Taima the Seattle Seahawk and the Genus Buteo

For those of you who watching the Broncos/Seahawks game right now, you might have noticed clips of a random bird of prey flying around which, if you're anything like me, that was the highlight of the entire game.  Named Taima, the bird is the mascot for the Seattle Seahawks football team, an augur hawk (Buteo rufofuscus).  Although sometimes referred to as the augur buzzard, I prefer the name augur hawk, as buzzard is sometimes a bit of a confusing name.*  According to the Seahawks website, Taima has been the "first one out of the tunnel" prior to every game.**  The augur hawk is one of the most common hawks in Africa, and inhabits an enormous portion of the eastern and central part of the continent.  Open plains, grasslands, and forests are the augur's preferred habitat, fairly similar to its close North American cousin, the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jaimaicensis).

The broad-winged hawk (Buteo platypterus) is one of the smallest members of the genus, and a hawk that's involved in a very interesting new project, the aptly named "Broad-Winged Hawk Project."  Similar in many ways to the OCEARCH shark tracking project, the BWHP is using satellite telemetry technology to track broad-winged hawks on their migration from Pennsylvania, all the way down to Central and South America.  You can join in the tracking fun by clicking on the link HERE!  Several of the nestling broad-wings were from pretty close to where my friend Zach Evens's cabin in Pennsylvania was that we visited in August!

There are a ton of other hawks in the genus Buteo besides the red-tail, augur, and broad-wing, several of which we've talked about here on the blog, such as the red-shouldered hawk (B. lineatus), rough-legged hawk (B. lagopus), and the Swainson's hawk (B. swainsoni).

A rough-legged hawk on the hand of Anne Price, the Curator of Raptors for the Raptor Education Foundation at one of the raptor shows at the Best Western Denver Southwest!

*In the Americas, a buzzard typically refers to a vulture, while in the Old World, buzzard is often attributed to members of the genus Buteo, of which the augur hawk is a member.  We Americans tend to refer to buteos simply as hawks, which is part of what can lead to this confusion.

**For those of you not in the know, the tunnel is not a metaphorical tunnel, and instead refers to a legit tunnel that leads from the locker room onto the stadium.

Works Cited:

Baby Prairie Dogs and Birdwatching on the Bird of Prey Route!

Today, with the summer weather and the lack of school, I decided to take my car over to what I like to call the "Bird of Prey Route," a little dirt road in between Superior and Boulder about ten minutes from my house here in Colorado.  You can usually see at least one or two different types of raptors there, and there are a number of other awesome animals that I have spotted there, as well!  Today, I saw a lot of really cool birds, as well as some baby prairie dogs, as you can see below!

This particular species of prairie dog is the black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus).  Like the other species of prairie dog, the black-tail is a highly social little rodent.  Below you can see two pups "kissing" each other, a type of interaction that members of the same family group will employ.  I think this is just to help solidify familial bonds, but I'm not sure if anybody knows for certain.

Today, the bird of prey route did not disappoint!  Perched in the tree in the picture below is the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis), definitely the raptor that I see most often when on the route.

I also saw a pair of American kestrels (Falco sparverius), the species of raptor that I see second most often.  I don't usually see the kestrels so close together, however, so perhaps this was a mated pair.  I did see one of them fly into a hollow in a tree, which might be where a nest is hidden away!

As I was watching the hollow in the tree where the American kestrel swooped off into, I noticed several European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) flying into other hollows on the tree.  Then I realized that the angle of one of the hollows was just right, and that I could actually see the adult starling feed its young!  If you zoom in on the picture, you can see that the baby already looks pretty big, maybe even as big as the parent!

Black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia) are especially abundant in the area, and I saw several of them as well.

This magpie looks like it is molting!

Now this particular tree presents a particularly provocative puzzle, as it is almost completely covered in some very sharp looking thorns.  A few weeks ago, I saw another tree, much larger than this one, along the banks of Boulder Creek that had some enormous thorns on its branches as well, some of them easily six inches long, and super sharp on the end!  I don't know for certain what kind of tree this, or the Boulder Creek tree, is, but a good candidate I think is the honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos), or some other tree closely related to the honey locust.  Below is the picture of the tree that I took on the Bird of Prey Route.

Here is a picture of the thorns of the honey locust tree.

