Maggie's Farm

Once a common bird in New England and the Eastern seaboard but now gone the way of the Passenger Pigeon. From Wiki:

Heath Hens were extremely common in their habitat during Colonial times, but being a gallinaceous bird, they were hunted by settlers extensively for food. In fact, many have speculated that the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving dinner featured Heath Hens and not wild turkey. By the late 18th century, the heath hen had a reputation as poor man's food for being so cheap and plentiful; Thomas L. Winthrop related that they could be found on the Boston Common and that servants would sometimes bargain with a new employer for not being given Heath Hen for food more often than 2 or 3 days a week.

I hear the Redwings and Grackles croaking and gurgling in the morning, on their way to their breeding marshes further north. The White-Throated Sparrows have begun with their spring song, and, at the same time, I see that my Juncos have left for their breeding grounds on the tundra. The White-Throateds will be leaving now too. See ya next winter, God willing, little fellows.

Redwings:

This is a re-post from guest author Skook:

Glaciers and mountain-building have created many distinct species of trout throughout the Pacific drainage.  To find them, fish a mountain river, take a boat out on the Pacific, or hike to a desert lake.

Rainbow (above) – Silver with black spots and a reddish band along the side.  Their native range is the West Coast mountains, though they have been introduced elsewhere in North America and beyond.   Redbands are a variant found in the Great Basin, where they have adapted to high summer temperatures.  Steelheads are anadromous rainbows that spend parts of their lives in the North Pacific from Kamchatka down to Malibu Creek near Los Angeles.  In the Northwest, rainbows and steelhead are the premier game trout of the rivers and coast.

(While Rainbows are to be found in the East, these are all transplants or hatchery fish. The native stream trout in the East is the Brook Trout - which is a char.)

Cutthroat – Meriwether Lewis stopped at a Philadelphia tackle shop before setting out and his purchases served his expedition well, like on the Great Falls of the Missouri in June 1805.  Private Silas Goodrich fished the river as Lewis described events.  Goodrich caught a trout “with specks of a deep black…and a small dash of red on each side behind the front ventral fins… the flesh, when in good order, of a rose red.”  There are at least 14 types, often unique to particular river systems.  Cutthroats are the classic trout of the inland American West, and they sometimes interbreed with Rainbows.


Dolly Varden  - These are char (as is the eastern Brook Trout), like trout but with different teeth and coloration.  Dollys are olive or gray-green with yellow to pink spots and light gray bellies.  A character from a Dickens novel, Dolly Varden became the name of a patterned dress and in the 1870’s the name was given to the char found in California’s McCloud River. Dolly Varden are similar to Bull Trout, another char, and at one time they were thought to be the same species. They spend time in the ocean as do Cutthroats.     

There are a few other species found in isolated areas that exist today only due to the hard work of folks like Trout Unlimited.  Here are two examples:     

Apache Trout - Jump in your car and drive to the Ft. Apache Indian Reservation about three hours northeast of Phoenix.  There in the White River is the gold, red, and black Apache.  It has been a long struggle due to loss of habitat and interbreeding with rainbows.  But now things look good enough to move it from the endangered list to merely “threatened” so you may legally try your luck at catch and release.

Gila Trout – Another modestly reviving species in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, it too had been pushed to the brink by development and competition with non-native trout introduced decades ago.  Gilas have black spots on gold and copper bodies and grow to over a foot. Long term restoration has brought them back enough to permit limited fishing in a few beautiful mountain streams.  Bring your hiking boots.

- The Mediterranean population of the Bluefin Tuna - "Tonno" - the King of Fish, is headed for extinction due to overfishing. Their vulnerability is that they all congregate in one place for breeding, and helos direct the netting. EU politics will permit that extinction to occur. A damn shame. Of course, the regular Atlantic population is headed for the same fate.

- And Bottlenose Dolphins aren't really fish, but the Japanese in Taji kill 23,000 of them each year. This is not stewardship.

