We had sleet and freezing rain overnight. Fortunately the ice was not very thick and by dawn the temperature rose so it’s merely raining now.
The crows flew over my house later than usual this morning. I wonder if the ice affected their roost.
The trees were beautiful before the rain began.
What a cold night! Temperatures in the single digits! Again I thought of how the birds are coping with cold.
Chuck Tague’s photo of Canada geese coming in for a landing made me wonder how they can swim in near freezing river water and stand on ice for hours. It turns out that birds have special adaptions to keep themselves warm.
Feathers are one big advantage. Not only do they naturally conserve heat but the feathers closest to a bird’s skin are downy. Birds fluff their feathers to expand the down when the weather’s cold, making the little birds look like butterballs.
You can see the effect of feather insulation at this link showing infrared photos of a parrot on a person’s arm. The person’s arm looks “hot” but the parrot’s body looks “cool” because its feathers are such good insulation.
Another cold weather advantage for ducks and geese are their waterproof feathers and a layer of fat under their skin. The fat keeps them warm in cold water and their feathers keep them dry.
This leaves the problem of warming their feet. Birds can tuck a foot up under their feathers but this is impractical for very long.
So how can geese stand on ice in their bare feet? Water birds have an unusual circulatory system in their legs and feet. The veins and arteries in their legs are intertwined so that cold blood leaving their feet is warmed by the arteries delivering warm blood. (Open the comments below for a more accurate explanation from Dr. Bledsoe of Univ of Pittsburgh.)
Perhaps this means birds’ feet are a little colder all the time, but it doesn’t bother them. The advantage is that their central body doesn’t have to cope with cold blood returning directly to their hearts.
We humans don’t have these advantages so my feet are mighty glad they’re indoors right now.
(photo by Chuck Tague)
For the past two days it has been “unseasonably warm” here in Pittsburgh, but to me it feels unnatural. The highs have been in the upper 60s, warmer than we keep our house at this time of year. This is even more remarkable because it was 13oF five days ago.
The weather reminds me of a comment made by a young Finnish friend of ours who visited Pittsburgh in July many years ago. As we sat outdoors after dark watching a softball game under floodlights, Oüti said she had never been outdoors when it was both hot and dark. The sun hardly sets in the summer in Finland so being warm after sunset was unusual for her.
Well, this weather feels the same way. The sun set just after 5:00pm today but it feels like the end of March. By that measure, the sun should have set after 7:30pm and it would not have been both hot and dark during rush hour when I took this picture in Schenley Park.
I do appreciate that it feels good to stroll outside and that the birds sing in the morning. It just unsettles me a little.
Scattered snow flurries. High 22oF. Low 12. On days like this I think about the challenges birds face outdoors.
Birds are outside in every kind of weather and have to cope with it — no matter what. It turns out that eating is the best defense against freezing to death. Food is the fuel they burn to stay warm.
The birds that stay in Pittsburgh in the winter are those who eat the kinds of food that are still available. Sparrows, cardinals and woodpeckers eat seeds, suet and dormant insects. Hawks and owls eat rodents and other birds. Starlings, crows and gulls eat anything, including garbage.
The colder it is, the more they have to eat to stay warm, In Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich I learned that “if [golden-crowned] kinglets go without food for only one or two hours in the daytime, they starve (and freeze) to death.” Birds burn up enormous amounts of calories to stay warm.
In the worst of winter I try to help the seed-eaters, and indirectly the hawks who eat them, by putting out bird seed. They are all grateful to have found an easy source of food. I have tried commercially made suet (animal fat with added bird seed) but it’s not popular with my avian visitors. Marcy Cunkleman makes her own suet from scratch and it’s a great success. You can tell by her photo of a plump red-bellied woodpecker at her feeder.
We humans are now largely insulated against the rigors of coping with cold. We have built permanent shelters and figured out how to use fire to heat them, whether directly through burning wood, oil or gas or indirectly by burning coal for electricity.
But I think our bodies have not forgotten our ancestral past when we lived outdoors all the time. As winter comes we eat more and cook more. No wonder the holidays are so replete with food. No wonder we eat so much and then vow to go on diets in the new year. Now that I understand how cold triggers eating, I know why those diets are so hard to accomplish in January.
(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
Here we are at the shortest day of the year – at last. Much as I like winter, it’s a relief to know the days will be getting longer again. Winter in Pittsburgh is usually overcast so we welcome all the sun we can get!
Interestingly, daylight is not going to increase evenly at both ends of the day. Sunrise will make no significant change until January 22. In fact it will move three minutes later, chopping away at the front of the day. Meanwhile sunset will gain a few seconds tomorrow. By January 6 it will add a minute per day.
If you are outdoors in the morning it will feel like nothing has changed. If you are out in the evening, the days will seem longer. Birds are outside all the time so they’re the first to tell us about the change in light.
In early January, especially on sunny days, the song sparrows start to sing. Marcy Cunkelman photographed this little guy on a sunny day last winter. The sun looks so nice on the snow I’ll bet he sang a little.
I’m certainly looking forward to the first song of the new year. It won’t be long now.
It snowed here all day until sunset. By lunchtime there was more than an inch of snow. Over at Pitt the only birds I saw were pigeons and they were doing something unusual. They were foraging on the sidewalk instead of on the grass.
I pay attention to pigeons because they are the peregrines’ favorite food. A scared flock of pigeons often alerts me to the presence of the peregrines. Today it was apparently too snowy for the falcons to hunt so the pigeons were safe out in the open.
But why were they on the sidewalk? It finally dawned on me. The sidewalk was the only snow-free area where they could see potential food. Perhaps they were eating the de-icing salt.
The snow was beautiful, but it’s a pretty quiet birding day when the best bird is a pigeon eating rock salt.
For a variety of reasons I had planned to drive to work today, but when I looked out the window and saw it snowing I changed my mind and walked.
I love snow and this first snowfall was perfect. In the windbreaks big, fat snowflakes landed on my eyelashes. It was too warm to accumulate, so the ground wasn’t slippery. As you can see from the picture I took with my cellphone, the snow barely stuck to the leaves of this Euonymus bush.
I didn’t see many birds: a flock of crows from the East End roost, a few robins in scattered groups, three cedar waxwings, some starlings. The birds live outdoors in the cold all day so they weren’t wasting any energy getting excited about the First Snow.
No gray skies today! I took this picture at lunch time.
With good weather today and a cold front coming tomorrow, the birds are quite active: large flocks of grackles in Schenley Park, blue jays flying south, a red-tailed hawk hunting near Central Catholic High School (steeple in picture), and a peregrine falcon perched at the top of University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning.
It’s an overcast morning in Pittsburgh, the third day in a row of gray skies, not unusual for November. There are very few birds in view. The most active animals are squirrels.
On days like this I think of the poem ‘No!’ by Thomas Hood (1844) a portion of which reads:
No sun - no moon! No morn - no noon - No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day. ... No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member - No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! - November!