Tag Archives: Birds

Belted Kingfisher and Fish

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Belted Kingfisher and Fish

Belted Kingfisher and Fish

Anne and I went bicycling in the park today. This is the second time that she has ridden and the first real ride that she has had since her accident last year. On the was back home, we swung by the owl’s nest, so that Anne could see them, they were nowhere to be seen. I suspect that with today’s wind-shift, Sarah was hunkering down in the nest.

While we were standing around, wondering where the owl was, this kingfisher showed up and hung around long enough to gobble up its freshly caught fish. We saw this bird manifest the same behavior that the woman yesterday described to me. The kingfisher would smack the fish against the tree branch, I guess to stun it. I’ve compiled some of the photos into an animated GIF, to better convey this bird’s dining process. The following sound clip was recorded earlier and is included to let you know what to listen for. Kingfishers have a very distinctive call and are easier to find and track audibly than they are visually.

Biking and Birding

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Sarah, the Great-horned Owl
Bike Wheel Shadow
Red-tailed Hawk


Saturday was an active day. First, Anne and I walked several miles in the morning. It was cold, but brilliantly clear. We stopped at Big Daddy’s Cheesecake for breakfast. We had eggs not cheesecake, so wipe that smirk off your face. On the way home, we shopped for dinner at Schnucks.

We were going to make a pasta dish with a saga cheese sauce. This is a dish that we’ve made for years, but the store was out of saga cheese. The helpful people at the cheese bar suggested a suitable substitute and we were able to amaze them by describing our planned recipe. It is dirt simple:

  • Cut the saga into bits and place in a ceramic bowl.
  • Add minced vegetables and an imperial glop of oil.
  • We’re using red bell pepper, red onion and peas.
  • Place the ceramic bowl with cheese and vegetables on top of the cooking pot for boiling the pasta.
  • Bring the water to a boil and add pasta.
  • Rotini pasta is recommended, because it holds the sauce better than a linguine would.
  • The heat from the boiling water will heat the ceramic bowl and melt the cheese and cook the vegetables.
  • After the pasta is cooked, drain water and mix with cheese and vegetables in the ceramic bowl and serve.

Having done our shopping by foot will make this a car free day. We are just so fricking green. I checked the mail after we got home and there was a solicitation from one of the local Toyota dealers. They made an offer to buy our Prius. They offered $20K. We had paid $26K for it new, almost two years ago. I figure that if this pitch is not just a total scam, which it almost certainly is, they have to be planning on reselling our car for almost list again.

Anne thought that this whole idea was rather stupid, because if we sold the Prius, we would just have to turn around again and buy another car. Then she had an epiphany. What if we bait-and-switched the used car dealer instead of letting them do the same to us? Instead of selling the two-year-old Prius, why not sell them the twenty-year-old Prizm. It’s sort of a Toyota. The first three letters are both the same and instead of a car that would be hard to part with, because it is all about ‘us’, why not a car with some zoom in it? We’ll entertain $20K or best offer. 😉

I went for a bike ride in the park this afternoon. I had done some Internet research and had a pretty good idea of where to find the Forest Park owls. I found one, Sarah, on the nest. I woke her up and she eventually retreated further into the tree trunk. The pictured shot show her kind of half awake. I never could find Charles, but I hear that he is still around. This pair has been nesting in the park for seven years now.

Later I spoke with a woman who was busy looking at something with binoculars. She had seen a kingfisher, who had a fish. It had been beating the fish against the branch. It must have flown off by the time I arrived. Later, I saw the Red-tailed hawk in the same tree as the kingfisher was in. Earlier in the day, during our morning walk, Anne pointed out a mated pair of Red-tails lazily circling high above us.

Patriot

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Patriot, American Bald Eagle

Patriot, American Bald Eagle

Old business first, an update on yesterday’s post, the office of Claire McCaskill has already responded to yesterday’s tour requests to see the US Capital and Whitehouse. We have a tour reservation for the Capital and our Whitehouse tour request has been forwarded to the Whitehouse, some mumble jumble about the separation of powers. We ought to hear yay or nay from Obama in a couple of weeks. I am impressed that was pretty fast. Who says that the Senate can’t move quickly? Oh, Mister Blunt?

