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)
Yesterday I discovered European Wildlife by Lukáš Pich on YouTube and this beautiful video, Wild Czechia – My Best Wildlife Encounters of 2023, featured below. Filmed in the Czech Republic in 2023 the images are gorgeous, the action is fascinating and all is enhanced by the sound track.
For North Americans most of the birds, insects and animals in the video will be unfamiliar but we have a few in common. Watch for the leaping red fox, a family of ravens, barn swallows in flight, and a flock of great egrets taking off. There are also many species that resemble our own ants, staghorn beetles, dragonflies, hawks, owls, woodpeckers and songbirds. For instance, we don’t have great crested grebes in North America (photo at top) but it has traits similar to our horned and western grebes.
At 1:00 minute into the video a bird enters the frame and poses to sing. I guarantee that you will be able to identify this bird by its song (see *1 below).
(3) Though I’ve never to Czechia the Czech Republic brings to mind old buildings and the capital city, Prague. I found beautiful photos of its wild places including the Javornik Mountains.
We won’t have frost on our eyelashes but today it will feel like we ought to. Pittsburgh’s current temperature of 21°F is only half of the normal high (42°F), and the wind chill in 15-24 mph wind makes it feel much worse.
The wind chill temperature is how cold people and animals feel when outside. Wind chill is based on the rate of heat loss from exposed skin caused by wind and cold. As the wind increases, it draws heat from the body, driving down skin temperature and eventually the internal body temperature.
This wind chill chart shows how temperature and wind create a “Feels Like” temperature. Blue-to-purple background colors indicate how quickly exposed skin gets frostbite. Under extreme conditions it can take only 5 minutes. (I have circled today’s approximate values in red.)
Yes, it feels cold and to make matters worse our bodies are not used to it. Just two days ago it was partly sunny and 59°F on Monday afternoon, 10 December.
So bundle up. It is wind chill-y today.
p.s. How cold does it have to be to get frost on your eyelashes? Minus 50°F == -50°F.
The Great Lakes hold nearly 20% of the world’s fresh surface water. And, more astonishingly, the lakes hold more than 90% of North America’s fresh surface water.
But this water supply is not unlimited. The Great Lakes are a one-time gift from the glaciers that melted in our region thousands of years ago. Less than 1 percent of the lakes’ water is renewed annually through rainfall and snowmelt. That means the Great Lakes can be depleted if we don’t keep Great Lakes water in the Great Lakes Basin.
The Great Lakes watershed map shows how little of the surrounding land drains into lakes. This is especially true of northern Pennsylvania and Chautauqua County, NY.
As climate change puts enormous strains on fresh water resources, multinational companies look longingly at bottling our rivers and lakes. Fortunately the Great Lakes basin had an early wake up call.
In 1998, an obscure Canadian consulting company, the Nova Group, announced its intention to ship 158 million gallons of Lake Superior water to Asia. Though that specific plan seemed unlikely to materialize, it raised alarms about the vulnerability of the Great Lakes in an increasingly hot and thirsty world.
And so the Great Lakes Compact was born. Signed into law in 2008, it prohibits diversion of water outside the Great Lakes basin with very limited exceptions.
This one-time gift of the Ice Age glaciers won’t be frittered away.
p.s. Prior to 1945 humans diverted Great Lakes water in four locations but these have barely made a dent in the total watershed.
Ogoki pulls water from Hudson Bay watershed into Lake Superior. 1943.
Long Lac pulls water from Hudson Bay watershed into Lake Superior. 1939.
The Chicago River is diverted away from Lake Michigan and into the Mississippi watershed. Beginning in the 1800s.
Welland Canal is a navigation channel from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario that bypasses Niagara Falls. Beginning in 1824.
The combined effects of the Long Lac, Ogoki and Chicago diversions and the Welland Canal have been to permanently raise Lake Superior by an average of 2.1 centimeters (0.8 inches), lower Lakes Michigan-Huron by 0.6 cm (0.2 in), lower Lake Erie by 10 cm (4 in) and raise Lake Ontario by 2.4 cm (1 in), according to the IJC’s 1985 Great Lakes Diversions and Consumptive Uses report.
A sinkhole topped the news in western Pennsylvania last week when a 64 year old grandmother, Elizabeth Pollard, fell into one after sunset in Unity Twp, Westmoreland County, located 40 miles from Pittsburgh.
Ms. Pollard was last seen Monday [2 December at 5pm] while searching for her cat, Pepper, outside Monday’s Union Restaurant. She fell through the sinkhole that had “just enough dirt” for a roof system and grass to grow, Trooper Limani said.
