Outside My Window

Another rainy Sunday afternoon and it’s making me stir crazy.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it’s not icy but I wanted to hike in the woods today and cold rain isn’t any fun.

Is anyone else anxious for good weather?  It appears so.

Dianne Machesney sent me this picture from North Park near the Lone Pine ball field and wrote, “Some unknown person has been decorating two tree limb stubs for years now. They change with the seasons and often sport Steeler clothes.”

To me this character’s saying, “Rain is a hopeful sign of spring.”

True, I should try to enjoy the rain.  By the end of the week the lows will be 18 degrees.

(photo by Dianne Machesney)

Some time in the next two weeks the people of State College, Pennsylvania will wake to find dead birds dropping from the sky.

If all goes as planned there will be 15,000 dead starlings on rooftops, in gutters, on patios, in gardens, on parking lots, playsets and fields. 

No amount of advanced warning can prepare people for how appalling this will be but the U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying anyway.  Last week the Centre Daily Times and WJAC-TV announced that USDA has permission to poison the large flock of European starlings near University Park airport because they might pose an aviation hazard. 

Really?  Well, they caused a plane to return to the airport three years ago.  That incident did not result in a mass poisoning but last year’s crash-landing on the Hudson River has the FAA focused on bird strikes.  For them, poison is appealing because it looks like the problem is solved when thousands of birds die.  Unfortunately it’s not an effective long term solution compared to non-lethal methods.

But aren’t there laws protecting birds?  Yes, but not always.  European starlings are not protected because they are non-native and listed as a nuisance species.  USDA is even allowed to poison protected species if farmers claim the birds are damaging their crops.  

So will the poison be dangerous to people and pets?  It depends on who you ask.  USDA uses DRC-1339 which they say only kills starlings (or blackbirds or crows or whatever bird they happen to be targeting) but if that were the case how do you explain these warnings on the label and these rules for handling it?

• Those who mix it with bait must wear respirators if they are dealing with a pound or more of it.
• Bait must be carefully placed and removed to insure non-target species are not exposed.
• Treated baits cannot be placed within 50 feet of water.  
• It is prohibited to graze animals or grow crops on treated areas for 365 days.

The USDA will be as careful as possible, but the fact is that they’ll be putting DRC-1339 into thousands of portable poison containers (birds) who will fly around the surrounding area for a short time and deposit it by dying in unknown and unpredictable places.  It is impossible to fully control the process. 

Whenever they conduct one of these operations people are appalled and outraged and when they make their outrage known USDA is not asked back again for a very long time.  State College is about to go through this.  Stay tuned for the results. 

OK, I’ll climb down from my soapbox now.  Just don’t say you haven’t been warned.

(image from Wikipedia, in the public domain, color altered)

This is a question I never thought about until I read a brief article in Science Daily.  Then one thought lead to another, I opened up Google and I was off on a fact finding mission.

What is the heaviest bird that can fly?  We can’t count the ostrich – who can’t fly – even though he can weigh up to 300 pounds.  The heaviest flying bird is the kori bustard of the African desert, pictured above, who weighs 27 to 44 pounds.  At his heaviest this is almost twice the weight of North America’s largest bird, the trumpeter swan, who typically weighs 23 pounds. 

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s biggest birds are even smaller.  A large male wild turkey weighs 16.2 pounds, a large male Canada goose weighs 9.8 pounds.  My beloved peregrines, though fierce, are small.  The male typically weighs 1.5 pounds, the female 2.2 pounds.  Yes, the female outweighs him.

And just because a bird is large doesn’t make him heavy.  The wandering albatross has the longest wingspan at 8.2 to 11.5 feet (up to twice a man’s height) but weighs only 13-26 pounds.

So now that we know the maximums, why do birds stop there?  Why are there no behemoth birds like whales or elephants?

The answer is that as a bird’s mass increases it takes longer for its flight feathers to grow.  This correlation was found by Sievert Rohwer and his colleagues at the Burke Museum at the University of Washington.

The bigger the bird the longer the flight feathers must be but the slower those feathers grow.  At the high end of body mass, the primaries grow so slowly that they’re in danger of wearing out before they can be replaced.  This causes large birds to either molt very slowly – sometimes over a period of years – or, in the case of geese, to lose all their flight feathers at once and hang out on water until the feathers grow back.

So if a bird wants to fly it can’t weigh much more than 44 pounds – and that’s stretching it.   As you can see, the kori bustard spends a lot of time walking.

For more information see the press release in Science Daily or the complete article in PLos Biology.

(photo of a kori bustard by Winfried Bruenken, published under Creative Commons license on Wikipedia.  Click on the photo to see the original.)

OK, I’ll admit it.  I love snow.  I hate to drive in it but everything else about it is gorgeous. 

I love when it’s 28^oF with no wind and there are big snowflakes falling around me.  Better yet, I love the day after a snowstorm when the sky clears and the sun glints on untouched snow.  Bing Crosby describes my ideal in his song White Christmas.  Beautiful!

But I’m conflicted.  As I said, I hate – even avoid – driving in snow so I’ve been keeping track of the holiday weather forecast because I’ll be driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike to visit my husband’s family on Christmas (my husband doesn’t drive).  I look at the forecast every day.  Will there be snow?

The good news is that it won’t snow on Christmas Day, the bad news is it’ll rain.  Cold rain.  A forecast high of 41^oF in Pittsburgh and 36^o in Somerset which is, in my opinion, the Bad Weather Capitol of Pennsylvania and guaranteed to have the worst weather on the Turnpike.

