The new Indiana Raptor Center website is open for business.
I've written about Indiana Raptor Center several times over the years. They are a local (to me) hospital that rescues and rehabilitates orphaned and injured birds of prey, as well as performing educational programs to teach the public about the importance of raptors in the environment and conservation in general. Since last summer, I have been working on their new website along with my wife Jennie, who was instrumental in rethinking the site architecture and researching other sites in the wildlife rescue world. Now it's complete, and I'd like to invite you to check it out.
The center was in dire need of a new site, for many reasons. The new design is focused on two prime objectives: 1) make the site work well on mobile devices; and 2) make it really easy and obvious how to donate. InRC does work that is clearly in the public interest, but they receive no public money. On their old site, fundraising was almost an afterthought. I won't go on too long about the process of creating the site, since I talk about it a bit at the InRC blog.
The amount of work InRC does astounds me - as does their ability to weather the almost daily heartbreak that comes with the job. They're a totally volunteer organization. Since I know for a fact there's a considerable overlap between LITC readers and lovers of living dinosaurs, I hope you'll visit the site, share a link with our fellow bird lovers, and pitch a few dollars to them if you are able and inclined.
Taiga, a recently departed peregrine falcon who served as an education ambassador for years.
My local rescue and rehab center for birds of prey, Indiana Raptor Center in Nashville, Indiana, is preparing for its big annual fundraiser, Raptor Rendezvous. If you're a resident of Indiana or surrounding states, I can't recommend it highly enough. Raptor rehabbers from around the Midwest come out, bringing a wide variety of birds. This year, I've also designed a 2014 calendar for InRC, which will be available at the event. The July illustration features, appropriately enough, the Bald Eagles above. They're Piper and Ben, two of InRC's residents.
I recently shared this preview image along with another one at my Tumblr. I also have all of the information about the Raptor Rendezvous there. In brief: it's on September 7, in the beautiful confines of Brown County State Park in Nashville, IN. The event will begin with a dinner, followed by an evening program starring a variety of birds. Did I mention the birds? It will be packed with birds, with special front-row seating area for photographers. The rehabbers are pretty cool, as far as humans go. They tell some good tales. Mostly about birds. If you're on Facebook, check out the event page, as well.
If you're unable to attend but would like to purchase a calendar, I can make that happen if you shoot me an email. If you can't afford to do either, I'd greatly appreciate tweets, Facebook shares, and reblogs of my Tumblr post.
That there is Shawnee, a young example of the extant theropod species Haliaeetus leucocephalus, the bald eagle. I met him recently at Indiana Raptor Center, a group I've been working with for a year now (and have written about a few times). This weekend is their big fundraising event, the Raptor Rendezvous. If you're a local-to-me reader (as in, if you live in southern Indiana or thereabouts, it would be well worth your time to drive to Nashville, Indiana for one or both days of the event. I'll also have some artwork in the auction and photographs for sale, and you can say "hello" if you recognize me. I'll be the exhausted grad student.
Shawnee is not ready for primetime yet, but you will get to see a ton of great birds up close, including this charmer, a Tyto alba named Oberon.
Here's the raptor center's press release, which has all of the pertinent information.
Indiana Raptor Center (InRC), located in Nashville IN, is presenting the second annual Raptor Rendezvous Festival in Brown County on October 27 and 28. Events include a rendezvous tent on Saturday, Oct. 27, 9 am – 5 pm, located in the Nashville Village Green at Main and Jefferson Streets, complete with re-enactment falconers and live birds, an education display about InRC, and a trading post full of handmade goods, InRC merchandise, small collectible antiques and vintage curiosities, the sale of which supports InRC.
On October 28 the cap-off event of the weekend is a 4 hour extravaganza at the Brown County State Park Abe Martin Lodge, 1 pm – 5 pm. Included will be a silent auction, beverages and concessions and a bird of prey display including approximately 20 bird of prey species from FIVE Indiana and Illinois rehabilitation and education centers.
Special guest from Illinois Raptor Center will be Jack Nuzzo presenting a golden eagle, and a few others seldom seen in Brown County. Charly Taylor from WildCare in Bloomington, Kathy Hershey from Utopia Wildlife in Columbus, Brittany Davis of Eagle Creek in Indianapolis, and the crew from InRC will present area favorites like the bald eagle, barn owl, and some exotic raptor species from other parts of the world.
