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…