Info Burung Kicauan

This is a video Zick and I made showing how we (as crazy people) make our suet dough for bird feeding. It also features cameos by Chet Baker, Boston terrier and by Liam Thompson, creeper. Much of the video footage was shot by Phoebe Linnea Thompson.

I hope you like this short how-to video. It felt like we were shooting some weird cooking show for bird watchers.

Hey everyone! I hope you had a wonderful holiday with the special people in your life.
 
I'm still in Canada with my fam having a great time.  We're enjoying moderately cool temperatures with just the right amount of snow - not too much, but certainly enough to keep us in the spirit.  Christmas was super relaxing and quiet with all my mom's yummy food to top it off.  No matter how old I get it's always so nice to come home.  To see the people who have always loved and cared for me.  To sleep in my old room that's been preserved just for me, and be reminded of the safe place I have to come and take a breather.

There should be some interesting outfit pics to share later this week or next, but in the meantime here's an idea of just how remote and fantastically peaceful it is where we are.

I hope you're all having a great day wherever you are and however you're celebrating!

When the fall colors paint the woodlands we know that soon the trees will be naked. Perhaps the only redeeming thing about this transition from blazing scarlets, oranges, and yellows to bare leafless branches is that it reveals a delicious fruit treat known well to woodland sprites and observant humans: the persimmon.


Off we go to the site of last year's best persimmon tree, out at the end of the meadow. Once there, we turn our eyes skyward, hoping to see this:

After locating the source tree, we scour the ground below it for "drops." These are persimmons that have already fallen. Conventional woods wisdom holds that persimmons rarely fall before the first hard frost. And if they DO fall before that event, they will be bitter and not fit to eat. This autumn the persimmons we found—well before the first hard frost—were perfectly juicy and delicious.


We shake the tree, gently encouraging it to share. As the small fruits (about the size of a large grape or a small Brussels sprout) drop we try to catch them. If they make it to the ground, they seem to disappear—their warm orange hue blending in with the leaf-covered ground.


We gather them up in handfuls, sneaking one or two into our mouths "just to check them for eatability." Here's how to eat a persimmon: You squeeze the insides out of the persimmon's skin, and then begin the exquisite process of divining pulp from seeds. The seeds, which are the size of pumpkin seeds, but thicker, are most of what's inside the fruit. One by one these are ejected onto the ground. Animals that eat the persimmon fruits eject the seeds another way. Scoured by the mammals' stomach muscles and digestive juices, these seeds are the start of a new generation of persimmon trees.


In our east woods there is a line of persimmon trees, all about the same age and size. These were probably "planted" by mammals that visited some older, now departed persimmon tree day after day in the fall and early winter. As they chewed up the fruits and took in their pulpy goodness, yesterday's seeds came out the other end, thus ensuring that this symbiotic relationship would continue in our patch of woods into the future.

Knowing all of this makes me thankful that I'm part of this giant web of life.
Happy holidays to one and all! May your new year be full of wild and delicious fruits.

I'm bummed out that I didn't have the opportunity to come around today and wish each of you a great Christmas/Holiday.  On top of torrential rain and a small earthquake, Chef's kitty sprained her leg and had to go to the vet causing upset upon upset for us.  Thankfully she is okay, but we discovered she is 14 years old instead of 4 like we thought so it was a pretty sobering visit.  She's super small and we found her on the street so assumed she was young.  Sigh.

Anyway, all that being said I'm now more behind on last minute things (argh how is this possible?) and have to get the ol' bag packed so am checking out a bit early.  We take off for Canada on Friday morning and there is limited internet (if any at all), so it may be a week before I'm able to visit you or get a post in (uh, minor withdrawals setting in?).  I do, however, have my trapper hat at the ready and am hoping for some crazy snow pics.  Fingers crossed.  Here's wishing you a very Merry Christmas with your family and friends!!  You guys are the best!


Are you staying at home this weekend or heading out to visit family?

Glassybaby was founded by Lee Rhodes who, in 1998, was fighting a rare form of lung cancer and looking for an outlet to relieve stress.  She had given the gift of a glassblowing class to the father of her kids who, in turn, made and gifted Lee these candle holders in various colors.  They were an instant source of serenity as she filled them with votives and relaxed by their soothing colors.  By 2001 Lee began creating on her own and in 2003 opened her first store in Seattle having hired professional glass blowers to meet growing demands.  That location remains today as the primary store and studio, but two others have been added in University Village and Bellevue - as well as one in New York City.  How great is that?  

At the core of the company is a desire to give back.  Certain Glassybaby's give a portion of profits to various cancer charities.  I picked up the bff for a good friend of mine - I love knowing that 10% will be donated to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. If you have your back against the wall and are looking for a last minute gift totally check out the site - there are so many wonderful colors to choose from I was like a deer in the headlights trying to narrow it down.

