While this is the busiest weekend of the year at most cemeteries, Nature is always busy and doesn't stop for tons of cars, visitors, shovels, and new flowers.
Yesterday I watched an adult Great Horned Owl fly into an American Elm with what appeared to be a Eurasian Collared-Dove. It ate the good parts (head) and took the remains up to one of two youngsters in the same tree. The parent stayed with the welfare recipient for a quarter of an hour, then flew off. Today I found all three of this year's brood sitting together shoulder to shoulder in the same elm, with one parent in the next tree and the other sitting off in another tree. All five of this year's family grouping present and accounted for. Most exciting today was finding a brand new active Broad-tailed Hummingbird nest and confirming that another nest that has been in use or at least added-on to for the last three years is also active. The "tripledecker" nest is particularly interesting (photo taken), in that it is very tall and with a female on top, looks quite top-heavy. Both nests fit the predictive formula suggested to me last summer by Jeff Jones: nest on a dead limb angling down from a live horizontal branch that forms an overhead roof. Both are in the very lowest part of Colorado Blue Spruce crowns (each about 8-9 feet off the ground). Also on a lower limb of blue spruce, about a foot in from the tip, is an active nest of Chipping Sparrows. Elm Leafminer Sawfly (Profenusa ulmi) larvae are dropping out of mined Siberian Elm and American Elm leaves (not to be confused with the European Elm Flea Weevil, which also mines elm leaves, but which pupates within the mines and is eaten by birds that simply bite the brown portion of the leaf, weevil and all). The larvae will pupate in the soil, that is, if they aren't first detected and eaten by birds. Today a male American Robin was so happy to be scoring every 5 seconds or so that it paused to sing heartily between bites. The sawfly larvae are legless, very pale yellow, and about 1/8th inch long. If you notice a robin pecking at the sidewalk or bare soil under an elm, walking two steps and repeating this action, I suspect that is what it is getting. If you want to look like a true entomological nerd, follow a robin for a while that is pecking repeatedly in the above manner, shoo it off, and get down on your all-fours to confirm the prey. Warning - if your neighbors get a video, it might go viral. Yesterday the following were FOY for Grandview Cemetery in 2012: Western Wood-Pewee, Chimney Swift, and Common Nighthawk. Finally, yesterday along the ditch at the north end was a singing, first-summer male American Redstart feeding at length in a honeylocust (no doubt on leafhoppers and plant bugs). Last one I had seen at Grandview was 24 years ago! Dave Leatherman Fort Collins -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Colorado Birds" group. To post to this group, send email to cobirds@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cobirds+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cobirds?hl=en.
