Baby Scrub-Jays and a Box of Tamales

First nestling of the season!

By now we’ve found over 50 nests!! Some of those were abandoned and a couple were depredated, but most of them are still active and many of them have eggs. The exciting thing is that a number of those have hatched this week – we have little scrub-jay nestlings everywhere! This means that in a week and a half we’re going to have a lot of work with banding all of these nestlings (we band them when they are about 11 days old). So the work is really going to ramp up now. The good thing is that we’ve found most of the nests that might be out there, but now it’s more tedious having to keep searching the same few areas for birds/nests that keep evading us.

I DID make a spectacular discovery last week (if I do say so myself) – I spent hours over several different days trying to find this one pair’s nest. I knew the general area because it’s where they kept popping up every time I arrived, but I just couldn’t find it… until I did. It was inside of an old rusted car, behind where the steering wheel should have been, inside the dashboard area! Apparently this is the first known instance of Florida Scrub-Jays nesting in a non-vegetative substrate. At least, neither my boss (who has worked with FSJs around 15 years) nor the director of the avian program at Archbold Biological Station (who has had a similarly long run) have ever heard of that happening. A couple of guys from my office actually think I can get this published – not a huge article, but a blurb or bulletin or something. How awesome! Anyways, that nest is really well hidden – it took me a good 5-7 minutes to figure out how to even check the nest contents once I realized where it was (the “car” is just a big heap of rusty, jagged metal and broken glass). Fortunately there is a rusted hole the size of my thumb off center from the nest, so I was barely able to peek through and see that there were 4 eggs inside.

Now, the nest in a rusted car was pretty dang awesome, but my mom’s surprise present might just have that beat. She told me that a package she mailed to me had just been delivered, so I went to the office and saw this huge box waiting for me on a chair. I opened it back in my trailer and found like 30 frozen tamales from the Tucson Tamale Company, which was a place we stopped on the way to Texas last year and Florida this year. Their tamales are sooo good! And now I’ve got heaps of them in my freezer!! Not totally sure what inspired this gift, but thanks, Mom!

Other fun things from the past week of work – I visited the friendliest scrub-jay on the range, passed by the burrowing owls again, saw a bunch of cool creatures, and found 4 other nests. One of those nests I managed to find despite a bunch of rain. There were not many territories that I had to visit, and since the weather was looking to be pretty crappy all day I just toughed it out. Fortunately I used my wide-brimmed hat as an umbrella by standing straight as a pencil under it while staring these birds down. For like an hour. I didn’t want to move and they weren’t going to move, so we just stood there staring at each other until the rain stopped. After a while the female flew to the nest to go incubate her eggs. I went in the direction that she disappeared and eventually saw her sitting on her nest, watching me. Creeper. But hey! I found the nest on a day when we didn’t think we’d find any nests.

Yellow-rumped Warbler with Florida Scrub-Jay in background

Swallow-tailed Kites

Last Saturday was my first actual outing to an event in town (not for lack of trying, for lack of events). Sheena and I went to Music in the Park at Highlands Hammock (that place I went to a couple weeks ago on my day off). We were excited to finally have something to go and do, but slightly less excited when we saw that we were the youngest people there by about 30 years. We still had fun though! I think the band was called GrooVus – the played a lot of oldies (shocking), but also some more recent stuff. It looks like they only do this once a month from March – May, I’m guessing because after May it’s too dang hot, even at 7pm.

On Monday night (my Friday night), several of us from the office went to see Divergent. It was a really good movie and highly recommend it! It was kind of reminiscent of The Hunger Games, which I happened to be re-reading at the time. (I say “at the time” because I finished The Hunger Games the next day, along with Catching Fire, and I read Mockingjay the day after that. Big weekend for me.) Now I’ll need to read Divergent. After the movie we went out to dinner at Chili’s where I paid way too much for a delicious fruit-filled margarita, a massive burger, and a mini-pazookie (or whatever the Chili’s equivalent is called). It was totally worth it. Of course, Sheena and I still had half a pan of my Bailey’s Brownies in the fridge, along with Easter candy we splurged on. But who can say no to a pazookie?

Okay, the Bailey’s Brownies – I’m starting to realize confirming that the rest of the US is inferior to California because no one else seems to sell liquor at grocery stores! (Only confirmed for Oregon, Texas, and Florida, but that’s basically everyone, right?) If you’re going to sell beer and wine, why not just include liquor, too? Why are you making me make a special trip just to buy Bailey’s? It’s hardly even hard alcohol! Not only that, but grocery stores restrict the times during which you can purchase the meager supplies of booze that they DO carry. I’m sorry, but sometimes you need to buy beer before noon on a Sunday. These are the things that will drive me back to California…

"Don't get shot."

