Squirrel outside my 6th floor window, 4 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
8 May 2023
I live on the 6th floor of a high rise so I was startled to glance out the kitchen window last Thursday and see the back end of a squirrel. I know squirrels can climb but this one had to scale a brick wall, climbing more than 60 feet without the help of anything. No exterior fire escapes. No nearby trees. Nothing but bricks and window ledges.
The wall the squirrel had to climb, 5 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
When I saw him on my windowsill he was looking in the direction of a bird feeder more than 100 feet away on the building next door. City squirrels walk wires to cross the street so maybe he thought he’d find a wire connecting the buildings. No such thing.
He contemplated his exit. “How did I get here? How do I get back?”
Squirrel contemplates getting down from here, 4 May 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
He must have figured it out. He was gone the next time I looked.
I haven’t seen a bright red scarlet tanager yet this Spring but I think today’s the day.
Last night from the Rockies to the East Coast nearly a billion birds flew overhead in the continental U.S. According to BirdCast‘s map 886.4 million birds were in the air at 1:00am. The bright white and yellow portions of the map were especially intense.
This was the week the north wind blew and it rained until Friday. This week an American bittern and sora spent more than 7 days at pond-sized Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park. They were still there yesterday in sunshine.
After I saw the bittern in pouring rain last Friday the sora eluded me. On Sunday evening I drove to Schenley Park just before dusk and aaarrg! I left my binoculars at home! Too late to go get them I went down to the pond and hoped for a ‘naked eye’ sighting.
Soras (Porzana carolina) are in the rail family but aren’t nearly as “thin as a rail.” Instead they look plump but surprisingly small. They weigh as much as an American robin but have very short tails. Knowing what size to look for is key to finding one.
Standing silently at The Spot To See The Sora (birders’ pindrop) I watched the bird come out to feed at dusk among the reeds. Without binoculars he looked like this.
Lousy cellphone photo of a ‘naked eye’ a sora in Schenley Park, 30 April 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Before I left I heard the sora vocalizing after he’d walked back into the reeds. The Merlin app refused to identify him. (“That bird can’t be here so I’m not telling you it is.”) My Merlin recording is too muddy to post but this is what the sora sounded like:
After a cold wet week in Pittsburgh it’s hard to imagine being excited about rain but this little owl (Athene noctua) in Britain is loving it. (Yes, “little owl” is his common name.)
Redbud phenology on 4 May 1915 and 2017 (photo of herbarium specimens collected at Powers Run, O’Hara Twp, housed at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh)
The specimen on the left is just beginning to flower on 4 May 1915. The specimen on the right, collected 102 years later on 4 May 2017, is in full leaf with incipient seed pods.
It’s been six years since the 2017 specimen was collected and in that time climate change seems to have sped up. How are the redbuds affected this year? Did the cold wet weather slow them down? How big are the leaves? Are there seed pods yet?
Today’s the day to check the redbuds and see how much our crazy climate change weather has made a difference in 108 years.
p.s. On my trip to Enlow Fork on 26 April I noted that, surprisingly, there was no big change to blooming times of Enlow’s flowers this year.
(photo by Kate St. John taken at the We Are Nature exhibit at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in November 2017)
Wild parrots live in flocks and interact with each other all the time but pet parrots often have lonely isolated lives that lead to psychological problems and self-damaging behaviors. We know that video chats help people connect over long distances. Could parrot-to-parrot video chats enrich the pet birds’ lives? The answer “Yes!” was presented at the ACM SIGCHI conference last month.
A research team from Northeastern University, MIT and the University of Glasgow, who study the potential of technology to enrich the lives of pets and zoo animals, enlisted 18 pet parrots and their caregivers in a three-month-long study to connect the parrots to each other online. Even in such a short time the birds became so engaged that they and their caregivers did not want to stop when the study ended.
During the first two weeks, the parrots were taught to ring a bell and touch a screen image of another parrot so that their caregiver would start a video chat with the selected bird.
In the second phase, which lasted two months, the birds were given free reign to request and make calls whenever they wanted. The birds quickly developed favorite video-chat friends with whom they talked, sang and preened. “Parrots who made the most calls also received more calls, suggesting that the study helped the birds become more social. Their caretakers also reported improved bonding with their pets.” — Phys.org.
The results were quite exciting in some households.
“We saw some really encouraging results from the study. The parrots seemed to grasp that they were truly engaging with other birds onscreen and their behavior often mirrored what we would expect from real-life interactions between these types of birds. We saw birds learn to forage for the first time, and one caregiver reported that their bird flew for the first time after making a call,” said co-author Dr. Jennifer Cunha who is co-founder of Parrot Kindergarten, Inc. that helped to recruit and train the parrot caregivers for the study.
On a hike at Hays Woods last week with Jared Belsky of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy we saw odd holes on a bare spot of ground, each one surrounded by a dust cone shaped like a tiny volcano. I could tell they where probably made by insects but which ones?
