It seems that Pittsburgh missed waterfowl migration this fall with only a handful of the expected migrants landing on our rivers and lakes. Except for long distance migrants, waterfowl haven’t come at all.
Some ducks, geese and gulls only move south when ice overtakes their location. If they’re hanging out at Lake Erie near Presque Isle, the map of yesterday’s water temperature indicates they have no reason to leave. The water there is more than 40°F and the only ice is in small bays (black color on the map).
There are a few rare geese, though, photographed and posted to eBird and embedded below.
There’s currently a Ross’s goose (Anser rossii) at North Park, noticeably small than the Canada geese it’s hanging out with.
Yesterday there was a brant (Branta bernicla) at Duck Hollow without any Canada geese to keep it company. So it hung out with ring-billed gulls.
And a flock of 16 greater white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons) who normally migrate west of the Mississippi and winter in Louisiana, southern Texas and Mexico have been hanging out with Canada geese in Butler County since 1 December.
These geese are called “white-fronted” because their foreheads are white.
Wondering why the ducks aren’t here? This 2021 vintage article explains why.
Snow in Schenley Park, 20 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
22 December 2024
In the run-up to the winter solstice the temperature dropped below freezing last week and the clouds moved in. Seen last week includes evidence of deer, snow and crows.
Evidence of deer: After the city parks bow hunt began in September the deer found other places to hang out including cemeteries and backyards. But we still see their evidence of their nighttime presence including this buck rub in Frick Park on 19 December.
Buck rub on a tree in Frick Park, 19 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Snow fell on Friday and Saturday. In this video its starts out a bit furious and then tapers.
Snowing in Pittsburgh on 21 Dec 2024 (video by Kate St. John)
Our search for the Pittsburgh crow roost continues. We need to find as much of it as we can before the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, 28 December. So far we haven’t broken 10,000 but we know there are more than that.
Though crows prefer to spend the night in trees we’ve discovered they also roost on rooftops in Oakland where we cannot see and count them. Dang!
Last night Carol Steytler found some near the Pitt Field House. Not a huge number, but encouraging. Her video is dark; it was the middle of the night.
Please help us find the crows. Leave a comment to let me know where you see lots of crows after 4:00pm in the city limits. Tell me about …
Huge flocks of crows
Seen after 4:00pm or Overnight
Where are they? Provide specific location, street or landmark.
If flying, what direction are they going? I’ll map your contribution and triangulate.
Sunrise in Pittsburgh, 18 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
21 December 2024
Happy Winter Solstice! The days will be getting longer soon.
Most of us were asleep when the winter solstice occurred in Pittsburgh at 4:21 AM EST. We could not see it, even if we’d been awake, because today’s sunrise is at 7:39am EST. On this the shortest day we’ll have 9 hours, 16 minutes and 59 seconds of daylight.
In Britain, Stonehenge is aligned to mark the summer solstice at sunrise and the winter solstice at sunset. Nonetheless, Stonehenge holds their winter solstice celebration at sunrise every year. Here’s a video of last year’s celebrations.
Stonehenge is an even bigger feat of prehistoric engineering than we’d originally thought. In 2021 scientists learned that its igneous bluestones were imported from southwest Wales. This year a Welsh scientist discovered that its giant, partially buried, 6 ton altar stone came from Scotland! A truly cosmopolitan monument.
This month Schmidt Ocean posted a beautiful deep sea video from their deep sea rover’s voyage off the Pacific coast of South America.
11 Dec 2024: After 55 days of exploration, the #ChileMargin2024 expedition team is heading home. Researchers have been exploring along a margin where a submerged continental shelf extends from the country’s west coast and drops steeply and suddenly into the Pacific Ocean.
Did you see the rocks and cliffs in the video? If you could see the entire formation without the ocean in the way, it is actually a very steep mountain range from the bottom of the trench to the top of the Andes, more than 15,000 meters or about 49,300 feet(*) with squids at the bottom and birds at the top.
This area is so deep because the Nazca Plate is subducting under the South American Plate, causing the Andes to rise and the Peru-Chile Trench to plunge deeper.
Schmidt Ocean Institute is a 501(c)(3) private non-profit operating foundation established to advance oceanographic research, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans.
Though this willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus) thinks he’s hiding his all-white plumage makes him painfully obvious in a snowless landscape.
There are three species of north country ptarmigans (Lagopus) — willow, white-tailed and rock ptarmigans — that change their plumage with the seasons in order to stay camouflaged against the ground. They’re white in winter to match the snow, brown in summer to match vegetation, and mottled as the seasons change. Their molt cycle worked well until climate change made winters shorter.
Fourteen years ago, in 2010, I blogged about the willow ptarmigan’s superior winter camouflage in Where’s Willow? and he was hard to find in the snowy landscape.
But climate change is making winter is shorter. Snow cover does not begin as early as it used to the fall and it melts earlier in the spring. The ptarmigans’ molt cycle is still on the old schedule so he’s no longer camouflaged when the seasons change. You can see this rock ptarmigan easily from far away.
Winter crows are incredibly persistent. Year after year they return in large numbers to the same city, even if the city harasses them. Some cities harass their winter crows, some celebrate them. This is a Tale of Two Cities from the winter crows’ perspective — Rochester, New York and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
From the crows’ perspective, smaller units won’t provide safety in numbers so the crows will reconvene somewhere. But where? Will the new location cause trouble, too?
Rochester could choose a more permanent solution by “thinking like a crow.”
