Just as I did last year, I’ll be leading bird and nature walks once a month beginning in late March. This year I’m branching out to include Duck Hollow/Lower Nine Mile Run as well as Schenley Park.
Come out with me to see birds and trees, blooms and bees. On each walk we’ll travel slowly, keeping our eyes and ears open for the latest birds and flowers.
Dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes that aren’t afraid of mud. Bring binoculars and field guides if you have them. The walks will begin at 8:30am and last two hours but you can bow out early if you wish.
Here’s the schedule for the first three walks. More will follow in summer and fall; stay tuned.
CANCELLED Sunday March 20, 8:30am, meet at Duck Hollow parking lot at the end of Old Browns Hill Road.
As each date approaches I’ll post a reminder here on the blog. Visit my Events page any time for directions and up-to-date information including cancellations and rain dates.
Hope to see you on March 20 at Duck Hollow. It’s time for Spring!
Dear Readers,
There are 20 of you out there who have not changed your bookmark for my website and are still looking for me every day at WQED.org. My blog isn’t there anymore! It moved on November 29, 2015 to http://www.birdsoutsidemywindow.org.
So far you’ve been able to find me but that may change so please click on the image above and make a NEW bookmark for my blog.
Pterosaurs broke a lot of rules. They were warm-blooded reptiles. Their bodies were furry. Their heads looked like birds. They stood on their wings! And when they took off they jumped in the air and flew.
You can see them as skeletons and …
Pterosaur skeleton, main exhibit, Carnegie Museum of Natural History (photo by Kate St. John)
… as life-size replicas with fur and wings and colors.
Quetzalcoatlus was as big as a giraffe (look at him standing on his wings!). Others were as small as finches. Yet they’re not the ancestors of birds.
Quetzalcoatlus was the size of a giraffe (floor sign at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, photo by Kate St. John)
The exhibit includes videos and three interactive Wii-like flight zones where you flap your arms and the pterosaur flies. I flunked flight school with the small insect-eating pterosaur but I soared with the large one.
A few years ago in the Argentinean desert, a shepherd was searching for one of his lost sheep when he spotted the tip of a gigantic fossil bone sticking out of a rock. When the news reached paleontologists at the MEF Museum in Trelew, Argentina, they set up camp at the discovery site to examine it and look for more bones. By the end of the dig, they had uncovered more than 200 other huge bones from seven dinosaurs, all belonging to a new species of giant plant-eating titanosaur whose name will be announced soon.
The giant was 121 feet long, weighed 77 tons, died 101.6 million years ago, and was still growing when he died!
Visit the dig and follow the forensic research. See 3D animations and the skeleton’s reconstruction. See how these creatures compare to our largest land animals today. The videos (above and below) show the enormous thigh bone and examine a baby dinosaur inside the egg.
Tomorrow is the mid-point of winter, halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. February 2 is also the day when a very special rodent, Punxsutawney Phil, emerges from his den to predict the weather for the next six weeks.
Phil never makes his prediction in isolation. His day in the sun (or shade) spawns a huge celebration in Punxsutawney, PA. Preview the excitement in his eight minute promo video above.
If you don’t like winter, then hope for an overcast sky so that Phil has a day in the shade. Here’s why.
Are humans the only species that fools others to survive, find food, and mate? Not at all!
This month PBS NATURE premieres a new three-part series, Natural Born Hustlers, airing on PBS on Wednesdays, January 13, 20 and 27 at 8:00pm (ET) (check local listings).
Episode One, Staying Alive, focuses on survival techniques: camouflage, dominance tricks, audio mimics and playing dead. Early on I was amazed to learn how zebras’ stripes create an optical illusion. You have to see them in motion to believe it!
Other fascinating finds are the amazing skin-morphing camouflage of cuttlefish, the lizard that walks like a stinky beetle, and the white-faced capuchin monkeys who calculate whether they’re needed in battle. “More capuchins are killed by their own kind than by predators,” says the episode. What an unfortunate trait to have in common with humans.
The video excerpt above gives you a good idea of animals’ ingenuity. California ground squirrels use their enemy’s scent as protective camouflage. Their arch enemy is the rattlesnake, so if you hate to look at snakes this video will make you flinch.
And fair warning to those afraid of snakes: Staying Alive has quite a few snakes in it including a match-up in North Carolina of a harmless species that mimics the coral snake. The bonus is that you can identify birds by song on the audio track.
If you’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to log more bird sightings in eBird, here’s the tool for you. And it’s FREE. All you need is a smartphone.
Fair warning: I’m about to “talk techie” so if you don’t have a smartphone or you don’t use eBird you might want to tune out right now. 😉
Back in 2012, the BirdLog app allowed iPhone and Android users to enter checklists on our smartphones and seamlessly upload them into our eBird accounts. Cornell Lab was so impressed with BirdLog that in 2014 they made an agreement with its owner, David Bell, to take over development and maintenance, renaming it eBird Mobile. The iOS version launched in June. The Android version launched in December. The old BirdLog app is now retired.
Download eBird Mobile, tell it your eBird login and password and you’re ready to go.
eBird Mobile is easy to use. To enter a new checklist, click the big green Start button.