- Another fish tale: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World.

A re-post. We'll do the Western species later in the week -

It's getting near Opening Day around here, so here's an update on the Salmonidae. For our other pieces on fishing, enter "fishing" in our search space - you will catch some good stuff - along with some random entries.

Taxonomy: The family Salmonidae includes a number of cool-water fish subfamilies: trout, salmon, char, grayling, Lake Whitefish, and other less well-known fish. The Brook Trout and Lake Trout are technically members of the Char subfamily of the Salmonidae.

Heritage: The aggressive, young-trout-killing Brown Trout is a transplant from Eurasia. The fast-water Rainbow Trout is a transplant from the Pacific watershed. The splendid Brook Trout and the big Lake Trout are the common native game species of the Eastern US, and both are technically Char, not trout per se. At this point, the wonderful game "trout" have been transplanted world-wide, and some have established viable wild populations, as with the trout in Patagonia, where you can even catch New England's Brook Trout today.

Anadromy: Most Salmonidae have the capacity, or the preference, to be anadromous - to migrate to salt water until maturity - when they have the opportunity. The Arctic Char, of culinary and cold water fame (anti-freeze in the blood), is anadromous. So is the Steelhead - actually a migratory Rainbow. Salmon are, of course. Sea-going fish grow larger on the rich variety of big-water foods. Interestingly, many land-locked Salmonidae imitate anadromy by entering streams to spawn, and then return to their home fresh-water lakes or just stay put in the streams, if there is enough to eat.

The Great Lakes and other large lakes have their own Salmonidae species, such as Lake Whitefish, and Lake Trout which are not found in trout streams.

Hatchery fish:  When you fish for trout in the East, you are, in all likelihood, catching hatchery fish, not wild, born-in-nature fish. Too many anglers, and not enough habitat, so we pretend we are catching wild fish. Catch-and-release gives your fellow angler a chance, and saves your state government, or your fishing club, money on their hatchery budgets. Still, some wild breeding populations do exist, and fly-fishing with barbless hooks gives every fish a sporting chance to avoid the crushing humiliation of the sportman's net. But I still wonder what would happen if we banned all fresh-water stream fishing for five years. What would we find in our streams? Nothing?  Or big, mature breeding trout hunkering under stream banks and fallen logs? We will never know, but I suspect that many of our streams would not support wild trout populations.

Other details:

 - Superb taxonomy website: ITIS
 - Good Eastern trout summary, Pennsylvania Fishes
 - An example of how eastern states manage their fresh-water recreational fisheries, from Connecticut
 - An example of what fish hatcheries do, from New York State

 Image: Brook Trout, by Denton

A reader sent in this photo of Phragmites australis, aka Phragmites, aka Common Reed, from a southern New England marsh yesterday. This presumably non-native, invasive reed has spread like a cancer in marshes across the US, crowding out native marsh species and, in many areas, creating hundreds or thousands of acres of sterile "monoculture" marshland (eg the vast and once-biologically-bountiful New Jersey marshlands).

(There is a native species of Phragmites, shorter, far less aggressive, and pickier of habitat. I took a photo of a stand of it in Canada, but can't find my photo. Here's a genetic study of Phragmites species in North America.)

Ducks Unlimited has many programs, such as this one, to try to control these weed reeds. Nonetheless, they are here to stay. Illegal immigration or globalization?

Just the usual old winter friends lately: SC Junco, WT Sparrow, Song Sparrow, Blue Jay, RB Woodpecker, Carolina Wren, Cardinal, Chickadee, some dang House Sparrows, Tufted Titmouse, Mourning Dove.

I need my Sharpie back to eat those overfed House Sparrows.

(It's interesting to see how just some of the Juncoes - ground-feeders - figure out how to use a hanging feeder, but most do not. Have yet to see a WT Sparrow on the hanger. I throw handfuls of seed on the ground each morning for the ground-feeders, figuring it will all be gone by late afternoon so as not to encourage rats.)

