The amazing photo below of an eagle’s claw and a human hand left me wondering, Who is this bird and why are his claws so big? Today I’ll tell you a bit of his life story.
Juvenile crowned eagle in captivity (image from r/pics on Reddit)
Shaped like a giant goshawk with a feather crest, the crowned eagle (Stephanoaetus coronatus) lives in the riparian forests of sub-Saharan Africa where it eats monkeys, small forest antelopes (duikers), “mouse-deer” (chevrotains) and “rock rabbits” (rock hyrax). Click on the links to see photos of these unusual animals.
Crowned eagles weigh only 6-10 pounds, smaller than bald eagles, yet they routinely capture mammals twice as heavy as they are. Reports say they can fly with prey that outweighs them, but they normally rip it apart on the ground and cache pieces in the trees. For this lifestyle they need large talons.
Deforestation in Africa is destroying the crowned eagles’ high-canopy habitat and their population is declining. They are listed as Near Threatened by the IUCN.
For thousands of years people have known that certain sand dunes make a low humming sound, the musical note of G, E or F. It occurs when the sand is moving but you can force the sound if you slide downhill. Why does it hum?
A decade ago scientists at CalTech studied two humming sand dunes in California to answer that question. They found that for the sand to sing, the grains have to be all the same size, the dune must have a slope greater than 30 degrees and be over 120 feet tall, and the sand must be dried under the desert’s summer sun. It was very hot work.
The humming sound occurs naturally when the sand moves but that doesn’t happen on a predictable schedule so the CalTech team forced the sound. Dr. Melany Hunt explained,
Usually we would trigger it by having a number of people slide down the dune in unison. We always called it ‘Science by the seat of our pants.’
Sanderling at Corporation Beach, MA, 19 Oct 2019 (photo by Bob Kroeger)
27 October 2019
This month’s trip to Cape Cod provided me with a brief change of scene and a brief change of birds. On October 18 and 19, local photographer Bob Kroeger showed me many of his favorite birding spots. Here are some of the birds we saw, with thanks to Bob for the photos.
Sanderlings (Calidris alba) never come to Pittsburgh but they spend the winter at Cape Cod. It was fun to see them poking the sand with their beaks and bathing at the water’s edge at Corporation Beach.
Sanderlings bathing at Corporation Beach, MA, 19 Oct 2019 (photo by Bob Kroeger)
Ruddy turnstones (Arenaria interpres) are an extremely rare bird in Pittsburgh that also winters at Cape Cod. They aren’t ruddy in the fall, but their legs are still orange.
Ruddy turnstone (photo by Bob Kroeger)
Great blue herons (Ardea herodias) were plentiful in the marshes. They’re huge in flight!
Great blue heron in flight (photo by Bob Kroeger)
We found one or two blackpoll warblers (Setophaga striata) at nearly every place we stopped. This one at Long Pasture still has hints of black on his face and the telltale yellow feet. They are on their way to Brazil.
Blackpoll warbler (photo by Bob Kroeger)
We found a flock of 25 palm warblers (Setophaga palmarum) at Cape Cod Organic Farm, all of them the duller western birds. In mild winters palm warblers stay on the Cape.
Palm warbler (photo by Bob Kroeger)
Most plentiful by far were the “myrtle” yellow-rumped warblers (Setophaga coronata) who’ve come to stay for the season. The winter birds look dull but in Bob’s closeup below you can see his feather details.
A close look at a yellow-rumped warbler (photo by Bob Kroeger)
Best only-at-the-sea birds: At Wellfleet Bay on the 21st I saw distant flocks of 200 brant (Branta bernicla) and 60 common eider (Somateria mollissima).
Most amazing sound: The wing whistle of a flock of scoters passing overhead. Sounds like this.
Best mammal : A coyote crossing the road near Monomoy.
