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Our granddaughters seem interested in the structure of the feet of this newly hatched chick:
Of Hamster Livers and Starling Ears
In college, I majored in biology. This was a direct result of my childhood interest in birds and all living things. More properly, it was a result of the intense curiosity that is stimulated by even the most subtle aspects of the morphology and behavior of living things. Curiosity causes one to ask many questions. Whether trivial or sublime, so many questions remain unanswered. I don’t know who said it, but it is so true: “The last thing a science learns is what it is about.”A fact that intrigued me was that Golden Hamsters appear to be immune from the effects of the alkaloid colchicine, a mitotic poison that freezes cells in the process of dividing. The theory was that the hamster evolved in a region where the herb that produces colchicine is common. It somehow adapted and survived by developing resistance to the effects of the chemical. Many anti-cancer drugs also prevent multiplication of tumor cells, so I thought the lowly hamster might provide a key to finding how to selectively protect healthy cells from damage during chemotherapy.
I kept a colony of hamsters in the college lab, and fed them high doses of colchicine. They appeared to suffer no ill effects, although they did not reproduce while eating the colchicine-laced food. In order to test my hypothesis that the substance may end up being concentrated in a particular organ, I euthanized the animals, pooled their organs, and using a primitive glass column chromatograph, analyzed their tissues for colchicine. This revealed that the colchicine was indeed concentrated in their livers. Histologic examination revealed no pathologic changes in the liver or any other organs. It was an uncontrolled, poorly designed experiment without a clear hypothesis, that wasted the lives of innocent animals. I never learned why or how the hamsters resisted the effects of the poison. Since hamsters are normally exceptionally prolific, their failure to bear young appeared odd, as their body tissues exhibited normal cell division.
After I graduated, it was off to medical school, and that was the end of my experiment. It left me with more questions than answers.Today, an Internet search reveals much sophisticated research on the same subject. For example, it was subsequently confirmed that the natural resistance of the Golden Hamster to colchicine is not manifested in the developing embryos in utero. Francis Crick had discovered the double helix of DNA only a couple of years before I executed my hamsters, but now the unusual resistance of hamsters to the erstwhile toxin has been explained at the molecular level. Resistance to colchicine has been found to be associated with specific DNA sequences containing genes which alter plasma membrane permeability, leading to a decreased uptake of several anti-cancer drugs. Now, 55 years later, I cannot find any reference as to the applicability of this knowledge to clinical medicine.
Nieta watches as a Black Swallowtail butterfly emerges from its chrysalis:
The natural world is so full of questions. Before I retired, I traveled a great deal and spent lots of time at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. One day, in the mid-1970s, I noticed that European Starlings were feeding nestlings, whose heads popped out of nests located in crevices located where the jetways connected to the airport terminal’s walls. It seemed odd that the birds were exhibiting normal behavior in such a noise-filled environment. All the humans who worked in that area were wearing hearing protection. Yet these birds, of a species that is particularly vocal, seemed not to be suffering in the least. Surely, their sensitive ears must have been severely damaged by all those decibels.
Humans can adapt to hearing loss, through gestures, sign language and writing. Birds appear to rely heavily upon the subtleties of calls and songs, especially in their reproductive behaviors. Owls are known to locate prey by hearing alone. How did those starlings manage to rear their families amid the constant roar of jet engines? Incidentally, Killdeers were often present along the taxiways and landing strips– was it possible that they, too, were able to breed under these circumstances?
Internet research now provides me with an appreciation of the fallacy of anthropomorphising, of applying human attributes to birds. Just as my earlier assumptions about sex-linked characteristics in Muscovy Ducks proved to be 180 degrees away from the truth (I had falsely assumed that male sex was determined by the male parent, as in humans, whose males are heterogametic), I now know that the inner ears of birds, and most reptiles and mammals, have a unique regenerative ability to recover from damage to the microscopic auditory hairs (cochlear cilia) that are so essential to normal hearing. This fact was discovered by medical researchers who were looking for a cure for human deafness. Indeed, we humans are the oddballs in this respect.
