Outside My Window

Very soon all the trees will be bare in my neighborhood.  This is already the case north of Pittsburgh.

A week ago I visited the Clarion River in Jefferson County where I noticed all the trees were bare, even the oaks.  At the Allegheny Front last Sunday the leaves on the mountain had fallen but in the valley the oaks were russet, the tulip trees golden.  In the valley it was the final show and by now it’s probably over.

But the show isn’t over yet if there are non-native trees in your area.  Non-natives from northern locations are out of sync with our photo period so most of them still have leaves, some are still green. 

For instance, our native maples lost their leaves two weeks ago but Norway maples still retain yellow and even green leaves.  They’re responding to the amount of light they expect in Norway in October, which is about 10 hours per day.  Our days aren’t that short until early November so these non-natives still have leaves.  They’re on Norway time.

Eventually even the non-natives will catch up.  How will I know when all the leaves are gone?  When I don’t have to rake anymore.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

This morning the fog rose from the river and blanketed my neighborhood in frost. 

Above the fog the sky is clear, the sun shining.  Both fog and frost will be gone soon.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Tundra swans are on the move.

Last Sunday at the Allegheny Front we heard three flocks whoo-ing overhead before we saw them very high above us, heading southeast to the Chesapeake.  That night I heard another flock pass over my house though I couldn’t see them in the dark.  As their voices faded in the distance I heard a lone swan following them.  He had fallen behind.

Swans and geese fly in V formation because it cuts down on wind resistance.  The lead bird takes the brunt of the wind and expends the most energy.  The birds who follow fly just above the wing of the bird ahead of them and ride a cushion of air created by the previous bird’s wing.  Eventually the lead bird tires, falls back in the flock and lets another bird take the point position.  In this way the entire flock shares the burden and is able to fly further without becoming exhausted.

A lone bird gets no benefit from the V formation and, if he’s trying to rejoin the flock, he must fly faster than they do.  If they don’t slow down, how can he ever catch up?

Tundra swans travel in family groups and pause more often during fall migration so their young can regain energy and keep up with the flock.  Juvenile swans are especially vulnerable if they fall behind because they don’t know the migration route.  They learn it from their elders on their first trip south.   If a juvenile becomes separated from the flock, he’s lost.

It’s poignant to see a lone juvenile tundra swan in November.  When I do I always hope another flock will come along to take him in.

(photo by Steve Gosser)

(p.s.  How to recognize juvenile tundra swans:  In this picture there are three adults and four juveniles.  The adults have bright white heads, the juveniles have grey heads that gradually lighten to white on their necks.  Sometimes the juveniles have pink on their bills.)

The crows are back in town, raucous as ever!  Thousands flew over my house this morning.

I was planning to use this photo to blog about them when I showed it to my husband and we started to laugh.  These crows look so much like a gang that my husband started to quote the lyrics from the song When You’re A Jet from West Side Story.  He knows all these songs because his parents were really into Broadway musicals.  Soon he was inventing crow lyrics.  Soon he had written a crow version of the song.  And so was born…

South Side Story

Coal: Hey, Biff, getta load on what them filthy pigeons are doin’…

Biff:  Them?  With their stupid green heads and silly pink galoshes?  We’ve already laughed ‘em off the street…

Coal:  Oh yeah? Well they’ve moved into the parking lot down at the Giant Eagle.

Midnight:  Yeah, they’re takin’ over OUR dumpsters.

Sulfur:  [chiming in timidly] One of ‘em swiped a cheeto I had my dibs on…

Biff:  Well, don’t worry, we’ll take care of them – because we’re CROWS!

When you’re a Crow
You’re as black as the night.
You’re as sleek as cold steel
and you’re ready for flight.

When you’re a Crow
You are sure of respect.
You’ve got boys in your roost.
You’ve got cards in your deck.

          The Crows are in gear,
          our cylinders are clickin’.
          You Pigeons stay clear –
          cause once you’re in the pot
          you know you taste like chicken!   
   
When you’re a Crow
well, you’ve been to Crow school.
You can poke open bags.
You can even make tools.

You can steal a gold ring.
You can gang up on cats. 
You can count up to five.
You’re a bird and a half!

