Scratching the Rhino

The special surprise offered to participants in The Ohio Ornithological Society's Wilds Winter Birding Extravaganza on Saturday, January 16, was a trip behind the scenes at this endangered animal breeding and research facility. Where behind the scenes? To the rhino building to see the southern white rhinoceroses, including Anan the new baby rhino born last Halloween! This was perhaps the only thing that got our kids to go along on the trip—the promise of seeing rhinos up close.

Anan and her mom.

After a bit of bus hopping and a short introductory talk from The Wilds' rhino experts, we were ushered into one of the two rhino barns, tucked deep in a valley, and surrounded by industrial-strength, rhino-proof fencing.

We were told we could touch the rhinos—that they even liked it! But that we needed to be very careful when sticking our appendages through the metal pipe fence lest a rhino accidentally lean toward us and pin our body parts against the fence.


Clearly these animals were used to humans and approached our curious group for a closer look.
SO MASSIVE! My gosh these things look and feel like armored tanks, but their eyes are soft and small.Look at the massive feet on these surprisingly mobile and nimble mammals.


We all took turns petting, scratching, and admiring the rhinos as they stood next to our reaching hands.
The rhino skin was hard and dusty, like mud-spattered heavy canvas overlaying concrete.


Anan made her appearance, walking right up to Julie and Liam. Julie, of course, kissed her right on the snout. Watch for her blog post soon, likely titled "Frenching the Rhino."

But Zick The Animal Charmer did not stop there. Oh noooo. As soon as the mama rhino came over to be scratched, Julie began scratching her inside a giant crease in her skin on the flank in front of the hind legs.

The rhino gave many signs that this felt good: leaning in closer, relaxing her skin to let Julie scratch more deeply, exhaling deeply, breaking rhino wind (true!), and finally, as if feeling the ultimate in relaxation, dropping slowly to the ground.

But Julie was not the only one with a special connection to these animals.

Liam immediately felt he had "special rhino powers" much like the "special gorilla powers" he experienced at The Columbus Zoo (which is affiliated with The Wilds). Who were we to disagree, when we saw how the adult female rhino seemed attracted to Liam, and how calmly he stood there petting and talking to her, when others in our group backed away?

Phoebe would be mad if I did not include her rhino photo here, too. And since she and I are about to spend a week at a birding festival together I need to stay on her good side.

Even I got a chance to scratch the rhino, and I really dug it.
What a completely cool addition to our winter birding adventure at the Wilds. I've still got a buzz from those rhinos. So much so that I am thinking of changing this blog to Bill of the Rhinos. What do you think?

Birding the Wilds

More than 150 brave and bundled souls showed up at The Wilds for the annual winter birding trip with The Ohio Ornithological Society. The weather began as bleakly as expected. The parking lot where we met was solid ice covered in a layer of slush. But there was no wind. My group, co-lead with Peter King and Julie Zickefoose, was group 5, assigned to begin at Long Lake. I knew Long Lake would be frozen (and likely duck-free) so we only drove about 150 yards down the road to our first stop. There we spotted a handful of raptors, including red-tailed hawk (3), rough-legged hawk (4), American kestrel, and what turned out to be the lone northern harrier of the day.

This single harrier, where normally we might see five or more, told us that the small mammal population was probably very low. No food, fewer birds.

Still a four-raptor stop was a great start, so we moved on down the road happily. Well, not everyone was happy. Phoebe and Liam sometimes get a notion to act like going on a birding trip in winter is akin to being condemned to 50 years of doing algebra homework. That "brattitude" would change on this day...we had a secret weapon in our arsenal.

Maybe asking Phoebe to be the trip photographer was not such a good idea.

We got to Long Lake and, as expected, it was frozen solid. Then the wind kicked up and so we headed for some back roads that offered a bit of wind protection. We did have several nice flyovers from trumpeter swans—actual wild trumpeter swans that now spend part of the winter here.

At the Jeffrey Point Birding Deck we spotted lots of white-tailed deer, many of The Wilds' captive large mammals, very few birds, and Papa Green Smurf.

While we scanned for birds (hoping for a golden eagle) along Zion Ridge Road, the sun came out. We hardly knew what to do. Then it began to warm up, thoroughly confusing us. This was The Wilds in January after all. Wha-ha-hoppen?

We thought it might be a trick, so we kept our sensible headgear on just in case.

We bird-dogged some horned larks along Zion Ridge Road after hearing their tinkling call notes.

And that was a life bird for several among us, thus the mandatory Life Bird Wiggle celebration to appease the Birding Gods.

We ended the birding portion of our day with somewhere north of 50 species—a most respectable total. I never did set eyes on a golden eagle, though many others did. For me the skies were empty, but our hearts were full.

Next stop: Scratching the Rhino.

Cold Birding, Ohio Style

Marc Nolls of the OOS birding at The Wilds.

