Monthly Archives: December 2014

Winter Solstice

Sunset at frozen Pudasjärvi lake, Finland (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s going to be a dark day in Pudasjärvi, Finland, where this photo was taken.  Within the next 12 hours, the sun will reach its southern solstice(*).

Pudasjärvi is so far north (at 65.3619° N, 26.9859° E) that during the winter solstice the sun is up only 3 hours and 30 minutes, rising at 10:27am and setting at 1:58pm.  At high noon it will be only 1.5 degrees above the horizon — barely risen — and to make matters worse the moon is New so it won’t provide any light at all.

The day will be brighter here in Pittsburgh with 9 hours and 17 minutes of sunlight — as soon as the heavy clouds open up and allow the sun to shine.

Starting tomorrow the days will get longer.

Things will get better. I promise!

(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

(*) The solstice is at 6:03pm Eastern Standard Time, 1:03am Eastern European Time.

I Want To See Shadows!

Shadows on Avenue Foch, along the Saint-Roch Square, Le Havre (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

If you live in southwestern Pennsylvania, when is the last time you saw a shadow outdoors?

A review of weather data for the past 30 days shows the sky has been overcast or foggy every day except for three days near Thanksgiving and on December 7 and December 9.

We’ve had only five days with enough sunlight to make a shadow. Otherwise, we’ve seen only brief glimpses of sun.

Oh, for a moment when the clouds are broken! It will finally happen this weekend.  Check the Pittsburgh Clear Sky Chart(*) to see how long it will last.

When the sun comes out, I’m going outdoors to make a shadow of my own.

(photo of Avenue Foch, along the Saint-Roch Square, Le Havre from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)

(*) Astronomers use the Clear Sky Chart to find out when to view the stars at night.

Here’s How It Melts

Moulin in Greenland (screenshot from National Geographic video online)

The news was bad this week for the Marshall Islands, South Florida, the Netherlands and Lower Manhattan.

Contrary to earlier predictions, satellite data from Greenland’s ice sheet shows that climate change is melting it a lot faster than we thought.  When all that land-based water melts into the sea, the ocean will rise and permanently flood low-lying land around the world, including the places I named above.

Why is it melting so fast?  A big reason is the action of numerous superglacial lakes (i.e. lakes on top of the glacier) that form in the summer. The lakes collect ice melt but they also speed up melting because they empty all at once — downward! — and flow under the ice sheet, lubricating it and sending it much faster to the sea.

If you find this hard to imagine — or even if you don’t — click on the screenshot above (or here) to see a video showing how this happens.

At another site, the scientists camped near a superglacial lake to study its development.  One day the lake disappeared but the weather was so foggy they couldn’t see what happened. All around them the ice they were standing on cracked and heaved and boomed.  Scary!

When the weather finally cleared they retrieved the measuring devices they’d left on the lake bottom (now dry) and pulled the data.

The lake they’d camped next to — two miles wide and 40 feet deep — had emptied into the ground 3,000 feet below in only 40 minutes!

Yow!

 

(screenshot from National Geographic online video.  Click on the image to watch the show)

 

She Went Far — Very Far

U.S. Peregrine ends up in Japan (photo of article by Gary Gerhardt in the Rocky Mountain News, July 16, 1993)

In February 1993 Mamoru Nakamura photographed a female peregrine 100 km southwest of Tokyo.  She didn’t look like one of two peregrine subspecies normally found in Japan and she had bands that no one recognized — an all-black band on her left leg 5/V* and a silver band on her right.

Her photograph made its way to Japanese raptor expert Teruaki Morioka, co-author of Birds of Japan in Photographs and author of Birds of Prey in Japan.

Believing this peregrine to be a Western Hemisphere anatum subspecies he sent a letter and photo to raptor expert William S. Clark, author of the Peterson Field Guide to Hawks of North America.

Bill sent the photo to the National Park Service who confirmed her identity.  She was banded as a nestling at Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona in June 1991 and photographed in Japan in February 1993.

