First, can the insanely popular Angry Birds game get people into birding? The folks at 10,000 Birds point out some real-life angry birds:
First is a small bird that is almost universally described as cute. This might explain its anger. Or perhaps it is angry because it is called a Bushtit. And, no, I am not kidding about the name. If you were referred to as “Bushtit” wouldn’t you be angry too?
Just yesterday, I watched a pair of Northern Mockingbirds repeatedly dive-bomb a Red-Shouldered Hawk, who was trying to hide in a tree in our apartment complex. Yes, there are dramatic examples of angry birds out there. Here’s a Cooper’s Hawk who’s apparently unable to comprehend that this is not a real owl in its territory (via):
Next, Daren Naish takes a look at lagomorph evolution- the family that includes rabbits- in light of a recent discovery of a giant fossil lagomorph on the island of Minorca. Here’s an artist’s depiction of the species, Nuralagus rex. Note the European Rabbit for comparison:
Artist's conception of Nuralagus rex. (Image: Meike Köhler, via National Geographic)
In his post (“You have your giant fossil rabbit neck all wrong“- and that is an awesome title!), he discusses the lack of study that’s been done on lagomorph phyolgeny, as well as addressing the title of his post. Check out his discussion if you’re interested in lagomorph evolution (and not just adorablebunnyantics).
Some photos just capture the essence of Noe perfectly.
Case in point:
Tao of bunny.
Here, we see Noe waiting at the edge of the kitchen for noms while vegetables are being chopped for dinner. Her posture is relaxed, but alert. Note also that her front half lies on the cool surface of the linoleum, while her rear paws have traction on the carpet in case she needs to leap up and move quickly.
And yes, her patience was eventually rewarded with a yummy piece of kale.
On our recent Great Lakes trip, we didn’t stop to see quirky roadside attractions like the SPAM Museum or the world’s largest ball of twine. But we did get to see a few other random giant objects of cultural significance…
First was the giant frosty mug of root beer at a drive-in diner in Taylors Falls, MN. While not as large as the others, it rotated!
Thirsty?
While we were disappointed that it was in front of a “Drive-In”, not a “Drive-Inn” (Hawaii folks will get the reference), they did have good root beer.
Second is from Lindstrom, MN, a town that’s obviously proud of its Swedish roots. Their water tower is decorated like a coffeepot:
"Valcommen till Lindstrom."
Finally, this inexplicable monster pileated woodpecker in downtown Toronto near the CN Tower:
Apparently, German police have been attempting to train turkey vultures (imported from North America) to detect bodies while flying. The idea actually seems reasonable in principle- turkey vultures have excellent senses of smell, and could detect the scent of corpses from far away. They’re also closely related to hawks and falcons- two groups of birds that have been trained to be handled by people and use for hunting for centuries.
The problem here seems to be that the first bird the German police have been training is both lazy and shy. From a BBC report:
But according to Spiegel: “Sherlock’s success has been limited.
“While he can locate a stinking burial shroud, which the police gave the bird park to use for training purposes and which is clearly marked with a yellow plastic cup, Sherlock doesn’t approach the shroud by air.
“He prefers to travel by foot.”
Furthermore, the bird is yet to perform outside the familiar confines of the zoo.
“The bird is naturally anxious, and he would hide in the woods or bolt,” according to his trainer.
I don’t know if they’re going to try to train another vulture, but it sounds like they’re pretty disappointed by the first vulture’s failure. Oh well.
A few weeks ago, I came across a dead parrot on the side of the road. Not right on the road, but near a hedge bordering the rear end of the local mall. As I was walking, I spotted a brilliant turquoise and gold colored object, crumpled under the hedge. I was sure it must be an article of clothing- maybe someone’s shirt, or a scarf. The colors were so vibrant- at first, I though it must be something made out of silk, or maybe satin. But when I got closer, I saw it was a dead macaw.
It was very hot that day- in the mid 90s- and had been hot for several days. The bird’s body wasn’t stinky- I actually couldn’t smell any rot at all. It was just lying on the ground, wings slightly outspread to reveal its brilliant sea-turquoise and cobalt plumage. Its long tail feathers trailed off behind it. Its feathers seemed strangely smooth and unmarred- there were no ants crawling on them, and none of them were broken. It was lying slightly on one side, so its brilliant gold chest feathers were also visible.
How had it died? And when? It had been a few days since I had walked that way, so its body could have been there a few days. Its eye was sunken, and the white-and-black pattern of feathers on its face was shriveled. I didn’t go up and poke at it, but it didn’t look particularly damaged or like it was in an advanced state of decay. Had it broken its neck by flying into the tree near it? Did it die of thirst, or disease? Was it attacked by our neighborhood red-shouldered hawk? I suppose if I had examined it more closely, there would have been some clues. But at that point, I was really just disturbed at finding it there.