Research conducted at the Laboratory of Comparative Psychoacoustics in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD explores the issues of the effects of noise on bird behavior. Remarkably, they have discovered that birds have the ability to block out or mask certain background noises and still hear the calls of others. The following is from an abstract entitled The General Effects of Noise on Hearing in Birds
“A great deal has been learned over the last several decades about the effect of noise on hearing thresholds in both humans and animals including birds. One useful measure, the critical ratio (the ratio of tone intensity to noise intensity expressed in decibels), tells us how loud a pure tone must be to be detected against a background of broadband, white noise. The critical ratio is the level of the pure tone at threshold (in dB) minus the spectrum level (dB per Hz) of the noise.
“Critical ratios have been measured in the laboratory for a number of species of birds including: budgerigars, canaries, starlings, song sparrows, swamp sparrows, red-wing blackbirds, cowbirds, great tits, cockatiels, and barn owls. In general, the effect of white noise on hearing thresholds in birds (as well as in humans) doubles with every doubling of frequency. In other words, the critical ratio at 2.0 kHz is 3 dB higher than the critical ratio at 1.0 kHz. However, some birds, such as budgerigars, show a remarkably different masking pattern… [suggesting] that budgerigars hear better in noise than other birds at frequencies between 2-4 kHz. Importantly, these laboratory studies of masking by noise can also be used to make predictions about how environmental or anthropogenic (human-made) noise affects the abilities of birds to hear each other in the real world… “
My question about the starlings remains essentially unanswered. In this one narrow area, such unanswered questions abound. Following are some suggested areas for future research, excerpted from the UMD Web site,
“…When noise masks the biologically important signals of birds in the wild, and interferes with their ability to communicate effectively, it surely has a detrimental effect on their normal behavior and breeding biology…
“…There are virtually no data published on the effects of different types of noises (e.g. traffic or aircraft noises) on the perception of species-specific vocalizations. Such laboratory data are critical for understanding the effect of noise on acoustic communication and for developing reasonable guidelines for noise abatement…
“… It is important to understand that intense traffic or aircraft noise probably represents a substantial risk to normal acoustic communication in birds. It is not practical to think of eliminating the detrimental effects on communication completely. It is practical, however, to try and quantify the risks so that intelligent judgments can be made concerning the extent to which noise may interfere with the normal behavior and breeding biology of birds in the wild, and reasonable arguments can be made about how much risk is acceptable. At present, predictions made for detection of vocalizations in the environment only address the simplest case, the ability of a bird to tell whether a sound occurred (i.e. detection). Such a measure does not reflect a bird’s ability to communicate effectively in a particular acoustic environment, and may have little bearing on it…
” …At the present time, these worthwhile environmental projects are not funded. The ultimate goal of these studies is to generate a predictive model for evaluating the impact of noise on acoustic communication in birds in order save endangered species…”
The story of the Rosy-Finches of Sandia Crest, New Mexico. This flag waves all winter on rosyfinch.com, when rosy-finches are present at Sandia Crest. It stopped waving on April 4, when the last flocks were seen. A few finches visited after April 4th, but no appreciable flocks. One Black Rosy-Finch was coming in for seed on April 8. Feeders and sighting logs were removed April 9th. Now we can look forward to their return, next November! In the meantime, explore the links below and to the left, and know there is great birding in the Sandias and the greater Albuquerque area all year ’round.
(The rosy-finch flocks at Taos Ski Valley persisted until April 21, according to Gil Bachmann, Manager of the Kandahar Condominiums. A few individuals were still there on April 27. Gil said he missed the flurry of activity.)
View of the Sandia Crest House from the south. The large picture windows on three sides provide excellent viewing of the rosy-finch feeders. (Click on photo for full screen view).
Back on December 7, 1999, Mary Lou and I saw our first rosy-finch up there, in the parking lot of the Crest House at 10,678 feet. Then, they were considered “rare but regular” winter visitors to the Sandia Mountains. We had previously chased after them several times after seeing reports on the Internet, but had not succeeded in finding them until that snowy day. Since they had been attracted by bread crusts thrown away by some workers, we decided to return and scatter seed. It worked, and we kept putting out seed in the parking lot, and the birds have been visiting reliably every day of every winter since then. Usually, all three species and both the Interior and Hepburn’s (Gray-cheeked) race of the Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch have been there together.
