Bird diversity is lower in winter but the birds are still beautiful as you can see in these portraits by Pittsburgh bird photographer Zachary Vaughan.
Page through the series to see my favorites: a robin holding a crabapple, an eastern screech owl and a starling with a two-tone beak. You’ll also see the red-bellied woodpecker’s red belly.
Fingers crossed about the crows. Last night we could tell they were sleeping on rooftops at/near the VA Hospital in Oakland. Exactly where we cannot see to count them. Erf!
White-fronted nunbirds (Monasa morphoeus) are at their most interesting when they sing in “group choruses of loud gobbling, barking notes, sustained for up to 20 minutes at a time, chiefly at the beginning and end of day.” — quoted from Birds of the World.
Crows roosting near Thackeray Hall a year ago, in 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
26 December 2024
Two days from now, on 28 December, we’ll try to count all of Pittsburgh’s winter crows for the annual Christmas Bird Count. Unfortunately our efforts to find them have fallen quite short of the number we expect.
I believe there are 10,000 to 20,000 crows in the area but we’ve found only 2,000 to 5,000 in Oakland this week, even though I saw about 8,000 the week before. It is likely that the crows split the roost.
In prior years in Lawrence, Massachusetts their crow roost used to be in one place but this winter their crows have split into three locations. Lawrence Crow Patrol has found them all, as shown in this 14 December video. I wish we could say the same.
Have you seen crows crowded at the tops of trees at night? Have you found lots of crow poop in the morning — a sure sign that they were sleeping there the night before?
Let me know where the crows are sleeping by leaving a comment below.
It seems that Pittsburgh missed waterfowl migration this fall with only a handful of the expected migrants landing on our rivers and lakes. Except for long distance migrants, waterfowl haven’t come at all.
Some ducks, geese and gulls only move south when ice overtakes their location. If they’re hanging out at Lake Erie near Presque Isle, the map of yesterday’s water temperature indicates they have no reason to leave. The water there is more than 40°F and the only ice is in small bays (black color on the map).
There are a few rare geese, though, photographed and posted to eBird and embedded below.
There’s currently a Ross’s goose (Anser rossii) at North Park, noticeably small than the Canada geese it’s hanging out with.
Yesterday there was a brant (Branta bernicla) at Duck Hollow without any Canada geese to keep it company. So it hung out with ring-billed gulls.
And a flock of 16 greater white-fronted geese (Anser albifrons) who normally migrate west of the Mississippi and winter in Louisiana, southern Texas and Mexico have been hanging out with Canada geese in Butler County since 1 December.
These geese are called “white-fronted” because their foreheads are white.
Wondering why the ducks aren’t here? This 2021 vintage article explains why.
Snow in Schenley Park, 20 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
22 December 2024
In the run-up to the winter solstice the temperature dropped below freezing last week and the clouds moved in. Seen last week includes evidence of deer, snow and crows.
Evidence of deer: After the city parks bow hunt began in September the deer found other places to hang out including cemeteries and backyards. But we still see their evidence of their nighttime presence including this buck rub in Frick Park on 19 December.
Buck rub on a tree in Frick Park, 19 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Snow fell on Friday and Saturday. In this video its starts out a bit furious and then tapers.
Snowing in Pittsburgh on 21 Dec 2024 (video by Kate St. John)
Our search for the Pittsburgh crow roost continues. We need to find as much of it as we can before the Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count on Saturday, 28 December. So far we haven’t broken 10,000 but we know there are more than that.
Though crows prefer to spend the night in trees we’ve discovered they also roost on rooftops in Oakland where we cannot see and count them. Dang!
Last night Carol Steytler found some near the Pitt Field House. Not a huge number, but encouraging. Her video is dark; it was the middle of the night.
Please help us find the crows. Leave a comment to let me know where you see lots of crows after 4:00pm in the city limits. Tell me about …
Huge flocks of crows
Seen after 4:00pm or Overnight
Where are they? Provide specific location, street or landmark.
If flying, what direction are they going? I’ll map your contribution and triangulate.
Sunrise in Pittsburgh, 18 Dec 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
21 December 2024
Happy Winter Solstice! The days will be getting longer soon.
Most of us were asleep when the winter solstice occurred in Pittsburgh at 4:21 AM EST. We could not see it, even if we’d been awake, because today’s sunrise is at 7:39am EST. On this the shortest day we’ll have 9 hours, 16 minutes and 59 seconds of daylight.
In Britain, Stonehenge is aligned to mark the summer solstice at sunrise and the winter solstice at sunset. Nonetheless, Stonehenge holds their winter solstice celebration at sunrise every year. Here’s a video of last year’s celebrations.
Stonehenge is an even bigger feat of prehistoric engineering than we’d originally thought. In 2021 scientists learned that its igneous bluestones were imported from southwest Wales. This year a Welsh scientist discovered that its giant, partially buried, 6 ton altar stone came from Scotland! A truly cosmopolitan monument.
This month Schmidt Ocean posted a beautiful deep sea video from their deep sea rover’s voyage off the Pacific coast of South America.
11 Dec 2024: After 55 days of exploration, the #ChileMargin2024 expedition team is heading home. Researchers have been exploring along a margin where a submerged continental shelf extends from the country’s west coast and drops steeply and suddenly into the Pacific Ocean.
Did you see the rocks and cliffs in the video? If you could see the entire formation without the ocean in the way, it is actually a very steep mountain range from the bottom of the trench to the top of the Andes, more than 15,000 meters or about 49,300 feet(*) with squids at the bottom and birds at the top.
This area is so deep because the Nazca Plate is subducting under the South American Plate, causing the Andes to rise and the Peru-Chile Trench to plunge deeper.
Schmidt Ocean Institute is a 501(c)(3) private non-profit operating foundation established to advance oceanographic research, discovery, and knowledge, and catalyze sharing of information about the oceans.
Though this willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus) thinks he’s hiding his all-white plumage makes him painfully obvious in a snowless landscape.
There are three species of north country ptarmigans (Lagopus) — willow, white-tailed and rock ptarmigans — that change their plumage with the seasons in order to stay camouflaged against the ground. They’re white in winter to match the snow, brown in summer to match vegetation, and mottled as the seasons change. Their molt cycle worked well until climate change made winters shorter.
Fourteen years ago, in 2010, I blogged about the willow ptarmigan’s superior winter camouflage in Where’s Willow? and he was hard to find in the snowy landscape.
But climate change is making winter is shorter. Snow cover does not begin as early as it used to the fall and it melts earlier in the spring. The ptarmigans’ molt cycle is still on the old schedule so he’s no longer camouflaged when the seasons change. You can see this rock ptarmigan easily from far away.
