22 December 2022
How do you pronounce the name of this plant? Do you say the second “i”?
What? There are two “i”s ?
Being from Pittsburgh, home of the vowel poor dialect called “Pittsburghese,” it’s no surprise that I’m missing a vowel here.
I learned about the second “i” 10 years ago but I haven’t changed my ways. Nor has Pittsburgh. So tell me, How do you say…?
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, screenshot from Google; click on the captions to see the originals)
14 December 2022
Just one week away from the winter solstice birds are not abundant in Pittsburgh and are certainly not singing, but it’s still good for us to seek them out. A new study says that the sight or sound of birds makes us happier.
Published in October in Scientific Reports, the study enlisted 1,200+ participants in the UK, EU and US. Using a phone app called Urban Mind, participants were asked three times a day whether they could see or hear birds plus questions about their mental well-being. The data showed that being near birds improved the mental health of people both with and without depression. The good mood lasts 8 hours.
It certainly works for me. I was recently upset by sad news of a friend and could not stop thinking about it. Hours later, still mourning, I went out for a walk. While my brain was busy with sadness a noisy crow flew over and drew my attention, “Hey!” I stopped to look at the crow and my brain shifted gears. Already I felt happier. Thank you, crows.
Despite gray December days, take the time to get outdoors or watch your bird feeders for a splash of happiness.
In the meantime get happy with the sound of a northern cardinal in May.
Read more about the study at Being Around Birds Boosts Our Mental Well-Being Even 8 Hours After Hearing Them.
(photos by Cris Hamilton, Wikimedia Commons and Steve Gosser)
25 November 2022
Kites sometimes fly with the birds. A distant raptor soars at center-bottom of the photo above. Kite + Bird.
In 1914 this kite was becoming a plane. Kite = Plane.
Some kites are birds. More than two dozen species of raptors are named “kite” including the Mississippi kite (Ictinia mississippiensis) of North America and the red kite (Milvus milvus) in Europe. Kite = Bird.
Putting them all together, Chris Darbey (@chrisddarbey) photographed a red kite with a jet contrail. Kite=Bird + Plane.
Taken near Oxford where multiple kites and planes overhead were regular. pic.twitter.com/nwUSkY9wsH
— Chris Darby (@ChrisDDarby) August 9, 2022
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, tweet embedded from @ChrisDDarby)
15 November 2022
Today the global human population has reached 8 billion. Lest we think our current growth rate is normal, this graph shows that human population since 10,000 BCE (the start of agriculture) has had a rapid and unnatural growth spurt in the last 70 years.
There are so many humans now that we have changed the surface of the Earth, its atmosphere, and its climate just to supply our own needs.
This rate of growth is unsustainable and somehow our species naturally knows it. Population growth will continue but is slowing to a rate of only 1% by the end of this century. Unfortunately there will be 10.9 billion of us by then!
Asia will lead the world in slowing the rate while North America remains relatively stable. (Note: The dip in 2020 is COVID deaths outperforming births.)
How will we feed 8 to 10.9 billion people? Where will we live when the sea rises and the deserts expand?
It’s a good thing for humans and the planet that our species will stop reproducing quite so fast.
Read more about the slowing growth rate here at Our World in Data.
(photo/ graph links are in the captions. Slideshow photos from Wikimedia Commons in order: Rush hour in Russia, Beach in the Netherlands, Inauguration Day 2009, Crowded exhibit in India, Crowded street, Sao Paulo station, train surfing in Indonesia, crowded Faire in UK, train in Ecuador)
11 November 2022
Spanish cellist Diana Gomez plays music outdoors in many venues. Here’s what happened when she took her cello into a forest and played Bach’s Suite No.1.
Come closer. Listen.
The stags that approached her are red deer (Cervus elaphus), native to Europe and one of the largest deer species. Spanish red deer (Cervus elaphus hispanicus) are not as red as other members of the species.
To hear more from Diana Gomez check out her YouTube channel at Chelodiana or follow her on Instagram at Chelodiana. Her video Ocean includes cameo appearances of egrets and flamingo.
p.s. Two years ago Roger Day played Bach on his tuba in Frick Park and, in his words, “got only cicadas” to respond. Check out his video here.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original. video from Chelodiana)
7 November 2022
The scimitar-horned oryx or scimitar oryx (Oryx dammah) is extinct in the wild but not extinct on Earth. These iconic animals still exist because their beauty prompted us to preserve them.
