Day Late / Dollar Short

Day Late: While she missed the Easter holiday by a day, JoDurt never struck me as one one for cliches or cutesiness anyway.

I’m pleased to announce that yesterday, JoDurt, born of Flowerpot, The Queen of The Causeway, was caught on cam incubating her 2023 eggs for the first time. You too can celebrate the special moment we knew it was go time at BOIS in the video above.

Congratulations to you, Jo & Grassboy. While they are only getting started here, just laying successfully is a huge accomplishment for a species which was extinct just a few decades ago.

It is coming up on a decade since I first met Jo Durt at Holgate when she was just 6 months old. I knew she was special that very first night. I just never imagined I’d be writing a post like this about her so many years later. We often think of the people who changed the course of our lives… I can’t believe a bird changed the direction of mine in such a big way. I am so grateful to our little flowerpot girl! I love you Jo Durt!

Dollar Short: Being able to monitor productivity without disturbing the birds is a huge bonus of Little Egg’s cameras. While their actual purpose is to record prey deliveries to the nest and quantify their impact on local bird populations, they are also helping to monitor the nests more generally with zero disruption to the birds. This project has been so successful (more on that to come later this summer) we are expanding it to even more nests throughout New Jersey, and we are now running the cameras all year, 24 hours a day.

If you’d like to be a part of it, I encourage you to make a fully tax-deductible donation to The Little Egg Foundation to help us purchase more gear, more data access, and more super computer processing power to manage the incredible data these cameras are collecting. We really need support to keep this project growing.

Our cameras our on their way to some other, really interesting places I hope to be able to share here later this summer.

It looks like it’s go-time and the season is off and running. I’m wise enough now not to make any predictions. But, between you & me? It’s going to be awesome!!11!

I’ll leave you with another short video from a Little Egg Cam last night, across the bay from Jo & Grassboy. While I’m not convinced that Bey & Lay-zee are incubating just yet, this sure looks like one very, preggers Peregrine. And oh, that hop.