Eyes on the Wild

Last fall I bought a lovely gourd from a local farm, to decorate my doorstep. By mistake, I left it out all winter, and come spring it was hard and dry. So I googled “How to make a bird house”, landed on https://www.thespruce.com/gourd-bird-houses-4070291 , and this was the result (my son drilled the big 1 1/4″ inch hole, I did the rest!). I hung it from some bushes near my vegetable garden, where I could see it, and waited.

As you can see, to my delight a pair of House Wrens, Troglodytes aedon, moved in, and this is their story. As you enjoy these photos, remember that the nest-hole is only 1 1/4 inch in diameter !

It was quickly clear there were young inside, and both adults came every few minutes with food.

They brought a huge range of delicacies. A bright orange grub or pupa:

a grasshopper:

which fought an unsuccessful rearguard action:

earwigs:

a rather large spider:

(They brought two of these in quick succession!).

Also moths:

some of which were the awful Spongy Moth, of which see my footnote!

bright green caterpillars

and other things I can’t identify:

On one occasion she excelled herself by bringing in two bugs in a single delivery, albeit rather small ones:

After handing over the food, the parent usually went back into the nest for a diaper (nappy!) change. Baby birds’ excretions come packaged in a convenient membrane called a fecal sac (oh, how I wish human babies had the same tradition) and the adult just picks it up and carries it off:

They had a sort of musical routine. They flew in to the clump of bushes, and made a call. Then they moved to a closer branch and called again. Sometimes it took more than one of these rest-stops, but eventually they moved to the branch the nest was hanging from, and called again. and then they launched themselves, landed very briefly on the tiny perch I had thoughtfully provided for them, and then leant in and proffered the morsel.

The “perch-to-mouth” time frame was usually only a second, unless the prey fought back.

For most of the time I was watching the nest, the actual young were invisible, deep inside their appropriately womb-like gourd. But one day they peeked out:

There were in fact three, glimpsed but not photographed. They got braver:

and braver:

and braver

Until one morning I photographed this one gripping the edge of the nest, poised to conquer the world:

I left for two hours, and when I came back, they were gone, launched, fledged. Well done those parents.

PS House Wrens are really tiny, and very successful. Adults weigh about 10 to 12 g (0.35 to 0.42 oz). are 11 to 13 cm (4.3 to 5.1 in) long, with a 15 cm (5.9 in) wingspan.  They are found the full length of the Americas, from Canada to southernmost South America, and are the most widely distributed native bird in the Americas

PPS One of their catches was a Spongy Moth, Lymantria dispar, and I cheered. Formerly known as Gypsy Moth, they came from Europe, and they erupt in locust-like infestations that last several years. Right now they are stripping our trees down to skeletons. Much as I love nature, they are stretching the limits of my tolerance. If you can bear to read about them, here you are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymantria_dispar_dispar

In June beavers have a banquet of soft green leafy things and succulent roots to eat. They tend to eat less in the way of woody stuff (twigs and cambium), and they move around their territory, browsing. If the dam needs repairs, they take care of it.

My beavers have been behaving somewhat differently. In early morning and late afternoon they have been sitting on a tiny island just behind their lodge, munching on what looks like twigs and logs. As a result, I have been privileged to watch them out of the water, a rarity (remember, they are largely nocturnal, and only leave the water when they have to).

I have seen two together, mutually grooming,

and clearly very affectionate

and while I was watching these two there was a distant tail slap, so there must be a third one around.

They were coming and going. This one was swimming around my kayak yesterday afternoon:

Not very scared, but curious:

When they were back at the lodge, they would either swim up with a mouthful of mud and gunk, or do a short dive and then surface with the mud supplies:

then climb up the lodge and plaster it on top:

Sometimes they just seemed to take a rest:

then back to more mudding:

Then off to find more.

I am wondering if there might be young in the lodge. They are born in May and June, venturing out after only two weeks or so. Typically they would be cared for by both parents, and also last year’s young, which would explain the trio, and their tendency to stay close to the lodge and keep it in good repair.

So I waited till now, mid-July, in the hope of seeing young ones, but no such luck. The adults are around, slapping their tails, but either the young are a figment of my wishful thinking, or they are only allowed out at night. Time to send out this post.

