Two Gulls and a Gull

Two Herring Gulls and a Great Black-backed Gull on the shore of the Raritan River yesterday afternoon.

When I posted a link to the photo on Twitter  last night, a follower commented that the water looks terrible. The river does have some pollution problems, and the visual perception probably is not helped by the plastic hose partially submerged in the water. There are a couple of other factors at play, though. One is that the river is at or near low tide, and it often looks and smells worse at that point in the day. We also have just had two days of rain, so the river includes a lot of runoff – both road runoff and eroded sediments. I am not sure that the river in this stretch is ever really clear, but sometimes it looks dirtier than others.

Loose Feathers #263

Parasitic Jaeger / Photo by Art Sowls (USFWS)

Birds and birding news

• As the Arctic warms from climate change, Polar Bears may be able to survive by preying on a new food source, Snow Goose eggs. Such predation is unlikely to threaten the Snow Goose population since their breeding season only partially overlaps the period when polar bears are onshore raiding nests.
• Birds hit powerlines because of blind spots in their vision; when they look down for other birds or feeding areas, they cannot see what is straight in front of them.
• This is the season for spotting jaegers if you watch birds along major bodies of water such as the oceans or the Great Lakes.
• About 60 migrating songbirds crashed into storefront windows in Rehoboth Beach, DE, during a large nocturnal migration flight last Friday.
• Farmland birds with larger brains seem to be less vulnerable to ecological change.
• Three captive-bred California Condors were released into the wild in Arizona and California.
• Kingfisher numbers in the U.K. are rising thanks to better water quality in the country's streams and canals.
• Birders in Manitoba are conducting field research for an upcoming breeding bird atlas.

Birds in the blogosphere

• The Drinking Bird: A Pacific Wren dilemma
• The Birdchaser: Why I Love Audubon (and Audubon and Birds?)
• The Birder's Library: Birds of Cape May
• Not Exactly Rocket Science: The bird that cries hawk: fork-tailed drongos rob meerkats with false alarms
• NYT City Room: A Star at the Public Library: A Little Yellow Bird
• brewster’s linnet: Harry Hits the Press

Oil Spill

• National Geographic has a video on citizen science efforts to track birds in the area affected by the BP spill.
• The federal government enrolled 470,000 acres of farmland for habitat conversion to attract migratory shorebirds and waterfowl away from the Gulf of Mexico. The fields are flooded so that birds may use them as temporary wetlands.
• Beyond the threat posed by lingering oil, birds migrating over the Gulf at night can be disoriented by the bright lights on oil platforms, much like birds flying through cities can be disoriented by skyscrapers. The U.S. Minerals Management Service has failed to push oil companies to install safer lighting, even though its own study discovered the threat.
• Louisiana has decided to stop the sand berm project and convert the existing berms into barrier islands.
• Many Gulf residents continue to distrust the evaluations of industry and government scientists about the safety of the Gulf's waters.

Environment and biodiversity

• Narwhals tagged with sensors are collecting ocean temperature data in Baffin Bay off western Greenland.
• This week's U.S. election brought a lot of climate change deniers into the House and Senate, or promoted existing ones into positions of greater influence. This threatens the chances for green energy legislation and other environmental goals.
• A Malaysian court fined and jailed a man for illegally trafficking boa constrictors and other wild animals.
• The National Park Service is trying to encourage more minorities to take advantage of the country's national parks. Wilderness parks like Yosemite attract particularly low numbers of minorities, especially blacks.
• Shortly before California voters reaffirmed the state's climate change law, the state released a draft of regulations for how it will implement the law.
• Shade trees may discourage some criminal behavior by making a neighborhood look better maintained.
• Mother Jones evaluates whether it is better to turn a computer off or put it to sleep. It saves more energy to turn a computer off, but the energy savings are minimal for contemporary laptops.

Carnivals

• Berry Go Round #33
• Carnival of the Blue #42
• Circus of the Spineless #56
• Festival of the Trees #53
• Carnival of Evolution #29

Smoke in the Sky

Yesterday was a gorgeous fall day – sunny and clear, with crisp air that was not too cold. So I took another walk through my local park in the late afternoon. I did not see the weird ducks I mentioned in another post, but I did see a nice selection of other birds. A late season Osprey flew upstream along the river. Several species of sparrows were around. In one small patch of vegetation, I saw a few Song Sparrows, several Savannah Sparrows, and two Swamp Sparrows, along with a small flock of Yellow-rumped Warblers and a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Other birds included a Red-tailed Hawk being harassed by a Northern Mockingbird.