This Saturday, January 16, the Ohio Ornithological Society will hold our annual winter birding trip to The Wilds. In the good news/bad news department, the trip is already maxed out at 150 participants, with a waiting list of 30+. This is surprising to me given the weather we normally have for this outing: think Arctic Circle. No matter what the weather person predicts, it's always 20 degrees colder at The (wide-open) Wilds. If you're coming along, wear everything you've got and activate the hand warmers.

We're hoping to see some specialty birds there. Among the highlights in past years have been golden eagle, northern shrike, prairie falcon, snow bunting, and white-fronted goose. More likely (though not guaranteed) are northern harrier, horned lark, rough-legged hawk, and short-eared owl.

Rough-legged hawk.

Even if we don't see many birds, we'll still be treated to some mammal watching and the omnipresent Canada geese.


Our group will split into smaller car pools to cover all the prime birding spots. Jim McCormac (shown above demonstrating the effectiveness of his deodorant) always attracts a big crowd with his mad birding skilz. Even when the birding is slow, we still have a good time. We're hoping it's cold enough to keep the mud frozen, but not SO cold that bodily extremities are frozen.

The Wilds is 20,000 acres of recovering strip mine: prime habitat for grassland birds year-round. Poor habitat for trees, as this photo indicates.

And at the end of the daylight hours, if we are lucky, we might catch a glimpse or two of a short-eared owl.

A short-eared owl in the low light of a January dusk.

When the Going Gets Rough (leg)

On our late November birding trip to The Wilds, the birding started out very slowly. Normally as we drive the roads around the property we spook up flocks of horned larks, Savannah sparrows, American tree sparrows, and dark-eyed juncos. Not on this reasonably mild winter day. It was Deadsville, dude.

So we did what any bunch of bored birders would do, we started scanning to see if we could spot anything interesting. I've already recounted our observations of the local white-tailed deer, plus the captive endangered species at The Wilds. A few red-tailed hawks, a flashy male American kestrel, and a distant male northern harrier were nice, but I was hoping for something a bit rougher. And there it was: a rough-legged hawk.

It was a distant bird, but even before I got the scope on it, I had a hunch it was a rough-legged because of where it was perched. It was in the top of a small tree along a fence line. It would be unusual to find a redtail perching in such a small tree. But for the comparatively tiny-footed rough-legged hawk, the thin branches of the small pine were perfect. Rough-leggeds have small feet for grabbing smaller prey such as rodents.

On the Arctic tundra where these birds breed, lemmings are a main prey item. Here at The Wilds, it's probably meadow voles. The red-taileds with their larger feet are seeking rabbits in the meadows and squirrels along the woodland edges. And when they perch, they are perching on larger, sturdier branches.


Around the back side of The Wilds we pulled up to an overlook and quickly spotted another roughleg hovering over a hillside. We jumped out of the van and took up positions in a grassy ditch to take some photographs. The hawk obliged us by flying over. I'm still not great at getting good shots of flying birds, but this bird was large enough that I couldn't strike out completely.
Here are a few of the images from that fly over.

The bold black-and-white wing pattern of a rough-legged hawk in flight.

Long, wide wings with black carpal patches. A black belly band.

The white tail with a broad black band shows well in this photo.

It was very cool to see this second rough-leg. And this sighting seemed to open up the birding action a bit. Soon we were scoping rafts of buffleheads and mallards, gadwall and scaup. We never did see a single lark, though, which seemed weird. Maybe the more recent snows have brought them down from up north.


Soon enough it was time to suit up and bug out. We let the sun say its fare-thee-well and then we did likewise.

Phoebe's Giraffe

Here's a short video from our recent trip to The Wilds, where we re-enacted a memorable moment in the life of daughter Phoebe Linnea, from one of her very first birding trips. This commemorates her first accurate mammal ID call using a spotting scope. Now she's all growed up! Man, time surely flies...

Buck Fever at The Wilds

The rolling grasslands of The Wilds, a "reclaimed" strip mine that is now an endangered animal facility and a birding hotspot.

Heading back to The Wilds for another post or two...

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we took the kids on a drive to The Wilds, near Cumberland, Ohio for a day of birding and animal watching. Deer-hunting season was set to start in two days. Because The Wilds has vast areas of fenced grassland where endangered animals are captive bred and studied, hunting is not allowed inside its boundaries.

The local white-tailed deer know this, and they spend hunting season inside the fenced areas, practically thumbing their noses at the hunters driving the perimeter roads. The hunters, for their part, can barely see out of their truck windows because their hyperventilating has caused the glass to fog. Why are they hyperventilating? Because right across that tiny little fence is a group of monster bucks practically begging to be "harvested." Aside from the bounty of meat these giant deer would provide, their heads and awesome racks would look so righteous on the den wall back home.

The bucks gather in loose groups, loafing, grazing, casting glances at the trucks driving slowly past—trucks with heavy sighs and even sobbing coming from them. Each buck we spotted was bigger than the last. Eight-pointers looked puny. Ten pointers and larger were the norm.

