myip2014

An incompetent bald eagle

[I am away from Maine visiting family, and have missed the huge snowstorms. Instead, something from the fall.]

Today I have a departure from my usual posts. All the videos here were taken by a friend of mine, Bruce Barrett, from his home a few miles from mine. Thankyou Bruce for allowing me to post these.

Bruce was watching two bald eagles that were hanging out in the pine trees in the fall. Here is one hunting a goose, making two unsuccessful attempts:

At least it flew off to a nearby tree. On two other days, it was even less successful. It somehow ended up in the water, and these two videos show it SWIMMING to safety!

I had no idea eagles could do this, although I have seen one paddling, as it drank:

I suppose it is quite useful to be able to swim: bald eagles are not very good hunters, and a lot of their food comes from scavenging, and from stealing other bird’s kills. The one in the videos stooped to try and grab the waterfowl with one or both feet, but they often need multiple attempts before they are successful.

PS The goose in the first video apparently seemed injured and had trouble flying any distance. The eagle eventually got it, after the pond was frozen.

Singing the Red-bellied Blues*

Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Melanerpes carolinus, are common in the US, but they used to be southerners. I photographed this male in Florida several years ago.

They have been moving steadily northwards at an ever-accelerating rate since the 1950’s if not before, and this expansion is closely linked to the warming winters. Here in Maine I have occasionally seen them in the warmer months, but this is the first time I have seen them in the winter, on and around my bird feeder. All the following photos were taken from mid-December 2025 to early January 2026 in Western Maine.

This is a female; only the back of her head is red, not the crown.

The red circle on the map below (constructed in Cornell’s eBird) is where I live. The blue dots show increased winter abundance of these woodpeckers, and as you can see we are on the northern edge of the area where they are now found.

They are very misleadingly named, since their belly is mostly white, with just a faint reddish wash on the lower belly. You can just see it here:

They’re charming birds, about 24cm long, with beautiful plumage:

Unlike most woodpeckers they rarely excavate trees to find insects. Instead, they are opportunistic generalists, eating fruit (as in the first photo of this post), insects, nuts, and seeds, (and occasionally lizards!) and willing to come to feeders. This varied diet makes them very adaptable, and helps them spread into new habitats.

This one was hopping around high in the hickory tree:

I’m happy to welcome a fourth woodpecker to my year-round ecosystem., alongside Pileated Woodpeckers, Hairy Woodpeckers, and Downy Woodpeckers!

PS Zuckerberg et al (2011) link the range expansion to the rise in average minimum temperature during the core winter season.

*The bad pun in my title is with apologies to Leadbelly.

“To see a world in a grain of sand”*

2025 was a strange year, weather-wise. It was extremely dry for months, and most of Maine was classified as in severe or extreme drought. There were no mushrooms to be seen, and I postponed, then canceled, my usual mushroom hikes. When rain finally came, it was very late in the season, and at first I saw only very, very tiny fungi growing on dead wood. I thought I’d show you some. Most of them are only millimeters across. My finger is for scale!

The “eggs” (more properly called periodoles) in these bird’s nest fungi contain the spores. When it rains, the splash of a raindrop ejects the eggs and spreads the thousands of spores in each egg.

The next photo shows a full cup in the foreground, and an empty one at the back:

Amorphous Birds Nest Fungus, full and empty

The other fungi below typically have spores dispersed by the wind. I have named as many as I can.

*Irpex* sp, probably *I. latemarginatus*

*Helicogloea compressa*, a fungus not a slime mold

I call this last one below the “poached egg” crust fungus (or possibly slime mold): I have no idea what its proper name is. The 2cm long wintergreen leaf is for scale!

*The famous quote in my title is from William Blake:

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour”

How to survive in winter

[May they live through this winter to delight me next summer. Happy 2026 everyone.]

Beside our house is a venerable Shagbark Hickory tree. It was 2019 joint champion for the tallest one in Oxford County, Maine. It is the favorite home of two species of Nuthatch, especially the White-breasted Nuthatches. They live here year-round, and in weather like this (3F, or -16C), they shelter in a crevice on the south side of the tree, out of the wind:

They check for predators:

then make short trips out to the bird-feeder:

where they can be quite aggressive:

They are common birds, resident throughout the US. Their name is somewhat of a misnomer. In the summer they eat almost entirely insects, searching for them under the bark and in crevices, and working their way head-first down, not up, the tree:

The rest of the year they eat seeds (up to 70% of their mid-winter diet), and maybe very tiny nuts like beechnuts, which they hide under tree bark. For this, a Shagbark Hickory is ideal! They are “scatter hoarders”: they hide each seed separately under the bark of the trunk, and in both the top and bottom of larger branches:

while doing elastic backbends to keep a wary eye on things. *

They pair for life, and nest in tree cavities. This fledgling (left) was still being fed by the parent last June:

Their call is raucous, what the poet John Clare called “a skreeking noise”. This recording was made by A.Richardson in Montana, downloaded from Xenocanto:

Clare’s full poem can be found here: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14327871-In-Summer-Showers-A-Skreeking-Noise-Is-Heard-by-John-Clare

They have an insouciant charm that beguiles me:

* One feels that the “upward-facing dog” should be renamed the “upward-facing nuthatch”.