And here is the picture that I took on my iPhone at Boulder Creek of this tree.  The thorns look pretty similar to those of the honey locust, and I think that the trunk of the tree looks pretty similar, too.

Now why do these trees have such huge thorns?  That's a really good question.  I started answering (or at least trying to answer) the question here in this blog post, but everything rapidly started spiraling out of control and off focus as I started talking about giraffes, tiny squirrels, cheetahs, and extinct North American elephants.  For those of you who know me, it should come as no surprise that I spiraled so quickly off topic.  But regardless, what I had written ended up having enough material for at least three or more posts, so I have moved the answer to a different post, which I will hopefully be publishing soon.  Keep an eye out for that!  In the meantime, back to the future birds!  Here, we see a pair of barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) perched on a wire.

I'm not quite as sure about the identity of this particular bird.  Also a swallow, I am thinking that it might be a violet-green swallow (Tachycineta thalassina).

I believe this to be a vesper sparrow (Pooecetes gramineus).

A western kingbird (Tyrannus verticalis), another bird that I see all the time here, at least in the summer!

At last, we have one of the most exciting birds that I saw on the route today, the blue grosbeak (Passerina caerulea), a bird that I don't remember ever seeing before!

Remember to check back soon to learn all about those massively spiky trees!

Works Cited:

Robbins, C. S., Bruun, B., & Zim, H. S. (1983). Birds of North America. New York: Golden Press.

Stokes, D. W., & Stokes, L. Q. (2010). The Stokes field guide to the birds of North America. New York: Little, Brown.

Eye Black: What Works for Football Players Works for the Cheetah

I remember when I was younger I would always wonder why baseball and football players wore black paint under their eyes.  My dad told me that the "eye black" was to help to reduce the glare that their eyes received from the sun.  Although some people seem to disagree whether or not this is effective for human sports players, it seems that several animals have evolved a similar pattern on their face!  But before we dive in, a very special thanks to Anne Price for her help with this post!

I imagine that there are a number of stories told by native peoples of Africa that explain the tear marks of the cheetah, which you can see in the picture above.  The one that I have heard before (which you can read by clicking HERE) tells of the cheetah being told by lions that she was not a cat, and instead was a dog.  The cheetah then went to talk with the wild dogs.  But the wild dogs also kicked the cheetah out, saying that she was a cat and not a dog.  The cheetah, sad with the fact that she did not seem to belong to either group, cried so much that the tear marks were burned into her face.

Some scientists believe that these black marks, which they called "malar stripes" or "malar marks," actually evolved to help the cheetah see in sunny conditions, by reducing glare and keeping the sun out of its eyes.  This would have been the original "eye black," a phenomenon whose roots extend back much further than the origins of baseball or football.  I was surprised when I was researching this natural eye black, as I thought it was a commonly cited fact that cheetahs had this eye black to reduce glare.  However, many of the sources just mentioned the malar stripes, and didn't actually address their function.  

In the book "Big Cat Diary: Cheetah," Jonathan and Angela Scott propose an alternative hypothesis.  Though they do mention the anti-glare hypothesis, the Scotts suspect that a more likely alternative is that the tear-marks serve to "accentuate facial expressions," which they say would be an "important consideration in social interactions with other cheetahs."  The tear marks, "along with the growls and hisses that are an important part of a cheetah's defensive repertoire," might "deter competitors from approaching."  While this is well and good for the cheetah, and is likely at least part of the reason why the cheetah has the malar stripes, I have a difficult time believing that this is the only reason why some animals evolved the stripes.  We will get to my reasoning in a second.

What I find really interesting about these stripes is that they are unique to the cheetah in the cat world.  The cheetah, as is mentioned in the African story above, is a very unique cat, different in many ways from others felines.  One way in which the cheetah is different is that it hunts primarily during the day, and is much less a nocturnal animal than most cats.  If you look at the eye of your house cat, look for two things.  The first is the size of the eye.  Though the cat is quite small compared to you, Mr. Whiskers has eyes that are only a bit smaller than yours!  Second, look at the pupils.  Unlike the pupils of humans that stay circular regardless of the level of dilation or constriction, cat pupils constrict to tiny diamond slits, but dilate to large circles.  This is because most cats are active at night and during the day, and in order to protect their eyes in a variety of light conditions, they have evolved very mobile pupils.  

