What does a city do when it’s overwhelmed by illegal garbage dumps?
In Lima, Peru much of the trash generated by its 10 million people is dumped illegally but it’s hard to clean up because the dumps are hidden and people don’t care. In December 2015 the Peru Ministry of Environment enlisted the help of birds.
Black vultures (Coragyps atratus) are excellent at finding garbage — after all, their lives depend on it — so the program equipped 10 black vultures with GPS trackers and GoPro cameras and Ta dah! The vultures find the dumps. The humans place the dumps on the map and clean them up. And the vultures have become celebrities.
See the maps at Gallinazo Avisa. Meet the vultures — they have names — in their second video here. (Don’t miss the punchline at the end of the video!)
Read more about Peru’s “Vultures Warn” program at fastcoexist.com.
Peregrine falcons and common ravens have a long history of nesting near each other. Both favor cliff ledges with similar qualities and will nest 100-200 meters apart (1-2 football fields). They’ll even take over each others’ unused nest sites, but they don’t get along.
Peregrines harass ravens though they rarely hurt them. Ravens are big and powerful and very acrobatic in flight.
Since 2007 a peregrine pair has nested over the Ohio River on one of two bridges: the Monaca-East Rochester Bridge (Rt. 51), or the enormous Monaca-Beaver railroad bridge. In 2015 they nested on the east tower of the railroad bridge (Monaca side) and fledged two young.
Ravens are rare in Pennsylvania’s urban areas but they do nest on railroad bridges, laying their eggs in late February a month before the peregrines nest.
Last Friday, February 12, Gina Rubino was watching a raven build a nest on the west arch (Beaver side) of the Monaca-Beaver railroad bridge when two peregrines showed up. She recorded three videos. Above, a raven builds the nest on the near arch, then perches on top of the arch and takes shelter when a peregrine zooms past.
Below, two peregrines harass the raven who again takes shelter in the bridge structure. This double-teaming is typical of peregrine-raven interactions.
Peregrine falcon at Tarentum Bridge, 8 Feb 2016, 3:30pm (photo by Scott Kinzey)
On Monday February 8 at 3:30pm, Scott Kinzey stopped by the boat launch at the Tarentum Bridge. As soon as he pulled into the parking lot a peregrine falcon flew over his car and landed on a low beam.
The bird was banded and Scott could see that the top of the band was black, the first digit was ‘6’ and the second digit was rounded — but that’s all. Fortunately, he had his camera with him.
Does this bird look familiar?
Peregrine falcon at Tarentum Bridge, 8 Feb 2016, 3:30pm (photo by Scott Kinzey)
Scott watched as the peregrine “flew into the [structural] holes on the bottom beam of the bridge as if looking for something. Several times, maybe four different holes. It flew off towards the middle of the bridge before 5:00pm.”
This description resembles Hope (black/green, 69/Z) who made the Tarentum Bridge her home for six years before she moved to the Cathedral of Learning last November. Did she come back for a visit? Was she back to stay?
I checked the falconcam archives for her presence at the Pitt nest. Since the last big snowstorm (January 12, 4″-6″) she’d been on camera every day, usually several times a day, but on February 8 her last nest visit was at 12:15pm and she didn’t reappear until February 10 at 12:25pm, 48 hours later. Since then she’s been on camera every day.
I can’t prove a negative. I can’t prove that Hope was not near the Cathedral of Learning on the evening of February 8 because she may have been there, though not on camera.
On the other hand, Tarentum is only 15 miles from the Cathedral of Learning. A peregrine could fly there at a leisurely pace in only half an hour.
Rob Protz, who monitors the peregrines at Tarentum, examined Scott’s photos and says this bird’s facial features look like Hope.
Peregrine falcon at Tarentum Bridge, 8 Feb 2016, 3:30pm (photo by Scott Kinzey)
Maybe Hope goes home to visit and then returns to Pitt. Maybe she spends her days at Pitt and her nights at Tarentum. We don’t know.
What we do know is that she visits the Cathedral of Learning nest nearly every day, sometimes several times a day, and she courts with E2.
For now Hope can hang out in two places if she wants to, but she’ll have to pick one nest when she lays her eggs next month.
In the meantime, stop by the Cathedral of Learning and the Tarentum Bridge at 5:00pm to count peregrines. Are there four different peregrines at these two sites — or only three?
