The breeding season is over for the European starlings in my neighborhood.
The first sign that the adults had thrown in the towel came early this month when I noticed their beaks had completely changed from breeding season’s yellow back to black.
They’re also molting, replacing their dark, shiny feathers with new white-tipped ones that make them look speckled or “starry” (hence their starling name).
Right now they look like to the two birds in the foreground, above. Only two months ago they looked like this.
Not to be outdone, the juvenile starlings are molting, too. A newly fledged starling has drab brown feathers (click here to see) but they become starry by their first winter. Halfway through the molt sequence they look like the two motley birds in the background, above — drab heads, starry breasts.
Believe it or not, summer is half over.
The starlings, they are a’changing.
(photo by Daniel Plazanet on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
We had a fruit fly episode at work last week. We trapped and did not release.
It all began when Emily came back from maternity leave and discovered a co-worker had left old food in her office refrigerator. Emily carefully wrapped up the rotting fruit and threw it away but a couple of fruit flies escaped.
For two days we barely noticed them. A single fruit fly would appear at mealtimes and disappear afterward. By Thursday however the single fruit fly became two and one of them never went away.
I’m no expert on fruit fly identification but these seemed to be Drosophila melanogaster nicknamed “vinegar flies” because they’re especially attracted to vinegar, a by-product of the rotting fruit which is their favorite food. Here’s a close-up from Wikimedia.
D. melanogaster is well studied. For more than 100 years it’s been the subject of genetic research because its traits are easy to parse out and it reproduces quickly. At warm room temperature (77oF) a newly laid egg becomes a breeding adult in only 8.5 days. The adults live about three weeks during which time the females can lay 100 eggs per day. The D. melanogaster population can quickly get out of hand if you don’t have swallows and flycatchers around to eat them.
Fortunately Emily knew exactly what to do. She taught us how to make vinegar traps, as in…
Pour a little vinegar in the bottom of a cup
Cover the top, leaving only a small hole. We used tape to cover the cups.
Wait for the flies to fly in and never come out.
Emily supplied the plastic cups. We supplied the tape and vinegar. All we had was balsamic vinegar — very dark.
The first photo shows what our traps looked like from the side. The photo below shows them from the top. Because we used tape, the trap hole is a triangle.
My traps caught nothing for hours. Emily’s caught many.
When she left for the day Emily threw away her traps so the next day was quite a success for mine. Using their keen sense of smell, the flies flew further to find the vinegar. In a matter of seconds they could find a new food source down the hallway, the equivalent of a human smelling food and traveling seven miles.
My traps’ success is shown below with three circled fruit flies. And what are those tiny dark specks near the flies? Eggs!
Without birds to eat the flies, vinegar traps will have to do.
(close-up of D. melanogaster from Wikimedia Commons, all other photos by Kate St. John)
For many years Paul Staniszewski has photographed Pennsylvania’s elk herd near Benezette, Pennsylvania, often with beautiful and impressive results such as a photo of a bull nicknamed “Attitude.”
But he hadn’t been able to capture a good photograph of a newborn calf … until last month.
Paul sent me the picture above and wrote, “Since I have been photographing elk, I was never able to get a decent shot of a new born elk calf. There always seemed to be some problem: the calf was too skittish, the grass was too tall, the mother was being too protective, the light was not good, and etc… Well on this occasion [June 12], I finally was able to get what I consider to be a perfect photo of an elk calf that was born just hours before.”
As you can see, elk calves resemble white-tailed deer fawns. What you can’t tell by the picture is the calf’s size. Adult elk are 3-4 times larger than white-tailed deer and their babies are too. Elk calves weigh 30 pounds at birth compared to newborn fawns at 4-10 pounds.
You might think a baby this large would be easy to see, especially since elk live in a herd, but the mothers go off alone to give birth and they are very protective of their young.
An elk cow doesn’t have antlers, but she’s not something you want to tangle with. She weighs about 500 pounds, stands 4.5 feet tall at the shoulder and is 6.5 feet long from nose to rump.
She’ll charge at you if she thinks you’re a threat to her baby.
That’s why her newborn calf is a rare sight.
Thanks to Paul Staniszewski for sharing his photos. For more views of Pennsylvania’s elk and information on photographing them, see his website here.
Have you ever noticed how the amount and direction of light can make a bird look different?
Male Costa’s hummingbirds have shiny purple feathers all over their heads but the feathers look black when the light is at the wrong angle.
This male fluffed his face feathers while Bill Parker was taking his picture in California last winter. Here’s what he could have looked like had he kept his feathers sleeked.
The light has been subdued in Pittsburgh this weekend because of cloudy, rainy weather. The birds look dull but we need the rain.
(photo of a Costa’s hummingbird by William Parker)
Apparently it looked that way to the person who named this the Monkeyflower (Mimulus ringens).
Monkeyflowers are found in wet habitats across most of the U.S and Canada. In the Pittsburgh area the one place I’m certain to find them at this time of year is in the wet patch below the wooden footbridge at Jennings Prairie.
Dianne Machesney found this one at Moraine State Park last weekend.
