In just 17 days the winter solstice on 21 December will bring us the shortest day and longest night. Since peregrines cue on the amount of daylight to trigger their breeding season, they aren’t in the mood for courtship right now. But the Pitt peregrines stay at the Cathedral of Learning year round and occasionally visit the nest ledge anyway in the off season. Sometimes they call for their mate to join them in a bowing session.
In the snapshot above Ecco calls for Carla to join him last week. “Hey, Carla. Come here!” She didn’t show up then, but she stopped by on Sunday. However Ecco didn’t arrive. (Note: The sun’s low angle made white dirt-spots glow on the camera housing.)
Great blue heron at Cuyahoga Valley National Park, 17 March 2021 (photo by Karyn Delaney)
3 December 2024
Did you know you can identify bird photos on your cellphone? Merlin Bird ID’s Photo ID function was updated last month with thousands of images from Macaulay Library, the home of eBird checklist photos, providing more real life photos of birds in context.
Here’s how it works: If you want to identify the photo above, by Karyn Delaney, open the Merlin app (download here) and choose Photo ID as shown in the screenshots below.
Choose a photo on your phone or in your photo library. Make it fill the box.
Merlin wants to know when and were you saw the bird because it helps with bird ID.
Quick results! Plus lots of information about the bird.
I found out about the Photo ID upgrade when the Macaulay Library thanked me for contributing photos to eBird and said they used 3 of them. Since I rarely take pictures of birds I have almost no photos in my eBird checklists. I can almost guess which ones they picked: Two peregrine photos and one mockingbird.
Peregrine at Sewickley Bridge, 28 February 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)Peregrine at Graff Bridge, Kittanning, 7 Jun 2018 (photo by Kate St. John)Northern mockingbird missing its tail, Phipps Conservatory front lawn, 27 March 2017 (photo by Kate St. John)
Try out the Merlin app and see how it works.
Add photos to your eBird checklists and contribute to bird identification.
How do birds avoid midair collisions? In 2016 scientists learned that budgerigars flying head on toward each other avoid crashes by always turning right.
Researchers in Australia trained 14 male budgies to fly in a narrow well lit tunnel, one at a time. After the birds were acclimated they positioned one bird at each end of the tunnel and let them fly straight at each other. Two set of cameras recorded the birds’ reactions.
Over the course of four days, seven budgie pairs made 102 flights with no mishaps. When the researchers reviewed the video, they saw that the birds avoided any aerial mishaps thanks to two evolutionary traits. About 85 percent of the time, the birds turned right upon approach. “This seems to be a simple, efficient and effective strategy for avoiding head-on collisions,” Srinivasan said.
The budgies also seemed to decide whether to fly over or under an approaching bird, and the pairs rarely made the same choice. … The researchers speculate that either each budgie prefers one flying height over the other, or flock hierarchy determines who flies high and who flies low.
Well, actually, 70% of the world drives on the right, 30% on the left. Heaven help you when you drive in a country that does the opposite of what you’ve learned!
And if it’s really important the nuthatch opens its wings and sways side to side in a mesmerizing display. The bluebird on the other side of this feeder stares for a while and decides not to stick around.
White-breasted nuthatch tells bluebird to go away (video embedded from Birder in VA on YouTube)
Did you know that white-breasted nuthatches use crushed bugs and other items to lay scent outside the entrance to their nests? Listen to BirdNote to find out more …
… and then watch a nuthatch sweep a bug around its nest hole.
Rose blooming in November, 23 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
30 November 2024
Even though it’s November and getting colder and darker by the day, I found some confused flowers this week. Imported trees and plants that should be dormant were in bloom.
A rose, above, and an ornamental cherry tree were beautiful in the rain.
Ornamental cherry tree blooming in November, 23 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Moth mullein was battered but blooming on an almost sunny day.
Battered but blooming, moth mullein in November, 23 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Northern magnolia buds were swelling in anticipation of spring … even though it was late November.
Fat buds on northern magnolia, 27 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Alas, these flowers will be no match for this week’s (finally normal) freezing temperatures.
