Outside My Window

Tornadoes and cyclones kill people, but did you know that merely lousy weather kills birds?

The past few weeks have been miserable here in Pittsburgh.  My cellphone picture from last Sunday tells it all.  It has rained nearly every day, sometimes it’s windy, always it’s cold.  It’s been bad for farmers and gardeners and anything that lives outdoors.

The birds who eat insects, such as chimney swifts and swallows, have taken it on the chin.  Insects hide from the cold so there’s less to eat, but that’s precisely when the birds need more food to maintain their body temperature. 

I haven’t seen as many chimney swifts and swallows as I’d expect at this time of year.  The ones who haven’t arrived yet from the south are probably lucky.  It’s been so miserable that a flock of chimney swifts gave up for the day at 3:00pm last Wednesday.  I saw them spiral around a chimney and drop in to roost where they clung to the inside to wait out the cold.  I hope the chimney was not fed by a furnace.  We all had our furnaces on.

Bluebirds have suffered too.  They lay their first eggs in April and fledge their first brood in May, feeding them insects from the fields around their nests.  Len Hess reported on PABIRDS that 23 of out of 28 baby bluebirds died in the nest boxes he monitors in Westmoreland County.  The young birds were healthy and doing fine the previous week but the cold and rain spelled disaster.  The same was true for Fred Zahradnik’s bluebirds in the eastern part of the state where they experienced a nor’easter.

This morning there’s a break in the clouds.  Tomorrow the weather is supposed to change, bringing sun and temperatures in the 60s and 70s for the weekend. 

Thank goodness for all our sakes! 

Last week the trees put on their best apparel, all decked out in flowers. The weather was fine - not cold like today. Here are some memories from last week’s beautiful weather, captured on my cell phone camera.

An apple tree in full bloom behind WQED’s offices. It looked lovely and smelled sweet, the quintessential flowering tree.

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A London plane tree in Greenfield sporting red and green balls. The balls are covered with the tree’s tiny flowers. When the flowers are fertilized, the balls become seeds that break up and float away in the wind the following spring.

This tree is a hybrid of the Oriental plane tree and American sycamore. Many of them were planted in Pittsburgh more than 100 years ago because they are very tolerant of air pollution.

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A sugar maple in full flower. From below, its flowers look like fluffy, pale green, hanging leaves but they are actually bunches of small flowers suspended on long stems. They are pollinated by both insects and wind.

And yes, the pollen count was high last week.

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It was almost 60^o today in Pittsburgh. When I got home from work the crocuses had started blooming in my back yard.

Marcy Cunkleman’s yard in Indiana County gets more sun so her flowers started blooming last week. And with the flowers came the honeybees.

Thanks for the photo, Marcy.

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Today’s weather is gorgeous so I did some long-needed yard work. 

While I knelt in the garden American goldfinches visited my thistle feeder.  That’s when I noticed the males are changing into their spring clothes. 

In winter both sexes of goldfinches are dull yellow with no black cap.  Right now they’re midway into breeding plumage as you can see in this picture by Marcy Cunkelman. 

The females (bird on left) don’t change color very much but the males molt the dull feathers and grow bright new yellow ones.  The male at bottom has changed halfway and already has a black cap.  The male at top right has almost finished changing.

By the time the golfinches are completely “gold” again, spring will be here.

Weather:  We had an east wind today - not good in this land where the prevailing wind is from the southwest.   Eventually the wind dropped and it began to rain steadily.  I took a picture at 5:00pm near the Cathedral of Learning.  Dreary, dreary sky.  Not a good day for watching birds.

As of yesterday Pittsburgh’s precipitation was 2.39″ - that’s 37% above normal for the year - in only 10 weeks.  No wonder the rivers are in flood.

Meanwhile my car developed a leak in the driver’s side door that made the carpet into a squishy, water-seeping bog.  I had it fixed today… I hope.

Crows:  Bonnie Jeanne Tibbetts brought an NPR story to my attention called “Taking Over the World One Crow at a Time.”  Apparently Josh Klein invented a box that teaches crows to pick up loose change in exchange for peanuts.  I have no idea if he’s tried it on wild crows yet, but I’d love to be there when he does. 