Craziest bird: A wild turkey running non-stop around a parked car in Harwich, like this. I’m waiting for the day I see this in Pittsburgh. 😉
The view from Fort Hill at Cape Cod, 18 Oct 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Travel is a tonic for seeing the world in new ways. This month my husband and I spent a week with his sister at Cape Cod where we had new weather, new scenery and new looks at plants I might have seen at home.
Our timing was pretty good. We missed the October 12 nor’easter but were on hand for the October 17 “bomb cyclone.” We didn’t lose power, but it was still very windy on the 18th when I visited Fort Hill, pictured above.
Birds were hard to find that day so I noticed plants such as this European spindle-tree (Euonymus europaeus) with puffy, pink, four-sided fruits.
European spindle-tree fruits, 18 Oct 2019, Dennis, MA (photo by Kate St. John)
The puffballs are actually a casing that holds orange fruit within. This ornamental has probably been planted in Pittsburgh, though I’ve never noticed it.
Someone ate this, Cape Cod, 20 Oct 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Who ate it? Perhaps this caterpillar did. I found him elsewhere on the plant.
And finally, the sun touched translucent red berries and made them glow at Bell’s Neck.
The small plants have a single leaf midway up the stem (lefthand photo) and were growing among pine needles. Please leave a comment to tell me what they are.
p.s. Thank you to Kerry Givens who identified the red berries as a Canada mayflower and the caterpillar as a Turbulent Phosphila moth.
(photos by Kate St. John except where noted in the captions; click the captions to see the originals)
The intense wildfires in Alaska this summer are different than those we’re used to in the Lower 48. These were sparked by unusual weather, they’re harder to put out because the soil is burning, and they’re causing their own feedback loop.
When lightning starts a fire in the boreal forest or tundra it doesn’t just burn trees and shrubs. It also burns below the surface because the soil is like peat moss. These “underground” fires are extremely hard to put out.
And finally, the fires cause their own feedback loop. They’re generated by unusually hot weather and their byproducts — smoke and CO2 — result in more hot weather. The smoke deposits black soot on polar ice which makes it melt faster (warming the area) and the CO2 contributes to climate change. As the climate gets hotter it spawns more arctic fires.
This 13 August video from NASA tells more about the arctic wildfires and how they’ll affect us — both now and later.
Late last month observers discovered a small green pond at the bottom of Halema’uma’u Crater at Kilauea volcano. Water inside the crater is rather amazing since Kilauea is the active volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i that erupted violently in 2018, destroying parts of Leilani Estates, Highway 132, Vacationland and Kapoho.
Geologists wondered if the green spot was a rock or algae so they flew over the crater several times looking for a telltale reflection to indicate it was water. Yes, it’s wet.
A week’s worth of photos also showed that pond had grown since it’s original “size of a pickup truck.”
Geologists don’t know how the pond got there but it’s worth watching to find out more. Fortunately by August 2 they’d found a safe place to view it from the crater’s edge.
Bristle-thighed curlews are so rare and hard to find that they’ve been called the birders’ Holy Grail. The word “Tahiti” in their scientific name, Numenius tahitiensis, tells us why. These birds are Pacific Islanders. Their remote breeding location in Alaska was not discovered until 1948.
Adult bristle-thighed curlews spend only two months on their breeding grounds at the central Seward Peninsula and Yukon Delta. They arrive in late May and begin nesting almost immediately.
At 3+ weeks old they learn to fly but they aren’t independent yet. At 5 weeks their parents leave them with a few caretaker adults and depart for the staging grounds at the Bering Sea.
There they fatten up for the first leg of their journey home — a non-stop 2,500 mile flight to Laysan, Midway Atoll in the Hawaiian islands. For some curlews the final destination is much further, as shown on the map below. (Red spots are breeding range, white arrow is first stop, blue circles are wintering locations.)
Young curlews follow the adults a few weeks later. They won’t return to Alaska until they’re three to four years old.