When you’re a Crow
You’re an Army of One
You make plans for the day
and your plans all get done.

          Here come the Crows,
          we are cruisin’ your way!
          We are takin’ the mirror
          from that new Chevrolet.
          We are climbing the curbs
          and we’re eating old meat.
          We are chasing the rats.
          We are claiming this street!
 
Once you’ve been marked
With a capital C
You’re the top-perching bird
any pole, any tree.

When you’re a Crow
You can chortle and caw
You don’t “sing,” man, you SHOUT
And your word is the law.

          You Pigeons watch out
          Cause we’re namin’ your name.
          We’re not takin’ crap,
          you are outta this game.

          You’ll be feeling our heat.
          You’ll be tasting our juice.
          So, get off of our wires…
          Cause
                 We
                        Rule
                                The Roost!

– by Richard St. John with a huge tip of the hat to Stephen Sondheim and West Side Story.  Here are the original lyrics.  Photo by Marcy Cunkelman.

Now that Halloween is over the holiday shopping season has officially begun.

If you’re like me you’re hard pressed for gift ideas for friends and family and you might, like me, have a hard time answering the question, “What do you want for Christmas?”

Fortunately I got a head start on this last summer when Robyn Martin of our ShopWQED department asked me to select nature-related books and gifts for the ShopWQED website.  She gave me a catalog to select from and urged me to suggest additional items that she could offer as well.

I circled my favorites, many of which I already own — I highly recommend Great Natural Areas of Western Pennsylvania and How Birds Migrate – and I added one of my favorite wildflower books.

Wildflowers of Pennsylvania by May Joy Haywood and Phyllis Testal Monk, is an illustrated guide to the wildflowers of the entire state.  Published in Pittsburgh in 2001, every flower is illustrated by a photograph contributed by members of the Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania.   Those of you who know Esther Allen will find many of her photos inside. 

I use Wildflowers of Pennsylvania as a resource when I blog about flowers and in the winter I browse through the photos and think about spring.  I’m glad we could offer this book online to a wider audience.

Take a look at the ShopWQED Nature section.  Maybe you’ll find some gift ideas.

p.s.  Click on the shopping bag above to see the entire website including Rick Sebak’s DVDs and Chris Fennimore’s cookbooks.

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If you’ve been watching this blog for a while, you know that one of Pittsburgh’s peregrine falcon “sons” has spent the past 11 months in rehab.  Now, at last, Pittsburgh Pete has a permanent home.  This is quite a victory for Pete, and for Judy Bailey who rescued him.

Pete (black/green 3/K) was born at the Gulf Tower in 2006 and nested successfully at the Burlington Lift Bridge in 2008 but he was seriously injured in a battle with a rival that June.  Pete seemed to recover on his own but was found grounded and unable to fly in November 2008.

Since then Pete has been in the care of Judy Bailey, pictured with him here.  Judy is an Animal Control Officer in Hamilton so she could nurse him back to health but is not licensed to keep him.  When it was determined last May that Pete’s seizures prevented him from being released into the wild, Judy had to find him a permanent home.  Otherwise he would die. 

Over the summer Mountsberg Raptor Centre in Campbellville, Ontario offered to take Pete as an educational bird if he could sit quietly on the glove and tolerate people near him in an educational setting.  Pete didn’t know these skills so Judy trained him.  Thanks to her hard work and Pete’s ability to learn, he went to his permanent home at the Raptor Centre in late October.  Mountsberg is excited to have him.

Hooray for Pete and a big thank you to Judy Bailey!  She really is Pete’s guardian angel.

For more information on Pittsburgh Pete’s injury and recovery, see my blogs on August 5, 2008, December 4, 2008 and August 14, 2009.

(photo from Judy Bailey)

Today’s the day for spooks and ghosts.  Its colors are black and orange, the black of night and witches’ hats, the orange of glowing embers and the harvest moon. 

Why aren’t our black-and-orange birds associated with Halloween?  Probably because Baltimore orioles, American redstarts and Blackburnian warblers are small and harmless and they’ve migrated out of North America by late October.  Instead the smart and crafty crows and ravens are symbols of this spooky holiday.  Black is in and the crows are in town.

