Yearly Archives: 2010

A Crow in Jay’s Clothing?

Beyond Bounds, Crows & Ravens, Musings & News


To those of us in eastern North America this bird looks all mixed up.

He has a crow head, blue jay colors and an incredibly long tail.  He resembles crows and jays because he’s a corvid.  We don’t see him in Pennsylvania because he lives west of Iowa and east of the Sierra Nevadas.  Say hello to the black-billed magpie.

I saw this bird once, but now my sighting doesn’t count.  Years ago I saw a magpie outside my airplane window as we taxied to the gate at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.  Then, in their never-ending quest to reclassify birds the American Ornithological Union split the black-billed magpie from the European magpie and this bird dropped off my life list.   He is now Pica hudsonia.  The bird I saw in Paris was a Pica pica.

If I visited open country in the western U.S. I could easily re-add this bird to my list.  Black-billed magpies are loud and conspicuous, midway in size between blue jays and American crows.  Like crows they are smart, omnivorous and versatile.  Their claim to fame is their very long tail (more than half their body length) and their huge ball-shaped stick nests.

Maybe I should fly to Denver and look out the airplane window.  😉

(photo by Julie Brown)

Explosion of Yellow

Phenology, Trees


An explosion of yellow.  That’s what Jonathan Nadle said of this photo he took in Beechview yesterday.  What a beautiful day!

The trees in Pittsburgh still have leaves, but don’t assume we have some special formula for extending autumn.  This tree is yellow because it’s confused.

This is a Norway maple, so it sheds its leaves in response to fall light levels in northern Europe.  When it experiences 10 hours of daylight, which is exactly what we’ll have today, it thinks it’s mid-October.

You can take the tree out of Norway but you can’t take Norway out of the tree.

(photo by Jonathan Nadle)

Anatomy: Excretion

Bird Anatomy


Any visit to a crow roost focuses one’s mind on the subject of bird poop.  How do I to avoid it? Will it stain? Do they time this so they’ll hit me?   So in today’s anatomy lesson I’m skipping over the next logical topic in bird digestion and jumping directly to the back end.  Hold on to your hats!

Unlike mammals, birds have a single opening for both urinary and digestive excretions so their poop is made of two components: output from their kidneys and from their intestines.

Birds’ kidneys are a miracle of water conservation.  Instead of passing urea and water their kidneys produce uric acid, a white, crystalline, semi-solid that’s not water soluble and is full of nitrogen.  This makes it a good fertilizer that’s easy to collect because it doesn’t wash away.

If you were on the receiving end of bird poop and it was only made of uric acid, it wouldn’t immediately stain your clothes.  You could probably scrape it off.  Unfortunately the second component of bird poop — digestive waste — is disgusting and it can stain.  Pokeberries make purple marks no matter whether you daub them on your clothes yourself or receive a little “gift” from a bird.  Need I say more?

You may not have noticed, but birds poop just before they fly to lighten their load.  I sometimes amaze my friends by remarking, “That hawk is about to take off,” and then it does.  They don’t know I just saw it poop.

Some people think birds are aiming for them.  “Do they time this so they’ll hit me?”  Not exactly.  If you stand below a flock of birds and give them the creeps they’ll get ready to fly.  When they lighten their load you might get hit, but they weren’t aiming for you.

Which brings me full circle to the crow roost and a word to the wise:  The absolute worst time of day to be on the ground under the roost is just when the flock disperses at dawn.

Wear a hat.  Better yet, wear a rain slicker and carry an umbrella.

 

(photo of the Ruskin Avenue sidewalk below the crow roost, by Kate St. John)

Crow Diary

Crows & Ravens
Flock of crows (photo from Shutterstock by Romeo Mikulic)
Flock of crows at dusk (photo from Shutterstock by Romeo Mikulic)

11 November 2010

Wake up. Get ready to go. Round up the family and head out.

Travel 10 or 20 miles and stop for food.

Look for a popular place.  It’s nice to be with a happy crowd.

Have a good meal.  Meet some old friends.  “Hey, how’s the family?  Haven’t seen you since last winter.”  Swap some stories, enjoy the food.

Everyone has a good time.

End of the day, it’s time to head back.

Travel back those same 10 or 20 miles.

