The Mourning Dove

A few days ago, I talked about the mystery bird I glimpsed flying away from the feeder. It turns out that he visited again today. As he walked casually around the feeder, finding fallen seeds, I began to think that he was about the size of my bird in flight. Finding this nature site was my first step in solving the mystery. With some trial and error, I plugged in tan instead of yellow and was fairly certain I had found my bird. Then I googled some images of the mourning dove in flight. My search proved successful. This description, "Mourning Doves fly fast on powerful wingbeats, sometimes making sudden ascents, descents, and dodges, their pointed tails stretching behind them." on the Cornell Ornithology Site matched my bird's flight exactly.

The Mighty Chickadee In The Colorado Forest

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology describe the little bird that frequents most of Canada and North America as "universally cute." But Kailen Mooney, while a doctoral student at UC-Boulder in 2006 proved this "cute" bird can also save the magnificent pine trees. He found that these mountain chickadees , along with other songbirds such as the red-breasted nuthatch and the pygmy nuthatch who are year-round residents of the Colorado pine forests can change the "flavor" of a tree. Mooney put about 300 insects and spiders on some ponderosa pines in Colorado. Then he covered the pine with netting so the chickadees and his friends could not eat the aphids and caterpillars. While dining on the branches the tree, like other plant life, these insects cause the tree to give off an odor. When the birds ate the insects, the tree's "flavor," or odor, which Mooney explains is a chemical called terpene, changed. But wait there are three other actors in this environmental tragedy. In walk the bark beetle, the squirrel and porcupine. They smell a change. A whiff they dislike. Like so many of Aesop's tales, the largest forest inhabitant once again is saved by his tiny companion. But the play does not end here.