SW carrying pigeon prey, Cleveland, Ohio in 2010 (photo by Chad+Chris Saladin)
13 December 2022
On Sunday at lunchtime I was reading at the kitchen table when my attention was suddenly drawn to an explosion of feathers outside my window. I had missed the hit (alas!!) but I saw a peregrine flapping away with its prize, heading toward the Cathedral of Learning. Even if I’d had a camera I would have missed the shot. It happened that fast!
Tall columnar arborvitae along an alley in Kutztown, PA, 27 Nov 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
12 December 2022
At Thanksgiving in Kutztown, PA I was stunned to see a solid wall of arborvitae bordering a neighborhood. In Pittsburgh’s East End, arborvitae is always bare from the ground to 4-5 five feet up, eaten by our overpopulated deer. Here’s a row of arborvitae at Schenley Park golf course.
Deer damage on arborvitae at Schenley Park golf course, 11 Dec 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Why didn’t deer browse the Kutztown trees? My guess is that they are the Green Giant variety of Western arborvitaes. Davey Tree explains:
Deer don’t care for Western arborvitaes, like green giant, steeplechase or spring grove. So, if you plant these, they may leave them alone.
Though, when deer are starving, they become less picky and will eat almost anything, including those deer-resistant arborvitaes. If deer are a big problem in your yard, avoid arborvitae altogether.
The internal spinning keeps the core in shape and allows it to continue traveling long after other bubbles have dispersed.
Dolphins and whales purposely produce bubble rings from their blow holes and play with them. They examine and prod the rings, roll them like wheels, speed them up, or nudge them until a smaller ring splits off. They will even bite or swallow the ring or swim through it if it’s large enough.
Divers familiar with the wild animals probably knew about this long ago. The rest of us saw it for the first time at aquariums. Here are some videos.
Video from 2008:
Video from 2010 at Sea World:
p.s. Though scientists have written about dolphins and bubble rings for at least 50 years, BBC Earth published a video only 8 months ago in which a scuba diver placed a bubble machine underwater and filmed the dolphins’ reactions. The narrated script says the dolphins are afraid of the manufactured bubbles and have to learn to be brave. Apparently, the producer was not aware dolphins already know about bubble rings, so why would they be afraid? Sigh. It’s a good example of why you cannot believe everything you hear on TV. Stay curious!
(photos and animation from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals. videos embedded from YouTube)
Rising moon reflected in the Monongahela River at Duck Hollow, 5 Dec 2022, 4:23pm (photo by Kate St. John)
10 December 2022
In December daylight is in short supply and the skies are often gray so clouds have a big effect on our mood in Pittsburgh. This week ranged from brilliantly sunny to thick overcast, from exhilarating to subdued (depressed?) depending on the variable clouds.
Above, on the miraculously clear afternoon of 5 December the moon rose over still water at Duck Hollow. Below, a line of clouds at sunrise painted the sky red on 2 December.
Sunrise in Pittsburgh, 2 Dec 2022, 7:16am (photo by Kate St. John)
The next day I was scouting for crows on Mt. Washington when crepuscular rays peeked through the clouds at sunset. Do you see the crows? They’re tiny black dots in the sky.
Crepuscular rays at sunset with crows in flight to Mt Washington’s “Saddle,” 3 Dec 2022, 4:42pm (photo by Kate St. John)
The clouds were so low on 6 December that fog engulfed the top of the Cathedral of Learning. Morela came down to Heinz Chapel’s scaffolding to look for birds in the nearby trees. Do you see her in the middle of the photo?
Peregrine on Heinz Chapel scaffolding, 6 Dec 2022, 12:39pm (photo by Kate St. John)
Last night’s clouds partially obscured the waning moon while moonlight made a colorful halo.
Moon halo, 9 Dec 2022, 7:57pm (photo by Kate St. John)
Today we’re back to overcast skies with 85% to 96% cloud cover for the next two days. Alas. No variation until Tuesday.
Back in 2015 I blogged about a Corvid called a red-billed chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) using the title Crows with Red Beaks? The chough (pronounced “chuff“) occurs on mountains and coastal cliffs from the west coasts of Ireland and Britain to southern Europe, North Africa, Central Asia, India and China. It is often found in the Himalayas but never seen in North, South, or Central America.
However, in the past seven years, 41 North American readers have commented that they have seen a chough in their neighborhood. Sometimes I reply with the unlikeliness of the sighting and in June 2018 I updated the article with suggestions on what they might have seen instead.
A wild chough in the Americas is such rare bird sighting that it would have made international birding news, like the sighting of a Steller’s sea eagle in Maine. Even so the chough sighting comments keep coming in, including two just last month. Still no news though.
Read the original posting and comments at the link below. What do you think they’ve seen? I’m stumped.
Sea level is rising overall about 3 millimeters (0.1 inches) per year due to climate change but Chesapeake Bay is rising even faster than the ocean — as much as 4.6 millimeters per year — because the area is still subsiding after the last Ice Age. Some Chesapeake Bay islands are disappearing.
