If you like puzzles, here’s one that helps you identify birds.
Cornell Lab’s All About Birds Academy offers an online puzzle of male diving ducks. Practice your ID skills while you put it together.
Click on the puzzle piece above or here to play.
(jigsaw puzzle pieces in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Diving ducks puzzle preview from All About Birds Academy)
Museum birds make me curious.
On a visit to Bird Hall at Carnegie Museum I saw this bird with an unusual crown that opens sideways!
Bird crests typically open front to back so that they’re aerodynamic. Cardinals, blue jays and tufted titmice can fly with their crests up. This bird would have a problem.
The label on the pedestal says Royal Flycatcher (Onychorhynchus coronatus), native from southern Mexico to southeastern Brazil. Why does she have a sideways crest? And what is it used for?
Back home on the Internet, I found out that royal flycatchers rarely raise their crowns. They use them in perched displays with their mates and in agonistic encounters with other birds but normally keep them flattened. The birds usually look like this. Pretty boring except for the tail.
.jpg)
And then I found Cameron Rutt’s blog and photos at Nemesis Bird with the gorgeous male shown above. Males have red crowns, females have orange. Wow!
Cameron encountered this flycatcher while banding birds in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. As he held the bird, it opened its crest and beak and silently rotated its head back and forth 180 degrees in a mesmerizing display. See Cameron’s video below.
Read more about this surprising and wonderful encounter in Cameron Rutt’s blog at Nemisis Bird.
I would never have learned this if I hadn’t been curious about the royal flycatcher at Carnegie Museum.
The bird that wears a royal crown.
(photo credits:
Male royal flycatcher with red crest raised, still photo and video by Cameron Rutt linked from Nemesis Bird and Flickr.
Female taxidermy mount at Bird Hall, Carnegie Museum, photo by Kate St.John.
Boring royal flycatcher not showing its crest, from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
.jpg)
Reports on PABIRDS just before Christmas say there’s been a surf scoter on the Allegheny River upriver from the Highland Park Bridge.
The reports don’t indicate whether it’s a colorful male or a dull looking first-year male or female.
This photo from Wikimedia Commons shows a female and male to give you an idea of what to look for. Notice the heavy triangular bill typical of scoters, and the white patch on the back of the head typical of surf scoters.
If you go looking for the bird, here’s where: Allegheny River at Highland Park Dam
(photo from Wikimedia Commons.Click on the image to see the original)
Happy Holidays to all!
(photo by Kate St. John)
When the holiday rush is over take some time to visit Phipps Conservatory’s Winter Flower Show and Light Garden, open through January 8.
The Light Garden begins to glow at 5:00p and is open until 11:00p. Click on Phipps’ photo above to see a 3D tour of the lights.
The flowers indoors are gorgeous as always, especially the Broderie Room. This photo from Wikimedia Commons is even better at full size. Click on the photo to get the full effect.
For more details, visit Phipps’ website for the Winter Flower Show and Light Garden.
(photo credits: Light Garden linked from Phipps Conservatory website. Broderie Room by Dllu is a Featured Photo at Wikimedia Commons. Click on each image to see its original.)
Dreaming of a white Christmas?
We won’t have snow in Pittsburgh this Christmas and we certainly won’t have evening grosbeaks but you can watch both — live — at Ontario FeederWatch.
The feeders are located in Manitouwadge, Ontario, a remote town that’s far away in the woods — an 11.5 hour drive from Toronto and 8 hours from Duluth, Minnesota.
Manitouwadge is so far north that it has birds we never see here including evening and pine grosbeaks, gray jays and hoary redpolls. There are also a lot of birds you’ll recognize: black-capped chickadees, downy and hairy woodpeckers, crows and starlings.
Tune in to Ontario FeederWatch and watch cool birds in the snow. (Click here or on the image above.)
Daylight: approximately 8:47am to 5:06pm EST.
(screenshot from Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Ontario Feederwatch. Click on the image to watch the live camera)
On Throw Back Thursday:
Six years ago I ran a series on bird anatomy. Here’s a refresher course on bird bones, the strong, hollow, lightweight structures that allow them to fly: Anatomy: Hollow Bones
By the time you read this, the winter solstice will have passed.
The sun paused it’s southward journey today at 5:44 AM Eastern Time and is already moving north.
Soon the days will be getting longer and the birds will begin to sing.
Listen for the song sparrow. What day will he sing his first song?
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. click on the image to see the original)
.jpg)
The cool thing about science is that it’s open to revision. If new data shows a different solution and the solution stands up under repeated, intensive review, then science changes its stance.
Museums are great places to see this kind of scientific progress in three dimensions.
The Blue Goose diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is good example. When the diorama was created in 1925, the blue goose was considered a separate species from the snow goose. The diorama was devoted to the unique “blue” species.
But the blue goose isn’t a separate species at all. By 1961 genetic tests had shown that the blue goose is a dark color morph of the snow goose. According to Birds of North America Online, the color is “controlled by a single locus, the blue allele being incompletely dominant to the white.” Although the blue color is somewhat dominant, snow geese tend to pick mates the same color as their parents so their white color persists.
The plaque next to the diorama explains how we’ve learned new things over time.
So when you hear a scientist making statements that include words like “may indicate” or “likely,” consider this. Scientists aren’t being vague. They’re speaking carefully from data that’s currently available. When they get even stronger evidence they’ll let you know. Statements like this are truthful: “Scientific studies indicate that extreme weather events such as heat waves and large storms are likely to become more frequent or more intense with human-induced climate change.” It only sounds vague to our society hungry for absolutes.
Meanwhile, we do know this is true: Blue geese are a color morph, not a separate species.
Visit the dioramas at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on the first floor near Discover Basecamp.
(photos taken at Carnegie Museum by Kate St. John. photo of snow geese from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
By now everyone in North Oakland is wondering: Why is it so hard to move the winter crow roost out of our neighborhood?
Perhaps it’s because crows are smarter than 6-year-olds.
Back in 2013 researchers presented New Caledonian crows with the same cognitive tests given to children ages 4-10.
All the children passed the simple water displacement tests: Drop pebbles into a water-filled tube to raise the water level and bring a floating treat within reach.
But children ages 4-6 failed the final test in which two of the tubes had a hidden connection. Stones dropped in one tube raised the water in another. Six-year-old brains weren’t mature enough yet.
Children ages 7-10 passed that final test, “Experiment 6, U-Tube” at the end of the video below. Notice that the crow succeeds. He, too, is smarter than a 6-year-old.
Since crows understand cause and effect, simple scare tactics just aren’t scary enough. Crows see through the ruse and innovate around the problem.
So getting the crows to leave North Oakland is a bit like convincing a roomful of boisterous 7-year-olds that they want to choose what we have in mind.
Perhaps we could get some tips from Cub Scout leaders. 
Read more about this study here in Science Daily.
(photo by Jacob McGinnis)