Egrets and herons are known for standing completely still and waiting for a fish or frog to swim toward them until they stab and grab it from the water.
Reddish egrets (Egretta rufescens) seem manic by comparison, “dancing” so much that they look crazy. Their hunting techniques include:
Foot wiggle
Umbrella wings
Stab the water
Prance and dance
Hover-fly with dragging legs
Watch for these antics below.
This immature bird’s umbrella wings look like a victory pose:
On Monday 6 March 2023, Fran Bungert sent me an email to say that she saw snow trillium blooming at Cedar Creek Park the day before. She added that 5 March is the earliest she’s ever seen it bloom.
In my experience snow trillium (Trillium nivale) is usually the earliest spring ephemeral in southwestern Pennsylvania, traditionally blooming in late March or early April. The flowers persist for about four weeks so my observations circled below are not necessarily first bloom date. Nonetheless Fran’s 5 March observation in red is the earliest ever!
Inspired to see the flowers I visited Cedar Creek on Tuesday afternoon. Before I reached the snow trillium hillside, I found evidence of flash floods that cut the creek bank. It was a brown landscape compared to what I see in April.
Cedar Creek and streamside trail, 7 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Snow trillium dotted the hillside but blended into the fallen leaves because the white flowers looked like splashes of sunshine. How many flowers do you see in this photo?
The flowers were at various stages from barely to fully open, at top.
Snow trillium at Cedar Creek, 7 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
I found harbinger of spring (Erigenia bulbosa) leaves but no flowers.
As of 7 March only the snow trillium was blooming at Cedar Creek.
(photos by Kate St. John)
p.s. For my own notes, here’s a list of blogs that indicate when I saw snow trillium:
Large-flowered Trillium, Barking Slopes, blooming on 25 March 2012 (photo by Kate St. John)
8 March 2023
North American wildflowers face many threats to their existence including habitat loss, deer overpopulation and pollinator declines but there is another threat we didn’t see coming until now. As the climate heats up North American spring ephemerals will have no time to bloom and store food for the coming summer. Their existence is threatened by the Too Early Springs of climate change.
Forest wildflowers bloom before the trees leaf out because they are in a race to gather as much sunshine as possible before the canopy closes. When the trees reach Full Leaf the flowers stop blooming.
Wildflowers in deciduous forests often rely on leafing out before the canopy to create 50-100% of their annual carbon budget. Lead author and Carnegie Museum of Natural History postdoctoral research associate Dr. Benjamin Lee describes it “as if a person were to eat all the calories they needed for a year in the first three weeks.”
Ideally, wildflowers would merely advance their blooming schedules and all would be well but the study published last December in Nature Communications shows otherwise. Using herbarium specimens in North America, Europe and Asia, researchers compared wildflower blooming times and tree leaf out dates for the three continents.
Blooming early works in Europe and Asia because those trees leaf out later anyway. But in North America the trees and flowers use the same temperature trigger. We had a real life example of this in Pittsburgh in March 2012 when temperatures stayed in the 60s to 70s for at least two weeks. In that Too Early Spring everything happened at once.
I visited Barking Slopes on 25 March 2012 and I found both early and late spring wildflowers in bloom: Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) which normally blooms in late March or early April and large-flowered bellwort (Uvularia grandiflora) which normally blooms in late April.
Bloodroot and bellwort both blooming at Barking Slopes, 25 March 2012 (photos by Kate St. John)
The trees were leafing out, too.
Leaf out on 25 March 2012 at Barking Slopes (photo by Kate St. John)
June weather in March? What could go wrong?
Fewer spring wildflowers in the future.
Read more about the Too Early Spring of 2012 below. Will it happen this year? Only time will tell.
Morela looks up as Ecco brings a snack, 6 March 2023 (photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh)
7 March 2023
This month Morela has been staying close to the Cathedral of Learning peregrine nest as her egg laying time approaches. Yesterday afternoon she was snoozing on the green perch when she saw or heard Ecco’s approach.
“Do you want a snack?”
“Yes!” And then lots of chatter as they discuss it.
In the middle of the video Morela jumps to the roof while Ecco is still off camera in the keyhole. We can’t see either bird because the streaming cam view is so close, but you can see the shadow of Morela’s tail.
Morela is on the nestbox roof, 6 March 2023 (photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh)
And you can see Morela’s toes on the nestbox roof in the snapshot camera view.
Morela’s toes are showing as she perches on the nestbox roof, 6 March 2023 (photo from the National Aviary snapshot cam at Univ of Pittsburgh)
At last Ecco presents the snack. It looks like he ate most of it already.
Ecco brings a snack for Morela, 6 March 2023 (photo from the National Aviary falconcam at Univ of Pittsburgh)
Honeysuckle leaf out 23 days apart, 2015 vs 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
6 March 2023
This winter has been so warm in Pittsburgh that flowers bloomed and plants leafed out in February. Spring is early, but how early?
Some years I photograph bush honeysuckle’s early leaves and I can tell you that leaf out this spring is 23 days earlier than in 2015. But that’s only one year.
The darkest red indicates 20+ days ahead of schedule. USAnpn called out a few examples in their 27 February report:
[As of 27 February 2023] Oklahoma City, OK is 9 days early, St. Louis, MO is 16 days early, and New York City is 32 days early. Phoenix, AZ is a week late. Seattle, WA is a week early.
How often does this anomaly happen? The darkest green on the map below shows that this is the earliest spring ever recorded in New York City while purple indicates the latest spring ever seen in southeastern Arizona.
Mike lives in Saskatoon, Canada where beavers (Castor canadensis) are more common than they are in Pittsburgh. Mike photographed seven at once last spring.
