Flickers on a Rainy Day

Rain makes lots of animals behave differently than they normally do. Many birds either take shelter or, like the American robin, head out to forage for drowning worms. The other day (and by other day, I mean several months ago, because I kept forgetting to post this post) during a rainstorm, I was walking with my friend Mona when we noticed a flicker stabbing repeatedly at the ground.

Here is a picture of the end result of what we were witnessing!

According to one source, the Puget Sound Backyard Birds, ants compose about 80% of a flickers diet, and foraging for this tasty insect snack is probably what the flicker was doing as it continually stabbed its beak into the ground! Even if it wasn't looking for ants, most of the flickers diet is insects. During the winter, when insects can become scarce, the flicker consumes berries and seeds. Certainly an unusual diet and foraging behavior for a woodpecker!

Below is a video uploaded by Deepa Mohan of a flicker foraging for food.  As you can see in the video, this flicker is foraging when the weather outside is not so frightful.  I assume that perhaps the flicker we saw was active while it was raining both because the insects would be scurrying around trying to find safe ground, and also probably because the ground was softer than usual.  

Like other woodpeckers, the flicker will nest in holes of trees, but will sometimes nest in the abandoned burrows of birds such as the belted kingfisher or the bank swallow, whose nests are located in holes within the earth.  Below is a picture of a pair of belted kingfishers flying into their nest:

Flickers are pretty common where I live, and they seem to be pretty common throughout the United States!  If you have any great flicker stories or pictures, make sure to send them in or comment below!

Works Cited:

Flocks of Robins and Winter Territoriality

Where I live in Colorado, and in fact across much of North America, the American robin (Turdus migratorius) is a common sight, especially during the spring and summer.  You can often find this bird hopping across the ground, rooting around in the ground for worms.  However, this morning, on my walk across campus, I noticed a flock of about thirty or so robins in a random tree, and couldn't remember a time when I had seen so many robins in one place, not even close.  What was going on?

Just like for a robin, a little digging proved fruitful....or should I say wormful?  "The Great Backyard Bird Count" (GBBC) revealed that during the winter, the territoriality of the American robin decreases dramatically.  Two graphs on the website, which I have included below, help us to understand what is going on.  The first graph, titled "Percent Submissions With Positive Sightings," charts the number of people who see robins.  As you can see, the peak months for robin sightings are between the months of April and July, with a peak in July.  March, as well as August through October, are also pretty good times to see robins, but during the winter months between November and February, robins are not seen as often.

The second graph, titled "Average Number of Birds for Positive Sightings" charts how many robins people typically see together: i.e., if they report a robin sighting, they also report how many robins there were together.  As you can see, April through September are definitely the worst months to see multiple robins together, with October through February being the best time, and a large peak in November.

Graphs are tough: what does this all mean in English?  Essentially, during the breeding season (spring and summer), robins maintain strict territories, which causes them to spread out, with a more even distribution.  This means that you would be more likely to see a robin on a walk through the park, but not several robins in the same place.  During the winter, presumably because their breeding territories are simply too small for them to get enough food, and since it is no longer the breeding season, they abandon their territories, allowing different robins to go wherever they wish.  For whatever reason, probably something to do with mutual protection, they also form flocks.  The forming of flocks also causes the number of individuals per sighting to increase.

Another study conducted by the GBBC (read the full write-up HERE) pertained to snow depth and frequency of robin sightings.  As you can see in the graph below, the likelihood of spotting an American robin with even just a little bit of snow drops quite dramatically.  Similar results were reported for the red-winged blackbird, while birds such as the white-throated sparrow and northern flicker responded to increased snow depth as well, but not quite as dramatically.

For the robin, a bird that typically feeds on the ground, even just a little bit of snow cover might prove to be an issue.  However, other ground-feeding birds, such as the dark-eyed junco, didn't seem to mind the snow anywhere near as much as the robin.  GBBC suggested that other factors must affect the distribution of these birds, such as "weather, diet, and the species' normal range and altitudinal limits."

A subspecies of the dark-eyed junco called the gray-headed junco.  I took this picture of the stuffed animal when we were in Ouray over the summer.

A picture of a dark-eyed junco that I took in my backyard.

