Category Archives: Musings & News

The Whole World Is Hotter

Climate Change, Musings & News, Weather & Sky

The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has reopened the topic of climate change.  Understandably the loudest voices come from those most affected, worried that this unusual storm is just the beginning of weather as usual on a warm planet.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York City was especially forthright.

How did we get such a strong hurricane so late in the season?  Why did it hit New Jersey, a place that’s had only one hurricane make landfall in 161 years of hurricane records?  (And that was in 1903.)

I learned the answers on WESA’s Allegheny Front on Saturday. Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground explained how hot ocean temperatures, prevailing winds, and high pressure centered over Greenland spawned the storm and steered it west.  (Click here to listen to the podcast.)

And though this individual storm can’t be pinned on climate change, its causes can.  The bottom line:  The whole world is hotter.

I hadn’t realized how much hotter and how rapidly the heat has increased until I watched this NASA animation of global surface temperature anomalies from 1880 to 2011.  Using the average global temperature in the mid-20th century as baseline, the map is colored blue when colder, orange when hotter.

Play the animation and see for yourself.

The train is rolling down the track.  (Perhaps it’s naive of me to say…) we could do something if we worked together politically and individually.  Meanwhile …

Old Charlie stole the handle
And the train won’t stop going
No way to slow down.
— Jethro Tull, Locomotive Breath, 1971

(animation from Goddard Multimedia, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA, January 2012. Click here for more information)

Stumped

Musings & News, Trees

On Saturday while hiking with KTA in the Quehanna Wild Area we encountered an area of low vegetation and waist-high stumps. The only trees were those growing on top of stumps like the one pictured above. These were not live sprouts from the old stumps.  They were all different species.

It was an oddly barren place where tree regeneration was prevented unless the seedlings were nurtured in the core of a stump.  Here’s a Wikimedia photo by Ruhrfisch, taken in the same area.

 

The stumps were white pines, felled a hundred years ago.  State Foresters wondered how old the trees were when cut so they studied stumps with intact rings and discovered that they were all the same age —  200 years old.  Something had caused the area to regrow from scratch around 1700.

And they were all cut down at once at the turn of the last century.  Loggers clear-cut the entire state, each tree felled by two men with a cross-cut saw.  When they were done Pennsylvania looked like this (Tioga County, 1914):

 

It took a long time to recover from this damage.  The clear-cuts were ravaged by fires and erosion.  During the Great Depression some areas were replanted by the Civilian Conservation Corps.  In other places the land is still challenged.

And so we have a few barren reminders of the time when Pennsylvania exploited trees.

 

(photo of a tree growing on a stump by Kate St. John, other photos from Wikimedia Commons — click on those photos to see their originals)

How’s The Water?

Musings & News, Water and Shore

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s waterways are scenic but in many places the water is bad.  This photo of the notch where Stony Run meets the Conemaugh River is a case in point.  See the orange tinge on the river bottom?  That’s bad water from abandoned mine drainage.

How prevalent is bad water in our area?

PittsburghTODAY recently published a map of non-attaining waterways in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Using Department of Environmental Protection data, the yellow lines show where water quality is compromised by abandoned mine drainage, agricultural runoff, sewage, and other causes.  The good water is blue.

Even in this thumbnail it’s easy to see that most of Allegheny County has bad surface water while most of Greene County is good.  The white space in the middle of Allegheny County is the City of Pittsburgh where the streams were buried as the city was built.  Click on the image to see the large map at PittsburghTODAY and drill in for a close-up.

The region’s bad water affects both our quality of life and the natural world.  Where water’s impaired aquatic life is poor, there are fewer fish, fewer birds, fewer mammals and bad water for us to drink.

So why is a lot of the map yellow?  It’s the legacy of coal.

During the heyday of deep mining in the early 1900’s Pennsylvania had weak or non-existent environmental laws and the state did not collect money from industry for clean up of the inevitable abandoned mine drainage.  Pennsylvania eventually enacted laws to prevent new damage but there’s no money to turn all of the yellow lines into blue.