What struck me, though was a large plume of smoke rising near the Raritan River. At first I thought it was just a dark cloud, but the way it rose steadily in relation to the other clouds made it obvious that it was smoke. Apparently it was coming from a brush fire in Edison. You can see photos of the blaze here. I am not sure how much damage it did or whether it was extinguished, but fire crews were working on it.

Bad Use for a Beer Can

Someone in the San Francisco Bay Area has apparently been capturing gulls and putting beer can collars around their necks. As you might expect, this is cruel to the gulls and violates federal law. If you live in the Bay Area and see one of the gulls, let the International Bird Rescue and Research Center know by calling (707) 207-0380 Ext. 110 or emailing no_cal_center@ibrrc.org.

Marine Animals and Toxic Chemicals from the BP Spill

A new report based on data collected during BP's oil spill shows that high concentrations of toxic chemicals spread deep into the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon's explosion.

The chemicals, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAHs, can kill animals right away in high enough concentrations and can cause cancer over time.

"From the time that these observations were made, there was an extensive release of additional oil and dispersants at the site. Therefore, the effects on the deep sea ecosystem may be considerably more severe than supported by the observations reported here," the researchers wrote in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

How persistent they are (and will be) is still uncertain.

The initial tests showed they were at high levels very deep under the water, the report shows.

"Based on our findings, subsurface exposure to PAH resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil release was likely to be associated with acute toxicity effects in discrete depth layers between 1,000 and 1,400 meters in the region southwest of the wellhead site and extending at least as far as 13 km," the research team wrote.

PAHs include a group of compounds, and different types were at different depths, they said.

It is possible they dissipate quickly, but no one has yet showed this, they added.

"Our findings suggest that toxicity effects of the subsurface PAH compounds could have extended at least as far as 13 km from the wellhead site," the researchers said.

In September a team at Oregon State University said they found alarming levels of PAHs in the region, 40 times higher than before the area was affected by the oil spill.

New information about the effects of the spill continues to come out, and as long as it does, I will continue posting it here.

Weird Ducks (Mostly Mallards)

Late fall brings the welcome return of some large groups of birds like raptors, sparrows, and waterfowl. Large and colorful birds like waterfowl are usually easy to identify. From time to time, though, a duck or goose shows up that does not look exactly like the birds in the field guides. Take the duck on the right in the image above. I recognized this one right away, partly from experience and partly because it is one of the few waterfowl hybrids pictured in the large Sibley guide. This is a hybrid of a Mallard and an American Black Duck, possibly the same one that has been present in my local park for the past few winters. This bird has a green crescent on its head and the tail and back of a male Mallard, but otherwise the dark, cold tones of its plumage resembles an American Black Duck. The female Mallard alongside the hybrid seems to be its mate, as the two kept close to each other while moving around in the river.

Another weird duck is this white duck. The structure and what exists of a plumage pattern reveals that it has Mallard ancestry. I am not sure, though, how it got in its current form. It could be a leucistic wild Mallard, that is, a bird lacking sufficient pigment to color most of its feathers. The other possibility is that it is a domestic Mallard breed, or perhaps the result of a domestic Mallard breeding with a wild one. I lean somewhat towards the latter since there are so many exotic ducks in our local avifauna, but I could see a case for leucism as well. There are two more photos of the bird below.

Whatever the explanation for its appearance, it is a good reminder that common birds can be interesting, too!

A Peregrine's (Nocturnal?) Diet

Naturalists in the U.K. have been collecting feathers and other bird parts from a Peregrine Falcon nest box to monitor what sorts of prey items they catch. One of the biologists described some surprising finds to the BBC:

By studying the diet of the Bath peregrines I have discovered that they not only feed on the ubiquitous feral pigeon and common garden birds - they also consume more unusual birds that you wouldn't see in the city.

There was evidence of our smallest, dainty duck - a teal - and the lapwing, more associated with ploughed fields.

I then began to find prey remains of birds that are very difficult to spot in the Bath region or don't normally occur here.

Secretive water birds such as water rails, spotted crakes, little grebes and shy woodland wading birds such as woodcock were all appearing in the diet.

The one thing they all had in common was that they migrate at night, travelling hundreds of miles west from mainland Europe.

I was able to confirm the peregrines were behaving like owls, catching birds as they flew over Bath at night.

The street lamps in Bath light up the migrating birds as they fly overhead.

I have watched a Peregrine hunting things in floodlights, so I am not all that surprised that others would do it. At the time, though, I assumed that it was catching bats or nighthawks. Nocturnal migratory birds had not occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense. One thing I wonder if whether this behavior is something that Peregrines do naturally (e.g., hunting by moonlight or the sounds of flight calls) or whether it is something they learned over the past century.

Or maybe Peregrines are just better at finding rare birds than birders. That pair must have quite a life list!