The GBBC devotes a paragraph to acknowledge the uncertainties in these results, a humility that I find refreshing and, sadly, not too common on many Internet sources these days.  GBBC looks at the graph below, plotting the snow depth against the likelihood of seeing a house finch, and notes the steady decline, as opposed to the sharp drop seen in the robin graph, or the lack of real pattern seen in the junco graph.  GBBC reports that this would be a pattern not expected if it was access to the ground (or lack thereof) that was causing these birds to move.  Instead, one would expect the sharp decline of the robin graph.  Other factors, such as temperature, could be what is causing birds like the house finch or the house sparrow to move.

A male house sparrow.

A female house finch, silhouetted against the backdrop of the evening sky.

Works Cited:

"Snow Depth Survey." The Great Backyard Bird Count. http://www.birdsource.org/gbbcX/science-stories/past-stories/snow-depth-survey (accessed January 23, 2014).

Stokes, Donald, and Lillian Stokes. The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010. (accessed January 23, 2014).

"Winter Robins." The Great Backyard Bird Count. http://www.birdsource.org/gbbcX/science-stories/past-stories/is-that-winter-flock-of-robins-in-your-yard-unusual/ (accessed January 23, 2014).

Kicking It In Crested Butte and a Little Geology Lesson

Over the summer, my family and I took a driving trip to several sites in Colorado that we hadn't been to before, or at least not in awhile.  I never got around to sharing pictures from that trip, but now that I have some free time on my hands, I've decided to go back and share some of the cooler pictures from that trip!  Let's start in the awesome and beautiful Crested Butte!

First off, a little geology lesson!  According to some of the signs placed along the path near town, Crested Butte* is something called a laccolith.  As you can see on the diagrams below on the sign, laccoliths look kind of like pimples that form at some places on the earth's surface.  First, layers of sedimentary rock were deposited.  Next, igneous rock in the form of magma melted its way through several of the underlying sedimentary layers, as you can see in the second picture.  The presence of more matter caused the overlying sedimentary layers to be pushed up, while the underlying layers remained flat.  

Over time, the magma cooled and crystallized, forming a granite-like igneous rock, with crystals of feldspar mixed in.  By using radiometric dating, geologists have determined that these rocks were formed around 30 million years ago, during the Oligocene Epoch.  Over those last 30 MY, erosion and weathering have broken down those layers of sedimentary rock that once covered the laccolith, and exposed the intrusion.  The intrusion is what makes up what you would walk on and see when you are on the mountain. 

A picture of some of the rocks near the summit of Crested Butte.  You can see a little pika peeking out from behind a rock in the center of the picture!  Interestingly (at least to me), the last time I talked about either pikas or the Oligocene Epoch was in the same post, the "Top Ten Mammals That Look Like Something They Aren't (Part 1)," a fun post if there ever was one!

Crested Butte (the mountain) has been further isolated from the surrounding mountains due to the influence of glacial forces.  Telltale signs of past glaciation are abundant in and around Crested Butte, including the u-shaped valleys, polished bedrock, giant boulders in places where they have no business being, and moraines (defined below), amongst other lines of evidence, all point to past episodes of glaciation.  Geologists have dated most of the moraines as about 22.5 to 16.5 thousand years old, during the last Ice Age, and believe that glacial retreat occurred rapidly about 15,000 years ago.  Even older glacial deposits date back to around 100,000 years ago!  

The scenery was truly spectacular between the town and where we were staying, up near the mountain resort, which in turn was next to the very confusing home rule principality of Mt. Crested Butte.  At times, the path turned into a boardwalk, which helped to preserve the wetlands in the area.  

Towards town, we passed over the Slate River.

A shot of the bridge over the Slate River in the foreground, with Crested Butte in the background.

As you can imagine, the area was populated by numerous birds, several of which I got pictures of.  I am fairly confident that this first one was a female mountain bluebird (Sialia currucoides).

We also saw a ton of killdeer (Charadrius vociferus), a fascinating bird, the adults of which will feign injury to draw predators away from fledlings, nests, eggs, and the like.  I've included a video which shows one of these animals doing its injury feigning!  In case the internal link or whatever it's called isn't working, click HERE to view the video.

Here are the pictures I took of the many killdeer running around!

A few more shots of the amazing scenery!