Alas.  Western Pennsylvania looks like Bing Crosby’s White Christmas right now but when Christmas Day comes I’ll just have to dream of it.

(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)

Today is the winter solstice, the day the sun stands still.  That’s what it means in Latin:  sol is sun and stice is from sistere meaning to stand still.

I doubt that most modern day people notice the sun stops its southward movement today, pauses, and in the days ahead begins to move north. 

We can afford to ignore it.  We have electricity and our days aren’t governed by the sun’s movement so we can safely leave the calculations of its passage to others.  They’ll let us know.

Besides, the change is slow, something our brains have little patience to observe.  We’re wired to notice rapid movement because it can mean danger or food. 

Our gadgets take advantage of this trait and provide a constant source of movement and distraction.  I know this all too well.  My computer and cell phone distract me all the time.  The up side is that my cell phone can take pictures like this one of a sun pillar.

Sun pillars are usually brief events that occur when the sun is close to the horizon and its light reflects on ice crystals that have nearly horizontal and parallel planar surfaces.  In other words, the ice crystals lined up just right and so did the sun. 

Will I notice the sun standing still today?  No.  I’m glad someone told me about it.

(photo of a sun pillar in Pittsburgh by Kate St. John)

The sky was clear, the full moon bright.  Last night my backyard was flooded with light as bright as day.

The trees and even the twigs cast shadows.  If I was a mouse there would be no hiding from an owl in that silvery light.

Above the Arctic Circle the sun set on September 21 inaugurating six months of perpetual darkness – or so I thought until the moon reminded me that once a month everything is revealed.

I imagine last night on Banks Island.  The sea ice glints in the moonlight.  An arctic fox crouches to pounce on a lemming.  A raven scans the ice for seal guts, remains of a polar bear’s meal.  Night is turned to day.

The Snow Moon will wane.  In two weeks time only stars will illuminate the scene.  The night will be dim until the next full moon – a Blue Moon – on December 31.

(photo by Chuck Tague.  See Chuck’s moon-watch in Florida and his Full Moon Schedule for 2010.)

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)

By weight, five of these   equal one of these  

How do I know?

When five house sparrows perch on my “squirrel proof” bird feeder, the lid tips and the feeder closes.  That’s exactly what happens when one common grackle lands there. Four house sparrows aren’t enough.  It has to be five. 

Does your feeder do weight conversions?  Post a comment and let me know.

(photos by Chuck Tague)

We’ve had a spate of hot, humid weather that’s finally going to break this weekend.  I shouldn’t complain – after all it’s August – but I’m no lover of heat and humidity and my nose tells me it’s time for a change.

My nose?  Well, I have a pretty good sense of smell.  Too good at times.  I love the scents of honeysuckle blooming, crushed mint leaves, warm pine needles, rain in the distance and damp earth at the end of winter.  (Remember the first day you smell the earth in spring?)

Right now the hot, soupy air is great for holding smells but the hotter it gets the more unpleasant some of those smells become.  I’ve been forced to think of this when, out on a walk, my nose suddenly detects spoiling food in a nearby garbage can or dog poo next to the sidewalk.  I give those spots a wide berth but the worst smells are hard to escape … the whiffs of something dead in the bushes. 

Fortunately turkey vultures have an excellent sense of smell and they love this stuff.  On my hikes I see them soaring overhead, sniffing the breeze, looking for the source of the smells I recoil from.

I hope they find that dead something-in-the-bushes.  They shouldn’t have much trouble.  It’s been fine weather for vultures.

(photo of a turkey vulture at Shaver’s Creek by Marcy Cunkelman)

For me the common nighthawk is an iconic species.  Its diving courtship display so fascinated me as a ten-year-old that I developed a lifelong interest in birds.

Nighthawks used to be easy to find in my Pittsburgh neighborhood in summertime. I live across the street from a floodlit ballpark where I could watch them hawking insects at dusk in the bright ballpark lights.

But not anymore.  Common nighthawks have declined precipitously in Pittsburgh and the eastern United States, so much so that some states list them as an endangered species.

Common nighthawks are not hawks but nightjars, relatives of the whip-poor-will, whose diet consists solely of flying insects including mosquitoes, moths and flying ants.  They’re incapable of torpor and must eat hundreds of insects per night so they require warm weather and plentiful bugs. 

Nighthawks range widely in the Western Hemisphere migrating from Argentina to Canada.  They used to arrive in Pittsburgh around May 5 and leave by September 5.  During fall migration hundreds of birds would pass through at dusk for two weeks starting at the end of August. 

Surprisingly, common nighthawks have not been well studied, though new efforts are underway.  What is known is that in the northeastern U.S. they used to nest in natural areas.  Then in the 1890s they began to nest almost exclusively on gravel rooftops in cities and towns.  In the 1990s people replaced gravel roofs with rubber roofs and nesting opportunities disappeared.  Meanwhile something must have gone wrong at their wintering grounds or in migration (probably pesticides) because year after year fewer migrants leave in the fall and even fewer return in the spring.

Ten years ago there were several nesting pairs in my neighborhood but last summer there was only a lone individual calling for a mate who never came.  This year he called for two weeks and was gone.  I don’t think I’ll ever again see them nest in my neighborhood.

Considering their rapid decline, I may live to see common nighthawks go extinct east of the Mississippi just as peregrine falcons did when I was young.

With human help peregrines came back.  Can we save the nighthawk?

(photo from WikiMedia taken by Daniel Berganza near Miami, Florida.  Click the photo to see the original.)