Celebrity in Central Park, Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl, February 2023 (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
28 July 2023
A selection of photos and videos this month around the web:
In February a Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo and became a celebrity. He’s still hanging out in July.
A minute with Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl in his favorite elm tree in a quiet meadow in Central Park. ? ?? ? pic.twitter.com/YJngOScMOk
— Manhattan Bird Alert (@BirdCentralPark) July 20, 2023
In Florida, swallow-tailed kites are preparing to migrate.
Our land stewardship team spotted this flock of Swallow-tailed Kites staging for #Migration in the northern part of the Sanctuary! They're getting ready to head to wintering grounds in South America. See their flight path here: https://t.co/gM31TOrnPXpic.twitter.com/lCCvBcQNf9
— Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary (@CorkscrewSwamp) July 26, 2023
In Europe, migration has already begun across the Strait of Gibraltar.
DNA of giraffe and elephant were both detected in the air outside Copenhagen Zoo (photos from Wikimedia Commons)
18 July 2023
We’ve been paying attention to air quality this summer as Canadian wildfire smoke blows into town. The smoke that reaches us, called smog or soot in the chart below, is labelled PM2.5 by air monitors (the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter). As you can see there’s a lot of other stuff in the air that the monitors are not analyzing — but they could. In the past few years scientists have discovered that we can check the air for DNA.
In 2021 Mark Johnson, a graduate student at Texas Tech, realized that pollen and plant fragments are such a big component of air quality that he decided to compare manual plant surveys to eDNA measurements at Texas Tech University’s Native Rangeland.
The two methods complemented each other. Manual surveys detected 80 species while eDNA found 91 using the devices pictured below. According to Science Magazine, “eDNA was better at finding easily overlooked species with small flowers, such as weakleaf bur ragweed. But people were better at spotting plants too rare to release much eDNA, particularly when they had showy flowers, such as the chocolate daisy.”
It was only a matter of time before similar air monitoring was used to detect animals.
Two recent studies — one in the UK, the other in Copenhagen — collected and analyzed air samples for animal DNA. And they found it. To prove their equipment, each study located air samplers near a zoo and both found zoo animal DNA. According to NPR, the Copenhagen study “picked up 49 animal species including rhinos, giraffes and elephants. ‘We even detected the guppy that was living in the pond in the rainforest house.'”
Find out what causes iridescence in this 16 minute video from PBS @BeSmart. If you don’t have much time, watch the first 4+ minutes about hummingbirds.
Ever since we became a group of united states on 4 July 1776 we’ve grappled with the interplay of national versus state laws and culture. We even have national and state birds.
The bald eagle takes center stage today on the Fourth of July but our national bird is celebrated all year long. Meanwhile state birds are rarely mentioned. This map from VividMaps shows who they are, though Alaska’s willow ptarmigan and Hawaii’s nene are not pictured.
Compared to the size of our planet we humans aren’t particularly large but with billions of us pumping groundwater we have changed the tilt of the Earth. Slightly.
The angle of Earth’s axial tilt varies over a period of 26,000 years (precession) from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees, but within that it wobbles due to sloshing liquids like molten lava, ocean currents, and massive air currents such as hurricanes.
This very short video shows the North Pole wandering as the axis wobbles.
Earth’s spin axis wobbles, its North Pole tracing out a roughly 10-meter-wide circle every year or so. The center of this wobble also drifts over the long term; lately, it has been tilting in the direction of Iceland by about 9 centimeters per year. …
Now, scientists have found that a significant amount of the polar drift results from human activity: pumping groundwater for drinking and irrigation.
To find out what affected Earth’s axial tilt, Clark R. Wilson at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues built a model of polar wander factoring in all the sloshing over time, including changes to surface water. But the model was missing something.
When the researchers also put in 2150 gigatons of groundwater that hydrologic models estimate were pumped between 1993 and 2010, the predicted polar motion aligned much more closely with observations. Wilson and his colleagues conclude that the redistribution of that water weight to the world’s oceans has caused Earth’s poles to shift nearly 80 centimeters during that time, reported Thursday in Geophysical Research Letters.
The GRACE satellites detected groundwater changes that produced this map. Notice how groundwater dropped in the U.S. Southeast and the Central Valley of California.
Just because black bears don’t have thumbs doesn’t mean they can’t get into cars and trucks. If there’s food inside a vehicle they have a big incentive to open it, even if it means breaking the glass and bending metal, as shown above in California.
This week in Evergreen, Colorado a bear smelled dog food inside a truck in a driveway. Since the truck was unlocked he didn’t have to break the windows and doors to get in.
See what happened next in this tweet from Colorado Parks and Wildlife — Northeast Region (@CPW_NE).
Dog food + unlocked truck = bear trapped in your truck
?up to listen our wildlife officer free the bear and scare it from the area. Good lesson to bring in food from your vehicles! Bears can smell it and learn how to open doors. pic.twitter.com/hKkgfwrXoH
Blackpoll warbler gleaning insects from a boxelder (photo by Chuck Tague)
25 May 2023
Call me crazy. Or maybe old-fashioned.
