Beautiful autumn in the woods, 26 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
28 October 2023
The last full week of October brought beautiful weather and fall foliage to Southwestern Pennsylvania. Early mornings were chilly but warmed up quickly. Here are a few scenes from the week.
Frick Park is beautiful in early morning sunlight on 26 October. With Charity Kheshgi.
American beech leaves in Schenley Park show three color stages: green, yellow, brown.
Sugar maple leaf is red at SGL 203, Marshall Twp
The arching trunks of a mature Norway maple in Shadyside, City of Pittsburgh.
Fall colors reflecting on Lake Arthur at Moraine State Park.
Beautiful sunrise on 26 October. Three crows pass by on their way from the roost.
American beech changing color, Schenley Park, 21 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Sugar maple leaf, SGL 203, 22 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Norway maple in yellow, Shadyside, Pittsburgh, 23 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Fall foliage reflection at Moraine State Park, 24 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Golden yellow is a them from leaves to sky.
Sunrise with three crows, 26 Oct 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
The Mercator projection that transforms our 3-dimensional Earth into 2-dimensions was invented in 1569 for use in navigation, which is why Google uses it. Unfortunately it totally distorts the size of land closer to the poles. It makes Greenland look big, maybe bigger than Africa. New Zealand is often cropped off this map.
The animation at top alternates between the Mercator projection and each country’s actual relative size. Hello, Northern Hemisphere, you aren’t as big as you think you are!
If we correct for size, as in the Gall-Peters projection, we mess up shapes and navigation.
Making a flat map of the Earth is like trying to cut an orange peel to make it lay flat on the table. Good luck!
p.s. Here’s a screenshot from the thetruesize.com mapping tool that Johnny Harris mentions at the end of the video. Its initial screen demonstrates that the contiguous U.S. + China + India can easily fit into Africa with room to spare. Try it at thetruesize.com
Pittsburgh’s spotted lanternfly plague (Lycorma delicatula) is mostly over after recent cold weather knocked out lots of adults. It’s not a bad year for brown marmorated stink bugs, so are the insect plagues over? Not quite. Yesterday I happened into a swarm of Asian ladybeetles.
Asian ladybeetles (Harmonia axyridis) were imported to the U.S. 35 years ago as predators for aphids, adelgids, psyllids and scales. They do a good job and they caused no trouble until they were able to overwinter starting in 1993.
It is not uncommon for tens of thousands of beetles to congregate in attics, ceilings and wall voids, and due to the warmth of the walls, will move around inside these voids and exit into the living areas of the home.
In addition to beetles biting (which they do), they exude a foul-smelling, yellow defensive chemical which will sometimes cause spotting on walls and other surfaces. Most people are only annoyed by the odor of these chemicals. However, some individuals have reported experiencing an allergic reaction to the defensive excretions.
Red oak acorns on the branch, August 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
25 October 2023
By late October leaves and nuts are underfoot and still falling. Red oak acorns that were green on the branch in August litter the footpaths and sidewalks now.
Red oak acorns on the ground, Sept 2020 (photo by Kate St. John)
Underneath black walnut trees it’s hard not to misstep on the yellow husked nuts. You may even be hit by a black walnut detached and dropped by a squirrel gathering nuts above you. Squirrels save time by crawling all over the tree and detaching lots of nuts. Then they scurry down to collect them. Ouch!
Keep looking down and you may find unusual nuts and seeds like these.
Magnolia cucumber tree lea and seeds, Sept 2011 (photo by Kate St. John)
Even without leaves, you can identify the trees above you by knowing the nuts at your feet. This fall I’ll run a series on identifying nuts found in western Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile to kick it off …
Adam Haritan explains a few trees you can identify without even looking up in this 15-minute Learn Your Land video.
On 18 October while Jim McCollum was taking photos of the Hays bald eagles a raven showed up and began to harass the new male eagle, nicknamed “V.”
10/18 – The new fella went for a fly about and got jumped by a Raven. The Raven chased him all over the sky. This guy needs to work on his fighting skills.
