Outside My Window

This is a test.  For the next two minutes this video will test your ability to identify birds by sound.  This is only a test.

Well, actually it’s a video of mockingbirds singing. Whose songs and calls are they imitating?

Use this quiz to get your ears in shape for birding by ear this spring.  At minimum you’ll remember the mockingbirds’ three-repeat song.

This is only a test.  If there had been an actual blue jay in the video you would have seen him.

(video by grcapro on YouTube)

Time for a quiz!

Remember the first time you were puzzled by the arrangement of birds in your field guide?   Why were loons at the beginning of the book?  Why did kingfishers come after hummingbirds?

It took me a long time to get used to taxonomic order but I finally mastered it and could thumb to the right place every time.

Not anymore!  DNA testing has revealed new relationships.  The old order is shaken up.  Ducks are first, kingfishers follow motmots, falcons have moved to be near their closest relatives.

So here’s a quiz:
Of the four birds shown below, which two are most closely related to peregrines?

Red-tailed hawk?                                                      Red-crowned parrot?

Red-legged seriema ?                                      Yellow-crowned night heron?

Pick two and leave a comment with your answer.

(photo credits:
Peregrine falcon (Dorothy) by Jessica Cernic Freeman,
Red-tailed hawk by Bobby Greene,
Red-crowned parrot by Roger Moore Glandauer via Wikimedia Commons,
Red-legged seriema from Wikimedia Commons,
Yellow-crowned night-heron by Chuck Tague. 
Inspiration for this Tenth Page comes from a conversation with Dr. Tony Bledsoe, Dept of Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh)

p.s.  Watch this space for clues.

On February mornings, the mourning doves sing songs of love.

The males perch high and puff their throats when they sing.  Though they are slender, they resemble pigeons when they do this.

Coo-OOOO Cooo Cooo Cooo.

Some say they sound like owls but those who think the sound is mournful named this dove.

Click here to hear their mourning morning song.

AND A QUIZ!    Identify the other bird singing in the recording.  His song is not normally heard in southwestern PA in the summer.  The mourning dove lives year-round from Maine to Mexico, from Canada to Cuba.  The other bird will give you a hint on the location of the recording.

(photo by Dori on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

Dear Readers,

A question has been puzzling me for a long time and the answers I’ve found on the Internet are unsatisfactory, so I’m asking you.

What is the difference between a duck and a goose?

Is a duck smaller than a goose?  Not always.  The Muscovy duck is much larger than a Ross’s goose.

Does a goose have a longer neck or legs?  Not always.  Consider these black-bellied whistling ducks.

When we see a duck or a goose, intuitively we are able to say, “That’s a duck” or “That’s a goose.”

But how do we know the difference?

Please let me know by posting a comment.

(Credits:  mallard silhouette by Vlado on Freedigitalphotos.net, goose silhouette from Shutterstock,  Muscovy duck by B.Walker on Wikimedia Commons, Ross’s goose by Alan Vernon on Wikimedia Commons, Black-bellied whistling ducks by Sultry on Wikimedia Commons)

p.s. See the comments! The answer is there!

All birds have feathers, wings and two legs but they certainly don’t look alike, not even in silhouette.

Birds in the same family can look very different.  Take sandpipers (Scolopacidae) for instance:

• Sanderlings are small sandpipers with short legs and a short pointy bill.
• Whimbrels are more than twice the sanderlings’ size with relatively short legs and a long down-curved bill.
• The critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper is smallest of all with short legs and a spoon-tipped bill.

Why are they so different?  Their features have evolved to match their lifestyles.

• Sanderlings chase waves to catch invertebrates tossed on sandy beaches.  They need to be quick so it’s important to be close to the ground and able to pick up prey quickly.
• Whimbrels use their long curved bills to probe the mud of salt marshes and tidal flats to find crabs and invertebrates.
• Spoon-billed sandpipers sweep their bills side to side in shallow water to capture prey.  Like the roseate spoonbill their lifestyle has shaped their bills.

