We spent a couple of hours hiking on the Fish Lake Nature Trail in East Bethel, which is part of the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Reserve maintained by the University of Minnesota. We enjoyed seeing a flurry of late afternoon activity among the avian migrants and residents, although most of the birds were high in the well leafed-out trees.
A beautiful afternoon for a bird walk during perfect spring weather!
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 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.
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.
A return visit to Whitewater Draw in the Sulfur Springs valley of southern Arizona was just as exciting as the first time we visited. Once again several thousand cranes were bunched in groups around lagoons of the Rio de Agua Prieta. It’s a photographer’s dream just to stand and watch as groups of cranes break off from one area, circle in the sky, and drop down into another area, while croaking their unmistakable, prehistoric rattling bugle.
We watched the cranes fly around for a couple of hours in the morning, then took a break for a picnic lunch, and when we returned to the lagoons, the cranes were having a mid-day break. Most of them were gathered around one edge of the lagoon in a long line. Some were sipping water, some were grooming, some were standing still as statues, but the scene was entirely different than the early morning.
On our first visit to Buenos Aires national wildlife refuge in southern Arizona last February, we saw lots of wildlife with little effort. But the weather this year could not have been more different than last year. Cold wind kept most of the birds from appearing, and even after driving every road open to the public we never found the pronghorn antelope that are so commonly observed near the public roads.
As it turns out, the wildlife at the refuge were good predictors of the coming stormy weather, because it snowed overnight, and morning temperatures the next day were in the low 30s F. Although the dirt roads were soft and slippery, we drove back to the refuge anyway, and finally found the antelope and the deer, as well as some dramatic winter landscapes.
The Sonoran desert in southwestern Arizona is hot, but amazingly diverse in plant life because it receives two periods of rainfall annually and it provides subtropical warmth in the winter. In fact, some of the cacti growing in Organ Pipe National Monument on the U.S.-Mexican border can’t survive freezing temperatures.
Back Yard Biology 