We drove about an hour north of the Twin Cities to get a better view of the Aurora “light show”, but unfortunately, it was a cloudy overcast night and the colors never developed. So this is the best view I saw until we left at midnight. The colors were far better the night before — darn!
Even the crescent moon was cloudy and opaque. Better luck next time…
Spring wildflowers are profuse and brilliant in Northern California right now, and we enjoyed a short hike in the Berkeley hills (above the UC-Berkeley campus) on a exceptionally clear day.
We took a recently reconstructed trail down the hillside through Derby Canyon. Volunteer groups (Take to the Hills and Berkeley Path Wanderer’s Association) have rebuilt the trail and added steps for easier walking downhill. Volunteers have been curating the flora by removing invasive plants and adding natives to the hillsides of Derby Canyon since 2015. The result is a diverse mix of bright wildflowers, dominated, of course, by the poppies.
What a fine day for a walk in the Berkeley hills!
I am originally from California, but I had never heard of them until recently, and yet they are (or were) omnipresent in the range/grasslands throughout the Central Valley of California. What are they? Well, we learned all about them on our field trip to the Merced Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve at the University of California-Merced, thanks to Chris Swarth, former Director of the Reserve.
Vernal pools are unique, ephemeral ecosystems that develop in the spring where winter rains puddle in grass and range lands that have a hard clay pan impermeable to water drainage below the soil surface. Pools can range in size from several feet to several acres, and in depth from several inches to a foot or more.
As the water evaporates from the pool, a unique ecosystem blooms (literally) and develops with a complex food web of protozoans, diverse species of invertebrates, and plants that draws amphibians, birds, and mammals to it until it dries up in mid-summer, and becomes quiescent and dormant until the next winter rains.
Vernal pools can actually thrive in a rangeland where cattle walk through them, creating little microcosms of deeper mini-pools within the larger pool. There, small communities of pool fauna and flora can flourish longer before drying out. However, estimates of 50-80 % of historic vernal pool habitat has been lost when rangeland has been converted to agriculture.
I’m told that rangelands are so extensive in this particular part of the Central Valley of California (near Merced) that it’s possible to ride/walk through them from the area in this photo to Yosemite Park whose snowy mountain tops you can just barely see in the distance! It’s refreshing to be in the middle of such a tranquil landscape of waving grasses as far as one can see.
We’re on a quick trip to California to celebrate a milestone birthday, and had to check out the birds at the Batiquitos Lagoon in Carlsbad, southern CA while we were in that area. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon with lots of songsters in the bushes to photograph. There were flowers and trail walkers everywhere, and the birds didn’t mind us pointing cameras at them.
And in the category of how birds tease bird photographers…
It’s easy to be cynical about the multitude of challenges to sustaining life on earth, but there are promising steps toward meeting some of those challenges, and today is a good day to think about them. I posted some of the blog below back in 2016, but the message is even more important today, on Earth Day 2024, when we should stop and reflect on how we impact our world.
Things we worry about — illustrated by photos from past blog postings
Warming climate, rising sea levels, and disappearing coastlines directly threaten human habitation, as well as that of wildlife in those areas.
Violent weather: tornadoes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms with high winds threaten people and wildlife.
Lack of winter snowpack reduces the spring/summer water flow in rivers necessary for grassland and desert plants and wildlife to prosper.
Changes in rainfall and river flow impact fish and invertebrate populations and the wildlife dependent on them.
Rising average air temperatures make the local climate unsuitable for plants (and animals). For example, the Cape Floral Kingdom at the tip of South Africa is doomed if temperatures rise much because there is no more southerly retreat for them.
Rising ocean temperatures, coupled with increased acidity of ocean water due to higher CO2 content threaten invertebrates, such as coral. Coral bleaching (due to the loss of their symbiotic algae) has increased dramatically in reefs all over the world in the last decade.
Habitat loss, as more acreage is converted to farmland, impacts wildlife and native plants, resulting in local extinctions.
Changes in weather patterns affect crop harvest and food production.
