Just a reminder that this coming Friday is GASP’s Night at the Aviary, September 30, 6-9 pm.
As part of the festivities I’ll present a short talk on “Clean Air is for the Birds … and People Too.”
It’s a fundraiser so tickets are $50 to $65. Click here for more information.
The weather was great this morning — cool and sunny — as 16 of us explored Schenley Park.
We started at the Westinghouse Fountain, checked the Phipps Run valley behind it and walked part of the Steve Falloon Trail but there were almost no birds except for woodpeckers and blue jays.
I extended the walk to the golf course road where we added mourning doves, Carolina chickadees and an eastern phoebe (Best Bird). Then to the Bartlett Shelter area where we added American goldfinches, common grackles and European starlings. Here’s the bird checklist.
I was surprised by the abundance of mushrooms, especially Chicken-of-the-woods.
If we’d been out there counting chipmunks we’d have had a fantastic day.
(photo by Kate St. John)
p.s. All the thrushes were at Beechwood Farms in Fox Chapel.
If you’ve seen a yellow-rumped warbler in both eastern and western North America you might get a new Life Bird without doing anything.
Two weeks ago Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eNewsletter announced that the yellow-rumped warbler, a species that was lumped in 1973, might have to split — possibly even four ways!
If the split happens, the birds would probably use the names they had before the lumping.
Yellow-rumps in eastern North America, shown above, used to be called “myrtle warblers.”
Yellow-rumps in western North America, shown below, were “Audubon’s warbler.”
These birds have different DNA and, happily for us, they look different. Notice the yellow throat on the western bird.
Read about the possible four-way split and see their breeding range map at Goodbye Yellow-rump on the All About Birds blog.
(photo of yellow-rumped myrtle warbler by Chuck Tague, yellow-rumped Audubon’s warbler by Steve Valasek)
This week there’s a lot of fluff in the air from flowers gone to seed. In my neighborhood it’s from a plant called American burnweed or pilewort that grows on burned sites and waste places. It loves the urban setting.
Though it’s a native plant in the Aster family, pilewort (Erechtites hieraciifolius) is far from beautiful. Two to eight feet tall it looks very weedy, even ugly. Each branch tip ends in a long green capsule that looks like a seed pod.
Are they seeds? No. I learned more when a bee paused to nectar on top of one.
A very close look revealed that the tip is a cluster of tiny flowers.
I opened the capsule and fanned its contents. Under magnification you can see the tiny white, almost translucent flowers with five petals, a protruding split pistil, and lavender centers.
They’re hard to photograph but here are two of my best attempts.
Most of the capsules have yellow tips. Probably stamens, but even harder to see.
After the flowers are pollinated the green capsules split open and the long white filaments carry the seeds through the air.
Ugly from afar, pilewort’s beauty is microscopic.
(photos by Kate St.John)
In case you missed it early this month …
Oklahoma is a place that rarely had earthquakes until hydraulic fracking brought deep well injection to the state in 2009. Since then fracking disposal has awakened previously unknown fault lines with frequent and usually mild tremblors.
Then on 3 September at 7:02am a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck Pawnee, 72 miles northeast of Oklahoma City as the crow flies. And, yes, the crow flew.
The birds in the area somehow knew the earthquake was coming and took flight before it happened. We know this because they appeared on Oklahoma City’s weather radar as an expanding cloud as much as 15 minutes before the quake!
See the radar image here and read more about birds’ extra earthquake sensors in the Washington Post.
p.s. Residents on the ground at Pawnee weren’t so lucky. See the damage at Newson6.
(photo by Chuck Tague)
After two days of sad stories about fish populations in decline here’s some hopeful news.
With sensible catch limits and sanctuaries where fishing is prohibited, we can turn the tide on ocean species decline — but only if we can enforce the laws. Unfortunately the ocean is a huge place with few “cops on the beat” and a lot of places for illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishermen to hide.
Until now.
Last week Oceana, SkyTruth, and Google launched the public Beta of Global Fishing Watch (GFW), a free online tool that allows anyone in the world to monitor and track the activities of the world’s largest commercial fishing vessels in near real-time.
Here’s how it works: Every ship over a certain tonnage is required to transmit Automatic Identification System (AIS) data containing its identity, location, course and speed. The data, received by satellites and accumulated since 2012, is used to plot each ship’s movements. To determine which boats are fishing vessels, Global Fishing Watch developed an algorithm that identifies fishing by the characteristic patterns it makes on the map.
The map shows no-fish zones and Economic Exclusion Zones where it’s easy to see if illegal fishing is going on. Vessels that turn off their AIS transmitters or purposely falsify their GPS data are automatically suspect.
Nations at the mercy of illegal fishing are happy to use GFW. In December 2014, when the tool was still in test mode, SkyTruth analyst Bjorn Bergman (from his desk in West Virginia!) saw a Taiwanese boat fishing illegally in Palau’s protected waters. And it turned off its AIS. The boat left Palau and headed for Indonesia. When it returned in January Bergman remotely helped Palau authorities chase it down. Read the whole story here at the GFW blog.
So if you’re wondering how the U.S. will stop illegal fishing in 582,578 square miles of the newly expanded Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument (surrounding the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands) the answer is:
We’ll catch them from the sky.
