Dorothy and E2 were up early this morning, courting before dawn.
Dorothy (on the left) looks as if she just ate. Wow! That means E2 was out hunting in the dark!
(photo from the National Aviary falconcam at the Univ of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning)
If April showers bring May flowers, what do March flowers bring?
In this case, scavenging flies.
Yesterday I found a huge patch of skunk cabbage blooming at Raccoon Creek State Park. They were so well camouflaged that I had to be careful where I stepped. I tried for a picture of the flowers hidden inside the spathe but was unsuccessful. Of course the pollinators don’t need to see the flower. They’re attracted to the smell. I stepped on one by accident and yes, it smelled awful.
Also found blooming in wet places are the long, yellow catkins of American hazelnut trees. Here are some from Marcy Cunkleman’s garden.
The warm weather fooled me into thinking spring had sprung, but this field at Raccoon brought me back to reality. How brown!
Spring still has a long way to go.
(skunk cabbage and field scene photos by Kate St. John, catkins photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
For more than a week Pittsburgh’s peregrine watchers have wondered why Louie and Dori aren’t visiting their nest at the Gulf Tower. Where are they?
Katie Munsch and Dan Costa found a clue. Yesterday morning they were startled to hear loud wailing coming from Katie’s 19th floor balcony at Point Park University in Downtown Pittsburgh. Since they couldn’t see the balcony from her window, they went outdoors to investigate and found this peregrine falcon!
Katie was worried about its behavior. The bird had been wailing, it attempted to spread its wings a couple of times but opened only one, and it allowed them to come quite close. Was it injured? She called the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
The Game Commission advised her to poke the falcon with a broom to determine whether or not it was injured. When Dan approached with a broom it flew away without effort. The bird was OK but Katie was puzzled so she posted a comment on my blog and sent me Dan’s pictures.
My first reaction was “Wow!”
Katie asked:
I had some questions, too.
By 4:00pm I was free to go investigate. On my way Downtown I stopped at Pitt and found Dorothy calmly perched on the Cathedral of Learning, facing the nest. Good!
Downtown, I drove with the window open to listen for wailing but heard none. I searched the Gulf Tower perches and surrounding buildings for peregrines. None.
Next stop, First Side. I walked around and scanned Lawrence Hall and the surrounding buildings for peregrines. None. I was beginning to think my search was hopeless when I heard a robin making alarm calls and saw him tilting his head toward the sky. I followed his gaze and found a peregrine perched 13 stories above us on a roof ornament of the West Penn Building.
When I stepped back for a better look the peregrine looked at me and flew away. It was not wailing but it was using the territorial flappy flight that signals, “This is mine!”
I can’t guess who this peregrine was, but now I know where the peregrines are focusing their attention: at First Side, less than half a mile from the nest.
Thanks to Katie and Dan we have a clue to the Gulf Tower mystery.
(photo by Dan Costa)
p.s. If you see any peregrines in Downtown Pittsburgh, please post a comment here! We want to know what’s going on.
When I wrote about killdeer nests on Tuesday, Emily and Kurt left comments reminding us that these birds lure danger away from their nests by pretending to be injured.
Here’s a video showing the killdeer’s broken-wing display, a convincing bit of play-acting. The adult looks gravely injured to attract the predator’s attention. As soon as the predator has been lured away from the eggs or babies, the killdeer makes a miraculous recovery and flies away.
In the video you can see why the adult is so worked up. A very cute baby killdeer runs away from the intruder at 5 seconds into the video and another hides in the grass at the 25-second mark.
Mama Killdeer thought he was scary but the man with the videocam was helping her family. He was herding her babies out of the street where the traffic was dangerous.
If you ever saw this bird, you might think it was a cross between a grackle and a scissor-tailed flycatcher because of its iridescent blue-black color and long, thin tail feathers.
But it’s not a bird. This is a drawing of a Microraptor, a pigeon-sized dinosaur that lived 130 million years ago. We know what it looked like thanks to extensive research published in yesterday’s issue of the journal Science, and this image by Mick Ellison of AMNH.
The research was a collaboration of American and Chinese scientists who examined Microraptor’s fossilized feathers at the microscopic level.
