Watering holes are places of abundant wildlife in Arizona’s Sonoran desert as captured on this trail cam in the borderlands. One of the night visitors is a ringtail (Bassariscus astutus), a member of the raccoon family, shown above. (There are two embedded videos below; please wait for them to refresh.)
Lots of other interesting critters visit this borderlands trail camera: coyote, coati, bear, gray fox, northern goshawk, ringtail, deer, Mexican spotted owl eating a bat, turkey vulture, Gould's turkey, and western spotted skunk, to name a few. https://t.co/KRYPVrxWd7pic.twitter.com/JKZ3FN29N6
When water crosses political boundaries animals cross, too, back and forth from Arizona to Mexico. But now the Border Wall makes most of that impossible.
Listen to Quitobaquito Springs flowing peacefully just feet from the U.S.-Mex border. This true desert oasis has provided life-giving water to endangered wildlife in the UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve spanning Arizona & Sonora, Mex, which is now severed by a border wall. pic.twitter.com/MWBjm0TeER
Acorns are complicated because oaks are extremely diverse. There are about 500 species in the Quercus genus (oaks) plus about 180 hybrids, all of them native to the Northern Hemisphere and Asia.
The best I can do in the field is divide them into the red oak or white oak group based on buds, bark and leaves. Knowing this, I balk at identifying acorns down to the species level. There is only so much room in my brain and I’m saving it for birds.
So with that in mind here are a few acorns I’ve found in Pittsburgh recently. What exact species are they? The only one I know for sure is the burr oak.
Pin oak acorns found on Devonshire St sidewalk (photo by Kate St. John) — see comments for IDBur oak acorn, Schenley Park, Oct 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)White oak acorn without its cap (photo by Kate St. John)Red oak acorns and a mix of fallen leaves, Sept 2020 (photo by Kate St. John)
Landslide by the Bridle Trail in Schenley Park, July 2019 (photo by Kate St. John)
12 December 2023
Spring is landslide season in Pittsburgh. Winter is a good time to get ready for it and there’s no time like the present. With climate change increasing Pittsburgh’s rainfall and downpours, our dissolve-in-water bedrock is getting wet faster.
This morning the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that, thanks to a $10 million federal grant, the City of Pittsburgh is about to begin two landslide mitigation projects along city streets on Mount Washington and is putting a third one out to bid.
Thankfully there is money, though not a lot of it, for municipalities to prevent landslides on our roads, but if you live above a landslide and you own the land that slid you’re out of luck. The slide eventually takes your house with it.
video embedded from KDKA, April 2022
Pittsburgh is especially prone to landslides because of our geology.
Two natural conditions occurring in western Pennsylvania are most responsible for landslide problems throughout the area. First, in many places the bedrock consists mainly of shales and claystones. The primary culprit is a thick, 40- to 60-foot rock layer called the Pittsburgh red beds.
[Red bed]rock rapidly falls apart in water and tends to lose strength with each seasonal freeze-thaw and wet-dry cycle. Water that collects in the rock has little chance to drain and subsequently helps make the slope unstable from the inside out.
The second naturally occurring condition responsible for landslides is western Pennsylvania’s landscape, which is dominated by steep hills and valleys.
[Hillside] soils normally are stiff but very prone to downhill movement. This movement normally is imperceptibly slow. During the spring, however, the soil often becomes very wet from thawing snow and spring rains and the creeping can accelerate into a full-blown landslide.
It is easy to find red bed outcrops on our hillsides. Here’s one in Schenley Park where there used to be topsoil but the red bed, formerly beneath the surface, eroded and left this tree on stilts.
Pittsburgh redbed rock eroded away from tree roots, Schenley Park (photo by Kate St. John, 2020)
A closer look at the red bed rock shows that it broke into tiny pieces — little crumbles — when it got wet. My foot is in the photo for scale.
Pittsburgh redbed rock crumbles into tiny pieces when wet (photo by Kate St. John, my boot shown for scale)
The location of these photos is marked on a Google topo map of Schenley Park below. Notice how steep the hillside is where the red bed is exposed. Uh oh!
Because of the prevalence of Pittsburgh red bed rock there are landslide problems throughout Allegheny County. Click here or on the map image below to see the details. Keep in mind that the colors red and orange are bad. The only safe color is yellow.
When you look at a starfish it is obvious that its body is arranged like the five spokes of a wheel. This is also true of its fellow enchinoderms sea urchins and sand dollars.
As larvae starfish are bilateral just like us, but when they grow up they change.