*UPDATE* The rain is still coming down and I could use about 700 Glassybaby's to relax by.  Is it January 2nd yet?  No.  To ease my pain are cookies.  Have you guys visited Mara at M Loves M?  She is one of my daily reads - I love her kind heart and great outfits, as well as the fun relationship she shares with her fiance.  Mara's been hosting a Christmas Cookie Recipe Exchange and featured my Thimble Cookies yesterday...totally check her out and read back through all the amazing and fun cookies that have been previewed!! I think these just might be the cutest ones I've ever seen.

This just in! Well, OK, it happened back around Halloween...

The digital edition of Bird Watcher's Digest (the magazine for which I humbly work as editor) has been awarded a Silver Award from the 2010 Digital Magazine Awards! Everyone here at the offices of BWD is buzzing with excitement over this award, so I just had to share it here on BOTB.

We've produced six issues of eBWD thus far and each one has helped us refine our thinking and offerings for the digital realm. One thing has remained constant: All subscribers to the print edition of Bird Watcher's Digest automatically get free access to our digital edition.
That's correct, amigo. If you subscribe to the print edition of BWD, you get access to eBWD as part of the deal. Feeling the urge? Subscribe now!

As we'd hoped, we have lots of people subscribing solely to eBWD, the digital-only edition. Increasingly readers want to receive their favorite content in some digital medium, and we're happy to oblige.

If you have not yet checked out our "award-winning digital edition" (it's neat to be able to say that) please do so. Some of the features that set our digital edition apart from a print magazine include:

• videos of featured bird species
• bird sounds and songs embedded into text links
• recordings of select authors reading their articles
• hot links throughout the content and advertisements for immediate exploration

But why read about eBWD when you can:

A: Go there yourself and sample some of the pages.

and/or

B: Watch a video in which I and (several of my well-dressed colleagues here at BWD) take you on a tour of eBWD. Here it is:



And remember it's not too late to get a BWD subscription as a holiday gift for that special someone who loves watching birds.

Welp with less than a week left until Christmas I have finally finished the tree. I've never had quite as much of a debacle as this year proved to be...we've had the tree for at least 2 weeks and holy mother of pearl I thought the thing was trying to take me down.  First I had to visit 17 stores for lights after most of the ones from last year decided they were no longer in working order and store after store was sold out.  Then I opened the lights, tested them out and a couple strands didn't work.  Then they did.  Then they didn't (you see where I'm going with this).  So I went back out to get replacement strands and finally managed, after 3 hell-filled work days, to get them all on the tree...only to plug it in and one strand went dead.  Then another.  Did you hear screams coming out of the west last week?  That was me.

I swear that mother stood for 2 days with no lights as I strolled off to bed in tears at 2:30am carrying a fist full of my own hair!!

Perhaps it was kismet for all my tree tricks at the lot. Whatever the case may be I am calling it a year (and a shot of tequila).  Serves me right, too - that's what I get for getting all wound up at the tree lot over a too big tree.  I'm lucky the ornament police didn't haul me over for not enough-itis.

After all the shenanigans that comprised tree trim 2010, please allow me to share some of my faves of what has turned out to be a very fun tree...

Only a couple more gifts to buy and I am done - Woo hooo!!!  If it keeps pouring and people stay off the road it could happen today.  Here's hoping for victory.  How's it coming along for all of you?

Okay girls I'm back after a brief respite - during which time the tree got 90% decorated and I managed to successfully purchase a handful of gifts.  How are all of you holding up?  Please tell me I'm not alone doing the last minute hustle.

Just in time for all of us who are still seeking that perfect something special for our best girlfriend, mom or sis (or, ahem, ourselves) Melinda Maria Jewelry is offering readers of this free bird a 30% discount off everything in the online store - including sale.  Simply type in this code at checkout to receive the discount:  FREEBIRD30 - even better, you can use this code from today through January 15, 2011 (you know, just in case you get some VISA check cards in the stocking...). 

 In a word:  YAHOOOO!!!


Please feel free to share the code with others or on your blogs.  This jewelry does not disappoint (as you've seen on my blog here, here, and here) and makes a wonderful gift.  And p.s. - if any boyfriends, husbands, brothers, significant others, bosses and/or dads out there are asking what to get you *cough* *cough* send them a list, a link and the code for guaranteed success. :)

With that I bid you good shopping, baking and tree trimming everyone.  May your weekends be filled with the best of the best including some quality time to take a breather.

If you watch a flying flock of birds long enough, it will spell out secret messages to you in the sky.