Admission to all events is free, donations are accepted, and cameras are welcome. This true Raptor Rendezvous will be the largest bird of prey program ever offered in the state of Indiana, larger even than our event last year! All proceeds from the weekend will be used to support the birds of the Indiana Raptor Center, including the provision of food, veterinary care, and shelter maintenance for both full-time residents and our rehabilitation patients.
Truly a wonderful, family event full of fun and information, and a few new surprises!
Indiana is currently experiencing a growing trend in shootings of raptors. This is a serious federal offense, carrying huge fines, but nonetheless my friends at Indiana Raptor Center are admitting more and more birds of prey suffering from gunshot wounds. They're usually fatal. Updates on the Facebook group for the center invariably gain many hopeful comments, only to be dashed with news that euthanization was necessary.
I'm hard at work on a poster which will be part of a multi-organizational public push to stop this awful trend. There's one telling bit of copy that haunts me as I work. I can't get it out of my head:
"70% of all raptors die withing the first year of their life. Rehabilitation centers report collisions, shootings, electrocution, and pesticide exposure as common causes for admissions."
Today on Twitter, I had a brief conversation with Sharon Wegner-Larson about conservation efforts, and the cynicism of appealing to peoples' self-interest in these matters. It is cold and calculating, but it's also necessary. In fact, it's been a strong through-line in much of my work over the last few months. This poster, inspired by a similar one used a few years ago in the State of Wisconsin, has that strategy in mind, making the point that while raptors may claim a few chickens, they more than pay their way by keeping potentially costly rodent populations down. If you can't hit the heart, aim for the wallet. It's often a larger target.
Illustration of Microraptor and Sinornithosaurus by Emily Willoughby, used with her permission. Click to big it up.
So, when I look at evocative pieces of paleontography like the above Liaoning scene by Emily Willoughby [blog], I have to wonder: even if the asteroid hadn't done the trick, who's to say that previous generations wouldn't have wiped out surviving non-avian dinosaurs by the time our current generations arrived on the planet? Our endless appetite for fictional dinosaur carnage doesn't speak well of their chances, certainly. Maybe it's for the best that so many are gone: it allows us to keep them alive in idealized worlds of our own choosing, safe from our baser instincts. Perhaps these fantasies of lost worlds can help us appreciate our own, and protect the avian dinosaurs with whom we still share the planet.
I find ostriches rather unnerving, and I hope this photo goes some way toward explaining why - apart from being much bigger than the vast majority of birds one is used to, they have diminutive heads perched on the end of ridiculous, pipe-cleaner necks. This isn't actually the most absurd pose that this individual pulled while feeding on some plants just outside its enclosure - at one point the neck pointed straight up at the base, bent almost at a right angle to fit through the fence, then bent up at another (near) right angle, and back once more so that the head was in a more-or-less horizontal position.
Anyway, the point of all this is that Niroot (who was there! He was! And he took the photo!) commented that if ostriches were only known from fossils, and he drew one in that position, he'd be lambasted for drawing the animal in an anatomically impossible pose. And he's probably right!
Of course, freaky as they might be, ostriches are really very cool animals; as the largest extant dinosaurs, they make it easy to envisage their huge, long-lost distant relatives. A point that's often made, perhaps, but true. And if these (mostly) herbivorous theropods are a bit offputting, imagine coming up against one with a huge head full of teeth. Feathered nonavian dinosaurs: if they're not just a bit scary, you're doing it wrong.
On Tuesday, I shared the story of a male turkey vulture with a broken wing whose retrieval I took part in. I talked to Laura from Indiana Raptor Center yesterday, and I'm sorry to say that he had to be euthanized. Unfortunately, the amount of dead tissue in the bone was too great. However, he will have a worthy second life, as he is to be mounted and presented to a local nature center for use in their interpretive programs. He lives in my memory, too. After years of watching these birds as they soared on thermals or congregated around a carcass, I was able to see one up close, to touch it, to watch as it greedily accepted a meal of raw beef. I hope I'm not too sentimental in supposing that I saw some avian form of joy in him as he ripped off pieces of meat, flinging it back and forth and spraying us with the gatorade it had been dipped in. Birdspeed, momentary friend!
