Kinglets Keeping Warm

I'm in Duluth, and have been here all day, killing time until my 2:30 AM shuttle to the Twin Cities airport, from where I will fly home (currently located in McKinney, TX) to spend a couple of weeks with my family for the holidays.  Today, I've had the joy of experiencing the blizzard (more snow accumulated today than in the entire month of December 2011) from the windows of various coffee shops and fast-food restaurants.

Luckily, I had some friends to keep me company for most of the day.

While hanging out and sipping hot chocolates, I've been finishing up Winter World by Bernd Heinrich, which is all about how animals deal with the weather we're currently experiencing here (see earlier blog post about turtles).  His inspiration for this book was observing golden-crowned kinglets, little birds that spend winters in very cold places.  How do they do it?

The scientific name for the kinglet genus is "regulus," which means "little king," a reference to the fact that kinglets appear to have a crown on their heads.  In the case of golden-crowned kinglets, that crown is golden and, in males, with a tinge of fiery red.  Kinglets are an evolutionarily distinct group of birds, and there are two species native to North America, the other being the ruby-crowned kinglet (guess what color its "crown" is!)  The golden-crowned kinglets are found throughout North America and Canada, meaning that many spend their winters in blustery New England.  How does such a small bird survive such cold weather?

A male golden-crowned kinglet I removed from a mist net while bird banding at Hawk Ridge in September, 2012.

One incredible aspect of the golden-crowned kinglets' winter survival skills is that they begin nesting in late March and April, when snowstorms are still common in New England.  Their nests are built inside of coniferous trees, deep enough that the overhanging branches will protect the nest from snow.  Furthermore, if snow covers a tree containing a nest, it adds an insulating layer from the cold.  Kinglet nests have been observed to contain a number of materials, one of the most common of which is grouse feathers.  The grouse feathers are the perfect size and shape to add significant warmth to the nest.  When it comes time to lay the eggs, kinglets lay 8-11, so many that they typically have two layers of eggs in the nest.  Furthermore, as soon as the hatchlings are old enough to stay warm on their own, a mother kinglet will get to work on a second nest, where she will lay another brood, a phenomenon known as "double clutching."  This sounds challenging, but 80% of kinglet hatchlings survive!

In order to keep their metabolism high enough to stay warm in the cold months, golden-crowned kinglets spend dawn until dusk foraging for food nonstop (the male apparently foraging for the female while she is on the nest).  The fat reserves they accumulate from this amount to about 0.3 grams, not nearly enough to survive a cold, winter's night.  How these 5-6 gram birds do that is still shrouded in mystery.

The two most likely spots a kinglet could lose heat is through the eyes and beak - thus, one simple method to keep warm is burying their "faces" in feathers when sleeping.  Also, kinglets appear to travel in groups of two or three.  Three kinglets huddling together during a cold night would prevent up to 37% of the heat loss they may otherwise experience individually.  However, it seems that the most important factor to keeping kinglets warm at night is shelter.  Where exactly they go is the question.  Heinrich suspected they were staying in abandoned squirrel nests, for example.  However, after following groups of kinglets near his cabin in Maine, it appeared that the kinglets did not have one set place to stay warm overnight.  Rather, because the kinglets were foraging until the moment it got dark, they were finding many different places to stay based on where they were when the sun set.

As I watch the snow falling outside the window of this cozy coffee shop, it is amazing to me to imagine a five-gram bird trying to stay warm out there tonight.  It doesn't surprise me that our knowledge of how they accomplish this is still minimal.  At the end of the day, I think Heinrich says it best: "They defy the odds and the laws of physics, and prove that the fabulous is possible."

Training Korppi

Korppi's first day at Wolf Ridge

At the beginning of the school-year, a new education animal joined the team at Wolf Ridge, a common raven we named "Korppi" (the Finnish word for "raven").  Working with Korppi quickly proved to be an entirely different situation than working with the education raptors.  Ravens are significantly smarter than raptors and require daily enrichment.

Korppi's enrichment comes in a number of forms.  Every day, we try to present her with a different challenge for obtaining her food, whether that involves hiding it somewhere in her enclosure, putting inside of some sort of puzzle-container, or simply giving her something that is challenging to eat (like an apple or a pumpkin).  Enrichment also comes in the form of training, which is something that I've been working with her on a daily basis.

