Search results for

Team MIG spent a wonderful day at the Audubon Center Beidler Forest. On the one and three-quarter mile long boardwalk, you may sometimes find a cluster of photographers with lenses all focused on a small cavity in a bald cypress knee, hoping to get pictures of Prothonotary warbler parents flying in and out with insects for their babies. Sometimes called swamp canaries, these birds are one of the only two warblers that nest in holes in dead wood, in Beidler most often a hole in a cypress knee slightly above water. In other parts of the state and country they nest in swamps, flooded bottomlands, or other places near water, mostly in dead tree holes sometimes first excavated by other birds, although they will use provided nesting boxes. Their breeding grounds extend to the Mississippi and as far north as Wisconsin.

The Prothonotary warbler is sometimes called the swamp canary. These small birds are a brilliant yellow with bluish-grey green wings and a black eye that’s very striking on the yellow head. Males are a more intense yellow than females.

When filming at Audubon’s Beidler Forest the Making It Grow team used binoculars to spy on a female Prothonotary warbler sitting on her eggs in a small hole in a cypress knee. Only the female incubates the eggs, which hatch after fourteen days. Then both parents are involved in feeding them, flying back and forth all day long bringing them insects.

To discover where prothonotary warblers spend their winters, Beidler staff devised an ingenious system. Several birds, weighing about half an ounce, have been fitted with tiny backpacks that record information about where they go. The devices don’t transmit coordinates, they would be too heavy. This system is dependent on having some of the birds, with their site fidelity, successfully making the trip south and returning to the place of their birth. Then they’re trapped, the backpacks removed, and information retrieved.

Professor Greg Reighard, Clemson researcher and international fruit specialist, explained that elderberries are primarily wind-pollinated. Although the flowers are extraordinarily showy, which you think would be a sign that they are attracting all sorts of pollinators, they don’t produce nectar so insect visitors are only collecting pollen. Still, their value to wildlife is high as the hundreds of dark purple fruits that each flower head produces are devoured by over 45 species of birds and racoons among others -- the Missouri Department of Conservation reports that a sharp-eyed naturalist even saw a box turtle eating fruits. But for people the entire plant contains compounds toxic to us, so this is one plant that grazers should not eat in the field. But properly prepared with heat, their berries have long been safely used for pies, wines and jellies.

An unusual bird, looking a little bit like a tanager, arrives in a listener's backyard. But, the coloring isn't right. The bird is an immature, male tanager, whose color quite different from a mature male's.

With its long orange trumpet-shaped flowers, trumpet creeper is a hummingbird magnet.

A listener witnesses an eastern rat snake when it encounters a nest of baby birds...

The pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) is a large, mostly black woodpecker native to North America. An insectivore, it inhabits deciduous forests in eastern North America, the Great Lakes, the boreal forests of Canada, and parts of the Pacific Coast. It is the largest extant woodpecker species in North America, with the possible exception of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed be reclassified as extinct. It is also the third largest species of woodpecker in the world, after the great slaty woodpecker and the black woodpecker. "Pileated" refers to the bird's prominent red crest, from the Latin pileatus meaning "capped".

J.S. Bach composed his St. Matthew Passion in 1727. But for the better part of a century after that, the piece essentially disappeared, unknown to all but a few specialists.