What a crowd!  Jostle for a good place to rest.

Noisy neighbors.

“Come on, folks, I’m trying to sleep!  Caw! Caw!”

Silence.

Night.

(photo from Shutterstock by Romeo Mikulic)

Crow Roost in Oakland

Crows & Ravens

Crows coming to roost in Pittsburgh (photo by Sharon Leadbitter)
Crows coming to roost in Pittsburgh (photo by Sharon Leadbitter)

I was inspired to write the Crow Diary after I visited the roost last night in Oakland.

As I predicted the time change has forced evening rush hour to coincide with the crows’ return to the roost so it’s much easier to keep tabs on them.  My friends and I call each other with the news.

Tony Bledsoe told me he had to “run the gauntlet” early yesterday morning to avoid crow poop falling from the trees near Crawford Hall.

Last night I went to see.  When I got out of the car at Bigelow and Ruskin, it smelled like I was in the presence of a lot of birds.  The crows were silent and almost impossible to see.  They weren’t “in” the trees.  They were on top of them.

Using binoculars I was able to count an average number of crows per tree: 55.  In the nine trees on Ruskin Avenue: about 500.

Most of the tall trees in that neighborhood north of the Cathderal of Learning had crows on them, but the crows were silent.  The pedestrians below had no idea that thousands of birds were sleeping above them.

Pittsburgh’s winter crows move their roost location a little every day.  By next week they might not be near Crawford Hall.

p.s. As you can see from the Diary, I think crows speak in short sentences.  😉

(photo by Sharon Leadbitter)

Winter Weeds: Purple-headed Coneflower

Winter Weeds & Trees


The trees are bare and the flowers are gone but I won’t stop going outdoors just because the growing season is over. 

There’s still a lot to see in winter.  The herbaceous plants have become interesting identification challenges. 

Have you ever seen a brown plant skeleton and wondered what it was?  I have and I’d like to learn more, so today I’m beginning a Wednesday series on identifying weeds in winter.

I mentioned this idea to Marcy Cunkelman and she was already on top of it with a collection of photographs from her garden.  Marcy knows her winter weeds because she doesn’t clear her garden in the fall.  If you haven’t cleared yours yet, don’t do it!  Leave the flowers standing.  (I’ll tell you why next week.)

Before we begin, here are some tips that will help you identify winter weeds.  These are expanded from a great book that has helped me a lot:  Weeds in Winter, written and illustrated by Lauren Brown, W. W. Norton, 1976.  The book has pen-and-ink drawings of the weeds and a helpful key system based on these fieldmarks:

  • Smell the plant.  This is a great clue.  Crush the fruit, seeds, leaves or stem.  If it smells like mint, it’s in the mint family.  If it smells like parsley or carrots it’s in the parsley family.  Smoky smell is the daisy family, burning rubber smell is the tomato family.  The list goes on.
  • Look at the leaves.  How are they arranged on the stalk?  Opposite each other or alternate?  Wrapping the stem or freestanding?  Rough or smooth?  Note their shape, if still recognizable.
  • Look at the stem.  Is it fuzzy? Smooth?  Shiny?  Thorny?  Rough?  Triangular?  Square?
  • Notice where the plant is growing (if it isn’t in a garden).  In a swamp?  On a dry hillside?  In a meadow or a forest?  By a road?
  • Are similar plants nearby?   Your individual plant may be damaged or imperfect but similar plants will provide the characteristics of the species.
  • Look at it thoroughly.  Sometimes the seed pod is your best clue, as we will see today.

So, to begin.

Our first “Winter Weed” is Purple-headed Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).  Its skeleton stands two to five feet high on a sturdy, rough stem.  Its leaves are alternate on the stem, toothed, egg-shaped and very rough on both sides like fine sandpaper.  As far as I can tell, it doesn’t smell.

When the flower first bloomed the central disk was flat but as the flower matures the disk rises into a cone.  In winter the seed cone looks like a bristly thistle, but don’t expect it to look that way for long.  American goldfinches love these seeds and will cling to the stem to pick them off. 

The goldfinches already ate half of Marcy’s coneflower seeds.  Now you can see the cone.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Happy Birthday Blog!

