Yesterday at Sax Zim Bog was bright, both day and night. It began with a full moon at -13F and peaked at 10F with this bird.
My Life Bird northern hawk owl was perched on top of a tree near the road, easy to see. He eyed us with suspicion as we trundled off the bus and stood in the road, staring at him. Do his eyebrows give him that disapproving look?
When he wasn’t staring back at us he scanned the bog for prey. I’ve read that northern hawk owls have perfected the technique of hunting by sight and can identify prey as much as half a mile away.
It helps to be in full sun if you need to see a vole at 2,640 feet.
p.s. Jess Botzan was lucky to capture this one in flight. I have never yet seen one fly.
I am really tired of cold weather and the effort it takes to walk around in heavy clothes and boots. I can hardly wait for spring and yet … I flew north yesterday to the Arrowhead of Minnesota where the high temperatures are lower than Pittsburgh’s lows, the lows have been -30F, and it snowed six inches yesterday. What was I thinking?
Jess and Brian Botzan were here last month and saw all the birds on my wish list: great gray owl, northern hawk owl, boreal chickadee, black-billed magpie, gray jay and pine grosbeak. Braving -50F wind chill Jess photographed this great gray owl at the very bog where I’ll be looking for one today. I hope to be so lucky.
So I’ve put on my long johns, corduroys, ski pants, turtleneck, thick wool sweater, polarlite cardigan, parka, Nordic earflap hat, two layers of mittens, wool socks, Sorel boots, face mask, bula and “Hot Hands” heat packets stuffed near my toes and fingers. I look and feel like a purple Pillsbury dough-boy but I am not cold.
My husband, who is too nearsighted to enjoy birding, has wisely stayed home.
Shorebirds are migrating but we’re not likely to see them in Pittsburgh because we don’t have a shore. However there’s an excellent place north of us that does: the harbor at Conneaut, Ohio.
Conneaut’s harbor was formed where Conneaut Creek flows into Lake Erie. The lake’s waves can be rough so the harbor has been sheltered by two breakwaters. These allowed the creek (and probably the harbor dredge) to deposit a sand spit and mud flat so extensive you can park on it.
Visiting shorebirds feed at the water’s edge and rest on the sand. Sometimes they’re so close you have to back up to see them with binoculars!
The harbor is more than two hours away but the trip is well worth it. Steve Gosser photographed this marbled godwit there in July.
Click here for a map and the harbor’s eBird checklist. The best place is called the “sand spit” on the map.
Early this month it was scary to read Chuck Tague’s account of a brush fire that came within two miles of his Ormond Beach home.
While the fired burned in Florida I was in another fire-prone place, San Diego, listening to a speech by Dr. John Fitzpatrick of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in which he touched on how important fire is for scrub habitats and for the survival of the Florida scrub-jay in particular.
To most of us wildfire is rare but it’s a natural cycle in scrub communities where plants, animals, and birds rely on its regular occurrence. “Regular” is important. If fire happens too often or too infrequently that’s bad too.
It has taken a while to learn this. Dr. Fitzpatrick described how they studied fire and birds at Archbold Station in Highlands County, Florida. For two decades Archbold suppressed fires and watched the scrub-jay population surge then dangerously decline. After 20 years scientists burned small tracts and watched the scrub-jays surge again. They learned that the Florida scrub-jay’s optimal habitat is at 5-15 years after a fire. At 15 years the scrub gets too tall, the jay’s predators increase and the birds decline.
Fire is necessary. The trick in populated areas is to manage it so it happens only when and where it’s needed.
In San Diego the local government conducts brush management programs to protect homes and businesses. According to San Diego Audubon, these programs sometimes make matters worse. If workers clear away native chaparral, it not only destroys endangered bird habitat but results in fire-prone grassy weeds that burn more easily. Proper management of native habitat actually lowers the risk of explosive fire.
So though we fear it, fire is important. Without it we wouldn’t have Florida scrub-jays, California gnatcatchers and coastal cactus wrens, to name a few.
(photo of a helicopter dropping water on a California wildfire, by FEMA via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)
Travel is very educational. Not only are there different birds in San Diego but the threats those birds face are different from what I’m used to in Pittsburgh. One issue particularly grabbed my attention because we never have to deal with it at home.
Where I come from it’s hard to imagine the wall that defines the southern edge of San Diego County and most of the U.S. border from here through Texas. Like the Berlin Wall it’s patrolled by armed guards, edged by cleared land for easy enforcement, and in places triple-fenced.
The border has been patrolled for a long time but the Real ID Act of 2005 mandated the border wall and exempted its construction from every environmental law including the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. Exemptions like this bring to mind mountaintop removal in West Virginia.
There are lots of problems to monitor. Here are just two examples.
The fence through Yogurt Canyon, shown above, disrupts the natural drainage into the Tijuana Estuary to the north. This affects everything that depends on the water, including birds.
Ironically, the wall has an unintended consequence. In the old days workers used to migrate back and forth like the birds — north for planting and harvesting, south to their homes in the winter.
In his 2001 book, Crossing Over, Rubén Martínez described how the patrols even then were ending the return migration. It’s now so dangerous at the wall that those who make it to the U.S. rarely leave — because they can’t.
I’m sure that’s not the result the wall’s proponents had in mind.
Read more about the border fence and how it affects the land and people of Tijuana and San Diego in Jill Marie Holslin’s blog At The Edges.
(photos used by permission of Jill Marie Holslin from her blog, At the Edges. Click on each image for more information.)
