike at LaGuardia was in October, 2010, and seems to be just a dead goose at the airport since the type of aircraft is marked unknown. Neither of the two 2010 strikes at JFK were described as causing damage.

One reason the overall numbers are going up is that pilots didn’t report them before Captain Sully saved a plane full of people hit by geese. A 2000 report from the USDA (the agency that kills geese and wildlife they don’t like)  says airstrikes are wildly underreported. The study focused on JFK, where 87% of strikes went unreported.

After Capt. Sully, the USDA and NYC got together to kill all of the Canada geese at area parks every year. But, since it’s great geese habitat, they’ll have to do it eternally because more geese just keep moving in.

New Yorkers protested Gillibrand’s office Thursday. The argument: killing the local geese won’t really prevent airstrikes. (The ones that hit the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane was migrating from Canada.) And you can’t just kill off every goose around every airport. Canada geese aren’t even the ones that usually hit planes. A study of bird strikes at JFK found that 71% were caused by gulls and 10% by raptors.

So why target them? The campaign to get rid of Canada Geese has more to do with their guano being a nuisance on golf courses and park lawns than anything with airplanes. Long before they were linked to airstrikes, Canada Geese were targeted by the USDA for pooping on grass.

The wildlife refuge doesn’t want to kill the Canada Geese, which have recently hatched chicks, because they think their current program is working. Michael Gannon, an editor at the Queens Chronicle, did one of the most thorough examinations of the issue so far. Don Riepe, the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge guardian, who JFK’s bird hazard task force for 25 years, told him that they’ve already reduced air strikes through more thoughtful programs like habitat reduction.

Ken Paskar of Friends of LaGuardia Airport said he’s not worried about the wildlife refuge as much as a garbage transfer station planned for the end of LaGuardia’s runway. Also, he asks what Gillibrand is going to do with all the other birds on the Atlantic flyway that pass by New York’s massive airports?

Meanwhile, Goosewatch NYC has set up a network to document the goose roundups when the USDA comes to town this summer. Typically they wait till the geese are moulting and can’t fly, then round them up in a van at dawn and gas them. They want residents to call GooseWatch (567-694-6693 or 567-NY-GOOSE) when the USDA trucks show up, so that volunteers can come to the park to document the event, even if they can’t stop it.

In Defense of Animals has a petition against Gillibrand’s bill.

Read about how GooseWatchNYC stopped the cull in Brooklyn’s premiere park

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Great horned owl family in Prospect Park, Brooklynred-tailed hawk nabs a pigeon

The owlets in Prospect Park have learned to fly over the last week. I didn’t see them for several days (which could be my lack of skill or because they were hopping around on the ground.) Then Sunday I saw three of them napping on a branch in the same fenced area as their nest, but several trees away. I had some help: crows were mobbing them. The chicks huddled together and one parent tried to sleep on a branch a few feet away.

In unrelated Brooklyn raptor news, I saw a white flutter in the bushes, then the aftermath: a red-tailed hawk standing on a pigeon. All around robins and other passing birds sounded an alarm call. At first I thought the bird was a young one, but then saw it had a full red tail. It’s probably one of the adult parents in the park. I wanted to tell a group of kids that were getting an Urban Park Ranger talk about insects, but then thought they’d never want to hear about ants after seeing the hawk.

red-tailed hawk nabs a pigeon

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

SEE ANIMALS IN NEW YORK CITY

Painted lady butterflies–kind of a runtish, drab cousin of the monarch–are migrating through New York City. Look for mobs of the smallish orange and brown butterflies on cherry trees. (Update: They may also be Red Admirals,  Gothamist says)

One tree on First Street and Prospect Park West had hundreds of the butterflies, which migrate from Mexico, flitting around them last night. We went back to check what seemed to be the roost this morning. Nothing.

On the Prospect Park Audubon bird walk this afternoon, another woman said her backyard cherry was also swarmed with the little butterflies last night.

The painted ladies seem to be having a great year, thanks to wet weather in Mexico. KCET in San Diego reported last month that their area was seeing huge numbers owing to the bumper crop of “thistles and cheeseweeds.” The Urban Dictionary says that’s marijuana, but what they’re really talking about is a plant that looks like rhubarb, but without the red stems, and grows in vacant lots. You can see why they like NYC.

