I don’t own a camera but I love great bird photos, so this workshop caught my eye. Maybe some of you would like to attend.
What: Photography Workshop at the National Aviary, Pittsburgh, PA
Who: Led by National Aviary educator and professional photographer Nicole Begley
When: Saturday, Jan. 7, 2012. 2:30-4:30 pm
Cost: Special Member price $36
Click on the photo above to read all about it on the National Aviary website.
(image from the National Aviary)
The most fascinating principle I learned from Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire is that the plants humans want (desire) are the ones that thrive.
Thanksgiving is a good reminder that this principle applies to turkeys, too.
Humans have probably hunted wild turkeys since Native Americans first arrived on this continent. The pre-Columbian Mexicans domesticated wild turkeys between 800BC and 200BC.
When Spanish conquistadors arrived 2,000 years later, in the early 1500s, they agreed that domestic turkeys were quite tasty and shipped some back home. Turkey became such a popular food in Europe that when the English settlers came to North America they brought domestic turkeys with them.
Wild turkeys were at their peak. Then things went downhill. Over the next 200 years habitat loss and unregulated hunting decimated the wild turkey population until there were only a few thousand left in Pennsylvania.
They could have gone extinct in eastern North America. Our desire brought them back.
In the late 1800’s Pennsylvania realized that hunting had to be regulated. The newly formed Pennsylvania Game Commission banned turkey hunting and rebuilt the population by stocking birds from Mexico. Then in 1929 they began a propagation program that raised wild turkeys for release into the wild.
This combination worked so well that today Pennsylvania’s wild turkeys have a thriving population of over 360,000 birds.
Wild turkeys are smart about predators, as we learned on PBS’s My Life as a Turkey. They’re wary where hunted but relatively easy to see in Pittsburgh’s suburbs and city parks.
So on Thanksgiving Day it’s interesting to reflect that most of us eat domestic turkeys. Our desire to eat them nearly extirpated wild turkeys and that same desire brought them back.
Turkeys could be a chapter in the zoology of desire.
(photo by Cris Hamilton)
p.s. If you missed My Life as a Turkey on PBS, you can watch the full episode online here.
I’m very late in posting this but if you have the time today, stop by Hillman Library where they’re celebrating Audubon Day with a one-day exhibit of more than 20 original folio prints from Audubon’s Birds of America.
Here’s more information, edited from Pitt’s press release:
John James Audubon’s Birds of America revolutionized bird illustration by portraying life-sized birds in their natural habitat. From 1827 to 1838 he painted 1,065 birds of 497 species. Since then, six of those species have gone extinct including the Carolina parrots shown above.
Audubon’s complete book includes 435 prints in four volumes, each print measuring 27 by 40 inches. Approximately 175 sets were printed, but over the years many of the volumes were dismantled so the prints could be sold individually to collectors. Only 120 complete sets exist.
Pitt’s University Library System acquired the complete Birds of America as part of the William McCullough Darlington Library, given to Pitt by Darlington’s two daughters. Because the rare prints are too fragile to share with the public as bound volumes, Pitt followed the Library of Congress model and unbound the volumes, conserved each print and now stores each in an archival folder.
In 2006 and 2007, Pitt digitized all 435 Birds of America plates and now displays the complete collection online at http://digital.library.pitt.edu/a/audubon.
p.s. Sorry for the late notice!
(photo of John James Audubon’s folio print of Carolina Parrots, courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh’s Library System)
Next Wednesday on PBS Nature…
Back in the 1990’s biologist and wildlife artist Joe Hutto spent two years in the Florida Flatwoods as mother to a flock of wild turkeys.
It began when a neighboring farmer dropped off a clutch of 16 orphaned wild turkey eggs and Joe decided to imprint them.
When the eggs hatched Joe made sure the first pair of eyes they saw were his own. The hatchlings immediately recognized him as their mother and thus began the strange and wonderful journey that became his 1998 book, Illumination in the Flatwoods.
My Life as a Turkey shows what happened, the joys of discovery and the sadness of death, as the peeps became poults and then adult birds. Day after day, week after week, Joe’s bond with his turkeys grew stronger. The more time he spent with them, the more he learned and the less detached he became. He was their parent, they were his family. He learned to live in the present as they did. He often felt more turkey than human.
My Life As A Turkey is beautiful, moving, sad and fascinating.
