Bears on the puma kill

After filling its stomach with one haunch the puma left and never returned. But 4 bears came to feed nightly and eventually a few other scavengers made their appearance.

Murphy's Law struck on the second night when the camera failed, but this whipped me into overkill mode. On each following night I staked two or three cameras. Each one operated independently and triggered one or two 27 watt LED lights.

I was learning on the run. When all cameras were in operation too much light marred some pretty cool clips. All I could do was adjust the position of cameras and lights every afternoon based on the previous night's results. I just didn't have the moxie to test the lights in darkness.

Then Murphy's Law got me again: the camera that gave by far the best clips in terms of lighting and perspective failed to record sound! 

I kept plugging away, and the game was up at the end of the week when the bears lost interest in the scraps.

I had an overwhelming 7 hours of very interesting video of variable quality.

This 3+ minute movie gives you an idea of what happened at the carcass on just one night and the next day.   

Sullen ravens

Our local ravens, Marco and Polo, have been looking sullen.

This winter and spring they breakfasted at 9:00AM daily with neighbor Richard.

While Richard ate his egg whites in the kitchen, Julia served the birds hard-boiled egg yolks on the back deck.

Richard was enthralled.

"They're intelligent, and they talk to each other".

Marco and Polo were like family.

They periodically checked in during the day and peered into the windows.

Then daylight savings kicked in and suddenly the ravens' breakfast was served an hour late.

The new schedule wasn't to their liking.

Marco and Polo were used to having breakfast only so many hours after sunrise.

They started peering into the window while Richard and Julia were still in bed, and when they got up, the birds watched them through the bathroom window.

Julia found it a little unnerving, but Richard was amused.

The birds remained impatient waiting for breakfast.

"Then I heard this tapping," said Richard, "but it took me a while to find out that they were pecking at the skylights".

It was starting to get like Hitchcock's "Birds", so Richard cut off the family breakfasts.

Cold turkey. It worked.

Marco and Polo gave up their attempts to break through the skylights, and spend a lot less time around the house.

"They still visit," says Richard,  "and they grumble on the phone pole. But they don't hang around like they used to".

A vulture day at Chimineas

They arrived shortly after dawn for a cold breakfast.

As the ranch house came into view we noticed the vultures in the cottonwoods. 

We unpacked and checked the first camera trap on a hill not far from the house.

That's when we found the dead cow. 

The Chimineas Ranch is in condor country. . . the inner coast range of San Luis Obispo County. 

California condors are coming back to the region, but the vultures never left. 

So we set a couple of cameras at the dead cow.  

It's something you do after your own meal has settled.

 

Two days and 985 pictures later we knew who visits the Carrion Cafe.

Common vultures (81% of the pictures), yellow-billed magpies (55%), ravens (36%), starlings (15%), coyotes (14%).

Magpies arrived for a cold breakfast (5:15:23AM) as soon as the coyotes left (5:15:13AM).

Then came 2 to 3 ravens and the vultures -- young and old, no more than 6 at a time. 

One starling watched from the sidelines and got bold when the big boys were scarce. 

Later in the morning there was a lull.

The vultures stretched their wings in the sun and preened.  

But they came and went all day long.  

Whether the meals were hot or cold, the Carrion Cafe was a busy place. 

Visitors of the great pool-Part 2

Surely there are dickey birds that bathe and drink from the big pool, but Rich's cam photographed only the big birds, like the band-tailed pigeon and a raven that was a little too blurry to post.

The red-shouldered hawk was there to bathe.



And so was the great-horned owl. Rich says, "The owl looks like it could be young or a molting adult. There were two shots of it, one up higher on the rocks, then a couple minutes later this one at pool level. It was last Friday at 2:30 PM, which was a hot day all over the area."

Cud chewers and crows

Tomales Point was swarming last week -- with starlings, crows, and ravens. The starlings' aerial synchronicity did justice to the blue angels. As we drove by the last dairy yards I stopped for a picture of the ravens and crows. The clever birds were uncooperative. The sorry image you see was a one-hand-out-the-window shot.

Why all the birds? I wondered.

Are they still looking for Tippy Hedren? Remember the toothsome and totally freaked-out blond in "The Birds"? Alfred Hitchcock filmed it in Bodega Bay, just up the coast from Tomales Point, and across the San Andreas fault.


[Photo from Wikipedia's Tippy Hedren]

More likely they're seeking bucolic company. Great flocks of crows, and a good number of ravens are always loafing around the dairy cows. Placentas and new born calves are easy pickings for carnivores and omnivorus birds like ravens and crows, and indeed there were a few new born calves on the ground. The highly synchronous calving season of some ruminants like caribou and wildebeest, attracts predators and scavengers ( the functional response), but the predators are swamped with the surplus. (This is a version of the safety-in-numbers hypothesis.)

