NESTING REDWINGS

With eggs in the nest, the redwings are on alert.

While kayaking Ottawa Marsh I came upon a nest and these two reacted in opposite fashion: the male flared and defended while the female retreated and hid.

Fight or flight.

Both made a lot of racket.

TALLAMY ON TV

At last, Douglas Tallamy's wonderful presentation, Gardening for Life, will be broadcast next week on Public Media Network.

The award winning author of Bringing Nature Home was the keynote speaker for a conference on native gardening at the Kalamazoo Nature Center in the Fall of 2009. I was commissioned by the Kalamazoo Area Chapter of Wild Ones to document Tallamy's presentation and the panel discussion following his talk. You can read more about the presentation and the commissioned DVD by clicking here.

If you care about the decline of biodiversity in the world and want to know how you can do something about it right in your backyard, you need to watch this program!

Friday, May 27th @8pm, channel 20

Sunday, May 29th @7pm, channel 19

Tuesday, May 31st @10am, channel 20

Thursday, June 2nd @3pm, channel 19

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Oh, how I love the little yellow warbler...let me count the ways.

And words will always fall short of my feelings and affection for Ottawa Marsh.

I made my first trip to Ottawa this year, still early enough in the season to savor

the more delicate shades of Spring's palette. 

Ask me anytime of year where I'd like to be, if I could be anywhere

in Southwest Michigan, and I will almost always say: Ottawa Marsh.

OSPREY DEJA VU

The Osprey are back!

In town along the Kalamazoo River.

They nested at this same spot for the first time two years ago, but were severely pressured by the constant gaze of awe struck onlookers, as well as a meth bust that put every news station van in Southwest Michigan within 10 yards of their nesting pole.

Given all that, I'm surprised they returned.

I'll post more soon. In the meantime, you can read an earlier post about these birds by clicking here.

PEREGRINES ABORT CLUTCH

The unfortunate update on our peregrines is that Idelle abandoned her nesting spot on the 15th floor of the Fifth Thirds building.

She aborted the clutch about two weeks ago, leaving behind four eggs in a copper-lined rain trough. It's very possible the torrential rains we had a few weeks ago were simply too much for Idelle as the rising water surrounded her and the eggs. 

A failed, first clutch is not uncommon and certainly explains the copulating I witnessed recently as the pair makes a second attempt at nesting this year. The birds have also gravitated over to one of the Pfizer buildings, perhaps attracted to what some say is a gravel roof.

Another twist in this story are reports of a third bird. Karen Tindall, who works in the Haymarket building on Michigan Avenue, across the street from Fifth Thirds, reports she saw a third peregrine recently in the area, something Jonathan Morgan (a local birder) witnessed a few weeks back. 

I think it's safe to say the falcons are here to stay, and sooner or later they'll succeed with a brood and young will fledge. The question is exactly where and when that will happen. 

PROBLEMS WITH BLOGSPOT

For some unknown reason, Blogspot was having internal difficulties and consequently my last post, "PEREGRINES ABORT CLUTCH", was unexpectedly deleted. I'll be re-writing and re-posting very soon. Stay tuned.

I'm proud to announce that I, 

Matt Clysdale, am now officially 

a "dot com".

mattclysdale.com is the home of my new website! 

There you'll find samples of both my photographs and videos. There's also a shopping cart if you're interested in purchasing a print.

I'm extremely excited since this is my first centralized website. It's a work in progress, but I've come to realize life itself is a work in progress.

Enjoy! 

Paintings by BRENT SPINK

My good friend and neighbor, Brent Spink, is exhibiting a large collection of his work this Thursday through Sunday (April 28th - May 1st) at 309 North Burdick, right next door to Sarkozy's bakery.

Brent is a master painter of the natural world and has an uncanny ability to capture the sublime, ephemeral beauty of a landscape, whether it's a pristine wetland or a bulldozed wood lot. He's exhibiting works from huge to small, new to old, surreal to real, and epic to everyday.

If you want to open beautiful, new horizons in your home, now is the time to invest in a Spink*. 

So, come take in the stirring visions of one of Michigan's finest painters. He's also a great guy to talk to. He'll be there.

Hope to see you,

Matt

Click here to see his Gazette article and get the specific times.

*If he sells enough work, perhaps he won't move out West as planned.

