Allegheny River and Highland Park Bridge, 25 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
26 October 2026
Over the years, peregrine falcons have been seen near the Highland Park Bridge but the most recent evidence of nesting was in 2022 when Mark Vass saw an adult feeding a juvenile in late June 2022.
In early March 2024 Justin Kolakowski saw a pair of peregrines chase a bald eagle, then land on the water tower near the bridge. I visited Aspinwall Riverfront Park and walked the trail seven times from March to July that year and found as many as 70 American herring gulls (Larus smithsonianus) but no peregrines. Then on 8 August 2024 I saw 1 peregrine falcon, obviously not nesting, and 60 herring gulls.
August 2024: Peregrines: 1, Gulls: 60
Yesterday I went back to Aspinwall Riverfront Park and was surprised to find no gulls at all — zero — but while I was counting pigeons a peregrine falcon zoomed upriver and made two sharp dive-and-climb displays. I lost track of him when a female peregrine arrived from upstream, flew past him and landed on the bridge. Their size difference was obvious –male and female.
October 2025: Peregrines 2, Gulls 0.
Allegheny River and Highland Park Bridge, 25 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Panther Hollow Lake, Schenley Park, documentation photo, 10 October 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
21 October 2025
It was a hard summer for Panther Hollow Lake in Schenley Park. In early July I wrote What’s Wrong With Panther Hollow Lake? about the many challenges it faces due to sediment, low water and the concrete edge. Its problems were exacerbated by summer’s drought and heat making it impossible to ignore the pond’s ugly surface of filamentous algae (pond scum) and duckweed. This month I noticed another challenge lurking below.
Last Friday duckweed (Lemnoideae) covered most of the water.
Panther Hollow Lake, duckweed documentation photo, Schenley Park, 17 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
But we have two helpers eating it now. A pair of mallards.
Mallard pair eating duckweed from the surface of Panther Hollow Lake, 17 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
This is what they’re eating.
Duckweed from Panther Hollow Lake, 22 June 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
At the railroad (west) end of the pond I could see into its shallow depths and finally realized that Panther Hollow Lake is choked with invasive hydrilla (waterthyme).
The water looks stagnant but the plants do move.
video by Kate St. John
Hydrilla is a problem in many Pennsylvania waterways.
Hydrilla moves from lake to lake on boats and gear. Fishing gear is a likely source of it since hydrilla is in the shallows at Duck Hollow, another a nearby fishing spot.
Despite its man-made origin Panther Hollow Lake is passing through the normal life cycle of a natural lake and is now doing its best to turn into a swamp and ultimately a meadow.
If we want an artificial lake or pond in a place where nature wants a meadow, we will have to spend a lot of money to make it that way and a lot of money over and over again to keep it that way. Money is tight, even for basic things … so that’s why Panther Hollow Lake is the way it is for now.
Cape Cod view at the end of Navigation Road, Banstable, MA, 4 October 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
11 October 2025
A week ago at Cape Cod I was birding with Bob Kroeger along Navigation Road in Barnstable when we popped out at this beautiful salt marsh scene at the end of the road.
I took the red foliage for granted until I got close. Glasswort’s succulent leaves provide the clue that it thrives in saline habitats. In spring and summer this plant is green so I probably didn’t notice it. In October it turns a beautiful red. I think this is Virginia glasswort (Salicornia virginica).
Virginia glasswort, Navigation Road, Cape Cod, 4 October 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Succulent leaves of Virginia glasswort, Cape Cod, 4 October 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
I’d been telling my sister-in-law about the crows that roost in Pittsburgh in the winter and she said, “You ought to see our cormorants.” As sunset approached we followed the bike trial to the Bass River in South Dennis and found 300 double-crested cormorants with more coming in all the time. I’ve heard that people aren’t happy that the birds roost on the wires over the river, but this is certainly a case of build-it-and-they-will-come.