Even though the painted lady lives nearly everywhere in the world, we’re still not clear on the details of its annual migration, Everett D. Cashatt of the Illinois State Museum says. The Iowa State entomology department is tracking them. But they’re not supposed to stop much, so yesterday may have been our big, peak day.

Their more spectacular and easily recognized cousins, the Monarchs, are also plowing through the latitudes of New York and Chicago in the last few weeks, according to the citizen scientist map at Learner.org.

Read more about butterfly migration

Where to SEE HAWKS, OWLS & OTHER RAPTORS

Fuzzy great horned owl in Prospect Park

Got to see more of the owl family in Prospect Park in the last couple days. And hear first-hand some of the reasons to keep it all hush-hush.

The two owl chicks are still on their tree, “branching,” just testing out their wings with very short hops. Soon they’ll try to fly. Inevitably they’ll wind up on the ground. The only question is whether it’ll be behind a fence in the woods (fine). On a pathway (bad). Or in an open field (horrible). Their worst enemy is people who think they’re helping–they far outnumber people who mean to do the owl harm. And those do exist. Rehabber Bobby Horvath told me how some guy wanted to catch and sell a juvenile red-tailed hawk that fledged on Houston Street.

So today I got to talk with Peter Dorosh the head of the Brooklyn Bird Club,  who does a fantastic blog on birding in Brooklyn. Peter, who works in the park, says that just this year he had to pick up raccoons shot by kids in the park. The protection of owls goes back to 1980, he says, when kids also shot owls in the city. He really did not want Central Park birders invading the Brooklyn territory and another birder who happened on us felt he had to explain that he hadn’t shown my friend Courtney and me the owl.

Another birder said that kids threw rocks at bald eagles nesting in Inwood and that put an end to their nesting there. I don’t find news stories on any of these incidents, which, of course doesn’t mean they aren’t true. My friend Dennis Edge told me how he had seen teenagers shoot at rare birds at the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. He helped police catch them and waited around for hours, but after talking with parents, the police just decided not to charge them.

great horned owl chick and parent

I think the bald eagle program, which released 20 of WI’s excess bald eagle chicks over five years, starting in 2002, was meant to bring bald eagles back to the city after September 11th. And I believe it ended because Thomas Cullen, the falconer hired to raise the eagles, which were on platforms behind a big-ass fence, was investigated for their treatment and one death.

Earlier story on the owl

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Two Brooklyn great horned owlets on nest, through spotting scope

The pair of great horned owls nesting in Prospect Park successfully hatched two owlets.

The young owls, now several weeks old. You can see their fuzzy, tawny feathers on their nest or sometimes on a branch a few feet away on the same tree.  They’re “branching”–testing out their wings and feet. They’re probably going to take short flights soon. I hope they don’t end up on any pathways.

Last week I saw them them practice jump. They awkwardly flap their wings and are clearly thinking about flying. Birdweb says they’ll take a few weeks to learn to fly, but will probably stick around mooching off their parents until fall.

I got to see the baby owl faces for the first time this weekend thanks to a guy from the Brooklyn Bird Club, who generously pointed out a great spot to see the nest through the trees. We were taking a young birding friend, who was delighted with the view. The little boy kept saying “Oh my God!” when he saw their yellow eyes.

I appreciated the courtesy from the birder keenly because for many birders the first rule of urban owls is don’t talk about urban owls. The sharpest birders want to keep the find to themselves. Got to protect the birds from boys who might shoot them, they say. Or crowds. Or dogs. I personally think that the average non-birder getting excited about the owls are exactly what the owl needs to be protected in the moment and in politics from anybody who would harm them.

Turns out the nest was in the tree next to the one everyone was mooning over all winter. They seemed to fly out at dusk from the adjacent tree. Maybe that was just owl trickery. The real nest tree is the one crows voraciously mobbed for the last couple months. I’m not going to give out the locale, but there are now so many birders in Prospect Park, you may be  to find them by looking for them.

Birders, mobbing crows and blue jays, white guano on the path and a few owl pellets are the big clues, in order of descending frequency and usefulness.

If a report in the New York Times is true, it’s the first successful brood of great horned owls in a century in Brooklyn. (The Bronx is lousy with them.) The owls, which are already common in rural parts of the country, are staging an urban comeback.