Growing up in England, birds were not my thing. There is a reason that I first got interested in birds in Africa. A lot of them are brightly colored, and in the dry season the trees drop their leaves and the birds are visible.

This is a male African Orange-bellied Parrot, Poicephalus rufiventris:

The orange continues under his wings:

Even his eyes are orange and the underside of his tail is bright green:

The female lacks the orange belly, but she still has the green belly feathers.

Another orange and green bird is the tiny Fischer’s Lovebird:

Orange, but no green this time, is the Red-and-Yellow Barbet (not a parrot, but just as brightly colored):

There are two in this shot:

Even the misleadingly named Brown (or Meyer’s) Parrot is dazzling when seen from below. These two in Tanzania are feasting on baobab flowers.

It is all much more exciting than the world of Little Brown Jobs, or LBJ’s, as birders rudely call the dowdier birds of temperate climes.

*PS My title is a quote from Edward Lear, of limerick fame, who was also an accomplished artist whose parrot paintings rivaled Audubon’s. He drew them from life at London Zoo, and wrote a letter to a friend including this poem, which I recommend reading aloud for the full rhythmic effect:

“Now I go to my dinner,
For all day I’ve been a-
way at the West End,
Painting the best end 
Of some vast Parrots
As red as new carrots,—
(They are at the museum,—
When you come you shall see ‘em,—)
I do the head and neck first;
—And ever since breakfast,
I’ve had one bun merely!
So—yours quite sincerely.”

As far as I can tell, he didn’t paint any of the specific parrots in this blog, but here is one of his scarlet macaw, now in the Houghton Library at Harvard.,

Common Warthogs, Phacochoerus africanus, are not the most glamorous of animals. The warthog character in The Lion King movie is called Pumbaa, which means “foolish” in Swahili. But I have a soft spot for them, and if you read on you will discover that so do some mongoose.

Omnipresent in Africa, when startled they run around with their tails in the air like mini flagpoles. This one had just erupted from its underground burrow, just behind it in the shot.

When they feed, they often shuffle along on their knees:

They love wallowing in mud to cool off and kill ticks. Look at the watermark on these two young males practicing their fighting skills.

This one has been wallowing, and is now having a good scratch, first one side, then its bottom, then the other side:

The males are mainly solitary, but when the female is in season, she may be followed around by several males. On this occasion her suitor failed to impress:

An adult male is formidable: he can weigh up to 330lbs (though 250lbs is more usual), and his tusks can be up to a foot long. The smaller lower tusks are razor sharp from constant rubbing against the upper tusks. They get their name from the giant growths on the faces of the males:

There are a total of four of these growths: two below the eyes, and two smaller ones further down. Although they look like warts, they are actually lumps of thickened skin.

In Uganda a number of years ago there was a resident warthog at one of the lodges that had bonded with a family of striped mongoose.

They look as though they are nursing:

but in fact I think that they were eating small insects from her skin, a mutually beneficial relationship, and judging by her blissed-out expression every bit as good as going to the spa.

The Northern Kenyan warthogs on my most recent trip are a particular species, the desert warthog, Phacochoerus aethiopicus, found only here and in Sudan. The tips of the ears curl back , and the “warts” are hook shaped, as you can see on this big male:

PS In Africa safari guides talk of the Big Five (lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo, leopard) but there are also the Ugly Five: warthog, hyena, vulture, wildebeest, marabou stork. It seems a little mean!

[Taking a break from Africa, a story from my garden in Maine.]

From time to time I am lucky enough to watch a spider mother setting up her nursery. This small spider, the Six-spotted Orb Weaver, Arianella displicata, is related to the Cucumber Spider. She is 4-8mm long, and highly skilled! In this shot she is upside down, but the photo is taken from below, and you can see the six black spots at the end of her abdomen.

She has laid her eggs, and enclosed them in a golden net .

Now the spider is cabling the edge of the grapevine leaf so it curls over to shelter the egg sac;

Look carefully at the lower part of the photo above and you can see that she has also spun an orb web, to catch her dinner. The silk is emerging from her spinnerets, the blackish orifice on the underside of her abdomen:

Three hours later I came back to see what she was up to, and this is what I found:

She had caught a Rose Chafer in her orb web. It is much bigger than she is, but that did not stop her tucking in:

Luckily for the Rose Chafer population, the survival of the species had been ensured the previous day on a nearby chive flower:

The night after the spider wove her web there was heavy rain, and the next morning she and her egg sac were still there, but the orb web and Rose Chafer had gone, and the cables that were holding the curled leaf had snapped. But she was still guarding her eggs, patting down the egg sac.