Choose a location: This is so convenient in the field! Your phone knows where it is so “Choose From Map” or “Choose a Nearby Hotspot” and it’s right there. Below, I chose a nearby hotspot: Duck Hollow.
Date and time conveniently default to Now or you can change them.
Start entering species: Scroll down the list of likely suspects or do a quick lookup by typing part of the name or the 4-letter species code in the “# species name/code” blank at left.
Enter the number of birds seen or click the “Present” box to make an X. Below, I didn’t feel like counting mallards and ring-billed gulls on Tuesday at Duck Hollow. (Yeah, I know I should count them but … )
Click Review and Submit (bottom right) to get this screen for entering the last bits of data.
Click Submit at the bottom right and it uploads the checklist into eBird. If you’re not in cell tower range, it’ll upload later.
You’re done! And the app is back to the big green start button.
But if you’re like me you forgot something and want to make a change. Just click on My Checklists (under the Start button) and your eBird lists come up right away.
I find eBird Mobile easier to use than browser based eBird at my desk computer.
On the first of January many birders start a new Year List of the birds they’ve seen. I’m not that organized but I can tell you that my last bird of 2015 was a rock pigeon (63 of them in my neighborhood) and my first birds this year were American crows leaving the roost before dawn.
May the new year be full of birds and the beauty of nature. Health and happiness to all.
Greenfield Bridge as seen from the air, 24 December 2015 (photo from Pat Hassett)
I don’t usually write about bridges, but there was big excitement only 1,200 feet from my house yesterday when contractors blew up the Greenfield Bridge. As you can see from the photo above, it connected my neighborhood to Schenley Park (right of photo) over the Parkway East I-376. I haven’t been able to walk into this part of Schenley since the bridge closed on October 17.
Even if you don’t live in Pittsburgh, the implosion made national news so you probably saw videos on TV. Here are some photos of the event, a bit of the birds’ perspective, and links to my favorite implosion videos.
Above, a birds-eye view of the bridge on Christmas Eve. Below, the bridge is wrapped, charged, and waiting on Monday morning, December 28.
The Greenfield Bridge, just before it blows (photo by Geoff Campbell)
The implosion required a lot of warning, coordination, street blocking and police patrols. The map below shows the exclusion zone.
Folks could stay home if their house was inside the circle but they had to stay inside and away from windows. If you live that close to something this exciting, you either left home to watch nearby or you saw the best view of all on TV.
Map of the Exclusion Zone around the implosion (distributed by City of Pittsburgh)
My house is outside the circle but I watched from one of the red roads closed to traffic. Those roads have good views but were open only to pedestrians to prevent gawkers’ cars from causing traffic and parking problems. It was fun watching with the neighbors. We were all in a party mood.
Starting an hour+ before the blast an infrared sensing helicopter circled overhead to make sure no one was outdoors within the exclusion zone. One guy snuck into the woods and had to be rousted out. We never saw him but he delayed the blast 20 minutes.
Back in October the neighborhood held a party and raffled off a chance to push the plunger and blow up the bridge. Sally Scheidlmeier, pictured below, won that honor. Here she is with the plunger (“Let’s Do It”) and the plunger’s victim in the distance, only minutes before the blast. She pushed the plunger …
Sally Scheidlmeier just before she pushed down the plunger to blow up the bridge (photo by Geoff Campbell)
… and then …
Thar she blows! (photo from Pat Hassett)
Here’s my favorite video of the blast from the Post-Gazette. Watch for the guy in the hard hat and orange-yellow vest who runs into the picture and down the road. That’s a man who loves his job!
Down in The Run (the neighborhood in the valley on the left side of the exclusion zone), Trinidad Regaspi took a video with her cellphone. Do you see that bird-like dot to the right of the telephone pole? It’s one of four wild turkeys that flew across the valley to escape the noise. They sure had a story for their friends last night!
Four wild turkeys escape the blasts (screenshot from video by Trinidad Regaspi’s Facebook video)
… and then the bridge was gone.
The Bridge is gone! (photo by Geoff Campbell)
It didn’t take long before the contractors were down on the Parkway picking up the pieces. Six pillars on the Schenley side didn’t fall during the blast but they came down shortly after I took this photo at noon. Alas, I missed it.
Six leaning pillars still stand on the Schenley side, but not for long. At noon on 28 Dec 2015 (photo by Kate St. John)
At road level there’s a lot of debris.
Picking up the pieces in the rain (photo from Pat Hassett)
The contractors are out there picking up the pieces all day and all night (we can hear them). They have to work fast because they only have permission to keep the interstate closed for 5 days after the blast.
I-376 is slated to reopen on January 1 at 6:00am. The new bridge will take 18+ months to build.
(photos from Pat Hassett, Geoff Campbell, Trinidad Regaspi and Kate St. John)
UPDATE DECEMBER 31, 2015: The cleanup finished ahead of schedule! The Parkway East opened INBOUND today at 2:00pm. OUTBOUND will reopen between 10:00pm and midnight because of another project down the road at the Birmingham Bridge.
Parkway East is all cleaned up, 31 Dec 2015, 8:30am (photo by Pat Hassett)