“Had I known what was in store—the difficult nature of the study and the time I was about to invest—I would have been hard pressed to justify such an intense involvement. But, fortunately, I naively allowed myself to blunder into a two-year commitment that was at once exhausting, often overwhelming, enlightening, and one of the most inspiring and satisfying experiences of my life.”
Don’t miss My Life As A Turkey next Wednesday, November 16 on PBS Nature. On WQED it’s at 8:00pm.
You will never look at a wild turkey the same way again.
(photo from My Life As A Turkey)
Surprise!
This morning 4 crows brought me 4 cupcakes to celebrate Outside My Window‘s 4th birthday.
They say it’s a thank you gift from the Winter Crow Flock for my enthusiastic love of birds. I guess their elders have forgiven me for liking peregrines so much.
These four crows are juveniles (the pink around their bills is the hint) so they missed last year’s blog statistics and are insisting on an update. To appease them, here are some numbers:
Numbers aside, I enjoy writing and am grateful to you, my readers, for your comments, suggestions and contributions. A huge thank you goes to the many photographers who’ve contributed photos and videos to the site. Without you I’d just be a pile of words.
So a big thank you and round of applause from me to you for 4 wonderful years together.
Ooops! The crows are getting impatient.
“Blow out the candles! We want to eat!”
(party crows by Joan Guerin)
p.s. Do you have a favorite post? A suggestion for new topics? Leave a comment and let me know.
I don’t want to change them but I’m supposed to turn my clocks back an hour tonight.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) was invented for people like me whose work is ruled by the clock but who spend their leisure time outdoors. It’s really inconvenient for those who work by the solar day — farmers, for instance.
Though I like Daylight Saving Time I hate changing the clocks no matter which direction they’re going.
The twice yearly jog causes trouble for nationwide schedules, computer programs, and our sleep patterns. We saw this when DST’s start and end dates moved by law in 2007. Computers that missed the patch stayed on the old schedule. Most annoying to me was the computer that unlocked the doors for the business day but remained on Standard time in early March. It was too old to patch so we changed its time by hand. Three weeks later it “knew” to change to DST and was wrong again. Aaaaarrrggg! (We got a new computer.)
Even worse are the clock-change effects on people. In March the loss of an hour makes everyone groggy. Studies have shown that there are significantly more workplace accidents on the Monday after we “spring forward.” Not only that, everyone’s grumpy for days! I am, too.
Most of the world doesn’t suffer through this. DST wasn’t standardized in the U.S. until 1966 and it’s not observed in Asia, Russia, most of Africa and most of South America. It’s not even observed in Arizona and Hawaii.
So why do we have Daylight Saving Time?
In a word: Lobbyists.
DST had a few early champions (G.V.Hudson, William Willett, and Pittsburgh’s Robert Garland) but it didn’t really catch on until lobbyists urged its use. The start and end dates moved in 2007 because the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores began lobbying for it in 2005. Their sales benefit from outdoor leisure time.
We don’t have to live like this. If I was in charge, we’d turn the clocks forward one night in March and we’d never go back.
I’m telling you, my clocks are just fine!
(photo in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)
Coming next Wednesday on PBS Nature is a raptor story nest-watchers can relate to.
Jungle Eagle follows filmmaker Fergus Beeley as he monitors a harpy eagle nest in Venezuela’s Orinoco River valley. Over a period of nine months he shows us the life of an eaglet and his family, from newly hatched chick to young adulthood. The story is dramatic. The lifestyle of these eagles makes it dangerous.
Harpy eagles live in the South American rainforest and are the largest eagle in the western hemisphere. They dwell at the top of the canopy and eat monkeys and sloths from the trees. They kill by surprise.
The adults are top predators but the young are vulnerable. When the chick is small his mother must guard him. Even the monkeys that become his food could eat him.
Fergus Beeley shows this by filming from a tree stand and using a nestcam. Peregrine nest watchers will see parallels between the harpy eagles and our favorite raptor:
Inevitably there are nestcam problems, but they’re more dangerous to fix than anything we ever encounter. Peregrines fiercely defend their nests and harpy eagles do, too. But harpy eagles are huge and they’re skilled at killing primates. And what are humans? Large primates!