For the color orange you can’t beat pumpkins.  Did you know that pumpkins are native to the Americas but they’re now grown around the world?  The major pumpkin-growing countries are the U.S., Mexico, India and China.  Pennsylvania is one of the top five pumpkin producing states so when I buy a pumpkin I’m “buying local.”

This Halloween we get a bonus.  We’ll turn our clocks back tonight and get an extra hour of sleep.  The bad news is that the sun will set at 5:07pm on Sunday and the black of night will descend upon us an hour earlier. 

Happy Halloween!

(photo by Chuck Tague)

Because I like birds, people often describe a bird they couldn’t identify and ask me if I can tell them what it was.  This week a request from my sister had me stumped for a while. 

My sister’s house overlooks a salt marsh in coastal Virginia.  From her back windows she can see a host of birds I never see at home:  bald eagles, osprey and great egrets, to name a few.  Mary isn’t a bird watcher but sometimes she sees something unusual and asks me what it is.  This week she wrote:  “A large bird – like a goose - I don’t know – has been hanging out at our marsh for the past 4 weeks by himself and he is all black except for under his tail or wing.  Mom and Dad saw it yesterday and didn’t know what it was either.”

Based on that description I sent her some photo links of brants and greater white-fronted geese.  She wrote back, “Nope isn’t that…I looked again with binoculars (wish they were stronger but they are not).  It has a long neck like a swan.  Black except white under its wings.  Beak is reddish.”

There are no black swans native to North America but they do exist in southern Australia.  I wouldn’t even know about them except that they’re sometimes imported to adorn man-made ponds and I’m familiar with a small flock at the water hazards of the Ponderosa Golf Course in Hookstown, PA.  Google and Wikimedia came up with this picture.  I sent it to my sister and she replied, “100% YES!”

What will happen to this bird?  Who can say?  He’s alone, imported from a remote place, and probably escaped from his former life as a pond ornament.  His large size protects him.  A salt marsh in southern Virginia where it rarely snows is probably just fine for the winter. 

And for me?  Another victory in Remote Bird Identification.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, in the public domain.  Click on the image to see the original)

There’s not much time left to prepare for winter, especially if you’re a chipmunk.

Eastern Chipmunks don’t hibernate and they don’t even fatten up in autumn like groundhogs.  Instead they stash a winter’s worth of food in their underground burrows where they live from late October to early March (in Pennsylvania) in periodic bouts of torpor.

Torpor is a short period of lowered body temperature and metabolism which conserves energy when it’s cold.  For chipmunks the length of torpor is highly variable.  They wake up throughout the winter to eat and even come out to forage if the weather’s nice.

Busy, busy, busy!  The chipmunks haven’t disappeared underground in the Pittsburgh area yet but their deadline is fast approaching.  To expedite their task they can pack up to 32 beech nuts in their cheeks before heading home.  Once there, they store the food in various chambers in their elaborate burrows which extend as much as 33 feet long and three feet below the surface.  Quite a palace.

I can imagine a chipmunk returning home at this time of year and inspecting the cupboard.  Do I have enough food yet?  Is the weather still good enough to go out and get more?  Is it time to stay home and sleep?

In the next week or two a cold front will come through, the weather will turn nasty and the chipmunks will pack it in.  Then we’ll have to wait for a sunny winter day to see them again.

(photo by Brian Herman)

What was this downy woodpecker doing before she got nervous about having her picture taken?  She was eating those whitish berries.

What are those whitish berries?  Poison ivy!

This fall there’s a good crop of poison ivy berries in western Pennsylvania and the birds are loving it.  I’ve seen large flocks of migrants hopping among the vines and eating the berries.  I’m always amazed they do this.  Touching poison ivy causes a nasty rash for most people.  Eating the berries would be devastating, even life threatening. 

I have heard that some people think you can desensitize yourself to poison ivy by eating small amounts and gradually increasing the dose.  Would you want to be the one to try? 

Now that the leaves have fallen it’s harder to recognize poison ivy so be careful not to collect these vines and berries for decorations.  Look, but don’t touch!

(photo by Chuck Tague)