In architecture, form follows function.  In birds their form happened first, then the birds with better features survived.

And now for a Quiz!

Every time I look at the silhouettes, I find myself trying to identify the birds.  There are 26 individuals and 3 flocks in the image.  How many of the silhouettes can you identify?

Tips:  I’ve numbered the individuals and marked the flocks with letters below. Assume each flock is made up of the same species.  Some of the 26 individuals are repeats.  If you can’t identify the exact species, name the bird by group, as in “gull.”

Post your answers in the comments.  Good luck!

(Inspiration for this Tenth Page is from page 10 of Ornithology by Frank B. Gill.  Bird silhouettes from Vectorilla.com. Click on the image to see the original)

Crack open your field guides!

Today’s quiz is:  Identify this enormous acorn.

Here are some of its characteristics:

• The acorns are huge.  The cups measure 1.25″ across.
• The outside has a rough diamond pattern with a fringe at the edge.
• The inside of the cup is smooth.
• The acorn itself is dark brown (see last photo).
• I found them in Schenley Park.

Here’s a close-up of the cups…

…and an acorn inside the cup.

Do you know what species this is?

Leave a comment with your answer.

(p.s.  The answer is now in the comments section.)

(photos by Kate St. John)

Can you recognize the name of a bird in a language you’ve never heard?

Last weekend I found a 2009 New York Times science quiz where you can test this skill.

The quiz is a sample from a study conducted by anthropologist Brent Berlin at the University of Georgia.  In it he showed that human names for the natural world usually incorporate qualities of the organisms, so we can tell the difference between a bird name and a fish name even if we’ve never heard the language.

The questions in the study, and the quiz, present pairs of bird and fish names in a very foreign language: the Huambisa language of Peru. Brent Berlin pronounces the words in audio clips.

The original study participants correctly guessed the bird name 58% of the time.  My hunch is that birders will score higher than that.

I did amazingly well, correctly choosing 9 out of 10 bird names.  This photo shows the bird whose name I missed.

Can you tell if a word names a bird?  Click here to take the quiz.

(photo of a male purple-throated euphonia by Dario Sanches from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original)

Charlie Hickey found these ducks in Delaware last month.

Can you identify them with their bottoms up?

Leave a comment with your answer.

(photo by Charlie Hickey)

When you play today’s “quiz” you’ll be teaching a computer how to think.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is building a new interactive bird identification tool and they need your help.  In yesterday’s eNewsletter they wrote:

To help you identify birds online, the Cornell Lab’s web team is building a new tool called “Merlin.” Merlin will use artificial intelligence to ask questions and provide suggestions to help you identify what you saw. First, though, Merlin needs to know how people observe and describe birds. Help populate Merlin’s “brain” by trying Mark My Bird, an online activity that asks 18 questions about a species. Play as often as you like to help us build Merlin faster!

Mark My Bird looks like a quiz but it’s actually gathering data for Merlin’s brain.  It will show you a photo of a mystery bird but don’t worry, it’s going to identify that bird for you.  All you have to do is choose the bird’s group (or say Not Sure), then click on the bird’s body parts and checkmark the colors and patterns you see.

I tried it myself and it’s pretty cool. You can use it to quiz your own bird skills or identify the mystery bird.

Click here or on the screenshot to play Mark My Bird.  Teach the computer how to think!

(screenshot from Cornell Lab of Ornithology Mark My Bird interactive tool)

When people see a bird that impresses them they often tell me about it.  Sometimes they say, “I saw a crane” and I wonder… was it a crane or something else?   So I’ve made this conundrum into a quiz.

Which of these are cranes?  All of them?  Some of them?  Only one of them?

Leave a comment with your answer.  Extra credit for naming the species and for identifying the non-native(s).

#1:

#2

#3

#4

(photos #1, #2 and #3 by Steve Gosser, photo #4 from Wikimedia Commons)

p.s. As usual I’ll wait to release comments from moderation so that early responders don’t give away the answer.