Patriot is the name of the pictured American Bald Eagle. It is a twenty-year-old female. Patriot is a rescue bird, rescued as a chick; the two other siblings from the nest didn’t survive. It is now a ward of the World Bird Sanctuary. Although the World Bird Sanctuary is located in West Saint Louis County, we met Patriot at the Audubon Center in the Riverlands Migratory Bird Sanctuary. On Sunday, we saw a number of free Bald Eagles at the Riverlands, but this is the most striking photograph of one. We also saw a few of the last of the Trumpeter Swans, the rest have already migrated north again. We saw about a hundred White Pelicans. They are a little early this year; they don’t normally come through town until March. We also saw numerous little birds. We are still trying to sort some of these species out. It snowed Sunday morning, about three inches worth. This was certainly our first “real” snowfall of the season and what with Saturday’s Groundhog Day forecast, it could also be our last one of the season.

Nell: I won’t pay the taxes!
Snidely: You must pay the taxes.
Dudley: I’ll pay the taxes.
Nell: My hero!

Tax season has descended upon our lovely little hovel. In a bit of gender role reversal vis-a-vie the above dialog, my lovely bride has transformed herself into a real PITA (Personal Income Tax Assessor). I am now peppered with requests for W-2 and 1099 forms and the like. Our financial division of labor is that I pay the monthly bills and Anne does the annual taxes. You can also think of this division of labor as a personal audit of how well I did at managing our finances over the past year. So far, Anne has uncovered that I failed to pay our personal property taxes last year. Claire can you offer some help here too? 😉

Penguin Parade

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Male Cardinal in the Garden’s Mediterranean House
Parading Penguins
Penguin Parade
Penguins on Parade
This Sea-Lion Was Not Invited to the Penguin Parade


We were out and about on Sunday. Our first stop was the botanical gardens. There the flags were at half mast, because Stan Musial died yesterday. Stan the Man was a great ball player and a great person too. Saint Louis loved him and we will miss him. I didn’t stay up for it, but Anne told me that the local TV newscast went nuts. After 45 minutes of Musial memorial, they tried to get on with the rest of the news. The sports announcer told us that the Blues hockey team won their opener 6-0 and did you know that six was Stan Musial’s number? Not to be outdone, the weather person announced that the high for the day was 66 °F and did you know that both those digits are the same as Musial’s jersey number? I guess that we should be thankful that there weren’t any hat tricks involving six. There was a pair of cardinals (male and female) in the garden’s Mediterranean House. I think that the male’s photo makes for a nice tie-in.

Anne’s camera battery died and my camera froze up in the cold, so it was time to leave the gardens. Brunch sounded good, so it was off to Local Harvest on Morganford. There are now two other Local Harvest restaurants in town, at the Old Post Office and Kirkwood, but I doubt that those other two locales have the same quota of hipsters as we saw. Anne and I were easily two standard deviations away from the median age of the clientele. Anne had the French toast and I had biscuits and gravy. The two dropped biscuits were to die for, plus they were humongous and could have easily made a meal for two. I could not finish them.

The next stop on our itinerary was the zoo. The zoo is now sponsoring winter events. Today’s signature event was the Penguin Parade. We got our parade spots, an hour before it began. This meant we had to wait in the cold, but Anne took full advantage of this time by mugging with other people’s babies. The zookeepers cooked up this event to boost attendance, but also to stimulate the penguins. This falls under the rubric that anything new and different is good for the animals. The zookeepers seemed rather nonplussed by the gathered crowd, but then had to impromptu double the length of the parade route, but the penguins just took it in stride. They genuinely seemed to enjoy the outing and weren’t particularly interested in rushing through it. The big ones are King penguins and the little ones are Gentoo. The kids of course loved it and me too.

As you can see the crowd was allowed get quite close to the penguins. We were admonished not to reach out and try to touch them, because they might bite. Like one of these perp-walking penguins last year, bit presidential candidate Newt Gingrich on the finger. Afterwards, we toured the new as of last year, sea-lion exhibit. I heard that the sea lions offered to host a future event, a penguin pool party. 😉

You look like you are wearing a tuxedo.
How do you know that I am not?