The next day out the window of the hotel room, we saw a pudgy dog walking by with a neck pillow looking thing around its neck.  A little research revealed that this was a KONG Cloud E-Collar, which pretty much serves the same purpose as the cone that you put on dogs and cats after surgeries or the like.  

Here is another picture of the dog.  This time it is relieving itself.

We ate breakfast at a fun little place along the creek!  I had a pancake that was ridiculously enormous.

There were lots of very pretty flowers all over town, including these yellow or wood poppies (Stylophorum diphyllum).  

I don't remember which building it was exactly, but one of the buildings in town had the mounted head of what is supposedly the world's largest rack of elk antlers, shot in Crested Butte in 1899 by a man named John Plute.  The antlers were certified as the largest in the world in 1961.  They definitely did look pretty large!

We'll be looking at more pictures from Crested Butte later!  See you then!

*Point of interest and possible confusion: Crested Butte can refer both to the town with a population of around 1,000, or the mountain with an elevation of 12,168 feet.  If you hear someone talk about Mt. Crested Butte, then they are most likely referring to the home rule principality by that name.  I don't really know what a home rule principality is, and a little bit of research nearly put me into a deep, trance-like state.  

Crested Butte on Dwellable

Works Cited:

A Family of Red-Shouldered Hawks by Wes Deyton, Guest Blogger

A month or so ago, I came across a documentary on YouTube about a family of Red-Shouldered Hawks made by a man named Wes Deyton.  I also saw a number of really cool pictures that he took of the birds, and thought it might be interesting to see if he'd be willing to do a guest post!  Kindly, he was happy to oblige!  First, a bit about Mr. Deyton:

My name is Wes Deyton and I recently graduated from Western Carolina University with a Bachelors Degree in Communications and Broadcasting.  I live in Fuquay Varina North Carolina, which is near Raleigh.  I enjoy taking pictures and making videos of wildlife as well as scenic nature.

Anyways, let's all give Mr. Deyton a warm welcome!  I hope you enjoy these pictures and the video, all of which were taken by Mr. Deyton, as much as I did!

The Red Shouldered Hawks in the video (below) were filmed in the woods behind my house. I have been following them for about the whole Summer.  I did not get any footage of the hawks in the nest when they were really young, because I was still at WCU. I have not been able to find them lately because I think the young Hawks have gone on to find their own territory.

The Red Shouldered Hawk is a medium sized hawk, it primarily lives in woodland areas and it can be found all over the eastern woodlands as well as California and Northern Mexico. These birds generally live in woodland and swamp areas and build their nests high up in trees, close to sources of water such as lakes, streams and swamps.  The nesting period of these birds is about 45-60 days.  

The female hawk spends most of her time getting food to bring back to the nest for her young.  The diet of these birds consist mostly of small mammals, reptiles (including snakes), and amphibians.  There is no sharing in a hawks nest when it comes to food: when the mother brings food to the nest, the chicks have to fight for food.  Sometimes, the female hawk will feed the smaller hawk to make sure it gets enough nourishment to grow and develop healthily.  

Hawks get bored in the nest and dream about life on the outside. They dream about flying high like their parents. This is very evident by seeing them jump back and forth and flap their wings in the nest before they are fully developed to fly. The young hawks climb from branch to branch to develop their balance and then fly short distances until they build up their confidence to fly away from the nest.

The hawk is at the top of the food chain and strikes fear in smaller birds when they are around.

Aren't those pictures brilliant!  Thank you very much Mr. Deyton for sharing these pictures and the video with us, we hope to hear more from you again in the future!  Thanks again!  -Zack Neher

North Carolina Piedmont on Dwellable

The New World Vultures: Top Ten Vultures (Part 2)

On Thursday, I published the first of our two-parter "Top Ten Vultures" posts, all in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day!  (Learn more HERE.)  In the last post, we looked at only the Old World Vultures, a group of birds that are native to Asia, Africa, and Europe.  Today, we will be looking at the New World Vultures who, despite their name, are not actually very closely related to the Old World Vultures at all!  Instead, the similarities in body design between the two different groups is a result of one of my favorite topics of all time, convergent evolution!  So let's do it: the last five of the top ten!  Meet my favorite five New World Vultures!  (For the previous post in the Top Ten Vultures duology, click HERE.)