Cormorants coming in to roost at the Bass Rover, South Dennis, MA, 4 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)Cormorants coming in to roost at the Bass Rover, South Dennis, MA, 4 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Back home in Pittsburgh, 10 October: While walking in Schenley Park yesterday I saw something white in a splash of sunlight in the woods. Was it trash?
What’s that white thing in the woods? Schenley Park, 10 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
When I bushwhacked to examine it I found a large puffball mushroom with a corner broken off. The last time I saw one in Schenley Park was 10 years ago!
Puffball mushroom, Schenley Park, 10 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
In case you’re not on Facebook, Ross Ellet went on to explain:
A 5″ drop on Lake Erie over a month is impressive and would equal about 850 billion gallons of water lost. It would also be the lowest water level since March of 2015.
This sounds astonishing until you realize that Lake Erie’s water level fluctuates seasonally and is normally at its lowest in winter. You can see it on this GLERL graph comparing this year’s water level (2025 YTD in blue) to last year (2024 in red).
Notice that the record maximums and minimums, shaded in pale blue, differ by 6.4 feet! Lake Erie has ranged about 3 feet higher and lower than it is today.
You usually experience these fluctuations only at the beach but I do remember flooded roads at Magee Marsh during high water in May 2019.
But right now it’s at the 1918-2024 Long Term Average, so there’s nothing to worry about.
p.s. Speaking of worry, I remember when Lake Erie was very polluted in the early 1970’s. Fish died all the time and we did not wade or swim in it.
While looking for photos for this article I found a file photo from June 1973 with the caption: “WHITE CITY BEACH SIGN [Cleveland, Ohio] WARNS AGAINST SWIMMING IN POLLUTED LAKE ERIE. TO REDUCE POLLUTION LIFEGUARDS POUR CHLORINE INTO THE WATER ONCE EVERY HOUR.”
Water pollution was so bad in the U.S. back then that it prompted the Clean Water Act of 1972. Only a year after the law was passed, Lake Erie was still in terrible shape because it took a long time to clean up.
Nowadays we take clean water for granted, but if the Clean Water Act is weakened we will slip back into the easy path of draining and dumping all kinds of yuk into the water.
We think of hurricanes as very dangerous and very devastating but there’s a pigeon-sized seabird, the Desertas petrel (Pterodroma deserta), who nests during hurricane season because it chases hurricanes to feed its chick.
High on a rocky plateau [on Bugio Island], one small nocturnal seabird is nestled in its burrow, where far below waves lap gently against the cliffs. In the blackness of night, it senses a storm brewing 1,000 miles (1609km) from the coast of Morocco.
Bugio Island is well situated for chasing hurricanes, all of which are born as tropical depressions off the coast of Africa, travel west to the Americas, then swing north.
When scientists put data trackers on Desertas petrels and tracked them for five years, 2015-2019, they found:
Desertas petrels make some of the longest foraging trips ever recorded in any species – traveling as far as 12,000km (7,460 miles) over deep, pelagic waters – all the way from Africa, to the New England coast and back again.
Unlike most seabirds who circumnavigate hurricanes or try to stay inside the eye of the storm, the Desertas petrel actively chases hurricanes, braves incredible winds, and captures food churned to the ocean’s surface in the wake of the hurricane.
They put themselves exactly in the right place at the right time to be run over by a hurricane.
High tide at the Average High Tide marker, Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, Massachusetts, 5 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St.John)
6 October 2025
Yesterday I went to Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary on Cape Cod with one goal in mind: Find out if high tide has reached the Average High Tide marker I saw there in 2017.
Yes, it has. In the past eight years they’ve had to add a short boardwalk over the low spot.
High tide marker on 30 Sep 2017 and high tide itself on 5 Oct 2025 (photos by Kate St. John)
Because it was high tide I was surprised to see ten fiddler crabs scuttling ahead of me on Goose Pond Trail. Three paused near an oak leaf hoping I wouldn’t see them — very hard to see in my cellphone photo.
Three fiddler crabs on Goose Pond Trail at high tide, Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, 5 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
One fiddler crab thought he was invisible in the grass. He’s holding his fiddle in front of his face.
