Take a visual trip to Florida and watch at least 10 species of birds feeding in a marsh. Notice that some stab at underwater prey, others nibble below the surface, some pick at the shore and some (the pink ones!) swipe their bills side-to-side.
How many of them can you identify? Leave a comment with your answer.
(Note: The embedded video is limited it to the first two minutes. Click here to see the entire 13.5 minute video.)
QUICK QUIZ: Name the two birds of prey pictured in these tweets. Leave a comment with your answer.
(The hawk tweet below is from September.)
Ok, I need some bird ID assistance. Who is this intense looking hawk? I saw it last week in Delaware. @edge_nature, can you help please? pic.twitter.com/Dn3AFrllIv
Quiz! Where is the largest desert on Earth? What continent is it on?
By “largest” I mean square miles. By “desert” I mean …
A desert is a barren area of landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions are hostile for plant and animal life. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to the processes of denudation. About one-third of the land surface of the world is arid or semi-arid.
Leave a comment with your answer. I’ll post the answer later today (see below).
Click here for a map (By the way, this map includes the answer but it doesn’t look that way!)
ANSWER: Antarctica! In fact both poles are deserts. The Antarctica Polar Desert is 5.5. million square miles, the Arctic Polar Desert is 5.4 million sq mi and the Sahara is 3.5 million sq mi. Read more about the largest deserts at geology.com.
Snow surface at Dome C Station, Antarctica (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
It cannot be too cold to snow some. It can be too cold to snow a lot. As air gets colder, it can hold less moisture. This is why the Antarctic is the greatest desert on Earth. It’s drier in many places than the Sahara! Climate change is expected to cause more snow in polar regions, not less. Now you know why. (warmer air means it can snow more)
Male northern cardinal feeds his lady, May 2018 (photo by Bob Kroeger)
23 August 2020
Many birds look ragged right now because they’re molting. July and August are the perfect time to replace worn feathers because the breeding season is over, food is plentiful and they aren’t traveling on migration. The cardinal below looks moth-eaten because he’s molting his body feathers.
What a red bird eats while he’s molting affects his feathers. Red feathers get their color from carotenoids in food so a diet rich in carotenoids makes a cardinal brighter for the coming year.
Bush honeysuckle, though invasive, is a good source of carotenoids. Unfortunately it’s not as nutritious as our native berries.
Invasive bush honeysuckle (photo by Kate St. John)
This bright red cardinal is eating American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana). The redder he is, the better the ladies like him.
House finches have a more obvious response to nutrition while molting. Finches without enough carotenoids produce orange feathers instead of red. In Marcy Cunkelman’s photo below there’s an orange house finch on the right, a red one on the left.
Red and orange house finches at the feeder (photo by Marcy Cunkelman)
You are what you eat.
(photos by Bob Kroeger, Marcy Cunkleman, Kate St. John and from Wikimedia Commons)
During #BlackBirdersWeek author, public speaker, photographer and birder Dudley Edmonson tweeted a video birdsong quiz with immediate answers. Click on the screenshot below to listen on Twitter.
How many songs can you identify?
p.s. All five birds are from eastern North America. The yellow warbler pictured above is not on the quiz.
If you don’t hear anything when the Twitter video plays, click the speaker icon on the video at bottom right.
Today a Quiz. Here are two super sharp photos of plants from very different families. What are they?
Quiz #1: The top photo is a focus stack of 100 images. In real life the image would be 2mm wide so I think it’s been magnified about 80 times. (This one is hard to guess. It helps to squint your eyes to make it look small.)
Quiz #2: The photo below is a focus stack of 70 macro images. What it is?
If you’re desperate for clues, click the links on the captions to view the photo descriptions. Here’s a clue for #2: It’s edible.
Have an idea? Leave a comment with your answer.
p.s. In case you’re curious … Focus stackingis a digital processing technique in which the photographer takes multiple images of the same object at different focal points, then digitally merges the photos to produce a completely in-focus image. The object has to hold still and so does the camera. It requires special software to merge the images.
This video shows how it works.
(photos and video from Wikimedia Commons; click on the captions to see the originals)
Now that the birds are singing again and more singers will arrive on migration, it’s time to practice identifying songs by ear. Yes, it’s hard to do but it’s easier if you can visualize the song.
Just like a sheet of music, a spectrogram of bird song shows how the frequency (pitch) goes up and down. The black dashes graph the frequency and length of the notes. The brown wave graphs loudness in decibels.
Play the matching audio to hear the graph: a song sparrow recorded by Ted Floyd, Xeno Canto XC374118.
This is just one example but you can learn to do it yourself and practice with two quizzes at Cornell Lab’s All About Birds.
Learn how to read the spectrograms that visualize bird song in this video: Bird Song Hero Tutorial.
Two quizzes follow the video or you can try them independently at the Bird Song Hero Challenge. TIP: Watch the sonogram as it plays! Some of them are tricky.
p.s. Did you know that birds sing harmonies we can’t hear? On the song sparrow spectrogram, above, there are tall vertical dashes during the fast part of the song. The bird is harmonizing with himself in the 12,000 HZ frequency. If you’re older than 30-something, you probably can’t hear it.
