Want to go on a field trip?

So as it turned out, I wasn't going to be quite as alone this week as I thought. Bob, a biologist and bander of tricolored blackbirds (not a biologist who also happens to be a tricolored blackbird), would be staying at the house and trapping blackbirds on the refuge for the next few days. His was welcome company, as I discovered when I returned to the house, elated from my close encounter of the badger kind.

"Want to go on a field trip?" the newly-arrived Bob asked me. "Sure!" I replied, and hopped in his truck--loaded up with cages and cracked corn--to drive down to the blackbirds' nettle nesting grounds. Apparently nettle is a thing they like?

(Tricolored Blackbird photograph courtesy of digitalmedia.fws.gov)

Once we reached the site, Bob spread the cracked corn on the road, placing the traps on top. This setup is apparently highly effective--the birds enter the traps to get at the corn, but the cages' design prevents the blackbirds from escaping--and has far less average mortality than the more dominant method of catching birds, mist-netting. Apparently there exists quite the divide between the trappers and the mist-netters, such that at bird-banding conferences, the two groups segregate their seating arrangements. Ah, scientific rivalry.

We went on a walk after, down to a spot overlooking a deep gorge, where across the way Bob had found a prairie falcon nest. On the way we saw a brown racer snake. Neither of us had a scope handy so we planned to bring one out the following day to get a closer look at the chicks. Some distance away from that nest, we spotted another, more unusual one. Built up high on the rock face was a nest with a long red ribbon dangling from it. Bob seemed to think it was a raven's nest, but that a horned owl had taken up residence there. We'll just have to confirm it tomorrow I guess.

Tadpoles found in a water trough.

Treefrog

Back at the house, I took Bob to see the baby barn owls, who had by now developed all their adult plumage and subsequently fledged. However, one of them did not seem to have mastered the art of flying, and upon our entrance into the barn it flew out awkwardly, bumping into the rafters and then dropping to the ground, where it proceeded to threat display to me. Bob chased it back into the barn, and we left the fledglings alone.

Not gonna lie, little owl: while your display didn't exactly scare me off, I was pretty impressed.