Patti cradling the turkey vulture as she places him in a box for a nap.
But I save a bit of news that, while not entirely happy, has a little more sweet than bitter, I think. On Monday, I also got to see a Bald Eagle in the center's flight barn. I had previously been in the barn with Great Horned Owls. This was a totally different experience. Eagles are a LOT louder than owls, and this bird watched me more intently than the owls did. When the center received the eagle, he was in terrible shape, emaciated, with an enlarged heart and liver. Patti and Laura's skills have brought him back to flight-readiness, and though he doesn't have many days ahead of him because of the condition of his liver, he will get to live them in the sunlight, on the shore of whatever nearby lake he chooses. You can't ask for much more than that.
A soon-to-be-released bald eagle in the flight barn.
To have an eagle fly less than four feet away from me and feel the wind off of his wings was a thrill.
One of the most common complaints of the stick-in-the-mud 'I heart the 1990s' crowd regarding fully feathered-up restorations of (predominantly) dromaeosaurs is that they end up resembling some form of oversized, toothy poultry, typically chickens or turkeys. Obviously, this is absurd foremost because there are plenty of birds with better public images to choose from when making such a comparison. On the other hand, it also implies that the person lodging said complaint hasn't been around turkeys recently, because turkeys are awesome. The little brat in Jurassic Park clearly didn't consider that even a literal six foot turkey would be potentially bloody terrifying. Particularly if it had long fingers with huge claws to grab you with.
More than this, turkeys - being very familiar and common domestic birds (I'm referring to Meleagris gallopavo here) - are excellent for education. Tom Holtz wrote a superb guest post for Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings back in 2009, which included a handy diagram illustrating the dinosaurian traits of a turkey's skeleton. In addition, their often quite grotesque and fantastical facial protuberances (which Darren Naish has blogged about before) are a perfect demonstration of how sexual selection can produce some truly bizarre results, and also how a living animal can look very different from what its skeleton might imply. While pointing out how this can be applied to palaeoart is not remotely new (SV-POW did it ages ago, for example, and one can point to a lot of Luis Rey's work), there's no harm in delivering a timely reminder now and then.
Really, though, this whole post was just an excuse to publish photos of some freaky freaky turkeys. And here they are. These specimens are to be found roaming free in Tilgate Park Nature Centre. Enjoy! And try not to picture a man-sized turkey waving its gigantic snood in your face. It'll give you nightmares.
Recently, Niroot (yes! Him again!) went back to Chiang Mai in Thailand and visited the Chiang Mai zoo, where he found the below information board - among others - explaining how birds are dinosaurs.
Admittedly, I can't read most of the text since, well, I don't speak (or read) Thai. So the main text could contain complete nonsense, for all I know. But the diagrams! The wonderful diagrams! I've been to a reasonable number of zoos in my life and have never seen anything quite like this. Another sign even featured some of Matt Martyniuk's restorations of feathered nonavian theropods.
Zoos: more of this, please.
One other thing: if you're thinking that it's been a little quiet around here recently, you're right. David's been very busy with his degree work and I've just been rather short on cash, so unable to get out there and find interesting stuff as much as I'd like. Hopefully things will pick up again soon, though. If nothing else, I have a fantastically geeky day out among some awesomely terrible life-size dinosaurs planned for next weekend, as well as more Vintage Dinosaur Art from the '70s on the way. Stay tuned.
Until then, here's a photo of a cassowary's (Casuarius casuarius) big behind that Niroot took while at the zoo. Cassowaries are perhaps some of the birds that are most evocative of their nonavian theropod relatives, as was explored in the Inside Nature's Giants episode 'The Dinosaur Bird'. Enjoy.
At one of my very favorite blogs, Cold Splinters, Jeffery Thrope recently posted a short memorial to the nature poet John Haines. I hadn't read any of his work, but the poem included in the post struck a strong chord with me. I imagine it will for any of you fellow bird lovers who ever gazed at a passing murder of crows, a nuthatch bounding up a tree trunk, or a heron patiently waiting for a fish and tried to put yourself in the avian mind.
