By the time you read this, the winter solstice will have passed.
The sun paused it’s southward journey today at 5:44 AM Eastern Time and is already moving north.
Soon the days will be getting longer and the birds will begin to sing.
Listen for the song sparrow. What day will he sing his first song?
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. click on the image to see the original)
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The cool thing about science is that it’s open to revision. If new data shows a different solution and the solution stands up under repeated, intensive review, then science changes its stance.
Museums are great places to see this kind of scientific progress in three dimensions.
The Blue Goose diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History is good example. When the diorama was created in 1925, the blue goose was considered a separate species from the snow goose. The diorama was devoted to the unique “blue” species.
But the blue goose isn’t a separate species at all. By 1961 genetic tests had shown that the blue goose is a dark color morph of the snow goose. According to Birds of North America Online, the color is “controlled by a single locus, the blue allele being incompletely dominant to the white.” Although the blue color is somewhat dominant, snow geese tend to pick mates the same color as their parents so their white color persists.
The plaque next to the diorama explains how we’ve learned new things over time.
So when you hear a scientist making statements that include words like “may indicate” or “likely,” consider this. Scientists aren’t being vague. They’re speaking carefully from data that’s currently available. When they get even stronger evidence they’ll let you know. Statements like this are truthful: “Scientific studies indicate that extreme weather events such as heat waves and large storms are likely to become more frequent or more intense with human-induced climate change.” It only sounds vague to our society hungry for absolutes.
Meanwhile, we do know this is true: Blue geese are a color morph, not a separate species.
Visit the dioramas at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on the first floor near Discover Basecamp.
(photos taken at Carnegie Museum by Kate St. John. photo of snow geese from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
By now everyone in North Oakland is wondering: Why is it so hard to move the winter crow roost out of our neighborhood?
Perhaps it’s because crows are smarter than 6-year-olds.
Back in 2013 researchers presented New Caledonian crows with the same cognitive tests given to children ages 4-10.
All the children passed the simple water displacement tests: Drop pebbles into a water-filled tube to raise the water level and bring a floating treat within reach.
But children ages 4-6 failed the final test in which two of the tubes had a hidden connection. Stones dropped in one tube raised the water in another. Six-year-old brains weren’t mature enough yet.
Children ages 7-10 passed that final test, “Experiment 6, U-Tube” at the end of the video below. Notice that the crow succeeds. He, too, is smarter than a 6-year-old.
Since crows understand cause and effect, simple scare tactics just aren’t scary enough. Crows see through the ruse and innovate around the problem.
So getting the crows to leave North Oakland is a bit like convincing a roomful of boisterous 7-year-olds that they want to choose what we have in mind.
Perhaps we could get some tips from Cub Scout leaders. 😉
Read more about this study here in Science Daily.
(photo by Jacob McGinnis)
This Featured picture from Wikimedia Commons was taken in Franz Josef Land, a Russian archipelago of 191 islands in the Arctic Ocean.
It’s a beautiful photo of an iceberg and there’s a bird in it.
Quiz: What bird?
Here are some hints:
So what bird is flying by this iceberg in Russia? I think I know.
Leave a comment with your answer.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
Snow, sleet, rain, freezing rain.
From 5 degrees F on Thursday night to 53 degrees with freezing rain today, we’ve had it all. And there’s more to come. Tomorrow night will be 15 degrees.
This yo-yo weather reminds me of what we learned during the polar vortex in January 2014: Climate change is making the jet stream wobble so we get shots of very cold air and then warm air soon after, as shown in drawing(c) below.
Be careful today! It’s variably icy out there.
p.s. I’ve used an old photo of ice because it’s too icy to step outside this morning!
(photo by Kate St. John. Drawing from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
16 December 2016
Uh oh! Blue light, though bright, isn’t better at night.
As cities switch from incandescent or mercury street lights to LEDs they’re saving electricity and money and providing more light. But brighter isn’t better if it’s blue.
The video above shows how the color temperature of light matters to our eyes and sleep patterns. Though the video doesn’t mention it, the color also matters to birds and animals.
