{"id":4332,"date":"2012-03-08T16:59:54","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=4332"},"modified":"2012-03-08T16:59:54","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T00:59:54","slug":"piling-bone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=4332","title":{"rendered":"Piling bone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The tops of pilings are fairly inaccessible places for anything but a bird. But, birds really like them. A piling provides a good perch for hunting, and a spot inaccessible to land predators. Atop pilings I have seen: kingfishers, eagles, ospreys, flickers, gulls (ring-billed and herring), tree swallows, violet-green swallows, herons, geese, mergansers, ravens, starlings and merlins.<\/p>\n<p>What I hadn&#8217;t seen before last month was a bone. On February 20<sup>th<\/sup>, a bone appeared atop a rather tall piling in the Lake (first picture); a day later, it vanished.<\/p>\n<p>Today (March 8<sup>th<\/sup>) another bone appeared atop the same piling (second picture). Will it also leave soon?<\/p>\n<p>The bone on the piling offers a whodunit?<\/p>\n<p>I think that the best guess so far was offered by Ralph Ritcey of Kamloops when the first one appeared:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I would agree that the object is a piece of bone &#8211; most probably a section of long bone from a beef cut by a butcher and sold as dog food. You don&#8217;t mention ravens visiting the pilings but they, along with eagles, are the most likely suspects to carry a remnant from butchering and deposit it there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My vote goes to ravens.<\/p>\n<p>But, why would ravens do this?<\/p>\n<p>The piling bone of February 20<sup>th<\/sup>.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4333\" onmousedown=\"return false\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/whatsit120220s.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>That bone vanished within a day and then a different bone appeared atop the same piling on March 8<sup>th<\/sup>.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-4334\" onmousedown=\"return false\" src=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/03\/bone120308s.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"720\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The tops of pilings are fairly inaccessible places for anything but a bird. But, birds really like them. A piling provides a good perch for hunting, and a spot inaccessible to land predators. Atop pilings I have seen: kingfishers, eagles, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/?p=4332\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4332"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4341,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4332\/revisions\/4341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kootenay-lake.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}