The poem is taken from his 1966 book, Winter News, and as birds are absolutely within the purview of LITC, I felt it was well worth sharing. Enjoy.
"If The Owl Calls Again"
at dusk from the island in the river, and it’s not too cold,
I’ll wait for the moon to rise, then take wing and glide to meet him.
We will not speak, but hooded against the frost soar above the alder flats, searching with tawny eyes.
And then we’ll sit in the shadowy spruce and pick the bones of careless mice,
while the long moon drifts toward Asia and the river mutters in its icy bed.
And when the morning climbs the limbs we’ll part without a sound,
fulfilled, floating homeward as the cold world awakens
The Tawny Eagle, Aquila rapax. Another gem from Dan Ripplinger, from Flickr.
Look at an eagle and know: this bird means business. All birds "mean business," of course. But it's hard not to project human qualities onto this bird. The eyes seem to perfectly project a sense of determination and tenacity. It's such a striking feature that it inspired one of Jim Henson's most memorable creations. Sam the Eagle doesn't need to do anything and you've got a pretty solid idea of what he's like as a character.
David Attenborough's Eagle: The Master of the Sky is one of many nature programs shared by BBCWorldwide's Youtube channel. It's one of his best. A sequence about Bald Eagles in Alaska is a particularly stunning portrayal of their social lives. As the gathered birds snatch dying salmon from a volcanically heated river, they vie with each other for the fish. It's a highly ritualized competition, far removed from the chaos one might think of when imagining predators competing for a kill.
This sequence is just the beginning; it's immediately followed by bits on the Crowned Eagle of Africa, picking monkeys out of trees, and a Golden Eagle in Greece who solves the problem of a tortoise's shell by carrying the poor creature high in the air and dropping it onto the rocks below. Two Black Eagles cooperate to hunt cagey rock hyraxes in Africa. African Fish-eagles harass flamingos until they're too exhausted to escape their talons. To watch the diversity of lifestyles and behaviors the eagles have adapted to as a genus, it's difficult to imagine why anyone would have ever consigned their saurian forbears to lives of bellicose drudgery. No doubt that the time-traveler visiting the Mesozoic would find that many of our most electric ideas about dinosaur behavior pale in comparison to the ways they truly interacted.
If you've been following this blog for a while, it probably won't come as a shock to learn that I collect old magazines that feature dinosaurs. Many antique shops have stacks of vintage magazines, and those covering dinosaurs in some way make up a decent portion of my "to scan" stack.
One of these recent acquisitions was an issue of Discover from March of 1989, featuring a profile of Stephen Czerkas by long-time dinosaur writer Don Lessem, roughly coinciding with the publication of Czerkas's book, My Life with Dinosaurs. Czerkas was an up-and-coming dinosaur researcher and sculptor who had done creature design on the 1978 B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs. Lessem's article focused on Czerkas as a paleontology outsider, one of those researchers who has knowledge, but not the degrees to show for it.
Plenty of paleontologists arrive at their profession by unconventional routes within or without of academia, and have made valuable contributions to the science. As in any field of study, those scientists have an uphill battle and face greater scrutiny - and occasionally bias - when presenting their ideas to their peers.
Preceding the article is the above photo of Czerkas in his workshop. It's striking just how similar these Deinonychus models are to what, just a few years later, would be called Velociraptor in Jurassic Park (a subject Brian Switek touches on today at Dinosaur Tracking). The movie wasn't even in production yet, and I can't find any connection between Czerkas' work and that of Stan Winston Studios, who created the movie's villains. But as Czerkas is not listed as a consultant on the movie, this may be a simple case of convergent evolution.
Reading this article in 2011, it's impossible not to view it through glasses stained by the "Archaeoraptor" fiasco of a decade ago. Czerkas's place in the history of paleontology will forever be connected with the controversy; google his name and you'll turn up droves of creationist blogs and websites that attempt to discredit evolutionary theory with "Archaeoraptor," the faked "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds.
