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.
Lots of animals don’t sleep for long periods like we do but a new study has found a polar opposite in Antarctica (pun intended) where chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) take 10,000 4-second naps each day during the breeding season. In this way they accrue 11 hours of daily sleep.
For us, the micronaps would be a form of sleep torture since we cannot enter restorative deep sleep in such a short time. But the chinstrap penguins do.
Brain waves showed the penguins experience slow wave (deep) sleep during those micro-naps. They nap while incubating or guarding their chicks and even while floating on the ocean.
So now I’m looking at group photos of chinstrap penguins and, sure enough, in every photo some of the adults are sleeping. They’re getting their beauty rest 4 seconds at a time.
Gusto heads into a stoop, 9 Feb 2022 (photo by Chad+Chris Saladin)
3 December 2023
Peregrines are the fastest animal on earth when they dive at 200 mph to catch their prey in flight. In fact they dive even faster when they’re hunting an evasive bird. The higher speed increases turning force so they’re more accurate at catching prey.
In 2005 Ken Franklin went sky diving with a peregrine to clock its maximum freefall speed at 242 mph (389 km/hr). In 2018 scientists wanted to study the details of the peregrines’ dive, but it was too hard to do in real time, so they created 3D simulations of a stooping peregrine pursuing a European starling.
The simulations showed that optimal speed for catching a bird in straight flight is 93 mph but if the prey is zig-zagging in the sky the best speed is 225 mph.
You’d think that the higher attack speeds would make it more difficult for falcons to adjust to a moving target. But the opposite turned out to be true: The predators were more maneuverable at higher speeds because they could generate more turning force; only then were they able to outmaneuver the highly agile starlings. So stoops don’t just help falcons quickly overtake prey—they also help the predators change directions.
Sunrise seems to pierce Central Catholic’s steeple, 28 Nov 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
2 December 2023
Saturday blogs usually show what I’ve “Seen This Week” but I have only one worthy photo, shown above. For the rest I’ve chosen sights that are timely for the season and seen at some point.
This Wednesday the water was low in the Monongahela River at Duck Hollow, just as it is in this photo from Nov 2020. However the sky was not so blue and it was very cold!
Nine Mile Run outflow at Duck Hollow, 29 Nov 2020 (photo by Kate St. John)
Wednesday’s low was 21°F but today will warm to nearly 60°F. No frost today like the bit shown below from Nov 2021.
Frost on the grass, 4 Nov 2021 (photo by Kate St. John)
The trees are bare now and showing off their silhouettes. Here are three typical sights on the cusp of December.
Bare trees at dusk, Schenley Park, 15 Nov 2012 (photo by Kate St. John)
You can identify young American elm trees by their twig arrangement that look like fish skeletons.
Twigs on young American elms look like fish bones, 2 Dec 2012 (photo by Kate St. John)
Black locust trees are always gnarly but this one was made worse when it was trimmed away from the utility wires in 2012.
Black locust tree looks twisted after powerline cutback, 28 Jan 2012 (photo by Kate St. John)
In 2013 US Fish & Wildlife proposed an experiment: Kill 3,600 barred owls (Strix varia) in the Pacific Northwest to keep them away from their close relative, the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis). Barred owls had spent 100 years expanding westward to the Pacific coast where they became more successful than their habitat-constrained spotted cousins and even interbred with them. Though barred owls are native to North America and moved west on their own, USFW dubbed them “invasive” and proposed killing them wherever found near spotted owls.
Nationwide comments on the culling proposal were overwhelmingly negative but local comments were in favor. The experiment went forward and barred owls were killed according to plan. The final paper describes barred owl “removal”.
Barred owls detected in treatment areas were removed using 12-gauge shotguns and well-established field protocols (20, 22, 23). A total of 2,485 barred owls were removed from treatment segments of five different study areas during the experiment (Table 1). The mean number of barred owls removed per year was highly variable among study areas, ranging from a low of 15.8 barred owls per year in Green Diamond (GDR), to a high of 251.5 barred owls per year in the Oregon Coast Range (COA).
Interestingly at two of the five study sites — Hoopa-Willow Creek and Green Diamond, California — the killing of 494 barred owls made little to no difference for the spotted owls. Click here for the graph that shows this.
However, USFW declared the experiment a success and recently drafted a new “Barred Owl Management” proposal to continue killing barred owls and expand the project further in California. The draft is currently in its 60-day public comment period: November 17, 2023 – January 16, 2024 during which we are free to express our opinion.
Public Comments Processing; Attn: Docket No. FWS-R1-ES-2022-0074
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters, MS: PRB/3W
5275 Leesburg Pike
Falls Church, VA 22041–380
UPDATE on 1 APRIL 2024: This application has created an uproar. No fooling! see …