Idelle

Karen Cleveland of the DNR was able to identify our female falcon using the band identification on her leg. And no, HP does not stand for Hewlett-Packard.

Her name is "Idelle". She was born on May 24th, 2009 at Gold Rock Point, in the Split Rock Lighthouse State Park in Lake County, Minnesota.

All the way from the gorgeous Lake Superior lakeshore - she's a city girl now. Amazing.

Idelle.

Peregrines In Our Future...

Around this time last year I wrote a post about falcons in Kalamazoo, inspired by a rare sighting of merlins that appeared to be nesting on the west side of town . At the end of that post I mentioned the periodic sightings of peregrine falcons in downtown Kalamazoo and how it would be great if they decided to make our little downtown their home. Well, sometimes in life our wishes are fulfilled.

Hi atop the 5/3rds Bank Building, just inside a rain trough on the 15th floor, rest three peach colored eggs with little reddish-brown specks. Sitting on top is a female falcon, expanding her breast feathers to envelop and protect her precious clutch from the cold spells of a capricious April, or pilfering crows. Periodically, the male, or tiercel, swoops up to the ledge with a dead bird offering and is met with a cry from his hungry mate. Their falcon chatter rings out like the familiar cry of a coopers hawk and is quickly becoming the tell tale sound of our resident pair of nesting peregrines.

For the past two years, people in town have observed peregrines perched on buildings, lamp posts, towers, and soaring the open sky, but never before have we had them nesting. It's well known that peregrines have been nesting in Grand Rapids, Detroit, and other larger, urban centers, but it remained in doubt--at least for me--whether peregrines would deem Kalamazoo suitable habitat. I've always perceived Kalamazoo as a baby city, with only one, maybe two buildings barely qualifying as sky-scrapers. I always wondered whether we were "big" enough for the largest of falcons.

It appears as though we are.

The old, American National Bank, with it's 1929 art deco designs carved into the limestone facade, serves as an urban cliff, looking out over the city and the vast territory of the Kalamazoo River valley, rife with falcon prey: the ubiquitous rock pigeon, the mourning dove, starlings, and countless other birds, including an occasional water fowl (one construction worker noted a duck head on one of the ledges of the building).

Peregrines have adapted beautifully to the rise of a new and almost entirely manufactured landscape: the city-scape. All across the country, and even the world, peregrines are nesting on buildings in our cities, as well as on bridges, smoke-stacks, power plants, radio towers, and any other man made structure that affords that aerial perch to survey the skies for food.

But, let's not count our falcons before they hatch. Our birds chose a questionable spot for nesting: a copper-lined rain trough with nothing to cradle the eggs and fully exposed to rain water, making a successful hatching pretty dubious. Karen Cleveland, all-bird biologist at the Michigan DNR, says it's not unusual for a rookie pair to try nesting in these less than perfect places. A rain trough will of course have water moving, and even coursing through during a torrential downpour, and that's not good for incubation. It can sometimes take successive, annual failings for a couple to attempt a new, successful location. Eventually they get it, and with a bird that can live up to 15 years in the wild, they have some time before they can make a contribution to the overall population of peregrines.

If the birds fail this first attempt, the Bank will hopefully put in (at the request of the DNR), a layer of pea-stone, or install a simple nest-box for either a second round of breeding this year or a completely fresh start next year. A little assistance from the human kind can go a long way, and if you're familiar with the plight of the peregrine over the last 50 years, you know humans have been instrumental in restoring the endangered peregrine population. Which is only appropriate considering it was human-made pesticides that decimated peregrine populations during the middle of the last century. I'll talk about this in a later post.

So, let's root for our resident pair and their first, vulnerable clutch. One way or another, I think they're here to stay. And soon enough, we should have a positive ID on each parent's bands. That way we'll be able to identify each bird and know exactly where they were born! In fact, there's an entire website dedicated to tracking and following the lineage of peregrines in the Midwest. You can find it at the Midwest Peregrine Society.

Although we're by no means the first city to be graced by peregrines, this is our first pair, and for that reason they're special. The fastest animal on the planet now resides on East Michigan Avenue. I'd say that's pretty cool.

I'll be posting more photos and writing about our new celebrity couple. So stay tuned, and either look up for the falcons, or look down on the ground around 5/3rds Bank - you just might see the leftovers from a falcon lunch.