Czerkas and his wife, Sylvia, bought "Archaeoraptor" for their Dinosaur Museum in Blanding, UT, promoting it to National Geographic, who had an exclusive story planned about its impact on our understanding of bird evolution. The problem was, the fossil was a mashup, eventually revealed to have been composed of Yanornis, Microraptor, and another critter. What makes the Czerkases' championing of the fossil infuriating rather than sad was that they didn't listen to Phil Currie and Tim Rowe's concerns about its legitimacy. Apparently blinded by the coming glory, they pushed on. The story was published. The fossil was analyzed further. It was discredited, and Czerkas ended up apologizing for his "idiot, bone-stupid mistake."
"Archaeoraptor" was an avoidable controversy, and one of its most annoying consequences was that it offered another arrow for the creationist quiver. It's a flimsy arrow, as all of their arrows are. The problem is the size of the quiver and the amount of time it takes to demonstrate the weakness of their many arguments. That "Archaeoraptor" is used at all baffles me. It's a clear indication that many creationists simply don't care about the rules of logic. "Archaeoraptor" was embarrassing for the paleontological community. For a minute. Once other scientists took a good look at it, it became a victory which shows why science is such a powerful tool for understanding our world: it has built-in mechanisms to remove bias and to correct mistakes. Want to poke fun at "arrogant evolutionists" for a mistake? Fine. I understand schadenfreude. It's fun. But it seems counterproductive to slam a group of people for their human fallibility when your own faction happens to be populated by fallible humans, too. That's the kind of thing that comes back to bite you on the proverbial rear end.
"Archaeoraptor" also serves as a lesson in the dangers of the black market fossil trade. In a 2002 article about "Archaeoraptor," paleontologist Kevin Padian explained to National Geographic how the tragic tale started, and it's such a perfect summation of the thorny issue, it deserves to be quoted at length here.
"The lesson in this should be the importance of conserving fossils and protecting them," said Padian. "Chinese villagers who found the specimen don't make a lot of money, and they don't know what these animals look like. There was no hoax. These are poor people trying to make a little extra money by selling fossils on the black market."
It's illegal to export fossils out of China, but a thriving black market exists, driven by poverty, powered by bribery, and feeding a seemingly inexhaustible desire for fossils among hobbyists.
Huge quantities of fossils are illegally excavated and smuggled out each year. And no wonder; the Archaeoraptor fossil sold in the United States for $80,000.
This is an internationally important region," said Padian. "The workers there are very poor; if they were better rewarded for working with scientists there would be no need to enhance the fossils, or for a black market at all. The international community needs to take steps to protect these fossils."
Looking back on Lessem's article twenty-odd years later, Czerkas's career has unfortunately done little to raise the general respectability of non-credentialed paleontologists. Oddly enough, even though "Archaeoraptor" never became the crown jewel in his museum and was a source of great embarrassment, it is featured prominently in Cerkas's anti-BAD* essay at the museum's site [PDF]. It lays out his view, which holds that dromaeosaurs aren't dinosaurs at all, and the fact that the opposite is the consensus is a figment dreamt up by cladists.
I suppose I should close on a happier note, though. Czerkas may not have been involved with Jurassic Park, but he has stamped his name on celluloid history. The early 80's Harryhausen-esque B-movie Planet of Dinosaurs included his model work. Here's a sample of it.
A week ago Monday, Michael Barton of Dispersal of Darwin reviewed Switek's Written in Stone, and with the review he shared a clip of a program called Paleoworld. It aired on The Learning Channel in the US in the mid-nineties (apparently it airs on the Science Channel now). I have to share it here. It's classic Robert Bakker.
I love Bakker's Thanksgiving table mini-lecture, but what really grabbed me when I watched this was seeing that gorgeous cassowary at the very beginning. That's a dinosaur. Straight, no chaser. A living, breathing dinosaur. Look into those eyes. Lovely. I want one for my yard.
Here's another great video, this one of an unexpected meeting with a cassowary. I love the way bird and human are sizing each other up. Given the cassowary's reputation as a dangerous bird (perfectly suited to one of Velociraptor's closest living relatives), the man's wariness is warranted.
