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.
Winter crows are incredibly persistent. Year after year they return in large numbers to the same city, even if the city harasses them. Some cities harass their winter crows, some celebrate them. This is a Tale of Two Cities from the winter crows’ perspective — Rochester, New York and Lawrence, Massachusetts.
From the crows’ perspective, smaller units won’t provide safety in numbers so the crows will reconvene somewhere. But where? Will the new location cause trouble, too?
Rochester could choose a more permanent solution by “thinking like a crow.”
Penn State University used to have a big crow problem in the center of campus. In 2009, with the help of crow expert Margaret Brittingham, they picked a location away from people where they wanted the crows to roost. Since crows want to sleep with the lights on, Penn State floodlit a remote set of trees and harassed the crows away from the people zone. The crows moved to the floodlit site and abandoned central campus. Not only that, the crows passed on information about the new roost from crow to crow year after year and continued to use the new roost, not the old one. Ta Dah! Read more at Penn State relocates its winter crows.
Tens of thousands of crows visit Lawrence, Massachusetts every winter but as far as I can tell they have never been harassed there. Instead the roost is celebrated as a tourist attraction, described on the Winter Crow Roost website and YouTube channel.
Nov. 18, 2024: Join us for an unforgettable evening on Crow Patrol under clear skies (55°F, NW winds at 15 mph) as we explore the Merrimack River staging area east of Rt. 495. Witness the incredible sight of American and Fish Crows vocalizing and converging into tree tops in a wild, dramatic display at the east end of Island Street.
Don’t miss this breathtaking show of nature in action! Watch now and share with friends who love the beauty and mystery of wildlife.
So from a crows’ perspective, they’d rather choose Lawrence, MA over Rochester, NY.
(*) p.s. Rochester’s crows are never going to switch to Massachusetts. The two flocks come from different parts of the continent: Lawrence attracts crows along the Atlantic coast flyway. Rochester attracts crows from Canada’s interior and areas south of Hudson Bay.
17 December 2024. Old news from 2012 with a recent update.
Food is scarce in the arctic during winter and early spring, so arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) fatten up for hibernation and cache food for later use.
When they wake up in April they have seeds in their cache to fall back on before the arctic blooms.
32,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, a ground squirrel stored food in his midden that he never ate. If everything had remained frozen no one would have known about his cache, but climate change is melting glaciers and ancient ice. Eventually the squirrel’s cache was exposed.
After they published their findings they continued their research and cultivated more seeds, identifying them as Silene linnaeana in 2021. This is the same genus as bladder campion.
This giant shark snout in the sky is a flock of thousands of common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) flying at dusk near Gretna, Scotland. As starlings gather to roost their tight flocks, called murmurations, wheel and turn in unison making beautiful patterns in the sky.
Under pressure from a predator, starlings intentionally fly closer together and shape-shift into giant blobs, making it impossible for the predator to lock on to a single bird as prey.
Starling murmuration at Eyemouth, UK
Can you see the peregrine at top right, above, and to the left below?
The only way for a peregrine to catch dinner is to break the blob. He rushes the flock, trying to separate a few starlings away from the group. The blob gets even tighter!
Crows stream by in Oakland, 4 Nov 2016 (photo by Kate St. John)
15 December 2024
For stirring winter wildlife spectacles in our own backyard it’s hard to beat Pittsburgh’s winter crow roost. Once you’ve seen them you can’t help but wonder: How many crows are there? In less than two weeks, if we’re lucky, we’ll find out.
On Saturday 28 December volunteers will fan out across the 7.5-mile radius Pittsburgh Christmas Bird Count (CBC) circle to tally all the birds they see in 24 hours. It’s the perfect time to count crows but it takes a team to do it. How do we count crows?
First, Find the Roost. Top Priority this week.
The best way to find all the crows in one place at one time is to count them entering, exiting or perched at their massive communal roost. But they change their roost often in late December. I need your help finding it.
Let me know where you see lots of crows after 4:00pm in the city limits. Tell me about …
Huge flocks of crows
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.
When To Count? Dusk.
For the CBC we (the crow count team) arrive in the target area around 4:15pm (45 mins before sunset) and count until it’s too dark to see, around 5:45pm (45 mins after sunset). Most of the crows come in after 5:20pm.
If we’re not sure where the roost is (oh no!) we follow the crows by car to the point where they congregate. This is a nerve wracking activity because crows do not fly the street grid.
If we know where the roost is (ideal!) we assemble at various vantage points to view the roost.
Estimate!
Are we counting every single crow? No way!
Estimate the number of crows in a particular patch of sky or a section of the roost, then multiply by the number of patches. This takes practice. Try it out this week.
Count by 10s or — when it’s intense — by 100s.
In Flight
Crows streaming overhead on their way to the roost, 1 Nov 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
If you’re on a crow flight path after 4:00pm you can count them as they go by. However, a vantage point underneath the stream (photo above) is basically impossible to count.
Find a straight edge boundary and count them as they pass the edge. The edge in this photo is a signpost. A sparse flock like this could be counted by 10s.
Crows flying to the roost, 4 Nov 2013 (photo by Kate St. John)
For the CBC we don’t want to double count so we find the roost and note the flight paths. If the flight paths have good vantage points we count there. This takes additional volunteers.
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.