Within two years we had engaged the US Forest Service, the Central New Mexico Audubon Society, and some private wild bird feeder and seed suppliers in a cooperative venture. Sunwest Silver, the Albuquerque company that owns Sandia Crest House, is the key to the success of the project, as they provided space for the feeders. The Forest Service prohibits feeding of wildlife on all but the “developed” or leased areas within its boundaries. (The Loveland ski resort in Colorado had its popular feeders removed a couple of years ago on order of the Forest Service. Frankly, their central location posed a traffic hazard as birders and skiers competed for parking spaces on the often slippery and snowy parking lot. Happily, Sandia Crest is far uphill from the “downhill” crowd, so there is usually plenty of parking.)
The first feeders at Sandia Crest were erected in February, 2001 and, as they say, “the rest is history.” You can read the whole story here in this article I wrote for Birders World. Much of the credit for the success goes to the USFS professionals and Volunteers, the Central New Mexico Audubon Society (the formal partner with the USFS in this project), notably to several young birders, merchants who continue to support the project, and the managers of the Crest House Restaurant and Gift Shop, which continues to host the feeders and accommodate the birding public along with regular customers. Organized research began largely in response to the efforts of the late Ryan Beaulieu, a High School student. His buddies have carried on the tradition (among them, Raymond VanBuskirk, Michael Hilchey and Cole Wolf, but I dare not try to name them all, for they are legion– just look at this page and this one as well!!).
Steve and Nancy Cox, of Rio Grande Bird Research, with the help of many volunteers, began a regular winter banding operation at Crest House in 2004. So far, they have banded over 1600 rosy-finches and are also conducting isotope studies to try to unravel the life histories of the four races of rosy-finches that converge on Sandia Crest every winter. Dave Weaver and Fran Lusso, trained USFS Volunteers, took over our duties as coordinators of the rosy-finch feeding project when we moved to Florida in 2004, and have served ably and with great dedication. They did not consider themselves “birders” when they started, but they quickly learned to separate the rosy-finch species, and now they are experts at identifying most anything that flies.
| May through October, TUESDAY MORNING GUIDED BIRD WALKS in the Sandia Mountains, sponsored by the U.S. Forest Service and Central New Mexico Birders meet at 8:00 a.m. (8:30 in May and October) at the |
Nelson Lake, view from south shore looking north:
On our first chance to get out birding since our arrival in Illinois this past weekend, we got out early to Nelson Lake Marsh (Dick Young Forest Preserve) in Batavia, Kane County. We had not been there since last November, just before we returned to Florida (via Amarillo) for the winter. We rolled our socks over our trouser legs (we heard there were ticks galore) and welcomed the temperate climate.
The flock of White Pelicans that has been present for the past month has dwindled to 13, that we could see. Canada Geese were nesting, and we saw two Sandhill Cranes and heard several more. An American Kestrel was our only raptor for the morning. Northern Cardinals, and Field, Song and Swamp Sparrows were singing vigorously. The high Northern (Yellow-shafted) Flicker count suggested they may be migrating through, though many were engaged in courtship or territorial displays. Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers made it a Trifecta. Our only warbler was a Yellow-rumped (Myrtle), and we saw a Brown Thrasher and couple of Blue-headed Vireos and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers.
The only birds that stood still long enough for me to photograph were sparrows, including this Song Sparrow:
This fuzzy view of a Swamp Sparrow was about the best I could do:
Despite the close range, my shaky hands did not do too well with this Swamp Sparrow, making me dream about getting an image stabilized lens:
Mary Lou did not know I photographed her on this path along the south shore of Nelson Lake, looking east:
From our perch in Chicagoland we can enjoy the many reports of arriving warblers in South Florida, and hope that when we are finally able to get out in the field, they will have made it to our neighborhood. This is the Key West radar as we are turning in for the night, which is just after midnight Florida time. At this hour, the flights from Cuba and the Keys are less dramatic than a couple of nights ago, but certainly worth watching. Check out BADBIRDZ for the entire night’s action.