A little tidbit I read recently. Crows will lite on eagles backs and peck at their necks. The eagles don’t fight back just soar higher and higher until for lack of oxygen the crow passes out and falls off the eagles back. I’m not sure about the validity but it’s a good story!
At what altitude does lack of oxygen affect birds?
Birds are the champions of high altitude and can breed and exercise (fly) at altitudes that kill humans. Some species are so well adapted to high altitude that they fly as high as a jet, over the Himalayas where humans die without supplemental oxygen. Even our North American songbirds fly high …
Migrating birds in the Caribbean(*) are mostly observed around 10,000 feet, although some are found half and some twice that high. Generally long-distance migrants seem to start out at about 5,000 feet and then progressively climb to around 20,000 feet.
Join me on Sunday 12 November 2023, 8:30am to 10:30am, for a bird and nature walk.
Meet at the Duck Hollow parking lot at the end of Old Browns Hill Road. Dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes. Bring binoculars, field guides and a birding scope if you have them. (Always remember to visit the Events page before you come in case of changes or cancellations.)
We’ll walk the nearby paths seeking birds, interesting plants, and lingering insects. Migrating ducks may be resting on the river. Mallards will attract attention because they’re courting.
Occasionally a rare bird shows up, so keep your fingers crossed. I can tell you we will not see is this American avocet that stopped by Duck Hollow on 3 October but it was sure fun while it lasted.
American avocet at Duck Hollow, 3 Oct 2023 (video by Charity Kheshgi)
The great-tailed grackle (Quiscalus mexicanus), a close relative of our common grackle, is so numerous and annoying in Austin, Texas in the winter that there are always news stories about them. This interview with a grackle researcher revealed a very cool fact about great-tailed grackles that probably applies to our grackles as well.
Great-tailed grackles can move their eyes independently to keep watch in two different directions at the same time! Check out the video below.
Bright red maple leaf near Phipps Conservatory, 16 October 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
21 October 2023
Fall color’s peak in southwestern Pennsylvania used to be around the 12th of October but climate change has pushed it later, closer to the 21st, as you can see in the PA fall foliage prediction for 19-25 October.
This week I found bright leaves on red maple trees, at top, and yellow on buckeyes and hickories.
Schenley Park leaves are yellow and green on 16 October 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Yellow and orange maple leaves, Frick Park, 18 October 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Frick and Schenley are dominated by oaks whose color will peak in the next two weeks. Meanwhile their few red maples turned red from the top down and have lost their leaves in the same order. The maples are gorgeous up close but you can’t see them from a distance because the tops are bare.
The top of this red maple is almost bare, 16 October 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Tomorrow night the northwest wind will bring migrating birds overnight and patchy frost on Monday morning.
Most people who find discarded bird tracking technology don’t know what they’re looking at and even when they do they don’t usually repurpose it. But every once in a while a transmitter goes roaming.
White storks (Ciconia ciconia) that breed in Poland migrate to eastern and southern Africa for the winter. For some, their final destination is the Blue Nile River valley, circled in yellow on the map below.
That autumn she flew to the Blue Nile River valley in Sudan where she became mysteriously inactive. Eventually she stopped moving altogether and had either died or the transmitter fell off. Researchers couldn’t figure out what happened until they got the phone bill.
Questions were raised when Kajtka lingered in the area for more than eight weeks, only roaming around 25 km [15 miles] in various directions.
In 2018, the mystery was solved when EcoLogic Group received a phone bill for 10,000 Polish zloty, the equivalent of £2,064 [$2,500]. Someone had picked up the tracker in Sudan and taken the opportunity to make 20 hours of phone calls using the SIM card.
Fortunately for cash-starved bird research this sort of episode is rare.
If Kajtka had survived she would have joined her fellow white storks moving north in March, perhaps with a stopover in the Hula Valley shown below. Gorgeous!
Do you feel thirsty when you wake up in the morning?
It turns out that as we exhale we also breath out water vapor, so during the hours of sleep we lose water. According to sleep specialist Dr. Michael Breus, the healthy solution is to drink a full glass of water in the morning before you drink coffee because caffeine is a diuretic.
We could avoid this by getting up in the middle of the night to drink water, but perhaps our bodies are compensating in another way …
