Hi all,

I just had a particularly wonderful encounter with one of the Green Lawn Cemetery Merlins (Green Lawn is on the south side of Columbus). She was in the usual southwest corner of the cemetery, just south of the bridge.

Anyway, I do natural history pieces with NBC 4's meteorologist Ben Gelber from time time, and today was one of those days. I suggested we do a story on the Merlin, as these charismatic little falcons have the potential to be an excellent "spark bird" for people who don't know much about birds, which is probably a big chunk of the TV viewing audience. You all know how unpredictable wild birds can be, and sure enough when we arrived on site there was no Merlin to be found. We had some backup stories - not as exciting, though - and launched into shooting some other stuff.

In the midst of the shoot, I glanced up to see Miss Merlin rocket into her favorite sycamore snag, and Buzz the cameraman swiveled his lens right onto her. This was decidedly cool, as we could now do the Merlin story, and with Buzz's mega-zoom the bird showed up OK, although it was far away and high aloft in the tree. Suddenly, the feathered hotdog dropped from her perch and strafed 20 feet over our heads and landed 30 feet away in perfect light in the boughs of a Kentucky coffee tree! She was clearly curious about us, but as Merlins do, quickly decided we were lesser beings and then completely ignored us and started grooming herself.

Buzz got killer video of the Merlin, I got some nice photos, and Ben should craft a pretty cool story from this experience. The piece should air tonight on the 6 pm and 11 pm news: http://www2.nbc4i.com/ Ben Gelber is great about promoting natural history, and Channel 4 does a fabulous job of devoting air time to nature-related stories. I really appreciate their efforts.

I got photos of everything that went on, and will post a pictorial story of today's Merlin episode later today on my blog: http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/

Jim

Jim McCormac
Columbus, Ohio
Like Nature? http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/
Like Birds? http://www.ohiobirds.org/



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