That’s a bird report headline from PABIRDS, February 7, 2016. If you’re not familiar with 4-letter bird codes it’s a meaningless message and you wouldn’t know these may be Life Birds. (Fortunately the names are inside the report.)
Few birds have short names so abbreviations come in handy when you’re writing down a lot of them … as we’re doing today for the Great Backyard Bird Count. The U.S. Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) ran into this problem early on and made a standardized list of 4-letter codes for birds in North America based on their complete English names. The coding scheme works roughly like this.
4 words in name: First letter of each word. Greater white-fronted goose = GWFG
3 words in name: First letter of first 2 words + 2 letters of the last word. Great horned owl = GHOW, Red-eyed vireo = REVI.
EXCEPT if the last two words are hyphenated. I always get this wrong! It’s the reverse of the rule above and there aren’t many names that fit this pattern. Rule is: First 2 letters of first word + first letters of last 2 words:
Eastern screech-owl = EASO
Eastern wood-pewee = EAWP
2 words: First 2 letters of each word. Snow goose = SNGO, American robin = AMRO
1 word: First 4 letters. Sora = SORA, Brambling = BRAM
Collisions: Sometimes two bird names result in the same code as in BTGW for both the Black-throated green warbler and Black-throated gray warbler. In this case, look up the code using the links below.
(Pittsburgh, PA – February 13, 2016) It’s not yet Valentine’s Day, but love is in the air at the Hays Bald Eagle nest. This morning, Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania confirmed that the Hays eagles have one egg in the nest. The egg was laid overnight, when the Bald Eagle web camera was turned off. The egg was noticed at 7:30 am when the cam came back up, clearly showing one of the eagles sitting on an egg.
Watch two Pittsburgh-area bald eagle nests — both Hays and Harmar — on the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania website at eagles.aswp.org. Read more on their Facebook page.
Pterosaurs broke a lot of rules. They were warm-blooded reptiles. Their bodies were furry. Their heads looked like birds. They stood on their wings! And when they took off they jumped in the air and flew.
You can see them as skeletons and …
Pterosaur skeleton, main exhibit, Carnegie Museum of Natural History (photo by Kate St. John)
… as life-size replicas with fur and wings and colors.
Quetzalcoatlus was as big as a giraffe (look at him standing on his wings!). Others were as small as finches. Yet they’re not the ancestors of birds.
Quetzalcoatlus was the size of a giraffe (floor sign at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, photo by Kate St. John)
The exhibit includes videos and three interactive Wii-like flight zones where you flap your arms and the pterosaur flies. I flunked flight school with the small insect-eating pterosaur but I soared with the large one.
A few years ago in the Argentinean desert, a shepherd was searching for one of his lost sheep when he spotted the tip of a gigantic fossil bone sticking out of a rock. When the news reached paleontologists at the MEF Museum in Trelew, Argentina, they set up camp at the discovery site to examine it and look for more bones. By the end of the dig, they had uncovered more than 200 other huge bones from seven dinosaurs, all belonging to a new species of giant plant-eating titanosaur whose name will be announced soon.
The giant was 121 feet long, weighed 77 tons, died 101.6 million years ago, and was still growing when he died!
Visit the dig and follow the forensic research. See 3D animations and the skeleton’s reconstruction. See how these creatures compare to our largest land animals today. The videos (above and below) show the enormous thigh bone and examine a baby dinosaur inside the egg.
American crow with peanut (photo from Shutterstock by Al Mueller)
On Throw Back Thursday:
A 17-year bird study that bridged the end of Communism and the start of capitalism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia showed the mix of species changed. Birds with small brains declined. Birds with big brains thrived.
Does capitalism benefit brainy birds? Click here to find out.
Peregrine falcon harasses pomarine jaegar, Cleveland, Ohio, January 2015 (photo by Chad+Chris Saladin)
It was so cold a year ago that unusual arctic birds were forced off the frozen Great Lakes to Ohio’s and Pennsylvania’s rivers.
In January 2015, Chris Saladin went to see a pomarine jaeger (Stercorarius pomarinus) on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland. Pomarines are piratical seabirds that nest in the arctic, famous for harassing gulls, terns and even gannets to steal their catches.
Chris was lucky to be on the scene when the female peregrine from the Hope Memorial Bridge decided to harass the jaeger. At first the pomarine flies alone, then the peregrine sees it, and … the pomarine leaves.
Watch a slideshow of the action below. (Click on any photo to see the show in its own screen.)
