northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com
North-state Naturalists: Counting Points
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/04/counting-points.html
Sunday, April 11, 2010. Biologists, wildlife researchers, ecologists and others use a variety of methods to count the number or variety of species within a selected area. These can include trapping, trackplate and camera monitoring for reptiles and small mammals. And nighttime flashlight counts and stream surveys for frogs and toads. For birds there are transect surveys. And the method perhaps most widely employed: point counts. The first we had heard from this early arriving central American migrant.
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North-state Naturalists: See, I Know This (Ceanothus) The California Lilac
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/05/see-i-know-this-ceanothus-california.html
Monday, May 10, 2010. See, I Know This (Ceanothus) The California Lilac. Have we just been too busy to notice or did miles of beautiful creamy white, sky blue and lavender blossoms appear overnight? A blustery gray and wet drive to Chico this morning was framed by a near continuous border of gently swaying clouds of puffy ceanothus blooms. Apparently the unusually moist spring has provided ideal conditions for this showy flowering shrub that for most of the year is an unassuming leafy green bush. Springt...
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North-state Naturalists: Starting Life in a Sock!
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/04/starting-life-in-sock.html
Thursday, April 15, 2010. Starting Life in a Sock! Spend their early life not unlike the children of the Old-Woman-in-the-shoe. Except in this case it’s more like a hanging sock! The classic image most of us have of a nest is the ‘shallow bowl’ style nest typical of American Robin and many other birds. Made up of horsehair and baling twine; big, round American Dipper nests. All of green moss and football shaped verdin nests. Our first sighting of note was about a dozen Canada Geese goslings. Hopefully we...
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North-state Naturalists: Big and Green
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-and-green.html
Tuesday, May 25, 2010. Our goal last Sunday was to find and record as many Butte County bird species as we could in 24 hours using only human power; a completely non-motorized ’Green’ Big Day. In the end there were still more birds to see, but there was a shortage of energy left to find them! We began just after midnight about 2 miles above Jonesville. Were vocalizing loudly. Flycatchers, warblers and woodpeckers joined the dawn chorus and by 6:30 am we had already tallied over 35 species. At the Butte C...
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North-state Naturalists: Nest Searching
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/05/nest-searching.html
Thursday, May 27, 2010. I was off work a little early today to pick the kids up from school, so I used the extra daylight hours to do one of my favorite things – nest searching. There are various ways to search for nest: some intrusive and some more benign. The more intrusive methods are typically conducted for serious biological research, where the searcher must assess the number of nesting birds in a given area, these can include such things as chain-dragging (! That has been singing from this spot for...
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North-state Naturalists: Black and Blue
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/04/black-and-blue.html
Thursday, April 8, 2010. In recent weeks there has been a dramatic increase in the number of butterflies afield, most notably. Every year I’m amazed at how many of these uniquely colored butterflies grace our area, especially considering that I don’t see (or notice) an abundance of their host plant – pipevine. In our area (but then I haven’t looked very hard for it either). The large yellow zebra. B philenor is a nectar drinker, preferring such California native flowers as lupines. Photo by Troy Bartlett.
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North-state Naturalists: Chat: A Bird True to it’s Name
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/05/chat-bird-true-to-its-name.html
Sunday, May 9, 2010. Chat: A Bird True to it’s Name. I met with local ear-birder Mike Skram and natural sound recordist Greg Weddig this morning to look for a bird species named in part for it’s ‘talkative’ ways: the Yellow-breasted Chat. After finding five individuals of this species who apparently only wanted to ‘crow and go’ we finally located a pair of very assertive males who really wanted to ‘chat’ and we were serenaded for 15 minutes. Of the Panamanian Isthmus. For targeting individual bird songs&...
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North-state Naturalists: Fragrant Birding.
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/04/fragrant-birding.html
Friday, April 23, 2010. One of the great ironies of bird-watching is that sometimes man-made facilities provide the best opportunity for viewing (could it be because many of the best natural areas are gone? And not just any man-made facility…I speak specifically of that most odious of areas: the sewage treatment plant. In the Chico area the Chico Oxidation Ponds a.k.a. Wastewater Pollution Control Plant. Is no exception – the bird viewing is often some of the most productive in our area. A visit to the p...
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North-state Naturalists: Skunked!
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/04/skunked.html
Tuesday, April 13, 2010. On a bike ride this afternoon in Forest Ranch Liam and I encountered an animal not normally seen out and about during midday. The fact that we smelled it before we saw it is a dead giveaway to it’s identity, but in fact something didn’t ‘smell right’ about the whole thing! There, running straight down the road in front of us, feathered tail held high was a handsome striped skunk Mephitis mephitis. What scared our skunk? Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). But Wait Theres More!
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North-state Naturalists: Candles and Alligators
http://northstatenaturalists.blogspot.com/2010/05/candles-and-alligators.html
Sunday, May 23, 2010. My daughter Alita and I were the first to arrive Saturday morning to begin setting out chairs and decorations for the annual Candles in the Canyon dinner at the Big Chico Creek Ecological Reserve. After running out of chores Alita climbed a vintage fig tree. Alligator lizards are common in the foothills right now, emerging from their winter torpor to warm their blood in the spring sunshine, I’ve probably seen 4 of them in the past week. Our local representative of the group. Lizard ...