Pretty much on schedule, the winds shifted to the southeast last night, bringing about much more favorable conditions for migrants venturing across the Florida Straits. I expected that there would almost surely be some spectacular radar images overnight, for BADBIRDZ to display in the morning.
I checked the Key West radar at bedtime, and found a “teaser” image. While the one-hour loop provides little but a glimpse of the big picture of neotropical migration, the fluid motion from the quick refresh rate lends a dramatic touch. The depth of the blue color (10-15 DBZ) suggests a density of 71 to 109 birds per cubic kilometer. This morning, BADBIRDZ tells the whole story that is introduced by this “trailer.”
One-hour Key West loop at about 10:00 PM shows flocks departing en masse, first from the Keys, and then from the north coast of Cuba.
The Miami loop also showed a lot of activity, with a good number of birds apparently coming right over my house. I went outside, looked and listened for about 10 minutes. I heard nothing unusual. The moon was nearly full and straight up. I looked at it through binoculars until my neck and arms burned, and my eyes watered too badly, but saw no birds cross its face.
Miami radar one hour loop, at a little after 10:00 PM, again shows the beginning of what should prove to be a very interesting night. Now, we’re off to Illinois to catch up with that wave!
Looking due east from our patio, we see that the waves are now coming in diagonally from the left. The wind is shifting eastward.
The lake is most interesting when the wind is still, when it is easy to see the bass splash to capture insects on the surface, or groups of small fish jump out of the water in unison, porpoise-like, to escape an underwater predator. The lake reveals quite a bit about the weather: wind shadows, wave intensity and direction. It signals sudden downbursts from thunderstorms and shifting winds.
Watching the lake last evening, after two days of steady northwest winds, we saw the wind shift to the northeast. High pressure is moving down along the east coast of Florida, and with it a gradual shift of wind direction to perhaps southerlies by tomorrow night. The waves on the lake signaled that waves of warblers were unlikely, but I checked the radar before turning in.
Despite the continued fairly strong NE winds, and no movement north from Cuba, Key West radar showed a burst of birds at 8:31 PM, slipping up the west coast of Florida towards Naples and along the west coast of Florida. This morning, BADBIRDZ confirmed that there had been little or no action across the Florida Straits, though there had been movement inland to the north, with, showing migrants exiting the Sunshine State.
A good sized flock is exiting from the SW tip of the Florida Peninsula, north of Flamingo, near Whitewater Bay and Oyster Bay in ENP. They are speeding along across the wind, at about 40 MPH.
Then, a little after 10:00 PM, this loop from Miami radar shows the same flock making progress up the coast, and a large number of birds exiting western Broward County and heading northwest towards Fort Myers.
Tree Tops Park
BirdBlogBytes
Yesterday morning, the air was crisp and cool after the passage of a second cold front the night before. As it turned out, the temperature never rose above a bone-chilling 69 degrees, a record low for April 15th. Mary Lou and I had some business to conduct in Fort Lauderdale, so we arranged our route to include a visit to Tree Tops Park in Davie.
We had not been to Tree Tops Park since just after Hurricane Wilma, when we found the area closed to visitors because of many felled trees and branches. We worried about damage to the park’s most interesting feature, a canopy platform that brings a visitor up to the level of the upper branches of the old Live Oaks. During migration this can be a great place to watch warblers, vireos and orioles at eye level as they move through. This morning it was not very birdy, but the quiet beauty of the place is impressive.
Wild Honeybee hive, high in a Live Oak tree.
Native Wild Coffee, with inconspicuous white flowers, thrived in the shade of the oaks. It is an important food source for birds and butterflies, but not related to the Starbucks kind.
Beautyberry also enjoys the shade. While not favored by wildlife, its fruits persist long into the dry season, and may become an emergency source of nutrition. Its leaves have insecticide properties.
A Tricolored Heron stalked near the boardwalk.
Tricolored Heron head closeup.
Anhinga nestlings, visible from the boardwalk.
Another view of the Anhinga nestlings.
Spider lily or Swamp Lily, near the boardwalk.
Mary Lou at entrance of ramp to the canopy platform.
A Green Heron sat quietly at the edge of the pond near the parking lot.
