Outside My Window

Another book!

For birders, pigeons are on the borderline between wild and tame, pests and pets.  They willingly live off our food scraps yet we vaguely feel there’s something wrong with this even though we feed backyard birds. 

Now there’s a book that tells us how pigeons got to where they are today and what special traits this has given them.  Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World’s Most Revered and Reviled Bird, by Andrew D. Blechman.

The saga began when humans domesticated the rock pigeon over 5,000 years ago.  Since then we have widely divergent relationships with these birds: from pigeon fanciers to pigeon shooters, protectors to poisoners, pigeon racers to compulsive pigeon feeders.  Blechman’s book delves into it all.

He also describes how:
•  Pigeons are naturally even tempered.  They do not bite or attack.  This made them easy to domesticate and it’s why them seem tame.
•  Racing pigeons fly non-stop more than 500 miles at more than 60 miles per hour.  This is even more amazing when you consider they are trucked to the starting point – a place they have never seen – and within minutes they figure out where they are and where home is.  Then they fly home immediately without stopping for food or water.
•  Pigeon hating is a relatively new sentiment, promoted by “bird control companies.”  For instance, if you use Google to search for this book online, the advertising links are all pigeon control companies.
•  A 100% guaranteed, permanent pigeon control method was invented in Europe and, amazingly, involves providing them with nests.  

After you read this book you won’t think the same old way about pigeons any more.

I’m going to take a brief side trip today and discuss plants and a very cool project you can participate in.

Last Saturday I listened to the radio show Living on Earth.  Here in Pittsburgh it’s broadcast at 6:00am on Saturdays on WDUQ so you have to be up early to hear it. 

The segment that intrigued me was about Project Budburst in which volunteers help scientists track climate change by reporting when plants bloom or leaf out. 

All you need to do is sign up online here.  Then, just record when a plant blooms or leafs out and where it was when you saw it.  Project Budburst does the rest.  They collect the data and correlate species, blooming time and location to chart the effects of climate change.

The project is interested in all kinds of plants.  The plants don’t even have to be native species.  You can report on lilacs, forsythia, dandelions and common weeds in your back yard.  Now, that’s easy!  Even I can do that!

I know that many of you spend time outdoors and in your garden.   Even if you only report once, it will improve the data. 

Read more about the project - and the science of phenology - at the links above.  Or click on the columbine picture from the Project Budburst website and it’ll take you right there.

This bird blog is hosted at WQED, Pittsburgh’s public television station.  

And it wouldn’t be public television without a historical costume drama.

Today I noticed the European starlings are changing into their sleek spring costumes.

To show you what I mean, I’ve put two of Chuck Tague’s pictures side by side.  On the left is a starling in non-breeding plumage.  His feathers look very speckled and his beak is dull gray-brown.  On the right is a starling in spring breeding plumage.  The speckled tips on his breast and head feathers have worn off so he looks glossy black-green - almost oily - and his beak is yellow. 

Now, for the history and drama.

Starlings are called “European” for good reason.  They didn’t live in North America until 1890 when a Shakespeare fan, Eugene Scheifflin, released 100 of them in New York’s Central Park because he wanted every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to live in the United States.  Starlings made only one appearance in Shakespeare and that was because they are mimics. 

Starlings can mimic many sounds including the calls of other birds.  In the wild they sound like this, but people can keep them as pets and teach them to say many things.     See Techno’s video.

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, Hotspur is angry at the king and says to Worcester, 
“He said he would not ransom Mortimer,
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer,
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll holloa “Mortimer.”
Nay;
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.”

Today our starling population ranges from Alaska to Mexico and is estimated at 200 million. 

200 million!  That’s a lot more “copies” circulating in North America than you’re likely to find of Henry IV, Part I.

When the weather is cold and miserable I stay indoors and read more.  In winter I am especially drawn to beautiful bird books because I want to see birds, not just read about them. 

This winter I can’t say enough about a beautiful book I got last month:  BIRD The Definitive Visual Guide, Audubon, DK Publishing, 2007.

It’s a gorgeous book, full of photos illustrating bird anatomy, bird habitat and over 1,400 species from around the world. 

Every page is beautifully done.  The layout is gorgeous and the contents are a fireside birders dream with informative species accounts, range maps, species size, habitat and migration.  And it includes a CD of 60 species’ songs and calls. 

I open BIRD at random for the “wow effect” and am never disappointed. 

It’s even beautiful when it’s closed.  The margins are printed with flock, jungle and feather patterns so the edges look marbled.

If you’re looking for something to do indoors, take a look at this book.

Read another review on the BirdFreak blog.  If you want to buy it, I suggest Amazon where the price is discounted. 

An animal-lover friend of mine began to feed the birds and was shocked when a coopers hawk killed a mourning dove at her feeder.  She does not eat meat and wanted to know if she could train the coopers not to eat meat either.  “If I put out more corn, will he eat the corn and not the doves?”

“No,” I said, “he will not eat corn.  He’s a carnivore.  That’s just how it is.”