The consequences of our actions threaten all life on earth if they are not corrected. In my lifetime I have seen the corrections being made, albeit perhaps too slowly: recycling materials, conserving water, “green energy” technology to reduce carbon dioxide release, reducing chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers, etc. released to the environment, reducing air pollution (I grew up in the smog-filled Los Angeles basin in the 1950’s when it was really hard to breathe in the summer).
We don’t have to wait for technology and policy to solve our environmental problems. Not just today on Earth Day, but every day, let’s think about the global consequences of our local actions so we can be a part of the solution to these challenges.
It’s available on Amazon today! Leo’s Great Adventure: A Golden Bamboo Lemur Tale. Yes, it’s another Lemur story set in Madagascar, but the storyline is quite different from the previous tale of Luna, the Mouse Lemur. [You can click on the links to go directly to the Amazon site to order the book(s).]
One of the most fascinating things I heard about when we visited Madagascar was that Bamboo Lemurs really do eat mostly bamboo. In fact, two lemur species eat the highly toxic giant bamboo which has the highest cyanide content of any bamboo. Those two lemur species consume an amount daily that would kill a human. In addition, one of the most beautiful forests we visited, Ranomafana National Park, was the perfect setting for a story about Bamboo Lemurs because they were the reason that the park was created in 1991.
As I mentioned in my previous post about the Luna book, I would like to write a series of children’s books about endangered animals and places to raise awareness of their fragile existence in our world today with the hope that younger readers will be inspired to contribute to conservation efforts in the future. My royalties from book sales will be donated to conservation research in Madagascar, specifically at this time to the Lemur Center at Duke University.
I hope you’ll like this fanciful tale and read it to your kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, etc. Here’s a small sampler of the wonderful illustrations created with ChatGPT’s AI art platform DALL-E (from OpenAI). My daughter Alison generated the images from precise written descriptions of the animal, the situation being described in the story, and the background where it took place. She’s a wizard at this stuff! The book was put together using Canva, a program with a library of clip art and image editing tools to blend art and text.
I hope you will write a comment and tell me how the kids liked the book. Thanks in advance for your interest!
The Rio Grande is the fourth-longest river in North America and runs almost 1900 miles from its origin in south-central Colorado through the cities of Albuquerque and El Paso across the Chihuahuan desert in northern and central Texas to its mouth near Brownsville, Texas, where it flows (or not) into the Gulf of Mexico. I visited that area near South Padre Island in January 2017, and was amazed at how little water there was in the “grand river”.
Since the mid-20th century, only about 20% of the Rio Grande water reaches the Gulf of Mexico and in some years (e.g., 2000), no water flows to the Gulf at all. This is largely a result of water taken out for irrigation of farmland in Colorado and Texas and water supplied to large cities along its route, along with climate changes in the amount of precipitation.
But in traveling through the arid landscape of the Chihuahuan desert in Texas in mid-winter this year, we were still able to see what the historic power of this river had carved along some of its routes in Big Bend National and State Parks.
With so little water in the river and in such a drought-prone landscape, you might expect there would be little wildlife. However, Audubon’s bird inventories of the park show that more than 150 bird species spend the winter in some parts of the park. Much to our surprise, we saw at least one Roadrunner a day, (and an amazing seven of them one day) along with many other brilliantly-colored and new birds for the trip.
Literally, Oh! Chihuahua!, as in to be impressed, or terrified, or surprised by the amazing expanse and diversity of North America’s largest desert. The expression probably originated with early Spanish explorers who were cautioning others to beware of the Chihuahuan desert area and the Apaches that lived there.
The Chihuahuan desert is indeed a great expanse, extending 900 miles from Albuquerque to just north of Mexico City. It also consists of a great variety of different land formations in typical basin and range topography: broad desert valleys (basins) bordered by mesas and mountains (ranges). Medium elevation of 1000-6000 feet keeps both summer and winter days cooler than one would expect in a desert climate. Summer rains from the Gulf of Mexico monsoons provide some moisture.
