On Throw Back Thursday:
A 17-year bird study that bridged the end of Communism and the start of capitalism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia showed the mix of species changed. Birds with small brains declined. Birds with big brains thrived.
Does capitalism benefit brainy birds? Click here to find out.
(photo from Shutterstock by Al Mueller)
It was so cold a year ago that unusual arctic birds were forced off the frozen Great Lakes to Ohio’s and Pennsylvania’s rivers.
In January 2015, Chris Saladin went to see a pomarine jaeger (Stercorarius pomarinus) on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland. Pomarines are piratical seabirds that nest in the arctic, famous for harassing gulls, terns and even gannets to steal their catches.
Chris was lucky to be on the scene when the female peregrine from the Hope Memorial Bridge decided to harass the jaeger. At first the pomarine flies alone, then the peregrine sees it, and … the pomarine leaves.
Watch a slideshow of the action below. (Click on any photo to see the show in its own screen.)
See all of Chris’ photos and read the complete story here.
For more news of Ohio’s peregrines, visit C&C’s Ohio Peregrine Page on Facebook.
(photo and slideshow from Chad+Chris Saladin’s Ohio Peregrine Page)
Last September I visited Annapolis, Maryland and walked past these memorial statues on dry ground. Little did I know this flooded scene is their future.
In 1950 Rachel Carson wrote in The Sea Around Us:
We live in an age of rising seas. All along the coasts of the United States a continuing rise of sea level has been perceptible on the tide gauges of the Coast and Geodetic Survey since 1930.
66 years later the ocean has risen enough to create frequent, even daily, challenges for coastal communities. Nuisance floods that close streets and parks are the harbinger of things to come.
NOAA’s diagram shows why these floods have become more common. (Click on the image to see the larger diagram.)
In 1950, the elevation between the highest high tide and street level was many feet deep and provided headroom for a storm surge. By 2010, the sea had risen so much that the headroom was gone. In some places it takes only a slightly higher tide to flood the street. To make matters worse, climate change is accelerating the rise as heat expands the water and massive ice sheets melt into the sea.
Some places are especially threatened. Chesapeake Bay is rising faster than the open coast. At Annapolis, Maryland the water is rising 3.51mm/year with just 0.29 meters of headroom. In only 45 years they can expect daily floods at the city dock, shown above. Baltimore is not far behind.
With the sea already engulfing islands and lapping at their toes, Maryland is assessing coastal areas and making plans. As Baltimore Magazine writes, “The question really isn’t what will be lost anymore, but what we will decide to save.”
Sadly, Florida and North Carolina both experience frequent flooding but have forbidden state employees from talking about it. (Florida last year and North Carolina in 2012). They’re losing precious time.
Yes, the sea is rising. Time and tide wait for no man.
(photo of flooding at Annapolis city dock at the Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial, by Amy McGovern @ForsakenFotos, Creative Commons license via Flickr)
p.s. Read more about Maryland’s wet future and the expected loss of Blackwater NWR and Assateague Island in “The Sea Also Rises” in Baltimore Magazine. Click here for photos of nuisance flooding in Miami, Florida and North Carolina.
8 February 2016
Science Fun:
John English told me about this cool website that animates global weather, especially wind on water. The website is called earth, “a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers updated every three hours.”
Click on the screenshot above to see conditions in the eastern North Pacific. Before you do, here are some tips:
Follow this quick link to see the North Atlantic and Great Lakes map. There’s usually less excitement here but look north toward Greenland and you’ll see why the North Atlantic is a dangerous place to cross in winter.
And for a really tangled mess of wind click here to see the air flow between South America and Antarctica!
Visit “earth” on Facebook for more screenshots and videos of amazing storms. You don’t need a Facebook login; just click on the link.