Also, a flock of Robins stopped by yesterday to finish off the Holly berries. Not a single berry left, now. I had a few early blackbirds last week - Grackles - but they are probably back in Georgia by now. I do usually see some Blackbird species around by Feb 15, trying to push the envelope.

The lack of Pelicans at my feeders would appear to disprove global warming catastrophe models. I'd write it up for a peer-reviewed journal, if the gummint or the EU would give me a generous grant: Effects of Global Warming on Pelican Occurrance at New England Bird-Feeders. $1.3 million would cover my research just fine, or at least help me get it underway. I will guarantee a research product which will help "the cause," and the $ will help me hire a handy research assistant/pelican-counter like one of Theo's so we don't lose all of our critical data:

Who knew? The restoration of Elk to Kentucky has been a huge success. (Thanks, reader.) Now they need their hunting season, since the predators haven't found them yet. No Cougars or wolves seen in KY lately, alas. Wildcats, yes! A wonderful state, but too far from salt water for me.

There used to be forest-dwelling buffalo ("Bison" for purists) throughout Kentucky, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Illinois, Ohio, too. How about trying a restoration of them? I do know that they bust through fences...

The blizzard in the Central Atlantic states, passing well south of here, has been classified as a Nor'easter - the classic winter storm of the east coast and especially of New England.

Why, one might ask, are cyclonic storms travelling northeast named after winds coming from the northeast? Well, it's because the winds in the cyclone blowing from the southwest are usually offshore as the storm, as these typically do, travels up the coast. Image below from this site.

Offshore, therefore, the winds are more likely to be from the southwest - wet winds. However, a Sou'wester is any southwest wind. The big cyclonic storm are still called Nor'easters, as in Perfect Storm. Here's a real Sou'wester (the hat):

Droll Yankees produces many good, squirrel-defeating bird feeders. They have the Whipper, the Dipper, the Flipper and the Tipper. I am trying the Tipper because it doesn't need batteries.

Yes, I always throw a few handfulls of seed on the ground each morning for the squirrels and the ground-feeders.

He is back to feeding on the sparrows at my bird feeder. Quite a sight to see him trying swoop in low under the radar, then chasing a bird through the bushes with much thrashing around.

Most of his attacks fail, but clearly enough succeed to keep him around.

Sharp-shinned Hawk. They are accipters.

Found a Wooly Bear caterpillar curled up cozy in the wood pile the other day. I carefully placed him under a hunk of bark in the woods. I have loved these critters since I used to find them with my Mom as a young kid.

They contain a cryoprotectant that keeps them vital during their winter hibernation. When it warms up, they will wake up and eat like crazy, pupate, and become a tiger moth - the Isabella Moth.

As I was considering some dinner plans, naturally the idea of foie-gras-stuffed quail came to mind.

Quail, around here, are Bob Whites. (Hunters in the South call them "birds," hence the origin of the term bird dog.) Habitat loss and development is the main reason that these Eastern US birds are approaching endangered status in parts of their range. You can read about them here. 

I have heard them calling their name out on Nantucket, Long Island and on Cape Cod, but nowhere inland in New England.

Fortunately, they are readily pen-raised and thus easily available at supermarkets - and for preserve shooters who typically, even in the South, release thousands of pen-raised birds for the pleasure of the sports.

This site has 91 quail recipes.

The crisisification of everything from weather to fatness to flu season trivializes real crises.

Just One Minute mocked the NYT's crisisification of the Atlantic Menhaden population. Fair enough. It's not a crisis, but it is a serious concern to all those concerned with ocean wildlife - and one which could be easily solved by limiting the helo-guided factory-fish harvest of these bottom-of-the-food-chain schooling fish.

Even as recently as 6 years ago, when fishing on Long Island Sound, you could catch your bait for Bluefish or Bass by tossing a bare hook into a school of Menhaden, aka Bunker, and just dragging the hook through the thick schools. Since the factory ships appeared, those giant schools have been harvested like the herds of Bison and the sky-darkening flocks of Passenger Pigeons.

