My Balcony Bird World

[Charles B]

The wife and I were reading books in bed this evening when this Eagle plopped down on our flat balcony rail and then hopped down to the garden below. Such a metalic thud of large craws against aluminium!

So I asked the AI GPT-5 mini to do a mathematical analysis on a 5 to 7 kg bird decending at a given speed and what effective weight on the railing caused such a thud:

I'll assume a more realistic vertical contact speed for a landing rather than a full hunting dive. Common landing vertical speeds for large raptors are often in the 3–10 m/s range; I'll show 3, 6 and 10 m/s and use masses 5–7 kg. I'll use stopping distances 0.05–0.25 m (shorter for abrupt contact on a rail, longer if legs flex/cushion).

If the eagle slowed well before touching the rail (v ≈ 3 m/s) the apparent load is on the order of 10–60 kgf depending on how much the legs/rail absorbed the motion — roughly a few times the bird's static weight.

If contact was more abrupt (v 6–10 m/s and short stopping distance ~0.05–0.10 m) the instantaneous load could be hundreds of kgf, producing a loud metallic thud.

[Charles B]

It was a peaceful day, overcast and 15° Celcius.
I've been fighting an upper respiratory infection of sorts for the last two months so I finally came up with my own inexpensive decongestant which really helps.

You only need a tablespoon of this to feel better at night or in the morning. But you have to sip it very slowly in a tea cup.

1 empty bottle 250 ml
1 lemon squeezed out
4 teaspoons honey
1 teaspoon cinamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon Cayenne red pepper
200 ml Irish Whiskey.



Well, wasn't much going on here today but our female Magpie 'Maggie' was here several times.

I set a tray of suet-ball pieces (which fall out of the ball-cage) in a clear, plastic tray on top of my berry plant pergola on the balcony.

Maggie always visits my birdbath first and tanks up on water and then makes a big hop up to the edge of my pergola where she gabs as big of a chunk she can carry in her beak and flys away up and over my FM ring antenna up there.

Alas on her last sortie she tripped on my antenna and the poor girl lost her lunch! Well, better luck next time Maggie!

The garden below the balcony is still free of rat holes but I saw 'somebody' had been digging by my rose & young wild plum tree. So I probed it with a long bamboo rod: Moggy poop! That's good!

[Charles B]

I've been reading my big thick book about various birds of the tit family; they are really amazing!
But this book is so full of credits and references to other ornitholgist's reports it's very slow going. There are 808 pages in very small print.

I was reading here about a certain ornithologist from Fulda, Germany who banded a Great Tit in 1939 and the bird was found dead 65 km away 15 1/2 years later!


Oh, when my wife work up at 4:00 AM for her hospital job she heard another large raptor bird decending onto our balcony rail near the bird bath.

And as there is no Sunday bus service here she had to ride her bike 10 km each way. In a wooded area along a bike path by some factories she even saw a woodpecker and heard it making a strange call.

Earlier, Anna was also followed on her bike for quite a while by a low flying brown-headed White-Tailed Eagle in the same area. He rested in trees and then followed her further.

[Charles B]

Today I officially reported my sighting of the Brown-Headed White-Tailed Eagle looking for prey in my garden. I also reworked my GPS coordinates and discovered I am only 9 km west of the center of the Sachsenwald forest where these birds were set out for rehabitation.
However Dr. Nora Wuttke (Coordinator of the Avifaunistic Commission Schleswig‑Holstein and Hamburg (AKSH)) already knows they are in my area. Case confirmed!

[Charles B]

Please Delete

[Willpar]

Not seeing your pic Charles, same with Linda.

[Charles B]

Not seeing your pic Charles, same with Linda.

I was having some trouble with Postimage William so I switched to Imgur. Can you see this Marsh Tit now?

[Willpar]

Not seeing your image Charles, Have noticed sometimes with Igmur images that they disappear for some reason.

[Charles B]

I just installed one bird house with a 28 mm plate for Blue Tits in the NE corner of my balcony by the support pole for the marquiese. When we sit in our hanging basket chair the brave Blue Tits have always buzzed over our heads to that wall where we used to hang beef-suet seed balls or to hunt for spiders. But the Great Tits are totally affraid of us.



Since our curtains are always bunched up in this corner they won't see us indoors either. It's also the warmest corner as the smaller radiator (the only one we can afford to turn on in the room) is below this window which has enough heat loss to keep the Tits frost free up there in winter. I look at it as primarily being a winter roosting place.

Hopefully birds use it and not a young queen wasp looking for a fall quarter!

I'm not yet certain where the second house with a 32 mm plate for the Great Tits will go. These bird houses are made of nice thick wood but don't seem to be weather-proofed. I hang the other one out in the garden on a pole next to the licac bushes or whatever. In such case I will need some non-toxic exterior varnish or wood treatment product.

[Charles B]

Please delete!