Cardinal songs

The trees are still bare, so when I hear one of the cardinals singing, I can often spot it at the highest point. In this video, you get to hear four different calls: the "water sprinkler" song, the "squeaky toy" song, the "pew! pew! pew! pew!" song, and the "bu bu bu chip chip chip chip chip chip chip chip" song.
In this next clip, you can see both the male and the female as they sing together.

Our day trip to La Laguna de Cañizar in Teruel

Between the villages of Villarquemado and Cella is an area that was a shallow lake until it was drained 300 years ago, for agriculture. A geologist, working with the mayors of the two towns, managed to get community support for a project to return some of this land to its natural state, despite the fears of some farmers. As of last year, the Laguna de Cañizar is now once again a "humedal" or marshy fresh-water lake. Thousands of cranes have arrived to overwinter, and dozens of other species of wildlife have returned or become more visible, including wading birds, ducks, swallows, raptors, frogs and toads, snakes, fish, otters, badgers, and other creatures. Because the canes can grow so quickly, an experiment with a few water buffalo is being conducted to see if  they do well through the winter, and if their grazing will help keep the growth under control.

We had a wonderful walk, windy and cold, but with gorgeous clouds. Our lunch in Villarquemado was excellent. We went on to other adventures (a castle!) later in the day, but that's for another post.

This place is a birder's paradise. The most impressive sight for us were the clouds of cranes. My photos hardly give an idea of how many there were, or how loud they were!

Here's one TV clip that shows the water buffalo (which we didn't see) and some of the many bird species that have returned to the area.

This video gives more of an idea of the cranes we saw.

Goshawk flying in slow motion

From a BBC show about animals, this amazing footage showing how a goshawk can fly through narrow spaces, as it does when it flies through dense woods.

Personal Trainer for "porky kookaburra"

From the comments to my post about fitness:

Poor baby! fed so many sausages she got overweight and unable to fly away from the dogs.

And here is what they sound like!

Amazing crow video

via Birdchick's blog, here is a video clip taken this Sunday at Loring Park in Minneapolis, of the tens of thousands of crows that fly in to roost their every night in the winter. One of my daily joys is seeing the crows fly overhead toward their roost, so this footage taken by TwinCitiesNaturalist is thrilling. I have to go see it in person some time soon! I highly recommend clicking on the full screen view icon in the lower right hand corner of the video to get the full effect.

Crows roosting in Minneapolis, near I-35

David Senn posted this video to YouTube, with a mix of stills and moving footage of crows gathering to roost at twilight somewhere near the freeway in Minneapolis. I really like how he used the still images and the soundtrack. Yesterday I saw what looked like THOUSANDS of crows flying in a steady stream from southwest to northeast, across the freeway I was on, as if they were going to the river. I also saw a very large hawk catch and eat a rodent while I was waiting at the stoplight; it perched in a tree right next to the freeway entrance I was waiting to get on. I love urban birds!

The Wild Parrots of Barcelona

I really loved the documentary movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, because it gave me a a glimpse of my home town, San Francisco, as an ecosystem including interactions between people and birds. Mark Bittner told his story in a book, and the film gave rise to a new partnership between him and the filmmaker.

When we were in Barcelona, I saw similar parrots in the parks, nesting in palm trees, flying about, and I thought they were wonderful: colorful, cute, charming. But when we were at dinner, Blas mentioned that they are in fact an invasive species and that their aggression was causing harm to the local ecosystem. This made me realize that I had been looking at them from the perspective of a tourist and that the locals might have a different point of view (just as they might see the tourists as an invasive species with a negative impact on their ecosystem!)

This BBC story about the wild parrots of Barcelona here tells how the population of Quaker Parrots (cotorras, as they are commonly called in spanish) has grown to a couple of thousand since the seventies. One problem is that they eat every kind of plant, and have devoured some farmers' tomato crops! Apparently the "urban parrot" phenomenon (birds native to South America establishing colonies and thriving in New Northern climes) has been observed in San Diego and Los Angeles, Brooklyn, London, and many other cities. Some are worried about it because they compete with native birds, but others see this new niche as a way some parrots, which are threatened with extinction in their native lands, might survive in new places

A very informative site about urban parrots is City Parrots, which documents the survival of the very showy Scarlet Macaw in Holland, as well as collecting stories about parrots from around the world. I'll try to put up some pictures later.

Great Blue Herons on the Mississippi

The little stretch of the Mississippi River that runs through downtown Minneapolis has such a fascinating history.
Yesterday the weather was perfect for a walk along the river. We saw the usual ducks and geese, but were also lucky enough to spot a group of cormorants lounging on some snagged trees just above the dam's spillway. There were at least two, maybe more Great Blue Herons fishing around the power plant. We saw them wading, flying, and perching in a tree where we suspected they had a nest.
We didn't get a close view, but here's a videoclip of a heron fishing in near a street after a flood:

An absolutely lovely clip with a heron in flight:
Here's a video of a Great Blue Heron who has just swallowed a great big fish.