2 September 2022
When we say that a bird has “moth-like flight” do we mean that its wings move like this? Check out Dr. Adrian Smith’s fifteen moths in slow motion flight.
1 wing flap from 15 moth species pic.twitter.com/GE9udTmTUv
— Adrian Smith (@DrAdrianSmith) August 25, 2022
p.s. Polyphemus moth species is shown above. Can you find it in the video?
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, tweet embedded from @DrAdrianSmith)
1 September 2022
There are more than 30,000 beetles in the Scarab family (Scarabaeidae), most of them active only at night.
The Glorious Scarab Beetle (Chrysina gloriosa) pictured at top was hiding underground when gardening unearthed it in its native US range of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.
Hidden gems include Beyer’s scarab which I saw in southeastern Arizona in 2015, described in this vintage article: Like a Jewel.
In the eastern US we have beautiful scarab beetles in our own backyards.
But we don’t think they’re beautiful because they eat our roses.
Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) are scarabs.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons, bugguide.net and Kate St. John, click on the captions to see the originals)
31 August 2022
Songbirds (Oscines) are the majority of the world’s birds as you can see circled on the supertree below. In August 2016 we found out that all of them originated in Australia. Here’s how it happened.
The world was a very different place during the Oligocene 35 million years ago. For one thing there was a big gap between Australia and Asia and songbirds’ ancestors could not leave Australia.
Then about 25 million years ago a land bridge formed when tectonic activity forced a patch of islands called Wallacea to the ocean’s surface. Wallacea, now part of Indonesia, bridged the gap and was the first step on the songbirds’ journey. (Ancient Wallacea in yellow below.)
They made the journey in flying steps, reaching the Western Hemisphere before Eurasia:
Like this…
Some songbirds were so successful that their DNA is found at each stop in living species across the world. Corvids are one such group.
Others, like waxwings (Bombycillidae), have few DNA traces to show the path they took. Waxwings’ living DNA relatives are found only in Wallacea, North America and northern Eurasia.
Learn more about songbirds’ amazing journey in these articles:
(blank world map from Wikimedia Commons. photo and remaining maps are credited in the captions, click on the links to see the originals)
30 August 2022
Northern mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) are special because they challenge our assumptions.
It was a wonder in 2014 when, after centuries of ornithologists saying that only male birds sing, Karan Odom at University of Maryland documented singing females. Most of the species live in the tropics but even back then 150 female-singing species were documented in North America.
After this breakthrough female singing became a hot study topic and more species were added to the list. Recent studies delve deeper. Do northern mockingbird females mimic like males? A study published this April found that they do.
Mockingbirds are also unusual because they sing in autumn when other birds are silent. They do it because they change location. Those that nest in the northern end of their range migrate south while others move locally (see animated eBird map). When mockingbirds “reappear” in September they are singing again to claim new territory.
Males and females look alike and they aren’t paired up in winter so we cannot tell which sex is singing. Nevertheless we can hear them. Here are some examples.
28 Sep 2021 in Cincinnati, Ohio:
7 Nov 2019 in Harlingen, TX:
I see mockingbirds in Pittsburgh in the winter. Are they local transplants or from further north? Are they male or female? I dunno.
(photos by Cris Hamilton and from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)
29 August 2022
A year ago in Schenley Park we had such a slow birding day that I wrote, “We worked for every bird.” A year later, nine of us were there yesterday and the birding was even slower! (14 species instead of 19.) However we found lots of insects and two white-tailed bucks in velvet. Here’s the story in pictures, thanks to Connie Gallagher.
Connie saw the very Best Bird, a blue-gray gnatcatcher.
We pondered the identity of these wasps and then remembered, all at once, that they are bald-faced hornets (Dolichovespula maculata), a type of yellowjacket wasp.
There was still dew on the wild senna as this bumblebee gathered nectar.
The browseline is so severe in Schenley Park that there’s no cover for the deer who sleep there during the day. Looking down from the Falloon Trail we saw two bucks, a 7-point buck (at top) and a 10-point below.
Fortunately some of us heard these birds flying overhead. I can tell their identity by shape and the yellow tips of their tails. Cedar waxwings.
Here’s the group that worked for every bird on Sunday. Thank you all for coming!
See our checklist at https://ebird.org/checklist/S117700393 and printed below.
Schenley Park–Panther Hollow, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, US
Aug 28, 2022 8:30 AM – 10:30 AM, 1.5 mile(s), 14 species
Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) 5
Chimney Swift (Chaetura pelagica) 4
Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) 1
Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) 2
Downy Woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens) 1
Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus) 1
Eastern Wood-Pewee (Contopus virens) 1
Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) 7
Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (Polioptila caerulea) 1 Seen by Connie
American Robin (Turdus migratorius) 1
Cedar Waxwing (Bombycilla cedrorum) 5
American Goldfinch (Spinus tristis) 3
Common Grackle (Quiscalus quiscula) 1
Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) 3 Including a bald female Cardinal
(photos by Connie Gallagher (group photo by Kate St. John))
28 August 2022
I had never seen the word “synanthrope” until I found it attached to this photo.
House sparrows are synanthropes. So are pigeons.
A synanthrope (syn-anthrope) [from Greek: syn-anthrope: syn=”together with” + anthropos=”man”] is a wild animal or plant that lives near, and benefits from, an association with humans and the somewhat artificial habitats that people create around themselves.