But there are other, even more impressive antlered creatures at The Wilds. The super-rare Pére David's deer from Asia is bred at The Wilds. Its antlers branch upward impressively, dwarfing the largest of the white-taileds. This species, extinct in the wild in its native China since the late 1800s, was saved by a French missionary named Father (or Pére) David Armand. Captive breeding in Europe throughout the last century has permitted the species to be reintroduced to small parts of its former range in China.

Pére David's deer, digiscoped at great distance.

While we were enjoying a northern harrier coursing low over the fields, a herd of sable antelope trotted over the rise. These handsome dark brown animals have long, tapered horns that arch up and backward. Native to Africa, sable antelope are prized by big game hunters for their amazing horns. The herd here at The Wilds seemed to be about a dozen animals, including at least one well-horned male which stood out in the crowd. Unfortunately I did not get a decent photo, so I borrowed this one from The Wilds' website, where you can see images of all the animals being bred and studied there.

Sable antelope. Image ©The Wilds.

With the day's end drawing near, we enjoyed the sunset and began the drive home. Just a mile down the road, we found the last monster buck of the day, crossing a field rather nonchalantly. He was outside the fence but seemed to think he was still off-limits because he scarcely made a move to run as we lowered our windows and snapped photos. The light was poor, so the pictures were less than ideal, but this regal creature seemed the picture of health.

We hope he's still that way now, several weeks later.

A trip to The Wilds may yield some great looks at birds, but there's a lot of other stuff to ogle, too. By the way, for those of you within driving distance of The Wilds, The Ohio Ornithological Society will be holding its annual winter birding day at the Wilds, on Saturday January 16, 2010. You can get more info on this free event at the OOS website.

Swans Mystery

Back to the mystery swans we encountered at The Wilds. As some of you web-savvy readers have already determined, these were trumpeter swans. I should pay more attention when I name my images for uploading!

Before 1900, trumpeter swans were extirpated from most of their North American breeding ranges by hunting. Only a remnant breeding population remained in Alaska and remote parts of the West.

During the 1990s there was a captive breeding and reintroduction program for trumpeter swans here in Ohio. The Wilds served as a captive rearing facility for birds hatched in captivity. The goal was to acclimate the birds to living in the wild so they could later be released along the Lake Erie marshes. More than 150 swans were released and today there is a small breeding population. At The Wilds a few birds are still around. I assume the flight feathers on their clipped wings grew back and they are now fully flighted, but don;t really know where to go.

The weird thing about these two birds is that one had black legs and one had yellow legs—at least the upper parts of the legs we could see above the water. You can see this in the photo below: the right hand bird has the yellow upper legs.

We checked the birds carefully in the spotting scope. Black bills eliminated mute swan. No pale yellow lore leaned us toward trumpeter. The notably long, straight black bill also pointed to trumpeter. The yellow-legged bird also was banded.

Yep. Captive but free-flying trumpeters.

Knowing that trumpeters had been captive-raised here, it's exciting, but not that exciting, to see them. Now if these had turned out to be tundra swans, we'd have been a bit more stoked. Tundras fly right over southeastern Ohio in the late fall/early winter on their way to the Atlantic Coast. Seeing a couple of tundra swans is always a notable event.

Odd swans are the least weird thing one can see while birding at The Wilds. More on that soon.

At The Wilds: Mystery Birds

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we took the kids birding to The Wilds, a 20,000-acre recovering strip mine that's an endangered animal breeding and research facility. In the temperate months you can tour The Wilds in one of their buses. But most bird watchers visiting The Wilds just like to drive the roads to see what birds are around, in the vast grassy fields, and the many ponds and lakes that dot the landscape.

On the south side of The Wilds there's a long, string-straight piece of road that passes a couple of long, narrow lakes. Well, calling these lakes might be a bit of a stretch—they are not naturally occurring. Really, they are deep scars in the earth, cut by massive machinery as it removed seams of coal. Now these giant holes have filled with water.

That matters not to the waterfowl that pass through these parts. The two white birds above were on this lake, loafing and preening. Swans, at first glance. But which swans?

More on this line of inquiry tomorrow.

Winter Day at The Wilds

Dust-bathing horned larks.

The Ohio Ornithological Society had its annual winter birding day at The Wilds in SE Ohio recently. More than 125 hardy souls made the scene. It was colder than a gyrfalcon's uvula there on the rolling grasslands near Cumberland, Ohio. The Wilds is a rare animal breeding and research facility nestled in the middle of 10,000 acres of recovering strip mine. And it's got the birds. In winter it's home to loads of raptors. The day's raptor tally included American kestrel, red-tailed hawk, Cooper's hawk, northern harrier, rough-legged hawk, bald eagle, and golden eagle. Large numbers of waterfowl were seen on those few ponds still unfrozen. Horned larks, a snow bunting, and even a few over-wintering eastern meadowlarks were present, too.

Cars lined up to see the last bird of the day.

But the bird that about half of us stayed to see waited until sunset to make its appearance. A short-eared owl coursed low over the frozen grasses giving all of us a great look.

Short-eared owl.

It was a fitting end to another wonderful day of birding with my fellow members of Ohio's largest birding organization.

For an another report of the day, see OOS Director Jim McCormac's blog here.