When she first arrived, Korppi needed to simply become comfortable with me and learn to associate me with positive experiences.  So, I sat in the corner of her mew and threw raisins for her to eat.  Eventually, she would come closer and closer to me until she was eating raisins right next to me.  Then, she spent a couple of days eating raisins off of my shoes before she finally worked up the courage to take them right out of my fingers.

Korppi tentatively investigating a pine-cone full of raisins

My next project was to crate-train her; that is, train her to voluntarily go into a travel crate so we can take her in and out of her enclosure.  This started off pretty good, but we reached a point where Korppi was refusing to enter the crate (even though she clearly knew what I wanted) and was beginning to get aggressive with me.  I figured out that we hadn't built up enough trust together yet, especially since her only experience with crates up to this point was being involuntarily stuffed into and out of one before she arrived at Wolf Ridge.  Her negative association with crates coupled with our quickly fading trust with each other created a situation that was not working for either of us.

At this point, it was time to focus on building trust together, so I spent the next month training her to perch on a scale perch during which I fed her lots of raisins.  Throughout the course of the month, I began to notice a change in our sessions as Korppi became more relaxed with me, nipping at my fingers less and less.  I also became more relaxed and I think my awareness of my body language contributed to our progress.

And then, today happened.  As Korppi was perched on her scale perch, I had my arm extended just below the perch and without any prompting, she stepped onto my arm.  I was completely caught off guard and made sure to reward her immediately.  It was an exciting moment - a testament to the trust we've finally built with each other.  She stepped up on my arm five or six more times today without any hesitation.

A moment I'm always going to remember

Now that she trusts me enough to step up onto my arm, we can move forward with some other training activities when I get back from Christmas break.  Where will our training sessions go from here?  Sometimes, it seems like that is more Korppi's decision than mine.

Chicken Butchering

"Everyone who eats meat should get warm blood on their hands at least once a year." -Kurt Mead

In my attempts to learn more about food and how it gets to my dinner plate, naturalist friend Nikki and I decided to take up an opportunity to try out chicken butchering and preparation.  Kurt Mead, resident odonatalogist, ice fisherman, hunter, craftsman, baker, and all-around awesome guy, invited us over for his family's annual chicken butchering.  The Meads raise around 50 chickens every year, which they then use to feed their family (and the occasional family friend).  They're a great example of an environmentally conscious family in their decisions about where their meat comes from.

1. Butchering: The first step of the chicken butchering process is the most uncomfortable, in that it is the actual killing of the chickens.  There are a lot of different things I could say about this.  This was the first time I ever killed anything bigger than a fly, so I was a little unsure about how I was going to react.  However, once there in the situation, the actual act of butchering was much easier than I expected.  These chickens were clearly raised to be killed for meat and I recognize that in order to eat meat, someone has to kill it.  I think Kurt's quote is true - if you can't take responsibility for your meat, than you probably should think twice about eating it.

The killing is surprisingly easy.  A chicken is grabbed, hung upside down from its legs and then the neck is cut with one smooth slice of the knife.  The chicken is killed instantly and you just have to give it some time for the blood to empty out.

2. Deplucking: This was weirdly my favorite part of the process.  The chicken is submerged in hot water for about a minute to loosen up the feathers.  Then the chicken is placed in the deplucker, a machine Kurt personally built to expedite this process.  It's a large tub with rubber fingers coming out of the sides and a spinner on the bottom.  By spinning the chicken around the fingers and spraying it down with a hose, all of the feathers magically come off - it was awesome.

Nikki soaking a chicken before putting it in the deplucker.  Kurt supervising.

3. Gutting: Removing the innards of the chicken takes awhile, but this was pretty easy for me.  Having gutted hundreds of mice and small birds for our resident raptors, I've become quite familiar with the inner workings of animal organs.  After cutting off the legs, and the "pope's nose" (a slang term for the tail/butt), you basically just stick your hand in the chicken and start taking out the organs.  Chicken by chicken, we removed the intestines, gizzard, heart, lungs, liver, and crop.

Nikki pulling out a chicken esophagus.

4. Rinsing and Packaging: Once the chicken is all cleaned out, it's pretty easy to rinse it out and package it up.  The chickens are then put in the freezer and the Mead family now has enough chicken to last them the entire year.

Fully prepped chickens also make great hand puppets!

Kurt kindly let me take a chicken home for my own freezer.  I'm looking forward to cooking it as well. How often does someone get to go from having a live animal to having a meal on his/her plate and experience all the steps in between?