Fauna Friday

This has been turkey week - we've seen a ton of them!  On the way to Townsend there's always a big gang of about 20 that we see in the fields next to the road, spotted them again on Wednesday.
On Sunday, we were finishing our hike along the Roaring Fork Road (which is closed to vehicle traffic for the winter) and as we neared Ely's Mill we crossed paths with a rafter of turkeys (that's the official term for a bunch of them, interesting choice) :

Just after I stopped the video, two turkeys were startled by us and took flight, landing high up on the hillside where the rest were headed.  It is amazing to see that happen, as big and galumphy as they appear, they are quieter and more graceful in flight than you might expect.
Also of note, Ely's Mill is getting their bee hives ready!! Hooray for mountain honey!  I'm sloooooowly using my one jar of wildflower honey I got from them last season, it tastes *exactly* like the cabins and forests along the Roaring Fork smell (to me).  Heavenly.

Fauna Friday

I'm instituting a new weekly feature here on the blog!  Welcome "Fauna Fridays", wherein I will post a few pics of the creatures I've seen during the week.  Enjoy!

This week's fauna were all sighted on Wednesday while hiking in Cades Cove, Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It was a cool, dreary, misty/drizzly day - my favorite kind and the best for hiking off-trail!

Red-tailed Hawk (I think) - we saw many hawks while driving & hiking.

The only things we saw more than hawks were deer - lots!

....including a handful of lovely bucks.

11 deer in this field near the Elijah Oliver cabin.

The Crows

I didn't set out to feed the crows... I merely intended to feed the typical yard birds: cardinals, blue jays, titmice, chickadees, goldfinches, etc.... and those did all show up in abundance, along with a few surprises like bluebirds and indigo buntings and a lone turkey.
Well, the local crow tribe took notice of all the activity and started coming to dine at my daily seed buffet. I don't mind a bit, in fact I'm quite pleased since I find crows very fascinating and beautiful birds, and they've inspired a lot of my artwork.

They swing by at least once (that I notice) on most days, there are usually 4 or 5, sometimes joined by a 6th. Two of them are babies/juveniles.... with full feather suits grown but still have stray bits of downy fuzz, pinkness at the corners of the beaks, and are a tad ungraceful yet (which of course just increases their charm). They feed themselves but still exhibit the baby-begging behavior at times. Mom/dad seem to be pretty much done with the spoon-feeding.

It has been exceptionally hard to photograph them, they see *every* little movement. I had to wrap my face and sneak to the window like a ninja to catch these shots. Two of them still spotted me videoing and flew about 40 feet away, while the others didn't seem to notice or care.


I'm pretty sure they live in the woods behind our house because they're always around and I can often hear them calling to each other. The babies can be quite noisy!

Peepin' Peeper

Here's Bob (aka The Peeper) looking out our bathroom window. He's discovered he likes to have a little peek outside! But he has a very short attention span and his interest fades after a couple minutes.

About a week ago, we were both standing there watching a snow flurry when the local crow flock flew over on their daily roosting trek around 5pm.

Peeper was mezmerized! He watched them all go by, a couple hundred in total, then looked at me as if to say, "what the heck was that?!"
If only I'd had the camera handy then..... *sigh*


By the way, he's 26 this year.
Sho' nuff.

It's crow season again!

When I say that, I don't mean it in a Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny "rabbit season! duck season!" kind of way. What I do mean is that we've reached the time of year when the various crow clans around our city start gathering together in the evenings and roost together overnight in a massive flock, a "murder".

For several years I've observed them flocking to one location in particular as dusk approaches. Occasionally they gather in other spots within a mile of that 'headquarters'. These locations vary over time - I've seen them abandon two locations due to human interference (ie: clear-cutting of trees). I've not stayed around to see if they roost at HQ or move onward to another area, but I hope to find out this season.

As you can see I am quite interested in crows (and ravens) (and birds in general) and that led me to an interesting discovery. Crow calling. I ran across crow calls in the hunting department of Bass Pro (I do NOT hunt), and decided to purchase one. I wondered if it would really work to get their attention and bring them near so I could get a better look at them.

Successful? Oh Yes. I'd say my crow caller has about an 80% success rate of bringing crows in when I use it, if not better. The first time I tried it out in the mountains (where we often hear crows cawing), we were swarmed by a small stormtrooper-like squadron that circled the treetops for a couple minutes and made such a huge racket!

Sometimes when I call crows, they answer back but keep their distance and don't fly in closer to investigate. They usually seem to respond most strongly to caws in bursts of 5, 7 and 9, as opposed to lesser numbered or even numbered caws. Oddly enough, this is similar with my own bird (a cockatiel) - he responds best to and prefers to mimic sequences of 5 or 7 finger-taps upon his cage bottom or a table top (he hammers back like a woodpecker).

This video was taken last weekend in the mountains. Sorry for the Blair Witch-like visual, you can't see much but the sound is OK :-) We were in an area which crows frequent, and we heard them cawing in the distance. I got out my caller and sent out a sequence of 7 calls. Within about 30 seconds two came to investigate us. As usual, we stood still and watched as the crows circled above the trees. A third did a single fly-by and left. The two who stayed were very vocal, and we heard others probably about a mile away but they did not come. One mostly perched in a treetop while the other circled around. I gave 5 caws, then 4 caws (they responded well to both), then after about a minute they headed onward.

The most crows that have ever flown in after a call has been about 10, which can be rather unsettling when they get into full clamor. They always leave within a few minutes of locating us.

Crow quotes:
"Crow is an omen of change. Crow lives in the void and has no sense of time. The Ancient Chiefs tell us that Crow sees simultaneously the three fates - past, present and future. Crow merges light and darkness, seeing both inner and outer reality."