One would hope that Pennsylvania learned from this history but in my opinion (not necessarily the opinion of WQED) our state has not.  Though damage is predictable from new industrial threats like Marcellus shale drilling, the state still begins with weak laws, suffers new damage, then changes the laws after the damage is done.  (Click here for examples of bad water and changed laws.)

So… how’s the water?
Sad.

(photo by Tim Vechter; map from PittsburghTODAY.org.  Click on the map to see the details)

Ubiquitous Human Noise

Musings & News, Schenley Park

Aldo Leopold at his Salk County shack, around 1940 (photo from Univ of Wisconsin Digital Archives)
Aldo Leopold at his Salk County shack, around 1940 (photo courtesy UW Digital Archives)

Imagine listening to birds without the sounds of human machinery in the background.  That’s what our world was like when Aldo Leopold was alive.

In 2012, ecologists Stan Temple and Christopher Bocast from the University of Wisconsin-Madison recreated a 1940 soundscape at Aldo Leopold’s shack in Salk County, Wisconsin. The project was amazing because they didn’t have a recording from Leopold’s time.  Instead they built it from his field notes.

Every morning Aldo Leopold listened to the birds and wrote detailed notes of the songs he heard, where he heard them, and the light levels when the birds first sang.  Using his notes, bird song recordings from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macauley Library, and newly recorded background sounds from Wisconsin, Temple and Bocast completed the soundscape.

The result is nothing like the place today.  The habitat, birds, and insects have changed and now there’s the constant hum of an interstate less than a mile away.

To get “clean” background sounds Temple and Bocast searched for a quiet place in Wisconsin.  It was very hard to find because, as Temple points out, “in the lower 48 states, there is no place more than 35 kilometers [21.7 miles] from the nearest road, making it nearly impossible to tune out the hum of human activity, even in places designated as wilderness.”

I’m familiar with the problem.  I’m used to noise near my city home but I go to the woods to be quiet and listen to nature.  In the last 15 years I’ve noticed an increase in human-generated sounds in the woods.  It’s impossible to avoid the sound of cars, trucks, trains, motorcycles, airplanes, chain saws, all-terrain vehicles, boats and jet skis.

I don’t like it. Perhaps I’m not alone.

On Sunday I watched a flock of robins in the trees along the Bridle Trail in Schenley Park, directly above the Parkway East.  I tried to locate the birds by sound but could not hear them over the roar of the interstate.

The birds probably couldn’t hear well either. It was more than annoying. It was stressful.

I wonder what they think of ubiquitous human noise.

 

Click on the photo above or on this news article at University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Then scroll down and click on the Soundscape link to hear what Aldo Leopold heard.

 

(photo of Aldo Leopold, courtesy UW Digital Archives.  Click on the image to read the article and listen to the recreated soundscape.)

Made In The Shade

Beyond Bounds, Musings & News
Coffee plantation in Brazil (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Here’s a photograph of a coffee plantation in the mountains of Brazil.

What’s wrong with this picture?

The trees are missing.  And so are the birds.

Last week the University of Utah announced the results of a new study on bird diversity that compared intact tropical forest, agroforests, and open farmland.  The result was not surprising:  Birds do better in agroforests than on farms.

Agroforests are “a type of farm where the crops are grown under trees at a reasonable density,” according to study author Çagan Sekercioglu. “Often, it’s not like forest-forest — it feels more like a open park.”

In the past, coffee and chocolate crops were both grown in agroforests — or in full tropical forest — because they are shade-loving plants.

But agri-business found even moderately shady habitat too labor intensive.  Always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, they bred coffee bushes to tolerate full sun.  For the past two decades they have cleared land, planted coffee in the sun, and harvested it mechanically.

Sadly, bird diversity drops as the habitat becomes more open. The study analyzed over 6,000 species and found that the more open the land, the fewer insect-eaters (flycatchers and warblers), fruit eaters (orioles and parrots), and nectar-eaters (hummingbirds).  Agroforests can support many of these species but the study showed that open farmland supports only seed and grain eaters — and these birds are often considered pests.

Does open farmland south of the border affect “our” birds?

