Category: Birds and Birding

Some links: 70

A roundup of conservation and natural history links:

  • A team at Towson University has launched a microsite and apps (for Android and iOS) for tracking the spread of the highly invasive Wavy-leaf Basketgrass (Oplismenus hirtellus ssp. undulatifolius).
  • Janet Fang summarizes a paper by Railsback and Johnson: simulations of coffee plantation activity indicate that 5% land coverage in trees maximizes coffee yields. The overstory of trees reduces the amount of space for coffee shrubs, but it invites birds, who forage on destructive borer beetles.
  • Nancy L. Brill describes the survey that a team of entomologists made of invertebrate life in 50 ordinary Raleigh, N.C. homes. The typical house was host to 100 different species of arthropod.

    Several families were found in more than 90 percent of homes: gall midges (Cecidomyiidae), ants (Formicidae) and carpet beetles (Dermestidae), along with cobweb spiders (Theridiidae), dark-winged fungus gnats (Sciaridae), cellar spiders (Pholcidae), scuttle flies (Phoridae) and book lice (Liposcelididae). Most houses also had dust mites (Pyroglyphidae).

    Pics and interpretation at Arthropods of Our Homes.

  • Tovar Cerulli argues that hunters and non-hunters have more in common than they might think.

    When clashes occur, it is all too easy to fall back on reductive notions about liberal, elite environmentalists and conservative, redneck hunters—the “greens” versus “the hook-and-bullet crowd.” With partisans on both sides invoking stereotypes and the media portraying hunters and environmentalists as opponents, it is tempting to imagine stark lines between the two.

    But such divisions are too simplistic.

  • An American Bird Conservancy post makes the connection between coffee farming… and hummingbirds!
  • The Birding Wire picked up my profile (for Friends of the Migratory Bird [Duck] Stamp) of Quivira National Wildlife Refuge.
  • A leader in Nature highlights a paper by Joshua J. Tewksbury et al., which calls for a revival in the practice of natural history. (I have the Tewksbury paper bookmarked but haven’t read it yet.)

    As natural history has been de-emphasized, molecular biology, genetics, experimental biology and ecological modelling have flourished. But here is the problem: many of those fields ultimately rely on data and specimens from natural history….

    No biology student should get a diploma without at least a single course in identifying organisms and learning basic techniques for observing and recording data about them.

↬ Leta

Some links: 69

Another post to clear out the inbox:

  • Steven Portugal et al. equipped 14 Bald Ibises (Geronticus eremita) with miniaturized GPS units to study the energetics and aerodynamics of flying in V formation. As the leader summarizes, each bird does indeed time its wingbeats to maximize the drafting effect of following another bird–abstract and heatmaps on the article page.

  • W. R. Grace & Co. has emerged from bankruptcy protection, as Catherine Ho reports.

    I interned for Grace in its New York headquarters in the late 1970s, and then somehow convinced someone at one of its newly-acquired retail businesses, Bermans, the Leather Experts to hire me full-time. (I lasted a year, and the lit out for Washington.) Bermans is long gone, merged into Wilsons and later Georgetown Leather Design, then gradually declining into liquidation in 2008. Back in the 1970s, Grace described its organization as a three-legged stool—specialty chemicals, energy, and consumer retail and restaurants. The energy game was no kinder to the portfolio than brands like Channel home centers and Houlihan’s restaurants. And, as Ho reports, personal-injury lawsuits stemming from asbestos contamination of the company’s vermiculite products sent the company into bankruptcy court.

    My workplace, the soaring building on 42nd Street (with a plaza that extended close enough to Sixth Avenue to give it an Avenue of the Americas address) still stands, but what’s left of the chemicals-only firm is now headquartered in Columbia, Maryland.

  • Brian Hayes uses a rhododendron shrub as a thermometer and wonders at the curled leaves’ apparent piecewise linear response to ambient temperature. Is the curling response a means to curtailing water loss, or a way to minimize UV damage to this understory shrub? Erik Tallak Nilsen likes the latter explanation.

A milestone: 5

Congratulations to the Bird Phenology Project and its volunteer digital transcribers. Over the weekend, the project’s one-millionth migration record was transcribed to digital format. An observation of a House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) (AOU code 721a) by Vernon Bailey in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico Territory in September, 1904 was the card that did it.

(Bailey was the husband of Florence Merriam Bailey, in whom I am currently interested.)

Emptying the shoebox

A holiday weekend affords some time to scan some old photos.

AlgernonSusan and AlbertaErstwhile cars and girlfriends, much loved. Did I really have that much stuff growing in my front yard? I think that’s my neighbor’s Mitsubishi 3000GT behind Algernon.

findingfoundA Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea) foraging at Huntley Meadows Park. This might have been my lifer.

the old old boardwalkIs this the original boardwalk at Huntley Meadows? I don’t think so, but it’s what we had in 1991.

Bonneville DamBonneville insideObsessions with the built environment on a trip to the Pacific Northwest in 1993. Bonneville Dam and its generator room.

closedopenThe bascule Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria. Today, it’s in the process of being replaced.

in your pocketWhere else in the world but Portland would you find an official city park the size of a manhole? Welcome to Mill Ends Park.

Some links: 68

Collecting a couple of birding-related links from various places:

  • Andrea Alfano explains how the conjunctivitis epidemic among House Finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) was tracked with citizen science observers through Project FeederWatch.

  • Christopher Cokinos calls out one of my particular bêtes noires: the indiscriminate use by sound designers of vocalizations of Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis).

    One irony of this hawk’s cry becoming the popular call of the wild is that red-tails occupy a range of habitats we don’t normally think of as “nature.” I’ve seen red-tails flying over busy streets and perching on light poles by shopping centers while they tear apart chipmunks or mice.

    Where do I see this hawk most frequently? Posted up somewhere along the Beltway.

    Not to mention Hollywood’s ventriloquizing that puts this noble buteo’s voice in the beak of Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). Leta doesn’t know much about birds, but she does know that this squeaky-voiced eagle really sounds like Mike Tyson.

Keep looking

Scott Weidensaul gives us a nudge to remember to look for bird-friendly certified shade-grown coffee. I will confess that I tend to grab anything that’s labelled organic at the market; my excuse is that coffee with the Smithsonian’s label (or with related labels like the Rainforest Alliance’s) is (surprisingly) more difficult to find where I shop than it used to be. Need to look harder.

Win-win

New research providing evidence for what we had good reason to believe: just as shade-grown coffee plantations are good for birds, birds are good for forested coffee plantations, especially predators of the Coffee Berry Borer Beetle (Hypothenemus hampei) like Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia). Traci Watson summarizes a paper by Daniel S. Karp et al.

Some links: 66

  • Steve Adair exlains the ducks-winter wheat connection in the upper Great Plains.
  • Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley visit the banding station and other research facilities at Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Powdermill Nature Reserve. When I was a beginning birder in the 90s, Susan and I visited Powdermill with a group led by Jane Huff, back when “the Bobs” (Mulvihill and Leberman) ran things. They’ve added a lot to the place since then. ᔥ Birdchat