First Monitoring Outing

We waited till late afternoon before we  both felt brave enough to take a shot at doing the first nestbox monitoring.  (What with the nutso weather, hail, rain, snow, hail again, rain again, sunshine for a while.)  We've got six nest boxes put up either on Dryad Ranch or on adjoining neighbor's places and we were eager to see if any birds had decided to check them out.

We gathered up the ladder, the clipboard and monitoring data sheet, a long pole and a specially-made plug for the nest hole and headed out.  We didn't see evidence of kestrels, but two of the boxes had evidence of another species, probably starlings, and as we approached a third, we saw a bird fly away from the vicinity of the box.  We are leaning strongly toward thinking it was an owl of some sort, possibly a Western Screech-owl.  That box had definite signs of interest, with a depression in the wood shavings we'd placed in it, and no evidence of grass or sticks that would indicate starling activity.  The other three boxes - no signs of bird interest yet.

I also got out and about before lunch to do a decent fungus hunting foray in between raindrops and was gratified to find some.  It has been a very disappointing year for fungus because of the lack of rain and I didn't want to let a good opportunity go to waste.  Of course, tomorrow would probably be even better, but alas, I'll be trundling off to work in the a.m.

Here is a shot of our pretty landscape this morning from the top of Ant Hill:

And of course!  What you were waiting for, the requisite fungus shot.  This little darling was found in a crevasse in a big downed pine not far from Altar Rock.

California Farmland

One of the joys of doing the nest box work was being outside in the (mostly) beautiful spring weather, in the range and farm land of our beautiful state.  I am fascinated on a regular basis by the fruit orchards so common as we go about the back roads.

Nest Boxes

The last several weeks have been All Kestrels All the Time.  Yesterday, Dino and I installed the last of a total of 79 nest boxes designed to attract American Kestrels.  Dino has been working non-stop on this project since December and we were celebrating yesterday evening for sure.

Dino got some great help from quite a few other volunteers from the local Audubon Society, hosting work parties in our shop building to manufacture the boxes, not to mention assistance in erecting the metal poles and nest boxes in the various locations around Madera and Merced counties where the boxes were placed.

It was really a lot of work, but the hope is that the boxes will attract a multitude of kestrels in these open grasslands areas where there are few naturally occurring nest cavities they can use.  We did hear the other day from a fellow Audubon member that she had seen a male kestrel on one of the first boxes that got put up, so fingers are firmly crossed.

The boxes will be monitored through March and April, possibly into May, meaning that volunteers will visit each nest box every couple of weeks to see if it is being used for nesting, which species is using the nest, how many nestlings hatch and so on.  The data will be used by the Peregrine Fund which provided some funding for purchase of the nest box materials, in an ongoing project they are starting this year to study kestrels.

Pig Hill: Aptly Named

Much of my weekend enjoyment seems to take place on the walks we take.  Last Sunday, I ended up taking two. The first I accompanied Dino to the mailbox at the red gate, a little over 3 miles. And then after I helped with some shop building/storage container organizing, I made good on my threat to do a Pig Hill hike. We'd gotten talking about good walks that get the old heart rate up and I realized I hadn't done one of those in a while. It's a good steep hill - not a cliff or anything but a decent challenge.

Just as I started up, right where the field starts sloping upward, under a big oak tree I spotted something white that looked suspiciously like bones. I always check those out. As I got closer, I could see it was a skull and initially I thought it was a horse. But as I kept looking, it was too small to be a horse, and then I saw: tusks!  How appropriate for Pig Hill. I finished my walk up and back, then scouted around the area to see if I could find anything else of the skeleton - no. I carried it home - four pieces, top, jaw and the two tusks which had fallen out. I stuck it in a bucket of dilute bleach and found an old scrubber and washed it off nicely. 

I didn't have time during the week to do any photography, but come yesterday morning as soon as I had some decent natural light coming in, set to work. 

I'd Rather Be Hiking. Also, #91!

I just got word from Dino that he saw two Rough-legged Hawks (Buteo lagopus) today, making that the 91st species for Dryad Ranch!

We got some nice rain over the weekend and Monday (finally).  At one point as I was standing at the kitchen window looking out, Dino came flying down the driveway on the tractor: dodging hail. That was it for the tractor work for the day.

I still ended up taking a couple of walks in the on/off drizzle. Although I feared I would be disappointed, as we'd only just gotten the rain, I was rewarded by spotting a few cap and stem mushrooms already popping up, and these turkey tails. The bonus was two types of slime mold, a sub-interest, which is very hard to photograph until such a time as I finally spend the bucks and throw some hardware at the problem.  Oh, look at this two millimeter red dot on a log! Anyway, turkey tails are usually orangy brown, but these new ones were green. Neat.

It was so amazingly beautiful walking; I swear I could smell the rain sinking into everything and hear all the trees and critters and living things breathing a big sigh of relief. As I got to the top of Deer Ridge, I found myself experiencing that sort of in the moment joy where you are just a human fully in the world, you could just as well be the wind or a pine cone and there's no silly mind chatter, just clean air in the lungs and wide open spaces. (Like this:)

Exploring the Contents

As Dino continues with organizing the marvel that is the shop building, he is making wonderful presentations of the old tools he has inherited and acquired over the years.  I claim he has all the "tools known to man", but he emphatically denies this.  The other day, he had a number of them out and was de-rusting and oiling.  Even though I am almost entirely hopeless at using hand tools, I remain fascinated by all the shapes and intended uses (about which I am also clueless, mostly).  Some of the tools are over 100 years old.

Taking Off

We made it through another Christmas season, with an annual trip to my folks house, a visit with Dino's sisters and an interesting side trip to see the USS Iowa in Richmond.  As it was Christmas Day itself, we weren't able to take the tour, but instead peered through a chain link fence for what turned out to be a pretty good view of it. 

These paperwhites bloomed a couple of days after Christmas; they were a gift from my sister and they are still blooming!

Dino has been super busy the past weeks what with participating in Christmas Bird Counts (Oakhurst, Mariposa and Merced) and working on the kestrel project.  That is shaping up very nicely, it looks like, with a number of possible areas surveyed and assessed.  Dino is in the stage of receiving approvals and permissions and is confident that a decent number of nest boxes will be built and put in place for this year's nesting season.  We'll be putting some on our property as well for the kestrel population of this area.

This beautiful photo of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk was taken by Dino on the Merced bird count.