The View From My Office
The Daily Wing returns today after my lovely hiatus backpacking in the Grand Canyon and birding in the Intermountain West region of Idaho. I report today, my birthday, from the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, where I’m spending a week catching up on writing and office work. The view from my office reaches 1.8 billion year into the Precambrian, where the Colorado River cuts through dark Vishnu Schist and rosy Zoroaster Granite (just barely visible behind the butte and the platform at the lower left of this photo). Stacked above – in sedimentary layers of red, brown, ochre, almond and countless blends – is a portrait of the region’s hot and heavy history: the collision of tectonic plates, the advance and retreats of great oceans and deserts, volcanic eruptions. It’s a story expressed in the sediments left behind and later exposed by the Colorado River (among other great forces of nature) over the course of the last six million years or so. read more…
Grousing About Idaho
In the sparse lowlands of western Idaho, a pre-dawn breeze swirls gently. Horned Larks break into a serenade of tinkling glass. One of North America’s great displays of sexuality is about to begin. Erupting from the darkness are pulses of white feathers, the chest-pounding of male Greater Sage-Grouse on the make. read more…
Onward and Downward
The Daily Wing takes a break with limited post during the next few week while I’m out of the office and into the Grand Canyon. I’ll resurface in early March.
Happy Valentine’s Day
Fireflies (Photinus sp. making sparks fly)
Rainbow Bluets (Enallagma antennatum)
Greenish Blues (Plebejus saepiolus)
Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetles (Cicindela sedecimpunctata)
Variable Darners (Aeshna interrupta)
The Waxwings of Montpelier
The Capital City of Vermont is now Waxwing Central. A mixed flock of roughly 450 Bohemian Waxwings and Cedar Waxwings is marauding around Montpelier, feeding on the fruits of ornamental trees. I spent a bit of quality time with them on Sunday, February 12. So did other birders. I’ve mapped recent locations. But the best ways to locate these birds, besides listening for them, might be to look high in hardwood trees. Waxwings often sit high and make periodic sorties to feed on fruit trees below. Update – February 17: Waxwings have suddenly become a bit tougher to find in Montpelier. These flocks do wander. I’ll keep you posted.
View Bohemian Waxwings in Montpelier, Vermont in a larger map
Barn Owls and Breeding Birds
If you build it, they will come. Barn Owls, thought to be gone from Vermont some years ago, are here. And Vermont’s own WCAX-TV is on the story, a tribute to a biology teacher, some nest boxes and enterprising kids.
Meanwhile, from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, is all the news that’s fit to print on the breeding birds of Vermont. VCE has put online the results of the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas.
“For five years, citizen scientists scoured fields, traversed forests, and endured black flies, mosquitos, and broken ankles to collect the more than 30,000 observations that comprise the Atlas database, ” VCE reports in a news release “Their hard work has been compiled, analyzed, summarized, and interpreted to document changes in the state’s bird distributions since the first Atlas.”
Complete with detailed accounts for each species, summaries of results, distribution maps, and tables, the Atlas website will be a hallmark reference for anyone needing accessible information on the status of birds that breed in Vermont.
A full-color hard cover Atlas book is now in production and scheduled for release in early 2013. (I wrote the section on the history of avian conservation in Vermont.) Complete with maps, data tables, full-text species accounts, photos, and interpretive chapters, the publication will serve as a rich, attractive, and user-friendly resource for birders, natural resource managers, and the conservation-interested public.
LEARN YOUR DIGITAL CAMERA AND CAPTURE THE WORLD
Thursday, February 16 / 6:30-9pm in Norwich / $25
Whether you’re shooting landscapes, sports, birds, flowers or grandkids, this workshop will solve your digital dilemmas.
Give me a couple of hours and I’ll give you mastery of your digital camera. You’ll finally understand the dials, buttons and menus on your point-and-shoot or SLR camera. No longer will you set it to “AUTO” and hope for the best. You and your camera will collaborate for the best shots possible. The session includes refreshments, a handout and wisdom from a veteran photographer (me). Bring yourself and your camera (charge the battery!) to the Vermont Center for Ecostudies (VCE) at 20 Palmer Court in White River Junction, which is just off Route 5 between downtown White River and Norwich. Here’s a map. No registration is necessary. A portion of your fee will be donated to VCE. Questions? Send me an email.
Your instructor, Bryan Pfeiffer, is an author, naturalist and professional photographer whose work appears in magazines, newspapers, business publications, on the web and even once around the globe on CNN. Bryan’s workshops combine humor, exuberance and wisdom for effective and enjoyable learning. He’s taught digital photography to hundreds of people around the country (including in Boise and at the Grand Canyon this March).