The association of corvids with cud chewers (and for that matter other ungulates) must be ancient. Ungulate herds attract scores of blood-, sweat-, and dung-craving insects, and as they wade through the grass the cud-chewers expose other insects, like grasshoppers to waiting birds.

The next time you find yourself in a cow pasture take a few minutes to meditate on a cow pie. (It's best to do this when alone.) Pick a fresh one, preferably steamy. The bombardment of beetles is really quite a spectacle. They dive into the poop with the abandon of kids at a crowded swimming pool. But that's where the allusion ends, because they don't come up for air. Why? Because there's a sex orgy going on in there.

The crows and ravens of Point Reyes aren't just after meat, that I am sure. I suspect that insects are the real attraction. The concentration of manure must seethe with spent dung beetles and their larvae.

Dung beetles can be as large as golf balls and as iridescent as gems. Who would have thought that a diet of shit could produce such beauty, or that coprophagous beetles could move beetle collectors to florid and passionate verbalization. The point is this: the next time you see a person or crow picking through a cow pie, you'll know they are after the same thing -- dung beetles.

I once made a bizarre observation related to this theme. I was watching Indian house crows (Corvus splendens) at the zoo in Trichur, India. The gray-mantled birds were loafing in an enclosure of sambar. About a dozen spectator crows perched on the fence watching one of their brethren. This bird was more of an inspector than a good shepherd. It hopped among the cud chewers, perched on a back or antler, and paused now and then to cock its head and inspect one of its charges .

Clearly something was going on, and I decided to hang around to find out.

Finally one of the sambar stood up, stretched, and raised its jolly roger. The deer was obviously getting ready to evacuate its bowel. Sure enough, the curious crow flew up to its back, and hopped to its rump, where it craned precariously to examine the bulging sphincter. As the bolus of pellets appeared the crow meticulously plucked one pellet from the mass, and flew off with its prize.

I was dumbfounded, but knowing that other deer would soon become active, I waited in anxious expectation. Finally another cow lazily gained its feet, and the whole scene was repeated again.

I realized I was on the threshold of scientific discovery, and in desperation looked for a way to follow the extraordinary bird or birds. Alas, there were no routes whence it went -- beyond the zoo's walls.

I envisioned the paper's title -- "Proctology in the Indian house crow" --which I would submit to the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society.

But there were hitches. Was the proctologist a single depraved crow, or a flock of innovators? To write my paper I also had to find out what the crows did with the pellets. The mind boggles at the possibilities.

Blast! It wasn't to be. I was with others; we had a full agenda, and it was time for our next appointment. As far as I know, the proctologist crows of Trichur remain an ornithological secret.

Stumped by birds

I was stumped.

Ever since ringtail exposed herself, I've been angling for more pictures of that trim body, and especially a few shots showing the full length of that gloriously fluffy banded tail. Getting more pictures of that little charmer meant I had to outsmart the fox. Ringtail had stayed away ever since Br'er fox showed up. He had become a camera hog. I mean, 70 pictures a night is a bit much.

My ploy was to place the bait out of the fox's reach, because ringtails are good climbers. As you have seen ("Br'er fox can climb"), a four foot snag was no contest for the fox. So the next night I draped the goodies--chicken neck and liver--on the log's tallest snag, thinking that six feet might be out of reach. I staked the cam 6 feet away and set it for a vertical frame or "portrait".

The next day the bait was gone and I chuckled "Got it"! I switched the camera to VIEW, and got the blue screen with that disappointing message: "No file in the folder"--technotalk for "no pictures". Time for analysis. The sensor must be out of kilter, I thought, and it must be related to the camera's vertical position. Ringtail could also be eluding the sensor by climbing up the back of the snag. I turned on the control board, did the "walk test", and re-adjusted the camera's position.

The next day--same message, no pics. Then it dawned on me. The bait thieves are coming during the day, dummy! I changed the dip switch from "Night" to "24 hour" pictures.

On the third day, the bait was gone, but the cam had captured the images of thieving ravens. I had been stumped by birds.

There were three ravens sat in a tree
Down a down hey down hey down.

They were as black as black can be
With a down

And one of them said to his mate
O where shall we our breakfast take
with a down derry derry derry down down

O down in yonder bramble wood
Down a down hey down hey down

There is a man who's done us good
with a down

Each day he ambles down the trail
his mind is gone, but he's not yet frail
with a down derry derry derry down down

For reasons only known to him
Down a down hey down hey down

He dangles chicken on the limb
with a down

It's such good luck that such lost souls
stuff well-cured mice in wooden holes
with a down derry derry derry down down

He must have gone to graduate school
Down a down hey down hey down

Its only there they make such fools
With a down

Thank God he ignored the honeydo list
Or this fine meal we would have missed
WITH A DOWN DERRY DERRY DERRY DOWN DOWN

[Okay, okay--I hacked it badly--but it's easier to mangle an old ballad than write it from scratch.]