5.  Number five on the list is the turkey vulture, a classic vulture for us Coloradans!  The only vulture alive today in Colorado (I suppose the occasional black vulture may wander in from the south), the turkey vulture is what many people think of when they hear the word "vulture."  I have noticed a lot (thirty or more) of turkey vultures circling this one place on the CU Boulder campus, so I am planning a little excursion to figure out what it is that is drawing them to that particular spot in such large numbers!  Recently, the folks at the Raptor Education Foundation brought a turkey vulture in to the Best Western Denver Southwest, a fun hotel that is currently undergoing renovations to become a functioning natural history museum!  (REF website HERE, BWDS website HERE.)  So here are some awesome pictures from that event!  If you guys ever get a chance to check out one of the presentations given by the folks at the Raptor Education Foundation, you definitely should go, it is a REAL treat!  In the pictures below, you can see the curator of the foundation, Anne Price, holding the turkey vulture, while the director, Peter Reshetniak (background), tells us a great deal about the bird!

4.  With nearly a ten foot wingspan, the California condor is the largest flying bird in North America!  (If you're having trouble visualizing ten feet, either go purchase ten one-foot long rulers and lay them end to end or, more simply, go find a good-sized California condor and stretch out its wings.  That's probably the best visual right there.)  The California condor is unfortunately labeled "Critically Endangered" by the IUCN, and it has experienced a pretty good comeback, and hopefully will continue to do so well into the future!  According to the IUCN website, the last six remaining wild individuals were brought into captivity for captive breeding purposes, making the species "Extinct in the Wild."  However, due to intense involvement from scientists, the species is on the rise, with around 213 individuals in the wild!

3.  Meet the only fossil vulture on our Top Ten list, Phasmagyps!  Some paleontologists are unsure whether Phasmagyps is actually a vulture, and this uncertainty is definitely understandable, as Phasmagyps is known from but a single bone!  If it is a vulture, then Phasmagyps might be the oldest known New World vulture!  Discovered in a Colorado quarry containing a number of fossils belonging to a 35 million year old rhinoceros called Trigonias, this single bone is now housed in the collections facility of the University of Colorado Boulder!  I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet, but I've tried to input a request to check out the bone, we'll see how that goes!

2.  Meet the Andean condor, one of the largest flying birds alive today, with more than a ten foot wingspan!  With an incredible lifespan of over 75 years in captivity, the Andean condor, much like most animals that live for a very long time, does not reproduce very quickly: and therein lies its vulnerability.  If, say, half of the population of Andean condors was shot in one year by humans, then it would take much longer for the population density to regain its former glory.  By contrast, if you destroy half of the population of, say, rats, then they would almost certainly regain their former numbers very quickly, as they reproduce at an alarmingly fast rate.  (The same principle applies to the California condor, who we talked about above.)  Fortunately, the Andean condor is nowhere near as vulnerable to extinction as its close relative, the California condor.

1.  At last, we come to my most favorite vulture of all time: the king vulture!  This guy is absolutely ridiculous looking, resembling a cross between a vulture, a turkey, and who knows what else!  It also has a very fun scientific name: Sarcoramphus papa!  Don't exactly know what it means, but I like to think it has something to do with being the Vulture Daddy.  I found on some sources online that the blood and feathers of the king vulture were used by the ancient Mayans to help cure disease, but I couldn't find any more information on that: all I found was the exact same sentence copied over and over again: "The bird's blood and feathers were also used to cure diseases."  An enigmatic sentence for a very engimatic looking bird.  But let's face it: it just looks awesome.

Thanks again for joining us today!  I do hope I have made you more aware of vultures of an international level!  But seriously, check out their page: http://www.vultureday.org/2013/index.php

The Old World Vultures: Top Ten Vultures (Part 1)

This coming Saturday is International Vulture Awareness Day, and in honor of the event, we are going to be taking a "Top Ten" look at the vultures!  Before we dive right in, I must make an important distinction.  Despite the fact that both the Cape Griffon vulture (native to Africa) and the turkey vulture (native to North America) are called vultures, they don't all belong to the same group!  Despite the often startling similarities possessed by these two different avian families, these similarities are not the result of a common ancestor, but the result of convergent evolution!  The Old World Vultures (native to Asia, Africa, and Europe) are in the same group of birds as the hawks and eagles do.  Meanwhile, the New World Vultures (native to the Americas) are just kinda out there, not too closely related to the Old World Vultures, but still birds of prey.  In order to keep this post from rapidly getting out of control (as has been known to happen to my blog posts), I have decided to break this Top Ten list into two parts.  The first part focuses on five awesome Old World Vultures, while the second post lists the last five vultures on the Top Ten list, all five of whom are New World Vultures!  Happy International Vulture Awareness Day, everybody!