NASA’s Landsat images of lower Chesapeake Bay from 1999 and 2019 show how much land has been lost in only 20 years. In 1999 there were white sand beaches on the island edges. By 2019 the beaches are gone and Great Fox Island in the center of the image has almost disappeared.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation used to hold in-residence educational programs on Great Fox (also called Fox Island) but in October 2019, with only 34 island acres left, they declared the end of the program. You can see why in the video below.
Just across the Virginia line (at the bottom of the satellite images) is Tangier Island whose land mass has shrunk 67% since the 1850s. Its population shrank as well. By now Tangier has only 345 acres and a population of about 470.
Residents are routinely flooded during the highest tides, pictured at top and below.
We humans used to think we were very special and very smart because we had language while other species did not. When we learned that other animals had language too our hubris diminished slightly but we still believed in our uniqueness: We were the only species that could think recursively.
In The Recursive Mind (Princeton University Press, 2011) Michael C. Corballis describes “a groundbreaking theory of what makes the human mind unique.”
The Recursive Mind challenges the commonly held notion that language is what makes us uniquely human. In this compelling book, Michael Corballis argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion: the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. “I think, therefore I am,” is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental “time travel”—the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness.
For instance, my sentences are often recursive. If you put parentheses around the complete embedded thoughts they can be thrown away without hurting the sentence. As in: “Our uniqueness suffered another blow last month when a study (published in Science Advances) revealed that crows can think recursively, too.”
The brackets make my head hurt. It’s easier to see in this diagram.
If you put brackets around the starting and ending “thoughts” you’ll see a pattern. The brackets fail in the non-recursive example.
According to Scientific American, after the crows were trained to peck bracket pairs, the researchers tested the birds’ ability to spontaneously generate recursive sequences on a new set of symbols. The birds were successful about 40 percent of the time, on par with 3 to 4 year olds in a 2020 study. The crows were better than monkeys who needed extra training to reach that level.
So another unique human trait is toppled by Corvids.
Crows gathering at dusk in Schenley Park, 21 Jan 2017 (photo by Mike Fialkovich)
5 December 2022
For the past several years I’ve counted Pittsburgh’s winter crow flock for the Christmas Bird Count. Some years I’ve counted as many as 20,000 but last year was a bust. Steady rain, fog, and the fact that the crows moved their roost just before the CBC meant I counted only 220. Aaarrg!
I will not be foiled again this year but I need your help. Where are the crows settling for the night? If you know where they are overnight or after sunset, leave a comment to let me know.
I say “overnight or after sunset” because crows make a big noisy deal out of gathering in large numbers on their way to the roost. Hundreds stage at the tops of trees and shout as more come in. When the sky darkens, they fall silent and leave. For where? That’s the question!
Last weekend I tried to find them. By 5:00pm on Saturday 3 December I was sure I’d found the roost by watching from Mt Washington at the Mon Incline (my vantage point is the pink V on the map below). Crows staged in the trees in The Saddle on Sycamore Street, then left for a tree-filled hillside near Kirkpatrick Street below Oak Hill, marked in yellow 12/3/22. I counted about 7,500.
Yesterday I went back to Mt. Washington, confident they’d do the same thing and I was wrong! They didn’t gather in the The Saddle; they didn’t roost at Kirkpatrick. Instead they gathered in the Hill District above Bigelow Boulevard. I could barely count 2,000. As I drove home I saw thousands over Bigelow Boulevard but couldn’t count while driving. Aaarrg! My guess at their location is marked in yellow 12/4/22.
Did they end up near Heinz Lofts along the Allegheny River or on Troy Hill as they did a few years ago? (See orange blocks and question mark.)
This year Claire Staples and I will count crows together for the CBC on 31 December but I fear the crows will foil us again.
Do you know where the crows are overnight or after sunset in Pittsburgh? If so, please leave a comment with your answer. (We will need this info especially during the week after Christmas.)
p.s. This weekend’s location change can probably be attributed to the weather. Strong west wind vs. weak southwest wind.
Sat 3 Dec 5pm: 43 degrees F. West wind gusting over 30 mph. Temperature falling.
Sun 4 Dec 5pm: 36 degrees F. SW wind at 6 mph. No wind chill.
(photo and map credits are in the captions; click on the captions to see the originals)
Dolphins are very intelligent and engage in many kinds of play. Robin Agarwal photographed their antics while on a pelagic tour in Monterey Bay on 30 November 2022. For instance …
The northern right whale dolphin (Lissodelphis borealis) in mid-leap, above, looks super sleek because he has no dorsal fin.
A Pacific white-sided dolphin, below, went way beyond mere jumping. He leapt, turned, and sometimes entered the water tail first. Somersaults!
Here’s a calmer view of this species (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) with a cape of bubbles from his spout.
Another favorite dolphin game is to ride the pressure wave at the front of a fast moving boat. Called “bow riding,” the bow wave pushes dolphins fast forward without any flapping on their part.
Dolphins like this game so much that they rushed toward the whale watch boat. Robin Agarwal says of this photo, “Pacific White-sided Dolphins and Northern Right Whale Dolphins stampeding towards the boat to bow ride – my favorite sight in the world.”