It took four days to find her body 30 feet down in the Marguerite mine whose roof and pillars are slowly collapsing after it was abandoned in 1950. It’s horrifying to think that when she stepped on a patch of grass a hole opened up and swallowed her. [More news at end.]
So I began to wonder: What causes sinkholes? Where are they likely? and Why are they round? My answers will be briefly paraphrased from PA DEP, Wikipedia and USGS.
What causes sinkholes?
Sinkholes are all about water. Water drains rapidly into the ground or runs underground and dissolves the subsurface, creating a void. For a while the surface remains intact, then it collapses into the void.
Human activity can cause sinkholes, too, including:
Groundwater pumping
Digging, drilling or removing soil
Water main breaks and intense concentrations of storm water
Dams large and small
Mining
Heavy loads on the surface.
Where are sinkholes likely?
Naturally occurring:According to American Geosciences, the most sinkhole-prone states are Florida, Texas, Alabama, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania because these have naturally occurring karst beneath the surface. Three kinds of karst are shown on this USGS map.
Wikipedia says sinkholes are usually circular. Gizmodo explains why in “Ask a geologist.”
When a void occurs in sediment that has a certain amount of cohesion (‘stickiness’ among sediment grains), the most stable configuration of the roof of the void is a dome, like the dome of the U.S. Capitol building. If that dome collapses, the vertical sides may remain upright, and the open hole will be circular.
If you wanted to find a raccoon, where would you look? Hint: Don’t bother searching in rural areas.
According to the NGS video below, there are 100 times more raccoons in the city than in the country, but we rarely see them. If you live in a city or suburb …
Is there a raccoon in your neighborhood? Definitely
… in your yard? Probably
… in your attic or crawl space? You might be surprised.
p.s. Back in 2008 I watched a family of raccoons nosing around my Greenfield neighborhood. They were aiming for my backyard! Fortunately they never got in the house.
Dr. Wacker presented information on crow vocalizations at the Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society in November 2024. To measure the calls they analyzed these components.
The team recorded crow vocalizations in various contexts and compared the spectrograms. And they discovered an unusual thing. Crows appear to be “saying” things in the silence between their caws (gaps) and the pauses between their calls.
Gaps between caws: Are longer in pre-roost aggregations (evening) than in post-roost aggregations (morning).
Pauses between calls: Are shorter while mobbing an owl than in pre-roost aggregations.
If you want to know what a crow is saying, listen to their silences.
Learn more about crow language in this Olympic Peninsula Audubon Society’s video. I have set it to start nearly an hour into the meeting, beginning with spectrogram analysis of crow calls. I’ve included this 15 minute portion here because it is so interesting. Click here to see the entire 1.5 hour meeting.
p.s. Dr. Wacker described an intriguing idea: The messages in human language come from our sounds. The messages in crow language appear to come from silences. Perhaps we can’t figure out what crows are saying because we aren’t used to listening to the silences.
Early morning sun and fog at Duck Hollow, 25 November 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
7 December 2024
This week the city received a light dusting of snow but the ground was not as beautiful as the sky. Two examples: Fog and sun at Duck Hollow before Thanksgiving, and a very red sunrise on 4 December.
Sunrise in Pittsburgh, 4 December 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
What is this? An arrangement of black carbon.
Faulty oven creates black carbon, November 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
These were the unexpected result of a faulty oven thermostat that carbonized the Thanksgiving biscuits. Fortunately that carbon is only skin deep. My niece cut off the bottoms. The tops were yummy.
Crows staging at Schenley Park golf course at sunset on 30 Nov 2024, 4:57pm (photo by Betty Rowland)
6 December 2024
Since late October visiting crows have been pouring into town to join Pittsburgh’s enormous winter crow flock. Their numbers in Shadyside and Oakland grew from 3,600 in mid-October to over 8,000 in mid-November … and then I lost track of them because they moved the roost and changed their flight path.
Alas! The flock is still growing — perhaps to 20,000! — and just three weeks from now on Sat. 28 December will be the annual Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count (CBC) when we’ll confirm the number of crows that come to town for the winter. If we can find them.
I had hopes last Saturday 30 November when Betty Rowland saw a huge flock staging at Schenley Park’s golf course, photo above. But when Betty checked again on Monday the crows were completely gone.
Our winter crows change or split their roost often in late December because they wear out their welcome so quickly. (See examples here.) So where are they now?
Please help. Let me know where you see lots of crows just before sunset or at night in the city and/or Allegheny County. Tell me about …
Huge flocks of crows
After 4:00pm
Where are they?
If flying, what direction are they going?
Your sightings are especially important in the week before the CBC, December 22-27.
To get you in the mood, here’s a video from Winter Crow Roost in Lawrence, Massachusetts where they’ve ramped up crow counting with photography and videos. Woo hoo!