My cat Chimney.  Notice her slit pupils.  And the One Direction pillow in the background.  Photo Credit: Dani Neher

The cheetah does not have diamond pupils, and instead has round pupils.  This stems from the fact that cheetahs are primarily diurnal, and usually hunt during the day.  According to the Scotts, "just like birds of prey," cheetahs have a "patch of highly light-sensitive cells on the retina known as the fovea."  These cells provide the cheetah with the "most precise visual perception," and enables them to "spot prey from as far away as 5 km (3 miles)."  I find this comparison to birds of prey interesting, as both the cheetah and the prairie falcon, another animal with malar stripes, would have the need to be able to spot prey from a great distance, and in sunny conditions.  This large North American falcon has very similar streaks of brown feathers beneath its eye, which flow down the face.  According to "The Prairie Falcon" by Stanley Anderson and John Squires, the "black mustachial stripes near the eyes...may further reduce glare."

This idea is supported by other bird of prey experts, such as Anne Price, the Curator of Raptors at the Raptor Education Foundation in Colorado.  Eager to learn more about the similar stripes on the face of the prairie falcon, I emailed Anne, and here's what she had to say:

It’s meant to reduce glare by having the sun strike or be concentrated in the area beneath the eye, leaving the area above in proper contrast.  The black lines under the eyes of cheetahs, most falcons (gyrfalcons and merlins being notable exceptions) and even flickers have malar stripes, though in flickers they serve as signals for courtship, not for better visibility of prey species!

Other falcons that have the malar stripe include the American kestrel....

....and the peregrine falcon.

Not all falcons have the malar stripe, however.  As Anne mentioned above, gyrfalcons and merlins are notable falcons that don't have the malar stripe, but here is another one: the African pygmy falcon, the smallest of the African raptors!  This is a picture that I took of one at the Denver Zoo.

Furthermore, the black streak under the eye is also seen on the face of many species that the cheetah preys upon.  According to the cheetah section in "Wild Cats of the World" by Mel and Fiona Sunquist, 91% of cheetah kills in the Serengeti are Thomson's gazelle.  In Kruger National Park, 68% of kills were the impala, and in other areas such as Botswana, springbok are an important part of the diet as well.  73.9% of the kills made by cheetahs in Nairobi National Park were Thomson's gazelle, Grant's gazelle, and impala.  As you can see in the pictures below, all of these antelope have that black streak under their eyes, though it is less pronounced in the Grant's gazelle and impala than it is in the Thomson's gazelle.  One of the biggest reasons for markings on an animal that don't aid in camouflage or sexual selection (i.e. differences between male and female that are used to attract a mate) is to help with species differentiation, so that they don't waste valuable time and resources attempting to breed with each other.  But since all of these antelope have the black tear marks, as well as both genders of the species, that's probably not the role that the tear marks were playing.*

A Cuvier's gazelle at the San Diego Zoo, which also has very similar malar stripes.

A Speke's gazelle at the San Diego Zoo, yet another gazelle that has the same sort of malar stripes.

It is these antelope that make me wonder whether the cheetah evolved the malar stripe to "accentuate facial expressions," as proposed by the Scotts.  In my experience, antelope such as the Thomson's gazelle don't really go around making faces at each other, at least nowhere near as much as cats do.  The fact that both the predator and prey in this scenario possess the same adaptation makes me wonder whether coevolution has occurred.

Coevolution is a biological phenomenon in which the evolution of one animal influences the evolution of another.  A classic example would be flowers and the insects that pollinate them.  Flowers need their pollen to be carried to other flowers in order for reproduction to occur.  Oftentimes, these flowers employ the use of bees and other insects to do the job for them.  But to make it worth their while, the flowers supply the insects with a delicious meal of nectar.  When the insects land to suck up the nectar, they also pick up some pollen.  Then, when they fly off to another flower to indulge in some more nectar, they unknowingly deposit some of the pollen, and simultaneously pick up some more!

I find it possible that coevolution has occurred in regards to the cheetah and its prey.  Imagine if a certain lineage of cheetah evolved that had the black tear marks beneath their eyes, while the rest of their cheetah brethren did not have this black streak.  If the black streak did help them see their prey a little better by reducing glare, then perhaps these cheetahs were more successful hunters, and produced more offspring because of it.  Suddenly, the gazelles and impala are faced with a formidable foe that can suddenly see farther than they used to be able to.  In order to compensate, it's possible that the antelope who also had black streaks under their eyes were able to see farther as well, and spot the approach of a predator from a greater distance.  Strangely enough, I haven't been able to find anything anywhere suggesting that coevolution might have occurred here, so who knows!  I'm just throwing this out there, I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, but it's a prospect which I find intriguing and thought worth sharing with all of you.