The iridescence breakthrough has an Ohio connection. Dr. Matt Shawkey, a co-author of the study and associate professor of biology at the University of Akron, discovered that in the commonly iridescent feathers of modern birds, arrays of pigment-bearing organelles called melanosomes were uniquely narrow. These same shapes were found in Microraptor melanosomes.
Want to learn more about this dinosaur? The American Museum of Natural History will have a live video chat today (Friday, March 9) at 12:30pm to discuss this earliest record of iridescence.
For more information, pictures and videos visit this page on the American Museum of Natural History’s website.
(drawing of a Microraptor based on digital overlays of nine fossilized specimens, by AMNH/Mick Ellison. Image featured here on Science Daily)
An article in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker got me thinking about human society.
Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism by Jonah Lehrer describes the history of the inclusive fitness theory and the current dispute among evolutionary biologists on the origin of altruism.
It all started with E.O. Wilson, a biologist, author and expert on ants. In 1975 he promoted the theory of kin selection to explain why altruistic individuals sacrifice themselves for their kin. (Ants do this a lot!) Natural selection says this shouldn’t work because their genes would die out but kin selection says they help their kin because it preserves the genes they share. Survival through kinship was named inclusive fitness.
Over the years E.O.Wilson started to see holes in inclusive fitness. In 2010 he and two mathematicians, Mark Nowak and Corina Tarnita, published an article in Nature that refuted it.
Half The New Yorker article is about the resulting fight. The other half is what caught my attention.
E.O.Wilson changed his mind because he learned more about ant behavior. As it turns out, cooperation within a species doesn’t spring up easily. When it happens to start within a group, it makes the group survive so well that they dominate other groups. Further, cooperative species are so successful that they dominate others species. Cooperation can start in any group. It just happens that the groups are composed of kin.
This works because “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups,” as E.O. Wilson wrote in 2007.
The first principle has certainly been my experience. Within a group, a selfish person pushes everyone else around. We see it working for these individuals and our society advertises it in slogans that say “It’s all about you” and “Have it all.” It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that you can’t have all of it if you’re sacrificing yourself. So we’re encouraged to be selfish.
But wait. The second principle is true too. Selfish groups lose to altruistic ones. Cooperation makes groups successful over rivals who fight among themselves.
It’s important not to lose sight of this. Humans have been successful as a species because we help each other. Selfishness is a disadvantage to society. Rugged individuals fail in the face of disasters like last week’s tornadoes. We can’t do everything alone, and we cannot expect society to thrive if we insist that everyone pull himself up by his own bootstraps.
I am happy to know that nature showed the way on this.
In my view kindness beats selfishness any day of the week!
(photo of leaf cutter ants, who are models of cooperation, from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
For some of the red maples in Schenley Park, winter is over. They’re already blooming.
Red maples (Acer rubrum) are one of the earliest trees to flower in the spring, producing red female flowers and yellowish male flowers. The male flowers are actually red but appear yellow from a distance because the yellow stamens extend beyond the red petals.
Shown above are the female flowers. Look closely and you can see the tiny wings of the fruit that will form from each flower.
Weeks ago I photographed the winter buds which, like all maples, are opposite on the stem. The red buds are globular, the bud scales are rounded. Here’s a close-up of what the buds looked like when they were closed.
Nearly everything about the red maple is red — the buds, twigs, flowers, fruit (before it dries), leaf stems and fall leaves. Red maples are so beautiful in autumn that they are often planted in cities and parks.
Red maple bark is not as easy to identify. It’s smooth on young trees and rough on old ones with vertical cracks that peel up a bit. Here’s a look at the bark that proves it’s easier to identify this tree by its buds.
Today and tomorrow we’ll have temperatures in the 60s and more of the red maples will bloom. Use binoculars to see the flowers.
Soon the Winter Tree series will end because the trees will have leaves.
(Bud and bark photos by Kate St. John. Red maple flowers’ photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the flowers’ photo to see the original)
Spring is certainly coming. I heard my first killdeer at Middle Creek last Sunday.