Here's The Most Important Fish in the Sea

Here's Meet menhaden - before this ecologically critical fish vanishes

Images via links above

We have posted in the past about one of my favorite birds, the Peregrine Falcon. They are "peregrine" because they breed in the north, summer in South America.

They are partial to cliffs and mountains, which is why they are comfortable living in cities with their abundant source of pigeons and sparrows, and nesting on tall buildings and urban bridges. 

The recovery of their populations east of the Mississippi is a wonder to conservationists and a tribute to what man can do to renew wildlife populations.

Photo is from an update on New York City's Peregrine Falcons at Smithsonian.

Walker Percy fans, of whom I am one, recall the protagonist in The Last Gentleman setting up his fancy telescope in Central Park to watch the falcons. (I am also a Dickens fan, a Wallace Stegner fan, a Mark Helprin fan... ok, I am not going to keep going down this track.)

I was sent this photo of American Black Ducks ("Blacks") by a reader in CT. Blacks are never abundant, but they are around. These northeastern dabblers, which are closely related to the Mallard, breed around both fresh (expecially beaver ponds) and salt water (mostly salt marshes). 

You can read about these fine ducks at CLO.

Caption and photo came in over the transom - might be photoshopped but we don't know -

By the length of his beard and the gray legs this bull moose must be over 10 years old. He appears to be over 8 feet at the shoulder hump … this fellow is ONE BIG BOY!  The picture was taken near Elliott Lake, Ontario, Canada on a dirt road, probably the width of 1.5 cars.

It's the time of year when I stock up on bags of Ocean Spray Cranberries and throw them in the freezer.

The canned cranberry "sauce" pictured is garbage. It's just congealed sweetened cranberry juice.

The recipe on the Ocean Spray bags is pretty good, but I cut the sugar they recommend. It's nothing but water, fresh or frozen berries, and sugar.

Better yet for Thanksgiving, game, and even chicken, is Cranberry-Orange Relish. Raw berries and an orange. Thanks to the mother-in-law for introducing me to this tangy thing years ago.

A great food, the Cranberry. I love to put them in pancakes (the combination of the sweetness of the maple syrup and the tartness of the cranberries is perfect).

Here's our old post on Cranberry Season and the Heart.

Funny thing about Cranberries: not many animals or birds like to eat them. Maybe bears? I've seen Box Turtles take a bite out of one, but I've never seen anything else eat them. I love Cranberries, as long as they aren't cooked too sweet. Here's a tiny Massachusetts Cranberry bog, flooded for harvest:

 Here's how it's done:

By 1940, essentially all American Chestnuts, a dominant climax tree (and a major mast-producing tree - once the major food of Turkey, Deer and lots of other critters) of American forests, were killed by the blight. Their wood has a remarkable durability and their somewhat rusty-colored carcasses can still be seen in our woodlands.

That is a bunch of Christmas Fern behind the fallen log.

Somewhere in either Tolstoy or Dostoevsky there is a comment about the remorse of the hunter when holding a Woodcock in hand. You have noticed that our head image on Maggie's now is Woodcock hunting.

John Stuart Skinner in his classic 1883 The Dog and the Sportsman put it this way:

I have frequently felt something like remorse, when, on picking up a wounded
one, I have met the forgiving expression of its full and bright, yet soft hazel
orb. How many of the beauties who dazzle and enslave us would be proud of such
an eye.

Christmas Fern. From the leaf litter, you can see that these woods are mainly Oak, Beech, and some Maple.

If you look carefully at this branch, you can see the stringy yellow flowers of Witch Hazel in their November bloom. Mountain Laurel is green in the background. Lousy photo:

Similar photo to that of earlier this morning. These woods are mostly Beech and Oak, which are the climax upland forest around here. Both hold their leaves late into the autumn and winter while they gradually turn brown.