For more information, watch the video and visit the Global Fishing Watch website.
(video from Global Fishing Watch on YouTube)
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Today, a fish story.
Bluefin tuna are following the same trajectory as the passenger pigeon. Because they taste good they’re poised to go extinct.
Atlantic (Thunnus thynnus) and Pacific bluefin tuna (Thunnis orientalis) are highly migratory predators that spawn on one side of their respective oceans and travel thousands of miles on migration to their feeding grounds. When they reach maturity at three to five years old they return to spawn. Bluefins can live 15 to 50 years and reach up to 990 pounds but because of overfishing very few live to maturity.
Like the passenger pigeon, human hunting pressure is the only reason for the bluefin’s decline. Technological advances in deep sea fishing have made it easy to catch all of them. Their meat is so prized in Japan for sushi and sashimi that the Pacific population has declined more than 97%. Large specimens are so rare that according to the January 11, 2013 issue of TIME magazine, “Just last week, a 489-lb. bluefin was sold at a fish auction in Tokyo for a record $1.76 million—or about $3,600 per pound.” That was nearly four years ago. Their status has only gotten worse.
Like the final decades of the passenger pigeon, the bluefin’s plight has been discussed for years. Catch limits for Atlantic bluefin have been in place since 2007 and it’s been nominated for endangered status. In 2010 the World Wildlife Fund pointed out there was still so much over-capacity for Atlantic tuna fishing that EU boats reached their catch limit in only one week. In 2011 Salon magazine asked, “Why are we still eating bluefin tuna?” In 2014, the Center for Biodiversity called for a Pacific bluefin fishing ban.
This summer the situation became so dire that a dozen environmental groups called for listing the Pacific bluefin tuna as Endangered and the Pew Trusts called for a Pacific bluefin moratorium.
This Pew Trusts video explains how the Pacific moratorium, implemented immediately, would save the species.
We still have time to turn it around — but not much.
Will bluefin tuna go the way of the passenger pigeon … from billions to none?
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)
It happened to land animals. Now it’s happening in the ocean. The biggest die first.
Based on Earth’s current extinction rate of 1,000 times the normal background rate (predicted to become 10 times worse) scientists believe we’re at the start of the sixth mass extinction.
Stanford geoscientist Jonathan Payne wondered if the traits of extinct marine animals could predict the likelihood of extinction in today’s ocean organisms. For mollusks and vertebrates Payne and his colleagues compared ecological traits such as habitat preference and body size in past extinct and present threatened genera (genus: one level above species). The results were surprising.
In past extinctions habitat preference was a good predictor that an animal would disappear. That’s not the case now. In this era, the best predictor of future extinction is large body size.
The difference is us. Human hunting pressure is driving ocean extinction. Our demand for seafood is high (there are billions of us to feed) and we’ve become very efficient at capturing the largest fish. Highly migratory predators like the Pacific bluefin tuna have declined precipitously.
We’ve seen this before. At the end of the Ice Age, as human population expanded across the globe, the megafauna simultaneously went extinct. It’s now known that sabretooth tigers, giant armadillos and woolly mammoths disappeared due to human hunting.
We humans are successful because we make tools and hunt cooperatively. Of course we kill the largest prey first. One large animal feeds more people.
Unfortunately we don’t know when to stop.
Read more about Payne’s study here at Science Daily.
(photo of swordfish from NOAA Photo Library. photo of woolly mammoth statue in Royal BC Museum, Victoria, Canada via Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
p.s. A word about the swordfish pictured above: Swordfish are highly migratory predators whose population is in danger in many oceans around the world. In 1998 the North Atlantic population dropped so low that fishing was suspended. A 2009 international assessment of North Atlantic swordfish showed they had recovered in U.S. fishing areas, so fishing resumed. Note: The fishermen who lost their lives aboard the Andrea Gail in The Perfect Storm were longline fishing for swordfish.
Just a reminder: I’m leading a bird and nature walk at Schenley Park this Sunday, September 25, 8:30am – 10:30am.
Meet at the Westinghouse Memorial Fountain. Then, depending on the mud, we’ll walk the Falloon Trail or the Serpentine Road keeping our eyes open for fall migrants. We’ll watch for flowers, too,.
Dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes. Bring binoculars and field guides if you have them.
Note: This is Pittsburgh’s Great Race Day and the course follows Forbes Avenue, so approach the park from the south.
Click here for more information and in case of cancellation. So far the weather forecast looks great!
(photo by Kate St. John)
Here’s a bird bathing technique I had never seen before … until yesterday.
Sunday morning Jack and Sue Solomon led a Three Rivers Birding Club outing at Frick Park. We all hoped to see warblers but the birds were sparse and badly backlit in the treetops.
A passing shower halfway through the walk was just what we needed. When the rain paused, a few birds were at eye level. One of them was a Kentucky warbler who drew our attention by bathing on top of sumac leaves.
The hummingbird in this video is doing the same thing. Watch at the 00:37 mark when he uses a leaf like a bathtub. Who knew!
p.s. Click here to see what a Kentucky warbler looks like.
(video by RM Videos on YouTube)