Cellophane bee holes at Hays Woods, 24 April 2023. My foot is in the photo for scale (photo by Kate St. John)
Cellophane bees (Colletes inaequalis) are the first bees of spring, sometimes emerging while there’s still snow on the ground. They are members of the group called “plasterer bees” (Colletes sp.) described by Wikipedia below:
The genus Colletes (plasterer bees) is a large group of ground-nesting bees of the family Colletidae that occur primarily in the Northern Hemisphere. They tend to be solitary, but sometimes nest close together in aggregations. Species in the genus build cells in underground nests that are lined with a cellophane-like plastic secretion, a true polyester, earning them the nickname polyester bees.
As much as Morela stands at the scrape overnight at the Cathedral of Learning peregrine nest and as much as she crouches to lay an egg, nothing happens. This has been the case for more than for two weeks now. Every night is like this one on 27-28 April.
Ecco is solicitous. He bows with Morela several times a day, brings her food and probably mates with her though we don’t see it on camera. Ecco can tell that she’s egg-y but …
Morela’s problem is obviously physical. She may be egg bound but there’s no way to know. Whatever it is, it does not look life threatening at this moment(*).
So there are no eggs this year at the Pitt peregrine nest. I would love for Morela to prove me wrong but … Alas.
Meanwhile, if you’re starved for the sight of peregrine chicks on camera, check out these streaming cameras:
Wakefield Peregrines, UK: Chicks in the nest. This site is 5 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time (Pittsburgh).
(*) HISTORY AT THIS NEST SITE: In 2014 Dorothy was egg bound, looked very sick (photo at the link) and then passed the egg and was well enough to lay eggs the next year. As of this writing on 1 May, Morela does not look sick like Dorothy did.
American bittern at Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, 28 April 2023 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
Sunday 30 April 2023
Early Friday morning in pouring rain, Adrian Fenton was at Schenley Park looking for two soras reported the day before on eBird. Soras (Porzana carolina) are unusual in the City of Pittsburgh so it was worth the trip to look for them, but try as he might Adrian could not find any soras. Instead he found something much better.
At 7:29am I was writing Friday’s blog when I got Adrian’s Rare Bird Alert that there was an American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus) among the reeds at Panther Hollow Lake. This bird is rare indeed! I dropped everything, put on my rain gear, and drove 5 minutes to Schenley Park.
Upon arrival I caught up with Adrian and he showed me where the bittern was. Except that I could not see it at first. Its camouflage is so good that it took me a while to latch onto the bird. Thank you, Adrian, for your patience!
More birders arrived, some looking from above on Panther Hollow Bridge. Charity Kheshgi viewed from eye level, as I had, and captured some great images of this cryptic bird.
American bittern at Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, 28 April 2023 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)American bittern at Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, 28 April 2023 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
Charity noticed that the bittern made a vertical wiggle with its neck and took a video. You can hear the sound of red-winged blackbirds and the ka-thunk of cars overhead on the Panther Hollow Bridge in the background. The wiggle is typical American bittern behavior though I’m unable to find an explanation for it.
By the end of Friday, 29 people had reported the bittern in eBird(*) but many more than that stopped by for a look. Some of them missed it on Friday, including Steve Northrop who found a sora that hadn’t been seen all day! See his checklist with sora photo.
So Friday came full circle with a search for a sora that found a bittern and a search for a bittern that found a sora.
On Saturday the bittern and sora were still present with an ever changing crowd of birders, binoculars, cameras and scopes. The crowd did not disturb the birds as the best viewing was from (up the hill) gravel paths 40 feet from the nearest water. The bittern was visible for most of the day Saturday, but the sora remained elusive. Around 6:30pm both birds put in an appearance and Steve Northop was there to witness it. Ta Dah!
Look for one thing, find another.
UPDATE on Friday 5 May 2023: Both the bittern and sora were still present on Friday 5 May in bright sunshine. By that time they’d stayed in Schenley Park more than 7 days and had become celebrities. My estimate is that 200 people came to see them, many of us multiple times.
Large-flowered trillium, Enlow Fork, 26 April 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
29 April 2023
Tomorrow is the big Enlow Fork Extravaganza at State Gamelands 302 on the border of Washington and Greene Counties. Known for its wildflowers and birds, the site is called “Enlow Fork” because its defining feature is the creek that runs through it, the Enlow Fork of Wheeling Creek.
Though tomorrow’s weather looks like rain, my friend Barb Griffith and I had a nice day there on Wednesday April 26.
At Enlow Fork, 26 April 2023 (photo by Barb Griffith)
We saw 45 species of birds including First of Year gray catbird, Baltimore oriole and American redstarts (checklist is here). We were disappointed not to find any wood thrushes, scarlet tanagers or rose-breasted grosbeaks though we have seen them there in late April in years past.
Spring leafout at Enlow Fork was late compared to the City of Pittsburgh, even though Enlow is 40 miles south of town. The side-by-side photos below show leafout at Schenley Park and at Enlow Fork on virtually the same day. I didn’t expect our urban heat island to make that much difference.
Leafout comparison: Schenley Park 25 April, Enlow Fork 26 April 2023 (photos by Kate St. John)
Lack of leaves and much less deer browse made the wildflowers superb. Here are just a few of those we saw. As always, if I’ve misidentified any, please let me know.