That head adornment is called a casque, and besides being a display feature, the cassowary uses it as a tool to clear the ground as they forage for food. Well before birds' theropod origin was scientific consensus, Barnum Brown named Corythosaurus casuarius for it, one of the crested duckbills. Decades later, C. casuarius was one of the lambeosaurs whose ontogeny was studied by Peter Dodson. He used the cassowary as "an analogy" for the lambeosaurs of Alberta's Oldman formation, an example of an extant animal that goes through the same kind of radical changes in skull structure in adolescence. Jack Horner then cited Dodson in his and Goodwin's paper lumping Dracorex and Stygimoloch with Pachycephalosaurus (not everyone agrees that the change they propose are analogous to how cassowary skulls develop, though; the Horner and Goodwin Pachycephalosaurus grows and resorbs bone while the cassowary simply grows it, albeit quickly and dramatically).
Though it's a ratite, one of the big, ground-dwelling birds who aren't necessarily acclaimed for their songs, the vocalizations of cassowaries are of special interest; they have been found to employ very low-frequency sounds, at the lower limit of human hearing, for communication.
The cassowary gives me goosebumps (pardon the pun) when I see it; there's no other that reminds me so strongly of a dinosaur. I know it's a silly sensation, more grounded in emotion than reason, but I willingly submit to it. I think that humans need those emotional queues to give the pursuits of science meaning beyond truth, to create those strange feelings of connectivity with the rest of nature that have so entranced us for our history as a sentient species. That's a bit of me waxing Scott Sampsonish.
Yes, I've already declared my love for Meleagris gallopavo here. But in the USA, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which is also known as "Turkey Day," so it's only fitting that I do so again. It is, as far as I know, the closest we come to a day honoring a bird. Heck, it's the closest we come to honoring any specific organism at all, with the exception of grandparents' day, mother's day and their ilk, which authorities agree are a bunch of bullshit Hallmark holidays. Not so for Turkey Day, which has a proper parade, special decorations, and traditional feast.
I used to think that Benjamin Franklin's endorsement of the turkey as the USA's national bird over the bald eagle was more legend than truth, but this is not the case. Indeed, he put it in writing.
...the turkey is in comparison a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America. Eagles have been found in all countries, but the turkey was peculiar to ours; the first of the species seen in Europe being brought to France by the Jesuits from Canada, and served up at the wedding table of Charles the Ninth. He is, besides (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that), a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his farm-yard with a red coat on.
I agree. I mean, look at this face. What's not to love?
The turkey also played a larger role in the progress of technology than the bald eagle ever did, for Franklin's favorite bird was also one of his test subjects. To wit, letter from one of his colleagues to the Royal Society, excerpted from his Life and Writings:
He made first several experiments on fowls, and found, that two large thin glass jars gilt, holding each about six gallons, were sufficient, when fully charged, to kill common hens outright; but the turkeys, though thrown into violent convulsions, and then lying as dead for some minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an hour. However, having added three other such to the former two, though not fully charged, he killed a turkey of about ten pounds weight, and believes that they would have killed a much larger. He conceited, as himself says, that the birds killed in this manner eat uncommonly tender.
So, for an "uncommonly tender" bird, skip the foolhardy deep-frying rig you've set up and electrocute it yourself.
Finally, here's a Norman Rockwell painting I photoshopped last year. Figured I'd roll it out again.
I'll probably always associate the varied whistles, chirps, burbles, and especially the somewhat harsh "chick-a-dee-dee-dee" call of the Black-capped Chickadee with my current backyard: there's something about it that pairs perfectly with the white pines that loom over the other trees around the perimeter. While it's been one of my favorite birds since I was a kid with an old field guide and a few bird feeders, it's this setting that seems to be the small songbird's perfect stage.
Theropods just don't get much cuter than this. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site lists some pretty incredible facts about this common visitor to bird feeders, especially regarding their cunning little brains. Take this one:
The Black-capped Chickadee hides seeds and other food items to eat later. Each item is placed in a different spot and the chickadee can remember thousands of hiding places.
Or this one:
Every autumn Black-capped Chickadees allow brain neurons containing old information to die, replacing them with new neurons so they can adapt to changes in their social flocks and environment even with their tiny brains.