Though I’ve read that a few killdeer stay in Pennsylvania all winter I only see them when they make their first push into Pennsylvania in the last week of February and first of March. Killdeer come north early because they nest relatively early — as early as April 11.
Like peregrine falcons killdeer will nest in gravel but unlike peregrines they choose open, level places rather than cliffs. This makes sense because killdeer babies walk away from the nest as soon as they hatch even though they can’t fly yet. Peregrine babies can’t — and won’t — leave the nest until they’re able to fly.
Killdeer nests are typically in fields, pastures, golf courses and gravel parking lots. Sometimes they line the nest with pieces of grass, wood chips or pebbles. Look closely in Chuck Tague’s photo above and you’ll see eggs below the bird. She’s nesting in a grassy place littered with old wood chips and leaves.
Whether it’s in a grassy field or a gravel parking lot, the eggs are always laid in a shallow depression so they don’t roll away. As added insurance, the killdeer arranges them with the points inward as you can see in Tim Vechter’s photo below. Notice how the eggs are camouflaged. Pretty sneaky!
If you want to see a killdeer’s nest, visit the beach parking lot at Keystone State Park in late April or early May. As soon as you pull into the lot you’ll see orange traffic cones blocking off some of the parking spaces. The cones are protecting killdeer nests.
If you get too close the birds will shout at you.
Of course!
(killdeer photo by Chuck Tague, nest photo by Tim Vechter)
If you haven’t been watching the National Aviary falconcams or monitoring the peregrines’ bridge nest locations, now’s the time to start.
Pittsburgh’s peregrines are very busy courting right now. Whether you watch on camera or in person it’s easy to see.
The male brings prey to his lady as a courtship offering. When he’s prepared it to his satisfaction he flies around, carrying it in his talons and calling for her to come. She flies up and takes it from him, sometimes in mid-air, and settles in to eat. When she’s finished eating he goes to the nest and calls her to come bow with him. After they bow he leaves and she stays to dig the scrape in the gravel where she’ll lay her eggs. This is a sure sign that they’ll nest soon.
You can see the nest activity on the falconcams. The photo above shows Dorothy and E2 at the Cathedral of Learning nest. The photo below shows Louie and Dori at the Gulf Tower.
If you want to see their courtship flight, you have to be near their nesting territory. Rob Protz was lucky to see a pair at Tarentum on Saturday evening when they flew around the bridge and landed to mate. Their nest location and the male’s identity are still a mystery so we’re hoping for some sharp eyes to figure this out. Other bridges to watch are McKees Rocks, Westinghouse and Monaca.
Be alert in the days ahead for the first eggs at Pitt and the Gulf Tower. Dorothy, at Pitt, laid her first egg on March 12 in 2010 and on March 13 in 2011. Dori, at the Gulf Tower, laid her first on March 17 last year.
Eggs are coming soon.
(photos from the National Aviary falconcams at Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning and at the Gulf Tower. Click on the photos to see the falconcams)
4 March 2012
In March the timberdoodles perform their sky dance.
Timberdoodles (American woodcocks, Scolopax minor), live in the countryside, are well camouflaged, and dance in the dark. I live in the city so it’s rare that I’m in shrubby fields at night. Consequently I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a woodcock’s courtship flight.
I do know where and when to find them.
When the weather’s good in early spring the male woodcock picks a suitable shrubby field as his stomping ground. In the hour before sunrise or the hour after sunset, he lets the ladies know he’s available by stomping around in the dark saying “peeent, peeent, peeent.” He sounds like a small rhythmic buzzer.
After a bit of peeenting he flings himself into the sky climbing hundreds of feet before circling back down to peeent again. While ascending his wings make a twittering sound. As he circles back down he chirps. You can tell what he’s doing even though it’s too dark to see him. “Peeent” on the ground, twitter going up, chirping coming down. He lands where he started and does it again. Here’s what he sounds like.
I’d like to see a woodcock again this spring but… which scrubby field will a timberdoodle choose? And is it a place I want to be after dark?
Hence, my quest.
p.s. For some awesome information on woodcocks, see Chuck Tague’s woodcock blog.
(photo by Bob Greene)