His persistence pays off. Watch this beaver eat a tree (3 minutes).
He also documents their behavior. For instance, how long does it take a beaver to break into an unfastened tree fence? See below.
Persistence pays off! ?? Whoever wrapped this tree forgot to fasten the edges together. Spud found the seam and worked her way in, and eventually left with the yummy tree inside. #beavers#funnyanimalspic.twitter.com/tR6XHjgeXW
— Mike’s Photos and Videos of Beavers (@MDigout99) March 2, 2023
Flowering cherry, Pittsburgh, 1 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
4 March 2023
This week the weather stayed above freezing with an extraordinary high of 72F on 1 March. The plants and trees responded by bursting into bloom and leaf. Pictured here are:
A flowering cherry tree in Shadyside, 1 March
Coltsfoot in bloom at Moraine State Park, 1 March
Hairy bittercress blooming in Shadyside, 2 March
London plane tree seed balls disintegrating (a spring thing), 27 Feb
Coltsfoot blooming, Moraine State Park, 1 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Hairy bittercress blooming, 2 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)London plane tree seed ball disintegrating, 27 Feb 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)Honeysuckle leafing out, 2 March 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Now that the plants are waking up for spring Pittsburgh’s deer (over)population is finding more to eat. In front of Phipps’ Botany Hall I found a side-by-side example of yews, a favorite deer winter food, protected and unprotected from deer browse. One bush has no protection, the rest were wrapped in plastic fencing(*). You can already see the difference.
(photos by Kate St. John)
(*) The protected yews were wrapped on 15 December 2022 so, at the time of the photo, the unprotected yew was showing 10.5 weeks of deer browsing.
This morning we may be two weeks away from the first Pitt peregrine egg of 2023. Morela’s first egg in 2021 was March 17, last year it was March 18. But who knows? She could be early or late this year.
Yesterday the pair had three bowing sessions at the nest. The first was brief and initiated by Ecco. The second was longer and Morela stuck around to dig the scrape. The third was unusual: Morela spent the entire time on the nestbox roof while Ecco bowed below. Did you see her yell at him from the roof? Check out this photo.
When the pair is not together one of them may be on the green perch, stepping in a sideways sashay. (This sashay video repeats the steps for emphasis.)
While you watch the falconcam get some practice identifying the birds with the two-photo slideshow at top. Notice that Ecco is small, has brighter-white and darker-gray feathers (more contrast), and has bright orange skin on this face and legs. Morela’s feathers are duller with less contrast, she’s bigger, and she has a peachy chest.
It’s spring and our local pigeons (Columba livia) are prancing in courtship. The males bow and coo to their chosen mates and accompany their ladies in flight. When their courtship is successful the males clap their wings.
You can hear cooing and wing clapping in this audio clip …
While traveling in Ecuador last month I saw balsa trees growing in the wild and learned that Ecuador supplies 95% of the world’s commercial balsa wood. The driving force behind these exports is an environmental paradox.
Balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) is a pioneer tree of tropical forest clearings, native to Central and South America. It is so fast growing that it can grow 6-9 feet a year and reach full height of about 100 feet in only 10-15 years. The trees are short-lived, lasting only 30-40 years.
Inside the living wood the cells are large, thin-walled and full of water so that the tree stands upright. When cut and kiln dried the wood is very lightweight and sturdy.
In the wild balsa trees are widely spaced at about one tree per acre (2-3/hectare) but to meet commercial demand balsa is grown in plantations containing 400 trees/acre (1000/hectare). Plantation trees are cut at 6-10 years old because much of the wood in older trees — the core and outer layers — is commercially useless.
Ecuadorans made ocean-going rafts of balsa logs long before the Spanish arrived in the 1500s and it is still used for rafts today. (Balsa is the Spanish word for raft.)
But none of these uses are the driving force behind increased Ecuadoran balsa exports.
Balsa wood is a component in wind turbine blades. According to GE which manufactures wind turbine blades at Castellon, “Workers make the blades from fiberglass fabric and balsa wood. Then, the blade is covered with an airtight foil and the team installs a network of tubes that pumps in and distributes the resin that will hold it together.”
Plantations provide 60% of Ecuador’s balsa wood but the remaining 40% is coming from wild trees in the rainforest. Using satellite images and on-the-ground followup Mongabay and Global Forest Watch have documented deforestation in Ecuador, especially east of the Andes in the Amazon watershed. According to Mongabay:
The Pastaza River Basin is one of the areas most affected by the balsa industry. There, the Pastaza, Bobonaza, Curaray, Villano, Copataza and other rivers are used as logging access routes, with satellite imagery showing their banks increasingly pockmarked by deforestation. Sources tell Mongabay Latam that the logging has been so intense that balsa has been completely removed from some areas.
…[And now] loggers are starting to harvest other timber species in areas that have been denuded of balsa.
“The same loggers and traders that one year ago arrived from [the cities of] Quevedo, Esmeraldas or Guayaquil are now arriving to look at what else is there,” Páez said.
“There is an ongoing process of deforestation of valuable tree species in Indigenous territories” with no monitoring by the authorities, she added.
The deforestation shows up as pink dots in Global Forest Watch’s map, below left. Are these places where birders go? The eBird map of Ecuador hotspots at right is red at sites where birders reported more than 500 species. There seems to be overlap south and east of Quito.
NOTE about the eBird map: eBird maps show where birders have found birds and reported them on eBird. The blank spots on the Ecuador map do not indicate an absence of birds but instead an absence of birders or an absence of Internet access.
(photo and map credits are in each caption; click on the captions to see the originals)