Photo by Kevin Morrison, via flickr. This bird stopped on a cruise ship while migrating over the Gulf of Mexico.
One day four or five years ago, my wife and I were doing one of our occasional landscaping projects on the meager scrap of land which was ours to work as condominium owners. It was an all-day project - building a small walkway of limestone that would make walking along the slope into the sinkhole behind the condo easier. As I built the retaining wall that held it up, a small gray songbird made a circuit between the roof of the condo, a small maple tree in the common area adjacent to the building, and spots unseen. Every so often it would stop at the roof, fly to the maple tree, sing or call, and fly away. I'd never seen it before, but I was surprised by how much it sounded like a Mockingbird, another bird I got to know since moving to southern Indiana. Its other call, a feline-sounding mew, helped me identify it as a Gray Catbird. While its range covers my hometown in northwest Indiana, I never saw one until moving south.
Since then, it's become my favorite local bird. The house we bought two years ago is blessed with a sheltered backyard bordered by silver and sugar maple, pine, sassafras, mulberry, dogwood, redbud, a hemlock, and a redcedar, making for a perfect hangout for catbirds, which have an affinity for mixed growth areas. A mimid like the mockingbird and the Brown Thrasher, the catbird is a gregarious visitor. Its coloration is beautiful in its simplicity: slate gray with a black cap and rufous bit under the tail.
If you're wondering just how canny its call's resemblance to a feline could be, close your eyes after clicking play on the video below.
I've been meaning to feature birds more often here - as they are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs - and I've decided to start a new series called Extant Theropod Appreciation. First up: one of my favorites, Cathartes aura. The Turkey Vulture.
Vultures get a bad rap. If I mention that I've paused in my travels to watch a couple of them eat a possum that lost a fight with the Michelin man, I get an odd look. If I express my favorable attitude to one taking up residence in my yard, I receive a shifty glance. They're gnarly, ugly, cowardly eaters of stinky carcasses, after all. Think of how they're portrayed in the media. In westerns, they're harbingers of doom, hanging back and waiting for the hero to slough off the burden of life so they can pick the flesh from his bones. In Looney Tunes cartoons, they're just dopey (and erroneously saddled with the name buzzard).
Photo by Mike Baird, via Flickr.
For me, there are few nobler winged beasts. They provide a vital service, ridding the environment of dead flesh, limiting the spread of disease. And for that task, they are finely honed: heads free of feathers that would get funky when shoved into the guts of bloated carrion; a keen sense of smell; a soaring flight that conserves energy while looking for a meal; and strongly acidic urine used to cool the legs and kill bacteria on them. Sure, you can list any animal's adaptations and hold them up as evidence of its virtue. But in the case of the Turkey Vulture, they also demonstrate that it's not merely "settling" for a diminished profession in comparison to the eagles and hawks we celebrate so often. Vultures are perfectly specialized for their role.
Birds have been a popular photographic subject forever, so they are predictably well-represented at Flickr. Some of my favorite photos are those at Dan's Photo Art. I was thinking over the weekend that I don't feature enough birds here. When this photo popped up in my contacts feed, the situation was immediately rectified. Browsing through Dan's photostream, it's tempting to click the "fave" button over, and over, and over... but that defeats the purpose of such a thing.
The clarity of his images floors me. He must have preternatural patience, and possibly a bit of good luck.
This morning, I had the rare treat of simultaneously hosting both a Hairy and a Downy Woodpecker at my suet block. As Hairy took her time and ate her fill, smaller Downy fidgeted in a nearby dogwood tree, occasionally chirping impatiently, occasionally fluttering toward the suet only to think better of it and return to her perch. It was adorable.
This was a perfect opportunity to finally compare these two woodpeckers, side by side. I grabbed my trusty Sibley Field Guide to finally settle this pressing matter. See, they look almost identical, save for a few crucial details.
Downy Woodpecker by Peggy Collins, via flickr
Hairy Woodpecker by Geoff Patterson via flickr
The big difference is that the Hairy is larger - not evident in the photos, unfortunately - with a more robust beak and plain white feathers under the tail. The Downy has a thicker tuft of white feathers on top of the beak, and the feathers under the tail have black spots. The above birds are both females; males of both species have a red band on the back of the head. Not being an expert birder by any means, I used to just call any black and white speckled woodpecker I saw flying around a Downy and be done with it. Seeing both in close proximity was a huge help. It made my morning!