This past week was super windy, which wasn’t great for our nest searching efforts. The scrub-jays aren’t great flyers, so when it’s too windy they seem to either forage under shrubs or stay perched in one spot and hold on for dear life (when it’s windy, it’s WINDY). Fortunately there were a couple of good days in there, so I was able to find three more nests! One of those was a pain in the butt – I drove into a territory, spotted one of the birds a few hundred meters away, and tromped out through the vegetation to see what he was up to. I followed that family for over an hour and tried to get clues about where they were nesting, but I wasn’t getting much from them. I lost them a couple of times, and after the third time (when they flew pretty far away) I was ready to call it quits. I made my way back to where I thought the road was, and there they were again! But this time they were pissed. I looked around and immediately saw the female sitting on a nest, right next to the road. I had wandered all around through the vegetation for a couple hours and she was nesting next to the dang road, 30 meters away from my car! Whatever, at least I found it!

The occasional storms meant that I only had good weather for one of my days off last week. I made the most of it and went to Highlands Hammock State Park about a half hour away. That park is beautiful! It’s located a ways off the main road, so there’s not a bunch of traffic driving by. There is a ton of wildlife there and a number of nature trails to explore, each of which seems to highlight a different type of wildlife (reptiles, birds, mammals, etc). It being Florida (and flat as a pancake), the trails were not exactly rigorous, but it was just really nice to wander around and enjoy the scenery. It was fun spotting the creatures that were hiding, but less so when the people I pointed them out to SHOUTED up the trail for their spouses/friends to come see. And of course after that, the group continued to follow me to see what else I would find… while shouting up and down the trail to each other. Fortunately they left a short while later, and then I ran into a park guide who saw me with binoculars and proceeded to take me around the trail pointing out interesting things. It’s great to stand out!

Saturday was the highlight of the week – it was opening day of turkey hunting season, which means there were a ton of hunters on the range who were eager to shoot at anything that moved… and I was going to be tromping around in the areas where they were trying to shoot things. Way to piss off people with guns. Our office manager sent an email out earlier in the week urging us to not schedule field work for Saturday unless it was absolutely necessary. I was originally scheduled to work that day, but didn’t know if that email would change anything. I showed up to work the next morning (Thursday) and my boss said, “Here’s your vest!” and handed me a bright orange vest to wear. I guess that answered my question…

The unfortunate thing was that I was the ONLY one in the office scheduled to work that day, so I was totally on my own. I still had a radio to call Rescue Ops if anything bad *did* happen, but there’s something reassuring about other people being in the office when the range is crawling with hunters. I went out that morning thinking, “Don’t get shot. Don’t get shot. Don’t get shot.” When I got to my first territory, I parked, acknowledged that I’d be totally fine, opened my car door, and immediately heard hunting dogs barking in the distance. Oh Jesus. Fortunately they didn’t sound THAT close, so I got on with my work (and found two of my nests that day!). The biggest problem I ended up having that day was not with the hunters, but a bull. A big, horny, pissed off bull. I was working on trap-training an unbanded scrub-jay by putting peanuts under a drop-trap propped up by a stick (real Wile E. Coyote stuff here) for her to get comfortable going into. This bird is super skittish because she’s the only scrub-jay in the area and so doesn’t have safety in numbers. It normally takes her a good 10 minutes to decide the coast is clear before she flies down to sneak some peanuts. That day was pretty windy, which didn’t help her confidence (harder to see predators when all the vegetation is moving), but an angry, GROWLING bull trotting toward us didn’t exactly help either. SURPRISINGLY she didn’t really go for it, so I had to wait for the bull to move before I could retrieve the trap and be on my way.

Red-bellied Woodpecker

My “weekend” this week was yesterday and today, which was decided when we realized they were the two worst weather days of the week. It’s good in the sense that I don’t have to struggle with uncooperative birds on these days, but bad in the sense that I was basically confined to my trailer yesterday. It was stormy on and off all day with super strong winds, so that ruled out going anywhere. I was able to tackle my growing To Do list, but I ended up eating dinner at 4:30pm, because doesn’t everyone eat when they’re bored? Today started off pretty gloomy, but there are supposed to be a few hours of sun in the early afternoon, so I’m heading out to the lake near town to see if I can lie out on the beach for a couple hours. Just have to keep an eye out for gators…

The funny thing is that I’m in shorts, flip flops, and a swim suit to go lie in the sun, and I look outside and there are people in sweatshirts and beanies, because at mid-70s it’s “cold” in Florida!

I've got SMOL but I'm not a SMOLdier

Burrowing Owl!