The saga of the stool and the otters

[A year ago I wrote the first part of this, but never posted it; then I added a new installment this fall, and still sat on the story. But now, following on the heels of last week’s otter post, it feels like a story with a happy ending, just right for Christmas.]

In the summer of 2024, I bought a small folding aluminum camping stool, which I kept by my beaver pond. One day it disappeared. I searched the shore thoroughly, no sign of it. I was mystified: only the animals and I go there.

Two days before Christmas 2024, the pond was now thinly frozen except for the nearby otter holes. To my astonishment, about eight feet out on the ice from where I’d last seen my stool, there was the folded stool:

The only explanation I can come up with is that the otters pulled it out of the pond onto the ice, either because the shiny blue metal looked like a fish, or just for fun. And I’ll also never know whether it was them that dragged it into the water in the first place.

The ice was too thin for me to venture out after it. I tried snagging it with a branch, no luck. Shortly after I wrote that post, there was a thaw, the ice melted, and the stool sank beneath the ice. You might assume the story ended there.

[Part 2, October 2025]

But in the fall, after a summer of drought and low water levels, I was out with some fellow walkers when one of them shouted: “Look what I found in the pond!”

At the very edge of the pond was my stool! It might have drifted there, or the otters might have dragged it, I will never know.

After a rinse, it was good as new.

Have a lovely holidays.

The only possible word is sleek

[Back to Lovell, Maine, for now.]

We had had the first proper snowfall of the winter on December 2nd, six inches of lovely fluffy stuff, so on the morning of December 3rd I snowshoed in to our beaver pond. Joy of joys, as I stood on the shoreline two young otters popped out of the ice just a few feet in front of me.

We were all a little startled, but I took a few quick photos:

and after one minute twenty seconds they slid back in:

I stayed put, and ten minutes later they returned, this time checking immediately to see if I was still there:

Since I clearly was, they didn’t hang around, only twenty seconds total this time, but then I saw a third one, on the left, further out on the ice near the beaver lodge.

This one was larger, perhaps the mother, and she was fishing successfully, three different fish over the course of fifteen minutes:

Eating one took a while:

Later, another otter joined her, but she didn’t share her fish. Watch the video here:

After a bit the youngsters appeared, sunbathing:

Looking for the others:

and sliding on the ice:

A communal slide, followed by a dip:

A perfect morning, for me and apparently for them too..

Forests in a land without trees

[This is my last post about our Mongolian trip. After this, back to Lovell, Maine.]

Despite what I have shown you so far, there are places in Mongolia with trees. An hour or so north of Ulaanbaatar, there is a real forest, the southern edge of the taiga that stretches north to Siberia. Called Terelj, the parts closest to the capital have become a major tourist destination, and we only reached a tiny wild corner of it just as the hotels were giving way to forest. It was fall, so the colors were lovely:

and we saw a handsome bird called a Northern Nutcracker, Nucifraga caryocatactes:

eating larch cones:

and hiding from us:

These birds are specialized nut-eaters; their tongue has a “lingual nail,” a long keratin growth that helps to lever up and shell seeds.

The only other woodlands we had seen were an odd little fragment near Chamdani in the Altai. Remember the Altai:

and then imagine how startling it was to encounter this: a wetland threaded with rivulets, dotted with small birches, and grazed into grassy moguls.

Small songbirds loved this place:

But my enduring memories of Mongolia will still be those wide open spaces. I end my series of Mongolian posts with this poem by the famous modern Mongolian poet Dashdorj Natsagdorj, who says it better than I can; it is quite long, so rather than pasting it , here is a link:

https://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1117&context=sfh

PS The poet had a very interesting life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashdorjiin_Natsagdorj

PPS The Nature Conservancy has a huge project helping Mongolia preserve its wild grasslands : read here:

https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/mongolias-conservation-horizon/

Nature at the edge of the modern world

In between the Altai and Hustai NP, we usually had a night before or after in or near Ulaanbaatar, the capital. It is now home to 1/2 of Mongolia’s population, 1.7 million people and growing. It is down in a valley and with a big pollution problem:

But there is still nature nearby.

