In the video below Australian paleontologist Mikael Siversson (“Birds are dinosaurs”) describes a trip he and a colleague made to Wyoming dinosaur country in the late 1990s. The video starts with a picture of the Badlands as he begins to tell the story. Watch for four minutes — or longer if you want to learn about dinosaur teeth. It involves bathtubs.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, screenshot from video; click on the captions to see the originals)
p.s. The toothy mouth pictured at top is the reconstructed skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex, a theropod ancestor of birds. Did birds have teeth? You bet!
Song sparrow with ancestor (photo by Frank Izaguirre)
Mourning dove with ancestors (photo by Frank Izaguirre)
Female northern cardinal with ancestor (photo by Frank Izaguirre)
Male northern cardinal with ancestors (photo by Frank Izaguirre)
We’ve known for a while that birds are descended from dinosaurs. In fact, paleontologist Mikael Siversson says, “Not only are birds descended from dinosaurs, but in fact birds are dinosaurs. They are highly specialized surviving dinosaurs.”
Of course modern birds have never met their long lost relatives so last Sunday Frank Izaguirre tweeted “A gift I recently gave myself was to put some dinos in the yard to facilitate this meeting of the ancestors.” They met below the bird feeder (photos above).
Bird-dinosaurs were lucky to survive the K-T extinction event that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. Mammals survived, too, and in the absence of large dinosaur predators they took over.
This statue in Schenley Park was celebrated when it was erected by the Italian-American Sons of Columbus in 1958 but has been a source of controversy in recent decades. Last week the decision came down to send it to a private location. The only remaining questions are where and when.
His legend was created to fill a gap and now the legend is fading. What if Columbus never crossed the Atlantic? Here’s how things might have been different.
The coronavirus pandemic gives us an inkling of what it was like when Columbus and the Spanish explorers brought pandemic to this part of the world. It changed the western hemisphere.
Before Columbus, the human population in the Americas was larger than that of Europe. The landscape, animals and birds were balanced by the pressure of so many people living in North, Central and South America. When European explorers accidentally left behind pigs that carried human disease, native Americans encountered the free-range pigs, had no immunity and spread the plagues through human contact.
The Western Hemisphere suddenly lost 95% of its human population in only 150 years. Remove the keystone species and you get some pretty weird results. European settlers didn’t see the transformation so they thought what they found was normal including the endless forest, huge bison herds and billions of passenger pigeons.
The most numerous wild bird on earth, estimated at 1.5 billion individuals, is the red-billed quelea (Quelea quelea) of sub-Saharan Africa. This very social weaver finch migrates and nests in flocks that number in millions.
This species is a major pest of cereal crops, and huge efforts have been expended by national and international agencies on lethal control and attempts to reduce population numbers by use of explosives, petrol bombs and aerial spraying of [organophosphate] avicides; in South Africa up to 21 million reported killed in a single month, with annual kill estimates of up to 180 million.
Control operations, however, probably do no more than replace naturally occurring mortality, and there is a significant adverse impact on other species, which are poisoned directly or die after eating dead queleas.
A much more successful control measure than killing them, though very labor intensive, is to actively make noise in the fields and scare the birds away.
After more than 70 years of control measures that kill hundreds of millions of birds per year, the red-billed quelea population has grown.
p.s. A video at this link shows all aspects of the red-billed queleas lives but is grisly at the end.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, videos embedded; click on the captions to see the originals)
Since I began blogging 13 years ago my morning life has settled into a predictable pattern: I get up very early (4:00 am), make coffee, settle at my computer and start writing. Coffee is essential.
What’s essential to me doesn’t work well for spiders. On caffeine they make wonky webs.
Illustration demonstrating action and cat’s performance after “Do it!” Action A: (a) the owner raises her right hand and touches the box with it; (b) cat’s action scored as matching the demonstration of action A
4 October 2020
And now for something completely different — not a wild animal but a wild result.
Last week Science Magazine reported the first ever scientific proof that a cat can imitate human behavior. A Japanese cat named Ebisu demonstrated it in a “Do As I Do” experiment.
“Do As I Do” is a training technique in which the owner gets the pet’s attention, performs an action, and then says “Do It.” The animal learns that Do It means copy me and repeats the action.
Ebisu’s owner, Higaki, said the cat learned easily because of her high food motivation.
Higaki showed that Ebisu could copy familiar actions, like opening a plastic drawer and biting a rubber string. Then she asked the cat to imitate two new behaviors [for which she had not been trained]. While standing before Ebisu, who sat on a countertop next to a cardboard box, Higaki raised her right hand and touched the box. At other times, she bent down and rubbed her face against the box.