In the end the eaglet reaches adulthood and starts to hunt on his own. As adults, harpy eagles are powerful, self sufficient birds. The real danger they face is extinction because people cut down the rainforest these birds require for life.
Watch Jungle Eagle on PBS Nature on Wednesday, November 9 to see beautiful footage of our hemisphere’s most powerful bird. On WQED the show is at 8:00pm EST.
(photo of a harpy eagle from PBS Nature)
31 October 2011
Happy Halloween! Here’s a selection of witchy things to celebrate the day.
Witches hat mushroom (Hygrophorus conicus), shown above, is common in the forest at this time of year..
Witch-hazel trees are blooming now in Schenley Park.
The gelatinous fruiting body of Witches Butter fungus (Tremella mesenterica) feels greasy or slimy when damp. Eeeewwwww!
Witches brooms in hackberry trees are ugly but don’t kill the tree. They’re so common in hackberries that I use them as a clue to identify the tree in winter.
(photo credits embedded above)
If you have a bird feeder and live in/near Pittsburgh….
WQED’s Chris Fennimore has 3 popcorn tins full of sunflower seeds that he wants to give to a good home. If you can pick them up at WQED (4802 Fifth Ave, Pittsburgh, 15213), then they’re yours!
How to “win:” Leave a comment below to tell me you want them. First come, first served.
If schedules mesh, you’ll get to meet Chris Fennimore when you pick them up.
//UPDATE: BIRD SEED HAS BEEN CLAIMED. THAT’S ALL, FOLKS. WE HAD A WINNER IN ONLY 6 MINUTES!
Unnoticed among the 10th Anniversary commemorations of 9/11 is this: Today is also International Rock Flipping Day (IRFD).
Back in 2007 Dave Bonta and Bev Wigney started “Rock Flipping Day” as a blog carnival — a day in which to look for and blog about Nature in an unlikely place. It immediately became an international event when bloggers from four continents posted their findings under rocks around the world. Susannah Anderson (Wanderin’ Weeta) now organizes the event on the second Sunday of September. In 2011 it happens to coincide with an important day in U.S. history.
I’ve participated in IRFD since 2009 so I decided to flip a rock despite today’s somber tone.
My chosen rock is in our city backyard in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It’s not actually a rock but a large concrete paving tile in the alley behind our back fence. My husband helped by lifting one end while I snapped away with the camera. You can see his feet as he holds up the slab.
What have we here?
Tunnels and trash.
The tunnels are easy to see. Inside the tunnels are two bits of trash, positioned as if dragged there by the tunnel-maker. Only one is visible in the picture. The square in the center of the photo that’s faintly yellow with a turquoise stripe is a piece of cellophane wrapper.
What lives in the city, makes tunnels, and pulls trash into them?
A gray-colored rodent with a naked tail. 🙁
I didn’t expect to find this. It’s creepy to think the tunnels were made by a rat right there behind my back fence, but what else could it be? The slab is in the alley where everyone keeps their garbage cans.
I have seen lots of wildlife in the City of Pittsburgh: hawks, owls, a bald eagle, groundhogs, raccoons, white-footed mice, deer, a red fox, even a toad. Just because I rarely see rats doesn’t mean they aren’t here.
Fortunately nothing moved under our rock and the tunnels don’t look recently used. Perhaps our “visitor” moved on when I stopped feeding the birds in the spring to keep away rodents this summer. Or maybe an owl or a red-tailed hawk ate him.
I can only hope!
Update: I did some research and I am very relieved! The tunnels are nowhere near large enough nor long enough to be rat tunnels. The tunnels under my rock are about 1″ in diameter and have straight-ways less than 6″ long. Rat tunnels are 3″ in diameter and 2 to 6 feet long. So the rock had a small rodent under it. Perhaps a mouse. I can cope with that!
(photo by Kate St. John)
p.s. Here’s the list of other bloggers who flipped a rock this year:
A Roving I will Go
Rebecca in the Woods
Fertanish Chatter
Bug Safari
Growing with Science Blog
Wild About Ants
Powell River Books Blog
Meandering Washington
Cicero Sings
Via Negativa
Mainly Mongoose
Chicken Spaghetti
Wanderin’ Weeta
Rock, Paper, Lizard. (The Interpreter)
_Cabin Girl
From Twitter: At Rattan Creek ff. From @gjesse on Twitter
From Flickr: Flickr group