Because humans are omnivores and we grow our own food, we find it hard to imagine the lives of creatures who must hunt to live.  If a coopers hawk is not an efficient hunter, if it does not kill birds, it will die.  It would be cruel to the hawk if it could not hunt. 

But what about the prey species?  Is it cruel to them that they are hunted? 

There is a beautiful poem by James Dickey in which he describes the heaven where wild animals go.  Called The Heaven of Animals he describes the predators in their heaven crouched on the limbs of trees and writes,

“And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.”

The universe is structured so that everything is eaten by something - in the grave, if not before. What an amazing cycle.

That’s just how it is.

In the evening the crows now flock to Oakland and roost around WQED.  Everyone notices them and asks me what the crows are doing. 

Expert answers, by Dr. Kevin J. McGowan of Cornell University, can be found here.  Please do click on the link and read about it.  It’s fascinating!

My answers - totally non-expert - are best expressed by my favorite poem that describes what these entertaining black birds are up to: 

Crows  by Doug Anderson, from Blues for Unemployed Secret Police Curbstone Press ©2000.  Reprinted by permission, http://www.curbstone.org/.

Crows

Hunch in the trees
to gossip
about God and his inexorable
experimenting,
about deer guts and fish so stupid
you could sell them air
and how out in the deserts
there’s a dog called coyote
with their mind
but no wings.
Crow with Iroquois hair.
Crow with a wisecrack
for everybody,
Crow with his beak
thrust through a bun,
the paper still clinging.
Then one says something
and they all leave,
complaining
the trees are not
what they used to be.
Crow with oilslick eyes.
Crow with a knife
sheathed in a shark’s fin.
Crow
in a midnight blue suit
standing in front of a judge:
Your Honor, I didn’t
kill him,
just ate him
and I wasn’t impressed.
Crows
clustered in the bruise light
in the bottoms
of dreams.
Crows in the red maple.
Crows keeping disrespect
respectable.
Crows teasing a stalking cat,
lifting off at the last minute,
snow shagging down
from their wings.
Crows darkening the sky,
making fun of the geese
on their way to Florida.
Crows in the roses,
beaks and thorns.
Crows feeding lizards
to their brood.
Crows lifting off road kill,
floating back down
after the car has passed.
Crow with a possum eye
speared on its beak.
Crow with a French fry.
Crows
in the chicken cages
on their way to market,
the farmer finally gone mad.
Crows hunkered down
rumpling feathers,
announcing the cataract
of snow
over the sun.
The crows prosper.
Carrion is everywhere.
The night
that is coming
is so dark
it will feel
like fur on the eyes.
So dark suddenly
you cannot see the snow.
Thrust your hand in it.
Hear it like sand
blowing on the roof.
A crow shifts his foot
and snow sifts
down from the tree.

(The picture is a stock photo of a raven.)

At rush hour last night, a river of crows flew over Fifth Avenue and perched in the trees on Wilkins.  That event and last week’s robin roost prompted me to think about flocking behavior. 

We’ve all noticed that birds flock in winter.  It turns out that flocking is usually a trait of social species, such as crows and parrots, and species whose food sources are abundant: omnivores like gulls and starlings, seed-eaters like blackbirds and finches.  But why to they do it?

The first reason is defense.  It’s harder to be caught unawares if you’re in a flock with many watchers and it’s statistically quite safe.  At the robin roost we heard a pair of great-horned owls but each owl will catch only one bird per night, leaving an individual robin with a 0.002% chance of becoming an owl meal.

Another flock advantage are the many eyes searching for food.  If the food source is abundant - a seed field or a landfill - everyone gets a meal.  Obviously, flocking doesn’t work for birds like red-tailed hawks who catch their prey by stealth. 

Social species enjoy flocks.  Crows get smarter by being with each other.  As Candace Savage said in Crows: Encounters with the Wise Guys:  “Nothing is more intellectually challenging than living in a social group, surrounded by a bunch of other animals that are sharpening their wits on you.” 

The most spectacular flocks are made up of starlings who wheel in unison without an apparent leader.  Tom Pawlesh took this photo of a spectacular “cloud” of starlings.  Not all birds fly in a tight formation like this.  When it comes to flocking, starlings are the champs.

Scattered snow flurries. High 22^oF.  Low 12.  That was the forecast and the birds were eating like crazy.

On days like this I think about the challenges birds face outdoors.  They are outside in every kind of weather and have to cope with it, no matter what.  It turns out that eating is the best defense against freezing to death.  Food is the fuel they burn to stay warm.

The birds we see in Pittsburgh in the winter are those who eat the kinds of food we still have available.  Sparrows, cardinals and woodpeckers eat seeds, suet and dormant insects.  Hawks and owls eat rodents and other birds.  Starlings, crows and gulls eat anything, including garbage.  

The colder it is, the more they have to eat to stay warm,  In Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival by Bernd Heinrich I learned that “if [golden-crowned] kinglets go without food for only one or two hours in the daytime, they starve (and freeze) to death.”   Birds burn up enormous amounts of calories to stay warm.