BONUS: Here’s how to identify low and high pressure systems in the northern hemisphere based on the direction the winds are circling. Use the right-hand rule. Curl your fingers in the direction of the winds (B) and point your thumb. The air column (I) is moving in the direction of your thumb. Low pressure sucks the air column up; high pressure pushes it down. The orientation of this diagram would be a low pressure system in the northern hemisphere.
(screenshot of the earth wind map from earth.nullschool.net, right-hand rule illustration from Wikipedia)
Are you ready to count birds? Next weekend is the 2016 Great Backyard Bird Count: Friday through Monday, February 12 to 15.
It’s easy to participate in this citizen science project. Just watch your feeders or go out birding. Don’t forget to …
Download the instructions on the 2016 Great Backyard Bird Count or read more here.
Have fun!
p.s. Photographers, submit your photos to the GBBC Photo Contest to win one of these prizes.
(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
In this weirdly warm winter all the snow melted a week ago, the daffodil leaves poked out further, and we didn’t have to wear jackets. At 61o on January 31 it was 26 degrees above normal!
Though yesterday’s temperature was exactly on target, today will be 8 degrees above average. That’s not a huge difference but enough to maintain our early mud season.
We already had mud in our neighborhood ballpark when rain on Wednesday morning enhanced the creamy mudscape.
Off the beaten path at Schenley Park it was muddy too, though navigable.
Are the plants in your area waking up early? Put on your mud boots and go out to see.
(photos by Kate St. John)
February is the month when birds are at a low ebb in Pittsburgh and birders want to get out of town. Many of us think of Florida.
Whether or not you’re heading south you’ll enjoy this video of heron life at Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge. Filmed and narrated by Jo Alwood, it shows the reddish egret at his best — dancing his water ballet.
(YouTube video by Jo Alwood. Click here for her YouTube channel)
On Throw Back Thursday, I found this gem in the archives from 2009.
What do birds mean when they puff up or raise their head feathers? Imagine if we used the same signals.
Read more here about Body Language.
(photo of Dorothy, 2004, by Jack Rowley)
Looking back, 2015 was an emotional roller coaster for Cathedral of Learning peregrine fans. It began at a low ebb with Dorothy showing her age and ended with Hope for the future.
As promised, here’s the long awaited slideshow of 2015 Pitt Peregrine Highlights with a summary below:
Watch the slideshow of 2015 Pitt peregrine highlights below. Click on any photo to see the it full-screen.
(photo from May 24, 2015 at the National Aviary falconcam, University of Pittsburgh)
*NOTE: A healthy chick normally doesn’t fall on his back and if he does he’s able to right himself quickly. In reviewing the snapshots for this slideshow I discovered that Dorothy had been flipping the chick for weeks. She was so quick we hadn’t noticed.
When I wrote that yellow-headed caracaras pick ticks off of mammals Dr. Tony Bledsoe pointed out that, based on the similar behavior of an African bird, it’s possible the caracaras are also drinking the animals’ blood.
Ewww! What gives?
In Africa, there are birds called oxpeckers (two species in genus Buphagus: yellow-billed and red-billed) that also perch on mammals and eat ticks, lice, fleas, and biting flies found on the animals’ skin. Studies have shown that individual oxpeckers eat up to 100 engorged ticks or 13,000 nymphs per day. Quite a benefit to the animal!
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Engorged ticks contain tiny blood meals so it’s not a big leap that the oxpeckers sometimes to go directly to the blood source, pecking and plucking at an animal’s wounds. Despite this parasitic and perhaps painful behavior, many mammals tolerate the oxpeckers although elephants and some antelopes shoo them off when they land.
Yellow-headed caracaras are unrelated to oxpeckers but their tick-eating behavior extends to blood meals as well. The Handbook of the Birds of the World includes this remark about the caracara’s eating habits:
“Perches on cattle and Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) to pick off ticks; picks flesh from open wounds on backs of cattle, which often seem oddly indifferent to the process.”
It sounds gruesome but the benefits of having your own portable tick-remover apparently outweigh the occasional blood meal.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the original)