A closer look at a fiddler crab along Goose Pond Trail at high tide, Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, 5 Oct 2025 (photo by Kate St. John)
Bonus birds: Twenty black-bellied plovers (Pluvialis squatarola, “grey plover” in Europe) and one lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes) were loafing in the marsh grass to wait out high tide. (This photo is from Wikimedia Commons.)
Black-bellied plovers are super-alert and quick to fly away in the presence of danger. I missed seeing a northern harrier fly by but they did not. When they called and flew away I confirmed that these bland looking birds had diagnostic black axillaries (armpits).
Black-bellied plovers in flight, non-breeding plumage (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Though their adult population is estimated to be 1 million to 2.5 million birds, the IUCN listed black-bellied plovers as Vulnerable to extinction in July 2024 because…
While Pluvialis squatarola remains a widespread and abundant species it is listed as Vulnerable in response to increasing evidence for rapid population declines over the past three generations (23 years), estimated to be more than 30%. The exact causes of these declines are unknown, but a myriad of plausible threats have been identified including habitat loss and degradation, disturbance and hunting.
Similarly the lesser yellowlegs, whose adult population is about 650,000, was listed as Vulnerable in July 2024 because their migrating population has declined more than 50% in three-generations due to potentially unstable harvest levels (hunting) at migration and non-breeding sites.
Lesser Yellowlegs (photo by Bobby Greene, 2010)
That’s it for shorebirds. Today we’re flying home.
Fiddler crabs fighting at Cape Cod, May 2014 (photo by Kate St. John)
3 October 2025
This weekend I’m visiting family at Cape Cod and looking forward to catching up with the fiddler crabs that live at Wellfleet Bay.
Fiddler crabs are any one of 107 species in the family Ocypodidae that are found on the coasts of the Americas, the Indo-Pacific, West Africa, and a small south-facing region of Portugal.
The males, pictured above, are the only ones with a “fiddle” claw while the females have two small claws, below. The males sometimes use the fiddle to fight each other but I see this so rarely that I took a lot of photos.
To see the fiddler crabs I’ll have to pay attention to the tides. They only come out at low tide and at my favorite viewing spot at Wellfleet Bay a marker in 2017 indicated that Goose Pond and Try Island Trails would be underwater at high tide.
Goose Pond & Try Island Trails, Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary, October 2017 (photo by Kate St. John)
This year’s map shows it gets inundated. I’d like to see the marker at high tide too but then I’d miss the crabs.
Skuas are predatory seabirds that eat fish, offal and carrion in the non-breeding season, other birds’ eggs and chicks during the breeding season, and steal food from others at any time of year.
Of the seven skua species, brown skuas (Stercorarius antarcticus) live only in the Southern Ocean that surrounds Antarctica.
Every other bird gives brown skuas a wide berth and attack thems if they get near their nest. These Gentoo penguins are not happy to see two brown skuas at once.
In several respects brown skuas seem to be the crows of the Southern Ocean. They work together by hunting in groups at penguin nesting colonies, they gang up on other birds to steal their food and, like crows, they recognize and occasionally bond with individual humans such as Father Kirilov, the Eastern Orthodox clergymen at Trinity Church in early 2015.
Kirilov says he has also made friends with three large brown skuas, Antarctic scavenging birds often seen hovering outside his doorstep, waiting for the priest to toss them fresh fish.
“Since 2008, I constantly meet them here and talk to them,” the priest says, recalling the time a skua tried to make off with his pointed monk hat. “Sometimes they become naughty,” he smiles.
That’s the upside. The downside is that if you band their young at the nest, they learn who you are and specifically attack you, just like crows. See a video of it at this vintage article.
This dog-like mammal who lived 50 million years ago in the Early Eocene is actually the ancestor of whales. Though Pakicetus inachus was the size of a large dog, his genus name means “whale found in Pakistan.”
In 50 million years Pakicetus‘ descendants became more water-oriented and then spent their whole lives in water. Consequently their bodies evolved fish-like features and they became recognizable whales.