So let's pretend that I live near a volcano, and today it erupts, burying these woodpeckers, me, and everything else in my yard. Fast forward ten million years or so. Incredibly, there are still paleontologists around, and they dig up these woodpeckers. Considering how similar the birds are, would the future paleontologists ascribe them to different species? Would they instead be thought to represent natural size variation or different ontological* stages within the same species?
With fully preserved skeletons, a skilled paleontologist could probably deduce that they are different species, at the very least based on the beak. I can only assume that the post-cranial skeleton is similar enough that if the head was missing, it would create quite a challenge. I could certainly see it being debated.
The funny thing is that based on recent genetic sequencing, it appears that the Downy and Hairy woodpeckers, both now placed in the Picoides genus, may need to be placed in separate genera. I had planned on summing up their relationship by noting that they share a recent common ancestor, but based on the distinct selective pressures placed on to separate populations, the lineages leading to Downy and Hairy woodpeckers split. When I did a bit of research, it turned out not to be quite so simple. Their ancestor is more distant than I'd assumed.
It's one of the consequences of technology. We now have to tools to study organisms at a deeper level than outward features, and science cannot ignore new information. It's less of an issue with living species: they have common names unrelated to the latin binomial. When we see chimpanzees we call them "chimpanzees," not Pan troglodytes. Unless we're unsufferable nerds, of course. But when the same thing happens to genera of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures, it's a bigger problem. Thus, Brontosaurus is learned to be a false genus based on a skull being placed on the wrong body. The world still isn't used to Apatosaurus.
*Ontogeny = the way an organism changes from birth to adulthood.
While rifling through the Skeptics Guide to the Universe archive, I ran across one of their 5 x 5 podcasts dealing with the dinosaur-bird link. The episode briefly summarizes the study which analyzed the amino acid sequence in collagen found in a T. rex femur and found similarities to that of chickens.
The SGU does cover dinosaur news pretty often, owing to the fact that dinosaurs are really cool and deserve of the attention. This episode contains one of my favorite SGU quotes yet. The show as a mild running feud among the hosts about which are badder, birds or monkeys. To avoid the appearance that the bird-dinosaur link might tip the scales in birds' favor, Rebecca Watson clarifies that it "...just means that some distant cousins of birds might have, at one time, been able to kick a monkey's butt."
Good quote, but I have to disagree. She's obviously never had to look one of these gnarly dudes in the eye. Image by Malnino, via Flickr.
It's a Phillipine, or "Monkey-Eating" Eagle. Birds win, end of discussion.
UPDATED 2/10/10: Still working my way up through old SGU episodes, and came across number 53. Indeed, a listener has brought the Monkey-Eating Eagle to the attention of Rebecca and the late Perry deAngelis. Typical of birdists, they reject it out of hand. Disgusting.
Just ran across a cool gallery at New Scientist called Monsters of the Skies, running down some of the giant avian theropods and pterosaurs of antiquity. Featured are Haast's Huge Eagles from New Zealand's golden days as a haven of avian megafauna, Cessna-sized Argentavis magnificens from Miocene Argentina, and the magnificent Azdarchid pterosaurs. And my reasoning for this post is betrayed: it's an excuse to feature another Mark Witton pterosaur illustration. This time, it's the iconic azhdarchid Quetzalcoatlusnothropi, caught in the act of raiding a tyrannosaur nest. For the sake clarity, those are indeed baby tyrannosaurs - azdarchids were huge, but not that huge.
Illustration by Mark Witton, via flickr
I might be laying it on a bit thick with all of this "avian theropod" and "extant avian dinosaur" business. From now on, I'll stick with the perfectly acceptable and beloved word "bird." But I'm also going to officially remove the Cretaceous barrier when discussing them. If a particularly charming titmouse ends up in my viewfinder whilst dining at my suet block, well, I'm not going to worry about justifying posting the photo here at LITC. I'm happy with this decision. It feels, in the words of Larry David, "pretty, pretty, pretty good."