10.  We'll start off with the lammergeier!  I remembered this one from a David Attenborough special that I saw several years ago!  This particular Old World Vulture was featured in a brief segment of "The Living Planet," and it was smashing good fun!  (That was a pun.  Unless you display a higher than average familiarity with your Old World Vultures, you probably won't get it.  But you will).  The lammergeier enjoys a nice meal of animal bones, especially the marrow on the insides, but oftentimes these bones are simply too tough for the bird to crack.  To successfully reach the innards, the lammergeier launches itself into the air, bone in hand, and flies upwards.  Once it has reached a satisfying height, the lammergeier will release the bone and, if all goes well, the bone will crack open upon impact with the hard rock below!  To see a video of this fantastic bird in action, make sure to click the link HERE!

2.  The smallest of the Old World Vultures, the palm-nut vulture is definitely quite distinctive, and, at least to my eye, looks a lot like an eagle!  (Not so much in the picture below, though, there it just looks like a bat!)  The palm-nut vulture, unlike most birds of prey, regularly consumes vegetable matter, with the primary component of its diet being the fruit of the oil-palm!  The palm-nut vulture does eat other foods as well, though, including crabs, fish, small mammals, reptiles, and birds.  Unlike most other vultures, rarely will a palm-nut vulture be spotted at a large carcass.

3.  The Egyptian vulture, much like the palm-nut vulture, also has a very varied diet.  This particular vulture also has ties to the lammergeier in the ways it gets to its food!  As is typical of vultures, the Egyptian will scavenge large carcasses, and this carrion is the primary component of its diet.  Just like the palm-nut, the Egyptian vulture will also consume rotting vegetables and fruits and, even grosser, it will eat poop!  (Although it may be gross, it is thought by many scientists today that part of the reason that so many people have allergies is because we don't eat poop!  Well....kind of.  Just read the post HERE.)  The Egyptian vulture also loves to eat eggs, but to get at the soft interior, the bird employs the use of tools, throwing rocks at the eggs to break them open!  To see a video of this, check out the YouTube link below!  But honestly, you might want to mute the video, the guy's voice is SOOOO annoying....

4.  Although this guy doesn't look quite as funky as some of the other vultures that we have already looked at, I really like the Cape griffon vulture (oftentimes simply called the Cape vulture, not to be confused with the griffon vulture) because I get to see them in the giraffe exhibit at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo most times we go down!  I was unable to figure out what the scientific name of the Cape griffon vulture, Gyps coprotheres, means.  I found that the genus name, Gyps, means "Condor" in Greek, and I am thinking that the species name, coprotheres, might have something to do with poop, given the fact that the Greek root "copros" means dung or excrement (i.e. coprolites are fossil poop).  However, I couldn't find anything on the Internet that would either confirm or deny my assumptions, so instead of hearing about some fascinating aspect of the Cape griffon vulture's feces, you instead can view some pictures and a video that myself and Grace Albers took at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo!

The video is indeed the link below, I didn't just accidentally upload two of the same picture!

5.  Finally: number 5, the last Old World Vulture on our Top Ten list!  Meet the white-headed vulture, aptly named due to the fact that it has a white head and it is a vulture.  The white-headed vulture is an early riser, often the first vulture to arrive at a carcass.  Because of this, it would have been funnier for me to put the white-headed vulture at the very top of this list, but I'm too lazy to change it so you will have to get by with me just telling you about how funny it is.  Often considered to be an "aloof" vulture (meaning that it generally sticks to the outskirts of a group of feeding vultures), the white-headed vulture can be very aggressive, rushing into the midst of a large group of vultures to grab a scrap of food, and then rushing right back out!

This concludes the first half of our "Top Ten Vulture" posts.  Check back soon for the second half, the New World Vultures half of the posts!