Bird song:  As the days lengthen, more birds are singing every day.  Yesterday was a good day to hear cardinals, robins, song sparrows, house finches, goldfinches and the mockingbird at Pitt.

Another cold night in Pittsburgh.  Tomorrow morning it’ll be only 10 degrees. 

As I walked home this evening I passed a brush pile on Forbes Avenue and heard the thin ‘zee’ of white-throated sparrows calling to each other.  I couldn’t see them but I’m sure they will shelter there tonight to stay warm.

To some of you a brush pile may look like “junk” but to a songbird it’s a life saver, providing protection from bad weather and predators. 

My friend Marcy Cunkelman is a great gardener and has made her yard both beautiful and bird-friendly.  For the songbirds, she constructed several brush piles.  The birds love them.

As you can see in Marcy’s photo, the coopers hawk - who eats birds - is very interested in the brush pile.  Perhaps he can see the songbirds hiding there.  Marcy tells me he sometimes tries to dive in to scare the little birds out of it, but they are safe inside.  

Tonight they’ll be in there out of the wind, fluffed up to stay warm.   Brrrr!

No birds anywhere.  It’d been snowing since last night with 4″ on the ground and it still keeps coming.  The snow is deep at the peregrine nest, but no footprints in the snow today.

Temperatures are rising and the weatherman predicts we’ll have freezing rain by 2:00pm.  

I walked to work, partly because I like walking in snow and partly to avoid driving in it. 

The only interesting bird I saw was a red-tailed hawk sleeping on a branch behind our building.  He looked headless because he had tucked his head into his back feathers.

The commute home - even on foot - will be interesting. 

We had sleet and freezing rain overnight.  Fortunately the ice was not very thick and by dawn the temperature rose so it’s merely raining now. 

The crows flew over my house later than usual this morning.  I wonder if the ice affected their roost. 

The trees were beautiful before the rain began.  

What a cold night!  Temperatures in the single digits!  Again I thought of how the birds are coping with cold. 

Chuck Tague’s beautiful picture of Canada geese made me wonder how they can swim in near freezing river water and stand on ice for hours.  It turns out that birds have special adaptions to keep themselves warm.

Feathers are one big advantage.  Not only do they naturally conserve heat but the feathers closest to a bird’s skin are downy.  Birds fluff their feathers to expand the down when the weather’s cold, making the little birds look like butterballs.

You can see the effect of feather insulation at this link showing infrared photos of a parrot on a person’s arm.  The person’s arm looks “hot” but the parrot’s body looks “cool” because its feathers are such good insulation.

Another cold weather advantage for ducks and geese are their waterproof feathers and a layer of fat under their skin.  The fat keeps them warm in cold water and their feathers keep them dry.

This leaves the problem of warming their feet.  Birds can tuck a foot up under their feathers but this is impractical for very long.

So how can geese stand on ice in their bare feet?  Water birds have an unusual circulatory system in their legs and feet.  The veins and arteries in their legs are intertwined so that cold blood leaving their feet is warmed by the arteries delivering warm blood.  (Open the comments below for a more accurate explanation from Dr. Bledsoe of Univ of Pittsburgh.) 

Perhaps this means birds’ feet are a little colder all the time, but it doesn’t bother them.  The advantage is that their central body doesn’t have to cope with cold blood returning directly to their hearts.

We humans don’t have these advantages so my feet are mighty glad they’re indoors right now.

For the past two days it has been “unseasonably warm” here in Pittsburgh, but to me it feels unnatural.  The highs have been in the upper 60s, warmer than we keep our house at this time of year.  This is even more remarkable because it was 13^oF five days ago.

The weather reminds me of a comment made by a young Finnish friend of ours who visited Pittsburgh in July many years ago.  As we sat outdoors after dark watching a softball game under floodlights, Oüti said she had never been outdoors when it was both hot and dark.  The sun hardly sets in the summer in Finland so being warm after sunset was unusual for her. 

Well, this weather feels the same way.  The sun set just after 5:00pm today but it feels like the end of March.  By that measure, the sun should have set after 7:30pm and it would not have been both hot and dark during rush hour when I took this picture in Schenley Park.

I do appreciate that it feels good to stroll outside and that the birds sing in the morning.  It just unsettles me a little.