Suburban Orlando is not the place you expect to find the body of a blue-and-gold macaw, just lying on the side of the street. Was it someone’s pet, and escaped in a bid for freedom? Did it escape from a pet store? Was it released because it was too expensive to care for, or because it was aggressive or insane from a life in captivity? Did it enjoy a few days of freedom, or did it starve to death in terror, not knowing how to forage for itself, or did it expire from the heat? Sure, you see plenty of dead birds on the side of the road in Florida- but not giant tropical birds with silken feathers in the colors of the ocean, shining in the sunlight even after death.
The macaw didn’t look like it had been detected by any predators- at least, it wasn’t partly eaten. And, over the next week or so, its corpse just continued to lie there. Was it too dessicated to attract any vultures? Did no feral cats or coyotes happen to pass by it? Maybe the little fence lizards enjoyed feasting on it, but if so, they went at it from underneath. For over a week, the bird just lay there, slowly drying out in the heat.
I kept expecting to find it one day, torn apart by scavengers- maybe missing a wing, or maybe its various limbs scattered under the hedge. But its position never changed.
Another thing I wonder is if anyone else saw it. How could you possibly miss a gloriously-colored bird like this, lying under a bush as it was? Are people so habituated to roadside trash that they avoid actually looking at what lies there? I wonder about this because the bird just lay there. No one came to pick it up and put it into a dumpster, or to gather its feathers for decoration. Granted, I didn’t mention it to anyone, or remove it myself. But clearly I’m the sort of person who has a morbid curiosity in checking up on the slowly decomposing carcass of a large bird from time to time. I’m surprised that no one else did anything about it.
About two weeks after I first saw it, I walked past the bird again, and the groundskeepers were trimming the hedges of the mall. Surely, they would remove the bird’s body? In fact, they did not. They just rolled it further under the hedge.
As of today, the macaw still lies there. The feathers are starting to look disheveled, but they still keep their brilliant colors. It can’t be long until the colors begin to fade, and what is left is a skeleton covered with dried-out skin and dangling feather shafts, leached of their color.
I’d like to think that this bird was at least happy in its few hours or perhaps days unconfined. But I just can’t tell myself that it was. But maybe it had at least some pleasure from flying free, if only for a time.
The nose is probably the hardest bunny part to properly depict using photos. In real life, it’s always twitching: sniffing, filtering, and sorting out scents.
Extreme nose close-up.
Note the furry lips and crinkled whiskers. The latter are characteristic to her breed. Also, there’s a little brown spot on her right lip- that’s a biopsy scar from a particularly long-lived skin infection she had a few years ago.
Noe lets us touch her nose, though if we pet her on it she angles her head as if to say, “This is the proper position for forehead rubs, silly humans.”
On our recent Great Lakes trip, we started off with a visit to western Wisconsin. When my sister & I were young, our grandparents bought a vacation house on a lake in a small town there, and we used to go up there for family weekends in the summers. When my grandparents passed away, my aunts took over the house, and they and my cousins (and their kids) still spend a lot of time there.
I hadn’t been back to the lake house for several years, and Yan had never seen it. So this was a good opportunity to visit with relatives and reminisce to Yan about summers at the lake.
The backyard is still pretty steep, but for some reason the hill seems much less scary now...
So, two incidents from childhood that came back to me at the lake both involved invertebrates behaving badly… at least from our perspective at the time.
First, the lake is fairly tannin-rich, meaning the water’s not super clear. One day (I must have been six or seven) I was wading in the shallow part of the lake, in the shade. When I got out of the water, there was a huge black leech stuck to my shin! I’m sure I freaked out a bit, and then some adult pulled the leech off. Of course, then blood started to trickle down my leg from the leech bite. So I fainted. (This is a family trait, mind you.) After coming to, I got a lot of teasing from my relatives.
The second incident happened to my sister, probably a different summer. She was playing in the backyard with my cousins, and I was sitting on the deck, probably reading. I remember all of a sudden hearing her scream, and seeing her running across the backyard hitting herself on the side of the face. Apparently, a wasp had gotten under her hair and was stinging her on the ear, repeatedly. After the wasp had been squished, and she was calming down on the porch with an ice cube on her earlobe, my other memory of that incident was my aunts and uncles joking that now they just needed to find a wasp for the other ear and she could put in earrings right then and there. This event must have traumatized her, because it took her until high school to actually get her ears pierced.
Okay, so these certainly aren’t the most traumatic childhood stories, but they were dramatic at the time.
Looks peaceful, except for the nasty leeches lurking under the water's calm surface.
One of the exciting events of the weekend was taking the pontoon over to town and going to Dairy Queen. Hey, it’s small-town Wisconsin, and this is good wholesome entertainment.
The DQ was just up the road from the park. (Photo: Y Fernandez)
The pontoon was exactly as I remember it- which is a bit scary, considering it had been over a decade since I had been on it last. But its structural integrity held for the entire trip.