— Wikipedia: Synanthrope
We can be forgiven for not knowing this little-used word since its present meaning is only 74 years old(*).
Synanthropes live with us but we often disparage them. They are wild but too familiar, too “tame,” too weedy. Here are some more examples.
The house mouse (Mus musculus)
Dandelions (Taraxacum sp.)
Horseweed (Erigeron canadensis) and pilewort (Erechtites hieraciifolius) are native North American plants that like disturbed soil. We notice them in August when they start to look ugly.
Two local mammals may be recent synanthropes, formerly shunning humans but now benefiting from our habitat.
Squirrels love our birdseed and shelter (attics).
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) prefer forest edges next to open areas, a landscape often created by humans. Have deer become synanthropes?
p.s. (*) Merriam-Webster explains that the word was introduced by botanist Theodor von Heldreich at a botanical conference in Paris, 16-24 August 1878, making its first-ever use almost exactly 144 years ago.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons and Kate St. John)
27 August 2022
This week’s weather put on a sky show.
Clouds…
Lightning and lots of it! Dave Dicello captured a split lightning bolt simultaneously hitting BNY Mellon and the east end of Duquesne University (more than 1/2 mile away) on Sunday morning 21 August. Click here for his latest sky/panorama photos or here for his website.
This lightning strike in #Pittsburgh was one of the closest I’ve ever captured, and certainly one of the clearest and most dramatic. This isn’t a composite; all these bolts happened within a fraction of a second, creating a terrifyingly beautiful scene. A new all time favorite. pic.twitter.com/IlYp9jNbW2
— Dave DiCello (@DaveDiCello) August 21, 2022
Anticrepuscular rays… are relatively rare and appear opposite the sun at sunrise or sunset. Caused by the backscattering of atmospheric light, the rays we saw on 23 August spanned the sky. I took a photo from my window but it pales in comparison to Dave DiCello’s (@DaveDiCello) from a different vantage point. His tweet and video are shared below my photo.
What a sunset in #Pittsburgh tonight. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. I’ve captured anti-crepuscular rays before, but never ones that stretched across the entire sky. And then the color as the sun was going down? Absolutely absurd. This has been a CRAZY 48 hours of weather. pic.twitter.com/IeU6WdF5it
— Dave DiCello (@DaveDiCello) August 23, 2022
This is one of the wildest skies I’ve ever seen over #pittsburgh. Anti-crepuscular rays are shooting across the entire sky. Completely insane to capture. pic.twitter.com/Iitzv98fEL
— Dave DiCello (@DaveDiCello) August 23, 2022
The Moon and Venus rise together… my unprofessional cellphone photo on 25 August. Through a window but you get the idea.
(photos by Kate St. John, shared tweets by Dave DiCello)
26 August 2022
Do you see the cougar’s shadow pouncing down from above?
This shadow on the Superstition Mountains, Apache Junction, AZ, the cougar, only appears twice a year for approximately a week just as the sun is setting. pic.twitter.com/yJH5LW9Uhz
— jonathan slater?? (@joslater37) August 23, 2022
25 August 2022
Since moving to the 6th floor of a high-rise two years ago we have had no indoor bugs at all. Then, about a week ago, two extremely small bugs with waists and knobbed antennae showed up on the kitchen floor, standing there just outside the bottom of the stove.
They are not interested in water or sweets but only rarely attracted to a very tiny bit of grain or seed. They never fly. They just walk slowly — so slowly that it’s easy to catch one and put it in a ziploc bag (shown below).
Finding two bugs was a curiosity but a week later finding 20 bugs every morning felt like a problem. I checked inside my food cupboards — no bugs at all — and gave my bug-ziploc to building maintenance who is checking for bugs in adjacent units. I’m not to spray in case there will be a multi-floor solution in the days ahead.
Meanwhile Nature’s solution to tiny bugs ran right up to me.
This morning a house centipede (Scutigera coleoptrata), a top predator of insects, ran toward me across the carpet. I screamed! Then I remembered he would eat those little bugs if I could just catch him alive and carry him to the kitchen.
Catching a centipede on the spur of the moment is very tricky. (They run fast!) I fashioned a piece of paper to enclose him and got him to run onto the paper but time after time he ran out the corners of the trap. Finally I enclosed him, carried him to the kitchen, and let him loose below the stove.
A top predator has been moved into position under the stove. I can hardly wait for the house centipede to eat those mystery bugs!
Learn more about house centipedes in this vintage article.
p.s. No, I did not add a centipede. I just moved one about 20 feet.
And I am wondering… Are the mystery bugs actually sawtoothed grain beetles (Oryzaephilus surinamensis)? If so they arrived in someone’s groceries.
(photos by Kate St. John and from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
24 August 2022
With the breeding season over and their youngsters dispersed the Cathedral of Learning peregrines stay on territory, molt a few more feathers, and quietly preen in the sun. Morela and Ecco have no pressing need to court each other but they strengthen their pair bond by bowing at the nest a couple of times a week.
The bowing session on Sunday 21 August was longer than usual. Watch them in the slideshow above.
(photos from the National Aviary snapshot camera at Univ of Pittsburgh)