Books & Events


Outside My Window is three years old today.

Back in 2007 I started blogging when WQED’s Web Director, Joan Guerin, said I told good stories about birds and should write them down.  Little did I know that my effort would last this long and attract so many readers.

When I began I was afraid I’d run out of things to say but that worry is laid to rest.  Peregrines give me more than enough to write about from February through June.  Birds, flowers, trees and insects occupy spring, summer and fall.  Winter is fallow so I plan a series such as Friday’s Bird Anatomy lessons to keep me going.  I thought I’d be done with anatomy by now, but birds have more body parts than I expected.  😉

Outside My Window has done more than I expected, too.  Here are some surprising statistics:

There’s one more thing I didn’t expect:  Blogging has changed my life.  I now spend part of every day writing and I even get up early to do it.  I’ve made a whole new set of friends — you, my readers — and look forward to meeting more of you in the coming year.

Thanks so much for your support.  You inspire me to keep writing every day.

(Birthday crow by Joan Guerin at WQED)

p.s. Do you have a favorite post?  A suggestion for new topics?  Leave a comment and let me know.

bird-thday

This is a Gray Squirrel

Mammals, Schenley Park


Yes, really.

Black squirrels are not a new species, they’re just a common melanistic color phase of the eastern gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).

“Melanistic” comes from the Greek word for black, melanos, and is caused by melanin, the brown or black pigment that gives hair, skin and eyes a dark color.  Melanin can be inherited for a permanent dark color as in this squirrel, or it can be produced in greater quantities during tanning or in some diseases.

Melanism can confer a biological advantage when it provides better camouflage.  There’s even an effect called “industrial melanism” in which the majority of a species living in a dirty, industrial zone are darker than those who live in a cleaner environment.  This was famously documented among peppered moths in Britian during the sooty, late-1800s.

Who knows why Pittsburgh has black squirrels (we haven’t been sooty for half a century) but if you want to see them come on over to the area of Schenley Park that borders — you guessed it — Squirrel Hill.

 

(photo by D. Gordon E. Roberston from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the photo to see the original)

Beyond Bounds: Cryptic Forest Falcon

Beyond Bounds

Cryptic Forest-Falcon (photo linked from MSNBC slideshow of the Amazing Amazon)
Cryptic Forest-Falcon (photo linked from MSNBC slideshow of the Amazing Amazon)

Here’s a bird I doubt you’ll ever see in the wild.

This is the cryptic forest-falcon (Micrastur mintoni) of the southern Amazon watershed.  It is so shy and so hard to see that until 2002 its museum specimens were thought to be a similar bird, the lined forest-falcon. Both have slate gray backs and red-orange cere and lores.

Forest-falcons hunt in thickly forested habitat so their bodies have many of the same characteristics as our accipters:  short rounded wings, long tails, and relatively long legs.  The cryptic forest-falcon is somewhat comparable in size and shape to our sharp-shinned hawk.

If you happen to go to the Amazon to look for this bird, good luck.  My raptor guide says it is “best located by song: single low-pitched notes uk, uk, uk..”

Thanks to Diane Korolog for alerting me to this beautiful bird.

(photo is linked from MSNBC‘s Amazing Amazon slideshow.  Click on the picture to watch the slideshow. It is the second photo in the series.)

.http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Slideshows/_production/ss-101025-amazon-new-species/Micrastur_mintoni%201.ss_full.jpg

Clock Change

Books & Events


Tonight’s the night.  We gain an hour of sleep.  We lose an hour of evening daylight.

When we turn the clocks backward from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time the transition is smoothed by giving us all a well rested Sunday morning but I must admit I’m not fond of the change.  It’s a shock to my system when the sun sets at 6:11pm tonight, then at 5:10pm tomorrow.

Last March when we turned the clocks forward it took me almost a week to get used to it.  Obviously I live by the clock.  If I was a bird I’d live by the sun, leaving the roost at sunrise and returning at sunset. 

And that’s the one advantage of changing time zones without going anywhere.  We’ll get a new view of what the birds are doing. 

Starting Monday evening I’ll be leaving the office at sunset, the perfect time to watch the crows.

(animated nature clock by Nevit Dilmen on Wikimedia Commons.  Click the image to see the original.)