Scimitar-horned oryx are desert antelopes that can survive without water for months or years by absorbing water from the plants they eat. Native to the Sahel (pink on map below), there may have been 1 million of them at the height of their population in the early Holocene (9500–4500 BPE) but they declined over the centuries due to climate change and hunting.
However they were already iconic. Ancient Egyptians domesticated them, Ancient Romans bred them. They were prized for their horns and meat.
Unfortunately the wild population of scimitar oryx dropped to less than 200 by the early 1980’s and within 10 years the last ever seen was in Chad. Declared extinct in the wild in 2000, they still existed in captivity.
Soon captive breeding programs looked for suitable locations in the Sahel for the antelope’s reintroduction and began breeding them in zoos and in herds to succeed in the wild. In the U.S., ranches in Texas breed them for reintroduction and for hunting.
To get an idea of what the animals look like, see this video from the Greater Vancouver Zoo.
Thanks to captive breeding, the first scimitar-horned oryx were released in Chad in 2016, as shown in this video.
Many endangered species go extinct before we know they exist. That didn’t happen to this iconic animal.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, map from researchgate; click on the captions to see the originals)
5 November 2022
When we turn our clocks back tonight it may be the last time we’ll have to do it in the U.S. And then again, it might not be.
Our current DST law sets Daylight Saving Time for the entire U.S. and allows states and territories to opt out of it (stay on Standard Time). Those who have include most of Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
However the current law does not allow states to stay on Daylight Saving Time year-round even though Florida, Washington, California, and Oregon legislatures have all passed bills to make it permanent and 22 other states are considering it.
So in 2018 House and Senate reps from Florida introduced the Sunshine Protection Act.
On March 15, 2022, the US Senate unanimously passed the Sunshine Protection Act. The bill proposes—beginning in November 2023—that all states go on permanent DST, which is one hour later than standard time. States that have passed legislation for permanent DST will be allowed to enact their legislation. [It also allows states and territories that never switch to DST to stay on Standard Time as they do today. ]
— timeanddate.com: Daylight Saving Time Ends in USA & Canada 2022
But permanent DST is just a gleam in the eye of those who want it. It hasn’t passed the House.
Thus countries that border the U.S. have the usual dilemma. Southern Canadian provinces have so far stayed in synch with U.S. time zones. Meanwhile Mexico abolished Daylight Saving Time on 26 October 2022 (last month!) but allows northern border locations to stay in synch with the U.S.
Will we have Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Who knows. It’s more likely we’ll have Permanent Confusion.
Don’t forget to turn your clocks back tonight. 🙂
(photo by Kate St. John)
p.s. Here are some reasons why permanent DST would be darker than Standard Time: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2015/11/19/9762276/daylight-saving-time-bad-mapped
p.p.s. This study indicates that there would be fewer deer-vehicle collisions if we stayed on permanent DST.
3 November 2022
Seven years ago I opined on the confusing name of sweet potatoes. In the grocery store they were simply labeled “yams” though they are not yams at all. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Yams are in the yam family, Dioscoreaceae. The misleading labels began with a marketing campaign.
The Louisiana [orange sweet potato] industry coined the term “yam” in 1937 as part of a national marketing campaign to differentiate its product from the drier, white-fleshed types [of sweet potatoes] being grown on the East Coast.
— LSU, 23 May 2012: Sweet Potato Louisiana’s Most Popular Vegetable
But the confusing name goes back 400 years.
The mix-up between yams and sweet potatoes originated from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yams are an important part of West African food traditions. They are crucial to the regional diet with a religious significance and a cultural heritage.
As European slave traders steered their ships across the Middle Passage, they packed [African] yams, along with black-eyed peas, to feed their captives. … In the Americas, where yams were not readily available, sweet potatoes, which had traveled from Central America with Christopher Columbus, took their place. … Sweet potatoes became one of several transfer foods, a throughline allowing enslaved peoples to preserve their traditions and spiritual practices even in the face of captivity and abuse.
— paraphrased from Food and Wine, 10 Oct 2022: The Difference Between Yams and Sweet Potatoes Is Structural Racism
When I wrote about sweet potatoes in 2015, the words “sweet potato” were not on the labels in the grocery store but they’re there now, as seen in my photo at top. The Library of Congress pointed out in November 2019, “Today the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires labels with the term ‘yam’ to be accompanied by the term ‘sweet potato.’”