Everybody knows about the Hubble, but the Spitzer is equally remarkable.

Photo of star formation clusters is from this Spitzer photo gallery.

It's fun to check in with HawkCount and to explore their site to see what people are seeing during our wonderful raptor migration season.

Image is one of my favorites: The rugged, late-migrating Rough-Legged Hawk.

The road out to our village in the Berkshires. It is indeed over the river and through the woods. Woods, fields, and swamps:

View from the upper barn. Trout stream down there in the valley. Those are our woods up on the hills too - insofar as anybody can "own" woods. The hawks, owls, deer and and bears own them, really. Well, God owns them, but I can harvest firewood there. You can see the White Pine infestation in the upper meadow. We have been at 'em, but it's a lot of work to cut them down. It's a shame that you cannot really burn White Pine in the fireplace. Too much resin, burns too hot.

To get a taste of central Ohio, we stayed at the very pleasant Honey Run Inn outside Millersburg in Holmes County, the heart of Ohio Amish country where every other name seems to be Yoder. Excellent dinner menu there, but pricey. 

If you don't get lost, it's only a 45-minute beautiful country drive down to Gambier in Knox Co. Gotta watch out for your turns, though, on those nice two-lane county roads or you can end up far from your destination with no gas station anywhere.

When I visit a new area, I like to get a close-up feel for the woodlands and their outdoors, so I took a couple of early morning hikes up there in Holmes Co. I'd say the bird life and the tree life are similar that of southern New England, and the woodlands are similar hardwood forest - except that the density of nut and mast trees is remarkable: Walnut, Beech, various oaks, Hickory, Shagbark Hickory, Butternut, Ash. When you walk through the woods in late Oct. as I did, you hear the startling thunk of walnuts falling constantly. Also different - I saw no pines and no birch. Plenty of majestic Tulip Trees as one sees in southern New England, and Maples all over.

You cannot have familiarity with a woodland without knowing each tree, and I try to do so. Was mann weiss, mann sieht.

4000 years ago much of Ohio was short-grass prairie and full of Bison. A cooler, wetter climate since then has made possible the hillside woodlands of today (everything flat seems to be farmed) - plus there are no more Indians to burn the prairies to suppress woodland growth.

From the size of the trees, this patch of hilly woodland below was pasture 40 or 50 years ago. Why I did not see or hear lots of Wild Turkeys I do not know, but these woods definitely hold plenty of deer.

 A few more snaps from my hikes in the morning drizzle below the fold -

As a nod to huntin' season, our current image on top is from Currier and Ives' American Field Sports series. I do not see Snipe too often anymore, but I do not know why. Last time I saw them in any numbers was in a Manitoba marsh.

We posted on the sad story of the Ash Tree diseases recently, but I didn't have a good photo of a White Ash, the fine northern hardwood and pleasant shade tree from which the Louisville Slugger happens to be made.

I took a photo of one - a young one - on the Kenyon campus in its orange and yellow autumn splendor.

Either the Emerald Ash Borer, or more likely Ash Yellows, killed a 100 year-old majestic White Ash which provided welcome shade to our place.

The wonderful Ash is under seige from diseases spreading across the country. It's a damn shame, because these shade trees were fairly good substitutes for the old Elms that succumbed to the Dutch Elm disease.

Photo is some sort of Ash, but I'm pretty sure it's not our Eastern White Ash from its shape.

If you want to bring a Screech Owl family to your neighborhood, put up a nest box. They will find it, if you have any in the vicinity. They don't mind suburbia at all as long as they can find open places to hunt.

We like the Coveside products. Of course, other critters might want to use them - flying squirrels, Kestrels, etc., but you might get lucky with a nesting pair of Screeches.

(Note to the FTC: Coveside paid us $475,000 for this product  endorsement)

For the past four days, we have been visited by the noisest Eastern Screech Owl I have ever heard. For an hour or three at dawn and dusk he doesn't shut up, and drives the pup nuts. Maybe it's the full moon that is doing it?

