NHMP stands for New Hampshire.

A lot has been happening as of late on Archbold. I’ll just touch on a few of the highlights.

There’s been some prescribed burns recently, which strangely, I kind of enjoy the smell of…




I’ve also had to outrun a few afternoon T-storms while doing nest checks/ gathering data for my project.


An update into the life of our hand tame Scrub Jay friend GCB-I is that he does have a nest, and it is indeed with the more experienced female breeder, and they currently have 3 eggs. After nest checks this afternoon we’ll know whether or not it’ll be 4.

I was on a roll in the nest searching department a little while ago, with something like 9 nests in 7 days. I couldn’t keep up that stride forever… however it did allow me a morning off without nest searching. We’ve had a few abandonments and failures since then so another day like that is unlikely.

The convention on the crew is that if you find a “new breeding pair” and discover their nest you get to name the resulting territory. (I say “new breeding pair” because most of the time the birds are banded, we just didn’t know they had partnered up.) I did this by accident one morning while actually searching an adjacent territory. The breeding pair from the territory TP54 (named for telephone pole 54… not very exciting), had flown South and I didn’t see exactly where they went, so I headed in the general direction, when I discovered OCY-I and an unbanded female. The two of them had been helpers the previous year at TP54. Apparently they’re not related, because that morning I found them defending a nest. I named the resulting territory NHMP. For New Hampshire. (Not North Hump as Travis likes to call it.) There’s already a TRAV, a MICH, an ILLI, and an IOWA. So there needed to be a NHMP. If I find another territory I may have to try and name it something along the lines of Destroyer… or banana slug.

I found the most ridiculous nest today… We thought that the female breeder at the territory might have been dead because no one had seen her for a few days, and we thought we weren’t getting the male to bring her peanuts… We thought he was caching them in a pasture just past the rail road tracks. Turns out the tree that I saw him “dive to the pasture” from is growing over another tree that contains their nest. A nest which is about 10 to 12 feet in the air. Most of our nests are between 1 and 3 meters off the ground. Even Travis, who is 6’4” did not see it yesterday. I think I got lucky this morning, just happening to think, “Well, they’re not leaving me, so if there is one, it must be around here somewhere… and when I make a move to walk this way they get a little flustered… so may be I’ll just head over here… what the? (Picture me jumping with a hand outstretched to try and get the birds to squawk.) Seriously….?” Yes, indeed there was a nest about 5 feet above my head.

I have now seen my first “alien babies” as Michelle likes to call them. Little naked lumps of pink bird with shut eyes. A few of them have been well fed enough by their attentive fathers that they could pick their heads up and do a little feeble begging.


Oh, and Tony is probably the most annoying bird on the Station. I can’t nest search nor do nest checks, anywhere remotely near where he likes to hang out without him showing up, buzzing my head, and landing on a nearby snag, where he then squeaks at me until I give him a peanut. He landed on my hand today without a peanut being present. I’ve wanted to swat him a few times. It’s hard to keep an eye on the birds you’re trying to follow with a ravenous red bellied woodpecker fluttering around your head.