Perhaps USDA will completely change the name some day. Meanwhile find out more about the African yam, our native true yam and morning glory sweet potatoes in this vintage article:
(photo by Kate St. John)
In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.
— wikipedia says this quote is misattributed to Andy Warhol
30 October 2022
Two years ago, on 6 June 2020, Steve Gosser was birding at McConnell’s Mill when he heard a scarlet tanager singing but it didn’t look like one. Steve’s photos showed the bird to be a cross between a rose-breasted grosbeak and a scarlet tanager.
The next day ornithologists Bob Mulvihill and Steve Latta banded the bird and took blood samples for DNA testing. At top, Steve Gosser holds the bird before releasing him after banding while Bob dubbed the bird a “Scarlet Gosserbeak.” The bird was slightly famous when I blogged about him on 8 June 2020 at Who Is this Mystery Bird.
Mulvihill and Latta submitted the DNA samples for analysis and received an answer in February 2021 that the bird is indeed a hybrid of a rose-breasted grosbeak mother + scarlet tanager father. His scientific name is Pheucticus ludovicianus x Piranga olivacea (mother’s species listed first).
No one had ever heard of such a hybrid. The birds are in the same family, Cardinalidae, but not closely related. Tanagers are Piranga genus, grosbeaks are Pheucticus genus.
Toews, Rhinehart, Mulvihill, Gosser, Latta, et al submitted a paper about the bird. That’s when the hybrid’s real fame begins.
There are probably more articles since I last checked. This hybrid is world-famous for a lot more than 15 minutes!
(photos by Steve Gosser, phylogeny diagram from Wikipedia; click on the caption to see the original)
23 October 2022
The archaeological record shows that life on Earth has experienced five mass extinctions in which 70% to 90% of all species disappeared (*). After each extinction life came back.
The extinction rate today indicates we are now in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. Scientists predict that due to human pressure, habitat loss and climate change as much as 50% of all species will go extinct by 2100. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Interestingly, the IUCN Red List’s extinction ranking shows that birds may not fare as badly as many other organisms. It’s bad news for conifers, frogs and horseshoe crabs, though.
In the short term we are helping some species such as the Guam kingfisher (Todiramphus cinnamominus), shown above, already extinct in the wild and in a captive breeding program. In the long term we humans could change our ways to slow or stop species decline. Knowing humans, it doesn’t look good. We can mourn the future but if we take a very long view there is hope.
After the sixth mass extinction, what will happen next?
David Quammen‘s article Planet of Weeds in Harper’s October 1998 described the current mass extinction and asked eminent paleontologist David Jablonski “What next?” The article is quoted below.
Among the last questions I asked Jablonski was, What will happen after this mass extinction, assuming it proceeds to a worst-case scenario? If we destroy half or two thirds of all living species, how long will it take for evolution to fill the planet back up? “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I’d rather not bottom out and see what happens next.” In the journal paper he had hazarded that, based on fossil evidence in rock laid down atop the K-T event and others, the time required for full recovery might be five or ten million years. From a paleontological perspective, that’s fast. “Biotic recoveries after mass extinctions are geologically rapid but immensely prolonged on human time scales,” he wrote. There was also the proviso, cited from another expert, that recovery might not begin until after the extinction-causing circumstances have disappeared. But in this case, of course, the circumstances won’t likely disappear until we do.
Still, evolution never rests. It’s happening right now, in weed patches all over the planet. … So we might reasonably imagine an Earth upon which, ten million years after the extinction (or, alternatively, the drastic transformation) of Homo sapiens, wondrous forests are again filled with wondrous beasts. That’s the good news.
— from Planet of Weeds, by David Quammen, Harper’s Magazine, October 1998
A 2018 study said the recovery time for mammals may be 3 million years, faster than predicted in Quammen’s article.
The future is a long way away but it looks bright. Earth will again have “wondrous forests filled with wondrous beasts.”
p.s. In the comments Liz Spence reminded me of a good book about the current mass extinction: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. This book won the Pulitzer Prize.
(photos and graph from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
(*) The Top Five Extinctions in Earth’s history are paraphrased below from the American Museum of Natural History and Wikipedia:
