Here’s an assortment of wildflowers found in western Pennsylvania this month. Many are blooming. One has a fruit.
For fun, a quiz: Can you match their names to the list below?
(photos by Kate St. John)
Can you identify these birds in flight?
Hints:
(photo by Don Weiss)
The Answer … or at least part of the answer …
Any others?
Legend says that reindeer will pull Santa’s sleigh tonight.
What do we know about real reindeer (Rangifer tarandus)?
Here’s a quiz based on Reindeer: 12 Fascinating Facts About These Amazing Creatures on the National Wildlife Federation website. Click on the 12 Facts link to see the answers and even more information.
a. Reindeer live in Europe, Asia and North America, but on our continent they have a different name. What are they called?
b. Among moose, elk and white-tailed deer, only the males grow antlers. What about reindeer?
c. Reindeer coats change from winter to summer and so do their hooves. What’s different about their hooves and why do they change?
d. “Some subspecies have knees that make a clicking noise when they walk.” What’s the advantage to making this noise? (Do your knees click? Here’s an excuse for it.)
e. Reindeer do migrate and those in North America travel quite far. How far do they go?
f. Reindeer used to live in the Lower 48. Which state? And how long ago was that?
g. Where did we get the idea that reindeer can pull sleighs? Here’s a visual answer.
h. Who is the leading predator of reindeer calves? (Hint: It’s a bird!)
Visit Reindeer: 12 Fascinating Facts About These Amazing Creatures for the answers.
(clipart from Clipart Library; photos from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the images to see the originals)
Today, a quiz.
I found green eggs on stinging nettle on August 9 at Wolf Creek Narrows, Butler County, PA.
Are they eggs or something else?
And who laid them?
Post a comment with your answer.
I’ll reveal their identity later today.
THE ANSWER: 29 August, 3:15pm
This was a tricky quiz because the structures really do look like eggs. I thought they were butterfly eggs but they are too smooth. The likely butterflies lay very wrinkled eggs. For instance, click here to see the eggs of the small tortoiseshell butterfly.
Mary Ann Pike correctly identified the green “eggs” as nettle galls of (probably) Dasineura investita. The galls are the plant’s defenses against the larvae inside them. The larvae are from midges so tiny that I can’t find photographs of the adult insects though these three photos may give you an idea.
Caterpillars of the Sordid Hypena moth (Hypena sordidula) eat these galls. Click here to see it.
(photo by Kate St. John)
.jpg)
On a birding trip in Costa Rica:
Back in 2011 I made a bird identification quiz that featured this bird because it looks cool and I’d never seen it before.
Today I’m in Costa Rica within this bird’s home range.
Follow the link below to figure out what bird this is.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)
(*) p.s. As I mentioned on Jan 27, I wrote this article before I left home so I couldn’t know if I’d see this bird. I’ll let you know when I get back.
Day 7: Las Cruces Field Station
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)
Time for a quiz!
Name at least 5 bird species found on every continent except Antarctica. Hint: One of them is my favorite bird.
Leave a comment with your answer. (My answer will be in the comments, too.)
(map from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
Bare trees reveal secrets in December that we couldn’t see in October.
On Throw Back Thursday, here’s a quiz about a common winter nest we see in Pennsylvania. Whose is it?
(photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
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.
Here’s the complete alphabetic list developed by The Institute for Bird Populations. For a better explanation of the coding scheme, see this page on the Carolina Bird Club website.
Now that you know how to decipher the codes, here’s a quiz.
What five birds are named in the image above?
Leave a comment with your answer.
(illustration by Kate St. John)