As you can see in the video, Ebisu watches her owner place her hand on the box and tap it. Her owner stands straight, then says “Do It.” Ebisu places her paw on the box and taps it, then immediately asks for a treat. Of course she gets one. Good Kitty!
Illustration of demonstrating action and cat’s performance after “Do it!” command. Action B: (c) the owner bends down to rub her face on the box; (d) Cat’s action scored as matching the demonstration of action B
Skeptics say that Ebisu would have rubbed the box anyway. Really? Having lived with cats for most of my life I can tell you that getting a cat to do something on command is the tricky part.
Sadly Ebisu can no longer show off her talents. She got kidney disease this year and died in June. I know how hard that is. I’m sure Higaki misses her.
p.s. For a video of a dog trained to copy human behavior see the video in this article: Your Dog is a Copycat. The dog is even multi-lingual, trained in Italian but “Do it” in English. 😉
We’ve all heard of rare birds but what makes a bird rare?
By definition a bird is rare if it is very hard to find due to location, time of year, or low population. If it is far out of its normal range or seen at a time of year when it shouldn’t be there the bird is marked rare by eBird. To make it more challenging, some low population species are very secretive and live in dense habitat, thus are rarely seen(*).
Here are some recent examples.
Rare In Many Ways: Connecticut Warbler at Harrison Hills County Park, Allegheny County, PA on 24-26 Sept 2020
It is not abundant anywhere and its population is declining.
It is very hard to find and to see — even when you know exactly where it is — because Connecticut warblers are extremely secretive, foraging quietly in dense underbrush and rarely popping into view.
In most of North America it is seen only on migration so it’s present for only a day or three. (range map here)
Finding a Connecticut warbler requires luck and patience and more luck. Dave Brooke had all of those + his camera when this bird made an appearance at Harrison Hills County Park near Natrona Heights, PA on 24 September 2020. I went to see the bird myself on 26 September and managed to catch a glimpse of its tail as it foraged in a thick stand of mugwort. I wouldn’t have seen it at all if five other birders hadn’t pointed out the twitching plants when I arrived.
Rare by Location: Bay-breasted warbler, Santa Clara County, California, 27 September 2020
This fall we’ve had a very good run of bay-breasted warblers (Setophaga castanea) in the Pittsburgh area. I’ve seen so many that eBird tells me my report count is too high. However, a bay-breasted warbler in California is rare indeed. Robin Agarwal got a photo of it in Santa Clara County on 27 September 2020.
Rare for Time of Year: Barn Swallow, North Park, Allegheny County, PA, 26 September 2020.
Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica erythrogaster) are common in summer in southwestern Pennsylvania but they leave in August for Central and South America and are definitely gone in late September. However, on 26 September Mark Vass saw one flying over Marshall Lake at North Park, Allegheny County. eBird announced his find but there was no photo. (This photo is from Wikimedia Commons.)
VERY VERY RARE INDEED: The rarest of rare birds was found at Powdermill Banding Station on 24 September 2020 — a half-male-half-female bilateral gynandromorph rose-breasted grosbeak. The bird is male on his/her right side and female on the left. This birth defect is so rare that one of the banders said it was like seeing a unicorn. Click here and here for Powdermill photos and here for other half-male-half-female birds. Rare indeed!
Rose-breasted grosbeak gynandromorph (photo link-embedded from Powdermill banding station)
(photo credits: Connecticut warbler by Dave Brooke, bay-breasted warbler by Robin Agarwal, barm swallow from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
More than 115,000 people viewed this falsely labeled video (screenshot from YouTube)
This summer a 2012 YouTube video of a construction explosion in a Finnish river channel was falsely relabeled as a lightning strike on a river in northern California. It became an immediate sensation on social media because of the California wildfires.
At first I was fooled but I looked for more videos of lightning striking water and there really aren’t any because it’s so boring. Lightning only touches the water’s surface. That’s why fish don’t die. Yet the falsified video shows mud boiling from the bottom. Hmmm, something’s wrong with the label.
What I did find was a fact-checker video from KARE-11 in Minnesota in 2017. As they explained, the video was not lightning. It was a Finnish construction company displaying the work they do to clear river channels.
This falsely labeled video has been around for at least three years and it’s still fooling people. Why do we believe fake social media so easily?
We share it quickly because it’s just so easy to click “Share” without thinking.
A 2020 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology is reassuring. We aren’t stupid. We aren’t gullible. We haven’t been hoodwinked into believing something false. We’ve just been lazy. We didn’t think about it before we passed it along.
I’m really glad I looked into the lightning question.