This year I happened to visit Hawaii and Alaska on the same schedule as the bristle-thighed curlews. My Life Bird curlew was a fly-by at Kahuku Golf Course, Kauai on February 28, photographed here by Michael McNulty. Then I saw curlews on their breeding grounds near Nome, Alaska in June.
Every year the curlews travel from Hawaii to Alaska. With a worldwide population of only 7,000 birds and sea level rise due to flood their home islands, this amazing bird is vulnerable to extinction.
p.s. Bristle-thighed curlews are closely related to whimbrels, whom they resemble. We saw and heard both species in western Alaska.
Chocolate lily, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Last month we found chocolate lilies and other delightful wildflowers while on PIB‘s Alaska birding tour. Here are the best of them, mostly found at Turnagain Pass Rest Area on 18 June 2019. Please leave a comment to help me identify the ones I’ve labeled “mystery” flowers and correct any I’ve misidentified. Thanks!
At top, the chocolate lily (Fritillaria camschatcensis) is a gorgeous small flower that resembles a Canada lily (Lilium canadense) except that it’s the color of chocolate. What a treat!
Below, clasping twisted-stalk (Streptopus amplexifolius) has delicate bell-shaped yellow flowers that hang under the leaves. They remind me of Solomon’s seal.
Clasping twisted-stalk, near Anchorage, 13 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Liverleaf wintergreen in Seward, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
What is the yellow flower shown below? It looks like a cinquefoil to me but the leaves are so big. (The flower is about the size of the first joint of my thumb.)
Mystery: Is this a cinquefoil? (photo by Kate St. John)
Threeleaf foamflower in Seward, 20 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
I couldn’t identify this flower at first, but thanks to Janet Campagna’s comment I think these are yellow marsh marigold (Caltha palustris), seen at Turnagain Pass Rest Area, 18 June 2019.
Yellow marsh marigold at Turnagain Pass Rest Area, 18 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
And finally, dwarf fireweed (Chamaenerion latifolium) was easy to find along the Teller Road northwest of Nome.
Dwarf fireweed by the Teller Road outside Nome, Alaska, 21 June 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
Please let me know if I’ve misidentified any of these. The solo yellow flower, 7th photo, remains a mystery.
(photos by Kate St. John, all of them taken with my Pixel 3 cellphone)
Don’t be fooled by the happy green colors on the watery edge of this map. The high temperature in much of Alaska tomorrow will be 85 degrees F.
Alaska is baking under a five-to-seven day heat wave caused by exceptionally strong high pressure that will break most temperature records. Alaskans aren’t prepared for it. The normal high in Anchorage this week should be 67 degrees F but that’s close to what the low will be (61).
The deepest red on the map is in the southwest interior near the Kuskokwim River where the temperature will soar up to 95 degrees. This area suffered last winter, too, when an early thaw shut down transportation to 13,000 people.
Not only will it be hot in Alaska but it will be hard to breathe. Baking temperatures, dry vegetation and lightning have ignited huge forest fires across the state. The Sunday 7am forecast for much of Alaska includes “areas of smoke” shown in gray below.
If I had to pick a Best Bird on my trip to Alaska it would be the long-tailed jaegar (long-tailed skua, Stercorarius longicaudus), the most graceful arctic predator.
Long-tailed jaegars are the smallest of skuas, a genus of predatory seabirds that range from pole to pole. In flight their long tails and flowing movements remind me of swallow-tailed kites as they float over the tundra in pairs and loudly defend their territories. On the hunt they can hover like kestrels, as shown in the video below.
Though long-tailed jaegars are seabirds, their favorite foods in Alaska are collared lemmings.
Birds of North America Online explains his hunting technique …
Long-tailed Jaeger hunts these lemmings by hovering or poising in a headwind at height of 1-10 m [3-30 feet] (usually about 4 m) above tundra, like a kestrel unlike other jaegers, and by watching from perches on small rises or frost mounds … Having detected prey, often pursues it on foot and pecks it until it is dead; never uses feet to capture prey.