This week I had an extended birthday celebration! Strangely enough, none of the celebrating was ON my birthday. The night before some coworkers took me out to dinner at this delicious Mexican restaurant overlooking a lake. It was really nice of them to do, especially considering I’d only been here a few weeks. I had to work on my birthday (it was a Saturday, but there is usually no activity on the ranges during the weekends, so it’s an ideal time for us to be out in the field), but my boss was super awesome and gave me some little gifts as well as four gourmet cupcakes from some fancy bakery. We thought about them all day and then started shoving them in our mouths when we got back to the office that afternoon. They were really nice looking, and it occurred to me a bit too late that I should’ve taken a picture, but after ten hours in the field, the only thing going through my head was, “I WANT MY PEANUT BUTTER CUP CUPCAKE.” It was a good day in the field, though. We found four more nests and I saw ten new bird species, including Burrowing Owls, which are super cool. They look like little bumps in a field, and they have the brightest yellow eyes I’ve ever seen!

Birthday brownies and ice cream that Sally is eyeing.

After I finished work on Sunday, I met my new trailer-mates. Jacob is from Iowa and is working with the Grasshopper Sparrows, and Sheena is from Oregon and is working with the Red-cockaded Woodpeckers. They are both really nice and I think we’ll have a great season together! I only chatted with them briefly, and then I was off to Fort Myers to stay with my aunt and uncle for my “weekend” (Monday-Tuesday). It was a perfect night to visit because it meant I got to watch the Oscars! (We have a TV in the trailer but you can only watch DVDs, no cable or anything.) I now realize how much it sucks to watch live broadcasts on the east coast – they end soooo late! (I never thought I’d be saying that midnight was “so late.”)

Roseate Spoonbill in the background

Monday we had a relaxing morning and then drove over to Sanibel Island to go to “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge (ironically, where Sheena just finished a yearlong internship). It was beautiful (yet traffic-y)! They have a nice driving loop with a bunch of pull-offs to observe the wildlife. I saw a dozen different bird species including the Roseate Spoonbill, which is just awesome looking. I managed to get a quick peek at the only spoonbill out that day before he tucked his head into his wing. Perfect timing.

The next day my uncle and I shopped and hung out by the pool, and then I made the trek back to Avon Park (it’s about 2 hours from my place to theirs). I got to chat with my roommates some more, and then settled in to my usual TV show (or 3) for the evening. Thankfully I’ve finally finished Breaking Bad – as good as it was, it’s a creepy show to watch out here!

Sad, wet Scrub Jay

Wednesday was back to work - I went out nest searching on my own for the first time and I found a nest! I found another one on Thursday (despite terrible rainy weather for most of the day), two more on Friday, another one on Saturday, and two more today! I LOVE these birds! This is the easiest nest searching I’ve ever done! I think we’ve found nearly half the nests now – we’re up to 20 and there are 50ish territories, though not all territories have breeding pairs (some may have one breeder who is looking for a mate, or a group of helpers just hanging out, etc). This project has been going on for many years, so they know all of the birds who live on the property, where their territories are, and (generally) who the breeding pairs are. Of the nests we’ve found, a number of them are already getting eggs, so the season should be ramping up pretty quickly – still more nests to find, then chicks to band, re-nests of those that get predated, and monitoring the lucky chicks that fledge!

SMOL's nest

Oh yes, so the title of this post is significant because one of the territories that I found a nest in was called SMOL - all of the territories are four letter names that make anywhere from some to no sense (to me, at least). The birds in SMOL had totally tricked us as to where they were nesting, so we had been looking in the wrong area for days. When I finally found their nest, that song by The Killers got stuck in my head, but I of course replaced "soul" with "SMOL". Whatever - I got SMOL!

Other than work, I’m looking forward to exploring on my “weekend” (Tuesday and Wednesday, this week). I’m told that there is a really nice park not too far from here that I’ll be checking out – lots of wildlife and beautiful scenery. There is also a birding festival near Lake Okeechobee this week that I might head down to. I suppose it’s good to wander around at get exercise, even on my days off. Sheena and I TRIED to go to the gym today after I got off work (there is a gym here for employees), but things didn’t go as planned. It was a long day in the field but I was feeling good, so Sheena and I changed into workout clothes, got the gym key from the office, and wandered over to find the gym. (The Armory gets a massive sign on the front of the building, but the gym is this sketchy, unmarked brick building pushed up next to the tree line.) It turns out the locks had been changed out so we couldn’t get in. We were all suited up and ready to go, but no! How often does one actually take the initiative to go to the gym and then find out they can’t? Doesn’t one typically find any excuse not to go? Well, we were peeking in the windows but couldn’t do it! That’s what we get for trying to stay fit. I guess the solution is to never go to the gym again :-P (or, wait for Michelle to get the new key tomorrow).

I'll finish with a picture of some cute cows, because what kind of field project would this be if there weren't cows??