Yes, I know.....
Nice picture though.
Yes. Swallows are wonderful. There's so many happy summer memories attached to them, for me. We used to go tenting every year on Öland, quite near Ottenby Bird Observatory, when I was a kid, and around the communal shower rooms, the ice cream stand, the small grocery store -- everywhere Barn Swallows were nesting! Sadly they've rebuilt the whole place now, and since all animals by definition are unhygienic, they're actively dissuading the swallows from nesting under the drainpipes and roofs.
Holding House Martins is like holding small mice. They will try to crawl away from you, and their feet are just like mouse feet.
Birds of prey are quite smart. That said, my son and I are gonna hike up Mauna Kea this summer. About 21 miles through native forest, scrubland, and then alpine. My son's girlfriend, who is a native bird specialist, is gonna find it quite surreal to see me try and bait a hawk with a toy mouse. I think it will work, we'll see. (Keep this to yourself, but while in Alaska I caught a cod fish, humanely killed it, and waved it towards some circling eagles at least a 1000 ft. up near a mountaintop in Juneau. I then threw the fish back in the water, instantly an eagle whistled and dove on it. It went completely underwater and then flapped itself out and up.)
We tried to bait falcons with mice and kites with salmon in Japan last year, but they never wanted any part of it. The kites sometimes sat on a telephone pole just beside the salmon we had placed in open view in the middle of a bike road, but not even once did they swoop down to take it. And there were as many as 2000 kites flying past some days, so we had plenty of opportunity... but we were outsmarted by scavengers.
Incidentally, I have uploaded some of my pictures to Photobucket.
Here's the only one I have of a swallow, I think.
I wrote yesterday about how calm terns can be. Well,
these terns show that excellently. They can easily be placed to one side, and will watch the proceedings, but complain about everything you do. Nothing is ever
good enough for terns. However, they are sometimes
very tolerant, or even
extremely tolerant.
After banding (which takes place during the night), we just place the terns on
a bench outside the lab. They generally remain there until sunrise. After a productive night, there may be 30-40 terns there, of several species. The largest diversity we had 2007 when I was there last was five: Black Tern, Little Tern, Arctic Tern, Common tern, and Sandwich Tern. However, they also catch Caspian Tern. The highest diversity I've ever seen was in Australia last year, with Black Tern, Lesser Crested Tern, Greater Crested Tern, Caspian Tern, Roseate Tern, Arctic Tern, Sandwich tern and Little Tern in the same flocks...
This calmness when you bring night-caught birds in is quite common. This
Eider also didn't fly away, but walked around a lot. Duck generally
don't fly indoors, though, but they usually don't like being placed
upside down (for instance when you're looking for lice on the chest and undersides of the wings). They can be incredibly cute.
This Black-headed Gull is also night-caught, and didn't complain as much as some of the day-caught ones I've handled have. It's much more uncommon for smaller birds to be this calm, but did manage to get
this picture of a Goldcrest. Likely his calmness is more from exhaustion than from actual calmness, though...
Lastly, here are two nice birds from the Swedish North:
Red-necked Phalarope (female)
Long-tailed Skua
Both nested near the field station we had last year in Padjelanta, but their nests were plundered by red foxes, and the birds didn't remain long in the area after that...
And one more from Ottenby:
Rough-legged Buzzard
This is a notable picture, not only because it has a Rough-legged Buzzard in it, but also because the bearded man in the background is
Carl Edelstam, one of the quite few Ornithology Mystics, or whatever you want to call them, in Sweden. He's also a firm believer in homoeopathy and in some kind of universal scientific conspiracy to suppress his "research".
I'll try to get a few more pictures uploaded during the weekend. I filled about 12 GB of pictures during my trips to Japan, Australia and Thailand last year, and have loads of more pictures of Swedish birds as well. Any requests?