In late August reports started trickling in that high numbers of migratory birds were being found dead in New Mexico. The first report was at White Sands Missile Range on 20 August but as time passed the reports became more frequent, the locations increased, and so did the death toll. By now experts believe that hundreds of thousands of birds have died — perhaps millions — not only in New Mexico (red on map below) but in Colorado, Arizona and western Texas (orange highlight on map).
Austin Fisher took a video of the carnage last Sunday, 13 September 2020 in Velarde, New Mexico.
I just recorded this up in Velarde, N.M. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m told of other dead migratory birds found in Hernandez, Ojo Sarco and El Valle de Arroyo Seco. https://t.co/GpeFZbyuW7pic.twitter.com/XXVM4AZrDu
Science Alert reports that only migratory birds are affected, not the local residents. Most of the dead birds are warblers, swallows and flycatchers and “the affected travelers seem to act strangely before their deaths, spending more time on the ground than perched in trees, and generally appearing dazed, sleepy, and lethargic.”
While birds migrate south through the Rockies this fall they must fly through the ubiquitous wildfire smoke blowing across the US from California, Oregon and Washington. Here’s what it looked like via satellite on August 20, the first day dead birds were reported in New Mexico. Notice that the smoke had reached New Mexico that day.
Unfortunately birds’ respiratory systems are so different from ours and so efficient that they succumb quickly to bad air.
We turn oxygen into CO2 in one breath — in/out. Every exhalation releases the CO2/remains of the air we just breathed in.
When birds breathe, the air that enters their bodies stays inside for two breaths — in/out + in/out. During its 4-step journey, the air molecule travels through the lungs, two sets of air sacs and into the birds’ hollow bones where it waits for the next step. Click on the diagram below to watch the airflow inside a bird.
Sadly, the western fires are damaging much more than we realize. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that wildfire smoke is killing migratory birds a thousand miles away. … Another unexpected outcome of climate change.
UPDATE 31 March 2021: Further research found a strong correlation between the observations of dead birds and wildfires and the toxic gases they produced, but not a correlation with the early winter storms: Study Finds Wildfire Caused Massive Bird Die Off
(images from Wikimedia Commons, NASA and a screenshot from Oxford Learning Link. Click on the captions to see the originals)
Late afternoon sun looks pink in Pittsburgh, 14 Sept 2020 (photo by Jonathan Nadle)
16 September 2020
This week’s spooky sunsets and hazy skies in eastern North America are due to smoke from the massive wildfires in Washington, Oregon and California. The smoke is so intense that it’s dispersing across the continent and across the Atlantic, causing haze in Europe.
Near sunset on Monday 14 September the sun was a strange shade of pink in Pittsburgh, captured above in true color by Jonathan Nadle.
We can’t see the smoke coming but the satellites do, blowing eastward in two paths on Tuesday 15 September: one over the Northern Plains and Great Lakes, the other over Nebraska to Kentucky and Virginia.
#SATELLITE SPOTLIGHT: #Smoke from the #WesternWildfires continued to blow eastward today, as seen here from @NOAA‘s #GOES16??. Although it wasn’t nearly as thick as in the West, the smoke caused #hazy skies in many cities along the East Coast–including Boston, New York, and D.C. pic.twitter.com/AhP4mlYgSX
— NOAA Satellites – Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) September 16, 2020
It’s also blowing west over the Pacific, shown here on Friday 11 September.
— NOAA Satellites – Public Affairs (@NOAASatellitePA) September 12, 2020
The haze is inconvenient for us but truly hazardous on the West Coast. The dark brown colors on the map below are the worst air quality in the world. The air is so bad that people are leaving the area. I know of at least one person who’s fleeing from San Francisco to Pittsburgh.
By now the fires cover 4.5 million acres, an area so large that it’s hard to imagine. To help you visualize it The Guardian has created an interactive map comparing the fire acreage to well known cities and your own hometown — click here or on the tiny screenshot below. NOTE: The comparison below is for New York City. I compared the fire acreage to Pittsburgh and found it would run from approximately I-80 to the PA-West Virginia line!
Strange sun at sunset in Pittsburgh (filtered), 15 September 2020 (photo by Jonathan Nadle)
None of us are immune to this huge effect of climate change. Smoke gets in our eyes.
UPDATE: Janet Campagna, who lives in California, remarked that the days are much cooler because the sun can’t get through the smoke. This reminded me of the volcanic winter which results from smoke in the atmosphere after giant volcanic eruptions such as Krakatoa in 1883 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991.
(photos by Jonathan Nadle, screenshot of AirNow map from airnow.gov, screenshot of article from The Guardian)