Our hotel was outside Ulaanbaatar, called the Hotel Mongolica. It was near a river, and farmland, all marred by a serious litter problem. But there were flowers and birds in the grounds that made up for this. Here is an Azure Tit, a really delightful little thing:

A black kite:

and an Azure-winged Magpie:

A few wildflowers:

and farmland behind the hotel:

with a watchful dog:

In Hustai we saw an even finer dog, a Bankhar Dog, much to the excitement of our interpreter. This is the dog that went into battle with Genghis Khan, and Marco Polo brought one back to Venice with him. The best of them, like the one below, have spots above the eyes, giving rise to the name Mongolian Four-Eye Dog. Mongolians believe they are thus able to see into the spirit world. Genetic analysis suggests they are the ancestors of all breeds of livestock guard dogs.

I want one.

PS There is a depressing coda to the story of Bankhar dogs. Wikipedia says:

“As infrastructure and travel made the Bankhar dog’s native regions more accessible, non-native dogs began to intermix with the breed. During the Communist era of Mongolia, Bankhar dogs were let loose or exterminated to forcibly relocate nomadic groups into socialist-style settlements. Their pelts became fashionable for stylish Russian coats, and the largest dogs were killed to feed the growing dog coat industry. By the 1980s, the breed had almost disappeared.”

On the upside, they are now much sought-after, and perhaps the breed will recover. Read more here: https://www.bankhar.org/bankhar-dogs/

Small joys in the vastness: Amur Falcons and Gentians

Mongolia’s Hustai National Park is about 500 sq km in size, mainly hilly grasslands with rocky granite outcrops, on a smaller scale than the Altai, but open and empty nonetheless (though apparently in the summer it can get crowded.) At dawn the wolves howled at the rising sun.

We walked a little, sat on the closely-grazed turf,

and admired the remaining wildflowers, all low to the ground:

Fetid Dragonhead, *Dracocephalum foetidum*

We drove out of the park to a nearby river, with Ruddy Shelducks on the bank, and an endless herd of sheep and goats passing in the far distance:

In a tiny stream a Meadow Bunting was washing itself :

Everywhere there were Band-winged Grasshoppers that flew up on brightly colored wings, impossible to photograph in flight, but here is one on the ground:

And a very impressive female Armored Ground Cricket, Deracantha onos:

And all around rock piles arranged by giants (our vehicle is to the right of the further rock pile, for scale):

with domestic horses grazing nearby:

As we left the park, an Amur Falcon watched us from a fencepost:

Wapiti, anyone?

[The other large mammal in Mongolia’s Hustai National Park is the wapiti. It took me some considerable time to understand what we were looking for, because our guide used the names wapiti, moose, elk, and red deer interchangeably. In Eurasia, “elk” is often used for what Americans call moose, but there are no moose in Hustai. We were, it turned out, looking for a close relative of the North American elk, Cervus canadensis, but the subspecies sibiricus. To avoid the confusion with moose, the park rangers call them by the Cree name “wapiti”. “Red deer” was in fact a red herring: it was once thought that red deer, Cervus elaphus, and elk were the same species, but that is now known to be incorrect. C. canadensis has a wider rump patch and paler-hued antlers. ]

So, let’s stick with wapiti! Hustai has around 1300 of them, and they are not endangered. Here is a handsome bull wapiti, resting from his day’s exertions. It is the mating season, so he either has a herd of twenty or more females to keep under control, or he is trying to win a herd away from another male. Either way, an exhausting job.

This is a group of females:

Their lord and master rounds them up:

and moves them higher up the hill to a safer spot:

If he senses another male nearby, he may bellow, or rather “bugle”, an eerie sound. He stretches out his neck, and lowers his larynx to make his voice deeper and thus make himself seem bigger.

There was a larger male somewhere off to the left, but there was also a very young male right next to him, a so-called “spike” male (bottom left), whose antlers have not yet branched; eventually, the dominant male will throw him out of the herd.

The male bugled frequently, but best of all was one morning at dawn when we had gone to look for wolves, and we heard wapiti bugling intermingled with wolves howling. Magical.

The herd moved down towards us to drink from a tiny stream.

The male kept a very close eye on both them and us:

When some of them headed across the stream his displeasure was clear:

and they thought better of it:

After all this effort, his reward is near: the tongue licking the air is scenting an enticing female:

A man’s job is never done.

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