Some of my friends in the Pittsburgh area have noticed a disturbing lack of ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris) at their feeders this year. “I haven’t seen one since April. They should be here by now.”
Meanwhile other friends aren’t worried at all. Their hummingbird feeder activity is normal. What’s going on?
I pulled ruby-throated hummingbird eBird sightings January-to-June for 2020 through 2025 (inclusive) and put them into the slideshow below. Pick a spot to watch on the map and see it change — or not — as the years pass.
Is your home on or near this map? Are you missing hummingbirds this year? Or not? Leave a comment with your answer.
Doe in Schenley Park, 4 July 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
7 July 2025
Lest you think you don’t have to worry about ticks in the City of Pittsburgh, consider this:
On a walk in Schenley Park last week I saw two does and a fawn along the Upper Trail. The doe pictured above looked healthy but the other one, further away, had very red ears. Why? Through binoculars I saw that the insides of her ears were lined with hundreds of red-colored engorged ticks! There were ticks on the backs of her ears, on her face and on her neck as well. It was the worst tick infestation I’d ever seen. Ick!
Red-colored ticks? They were probably black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis). The ones that carry debilitating Lyme disease.
The infested doe is not spreading Lyme disease to ticks because deer are never infected by it. However she is spreading ticks — hundreds of potentially infected ticks — throughout Schenley Park. They will drop off in a new place when sated.
This spring and summer the Allegheny County Health Department is conducting black-legged tick sweeps in the City parks and so far they’re finding quite a lot of them.
At Pennsylvania’s Tick Research Lab — which is based at East Stroudsburg University with study locations all over the state — experts say they are tracking significantly more ticks this spring.
The Tick Lab recorded roughly two and a half times more ticks this May compared to the same time last year.
Spray Your Clothes to repel ticks (photo by Kate St. John)
In my experience wearing long pants, long sleeves, and socks sprayed with Permethrin is far safer from ticks than if you use insect repellent on your skin.
It’s all because of fireworks. We like them but our pets do not. Cats hide(*). Dogs panic and run. Some dogs, when trapped indoors, will destroy the house.
CBS Boston interviewed pet owners and shelter experts with tips on how to prepare. Some pet owners are about to find out how their pets react.
(*) p.s. I had a cat that would crawl into a cat-sized hole under the basement stairs. There was nothing we could do. We just had to wait until she came out.
This morning when I opened Cornell Lab’s Birds of the World website, the featured photo was a lesser horned owl (click the link to see it). I’d never heard of a “lesser” for two reasons. (1) It’s a relatively news species split from the great horned owl about a decade ago and (2) it lives in part South America where I’ve never been — Peru to Tierra del Fuego.
Great horned owls range from the Arctic into South America with so much regional variation that today, even after the split, there are 14 subspecies. The nominate subspecies, Bubo virginianus virginianus is the owl we’re familiar with in Pittsburgh. The lesser horned owl used to be a subspecies Bubo virginianus magellanicus of the great horned owl so he’s sometimes called the Magellanic owl.
What’s the difference between the two? Weight! The heaviest lesser horned owls (1,335g) weigh about half that of the heaviest great horned owls (2,500g).
Bolstering the evidence that they deserve to be split, a team of scientists led by Emily N. Ostrow conducted a DNA study of great horned owl subspecies including magellanicus and found that the subspecies’ DNA diverge in Peru.
Range-wide phylogenomics of the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) reveals deep north-south divergence in northern Peru — by Emily N. Ostrow?, Lucas H. DeCicco, Robert G. Moyle published in PeerJ
And that’s where the lesser horned owl’s range begins — in purple below.
May and June were very wet in western Pennsylvania, so much so that some crops won’t make it. @CBSPittsburgh interviewed Dan Yarnick about the floods at Yarnick’s Farm in Indiana County.
Graph comparing 2019 average high/low temperatures by month to 2080 prediction, Pittsburgh, with 100+ degrees maximum (graph by Kate St. John using current averages, adding UMCES prediction) Graph comparing 2019 average rainall by month to 2080 prediction for Pittsburgh (graph by Kate St. John using current averages, adding UMCES prediction)
The prediction said it would happen 55 years from now, in 2080, but it seems that climate change is ahead of schedule.
Rinse and repeat. Bad weather is becoming bad climate.
This year I’ve seen many examples of spineless creatures but who is the best of the invertebrates? The Guardian runs an annual contest to name the Invertebrate of the Year. Let’s see who won for 2025.
Our winner, the 0.5mm-long Milnesium tardigradum, has survived all five great extinction events. It survived in outer space when plonked there as part of a European Space Agency experiment. Tardigrades can endure radioactivity, most cancers, extreme cold, scorching heat, zero gravity, being shot from a gun and being trapped in a freezer for – wait for it – 30 years.
I try very hard not to be gullible but sometimes I get taken in. Yesterday was a lesson in Do Not Believe Everything You See On The Internet even if you trust the source. I’m bringing this up today so you, too, can learn the truth.