Yes.  Most of our breeding forest birds are neotropical migrants who spend less than half their lives in North America.  The majority of their time is spent in tropical forests — or agroforests — in Central and South America.

Every year there are fewer intact forests and fewer agroforests.  Meanwhile many of our neotropical migrants are in decline including cerulean warblers and scarlet tanagers.

You can help. Your coffee is good for birds if it’s made in the shade.

How do you know if coffee is shade-grown?

Check the label for bird-friendly, shade-grown certification by a trustworthy environmental organization such as the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC) or the Rainforest Alliance. (Unfortunately some manufacturers have co-opted the term shade-grown because they know it’s worth more.)

Certified bird-friendly coffee and chocolate(!) aren’t always easy to find.  If you have a favorite place to buy them, let us know by leaving a comment.

(photo by Fernando Rebêlo from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the caption to see the original)

Click here for more on the University of Utah bird study.

In Free Fall

Beyond Bounds, Musings & News, Songbirds

Last Sunday the Orlando Sentinel reported the grim news that the population of this bird, the Florida grasshopper sparrow, has plunged so far and so fast that it may go extinct in as little as three years.

Florida grasshopper sparrows are a unique non-migratory subspecies of the grasshopper sparrow that live their entire life in Florida’s dry prairie habitat.  Their loyalty to this habitat has made them endangered.

90% of the prairie is gone, converted to cattle ranches, farms, and development in the past 150 years.   By 1986 the Florida grasshopper sparrow was placed on the Endangered Species List.  The birds held their own in three remaining prairie preserves until recent population surveys found less than 200 individuals left.  It is now the most endangered bird in the continental U.S.

Loss of habitat obviously caused this bird’s decline but scientists say other factors have sent it over the cliff.  One factor is fire ants, accidentally imported from South America in the 1930’s.  Florida grasshopper sparrows nest on the ground.  The fire ants overwhelm their nests and eat the baby birds so there are no young sparrows to reach maturity in the next generation.

If this trend continues Florida grasshopper sparrows will go extinct when the last adults die.  Meanwhile U.S. Fish and Wildlife and other members of the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Working Group consider this a wildlife emergency and are focusing intensive efforts to save the bird.

Back in January 2008, Dan Irizarry visited a banding station at Kissimmee Prairie Preserve where he photographed this bird.  Little did he know… little did we know… that this may be one of the last living Florida grasshopper sparrows on earth.

If you’ve seen a Florida grasshopper sparrow you are lucky indeed.

(photo by Dan Irizarry. Click on the image to see Dan’s Flickr set from Kissimmee.)

 

I Love Pixels

Musings & News
Blackburnian warbler (photo by Chuck Tague)

A couple of months ago I borrowed a camera and tried taking photos of flowers. Occasionally a bird would come close and I’d snap its picture too.

You will never see those pictures. Good bird photography requires better equipment than I had borrowed and I found out it’s very hard to do.

In the old days — in the mid-2000s — far fewer people photographed birds. I know this because I was just starting to blog and it was hard to find pictures. Thankfully, Chuck Tague helped me out with his beautiful photos of birds and nature.

In 2007 it was a big commitment to own a good digital camera but technology has improved. It’s so inexpensive now that my cellphone has the same pixel count as a good camera back then. But my cellphone is not a good camera.  It doesn’t have the optical quality required for sharp pictures.(*)

Even so, I love pixels.

Pixels are the tiny dots that make up a digital photograph. When there are a lot of them they’re densely packed so you can zoom the photo on camera or computer and still see a sharp image (if the image was sharp to begin with). As you zoom, the pixels move away from each other but there are so many of them that you don’t lose much quality.

With a zoom lens, a great camera, and good light it’s possible to take a photo like this one (by Chuck Tague) that shows the bristle feathers around a Blackburnian warbler’s bill.

But you need more than good equipment to get this result. You need skill.

Thank you to all the skilled photographers who let me use their photos!