I have always been fond of these little owls, but they are rarely seen, just heard. I hope this guy sticks around.

Here's a sample of their calls, but their calls are more varied than that.

It's been interesting to me to see how many searches land on our post from last year: The mice, rats, voles, shrews and lemmings of New England.

It's gratifying to be useful to curious people.

Photo: The good old Meadow Mouse, properly named the Meadow Vole, common across the nothern part of North America, and good wholesome food for numerous predators. A lil' critter to be welcomed, because his presence means you have healthy lands.

h/t, Bits and Pieces:

The autumn hawk migration has begun around here. It's a wonderful phenomenon.

I had a Red-Shouldered (as in photo) high overhead this morning, but on the hills in September you can find "kettles" of Broad Wings - possibly our most commonly-seen fall migrant hawk on the Atlantic Flyway, circling as they ride the morning thermals up to catch a long free, coasting ride south until they reach the next thermal updraft.

The identification of raptors is difficult, and I have no skill at it but I have a couple of pals who are. Like so many things, you have to learn from an expert: a book is almost useless because hawks are almost always seen in flight and, during migration, usually at fairly high altitudes so you only have a profile and, perhaps, a flight style. Furthermore, many migrants are immature first-year birds without the mature plumage.

The species pass by in phases. In late October and November come the most interesting ones: rugged birds like eagles, Goshawks, and Rough Leggeds.

I easily identified my passing Red Shouldered because of the "windows" in his wings.

(Speaking of migration, I have seen almost no migrating Monarch butterflies this year. In fact, far fewer butterflies in the gardens all summer than usual. Missed them because, in my view, butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds are part of the vitality and fun of gardens.)

A re-post -

In a comment on our piece about clear-cutting, a reader let us know about this book: 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann.

Human fantasies about the Garden of Eden, like human utopian fantasies, just never give up. You might almost think we all wish we were back in the womb.

I ordered the book, but here's a quote from Charles Mann's 2002 essay in The Atlantic on the subject:

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

It's a fascinating subject to me. Here's the whole essay.

Image: An early version of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom

It's the time of year when Tree Swallows head for the coasts to assemble for their migrations. I have seen them flocking by the hundreds on Cape Cod in August (even saw an albino among them a couple of years ago), and by the thousands in places like Jamaica Bay NWP.

These fine birds bother me in the spring, when they successfully compete for the 25 Bluebird nest boxes I have gone to much trouble to clean etc.

Bugs and berries are their food, and they like to breed near water. More about them at the new, and less informative, CLO.

Photo is a male. The females are brown.

An annual re-post:

We mentioned in our piece on cicadas that the Katydids would begin their singing in mid-late summer. They are beginning to go strong now here in New England.

Open that window, shut off the TV, and let those wonderful, soothing, romantic, sentimental, poignant, sleepy-time night sounds roll in to feed your soul. And engrave it in your heart - we only have so many Augusts in our lives. For the katydid, it's their one and only - no wonder they sing their hearts out, until a hard frost kills them all.

You hardly ever see a Katydid - they are well-camouflaged in the green leaves but they are all over. Early evening and nighttime are when they make their music - more like Kay-did than a three-syllable tune. It sounds as if they are singing to each other. With the crickets providing the chirping background theme, it's a fine choir out there right now, at night. The bugs own the world.

Here's more info about Katydids.

If you live in the Northeast, your gardens and plantings are, right now, being attacked by the unwanted and unwelcome alien Porcelainberry.

This aggressive Asian weed vine was introduced as a decorative ground cover, but it is a cancer with the ability to grow 15' or more per year, and to smother anything you have planted. If you pull it up, get the entire root - or poison it.

The birds poop the seeds everywhere, so they come up everywhere around here. Especially in gardens. Their roots are tenacious.

