Backyard birds need high-calorie food when the weather is harsh.  Did you know you can “cook” for the birds?

Marcy Cunkelman has a favorite No-melt Peanut Butter Suet recipe that’s a real bird-pleaser and well worth trying.

The recipe has a long and famous history in our area.  Scott Shalaway calls it The Best Suet recipe and has been telling folks about it on his radio show since 2005.  He credits Martha Sargent in Alabama for passing it along to him.  Julie Zickefoose, from southern Ohio, has a similar recipe called “Zick Dough” that omits the sugar and adds chick starter.

Marcy makes Scott’s version and loads it into holes drilled in old logs.  (The blue jays, above, are waiting for her to reload the holes.)  You can also offer it on trays or in suet cages. The secret is real lard — not substitutes.

No-melt Peanut Butter Suet Recipe (from Martha Sargent in Alabama)
Melt 1 cup of lard and 1 cup of crunchy peanut butter in microwave or over low heat in a kettle. Stir, then add:
2 cups of quick cook oats
2 cups yellow cornmeal
1 cup of flour
1/3 cup of sugar

Pour into square containers and freeze for your suet holders or load into a suet log or even spread on a tree trunk.

We’re heading into a warming trend but winter is still with us so there’s plenty of time to “get cooking.”

Note this caveat from Julie Zickefoose:  Julie used to feed her birds Zick Dough all year long but the bluebirds got gout from it!  (Yes, even birds can get gout from a rich diet.)  The bluebirds recovered when she stopped feeding them suet in the non-winter months.  Here’s her recipe and warning at Birdwatcher’s Digest.

(photos by Marcy Cunkelman)

9 January 2015

To a novice like me, this rock is interesting because of its shape and color, but I would never have found its photo if it hadn’t had pizzazz.

It’s a rare and valuable specimen of Willemite, Franklinite and Rhodonite. Mineralogists can tell you that Franklinite pinpoints its origin right down to a single county — Sussex County, New Jersey — the only place on earth where Franklinite is found. This rock came from the Sterling Mine at Ogdensburg.

But that’s not what I mean about pizzazz.

Back in October at the Wissahickon Nature Club we learned about fluorescent minerals from Harlan Clare who showed us many samples under normal and “black” light.  What really impressed me is that a boring rock can display amazing colors if the mineral is fluorescent.

Expose this rock to ultraviolet light and it bursts into glowing green and orange!

Most rocks look boring in normal light so how did people figure out that some of them glow?

At a rock mine the ore sits out in the sun for a while after it’s pulled from underground. If you take a fluorescent rock back into the dark mine, it glows because it was exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet light.  Sir George Gabriel Stokes named this fluorescence in 1852 when he described why fluorite glows.

So now when you see a basket of boring rocks for sale, think of the possibilities.  When you know what you’re looking at you can find one with a hidden punch.  Harlan Clare carries a small UV flashlight so he can preview the rocks before he buys.

Some rocks are like willets.  They are boring until they open their wings.

(Two photos of Willemite, Franklinite, Rhodonite from the Sterling Mine, Sterling Hill, Ogdensburg, New Jersey (George Elling Collection) by Rob Lavinsky, iRocks.com – CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)

31 December 2014

Champagne and rain have something in common and it isn’t that they’re both wet.

While toasting the holiday with a glass of champagne I wondered, Why do champagne bubbles rise from discrete points inside the glass?

Champagne is carefully fermented under pressure so that carbon dioxide is absorbed into the liquid.  When you open a bottle of champagne the CO2 is released.   This can be beautiful or boring depending on the glass you use.

The bubbles perform badly in a plastic ‘glass’ (they won’t rise off the sides) and perform best in a tall thin champagne flute because it concentrates them into less surface area.  They will rise from a single point where there’s a dust mote in the liquid or a tiny nick inside the glass.  For this reason some glass makers purposely put tiny scratches, called artificial nucleation sites, in the bottoms of their champagne glasses to make bubble patterns.

What do champagne and rain have in common?

Champagne bubbles form around dust motes or nicks in the glass.  Raindrops form when water vapor condenses around tiny dust motes in the cloud. They both use a tiny “flaw” to get them going.

Learn more at:

• Deutsch Welle: The science of champagne and 
• American Physical Society: How Raindrops Form.

(photo in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons, enhanced to highlight the bubbles.)

This year’s remembrance of the passenger pigeon is, for me, inextricably linked to Christopher Columbus.

Last year I read a book that generated that association.  1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus describes what North America was like before and after Columbus’ arrival.

Before Columbus, the human population in the Americas was larger than Europe’s and the landscape, animals and birds were balanced by the pressure of so many people.  Europeans arrived and accidentally left behind pigs carrying human disease.  Native Americans, who had no immunity to European disease, encountered the free-range pigs 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.

So I wonder …

If Native Americans had not died off, would passenger pigeons have boomed at all?

If there hadn’t been so many passenger pigeons, would we have hunted them to extinction?

What if?

(Two photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on these links to see: portrait of Christopher Columbus by Sebastiano del Piombo, 1519.  Passenger Pigeons by Louis Agassiz Fuertes from a volume of articles, The Passenger Pigeon, 1907 (Mershon, editor))

Amazing as it seems none of the hills in the Pittsburgh Low Plateau were ever mountains.  They were all made by water cutting rock.

When dinosaurs roamed the earth, Pittsburgh was at the shore of a shallow inland sea to our west.  At the time our soil was composed of sandy beaches, mudflats and swamps. The sand became sandstone, the mud became shale, and the decayed swamp plants became coal.

No geologic events deformed our rocks.  To our east the Appalachians slammed into the edge of the plateau and pushed up the Allegheny Mountains.  To our north the retreat of the glaciers made the land rise in a bounce-back from the pressure release.  Our plateau remained essentially flat, tilting slightly to the south and west.  Indeed the rock layers in our area are horizontal.  You can see this at highway road cuts.

But Pittsburgh doesn’t look flat.

Water transformed us, cutting dendritic paths in the landscape as it drained to the inland sea (now the Gulf of Mexico). The paths became deep valleys.  When you stand in a valley you see hills.

Vegetation now hides what happened to the land. You see the hills but none of the water cuts as shown in this view of the Kiskiminetas (Kiski) River at the mouth of Roaring Run.

Take a short hike up Roaring Run and see what water can do.

Here the creek is carving a notch in weak shale.  The valley walls are steep and narrow.  The notch is big enough to wade in.

Eventually Roaring Run may look like the Kiski with tree-covered hills.

It all comes from water cutting rock.

(photos by Kate St. John)