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

Miserable bear and uncomfortable customer at Hachimantai Bear Park / Photo Courtesy of Little Akita WordPress

Two elderly women were mauled to death by bears who escaped concrete pens of a “bear farm” in northern Japan Friday. The specifics of a bear farm–animals are used both as cheap entertainment and for their gall bladders in traditional medicine–are unique to Asia. But these kind of escapes from private facilities are not. Too many of these sad places have horrific endings like the one we saw in Zanesville, OH.

The Hachimantai Bear Farm is one of two in Akita prefecture and eight in Japan, according to a 2002 report from the World Society for the Protection of Animals. Japan has a huge, totally unregulated market in bear gall bladder and some of the bear farms themselves sell it.

Yomuri Shinbun says that the farm opened in 1987 and has had a succession of seven owners and many complaints from animal groups about the animal’s living conditions.  They had 38 bears, mostly brown (grizzly) bears. There’s much confusion over how many were still in their concrete pens and how many escaped, but at least six were shot by local hunters after the incident.

Everyone originally thought that the bears escaped by climbing on piles snow. Mainichi quoted the 68-year-old operator of the park saying: ”They may have climbed over the fence from there [a snow pile]…We used to remove the snow by pouring water onto it, but we were not aware that parts of it were still there.”  But Japan Times now says a cage door was open. And one of the women may have collapsed before she was attacked. Also note: the two dead workers were 76 and 69. If I lived near there, they probably wouldn’t be my first choice for the staff.

A blogger at Little Akita WordPress described visiting the place, then getting depressed about their miserable lives in concrete pens: “After seeing those bears which live there, I felt sorry for them… They should be able to live in nature. I got very sad watching the bears which did performances to get food.”

The bears would do tricks, like showing off their bear paws, to get food from tourists. This isn’t just a backwater, shameful sideshow. Mainichi Shinbun says that 7,000 people a year still visited. The Akita Tourism board mentions it. These creepy places keep in business because people keep going to them not realizing how easy, or at least possible, it is to see them in the wild.

Bears had to perform for food at the park

Where to SEE BEAR Polar, Grizzly, Black, any kind

SEE ANIMALS IN ASIA

Lanny Chambers, who runs hummingbirds.net says hummingbirders have been debating what’s going on with this freakishly early migration of ruby-throated hummingbirds and the consensus is that most of the birds are still sensibly waiting down south to be sure they don’t get caught in cold weather. In many other species it’s the young male pioneers that are always the ones wandering out early and far, hoping to get ahead. All of the manatees caught way up north in recent years, for example, have been males.

In hummingbird world, the males head north first to stake out a good territory. “I would be surprised if people were spotting females north of their normal ranges,” Chambers says. They have no reason to go early. They don’t have a regular mate or family structure; it’s every hummingbird for itself. The females “pick males that are the orneriest, nastiest” birds defending good territory, he says.

Another hummingbird tracker, Learner.org, has done a very cool animation of the migration data. Even though they employs school kids as citizen scientists–and so have a completely independent set of information–they show the same thing as hummingbird.net: a very early start to a migration, but the bulk of birds still hanging back in the south until it’s a sane time to head north.

Chambers says that some hummingbirds probably try to head north early every year, but storms stop them. They just go hide in the bushes. Hummingbirds are tougher than their delicate frames suggest, he says. “They can take a night or two of temperatures in the teens,” he says. “Twenty degrees isn’t a problem. They may be uncomfortable, but they’ll be okay.” Their main food isn’t flower nectar (or the Kool-Aid like drink people put out for them); it’s bugs.

Don’t take their early migration as a sign of global warming, the apocalypse or even of a hot summer. Hummingbirds spend the winter in Mexico and Central America, so they have no notion of what the weather is up here before they take off across the Gulf of Mexico. Studies show they go by hours of daylight, Chambers says.  ”Ruby throated hummingbirds have been arriving on the gulf coast exactly when they always do,” he says. “This is a pattern that just doesn’t vary.”

Read about the hummingbirds that came early or never left at all

Check out hummingbird.net’s very cool advice on attracting hummingbirds and using feeders

Where to SEE WEIRD BIRDS (All the interesting birds: pelicans, puffins, prairie chickens, vultures, hummingbirds)

SEE ANIMALS IN THE NORTHEAST (NY, NJ, MD, MA, ME, NH, VT, CT, RI, PA)