Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Ever since a female Pileated Woodpecker wearing a leg band appeared in my yard on September 14, I’ve been taking photo after photo of her, trying to tease out the band number. I’ve been calling her BG for “Banded Girl,” and she’s been exceptionally cooperative, so I wonder if she might be the female who hatched this year who came several times with an unbanded adult male who nested somewhere in the neighborhood.

(Listen to the radio version here when I record it tomorrow.) This migrant Northern Saw-whet Owl was detained temporarily at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory last October. At this very moment, migrants are flooding through the natural world, a world that has no political borders marking off cities, counties, provinces, states, or countries, no hurricane forecast maps to be scribbled on with a marker, no large bodies of water with names that a scurvy politician1 can arbitrarily change.

(Listen to the radio version here.) From the time I was three or four years old, I yearned to be a real, official birdwatcher. My first role model was a TV character named Pamela Livingtone, portrayed by Nancy Kulp, on The Bob Cummings Show. Nancy Kulp went on to play a similar role, Miss Jane Hathaway, on The Beverly Hillbillies.

(Listen to the radio version here.) Wisconsin Point’s nesting Piping Plovers. Photo by Mikayla Erickson/St. Louis River Alliance. At the end of August, several friends sent me a wonderful news story from the St. Louis River Alliance and from Wisconsin Public Radio: this summer, for the first time since 1977, a pair of Piping Plovers nested on Wisconsin Point in Superior.

Listen to the radio version of Part 1 here and Part 2 here later today. Setting out nest boxes seems like a low-maintenance kind of thing—you set out a high-quality birdhouse in a good location, and birds nest in it—end of story. But after the babies leave the nest, it’s important to clean out the nest box as soon as possible. Parent birds keep up with nest sanitation as best they can.

(Listen to the radio version here when I record it tomorrow.) When I was in seventh grade or so, my dad took the five of us kids and his second wife’s little boy to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. We went in at the entrance by the agricultural exhibits, and I made a beeline for the big incubator where people can watch baby chicks hatch. One egg was in the process—I could see the tip of the chick’s beak working on the crack where it had pipped.

(Listen to the radio version here when I record it tomorrow.) My daughter and son-in-law moved to Duluth from Brooklyn, New York, in April 2020, during the pandemic. She was pregnant at the time, and they lived with us, both working remotely, until Walter’s first birthday, when they moved into a house just 3 miles away, on Tischer Creek.

(Listen to the radio version here when I record it in the morning.) American Crow managing three peanuts! (You may need to zoom in to see all three.) One of the things I discovered when I was researching my book, 101 Ways to Help Birds, is that a dangerous fungus, Aspergillus flavus, attacks peanuts and corn. This mold produces aflatoxins, which are extremely dangerous for humans and other animals.

(Listen to the radio version here.) This week, I heard a meteorologist on the radio say that “meteorological autumn” begins on September 1. Of course, astronomical autumn won’t come till three weeks later, on the equinox which, this year, falls on September 22. The equinox is what calendar makers usually mark as the first day of fall. I’ve always thought of Labor Day, which can fall anywhere from September first through seventh, as the last day of summer.

(Listen to the radio version here when I record it.) There are no oak trees in my immediate neighborhood, so I don’t have any photos of jays taking acorns. I set out the peanuts myself, so I have lots of photos of jays with peanuts. But acorns are their single most important food.