It’s possible to buy yellow-toned LEDs but blue, because its bright, has been the default choice for city lights. We didn’t know that color mattered when the world began switching to LEDs and the bulbs have such a long life it’ll be decades before it’s time to replace them. Meanwhile humans, birds and animals will be coping with the change.
It makes me want to close my eyes.
(credits are in the captions)
p.s. Here’s a really helpful video showing the difference between incandescent, compact fluorescent and LED light bulbs in home use (the A19 screw base). You’ll also see the inside of an LED bulb. I was surprised to learn it’s a tiny computer.
On Throw Back Thursday:
Some mammals are as big as whales and elephants. Why are there no enormous birds?
Find out why in this 2009 article:
What Limits The Size of Flying Birds?
(photo by JJ Harrison via Wikimedia Commons)
While you eat ginger treats this month you probably won’t think of the plant that flavors them, but it has an interesting story.
Ginger root (Zingiber officinale) is used all over the world to flavor meat, seafood, vegetables and sweets. The plant is extinct in the wild yet millions of tons are cultivated each year.
Ginger is a flowering perennial that grows new stems from its rhizomes each spring. According to Wikipedia it probably originated in the tropical rainforest of the Indian subcontinent.
The plant is two to three feet tall with a pretty orchid-like flower. Though most of us have never seen the plant it can be grown in the garden. It takes 8-10 months for the rhizomes to mature.
The spice trade introduced ginger to the western world where it’s been popular since Roman times. Eventually cultivation put it out of business in the wild but made ginger more successful than its cohorts in the rainforest.
Today most ginger is grown in India, China and Nigeria, 2.1 million tons per year.
Wildly successful ginger is extinct in the wild.
(photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
Looking for birds in the winter can be cold and disappointing so here’s a warm and rewarding outing for early January.
Let’s go on a scavenger hunt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History on Sunday, 8 January 2017, 1:00pm to 3:00pm. We’ll meet in the big hallway(*) between the Art and Natural History Museums.
There are plenty of birds to see. From Bird Hall to dioramas and dinosaurs, birds are present in many of the displays. I’ll give you an introduction to the floor plan. Then we’ll spend an hour or more identifying everything with feathers on the second floor. This is an especially good area for a scavenger hunt because the birds aren’t always labeled in the displays.
Pictured here are two examples from the first floor dioramas. Above, a great horned owl is about to capture a skunk. Below, a common eider stands near her nest, made from her breast feathers.
After the scavenger hunt we can stay as long as we like. I’ll show you some cool things at Bird Hall and some “hidden” birds on the first and third floors.
The museum is open from noon to 5:00pm on Sundays. There is an admission fee for non-members with discounts for seniors, children, and students with ID. Click here for admission information and here for directions.
Hope to see you there on Sunday, January 8.
(photos by Kate St. John)
(*) The meeting place is on the first floor, called the Museum of Art Lobby on this map. It has benches along the edges and a wall of windows overlooking the outdoor sculpture garden.
If you like native plants you’re probably dismayed by the increase of invasive garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) in Pennsylvania’s woods.
Garlic mustard has become more abundant at the same time that Pennsylvania’s deer population has exploded. Since deer don’t eat garlic mustard, observers assumed the plant’s increase was directly tied to the fact that deer eat natives and not this invasive alien.
But the relationship is more complicated than that.
At October’s meeting of the Botanical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Dr. J. Mason Heberling presented conclusions he’s drawn after studying the interaction of garlic mustard, native plants, and deer from a 13 year experiment at Fox Chapel’s Trillium Trail.
It turns out that garlic mustard likes more sun than it normally gets in Pennsylvania’s summer woods so when deer over browse native plants their shade goes away and garlic mustard thrives.
When deer are excluded native plants grow again, they shade the garlic mustard and it decreases.
Fewer deer? Less garlic mustard!
Everything is connected, often in amazing ways.
For more information, read the study abstract here at Interactions of White-tailed Deer and Invasive Plants in Forests of Eastern North America presented at the Botany 2016 Conference.
(photo of garlic mustard by Kate St. John. photo of deer by josephamaker2018 via Wikimedia Commons; click on the original)