What does a city do when it’s overwhelmed by illegal garbage dumps?
In Lima, Peru much of the trash generated by its 10 million people is dumped illegally but it’s hard to clean up because the dumps are hidden and people don’t care. In December 2015 the Peru Ministry of Environment enlisted the help of birds.
Black vultures (Coragyps atratus) are excellent at finding garbage — after all, their lives depend on it — so the program equipped 10 black vultures with GPS trackers and GoPro cameras and Ta dah! The vultures find the dumps. The humans place the dumps on the map and clean them up. And the vultures have become celebrities.
See the maps at Gallinazo Avisa. Meet the vultures — they have names — in their second video here. (Don’t miss the punchline at the end of the video!)
Read more about Peru’s “Vultures Warn” program at fastcoexist.com.
That’s a bird report headline from PABIRDS, February 7, 2016. If you’re not familiar with 4-letter bird codes it’s a meaningless message and you wouldn’t know these may be Life Birds. (Fortunately the names are inside the report.)
Few birds have short names so abbreviations come in handy when you’re writing down a lot of them … as we’re doing today for the Great Backyard Bird Count. The U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) ran into this problem early on and made a standardized list of 4-letter codes for birds in North America based on their complete English names. The coding scheme works roughly like this.
4 words in name: First letter of each word. Greater white-fronted goose = GWFG
3 words in name: First letter of first 2 words + 2 letters of the last word. Great horned owl = GHOW, Red-eyed vireo = REVI.
EXCEPT if the last two words are hyphenated. I always get this wrong! It’s the reverse of the rule above and there aren’t many names that fit this pattern. Rule is: First 2 letters of first word + first letters of last 2 words:
Eastern screech-owl = EASO
Eastern wood-pewee = EAWP
2 words: First 2 letters of each word. Snow goose = SNGO, American robin = AMRO
1 word: First 4 letters. Sora = SORA, Brambling = BRAM
Collisions: Sometimes two bird names result in the same code as in BTGW for both the Black-throated green warbler and Black-throated gray warbler. In this case, look up the code using the links below.
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.
Earth’s life history is in its rocks, layer upon layer, each one with a name. Even if we can’t name all the geologic periods, we know at least one of them because of a movie — Jurassic Park.
Geoscientists identify epochs by the fossils and minerals they find in them. Even the boundaries are interesting. The Cretaceous period ends in a thin line, called the K-Pg (was K-T) boundary, that contains iridium from the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. There the Cretaceous period (K) ended and the Paleogene (Pg) began. Above the line are seven epochs including the Holocene, the most recent 11,700 years in which human population has expanded and thrived.
Now pretend you’re a geoscientist 10 million years in the future and you’re identifying epochs in the rocks. You see the K-Pg line and the seven epochs, and then on top of them, everywhere around the globe in rocks and ice, you find a layer containing substances never before seen on Earth or in outer space: aluminum, concrete, plastics, fly ash (below) and nuclear fallout.
The substances are so unique that, as a geoscientist, you must define this layer as a new geologic epoch and name it for its distinctive feature. The substances were created by humans. The epoch is called the Anthropocene.
Since atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first proposed the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch in 2000, the idea has taken hold in the scientific community. An international working group is studying the evidence to determine whether the epoch should be formally accepted into the geologic time scale by the International Union of Geological Sciences. Their recommendation is still postponed.
Members of the international working group formally analyzing the Anthropocene suggest that the key turning point happened in the mid-twentieth century. This was when humans did not just leave traces of their actions, but began to alter the whole Earth system. There was a ‘Great Acceleration’ of population, of carbon emissions, of species invasions and extinctions, of earth moving, of the production of concrete, plastics and metals.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the captions to see the originals)
“anthropo-” = Greek for human, “-cene” = “new” and is the ending applied to all the epochs in the current era, the Cenozoic.
The geologic terms epoch, period and era seem to be interchangeable but epochs are short time frames, periods are next in size, and eras are the longest. Click here for definitions.
Brambling in Medina County Ohio, 1 Jan 2016 (photo by Shawn Collins)
I usually don’t chase rare birds because it often ends in disappointment. If I don’t find the bird, the trip was wasted. If I do find it, it’s a let-down because the bird — or my view of it — is less exciting than I anticipated.
However, at dawn on New Years Day 11 of us piled into three cars and drove to Medina County, Ohio to chase the brambling.
If you’re new to birding, you may not have heard of this slightly eccentric activity. Chasing involves lots of hurry, planning, travel, high tech communication and patient waiting. It does not mean we approach our object closely. If the bird feels threatened it will fly away and no one will see it so those who approach too closely are told to back off. Humans do freak out when we’ve spent time, money and anticipation on a spectacle that another human is about to wreck!
The rarer the bird, the more people chase it. Bramblings (Fringilla montifringilla) are exceedingly rare in Ohio so this finch has attracted hundreds of people per day.
Our group arrived just after the brambling had visited the feeder and disappeared. The parking lot was emptying. We found good standing room in the viewing area.
Birders line up to see the brambling just after he made an appearance, 1 Jan 2016. This is half the crowd that was there 10 minutes earlier. (photo by Donna Foyle)
And we waited. The group swelled to about 60 people.
We’d heard that the bird appeared every 30 minutes. Not so! At just below freezing we were not dressed for a long wait but no one wanted to leave. After two hours the bird appeared for three minutes.
My first view was similar to this photo by Donna Foyle. That’s how I’ll remember the brambling. I didn’t see the clear view Shawn Collins obtained above.
A brief glimpse of the brambling, 1 Jan 2016 (photo by Donna Foyle)
Through my scope I did see the bird’s back just before the flock scattered, as in Shawn’s photo below. The brambling is very well camouflaged on the ground.
The brambling matches the ground when his back is turned, 1 Jan 2016 (photo by Shawn Collins)
And then the flock lifted off and he disappeared.
But I saw him! Fortunately everyone else in our group did, too. Others who missed the bird stayed behind to wait, perhaps for another two hours.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of birders have seen the brambling in Medina County since he was announced on December 28. Read more about his fame and discovery at Cleveland.com.
Acorn abundance varies every year. Some years there are lots of acorns, other years not so many. This variation is an oak survival mechanism that alternately floods and dries up the market to insure that some of their nuts survive hungry predation by squirrels, turkeys and deer.
Back in December 2008 there were so few acorns in the Washington, D.C. area that the situation made national news and people put out store-bought delicacies for squirrels.
Were the squirrels begging for attention? Click here to read this 2008 article: The Acorn Plot.
p.s. Pennsylvania’s squirrels have nothing to worry about this winter and next. The PA Game Commission says the acorn crop will be abundant this year and in 2016. Click here to read more.
Until quite recently I thought earthworms were native. All my life I’ve watched robins yank them out of the soil and seen them on the sidewalk after heavy rain. Gardeners and composters are happy with them, too, but…
What’s good for the garden is lousy for North America’s forests. Earthworms churn the soil column and devour leaf litter, invertebrates and fungi that our northern forests rely on. The result is a lack of ground cover and poor regeneration of the trees.
Like the emerald ash borer, we humans have accidentally introduced a species that’s bad for the forest. The only way to stop it is for us to stop moving worms and soil. Composters and gardeners take note! If you’re on the edge of the earthworm advance — in Minnesota or Maine, for instance — don’t buy worms. (Pittsburgh isn’t on that edge; earthworms have been here a very long time.)
(robin photo by William Majoros via Wikimedia Commons. Earthworm photo by James Lindsey at Ecology of Commanster, Belgium via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