For the past few weeks I've been reading the wonderful gift guides on so many of your blogs and discovering so many treasures.  Yet because of work and life and chaos, there seems to have been little time to really sit down and think about what to give my family and friends.  This week reality has set in that I have next to no time left - and suffice it to say panic is in the house.  Usually my Christmas/Holiday shopping is complete by the 1st of December, so this is unfamiliar territory and I don't like it.  Today when my mother asked me what I was hoping for all that came to mind was a blank slate.

So tonight I gave some thought as to what I would be happy to find under the tree - and also what I would like to give to some of my girlfriends.  This may be the only "gift guide" I do and it's not in fancy format, but if even one of these treats appears on Christmas morning it will be great...and thankfully I've already picked a couple up for friends.

On a recent Monday morning that was so snowy that school was canceled and the county roads were undisturbed by any moving vehicles, I went outside to fill the feeders. Moments after returning to the warm indoors I noticed a number of dark birds foraging on the ground, inside the brush pile. Wiping my still-foggy glasses, I could see that they were not common grackles.

The fact that they were foraging inside the brush pile made them very interesting. Grackles and red-winged blackbirds, both regular species at our feeders, usually forage on more open ground. Binocs to the eyes—rusty blackbirds!

This foraging behavior made perfect sense! This is a species that breeds in swampy woods in the far North. It's perfectly at home in dense habitat—especially when there is some cracked corn there to gobble up.

A few identification clues for the rusty versus other blackbirds:

• the rusty plumage is a great clue in fall and winter. Similar Brewer's blackbird females in fall show gray, not rust in plumage.
  
• pale eye stands out on the dark face around the eye.
• Pale rusty eyeline is obvious in fall females. Red-winged blackbird females are streaky overall.
  
• smaller overall than a common grackle.
  
• tail and bill shorter than common grackle.
• Prefers wooded, swampy habitat.
  

The rusty flock had five birds in it, and so I snapped a few digiscoped shots and a bit of video to document their presence. I'm sure the winter storm of Sunday brought these birds southward. Sadly, when we see rusty blackbirds at our feeders, they rarely stick around. This morning (Tuesday) we had just one rusty foraging under the pines on the western edge of our yard.

From these photos you can see how the species got its name, from the rusty edges on the bird's newly molted-in fall plumage. This is interesting since adult males in breeding plumage show no rust in their glossy blue-black finery. Fall males have dark bodies scalloped with rusty feathers. These three photos in this post show an adult female in fall (non-breeding) plumage.

The rusty blackbird has been experiencing a serious population crash in recent decades—some estimates say the population has dropped by 90 percent! Why? We're trying to find that out.

One thing seems certain: this species is a habitat specialist. It prefers wet wooded habitat and this habitat type has been greatly reduced in North America in the last century due to logging, draining of swamps for agricultural uses, suburban sprawl, and mosquito control measures. But habitat loss along may not be the whole reason.

Scientists suspect that the rusty blackbird's decline may also be tied to changes in food abundance in the swampy/boggy northern woods where the rusty breeds. It forages along the edges of the water, catching and eating lots of water-borne creatures such as salamanders, snails, insect larvae, and small fish. Acid rain and rising levels of mercury from air pollution have had a detrimental effect on this prey base.

Additionally, rusty blackbirds are getting hammered on their wintering grounds. In winter they sometimes join huge blackbird flocks in the South, along the Gulf of Mexico. These blackbird flocks are persecuted as agricultural pests—sometimes dying in the thousands after being sprayed with toxic chemicals from crop-dusting airplanes.

In 2005, the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center formed The Rusty Blackbird Technical Working Group to study this species and its shocking population decline. Last year they held their inaugural Rusty Blackbird Blitz to document the species' presence throughout its winter range. Dates for the 2011 Blitz are January 29 to February 13, 2011. A state-by-state list of Blitz coordinators is available online. Data collection is being handled by eBird, the joint effort by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon. All birders in the rusty blackbird's winter range are invited to participate.

In case you've never seen a live rusty blackbird, here's a short video for you to ogle.

I still haven't given up on sequins being the answer to world peace (mentioned here), but given the slim chance that every single person does not embrace the power of shine I am feeling much better having discovered a back up plan.

Consuming hot chocolate cake in a cup by the glowing lights of a Christmas tree.   

Now maybe you have heard of this magic before, but prior to yesterday I had not.  There I was randomly browsing Real Simple trying to forget that the lights on the tree all went out within a minute of being plugged in (Jesus take the wheel) when a golden marshmallow covered cup caught my eye.  Next thing I knew I was in the kitchen and the rest is history.  I.am.telling.you this thing is like smores sans the graham wafer and it is gooood!  I made a gluten-free version and it worked out perfectly, but regular flour will work just the same.

Oh, and make sure your cup is oven safe or it could be a hot mess.

You can find the recipe here and for convenience sake I'll list it below.

Ingredients