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BirdBlogBytes |
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| Save Our Boreal Birds | The Boreal Forest is a vitally important breeding ground that supports more than half of the North American populations of over 100 bird species, and it is steadily being carved up by unchecked development. |
| The BirdFreak | Video of song variations in Song Sparrow |
| Hawk Owls Nest | Participate in a Binocular Strap Poll |
| Bird Cinema | Richard Attenborough’s fascinating clip on nestling anatomy and behavior |
| Aimophila Adventures | Rick Wright goes “birding in the buff” (sans binos) |
A Bird Killer Towers Ominously
Over Our Lake
View to the east from our patio at sunrise, April 12. The communications tower is under construction on the horizon to the right.
At the top of our “wish list” when we started planning for a home in retirement was that we might be near our children, followed by a house with a view. No need to explain the first requirement, but after 25 years of living in flat country we wanted to be able to focus our eyes on something beyond the back fence. Our home site in New Mexico fit our specifications, and we looked out on the expansive eastern slope of Sandia Mountains. We built our home within a four to five hour drive of two of our children and their families, a daughter in Arizona and a son in Texas. We enjoyed living there for over ten years. Then, smitten by wanderlust, we decided it was time to downsize and move to be nearer to our other daughter and her family, in Florida.
One’s eyes are completely relaxed when focused upon a distant object. The relaxation can spread to the entire body. There are no mountains in Florida, but an expanse of water has a similar effect, so we settled on the shore of a small lake. The good news was that the house was only two miles away from our daughter’s family, which now included two baby granddughters. The bad news was that her husband got a big promotion to a position in Chicago before the moving van had even departed from New Mexico!
Still, we do enjoy the climate and do our best to see the rest of the family, particularly during the third season (we have Hot, Hotter and Hurricane). There is shopping nearby and nice paved paths for walking, plus our “patch” of recovering Everglades only a quarter mile from our house.
On this morning’s walk, we checked on the progress of the construction of a communications tower that is going up. About a mile to our east, and about 150 feet high, it already casts its reflection on our lake, and promises to loom much higher. As birders, we have additional cause for some concern.
Among the links below is a video on Bird Cinema with some sobering footage of migrating birds that were killed by communications towers. Attracted to their lights, the birds may become confused and circle aimlessly, and often be injured or killed by crashing into the structures.
According to the New Jersey Audubon Society:
“The problem is caused by the lights on the towers for aviation warning. On nights with a low ceiling, birds lose their cues for stellar and geomagnetic navigation. The light reflecting off water molecules in the air causes an illumined area, creating a whirlpool of birds circling the tower in the light space. Bill Evans of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology ventured the estimate cited above, of 2 to 4 million bird kills a year at towers, and there is a growing bibliography of documented North American tower kills of birds…”
The Federal Communications Commission has ordered some changes that should reduce bird mortality. In a February, 2008 decision that only affects towers along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida, the US Court of Appeals in D.C. now requires the FCC to study the effects of communications towers on migratory birds, and provide prior public notice of new tower applications. The FCC does not perform an environmental impact assessment or consult with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and gives no public notice until after a tower has already been approved. An article in the Los Angeles Times states, that under the court order, “FCC must weigh new towers’ risk to birds:”
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that millions of warblers, thrushes and other birds die each year because continuously burning lights atop those towers can disorient them in bad weather.
“The 2-1 decision affects only towers along the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida, a major route for migrating birds.
“But environmentalists hope the ruling will spur the FCC to approve proposed rules that would mandate white strobe lights on new towers nationwide. Studies have shown that those lights aren’t as disorienting to birds and could cut deaths by 70%…”
We are sure “our” tower is not covered by the order, for it was already under construction when the court issued its ruling. We cannot find any specific reference to this particular tower on the Web or in news articles.Of course, communication towers are a necessity in this day and age. We can only watch and worry, but it is reassuring that the FCC may now be taking some steps to reduce bird kills.