How did she get there?

The Rocky Mountain News article (snapshot above) called her “Wrong Way Peregrine” because she apparently flew west, not south as expected — but she may have been wandering as peregrines are wont to do.  Mike Britten of the National Park Service speculated that she hitched a ride on a ship crossing the Pacific and disembarked (without passport!) when she reached Japan.  We will never know.

In any case she went far — very far!

I heard about this bird from Bill Clark himself while on the Valley Raptors outing he led at last month’s Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival.  As we gazed at a peregrine perched on a water tower, Bill described this 1993 world traveler and later sent me a scan of the news article.

Thank you, Bill, for a great outing and such a wealth of raptor information!  I saw 13 Life Birds and my first ever aplomado falcon, white-tailed hawks and zone-tailed hawk on the Valley Raptors outing.

Check out Bill’s bio and publications here at The Peregrine Fund.

 

(photo of July 16, 1993 article by Gary Gerhardt in the Rocky Mountain News)

Socially Isolated? Age Faster

African grey parrot (photo by Keith Allison from Wikimedia Commons)
African grey parrot (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

16 December 2014

Early this month I wrote how lobsters don’t age because they have telomerase that repairs the DNA at the tips of their chromosomes (telomeres).  Most adult organisms don’t have that advantage so every time our cells divide our telomeres get shorter. It ages our cells and ages us.

African grey parrots are highly social creatures who are often stressed when they live alone.  It turns out that loneliness affects their telomeres.

In a study published last spring in PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Veterinary Medicine at Vienna, Austria examined blood samples from captive African grey parrots and compared the telomeres of parrots who lived alone versus those who lived with a companion parrot. (*)

Despite being the same age, solo African grey parrots had noticeably shorter telomeres than those who lived with friends.  The solo parrots aged faster than their peers.

Not only did the study illuminate the sadness of single parrots but it suggests that “telomeres may provide a biomarker for assessing exposure to social stress.” Read more here in Science Daily.

Humans are social creatures, too.  Doctors and nurses know that isolated humans don’t heal as fast or live as long, so when you’re sick it helps to have the care of those who love you … which leads me to an update on my husband’s recovery (see this blog post for news of his accident).

Today it’s been three weeks since Rick was hit by a car in a crosswalk.  He’s making progress though there are setbacks, such as the operation to fix his broken nose.  Fortunately his friends and relatives have rallied to help him (and me).  Rick is a very social creature — more social than I am — so calls and visits from his sister and friends have raised his spirits.

For now my life is circumscribed by his needs and appointments.  I miss birding and hiking alone (I’m not as social as Rick) but I try to go outdoors every day because that’s what keeps me sane.

We are hoping for good long telomeres when this is over.  😉

(photo by Keith Allison from Wikimedia Commons.  Click on the image to see the original)

(*) The parrot news release notes that in Austria it’s illegal to keep a parrot in isolation from other parrots, though some people do.

Can’t Tell Their Sex By Their Color

White-throated sparrow, white-striped color morph (photo from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license)
White-throated sparrow, white-striped color morph (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Many birds are sexually dimorphic — males are more colorful, the females are drab — but this isn’t true of white-throated sparrows.

White-throated sparrows come in two color morphs: white-striped shown above, tan-striped below.  The crisp white-striped birds aren’t always male, the plain tan-striped birds aren’t always female.  You can’t tell their sex by color.

White-throated sparrow, tan-striped color morph (photo by Henry McLin on Flickr, Creative Commons license)
White-throated sparrow, tan-striped color morph (photo by Henry McLin, Flickr Creative Commons license)

Here they are side-by-side: white-striped on left, tan-striped on right.  Notice that …

White-throated sparrows -- white-striped and tan-striped side-by-side (photos from Wikimedia Commons and Henry McLin, Creative Commons licenses)

  • Head stripes are black-and-white versus brown-and-tan
  • Lores are bright yellow versus dull yellow
  • Malar stripe is weak versus prominent
  • Breast is gray versus brown-and-tan
  • Breast is mostly clear versus very streaky

Not only do they look different but the white-striped birds are aggressive, philandering and don’t take much care of their kids while the tan-striped birds are gentle and very caring of their young.