As its leaves demonstrate, it is a member of the grape family and it can be confused with the native wild grape, which is a much less aggressive plant. You can read all about Porcelainberry here, and about how to try to get rid of it.

An experienced outdoorsman can identify most of the plants and trees in the areas with which he is familar - but not so much elsewhere. Like learning languages, though, he can learn a new area quickly because he has woods-sense based on the types of habitats he already knows.

An experienced outdoorsman can also predict what birds and critters are likely to be found in a given habitat. Woods-sense is one of the few talents I have. I like to attribute it to my Iroquois blood.

It used to be called Woodcraft, then Natural History, and now it's called Science: Barcoding plants by their DNA. It's sort-of cool, but it is soul-less and not woodcraft.

Photo: An Alder thicket - a common lowland and streamside habitat in the northern US. I have busted my way through more of these nearly-impenetrable things than I can count. The branches pull your hat off constantly, and sometimes you feel like you are in jail, with no exit. And if you try to raise your gun for a Grouse or Woodcock, there's always a branch to stop you. Good stuff.

Remember when Calvin insisted to his teacher that "Bats are birds"? (Correction - thanks, reader. I guess it was "Bats are bugs...". I was wrong again! That makes wrong twice in one week.)

New England is the home to around 7 species of bats, all nocturnal insectivores and most with some migratory habits.

Our most common bat is the Little Brown Bat (photo above) often found sleeping behind shutters or in crevices in sheds and attics during the summer and early fall. We had one who got into the house a few years ago. We managed to scoot him out a window. Wonderful - no, miraculous little critters, but worth keeping away from because they can carry rabies.

I noticed seeing very few bats around at twilight this year. I miss them dodging, diving, and ducking around in their bug-catching aerial antics. I checked it out. It turns out that there is a contagious bat disease in the Northeast. Whether this fungal infestation is the cause, or an effect of something else, is still not certain. It's a damn shame.

I hope their populations bounce back in my lifetime because these silent fluttering critters are one of the delights of the evening sky around here.

Marginal Revolution is a Puffin guy. 

More info about Puffins at All About Birds. Tyler Cowen linked to this Puffin video:

.

One of Tigerhawk's young Bald Eagles at his place in the Adirondacks. Is he echoing the silhouette of the pump on purpose?

MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen's short essay is rightly making the rounds today. One quote:

...all models predicting significant warming are greatly overestimating warming. This should not be surprising (though inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community).

 Read the whole thing. Related, a wamist read Prof. Ian Plimer's book, and was converted.

At the Okinawa Aquarium (borrowed from David Thompson). Note the Remoras on the Basking Shark - or is it a Whale Shark?:

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

5 minutes ago. I love storms. Cameras cannot capture thunder, wind, and driving rain:

"Were you out there praying in the garden?" Mrs. BD asked me later. "No." I said. "I was watching ants."

I spent around a half hour on Satuday afternoon sitting in the dirt watching ants. Few things can be more absorbing. (Or maybe I should say that everything in life can be absorbing if you sit for a minute.)

In doing final garden clean-up, I had to move a big old 4X4 garden edger to another spot and, naturally, uncovered a black ant nest full of eggs or pupae - I think pupae because you could see something inside the egg-like shape.

Almost instantly, the worker ants (both the big ones and the little) and the soldier ants grabbed an egg and ran for cover, scattering in all directions. After about 5 minutes, each ant with egg in mandible headed over to the right, over a rock and into a hole in a pile of garden mulch. In about 15 minutes, every one of around 200 eggs had been carried off to safety by a line or marching ants, back and forth like Chinese coolies.

Ants are said to represent 18-25% of the animal biomass of the planet - higher in the tropics. There is nothing as adaptible as the family Formicidae. They are hymenoptera - evolved from wasps, and all still have tiny stingers.

Ant social behavior is interesting, but their specialization, their physical specialization, and their chemical communication is more so.

Here's a good brief intro to ant behavior. The Wiki entry isn't too bad.