In the worst of winter I try to help the seed-eaters, and indirectly the hawks who eat them, by putting out bird seed.  They are all grateful to have found an easy source of food.  I have tried commercially made suet (animal fat with added bird seed) but it’s not popular with my avian visitors.  Marcy Cunkleman makes her own suet from scratch and it’s a great success.  You can tell by her photo of a plump red-bellied woodpecker at her feeder.

We humans are now largely insulated against the rigors of coping with cold.  We have built permanent shelters and figured out how to use fire to heat them, whether directly through burning wood, oil or gas or indirectly by burning coal for electricity. 

But I think our bodies have not forgotten our ancestral past when we lived outdoors all the time.  As winter comes we eat more and cook more.  No wonder the holidays are so replete with food.  No wonder we eat so much and then vow to go on diets in the new year.  Now that I understand how cold triggers eating, I know why those diets are so hard to accomplish in January.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know I like crows, but you may not know I like ravens even better.

This is partly because I’ve read some great books about them:  Mind of the Raven and Ravens in Winter both by Bernd Heinrich, In the Company of Crows and Ravens by John M. Marzluff and Tony Angell, and Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays by Candace Savage. 

In every case, ravens shine.  They are one of the most intelligent birds on earth, persistent and innovative in solving problems and known to outwit other critters, a feat which earned them human tributes as tricksters and gods.  Ravens even play.

In this part of eastern North America, ravens are thought to live only in the mountains, far from people, but last fall Chuck Tague photographed a pair of them at Western Penitentiary along the Ohio River.  My interest was piqued!

On New Year’s Day I drove along the Ohio to a spot near the McKees Rocks Bridge.  I was looking for peregrines and wondering if there were any suitable nesting sites near the Penitentiary.  

I didn’t find any peregrines, couldn’t see any nest sites.  I was disappointed, driving away, and muttering about a wasted afternoon when a raven jumped down on the road ahead of my car.  Wow!  She started to pick up something on the road but it worried her and she did a jump-back.  Then I saw the second raven, clinging to a bridge abutment, eating gravel from a crumbling spot in the cement and flapping to stay up there.  Double wow! 

I pulled off the road to watch.  It was late afternoon and the ravens were getting ready for dinner.  The one who ate gravel was filling his crop with grit so he could digest the delicacies to come. 

I hadn’t even noticed the nearby dumpster until the male raven (he’s larger) flew to it and began to inspect the bags.  He carefully picked open a hole and began pulling out garbage and discarding the inedible: foil, styrofoam plates, napkins, boxes.  Jackpot!  Chicken bones!

His mate began working on another bag.  She pulled out paper, folders and coffee cups.  Bummer!  Office supplies!  She gave up and walked the dumpster rim to the male’s side and tried to get a piece of the action.  He wasn’t mean about it but it was clear he was in charge and she couldn’t reach the bag.  She hopped up and over him twice.  Eventually he was sidetracked by a particularly nice bone and she was able to sort through the bag uninterrupted.

I was fascinated and wanted to watch longer but the area is a rather creepy place - all the better for ravens who don’t want to be bothered by people.

I know what you’re thinking.  How could I get so excited about birds eating garbage?  Check out the videos at PBS’s NATURE episode on Ravens, especially The Bird in Black and you’ll see what I’m looking forward to - right here in the city!

Today was Pittsburgh’s Christmas Bird Count, always held on the Saturday after Christmas.  I counted birds from my attic window during dawn “rush hour,” then walked my neighborhood on a route I’ve done for the past few years.  It was interesting to compare this year’s species and weather to the counts I’ve done in prior years.

You might be wondering, what is a Christmas bird count and how can it be accurate? 

The Christmas bird count began in 1900 when Frank Chapman of the newly formed Audubon Society decided that counting birds was a far better activity than the Christmas “side hunts” in which people killed as many birds as possible.   Each Christmas Count is held within a 15-mile diameter circle and on a single day between December 14 and January 5.  Volunteers organize their routes so they don’t overlap.  They tally the number of birds seen per species and record the weather conditions, the number of participants, hours spent and miles travelled. 

It’s impossible to be absolutely accurate counting large flocks or skulking birds, but over a span of 100+ years the counts are accurate enough to indicate trends in bird populations.  The main thing is that we do the same thing at the same time every year and allow for changes in number of participants, hours spent, etc.

This year was different for me in a few significant ways.  First, the weather was sunny and windy in the morning - it’s usually overcast.  Then, a few of the bird feeder locations were missing or empty, so no birds there.  On the other hand I found more birds than usual and it was an excellent day for raptors.  I saw a pair of red-tailed hawks in courtship flight, counted three Coopers hawks and stopped by University of Pittsburgh to tally the resident peregrine pair. 

And my absolute Best Bird was an adult bald eagle flying along the crest of the hill overlooking the Monongahela River.  It can’t get much better than having a bald eagle in my city neighborhood.  Wow.

(Chuck Tague took this picture in Florida but the eagle I saw looked much the same - just a little further away.)