Trego's Mountain Ear

It’s 6:39 am on June 29, and the sun is bright as it climbs above Stryker Peak.  It’s a small solar observation for me that occurs twice each summer, controlled by the location where I built, and observed because the living room window, ideally placed to observe wildlife in the hayfield, also includes Stryker Peak.  It will happen again next June 13. 

In Alaska, they have the Midnight Sun.  Here, I have the smaller, unique sunrise over Stryker.  It is enough – the Finns and Alaskans have a month or two of the Midnight Sun – I have four or five minutes, twice each June, of sunrise over Stryker Peak.  I guess that part of Summer is physics and astronomy. 

Biology – specifically predation – is showing up this year among the birds.  Last year, 3 turkey hens gathered together to protect their remaining 4 chicks from the ravens.  This year, the 3 more experienced hens are still together with a flock of 15 hatchlings.  A fourth hen has entered the group bringing in two more hatchlings.  The ravens nest in the same area, and protecting the little turkeys from them is a contest we watch from across the field.  It’s hard for a single turkey hen to protect her little ones from 3 or 4 ravens – but the group approach seems to offer more success.

This is the first year that predators have taken out adult geese – the grass is tall, and while I am guessing the predator is a bald eagle, first the gander disappeared, and mother goose tried to move her flock in with her father’s.  Then she disappeared, and Old Gander’s flock shows one more hatchling moved in between the parents, while the rest of the orphans try to stay close but don’t move in . . . and we’ve seen one dead gosling, and several have gone missing.

The swallows arrived late, and are now working to reduce the mosquito population. 

A week and a half after I started writing this, I watched the bald eagle prey on an orphan gosling.  It is not a pretty sight.  The world has no shortage of Canada geese – but these have became friends and neighbors over the years.  Gander maintains his now expanded flock in the larger pond, and they graze along the steep south bank, where an aerial attack is more risky to the attacker.  Still, it is the season for molting – and then comes flight training for the goslings.  There’s another month of risk before the geese will be taking to the air – and a grounded grazing goose has lost a lot of defensive abilities.

The turkey flock is up to five hens, and nearly two dozen small turkeys.  They have coped with raven predation, and the bald eagle doesn’t seem to be bothering them.  The mallards first lost the hen, and now most of those little ducks have been picked off.  The summer has had more predation than before.

Next Spring, with the eagle preying on geese, the island may not be the safe place for hatching eggs it has been.  Survival strategies have to change with the predators.