(*) My 2019 cellphone is better than my 2014 camera. I stopped carrying my camera. Oh my! But I still don’t take pictures of birds.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

April Fool

Musings & News, Songbirds

My goodness there are a lot of birds in the yard today!  I can hear the songs and calls of …

  • Northern cardinal
  • American robin
  • Eastern phoebe
  • Carolina wren
  • Blue jay
  • Tufted titmouse
  • White-breasted nuthatch
  • Killdeer (that’s odd!)
  • Eastern bluebird
  • Eastern towhee
  • Common grackle
  • Northern flicker
  • Mallard (quacking in my dry backyard?)
  • And what’s that back-up whistle?

April Fool!  It’s a northern mockingbird.

Did you know that both male and female mockingbirds sing?  And that the males can mimic over 150 songs?  No fooling!

Click here to listen.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Kindness Beats Selfishness

Insects, Musings & News

An article in the March 5 issue of The New Yorker got me thinking about human society.

Kin and Kind: A fight about the genetics of altruism by Jonah Lehrer describes the history of the inclusive fitness theory and the current dispute among evolutionary biologists on the origin of altruism.

It all started with E.O. Wilson, a biologist, author and expert on ants.  In 1975 he promoted the theory of kin selection to explain why altruistic individuals sacrifice themselves for their kin.  (Ants do this a lot!)  Natural selection says this shouldn’t work because their genes would die out but kin selection says they help their kin because it preserves the genes they share.  Survival through kinship was named inclusive fitness.

Over the years E.O.Wilson started to see holes in inclusive fitness.  In 2010 he and two mathematicians, Mark Nowak and Corina Tarnita, published an article in Nature that refuted it. 

Half The New Yorker article is about the resulting fight.  The other half is what caught my attention.

E.O.Wilson changed his mind because he learned more about ant behavior.  As it turns out, cooperation within a species doesn’t spring up easily.  When it happens to start within a group, it makes the group survive so well that they dominate other groups.  Further, cooperative species are so successful that they dominate others species.  Cooperation can start in any group.  It just happens that the groups are composed of kin.

This works because “Selfishness beats altruism within groups.  Altruistic groups beat selfish groups,”  as E.O. Wilson wrote in 2007.

The first principle has certainly been my experience.  Within a group, a selfish person pushes everyone else around.  We see it working for these individuals and our society advertises it in slogans that say “It’s all about you” and “Have it all.”   It doesn’t take much thinking to realize that you can’t have all of it if you’re sacrificing yourself.  So we’re encouraged to be selfish.

But wait.  The second principle is true too.  Selfish groups lose to altruistic ones.  Cooperation makes groups successful over rivals who fight among themselves.

It’s important not to lose sight of this.  Humans have been successful as a species because we help each other.  Selfishness is a disadvantage to society.  Rugged individuals fail in the face of disasters like last week’s tornadoes.  We can’t do everything alone, and we cannot expect society to thrive if we insist that everyone pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

I am happy to know that nature showed the way on this.

In my view kindness beats selfishness any day of the week!

(photo of leaf cutter ants, who are models of cooperation, from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)

Today Some Links Are Broken, Wikipedia Has Gone Dark

Musings & News

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you’ll notice that I use Wikipedia extensively for links to further information.  I personally use it every day for research.

Today Wikipedia has gone dark in protest of two bills, SOPA and PIPA, before the U.S. House and Senate.  If passed those bills would create new tools for censorship of international websites inside the U.S. and potentially shut down U.S. websites and their financial services, without a trial, for alleged copyright infringement.  These bills have been urged by the entertainment industry.

Read more about Wikipedia’s decision here.  Click on the graphic to see Wikipedia’s home page today.  (Note that mobile phones will see the normal page.)

———————  Personal opinion about SOPA and PIPA ———————

On this blog I make every effort to insure that I have rights to display the media I use, but I cannot know if a website is lying when it tells me media is in the public domain or is free to use.  If these bills become law, the federal government could shut down my blog without warning for copyright infringement if I used media from a place that lied to me.  Very scary stuff.  I’m contacting my legislators.

For today Wikipedia is dark and my links will not work.  I hope for a better tomorrow.

———————

(image from Wikipedia’s English language homepage, 18 January 2012)

p.s. Today’s Winter Tree blog is below.