Charlie Cogbill’s Trees
First came the surveyors.
Long before Vermont became a state of farms and villages, before high pastures and dirt roads emerged on the landscape, hearty men walked the region and divided forests into lots. The surveyors crossed streams, climbed mountains and swatted black flies as they marked parcels for settlers who would later arrive to claim their piece of a nascent state. The surveyors were among Vermont’s early explorers.
More than two centuries later, Charlie Cogbill is hot on their trail.
In the survey maps they left behind, in their notebooks, journals and other historic documents, Cogbill has found trees. Lots of trees. Maple and beech, spruce and pine, trees named by the surveyors in land records and blazed into history. These were “witness trees” – living landmarks the survey teams used to help designate the corners of each lot in the woods.
In his own march through historic documents over the past 30 years, Cogbill has found and catalogued more than 350,000 named trees from across the Northeast. The trees are echoes from forests that covered the region before European settlers arrived and began logging at a relentless pace.
Charlie Cogbill’s trees are toppling some textbook assumptions about the composition of eastern pre-settlement forests. Maple, for example, was hardly the dominant tree it is today. But perhaps more important, Cogbill’s innovative snapshot from the forests of our past can offer vital insights into the forests of our future.
“It’s effectively one point in time,” he explains, “but it’s an ideal point.” read more…
Tools and Toys
NEXT IN BRYAN PFEIFFER’S BETTER BIRDING LECTURE SERIES:
TOOLS AND TOYS FOR NATURALISTS
Monday, February 6 / 6:30pm at First Baptist Church of Montpelier / Fee: $10
In 90 minutes I’ll share four decades of wisdom on binoculars, cameras, books, apps and other essentials for enjoying wildlife and wild places. Bring your binoculars to this lecture! We’ll put them to use. I’ll also share my latest insights on how to buy the right digital camera for your life outdoors (or indoors). And you’ll discover new dimensions to nature with other tools and toys that I’ll bring for show and tell. The Better Birding Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the North Branch Nature Center and the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.
The Real Meaning of Groundhog Day
Blogger’s Note: You can also hear me read this as a commentary on Vermont Public Radio.
Pay no attention to Phil and the pranksters in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, today. Instead, listen for bird song. Black-capped Chickadees offer their wistful fee-bee serenade. Northern Cardinals launch into a series of rich, repeated whistled notes. And Carolina Wrens begin an energetic tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle!
It can sound like springtime in February, regardless of whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow. That’s because the real significance of Groundhog Day isn’t about sunshine. It’s about day length. Around February 2 we start getting more than 10 hours of daylight. And that matters to wildlife.
It doesn’t mean that spring is around the corner. Far from it. Songbirds schedule breeding to coincide with an abundance of food for their offspring, mostly insects, which comes around May and June. But now, as the days grow longer, birds do start thinking about … well, um, you know, making more birds. It’s why they sing.
It’s not entirely clear how birds measure day length, but we do know that photo-receptors in bird brains sense increasing light. It triggers the production of hormones that act like birdie Viagra. So when the food is there in May, songbirds will be ready … you know, physically.
Why February 2? Well, it falls about halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, a period reflected in human traditions from Paganism to Christianity. But why the groundhog? Couldn’t we have picked a loftier critter to represent the coming of the light? I’ve got nothing against woodchucks, by any other name. But, as it turns out, this rodent is indeed a worthy harbinger of spring.
In the light of February, woodchucks emerge from hibernation hot to trot. They need to breed now so that females produce litters during greater food abundance in April and May.
The same goes for other rodents, particularly squirrels, which have an unusual mating ritual. Female squirrels are in estrus, receptive to males for breeding, for about eight hours on only a single day during this season. And males outnumber females in the wild by as much as five to one. Among males competition for a female is fierce. So the boys spend a lot of time following a given female in the days leading up to their one big day.
Any male who’s too forthcoming, too anxious before she’s ready, will get from the female a swat to his face or a painful bite. But when those precious eight hours finally do arrive, on their day in the sun, males compete and fight for a copulation that might last only about 20 seconds.
So let’s recognize the real significance of Groundhog Day. In the growing light of February, this isn’t a holiday about six more weeks of winter. It’s a celebration of romance, even if it turns out to be a tribute to rodent romance.
BREAKING NEWS (at 7:57am today): Ruth Einstein reports two Red Squirrels copulating in her own backyard in Montpelier. “It was a great way to start my day,” she says.
