Continued from the previous post: what a treat to spend a day hiking between lakes without a heavy backpack, and through gorgeous green meadows lined with red fir trees on a fairly level trail!











Continued from the previous post: what a treat to spend a day hiking between lakes without a heavy backpack, and through gorgeous green meadows lined with red fir trees on a fairly level trail!
I should have posted this composite image of White-winged Doves coming to and leaving a perch yesterday — when it was National Pigeon/Dove day. Oh well….hence, the title of the post.
These doves are native to central America and Mexico, but expand northward into southern most CA, AZ, NM, and TX during their breeding season. They time their arrival with the blooming and fruiting of the saguaro cactus, feasting on its nectar, pollen, flowers, and seeds. In fact, the tiny seeds of the saguaro are the only ones the doves will consume, because they are so easy to pick out of the cup-shaped fruit.
Many dove species are particularly successful in hot, dry desert environments — they are the only birds that can pump or suck up water with their bills immersed so they can rehydrate quickly, and they are strong flyers that can search for waterholes within a wide radius of their nest. Once well hydrated doves can evaporatively cool themselves by panting, even at air temperatures in excess of 120 degrees F (50 degrees C). Amazing survivors!
the wildflowers bloom in great abundance, making the plains south of Trujillo a carpet of color!
In northernmost Portugal near the Spanish border is its largest national park—Peneda-Gerez. Forests of native Maritime Pine and plantations of eucalyptus introduced for paper manufacture give way to a low growing grassland interspersed with granite outcrops. This 270 square mile wilderness created in 1971 still has some inholdings of farms and small hillside towns, which only adds to the unique character of the area.
We spent part of a day acquainting ourselves with the beautiful environs of central Lisbon and then took a birding tour of the variety of habitats in the Tagus river estuary the following day. This is the largest estuary system in western Europe, with an area of more than 80,000 acres where as many as 50,000 waterfowl overwinter.
In a little over three decades, the White Stork increased from around 1000 individuals in Portugal in 1995 to about 15,000 individuals today. And one of the reasons for this increase in the face of near extinction is the access that the storks have to foraging in landfills for the nutritious remains of fishermen hauls, restaurant leftovers, and household garbage. in fact, now White Storks will not try to nest farther than about 10-12 miles from the landfills.
I haven’t seen many rare plants outside of Hawaii, but there is one oak tree species (Englemann Oaks) that has an incredibly limited range in southern California, making it a very rare plant in the U.S. Englemann Oaks used to be found on dry grassland mesas up to 4,000 feet in southern California. But their preferred climate/vegetation zone is also where humans like to build houses, and thus, their distribution has shrunk drastically to a narrow strip along the foothills of southern California mountains from Pasadena into San Diego county.
We visited the Santa Rosa plateau, an almost 10,000 acre Nature Conservancy preserve near Murietta, CA to get a look at these rare oaks.
Despite there being a lot of oaks in this area, there were surprisingly few Acorn woodpeckers, and i only saw a handful of them flying from tree to tree. However, there were a few other typical chaparral birds present on this overcast, windy day.
A fellow blogger reminded me that over the course of a year, or a decade, we write a lot of words about a lot of photos on our blogs. I have been writing this blog since July 2011, roughly a month after I retired. Somehow, I completely missed celebrating the 10th anniversary of “Backyard Biology” in July this year, and so after the end of 2021, I’m summarizing the highlights and milestones of the blog in this post.
Since that first entry, I have written 1689 posts, and the blog has had 415,000+ visitors (some just came once, some visited several to many times), with a total of more than 640,000 views during the past ten years. During that decade span I’ve written more than 307,000 words, which is about the equivalent of the word length of 4 novels, and I’m now finding that I am repeating myself, writing about the same topics in much the same way. And so the posts are more infrequent, and are now focused more on the natural history of the global backyard, rather than just my own backyard.
During the past 10 years, the post with by far the most views on one day (722) was on May 23, 2018, “Waterfall Extravaganza” in Hraufossar, Iceland, where there are 900 meters of continuous waterfalls streaming from a monster glacier and falling over impervious lava rock.
The same three or four posts seem to generate the most interest every year, probably as a result of a Google search for an answer. The top three each year tend to be: “How many seeds in a sunflower seed head?”, “Gigantic black horse fly”, and “Scary-looking, big, black wasp alert”. The post on sunflower seed heads gets about 30,000 views a year. Inquiring minds want to know!
This year, the most viewed post (528 views on October 17) was “Reflections”, which included some photos of images reflected in rippling water, like this one of Bald Cypress in the Mobile-Tensaw river delta.
In fact, the posts from our Fall trip to Alabama, a unique environment I had never seen before, were the most viewed posts of the entire year. Lagging far behind in views (350) was the post I entitled “Apocalypse”, thinking that would really capture readers’ attention.
And now it’s time to find some new material to showcase on Backyard Biology, with adventures near and far in 2022. Happy reading!
This past week has been prime time for Fall color in the Twin Cities area. Frosty overnight temps coupled with sunny, warmish days have really brought out the brilliant red and gold colors of the oak trees, in particular. For a more in-depth explanation of how these changes take place in plants at this time of year, please click here.
Five rivers feed into the 200,000+ acres of wetlands that make up the second largest river delta system in the U.S. just north of Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. The Mobile-Tensaw delta’s expanse of swamp, bog, natural rice paddies, canals, and rivers makes this area of Alabama a real biodiversity hotspot where you can find more species of fish, turtles, snails, crayfish, and oak trees than anywhere else in North America. Harvard ecologist E.O. Wilson has called it North America’s Amazon, and so it was a real treat to venture out on a small boat to explore some of the smaller waterways of the delta for ourselves.
The southeastern U.S., and the Mobile delta in particular, was a refuge for species driven south during the ice ages of the Pleistocene glaciation. Warm temperatures year-round and plenty of rainfall (averaging 70 inches per year) ensure the most equitable conditions for life to survive, and so it has in this cradle of biodiversity.
We took a car ferry to Dauphin Island which sits at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and then drove west to Pelican Point beach for a (hot) walk in the late morning sun. The beaches along the gulf coast of this part of Alabama are composed of finely ground, minuscule particles of quartz that originated in the Appalachian mountains, were ground down by erosion and river action before being transported to the gulf, where minerals were further reduced in size by wave action over tens of thousands of years. The result is an eye-blinding, fine, white sand that actually squeaks as you walk over it.
Alabama’s gulf shores are an ecological wonder!