We’re starved for thrashers in Pittsburgh right now. Of the eight species in North America only the brown thrasher occurs in the eastern U.S. and he’s away on his wintering grounds. All the rest are western or southwestern birds, several of which occur in California.
This one has “California” in his name. He doesn’t migrate — in fact he hardly moves away from his birthplace — so if you want to see him you have to be in California or northern Mexico.
The California thrasher loves dense desert chapparel but is sometimes found in scrubby or suburban habitat where he encounters a bird whose habits are quite similar.
Northern mockingbirds eat the same food and forage in the same way as California thrashers. Both are highly territorial so when a mockingbird moves into a thrasher’s territory constant warfare ensues.
Imagine the two contestants hopping and lunging.
Hey, Mr. Mockingbird, watch out for that beak!
Fortunately for northern mockingbirds, few of them like dense chaparral so these species are usually in separate places.
Good for the thrasher too. What a waste of energy to be constantly thrashing it out!
(photo by Alan Vernon from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the caption to see the original)
To my untrained East Coast eye this bird looks like an odd double-crested cormorant, but it is actually a Brandt’s cormorant, a common bird of the Pacific coast.
This weekend I’m in the bottom left corner of the United States at the San Diego Bird Festival, held in one of the two “Birdiest Counties” in the continental U.S. (Los Angeles County is the other.)
According to San Diego Audubon, “San Diego County boasts the largest bird list of any similarly sized area in the United States at almost 500 species.” With this honor also comes the distinction of having “the greatest number of endangered, threatened, and sensitive species than any comparable land area in the continental United States.”
San Diego is able to set these records because it has at least 11 habitat zones including coastal scrub, desert, mountains, salt marshes, wetlands and ocean, far outranking my land-locked home in Pittsburgh.
In my first hour of birding — just walking near the hotel — I saw long-billed curlew’s, marbled godwits, an orange-crowned warbler (singing!), Anna’s hummingbirds, black-crowned night-herons, and Heerman’s gulls. By now I’ve seen 94 species including this life bird, Brandt’s cormorant.
When you compare San Diego’s checklist of 501 birds to Allegheny County’s 316 species (including vagrants), I’m finding a “lifer” around every corner.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original. Quotes are from the San Diego Audubon Society website.)
My love of birds has me fascinated with almost anything that flies. Perhaps this is true for you too.
Last month my sister-in-law sent me a link to this 2004 video called Romancing The Wind. Produced by Robert Holbrook, it shows professional kite flyer Ray Bethell flying three kites simultaneously in an aerial ballet. Music from Leo Delibes’The Flower Duet complements the kites.
Ray Bethell is an amazing man. Over 80 years old, he’s a Multiple Kite World Champion from Vancouver, Canada who holds world records in endurance and number of simultaneous kites flown. Here you see him flying three kites at Vanier Park, holding one in each hand with a third tied to his belt. He’s used this same technique to fly 39 kites at the same time! Read more on his website here.
Like the falcons, Ray Bethell’s kites court in the wind.
p.s. The kite model Ray is using has a falcon name: Kestrel.
I rarely spend time near sand dunes so I was amazed to learn that sand can sing. In fact there are 35 places around the world where the dunes sing a low frequency hum in the bottom half of a cello’s range.
The droning happens naturally when the wind causes a sand avalanche. People can force the song by pushing sand downhill. The songs are well known but people have always wondered how and why they happen.
Singing dunes are crescent-shaped barchans with their backs to the wind and their horns pointing downwind. The slipface is inside the crescent (downwind) with its surface at the angle of repose and a stationary layer beneath.
Experiments have shown the importance of the grains themselves. If they’re spherical, 0.1 to 0.5 mm in diameter, and contain silica, they will sing in the lab when they slide down an incline.
This year physicists from Paris Diderot University discovered that grain size determines the tune. They studied two dunes: one in Morocco, one in Oman. The Moroccan dune has grains 150-170 microns and emits a 105 hz sound (for musicians that’s near G-sharp two octaves below middle C). The Omani dune has a variable grain size from 150 to 310 microns and its sound varies, too — from 90-150 hz (F-sharp to D).
Researchers took the Omani sand back to the lab and sifted it down to a nearly uniform size — 200 to 250 microns — and sent it down an incline. Voilà. The sand made a sound of 90 hz, close to the song of the Moroccan dune. (Click here for more information about the study.)
What are the songs like? In this video, filmed in Morocco, a man shows how he learned to make the sand sing. Turn up your speakers and you’ll be able to hear a variety of sounds as he puts the sand through its paces. The video is in French with subtitles, some of which are surprisingly translated as in the first sentence that says “Beware” when it means the less dangerous-sounding “Be aware.”
Thanks to science we’ve learned how the sand sings, but we still don’t know why.
Banner clouds are stationary, orographic clouds that only form in high wind on the leeward side of an isolated, steep mountain. The Matterhorn, pictured above, is famous for them.
Banner clouds are so picky that we’ll never see them in western Pennsylvania simply because we have no isolated steep mountains.
… except …
Under the right moisture conditions a banner cloud can form above or just behind an airplane’s wings. Click here for an example.
Airplanes form banner clouds because there’s lower air pressure on top of their wings (to generate lift). The lower pressure results in lower temperature which results in condensation. Hence a cloud.
And for a really weird effect, check out this cloud around a fighter jet on the verge of breaking the sound barrier. The shape is so perfect it’s hard to call it a banner.
(photo by Zacharie Grossen on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original)