Most animals, including humans, have a distinct head end and tail end, with a line of symmetry running down the middle of their body dividing it into two mirror-image halves. Animals with this two-sided symmetry are called bilaterians.
Echinoderms, on the other hand, have five lines of symmetry radiating from a central point and no physically obvious head or tail. Yet they are closely related to animals like us and evolved from a bilaterian ancestor. Even their larvae are bilaterally symmetrical, later radically reorganizing their bodies as they metamorphose into adults.
… and were surprised to find that the the entire animal, from center to tips of the arms, expresses as “head” genes. There are no torso or limb genes. As Science Magazine put it, “Genetically speaking, starfish have no arms — only a head.“
The findings show that “the body of an echinoderm, at least in terms of the external body surface, is essentially a head walking about the seafloor on its lips”, says Thurston Lacalli at the University of Victoria in Canada.
When 20,000 crows come to Pittsburgh for the winter, they have to sleep somewhere and they inevitably make a mess. Why do they roost near us where the mess will get on our nerves? Why don’t they sleep in the woods? Let’s take a look the reasons crows choose one location over another when it’s time to sleep.
Crows have a few simple requirements for a roost and they all have to come together at the same place. Safety is a big one. Crows want:
Tall trees for roosting
Warmth when it’s cold
No great horned owls!
Safety in numbers
Night lights. Lots of them.
White noise at the roost
No harassment from humans
1. Tall trees for roosting: Crows prefer to roost at the very top of mature trees. They perch on the highest twigs that support their weight.
Crows coming to the roost, Pittsburgh, 2017 (photo by Sharon Leadbitter)
2. Warmth when it’s cold: When the weather is well below freezing trees are too exposed for a good night’s sleep so crows may choose rooftops instead. Cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside due to the urban heat island effect.
3. No great horned owls! Crows are terrified of great horned owls who can hunt them in the dark. They prefer places that great horned owls avoid.
Great horned owl (photo by Alan Wolf via Flickr, CC license)
4. Safety in numbers: Crows sleep in a crowd so that someone’s always awake to watch for owls. It also lowers the odds of an individual being eaten.
Crows asleep near Heinz Chapel by the light of the Supermoon, Dec 2017 (photo by Kate St. John)
5. Night lights. Lots of them: Crows like to sleep with the lights on. It’s easier to watch for owls when you can see them coming. There are no nightlights in the woods.
Crows in a tree on Thackeray Ave, Pittsburgh, 2011 (photo by Peter Bell)
6. White noise at the roost: In addition to night lights, crows want white noise at the roost(*), the sound of running water or traffic. This location along Fifth Avenue at the University of Pittsburgh combines all their requirements in one place. Except that the mess bothers humans.
Crows roosting along Fifth Avenue in the trees at Pitt, Dec 2017 (photo by Kate St. John)
7. No harassment from humans: The perfect roost is usually near humans but crows make an enormous mess that people have to clean up. When the crows wear out their welcome, people figure out ways to get them to leave. This includes loud abrupt noises such as clappers and bangers, flashing lights, and harassment by falconers’ birds.
Now that we know what crows want at a roost we can figure out where they’re likely to be. Convincing them to leave is much easier to do before they land. 😉
(*) p.s. Why do crows want white noise when they sleep? No one has explained it but I have a theory that great horned owls avoid white noise. Owls need to hear their prey when they’re hunting and white noise makes that impossible.
Sky reflected on Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, 8 Dec 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
9 December 2023
There were just hints of ice floating on Panther Hollow Lake yesterday morning when the water reflected blue sky and whispy clouds.
Yesterday was unusually beautiful after the tumult of hail and thunder during the Steelers game last Sunday 3 December. After the storm a double rainbow glowed in the east.
Double rainbow on 3 Dec 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
The pot of gold seemed to be on Morewood Avenue.
The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is at Morewood Avenue, 3 Dec 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
If you look closely in the double rainbow photo you can see crows flying just above the trees.
Crows have become less reliable in my neighborhood since they moved the roost about a month ago. When they came through after the storm I went out to see them, counted 3,000 and recorded a video.
Crows flying toward the roost at dusk, 3 December 2023, Shadyside, Pittsburgh (video by Kate St .John)
Only 3 WEEKS until Pittsburgh’s Christmas Bird (Crow!) Count. The crows are getting tricky. Keep me posted! Thanks to Carol S for reporting them at North Shore last night.
p.s. If the reflection in the top photo is puzzling, here’s another perspective.
Sky and bridge reflected in Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, 8 Dec 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
If you live in Central America you may find this bird on your front porch.