*To read more about species differentiation and the role it plays in the success of biological organisms and species diversity, click HERE to learn more about the effects of logging on a type of fish called cichlids.

Works Cited:



An interview with Anne Price.

Anderson, Stanley H., and John R. Squires. The Prairie Falcon. University of Texas Press, 1997. (accessed December 16, 2013).

"General Information About the Cheetah." Cheetah Conservation Fund. http://www.cheetah.org/?nd=general_info (accessed December 16, 2013).

"How The Cheetah Got Its Tears." Cheetah Conservation Fund. http://www.cheetah.org/?nd=story_cheetah_tears (accessed December 16, 2013).

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).

Drive to the Quarry: Dinosaur Road Trip With Grace Part 3

PREVIOUSLY, ON BATTLESTAR GALACTICA:

-Grace Albers and I are taking a trip down to Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado.
-We checked out some cool petroglyphs and then camped the night.
-And now....

Grace was up before I was, and got some cool pictures near the Green River that went right by our campsite!

A sprinkler going off on the farmlands across the river!

A golden-mantled ground squirrel back at the campsite!  These things sure can get pesky, especially if there's food around!

After a quick breakfast, we were off to the quarry!  Here are some of the gorgeous scenery shots on the way!  Pyg definitely enjoyed our view of the Green River!

The Green River in the bottom of the shot!

And then....we saw it!  As we were driving, Grace suddenly told me to stop and back up (as there was no one on the road.  I was being safe, mother, don't worry).  Her instincts were right: it was a golden eagle!  Here are a ton of great shots she took!

Pretty awesome pictures, right!  Well, we continued on to the quarry and were met with an enormous Stegosaurus statue out front!  Here is a picture of Grace next to it!

And here's a Pyg pic!

We went inside of the visitors center.  While we waited for the shuttle to arrive to take us up to the quarry, we looked at some of the things that were inside of the visitor center!  First off, we have some fossil lizard footprints from the Chinle Formation, a Late Triassic formation of North America, whose rocks are around 225 million years old!

Next we have part of the jaw of the large Morrison Formation predator Allosaurus!

Now THIS I thought was really cool, and we will talk more about it in later Dinosaur National Monument posts, but pretty much the two pictures below are before and after pictures.  The first picture is what the intersection of the Green and Yampa Rivers looks like today.  The second is a drawing of what the area WOULD look like if a dam had been built downstream in 1950!  Fortunately, the dam plans were averted!  We will talk more about this dam thingy later!

Pyg touches a large hunk of rock that is about 1.2 BILLION years old!

"What do they keep in there, King Kong?"  Nice Jurassic Park reference, Zack.

After a bit of waiting, the shuttle arrived!  Pyg eagerly awaits our departure!

As we were boarding the tram, I noticed a pair of birds of prey soaring above our heads!  Originally, I thought that they were two of the same birds, and it wasn't until after I put the pictures onto my computer that I realized that these were two very different birds, indeed!  However, I had little to no idea what these birds were, so I contacted Anne Price, the Curator of Raptors at the Raptor Education Foundation, who often brings some fantastic birds to the Best Western Denver Southwest!  To see some fantastic pictures of these experiences and to learn more about them, click HERE and HERE!

Anyways, after talking with Anne, she said that the above picture, as well as the two below, are all of an immature red-tailed hawk, "with a very distinct “dash-and-comma” markings on the wings."

Anne got pretty excited about this last picture, though!  Here is what she said in the email:

"I am 99% certain it is an adult goshawk!!  Very rare to see this bird soaring, and totally in an unusual area; this bird is getting ready  to migrate, or has already started to. Of the 3 accipiters in the US (which are known for having short wings and long tails), the goshawk has the longest wings proportionally to the body and tail. You can very much see that in evidence in your photo. The distinct stripes on the tail are a giveaway too."

Pretty exciting stuff, I'm glad we got the chance to see one!

Finally, as the tram started moving, we noticed some ripple marks frozen in the rock face above us, a reminder that most of the surrounding area was under a shallow inland sea!

Next time: The Quarry!