As a result of this climatic diversity, the Chihuahuan desert has a remarkable diversity of plants and animals. For example, more than 20 species of mammals can be found throughout the Chihuahuan desert area: mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, coyote, grey fox, even wolves, in addition to jaguar, puma, bobcat, javelina, bison, skunk, coati, jackrabbits, and many species of small rodents. Driving through the area in the dead of winter, you wonder how there could possibly be that much diversity, but the landscape will change dramatically when the rains come.
We were not lucky enough to see all the mammalian diversity that inhabits this desert area, but here’s what we could perhaps expect to see on another visit.
Several other large mammals used to be present in the Chihuahuan desert but were extirpated in the U.S. when large ranches were established in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in the 1900s. Jaguars, pumas, bobcats, even a smaller version of the gray wolf, called the Mexican Wolf, were originally part of the Chihuahuan fauna. Imagine being able to see these animals there today.
Like cougars, wolves in North America are wide-ranging animals, that have spread from Asia into a variety of environments in the U.S. and Canada and become somewhat specialized to live there. Mexican wolves filled the top canid carnivore role in the Chihuahuan desert but were hunted to extinction in the U.S. Several of them were captured in Mexico in the 1970s and sent to the U.S. to start a captive breeding program. Generations later, their descendants have been reintroduced in parts of Arizona and New Mexico, and their numbers have slowly been increasing. Some were even sent back to Mexico because the population of wolves there had become very rare. However, there are less than 400 of them in the wild today.
One important feature of the Chihuahuan desert area to note is that it spans two countries, between which, historically, wildlife moved freely. At least this was true before there was a huge barrier erected between the two countries. The Wall does more than limit human movement. It prohibits the exchange of wildlife (and thus gene flow) necessary to sustain vibrant communities in both places, and it limits animals from moving north toward cooler climates in an era of record-setting heat waves year after year.
How will this 700+ mile long structure impact wildlife in the Chihuahuan desert? Time will tell.
Birds are capable of some amazing feats of flying and have become excellent models for the design of aircraft. Most birds that can “hang” or remain stationary in air accomplish this by flying into the wind with their wings adjusted to achieve maximum lift and flapping, if necessary, to remain in the same position relative to the ground. This is called “windhovering”. You may have seen examples of this behavior in Kestrels, Ospreys, Northern Harriers, or Caspian Terns that use this strategy to “hover” in place while keeping their heads motionless and searching for prey below them.
The video below illustrates the way birds, a Kestrel, in this case, maintain their position in the air column while keeping their heads completely still. Here, the oncoming wind is sufficient to provide lift so the bird moves its wings very little. When wind speed decreases, the birds must start flapping to stay aloft.
It was interesting to watch several Mexican Jays try to hover in still air as they tried to grab suet from a feeder designed for small birds and woodpeckers. The Jays could hover briefly next to the feeder using a combination of powerful wing strokes, as illustrated in the slideshow below. The sequence starts at slide 1 (the number of the slide is in the lower right corner) and ends at slide 23. My camera was set for 10 frames per second, so this sequence represents a little more than 2 seconds of “hovering” by the jays.
I haven’t seen Blue Jays try this on the suet feeders in my backyard. But if Mexican Jays can do this, Blue Jays should be able to also.
We spent some time hiking in Ramsey Canyon, a Nature Conservancy preserve in southern Arizona near the city of Sierra Vista. This preserve is a unique and interesting place because it is located at the intersection of Sonoran and Chihuahan deserts and the junction of the Rocky Mountains with the Sierra Madre of Mexico. As a result, the preserve has representatives of all of these communities in one place.
The canyon is an elongate creek bed lined with shady sycamores, oaks, and maples and steep hillsides lined with pines, cacti, and yucca. And it has the added attraction of a very nice bed and breakfast right next door to the preserve.
A delightful place to visit, and to support the work of The Nature Conservancy: “Together, we find a way” to preserve our world.
Back Yard Biology 