The harsh reality is that house sparrows often kill adult bluebirds and their nestlings in the box, and build their messy nests on top of the carnage below.House sparrows are a non-native species that often kill native bluebirds when they take over a nest box.

“If I were a flicker, I would look at houses as big trees,” says Chris Anderson, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist.With all their knocking and rolling, flickers are an entertaining bird worth watching, but not worth losing your house for.

© Sjensen~ / Flickr Throughout the summer months, we supply birds with water, which they use for drinking, bathing, or simply cooling off.Going back to heated birdbaths, if managed properly, we can use these to allow birds to drink from it, and not bathe.

“People use town during the day but at night, hyenas come from natural areas around town into the city to feed on carcass waste left out by people,” Sonawane says.

What I noticed were turkey vultures – one of three vulture species in the U.S. and one of only seven in the western hemisphere – making their way from breeding grounds near the Canadian border to their wintering area as far south as Central or South America.

We hope that you enjoy this selection of the winning entries, with stories on everything from cassowary excrement to native trout conservation, from mothing as a hobby to essays on our childhood love of campground critters and The Crocodile Hunter.

In fact, some experts believe the only current native, wild population of fallow deer is now found in an isolated herd in Turkey.Today, the fallow deer is the national animal of Barbuda and Antigua, and deer hunting remains an important cultural activity on the island.

Mormon cricket outbreaks are more frequent than the 17-year cycle of the cicadas, and when they boom, the populations are impossible to miss.Certified Wildlife Biologist Jarren Kuipers of Land Steward Services notes that Mormon cricket outbreaks are more localized than the emergence of cicadas.

In some places you can find mourning cloak butterflies throughout the year, but after a long winter, the first sighting of one can be the earliest sign of spring.“You don’t usually have a butterfly that can live for almost an entire year as an adult,” says Blobaum.

Salmonella is a fatal bacterial infection for birds and it’s hitting siskins hard because they congregate around feeders, but the outbreak isn’t species-specific.Other states are seeing an uptick this spring as the bacteria continues to spread, which is why more state agencies are asking people to remove their bird feeders.

The Intermountain Bird Observatory was keeping tabs on them, and was receiving reports of up to 60 spending the winter here each year.And there’s perhaps no better way to discover those birds than by keeping a yard list.

Sometimes, we might even wonder if our efforts to provide nest boxes and brush piles somehow fail to meet the Carolina wren’s creative standards.Along with nest boxes, wrens seem to favor what brush piles have to offer.

© Vilseskogen / Flickr Siracusa, then a graduate student at the University of Guelph in southern Ontario, already knew from her previous work that red squirrels with familiar neighbors spent less time angrily defending their middens.

© Jan Helebrant / Flickr Though mistletoe might sound like an undesirable plant because it kills trees, some species are important keystone species in their habitats.

Lospalluto / Flickr I’m snowshoeing through Colorado’s Rocky Mountains when I see a small, nondescript bird at the far edge of the creek.American dippers are small and chunky — about the side of a robin — with grey-blue plumage, a brownish head, pink legs, a short tail, and a white eyelid.

Google Photos has long offered one of the best deals in cloud storage, allowing you to upload unlimited photos for free—as long as you were willing to sacrifice a little image quality.Like Google, iCloud encompasses all your shared cloud storage for Apple services—including photos.

The act of brood parasitism allows females to forgo the costs of nest building, incubating eggs, and feeding and protecting vulnerable young.

© Katja Schulz / Flickr This witch doesn’t fly around on a broomstick, yet an unexpected sighting of a 7-inch black moth in October is likely to catch your attention.With their bat-like flight, black witch moths may bring with them treats of fortune or bad omens.

According to Brenner, in her first summer enjoying moths she “photographed a moth that was emerald green, another that was pink, one that was half yellow and half black, and one that was as white as fresh snow.” In just a few months she captured images of a couple hundred moth species and “was completely hooked and happily identified myself as a new ‘moth-er.’”.

Before every scout camp, the older kids would serve up questionable nature facts meant to show their expertise and perhaps instill a bit of fear.I could only roll my eyes when, prepping for a group stay at a cabin, I heard stories regarding porcupines that visited outhouses at night.

And I had Steve Irwin, who loved wildlife with an unabashed enthusiasm that a paralytically self-conscious tween girl could never muster.Irwin taught millions of children like me that wildlife — even the ugly, slimy, and scaly — should be loved.

“To claim dominance, a mountain chickadee darts or hisses at the other bird, or it’s revealed by those who hang back around a feeder,” says McCallum.

Holliday, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College, who partners with Coelho on cicada killer research, adds, “I’ve only seen female velvet ants digging in known cicada killer nesting areas, so I don’t know what they do when they go down open burrows or dig down into closed ones.”.

Photo © Jeff Bryant / Flickr Green kingfisher is more abundant in Central and South America, but the species can be located in the southwestern reaches of the United States from Arizona to Texas.

Photo © Wade Tregaskis / Flickr Each morning, before I put the kettle on or open the news to see what fresh hell awaits our pandemic-blighted world, I check on the frogmouths.

At your backyard feeder, you’re likely seeing more hawks and fewer house sparrows, plus a few new bird species.A Pack of One. Fact: You may be hearing more urban coyotes, but it’s likely not as many as you think.

Back at its display ground, a red-winged blackbird will fend off rivals of its own species at its territory, but like many birds, will also drive away just about anything that gets near.

Photo © Jim / Flickr We all know that chickens, turkeys, cows, sheep, and the like are all domesticated animals, descended from wild relatives yet altered significantly by deliberate human intervention.

Like many misunderstood and undervalued creatures in the country’s wilds, the hellbender faces innumerable threats from poisoned water to climate change.Photo © Seánín Óg / Flickr As young, small hellbenders, they live under smaller rocks with gravel allowing an increase in oxygen flow.

It is probably one of the first “nature lessons” we learned at school: earthworms have to come to the surface after rain because they’re drowning. Another common explanation for worm emergence is that rain sounds like predators, so the worms come to the surface to escape.