Yesterday I saw an incredible photo of a very tiny goose from Wild Bird Fund, a trusted wildlife rehab agency in New York City and I believed it. Wrong! It was posted on April Fool’s Day. Duh!
The good news is that in looking up dwarf geese I learned that poor nutrition in the gosling phase can stunk the growth of a young Canada goose who then never reaches full size. Here’s the corrected news.
Now, what about that half-sized goose in the photo at top? Is it a dwarf? No. It’s a different species!
The Cackling Goose was long considered a group of smaller subspecies of the Canada Goose. In 2004, the smallest 4 of the 11 recognized Canada Goose subspecies were split out as the Cackling Goose. Canada and Cackling Geese hybridize in several locations, which can further complicate identification in the field.
Cackling geese (Branta hutchinsii) are about the size of mallards, have stubby bills, steeper foreheads and shorter necks. They are a Rare Bird in Pittsburgh though quite common in winter in New Jersey, the Great Plains and California’s Central Valley.
UPDATE 14 April 2025: As of yesterday the barnacle goose was on the move. He was seen at Highland Park in the morning but not found in the evening.
Yesterday morning Amy Henrici found a barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) with a flock of Canada geese on the Allegheny River in East Deer Twp. This is an incredibly rare bird for Pittsburgh considering that its winter range is in Northern Europe.
Barnacle geese breed in the Arctic — Greenland, Svalbard and Siberia — plus a few places in Northern Europe, and spend the winter in Ireland, the UK, and the coast of the North Sea.
My original guess was that this one accidentally turned southwest (instead of southeast) when it left Greenland and eventually arrived in Pittsburgh 3,000 miles away.
But I’m probably wrong! Mike Fialkovich pointed out that there’s a Greenland population that regularly migrates along the East Coast:
Barnacle Geese are annual in southeastern PA, appearing in fall and late winter/early spring. They typically are present a few days and then move on, presumably migrating back to the breeding grounds.
— Mike Fialkovich comment on this article, see comments section
So this goose may well be a southeastern PA visitor that made his way west of the Appalachians. But he’s the first to make it here!
Many birders have visited the hotspot to catch a glimpse of the bird. Corvus captured awesome photos.
My day was so busy on Saturday that I did not go see the goose but I’ve seen them in Finland so I didn’t feel too bad. I stopped by Sunday morning, 30 March, and saw him for myself.
Barnacle goose at Creighton, PA 30 March 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
I can’t believe I wrote about barnacle geese just three weeks ago, knowing we would never see one in Pittsburgh because they never come here. And now one has.
A new study published last week in the journal Science analyzed butterfly surveys from 2000 to 2020 to determine the population status of each species in the continental U.S. The results were sobering.
Total butterfly abundance (all individuals of all species) decreased across the contiguous US at a rate of 1.3% annually, for a cumulative 22% decline in overall abundance between 2000 and 2020.
The only region of the continental US that didn’t suffer was the Pacific Northwest where the total population remained stable and the highly irruptive California tortoiseshell (Nymphalis californica) surged on and off as expected.
The study found that declines were common and increases rare.
Over our two-decade study period, 33% of individual butterfly species (114 of 342) showed significantly declining trends in abundance. Conversely, only 3% of species increased.
For instance, the West Virginia white (Pieris virginiensis), above, declined each year by nearly 20%, in part because they are fooled into laying eggs on invasive garlic mustard that kills their caterpillars. By now 98% of them are gone.
And in southern Texas and south Florida the Soldier butterfly (Danaus erisemus), a relative of the monarch, declined about 15% per year, which means about 96% of them gone.
Every autumn barnacle geese (Branta leucopsis) leave their arctic breeding grounds and migrate to Europe. In 2021-2022, those wintering at Solway Firth, UK(*) became infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 and 31% of them died. Even though their population had been devastated, they recovered to full strength in just two years. This can give us hope for North American birds hit hard by bird flu.
Wild barnacle geese breed in Greenland, Svalbard and Siberia yet each population has its favorite wintering site as shown on the map. Counts on the wintering grounds are directly tied to one breeding location.
When bird flu hit Solway Firth in the winter of 2021-2022 researchers began a two+ year study to measure the demographic impact of the major HPAI outbreak on barnacle geese. During the outbreak they carefully counted dead goose carcasses and, thanks to fencing, were able to extrapolate for predation.
By February 2022 the barnacle goose population had dipped precipitously, but in the two years that followed the number of juveniles increased even faster. High birth rates on the breeding grounds quickly made up for the loss of adults.
The large impact of HPAI-related mortality on the Solway Barnacle Goose population was rapidly recovered, probably through a combination of the widespread development of natural immunity and high levels of breeding success in the years following the outbreak.
In Pennsylvania, snow geese have been hard hit with wild bird flu. It will be interesting to watch how their winter population fluctuates in the eastern U.S. in the years ahead.
p.s. We don’t have barnacle geese in the U.S. Here’s look like.
Barnacle geese (center of photo) look unique but are similar in size to their nearest relative the cackling goose.
Size comparison! Though cackling geese look like Canada geese they are much smaller. Thus barnacle geese are smaller than Canada geese we see in Pittsburgh.