Now that Thanksgiving is over turkeys can own the road again.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a wild turkey cross the road in the City of Pittsburgh. Six years ago they were very common in Pittsburgh’s East End but there are gone now, perhaps because the City’s huge deer population eats all their winter food.
If you want to see a lot of turkeys visit Pittsburgh’s northern suburbs. In February I saw 20 cross the road near North Park.
Fortunately none of them wanted to challenge cars!
Forget the Thanksgiving turkey, gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cornbread, and cranberry sauce. Let’s cut to the chase and eat pie today!
photos from Wikimedia Commons, linked in the list of fruits. p.s. …
A pumpkin, from a botanist‘s perspective, is a fruit because it’s a product of the seed-bearing structure of flowering plants. Vegetables, on the other hand, are the edible portion of plants such as leaves, stems, roots, bulbs, flowers, and tubers. Because pumpkins are less sweet and more savory from a culinary perspective, we categorize them as a vegetable.
November is a good time of year to look for hackberry trees in Pittsburgh and examine their fallen fruit. By now the pulp has worn off the pits, but unlike wooden cherry pits hackberries’ are like white seashells with a microscopic lattice of opal inside.
Common hackberry pits: one whole, one opened (photo by Kate St. John)
Learn about these amazing structures in this vintage article.
Then go find a hackberry tree (and an electron microscope).
Hackberry bark and bare branches make it easy to identify the tree, even in winter. The bark has ridges and the ridges have growth lines.
Hackberry bark has ridges. The ridges have growth lines (photo by Kate St. John)
Up in the bare branches, hackberry trees sometimes have twig formations called witches brooms “produced by the effects of an eriophyid mite (Aceria celtis) and/or an associated powdery mildew producing fungus (Sphaerotheca phytoptophila)” — from bugwood.
On 14 November The Allegheny Front described oil pollution on the Monongahela River that’s been happening for more than two years. Monitored by Three Rivers Waterkeeper since May 2022, an oil sheen sometimes covers the water from bank to bank for three miles, all the way to McKeesport. This can’t be good for our bald eagles who nest along on the Mon and eat fish from its water.
“These are pretty serious sheens,” said Captain Evan Clark, a boat captain for Three Rivers Waterkeeper. “When I’m boating around up there, my boat is running through a heavy rainbow sheen that can extend from one bank of the river to the other, literally for miles.”
In August 2022, an EPA inspector reported oil discharge from the plant’s outfall, or drainage pipe, and found “substantial rainbow sheening could be seen for approximately 3 miles downstream.”(*)
Last year the Pennsylvania Dept of Environmental Protection (DEP) determined the oil was coming from a USS Irvin Works outfall and “issued a compliance order requiring U.S. Steel to deploy absorbent booms, investigate the cause of the releases and implement a plan to fix any problems.” — The Allegheny Front
But a year later the problem has not been addressed and it happened again last month. DEP has proposed setting a water pollution permit level on that outfall. Three Rivers Waterkeeper wants real-time monitoring on it.
Meanwhile, oil-covered water cannot be good for our bald eagles who touch the water’s surface and eat fish and waterfowl captured in or on the water.
During an oil sheen episode the pair that nests at USS Irvin Works cannot hunt the Mon for three miles downstream of their nest without being exposed to the oil. This is a lot of territory to avoid with hungry chicks in the nest.
Employees at USS Irvin Works are so proud of their bald eagle pair that the company installed an eaglecam to watch them at the nest. Surely USS Irvin Works will clean up this outfall to protect everyone who uses the Mon including their favorite eagles.
Read more about the issue here at The Allegheny Front …
Charity Kheshgi and Jon Woon joined me yesterday at Duck Hollow where we looked for birds under extremely overcast skies. Unfortunately the ducks were so far away and the light was so poor that we have no photos to show for it. Instead I’ve embedded look-alike photos from Macaulay Library.
Best birds were these very distant ducks.
1 Canvasback female (sample photo above): We pondered this bird for a long time because she was paired with a male ring-necked duck. Yes, she was a canvasback. We were witnessing future hybridization within the Aythya genus.
The Ring-necked Duck entry in Birds of the World includes eBird records with photos of hybrids between Ring-necked Ducks and Canvasback, Redhead, Tufted Duck, and Great and Lesser Scaup.