Happy Friday!
We hiked 12 miles along a muddy trail and then stood for five hours in the rain waiting for this magical bird to appear. I’m just kidding. Someone called my guide and said, “Hey, there is a resplendent quetzal on my front porch. Do you want to come see it!” Seriously. pic.twitter.com/p4U22Yfvhp
Songbird migration ended last month but there’s birding fun ahead in the coming weeks. Join Audubon’s 124rd annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC) from Dec 14, 2023 to January 5, 2024!
Visit one (or more) of the >2,500 count circles in North America. Each circle has its own compiler who coordinates the count for a single scheduled day within the 15-mile radius. No experience is necessary. The only prerequisite is that you must contact the circle compiler in advance to reserve your place.
Go birding outdoors or, if you live in a Count Circle, stay home and count birds at your feeder. Click here and enter your home address to find out what circle you’re in. (If you’re within a circle, click on the colored bird icon to see date, time and contact information.)
Buckeyes have always been one of my favorite objects because their skin is smooth and shiny fresh out of the husk, perfect to carry in my pocket like a worry stone.
In America, the native Aesculus are commonly called “buckeyes,” a name derived from the resemblance of the shiny seed to the eye of a deer [a buck’s eye]. In the Old World, they’re called “horse chestnuts”—a name that arose from the belief that the trees were closely related to edible chestnuts (Castanea species), and because the seeds were fed to horses as a medicinal treatment for chest complaints and worm diseases.
Let’s go backwards in the growing season from nut to husk, flower and leaf by examining buckeyes planted in Schenley Park more than 100 years ago.
The large nut pictured at top left is from a European horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) native to Albania, Bulgaria, mainland Greece and North Macedonia. Each husk contains one to three nuts. Sometimes they’re flat on one side. My favorites are the round ones.
They’re produced from the white flowers that have pink (already fertilized) highlights. Notice that each leaf has seven fat leaflets. The number and shape of the leaflets indicate this is a horsechestnut.
Horse chestnut flowers and leaves (photo by Kate St. John)
In winter horse chestnuts are easy to identify by their large, sticky end buds.
The yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava) is native to the Appalachians and Ohio Valley and is North America’s tallest buckeye tree at 70 feet. Planted as an ornamental in Schenley Park it can hybridize with its shorter cousin, the Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra), making identification difficult for non-botanists like me.
Yellow and Ohio buckeye nuts look a lot like horse chestnuts. Seeing the husk is a big help because yellow buckeye husks are smooth …
p.s. The small buckeye nut in the top photo is from the shrub-sized bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora), planted in Schenley Park near Panther Hollow Lake. Click here to learn more.
(*) Which Flowers? I could not tell whether the flower photo was yellow or Ohio buckeye. Mary Ann Pike suggests Ohio buckeye in this comment.
Back in early September I urged us all to start paying attention and Be Careful Out There! Deer in the Road. Deer were restless in the run-up to the rut and had started to move around. From late October through November they mindlessly crossed in front of traffic, but now in early December the bulk of the rut is over and soon (if not already) there are fewer deer in the road. We can almost relax our vigilance because …
Chasing each other: During the rut — October and November — bucks roam in search of mates and chase does on the move. Driven by hormones, all of them ignore vehicles in the heat of sexual pursuit.
After the rut deer calm down and return to their home range where they stay December to September. Home ranges in Pennsylvania’s forests are approximately 800 acres (a 1.2 mile radius) and in urban areas just 100-300 acres. Even if the range includes road crossing(s) deer are not chasing each other and they know about cars. Many now watch and wait for traffic. Females that pay attention to vehicles live to reproduce and teach their fawns to watch and wait (when it’s not the rut).
Never run from hunters: Some people say that deer run into traffic to get away from hunters but studies have shown that the animals use a completely different strategy. They never run to evade hunters. Instead they stay put and hide.
Since 2013 Penn State’s Deer-Forest Study has tagged and tracked more than 1,200 white-tailed deer around 100 square miles of Pennsylvania forest. In the process they’ve learned that successful deer, the ones that survive hunting seasons, actually know when hunting is about to start and search for a good hiding place in advance. Then each day before dawn (hunters cannot hunt until after dawn) deer go to their hiding places and wait quietly until the afternoon when the hunters have left the woods.
One tracked doe’s hiding spot was incredibly hard for people to reach and impossible to sneak up on. Read about a family’s visit to Hillside Doe’s Hiding Spot.
Watch Hillside Doe’s movements during hunting season. She didn’t have to cross roads to get there.
