News From The Mews

 As we approach the end of the year, here's a look back at some of our animal ambassador highlights from 2023.

  Aldo is waiting for a nice layer of snow to make it feel like winter, but he can still celebrate the longest night of the year. He's turning in early tonight and looking forward to longer days (which means more time to enjoy his daily mouse!).

The fall newsletter from the American Kestrel Partnership shared some fascinating stories from kestrel nest box monitors in 2023. From broken eggs to buffleheads and cliff-side nests to long-distance migrations, kestrels in North America had an interesting year! You can read the kestrel breeding season stories in the AKP newsletter, under the section title, "Tails From a Wild 2023 Season"  here . Here's one anecdote that they shared from a nest box monitor in Oregon: "Diane Kook discovered the attachment hardware on one of her boxes had failed. Without a replacement on hand, she managed to temporarily mount the box at a much lower height than the standard 8–20 ft (2.5–6 m) we recommend, planning to properly reinstall it during her next visit. But the local kestrels had other ideas: by the time she returned, the box was occupied! Four kestrels eventually fledged from the limbo-level box, whose floor was a mere 2.5 ft (0.75 m) off the ground."

I stumbled across a TEDx Talk last week that brought together three of my favorite things: animals, banjos, and patterns. Musician Andy Thorn went viral several years ago when his wife filmed a wild red fox enjoying a private concert in their backyard: In his TEDx Talk, Andy poses the question that everyone around the world was wondering: why would a fox enjoy the dulcet tones emanating from the banjo? We may not speak the same language as a fox, he says, "but our lives are all ruled by the same patterns. Patterns of season and time." Humans and animals alike seek out the comfort of those patterns found everywhere in nature. Music is also made up of patterns. A song is layers of chord progressions, phrases, and rhythms. Music "speaks to us like a story on the level of pattern and time" and helps us process our experiences. Did that fox think about all of that during her mountain concert? Probably not. But I don't think it's too far of a leap to think that sh...