Whenever I go birding I make a list — on paper — of the birds I see using the four-letter code for each species. When I get home I type the paper list into eBird. This paper list became this checklist.
Why don’t I just enter the birds directly into the eBird app on my phone? Unfortunately I learned long ago that if I look at my phone in the woods I start to read email, respond to text messages, check the news … and suddenly I’m not birding anymore and I’ve got a whole new set of Things To Do that I didn’t need to trouble with yet. So to keep myself focused I write a paper list.
The codes are easy to remember (see the rules here) except where the rules resolve to the same thing for two or more birds. The overlap codes are the ones I forget:
Bay-breasted warbler (should be BBWA, I wrote BAYB)
Blackpoll warbler (should be BLPW, I wrote BLKPOLL) and
Blackburnian warbler (should be BLBW, I wrote BLKBUR).
I remembered these, though:
BAOR = Baltimore oriole
CHSP = Chipping sparrow
MAWA = Magnolia warbler
My list should have been:
A few of the birds seen or heard in Frick Park on 18 May 2023
Where did the codes come from? If you’ve read this far you might be curious.
Geneticist Kathleen Morrill compared Balto’s DNA with more than 600 genomes of wolves, coyotes, and dogs of different breeds including modern sled dog breeds such as Siberian huskies, more physically and genetically isolated sled dogs in Greenland, and “village dogs”— ownerless canines that live in Africa, South America, and Asia and make up 80% of the world’s dogs.
Being from a place where free-ranging dogs are rare because they’re collected by Animal Control, I was amazed to learn that more than three quarters of the dogs on Earth are “village” or “street” dogs.
I had a taste of this on my trip to Ecuador in February. I saw many, many free-ranging dogs in the cities, villages and the rural countryside.
The dogs in Quito understood busy streets and the ebb and flow of traffic. They jaywalked when the street was clear to feast on the garbage bags placed on the median for collection. This was obviously a problem in rural places where people built raised platforms for their trash bags.
Not all of the dogs were on the street. I saw them perched on balconies …
At first I thought the street dogs were ownerless strays but then I noticed some had collars.
Veterinarian Nancy Kay visited Ecuador in 2016 and asked questions about the street dogs. She learned that most had owners but the owner-dog relationship is different than we’re used to in the States. Her insights include (paraphrased from her The Street Dogs of Ecuador blog):
“Much like ravens and crows, these street dogs always managed to get out of the way [of vehicles] just in the nick of time.
For the most part the dogs are owned solely for the purpose of property protection.
While the dogs go home at night, most of their daylight hours are spent out on the streets.
Most receive a modicum of food from their owners, so must rely on food found on the streets to sustain themselves.”
Seen This Week: While out birding on Tuesday I noticed blooming flowers and unusual leaves at Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve. Mitrewort (Mitella diphylla), at top, is one of my favorites because of its delicate, intricate flowers.
Star-of-Bethlehem, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 16 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
This red leaf gall caught my attention, but the bulk of it is under of the leaf and colored green (second photo). Does anyone know the name of this gall?
Upper side of leaf gall, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 16 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Underside of leaf gall, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 16 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Large-flowered valerian (Valeriana pauciflora) is in bud and in bloom at Raccoon Wildlfower Reserve.
Largeflower valerian, in bud and blooming, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 16 May 2023 (photos by Kate St. John)
Meanwhile jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum) is blooming in Schenley Park. I could not resist raising his lid.
Jack-in-the-pulpit, normal pose and lid raised, Schenley Park, 19 May 2023 (photos by Kate St. John)
We’ve all experienced a moment when a smell suddenly brings back memories. A whiff of perfume, a hint of cinnamon and clove, even the smell of furniture polish can send us back in time with vivid detail.
The reason is that our olfactory bulb which processes smells is physically connected to the two places in our brain that process emotion and memory, the amygdala and hippocampus. The link makes a lot of sense in animals that use pheromones for sexual attraction.
This strange entanglement of emotions and scents may actually have a simple evolutionary explanation. The amygdala evolved from an area of the brain that was originally dedicated to detecting chemicals, Herz said. “Emotions tell us about approaching things and avoiding things, and that’s exactly what the sense of smell does too,” she said. “So, they’re both very intimately connected to our survival.” In fact, the way we use emotions to understand and respond to the world resembles how animals use their sense of smell.
Which brings me to this plant I found blooming at Hays Woods in late April. The scent of cypress spurge (Euphorbia cyparissias) is so unique that it takes me back to a particular place and time and the happiness of seeing beautiful birds at Presque Isle State Park in early May.
Cypress spurge, Hays Woods, Pittsburgh, 24 April 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
On Throw Back Thursday here’s why cypress spurge reminds me of migrating warblers:
.jpg){kind=link}