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BirdBlogBytes |
|
| Save Our Boreal Birds | The Boreal Forest is a vitally important breeding ground that supports more than half of the North American populations of over 100 bird species, and it is steadily being carved up by unchecked development. |
| The BirdFreak | A sad goodbye to “Max,” and some beautiful Common Loon photos |
| BirdChaser | BirdChaser interviews Howard Cosell on the Sport of Birding! |
| Hawk Owls Nest | Patrick has suggestions for National Wildlife Week activities |
| Birds, Etcetera | In a reflective mood, John Trapp looks back a year and recalls a blog on Warbler Politics: How Birds Made Two Presidents! |
| Illinois Birders Forum | I’m watching this site closely– when the snow melts we will be birding at our second home in Chicagoland |
| Children and Nature | April is Nature Awareness Month |
| Bird Cinema | FCC orders measures to reduce communication tower danger to migrating birds |
| Birding in Maine | Great birding notes and photos from “Way Down East” |
| Kayak Paddle Tales | Peggy paddles Cedar Key, Florida and photographs spoonbills |
| Born Again Birdwatcher | John updates the schedule of BirdNote Podcasts |
Loxahatchee NWR Birds on Radar
This morning, on Miami Radar, I was able to capture a better-defined ring of birds exiting the general vicinity of Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge (Lox NWR in the clip below) at about 7:00 AM.Another large flock is seen flying from Water Conservation Area 3 (WCA-3) west of Fort Lauderdale. There is suggestion of an expanding ring here as well, but the bulk of this flock is progressing to the southwest, ahead of the advancing line of thunderstorms. (A very large ring of echoes around WCA-3 appeared on March 31, and may be viewed here).
It would be interesting to hear from people on the ground near either area as to whether these massive dawn flights represent wading birds, blackbirds, or a combination. (”My Son The Meterologist,” with due scientific caution, would include the possibility of clouds of insects.)
Note that as the ring begins to form, as shown in the clip of the earliest frame, that the biomass in both areas is high enough to produce a green echo. I sent this clip to David LaPuma (BADBIRDZ), for his information .
Detailed clip of Miami Radar loop on April 13, 2008 (6:49 AM EDT frame):
Miami Radar loop on April 13, 23008, 6:49 to 7:30 AM, EDT:
Two More “Donuts” With My Coffee
Miami Radar this morning showed two “donuts.” The first, rather small, appears NW of Fort Lauderdale in the 6:59 AM frame, and is located on or near Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Palm County. The other, a larger and more distinct burst shows up best in the final frame and is 25 miles SW of Fort Lauderdale, in the same location as the one we captured and posted on March 31. David LaPluma (BADBIRDZ) believes these represent the departure of flocks of wading birds or blackbirds from concentrated roosts in wetlands.
Morning Walk
Last night, we noted that the Key West radar showed the beginning of a large movement of migrants that seemed to be headed our way from Cuba. BADBIRDZ followed their progress overnight. Indeed, many settled down in the early morning hours. The birds were dispersed, but our house is within the landing area. This morning we walked to our local patch early, to try our luck.Our “patch” is a water and wildlife conservation area set aside by developers to mitigate some of the damage they did to the Everglades ecosystem. It is to the left (west) of this levee and gravel track that separates it from the 198th Avenue canal and our subdivision.
We hoped that maybe the migrating birds would be literally dripping from the trees. Instead we found the area to be quietly beautiful. Butterflies were first to catch our eyes.
The Queen Butterfly favors plants in the Milkweed family.
The White Peacock Butterfly is found year round in the deep South, and specializes in a composite white sunflower called Shepherd’s Needle.
Turning our attention to the sounds of birds, Catbirds were calling everywhere. They must have accounted for some of those radar echoes last night. Northern Cardinals and Carolina Wrens whistled. A Yellow-billed Cuckoo flew silently by, and a gray-plumaged male Northern Harrier seemed to be hanging around a bit late in the season. One Great Crested Flycatcher called from the treetops. Yellowthroats and Prairie Warblers were here, there and everywhere. White-eyed Vireos were also fairly numerous, but, as usual very difficult to see in the heavy foliage.
The distinctive field mark of this bird is obscured by a branch.
Ah, that’s better. The White-eyed Vireo bursts into song. 
Least Terns returned to our small lake only four days ago, but are already assembling on their favorite “lek,” the peak of our next door neighbor’s house. This female just swallowed a minnow offered by a courting male. I missed the exchange!