There are a lot of new, big houses on the lake, which was a bit strange to see. It’s nice that the family house is in an area that hasn’t been developed this much and is still pretty green.
Aunt Barb and some serious construction. (Photo: Y Fernandez)
So, a good visit, and a good start to our vacation.
Cautiously, he moves through the darkened forest. He knows his prey’s habits: the places she rests, her watering hole, the forest glades in which the succulent herbs that she favors grow. It is only a matter of time before he finds her.
Soon, he begins to see signs of her presence: a single dropping, a tuft of fur, toothmarks upon a branch. The marks are fresh.
He creeps around a corner.
There! She dozes, secure in her lair, confident that she is safe. …Foolishly confident.
Stealthily, he slowly moves toward her. It would not do for his prey to bolt.
The beast is dreaming- paws and lips twitching. Does she dream of sinking her teeth into a large carrot, juices dripping down her chin? Or perhaps of munching on some peppery arugula, its scent flavoring her breath? He does not know. While her eyes are open, he knows they see only the dream-vegetable feast before her.
The hunter creeps closer. If he can only reach out and…
A sharp <crack>! He clumsily steps upon a twig. The sound pierces the dim quiet.
The beast hears! She is instantly alert.
The hunter’s stealth has been in vain!
Now the chase will begin. His legs gathered beneath him, he prepares to leap. Which way will she run? He can only follow, as her instincts lead him on a mad chase for survival.
A recent fossil find in Florida seems to show the first- and actually only- Ice Age carving from the Americas depicting a mammoth (or a mastodon, a related type of Ice Age elephant). While many Ice Age carvings of mammoths and mastodons have been found in Europe and Africa, until this carving was found, no one had ever found one in the Americas.
The carving, on a bone that’s probably actually from a mammoth or mastodon, was discovered by a professional fossil collector at a site near Vero Beach, Florida. While this site is well-known as containing fossils of many Ice Age animals, no one had ever found anything like this before. Mammoths and mastodons went extinct in the Americas by about 13,000 years ago. So, assuming the artist actually encountered one of these animals (and given the type of bone the carving is on, that seems like a good assumption), this carving has to be at least that old.
Mammoth or mastodon carving from Vero Beach. (Image: Smithsonian Institution)
This discovery was actually made in 2009, but the question then was: Is it genuine? As this would be the first find of its type, the paleontologists at the University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History, and Smithsonian Institution who were evaluating it would need to provide substantial evidence to prove this.
In an upcoming paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the researchers lay out the results of several tests, and come to the conclusion that the carving probably is genuine. If so, this is quite an important find.
Close-up of the carving. (Image: Smithsonian Institution)
If you get beyond the shallow and superficial image of Florida as a theme-park playground, this state actually has some depth- including quite a few important fossil and archaeological sites.
Fore more information on this discovery, go here. Here’s the reference to the upcoming paper, which is available online if you have institutional access (otherwise, it will cost you $30): Purdy, B.A., Jones, K.S., Mecholsky, J.J., Bourne, G., Hulbert, R.C., MacFadden, B.J., Church, K.L., Warren, M.W., Jorstad, T.F., Stanford, D.J., Wachowiak, M.J., Speakman, R.J. Earliest Art in the Americas: Incised Image of a Proboscidean on a Mineralized Extinct Animal Bone from Vero Beach, Florida, Journal of Archaeological Science (2011), doi: 10.1016/ j.jas.2011.05.022
Birds: so many reasons they are cool, but here’s another one- they’re the only modern surviving dinosaurs. Yes, really.
Crocodiles, turtles, Komodo dragons- all related to dinosaurs, but not descended from dinosaurs. In fact, recent paleontological work has uncovered many new dinosaur species that share features we think of as “birdy.” Things like feathers, specialized bird-like lungs, and bipedalism. These features are found in a group of dinosaurs called maniraptorans, which are in turn cousins to the dinosaur group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex.
Artist's interpretation of a Scansoriopteryx hatchling, a "birdlike" maniraptoran dinosaur. (Image: Matt Martyniuk, azhdarcho.com)
Most of the time when we think of birds, we think of the things that make them birds, and not the things that make them dinosaurs. But that is because we often have the relationship between dinosaurs and birds reversed in our little primate minds; Much of what is bird-like is not exclusive to birds, but rather, to a larger group of dinosaurs. Birds have taken these particular traits in novel directions, but these traits existed independently of all the birdiness we usually attribute to our feathered, flying, bipedal friends, long ago, before the Great Extinction.
Check out his entire post- it’s worth reading.
And here’s a mediocre photo of an excellent museum display, from the American Museum of Natural History’s dinosaur fossil halls. It’s a 3-D cladogram (somewhat like a family tree) of dinosaur relationships. If you look at the upper right corner of the photo, you should be able to just make out the words “ALIVE TODAY.” This is where modern birds fit into the picture: our living dinosaurs.
Dinosaur cladogram from the AMNH. (Image: S. Stephens)