You would think these differences would force one of the color morphs to disappear from the gene pool but it doesn’t.  The reason is surprising.

When it comes to picking mates, these birds always mix it up.  White-striped (aggressive) males mate with tan-striped (care-giving) females and the tan-striped (gentle) males mate with white-striped (philandering) females. Thus the color morphs and personalities persist.

Learn more about their amazing social behavior in this article by GrrlScientist in The Guardian, May 2011.

And when you see white-throated sparrows you’ll know you can’t tell their sex by their color but the drab ones are always good parents.

 

(photos: White morph white-throated sparrow from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license.  Tan morph by Henry McLin on Flickr, Creative Commons license.  Click on each photo to see its original)

Ice Sculptures

Needle ice on a cold morning at Moraine State Park (photo by Kate St.John)

14 December 2014

Have you ever seen these ice structures?

Needle ice forms when the soil is still warm and the air is freezing.  As ice forms on the soil’s surface, it draws up subsurface water by capillary action and builds new ice from the bottom.  The result is a structure that looks like needles or tiny barricades. Since there is very little soil above the ice it pokes into the air.

Later in the season when the soil freezes, needle ice forms underground as part of a frost heave.  Click here to see a cut-away frost heave in Vermont.

This patch of needle ice formed above a seep at Moraine State Park last weekend.  Downstream the ground was squishy but here it was forming ice that looked like tiny walls.

Needle ice at Moraine State Park (photo by Kate St. John)

Watch for these ice sculptures on moist soil.

(photos by Kate St. John)

The Falcon Of The Queen

Screenshot of Falco della regina (screenshot from YouTube)

12 December 2014

This beautiful YouTube video shows a family of Eleonora’s falcons (Falco eleonorae) at their summer home in Sardinia.

Eleonora’s falcon is an Old World hobby(*) falcon that winters in Madagascar and nests on barren islands in the Mediterranean.  It was named for Eleanor of Arborea, national heroine of Sardinia, who in 1392 became the first ruler in history to protect hawk and falcon nests against illegal hunters.

Eleanor began rulling Arborea, a sovereign state in west-central Sardinia, in a moment of crisis in 1383. The Crown of Aragon based in Barcelona had conquered all of Sardinia except Arborea and succession to the Arborean throne was shaken by the murder of Hugh III. Eleanor’s infant son Frederick was next in line to the throne so she rushed to Arborea and became Regent Judge at age 36. In the first four years of her reign she united the Sardinians in a war against Aragon and won back nearly all of the island.

Eleanor’s greatest legacy was the Carta de Logu, the laws she promulgated in 1395.  Advanced for its time the laws were a uniform code of justice, publicly available, that set most criminal penalties as fines instead of imprisonment or death and preserved the property rights of women.  The Carta de Logu was so good that it lasted for four centuries until Charles Felix, a military King of Sardinia, suspended it in 1827.

Wikipedia explains how Eleanor advanced the rights of women through the legal code:

One notable provision of the Code is that it gave daughters and sons the same inheritance rights. As well, it also declared that rape could be recompensed through marriage only if the woman who was raped agreed to marry her rapist, and even if she did the Code declared that the rapist still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice). If she did not agree to marry him, he had to give her a dowry that suited her social status, so that she could marry someone else, and he still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice).

Wikipedia: Eleanor of Arborea

Click on the screenshot above to see a video of the falcon that bears Eleanor’s name. The Falco della Regina is “The Falcon of the Queen.”

p.s. (*) Hobbies are smaller than peregrines, larger than American kestrels, and were often used by falconers to hunt birds. “Hobby” does not mean amateur pastime. Instead this word comes from Old French, probably derived from Middle Dutch “hobeler” which means to turn or roll.

(video posted on YouTube by santonagriva)