{"id":998,"date":"2014-05-31T16:05:04","date_gmt":"2014-05-31T21:05:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2014\/05\/31\/140531-birdsandbees\/"},"modified":"2023-10-25T17:07:42","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T22:07:42","slug":"140531-birdsandbees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/05\/31\/140531-birdsandbees\/","title":{"rendered":"Snooping on the birds and the bees"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The barn swallow nest on our front porch that provided <a href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2013\/06\/23\/130623-nighttimesnake\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">some video footage last summer<\/a> is once again occupied. However, I haven&#8217;t noticed the presence of baby birds, and my curiosity got the better of me this afternoon. I mounted my GoPro on an extendable monopod, connected it via wifi to my iPad so I could monitor the footage, and did some detective work. Here&#8217;s what I found:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/97007315?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;color=c9ff23\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve never seen this before. Is it unusual for baby birds to share a nest with unhatched &#8211; but viable &#8211; eggs? I hate to be pessimistic, but I&#8217;m afraid two two eggs are not going to hatch&#8230;seems like they should have by now. I&#8217;ll let you know if and when anything changes.<\/p>\n<p>While I was out, I noticed an interesting insect crawling on the lone black-eyed susan bloom, so I swapped the GoPro for my macro-lensed DSLR.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/insectonblackeyedsusan.jpg\" alt=\"Unknown insect on black-eyed susan bloom\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/insectonblackeyedsusan2.jpg\" alt=\"Unknown insect on black-eyed susan bloom\" \/><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: 1px solid #ccc; margin-bottom: 6px;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/images\/miscphotos\/insectonblackeyedsusan3.jpg\" alt=\"Unknown insect on black-eyed susan bloom\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t i.d. the insect. It flew away, and the presence of wings under the carapace seems to indicate that it&#8217;s a beetle of some kind (we&#8217;ve touched on the <a href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2013\/03\/28\/130328-laybugmacros\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bug-vs-beetle distinction<\/a> in these pages), but I couldn&#8217;t find anything close to a matching photo despite extensive research (which, for me, means 3 1\/2 minutes looking at Googled images). If you have an idea, feel free to share it. Anyway, from a distance it wasn&#8217;t too impressive, but up close, the sparkling carapace and delicate hairs glistening in the sunlight were a revelation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The barn swallow nest on our front porch that provided some video footage last summer is once again occupied. However, I haven&#8217;t noticed the presence of baby birds, and my curiosity got the better of me this afternoon. I mounted my GoPro on an extendable monopod, connected it via wifi to my iPad so I&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2014\/05\/31\/140531-birdsandbees\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Snooping on the birds and the bees<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midland-odessa","category-photography","category-wildlife-birds","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=998"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12852,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/998\/revisions\/12852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}