She was also showing me her face with its six eyes, four black dots in the center and one to each side. (The number and arrangement of the eyes is another clue to identifying spider species.)

PS The golden crêche created by the spider reminds me of the spun-sugar cage of a croquembouche as created by a master pastry chef. Here is a spectacular example from the website https://www.craftybaking.com/recipe/croquembouche

Only a few humans can do this, but every Arianella mother can.

Black-backed Jackals, I had always thought, are scavengers, feeding off the carcasses killed by lions.This one in Namibia is feeding on an oryx carcass (the jackal is immediately behind the carcass, and the oryx horns are in the left foreground).

If you pushed me, I might have guessed that they also hunt tiny things like mice. All true, but it turns out they have bigger fish to fry (wrong metaphor, I admit.)

After a few hours of game watching in the Maasai Mara, we had paused for breakfast on a rise looking out over the huge grassy plain, filled with gazelle, impala, zebra and buffalo (this picture looks in the opposite direction, but I thought you’d like to see what breakfast was like!):

Two jackals were prowling around in the far distance. Suddenly Tinka, my guide, jumped to his feet and said “Oh my goodness, they’ve just killed that baby gazelle”, and hurriedly started to pack up our breakfast and load the truck. We drove at headlong speed across the plain, and sure enough, the jackals had got a newborn gazelle, its fur still wet and curly:

They argued over who got what,

paused,

and then they started a tug-of-war:

Here is a short video:

They eventually tore it in two, and the winner got the head:

She carried it off into the long grass strewn with small white flowers that seemed as though they were scattered in mourning for the tiny life cut short.

Ravel’s music, Pavane pour une infante defunte, though written for an infanta not an infant, still feels right, here played by Ravel himself.

PS The flowers are Cycnium adonense, the White Blotting Paper Flower, with delicate floppy petals.

I have seen black rhino, Diceros bicornis, once before, in Namibia, but their horns had been clipped off to protect them from poaching. In Kenya, though, I saw them in their untampered and intimidating state. I saw them in Lewa Downs in Laikipia, and also in Nairobi National Park, both of which have excellent anti-poaching programs, and healthy populations of these enormous animals.

Here is a fully grown male, with a vehicle in the background, for scale:

They can reach 4000 pounds ( 1400Kg). The females are a little smaller, but still substantial:

Even the calf is big enough to think twice about:

They have two horns, the front one is the longer of the two:

Unless your name is Sonya, in which case the back one is the longer one:

The presence of a youngster shows that this unusual arrangement has not stopped some male finding her appealing! It remains to be seen which parent will determine how her baby’s horns develop.

Although they sometimes eat grass, their mouths are designed for browsing, with a pointed hooked upper lip which allows them to delicately strip leaves off bushes:

White rhino, Ceratotherium simum, by contrast, are grazers, and have wide square mouths designed for hoovering up large amounts of grass.

The white rhino are even larger than the blacks, with males weighing up to 55oolbs.

Returning to the Black Rhino, they have poor eyesight, but excellent hearing. Their tube-shaped ears can rotate in all directions:

They remind me of miniature ear-trumpets, and are every bit as effective.

Another Kenyan post.

Some birds work hard gathering nesting materials, some build elaborate nests, and some barely bother. It’s all in the genes.

This swallow has a beakful of mud from a tiny puddle behind it, destined for its nest:

Weaver birds are so-named because they weave basketry concoctions, like this White-Browed Sparrow Weaver:

The finished object reminds me of a certain type of raw-edged straw hat,

For scale, here is a nest that had fallen from the tree:

Inside, there are some guineafowl feathers, for softness.

The male weaves the nest, and the female then comes and inspects his handiwork. If she doesn’t approve, she refuses to move in.

The Black-Capped Social Weaver goes a step further. They build large colonies of up to 60 nests, at the very end of slender twigs, making it harder for predators to reach the eggs. Their nests (jointly woven) start with a ring, and then they are rounded off:

They have an entrance and an exit, but once the eggs are laid the exit is closed.