Penn State University used to have a big crow problem in the center of campus. In 2009, with the help of crow expert Margaret Brittingham, they picked a location away from people where they wanted the crows to roost. Since crows want to sleep with the lights on, Penn State floodlit a remote set of trees and harassed the crows away from the people zone. The crows moved to the floodlit site and abandoned central campus. Not only that, the crows passed on information about the new roost from crow to crow year after year and continued to use the new roost, not the old one. Ta Dah! Read more at Penn State relocates its winter crows.
Tens of thousands of crows visit Lawrence, Massachusetts every winter but as far as I can tell they have never been harassed there. Instead the roost is celebrated as a tourist attraction, described on the Winter Crow Roost website and YouTube channel.
Nov. 18, 2024: Join us for an unforgettable evening on Crow Patrol under clear skies (55°F, NW winds at 15 mph) as we explore the Merrimack River staging area east of Rt. 495. Witness the incredible sight of American and Fish Crows vocalizing and converging into tree tops in a wild, dramatic display at the east end of Island Street.
Don’t miss this breathtaking show of nature in action! Watch now and share with friends who love the beauty and mystery of wildlife.
So from the crows’ perspective, you’d rather choose Lawrence, MA over Rochester, NY.
(*) p.s. Rochester’s crows are never going to switch to Lawrence MA. They come from different parts of the continent: Lawrence = Atlantic coast. Rochester = interior and south of Hudson Bay.
17 December 2024. Old news from 2012 with a recent update.
Food is scarce in the arctic during winter and early spring, so arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) fatten up for hibernation and cache food for later use.
When they wake up in April they have seeds in their cache to fall back on before the arctic blooms.
32,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, a ground squirrel stored food in his midden that he never ate. If everything had remained frozen no one would have known about his cache, but climate change is melting glaciers and ancient ice. Eventually the squirrel’s cache was exposed.
After they published their findings they continued their research and cultivated more seeds, identifying them as Silene linnaeana in 2021. This is the same genus as bladder campion.
This giant shark snout in the sky is a flock of thousands of common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) flying at dusk near Gretna, Scotland. As starlings gather to roost their tight flocks, called murmurations, wheel and turn in unison making beautiful patterns in the sky.
Under pressure from a predator, starlings intentionally fly closer together and shape-shift into giant blobs, making it impossible for the predator to lock on to a single bird as prey.
Starling murmuration at Eyemouth, UK
Can you see the peregrine at top right, above, and to the left below?
The only way for a peregrine to catch dinner is to break the blob. He rushes the flock, trying to separate a few starlings away from the group. The blob gets even tighter!
Crows stream by in Oakland, 4 Nov 2016 (photo by Kate St. John)
15 December 2024
For stirring winter wildlife spectacles in our own backyard it’s hard to beat Pittsburgh’s winter crow roost. Once you’ve seen them you can’t help but wonder: How many crows are there? In less than two weeks, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out.
On Saturday 28 December volunteers will fan out across the 7.5-mile radius Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count (CBC) circle to tally all the birds they see in 24 hours. It’s the perfect time to count crows but it takes a team to do it. How do we count crows?
First, Find the Roost. Top Priority this week.
The best way to find all the crows in one place at one time is to count them entering, exiting or perched at their massive communal roost. But they change their roost often in late December. I need your help finding it.
Let me know where you see lots of crows after 4:00pm in the city limits. Tell me about …
Huge flocks of crows
After 4:00pm or Overnight
Where are they? Provide specific location, street or landmark.
If flying, what direction are they going? I’ll map your contribution and triangulate.
When To Count? Dusk.
For the CBC we (the crow count team) arrive in the target area around 4:15pm (45 mins before sunset) and count until it’s too dark to see, around 5:45pm (45 mins after sunset). Most of the crows come in after 5:20pm.
If we’re not sure where the roost is (oh no!) we follow the crows by car to the point where they congregate. This is a nerve wracking activity because crows do not fly the street grid.
If we know where the roost is (ideal!) we assemble at various vantage points to view the roost.
Estimate!
Are we counting every single crow? No way!
Estimate the number of crows in a particular patch of sky or a section of the roost, then multiply by the number of patches. This takes practice. Try it out this week.
Count by 10s or — when it’s intense — by 100s.
In Flight
Crows streaming overhead on their way to the roost, 1 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
If you’re on a crow flight path after 4:00pm you can count them as they go by. However, a vantage point underneath the stream (photo above) is basically impossible to count.
Find a straight edge boundary and count them as they pass the edge. The edge in this photo is a signpost. A sparse flock like this could be counted by 10s.
Crows flying to the roost, 4 Nov 2013 (photo by Kate St. John)
For the CBC we don’t want to double count so we find the roost and note the flight paths. If the flight paths have good vantage points we count there. This takes additional volunteers.
Orange! at Phipps Conservatory, 12 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
14 December 2024
Color! Avoiding this week’s coldest weather, Charity Kheshgi and I visited Phipps Conservatory during their annual Holiday Magic flower show. This time I was captivated by summer colors. Orange! Yellow!
Yellow! at Phipps Conservatory, 12 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
A Major Lunar Standstill is coming up tomorrow.
The Full Moon on December 15, 2024, will rise and set at its most extreme northerly points on the horizon—the result of a once-every-18.6 years “major lunar standstill.”
How odd that just days before the winter solstice, when the sun stands still and rises and sets at its southernmost point, the moon is standing still at its northernmost point.
Watch for it tomorrow. Here’s the moon this morning with Jupiter to its left.
Jupiter and the Moon on their way to setting in the west, 14 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