Last month Pittsburgh’s young peregrines made their first short flight. This month they’ll become self sufficient and ready to leave home.
When they do, they’ll have adventures and most of them will be firsts: the first time they’re alone without family, the first time they see the ocean or the Great Lakes, the first time they encounter birds they never saw at home.
I wonder what they’ll do the first time they meet a raven.
Ravens are slightly larger than peregrines and are acrobatic fliers though not as fast as peregrines. In this video from the raven’s perspective, a peregrine and a juvenile raven wheel and joust in the air. You’d think this would be dangerous for the young raven but his parents are unconcerned.
Maybe the peregrine and raven are testing their flight skills. Maybe the peregrine is a juvenile too. Maybe that’s why they’re playing.
Here’s what black walnuts look like on the tree in July.
If you like to eat them, choose your favorite black walnut tree now and watch in early fall for the green husks to turn yellow-green. You’ll then have a brief opportunity to collect the nuts before the squirrels get them.
Your next challenge will be to remove the husks and expose the shell beneath. Don’t procrastinate or the over-ripe husks will spoil the nuts’ flavor.
Husking black walnuts is a difficult and messy task. The husks are really hard to remove and they leave a stain. Suggestions on husk removal range from hammers to gravel slurries to running over the nuts with your car (this last one is a bad idea).
The process is so messy that you’ll want helpers. If you’re really smart you’ll make it a Tom Sawyer moment and convince your friends to do it for you. This happened to me when I was ten years old.
That year a new family moved into our neighborhood from Georgia and the kids joined our neighborhood group. One day the mom gave us kids a fun job to do. She supplied us with hammers and bricks and a big bucket of black walnuts. We went to work hammering and smashing the husks on the driveway. We didn’t even think about the mess until we looked at our hands and clothes. Stained!
We went indoors to wash up but the stains remained. When I got home it was easy to explain what I’d been up to.
I remember thinking at the time that black walnut husking must be some strange custom from Georgia. I’d never encountered anyone else who did it. And now I know why.
Most birds build nests but this one takes construction to an extreme.
The hamerkop (Scopus umbretta) is a heron-like bird native to Africa that builds a domed nest so large a man can stand on it.
When they begin a new nest, the hamerkops find a suitable tree and spend six to eight weeks collecting 10,000 sticks and cementing them with mud to create a dome with a hidden entrance. They finish it off with thatch and decorations… er, rather, their idea of decorations which are sometimes colorful bits of trash.
A new nest is approximately three by five feet, perhaps not sturdy enough to support a man. But don’t worry, the hamerkops aren’t going anywhere (they’re non-migratory) and they’re not going to abandon their investment. Year after year they add more sticks and mud and the nest grows, sometimes to 6.5 feet in diameter. Now you can stand on it.
What a big pile of sticks! And a remarkable feat for a dull brown bird just slightly larger than a green heron.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons)
p.s. If you want to see a hamerkop in Pittsburgh there’s one in the Wetlands Room at the National Aviary. Until I learned about his nest, I never noticed him there because he’s dull brown and stays in the background.
Juvenile peregrine flies with a meal he just received from his parent (photo by Kim Steininger)
Good news from the Wilmington, Delaware peregrines.
If you’ve been following the Wilmington peregrines this year you know all four chicks are female and that they fledged by May 30.
On the afternoon of June 28 the juveniles were waiting for dinner when Wilmington’s falcon fans gathered on the roof of a nearby parking garage for the Fifth Annual Wilmington Falcon Watch. They were treated to quite a show.
Right above their heads an adult peregrine did a food exchange with one of the “girls.” Kim Steininger captured the action in a photo sequence which I’ve made into a slideshow.
My two favorite frames are the slide where the juvie (nicknamed RG) looks worried that she’ll drop her meal and the slide where the adult turns his head far sideways to check on the kid, “Did she grasp the food or did she drop it?”
In the end it was a successful transfer. Good job, RG!
p.s. More good news, though we’re waiting for confirmation: Last week I learned that the nesting peregrine pair at the Warren, Ohio water tower is a male from Pitt 2007 and a 2008 female from “the DuPont Building in Bloomington, Delaware.” There is no Bloomington in Delaware so this might be a typo for Wilmington. If the band-number of the female is confirmed to be from Wilmington, it means one of Dorothy’s sons has hooked up with a Wilmington girl. I hope it’s true. How cool is that!
Last weekend we visited my family in southeastern Virginia. Man, it was hot!! 80o at 7:00am, 102o in the afternoon. The weather looked great as long as you weren’t out in it. The only comfortable time outdoors was before 9:00am.
During one of my early morning forays I examined crepe myrtle flowers for the first time.
Crepe myrtle (also spelled crape myrtle and crapemyrtle) is a small ornamental tree or shrub from Asia and the Indian subcontinent whose flowers are crinkled like crêpe fabric. It blooms profusely in shades of pink or white throughout the summer. There are many Lagerstroemia species. The ones I examined were probably indica cultivars.
The flowers looked great all day despite the heat. What’s crepe myrtle’s secret? It loves full sun and heat — the more the better. The only thing it doesn’t like is prolonged frosty weather.