Not shaggy, but neat and tidy and carefully planned, I think they would win the Grand Designs TV award.

In complete contrast the Crowned Lapwing hides its eggs in plain sight.

Here is a male (left) displaying:

The eggs are laid on the ground, where a shallow depression offers only a sketchy attempt to provide a home for them:

Instead of investing time and energy in highly skilled home construction, the parents hang around nearby, and loudly harass any marauders, such as jackals.

Finally, perhaps most extreme, is the Eurasian Nightjar. The female is sitting on the nest in this photo, and we nearly trod on her.

Here she is in closeup:

She waits until the last possible moment to move, counting on her excellent camouflage, but once she does fly up and the eggs are revealed, they are still not easy to see:

And in closeup:

A range of different strategies, each successful in its own way.

[I’m not done with Kenya, but now that I’m back in Maine there are some stories that demand to be told.]

A neighbor told me about a red fox family in an open field close to the road, so I jumped in the truck. The first two photos were taken by Heinrich Wurm in early May, when there were six cubs, aged around four to six weeks old, and still nursing:

By the time I got back from Kenya there were only four cubs left, now aged between eight and nine weeks old. The remaining photos are mine.

They come out of the den in the early evening:

The sand is the output of the mother’s den construction, conveniently visible in the otherwise grassy meadow. The cubs don’t seem to stray too far from the den just yet, and if I stay in the truck they are not bothered by my presence. Watch them play:

A week later, on a sunnier evening, they were practicing their hunting skills. They would levitate and then pounce down on top of either a mouse,

or a sibling:

They jumped quite high, hard to convey in a photo.

Then the mother arrived, carrying what appeared to be a dead bird:

A cub appeared and she gave it the bird. Two of the cubs disappeared with their prey (or toy?) into the undergrowth. I can’t imagine this is much food divided between four cubs, but they certainly looked healthy.

To end, a portrait of the mother:

and a cub:

PS: There are many species of fox worldwide, and here in Maine we have both red and gray foxes. I found myself wondering whether these reds are the same species as the British red foxes, and the answer seems to be that nobody really knows. British settlers may have brought some European foxes, Vulpes vulpes, from the old country over to have the right kind of fox to hunt, and they may have interbred with local foxes, Vulpes fulva, but this seems to have been mainly in the Eastern US near settlements, and the native bloodlines still seem to have survived. For more details, read here:

https://www.wildlifeonline.me.uk/questions/answer/are-north-american-and-european-red-foxes-different-species

PPS In England many people loathe foxes, especially in cities, where they have adapted remarkably successfully to urban living, and become a pest. Read (or watch) Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox to get a sense of the British attitude to foxes! Here in Maine anyone who has chickens hates them, but a lot of the rest of us (including me) rather like them.

PPS My title is due to Linda Wurm. Thankyou Linda!

Fairly near the cheetah mother and cubs that I showed you before, there were three other young three-year old cheetah siblings (one male, two female) that had been thrown out by their mother a month ago, and were learning to manage on their own. My guide somehow found them asleep under a tree one morning (don’t worry, I couldn’t see them either):

Two were asleep

and one was on watch:

The previous evening they had been seen hunting and killing a young topi. Topi adults are good-sized antelope, 90-150Kg, much too big for the cheetah to tackle. Rather charmingly, the males are prone to standing with their forefeet on termite mounds to improve the view:

The males at this time of year are fighting for territory for their harem of females:

But there are also youngsters around, and the cheetah got one, near some woods. Big mistake. Out of the woods came a 70Kg leopard, much bigger than the 40Kg cheetah, and stole the topi.

I saw none of this, but it was the talk of the camp that evening. So next morning we went looking, and there, up in a tree in distinctively leopard style, was the ex-topi.

The leopard was nowhere to be seen, probably sleeping nearby on the ground. So we came back at 4pm, and there he was, sleeping on a branch just below the carcase.

He woke up, and decided dinner was in order:

He was hungry:

So he climbed up and claimed his meal:

Holding it in a deathly embrace:

He ate:

And after feeding for an hour or so, he gracefully descended to the ground to sleep off his full belly: