…and a Phainopepla in a Palo Verde tree.

As around the turn of every new year, Christmas Bird Counts are happening across America.  Under the auspices of the Audubon Society winter bird distribution and population information is compiled, collected by volunteers, most of whom are not ornithologists but people with a non-professional — although sometimes intense — interest in birds.  The vast quantity of info gathered in this time period is used “to assess the health of bird populations – and to help guide conservation action” in the U.S.

What do the volunteers gain from their long, often cold, hours in the field counting both species and individual birds seen?  For some it’s competition, to best a personal record for birds seen in a given area, and of course, there’s the satisfaction of adding to what’s known about North American avifauna.

right: Four Peaks above the Verde Valley

For me, it’s getting out into in the winter landscape, among plants and animals which, sometimes, it’s been too long since I’ve seen.  Of course, the birds are a big draw for me — but it’s not just birds.  We regularly see other critters on our patch of territory: jackrabbits, coyotes and cottontails are common, but one year, we spotted a bobcat.

For the past three years, I’ve  helped with the Salt and Verde Rivers CBC.

left: Yavapai Nation on the Verde River showing the bands of habitats we census.

Our particular area is in the Yavapai Nation along the Verde River east of the Phoenix metro area (special permission to bird the Indian Community is necessary), under the changeable faces of Four Peaks, at about 7600 feet, the highest peaks close to Phoenix.

The immediate censusing area is a mix of riverside riparian (cottonwoods, willows and invasive salt cedars), cattle-trampled mesquite bosques (mesquite and graythorn with little in between but sand and cowpies), desert upland (saguaros, creosote, cholla, palo verde and ironwood), and agricultural land: the tribe maintains many acres in pecan groves, citrus, and alfalfa. There’s also a patch of semi-rural residential area where tribe members and employees live.  Such variable habitats make for a fairly diverse species assortment, ranging from invasive exotics, like Eurasian Collared Doves and starlings, to uncommon natives like Bald Eagles, which nest along the Verde River.

right: Rio Verde

This area distinguishes itself in a few ways: in numbers of sparrows, including white-crowned, savannah, lark, song, vesper (photo below), and lincoln’s, which glean brushy ditches cut through the fields, alongside verdin, bewick’s wrens, and lesser goldfinch.  Other small birds like orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, ruby-crowned kinglets and both expected species of gnatcatchers hang in the cottonwoods — this year we saw bushtits for the first time. Red-winged black birds, meadowlarks, mourning doves, american pipits and house finches fill the fields and line the electrical wires along the road.  The river hosts wintering waterfowl large and small: gadwall, mergansers, wigeon, mallards, bufflehead, canada geese, coots, and this year, even snow geese.  Throw in five or six species of woodpeckers and other Sonoran upland species like thrashers, Abert’s towhees, cardinals, and quail — the area holds a record for most Phainopepla counted on a CBC — and you’ve got quite an assortment.

With such a smorgasbord of small birds — so very tasty! — there are plentiful predators like Peregrine falcons, Cooper’s hawks, Red tailed hawks, American kestrels, and harriers.  One “functional raptor” we encountered was a Loggerhead shrike, working the brushy ditches for reptiles and insects, maybe even a sparrow to eat.

right: Loggerhead shrike

There’s even raptor-on-raptor pursuit: I saw a Peregrine dive at a kestrel.  As the smaller falcon coursed over alfalfa fields searching for an unwary or slow pipit, the peregrine above took a shot at it out of the sun, its dive so steep and sharp that I could hear its feathers buzz like a bullroarer, the avian equivalent of a sonic boom.  But before the strike, it pulled up short, giving the impression of having accomplished a dry run; the kestrel only dipped in the air evasively, and went on its way.

Experiencing the unpredictability of the natural world is what makes getting out to count enjoyable.  And it doesn’t have to be far from the bustle of people and suburbia: sometimes, it’s all within a few miles of the intersection of a major highway, a casino, and the inevitable Denny’s.

(All photos taken by A.Shock during the 2009 Salt/Verde River Christmas Bird Count)

…who stopped by to visit Three Star Owl at the Audubon Arizona Gifts from Nature fundraiser and show in Scottsdale this Friday and Saturday.  The rain stayed away, and it was nice to see everyone out and about!  Special thanks to everyone at Audubon Arizona, for once again wrangling a great show!

(photo: smoke-fired coati effigy vessel, photo and piece by A.Shock)

It’s hard to believe that I have to jump right into gearing up for Wings Over Willcox, the Sandhill Crane and birding and nature festival coming up in Willcox, AZ, in the middle of next month (details here)!

Thanks again to you all, and Happy Holidays!

Audubon Arizona’s Gifts from Nature fundraiser.

Save the date!  Coming up quickly on the 11th and 12th of December, at the Cattletrack Compound in Scottsdale:

The Friday evening event is a festive preview and advance sale, with music, hors d’oevres, wine and hot cider.  It’s $25 per person (call for reservations, 602-468-6470 ext. 103). The Saturday public sale goes from 10 am – 4 pm, and has a recommended donation of $4.

There will be lots of local artists and their nature-related artwork – it’s a great place to do your holiday shopping.  Plus, proceeds plus a portion of the artist’s profits go to supporting environmental education and conservation in Arizona. Hope you can make it!  (And, keep your fingers crossed for fine weather!)

The next Three Star Owl event will be after the New Year, at Wings Over Willcox, January 13-17, 2010.

We’ve been trying to Green Up around here.  In addition to starting up a composting system for garden waste and kitchen scraps, as well as having plans for an herb and chile garden to use the compost on, we recently went to a mesquite-pod milling event.

Left: dried mesquite pods

Mesquite pods and seeds are really hard.  Really really hard.  The seeds especially.  So hard that not many animals, even hungry desert mammals with sharp teeth and strong jaws, eat them — despite the seeds’ high protein content.  Rock squirrels, coyotes, and gray foxes are among the modern Sonoran species that use the copious pods for a food source.  Often, pods are chewed briefly and swallowed whole for the animals’ stomach acid to take care of, and the hard seeds are pooped out later on, germination-enhanced, ready to sprout into fast-growing hardy trees.

Southwestern mesquite tree species evolved at the same time as large Pleistocene grazers like Mastodon and Ground Sloths (below), whose massive grinding molars and powerful digestive systems propagated the seeds efficiently. The trees’ fast growth habit could keep pace with major inroads of hungry megafauna, and the animals spread the seeds far and wide (cattle have largely replaced these extinct giants in the modern system).  People are prodigious users of mesquite, too, for food, furniture, and firewood, and browse for livestock. In some seasons and years, mesquite kept people alive, both indigeños and pioneers. Indigenous people milled the pods for gruel, atole and cakes, but the seeds are almost too hard to grind by hand with a mano and metate, which often were of wood.

This is where the Desert Harvesters come in.  They are a group dedicated to using food sources native to the Sonoran desert, including mesquite meal, which is nutritious, naturally sweet but with a low glycemic index, and gluten-free.

Right: The Desert Harvesters hammer mill rig

To get mesquite meal, the pods must be ground quite fine, so they use a generator-operated steel hammer mill on a trailer, which they tow to various locations around the state for milling events.  The one we attended was sponsored by the Phoenix Permaculture Guild at Roadrunner Park Farmer’s Market.  For $5 per 5-gallon bucket, they will grind your clean, dry mesquite pods into fabulously tasty, nutritious meal.   We toasted our pods in the oven first, so our meal seems particularly sweet and nutty.

Right: the steel “hammers”

Collecting the pods is easy, but time-consuming.  If you’d like to mill your pods, collect whole, dry, brown pods just as they begin to drop from the trees.  In the Phoenix area, this is roughly mid-summer as the monsoon rains are really beginning to get underway.  Dry the pods thoroughly, or toast them in a warm oven until they’re slightly brown.  Then store them in an insect-proof bucket until the hammer-milling event is in your neck of the woods, usually the end of October or the beginning of November.  (If you live in the Tucson area, you have a few more date options, since Tucson is Desert Harvesters’ home base, but all around the same time of year.)

Standing on line waiting for the millers to put your beans in the machine gives you ample time to shop around the Farmer’s Market or talk to other mesquite-bean collectors, and swap mesquite recipes and chat.  We talked to Jean, who also had carob pods to grind.  The process is not rapid — only a handful of pods goes in at a time, with the mill operators keeping a sharp eye out for rocks and debris, even though everyone’s pods are inspected once already, since hard objects in the steel blades would be hazardous and damaging. The millers often stop to remove the “chaff” from the hammer chamber: even with the powerful steel grinders, the seeds and tough fiber don’t pulverize, and has to be vacuumed out with a shop-vac every few minutes.  The chaff is saved for composting, brewing beer or tea, or feeding goats.

Left, our beans going into the hopper; note dude’s ear-plugs.

The meal-collection bin is emptied after each person’s pods have been ground, so the meal you end up with is from your own pods.  We brought two 5-gallon buckets of beans, and ended up with several pounds of meal.

Since there’s no gluten in mesquite meal, it can’t replace wheat flour 1:1 in most recipes, but you can use mesquite meal for up to 1/3 of the total flour amount, including gluten-free recipes.  This morning, we enjoyed mesquite pancakes sweetened with agave nectar for breakfast. Native Seed Search is an excellent source for info about mesquite meal, or for the meal itself, if you don’t have mesquite trees where you live.  But if you do, when you see the price, you’ll definitely want to collect and grind your own.

Right: our mesquite meal being poured back into our bucket

(All photos A or E Shock)

On last weekend’s trip to the Oregon coast, E and I noticed the beaches were festooned with unsupported sea-foam, churned up by the waves.  This might have been the slimy foam that’s currently causing major problems for sea birds along the Oregon coast.  The foam, a result of an off-shore algal bloom, coats the bird’s plumage as they dive or float in affected seawater. This destroys the water-proofing loft of down feathers, the warmth-holding space under the countour plumage which keeps the birds warm in cold water.

(Above: Foam-coated beach, Fort Stevens State Park; photo E. Shock)

Hundreds of hypothermal seabirds, including loons, murres, grebes, and puffins, are washing up on shore on along the northern beaches of Oregon. Extraordinary efforts are being made to save these animals at wildlife rescue centers both in Oregon and California.  The Coast Guard is helping evac the feathered patients from Oregon to a high-tech rescue center in California which is designed to help victims of oil-spills — read about it here and here.

(Right, unsupported sea foam, photo E.Shock)

We didn’t encounter any of the suffering birds, fortunately, but we did see a number of loons, grebes, and  sea-going ducks like scoters cruising the near-shore waves on beaches covered with blowing clots and rolls of sticky foam.

(Left: Red-throated loon, photo E.Shock.  Note that there’s a small wavelet behind the bird’s beak that’s making the bill look thicker than it actually is.)

International Vulture Awareness day is Sept. 5

Vultures and condors are really useful in your niche or ecosystem.  What to do with that pesky roadkill, thawed winterkill, shot-winged quarry, victims of natural disaster, contagion, or warfare, or any other squishy, odiferous and past-its-prime meaty object?  Just leave it to vultures — it’s easy, quick, FREE, and All Natural.

Recommended by ornithologists, epidemiologists, jhatorists, and vultures worldwide!

(Not available in perpetually frosty environments)

For more about International Vulture Awareness Day, click here.

(Photo:Turkey vulture; A.Shock)

The Telegraph website of the UK has posted a short column hastily summarizing a research paper concluding that Birding Is Not Green, especially competitive birding and twitching.  The Telegraph article is not very in-depth, refers mostly to Britain (although the issues are largely common to the US as well, and the primary author is at University of Illinois, and is a birder himself) and takes a bit of a snarky tone — you birders aren’t as green as you think — but it’s still worth a glance.

The author of the study points out that while chasing rarities, twitchers (the mostly British term for avid birders who mainly are interested in checking off bird species from their lists) log many gasoline-hogging hours in their vehicles, or taking long flights to see hard-to-find species or vagrants. A case in point from my own experience: many years ago a pinkish Ross’s Gull — usually an arctic bird — showed up near the Alton Lock and Dam on the Mississippi River north of St. Louis.  People were coming from places as far away as Italy and South Africa to see that bird, because it was closer and easier to get to than the high arctic.  And local birders made the drive twice or more, to log the bird in two separate years (it was at the New Year), and in two separate states, since it was at times visible from both the Missouri and Illinois side of the river!  A much more recent Ross’s gull at the Salton Sea created a similar scene.

(The photo above of the Salton Sea Ross’s Gull is by Henry Detweiler from the Southwest Birders website.  I’ve used it here because it’s a very nice photo of a ROGU, not because Southwest Birders are involved in any way that I know of in the debate about greenness and birding.)

These Ross’s Gulls chases would be cited as examples of fuel being used profligately, although the opposite argument could be made as well: visiting the Salton Sea or Alton, Illinois — closer and less pristine habitats than, say, Churchill Manitoba — actually represents a greener way of seeing the gull. In addition, the Telegraph article leaves out the fact that many birders (in the States, at least), regularly carpool to spot their targets.  Also ignored is that some eco-tours offer carbon offset opportunities for their trips.  And that many “birdwatchers” bird greenly in their yards, or nearby hotspots they access on foot or by bike.  Gilbert Water Ranch in Phoenix is a great place to bird by bike.  Some competitive birding activities, such as Big Days or Christmas Bird Counts, make useful contributions to what’s known about seasonal populations and ranges of birds, which for some might mitigate fossil fuel use to some degree.  No one criticizes the Family Roadtrip Vacation for being a fuel-wasting chase to bag National Parks: instead, people talk about broadening the kids’ horizons, engaging in “quality family time” and bolstering local economies. Traveling birders spend money in local economies, too. I would question why birding has been singled out for this criticism in the press.

(Left: Birding from the car in NZ: who’s birding who?  Cheeky Kea!  Photo: A.Shock)

There’s also a seriouly confusing and confused bit of content in the article that seems to quote the researchers as blaming birders for un-environmental practices because birders ignore pollution problems in bird-rich areas because birds tend to thrive there.  Not enough time to sort that one out in this post; I suspect the original study states it more clearly.

However, I didn’t set out to write a defense of the Greenness of Birding: most birders are aware that their passion has some not-so-environmentally-friendly aspects, and try to offset them.  The concept of Green Birding (like BIGBY) is not new; there are sites and posts all over the web — just plug “green birding” into your search engine and check a few of them out.  But, the Telegraph article does provide a reminder that some birding practices are fuel-consumptive or carbon-emitting, and we need to be aware and pro-active to make birding as green an activity as possible.

This might be one of those times it’s best to read the source article for yourself.  Here’s the reference:

Spencer Schaffner. Environmental Sporting: Birding at Superfund Sites, Landfills, and Sewage Ponds. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 2009; 33 (3): 206.

I couldn’t access more than an abstract online without a subscription to the online reference service.

Here’s a link to an interview with the author of the study, from Science Daily. This has more detail than the Telegraph article, and perhaps better summarizes Schaffner’s conclusions.

…just passed within a block of our house!

Turns out the street at the edge of our neighborhood — two houses away from ours — is a convenient north-south thoroughfare for Leaders of the Free World on their way between Sky Harbor Airport and resort row up on the shoulders of Camelback Mountain.  George W. Bush used to pass by every time he was in town en route to his favorite Phoenix digs, the Royal Palms, and on this trip the Obamas are staying at the Phoenecian.

Yesterday afternoon, we missed President Obama by a middle-aged minute — we were still hurrying over the front garden wall when the shiny black limos, trailed by mysterious subdued gray vans, zipped past the end of our street.  How disappointing!  I’d even made a polite sign about health care reform, with markers and a box to brandish, but we were too late.

So as E left for work this morning, he called home to say the police units were once again positioned along every side street, including ours.  Determined not to be so lame this time, I waited until I heard the chopper overhead, then grabbed a camera, a hat, and my sign and went out to wait at the corner in the shade of a mesquite tree. On the other side of the street a bunch of kids from the local parochial school were already out baking in the sun, and there was a sweaty pink cop who told me to stand back from the road. In just a few minutes, flashing lights could be seen up the road. Then steadily rolling down off Camelback Mountain towards us came a phalanx of motorcycle officers, some vans, two or three black limos with tiny side flags whipping, just like in the movies, white vans with clear windows crowded with Secret Service agents, Press Corps, and others, the mysterious gray vans again, an ambulance, and other serious-looking vehicles deemed necessary to keep POTUS safe on his way to a Stimulus Support speech at the Convention Center downtown.

Did I see the Prez or First Family?  Nope – just heavily tinted windows.  I was waving, so I didn’t even get a picture of their limos (if they were in them!), just some of the auxiliary vehicles.  But to me the important thing was that I was there with my mild little message, and for a split second in time, the President of the United States might have seen it.

That, and now I can add Presidential Motorcade to the Yard List.

(All photos A.Shock)

In an earlier post, there was an oblique mention of seeing “Feral Quadrupeds of Interest”.  These would be the wild burros who live in the desert around Lake Pleasant, Arizona.

On our hike the other day, E and I encountered a small group of them.  They are often described as “more likely to be heard than seen” and in fact, we did hear them first.  A loud braying filled the quiet air of the desert morning, drowning out the breeze in the saguaro spines, the jingling of the Black-throated sparrows, and the chup-chup-chup of the male cardinal.  It was instantly recognizable — after we remembered there were supposed to be feral donkeys out here! — and after looking around for a bit, E spotted a group of about 5 on the top of a ridge.  They were not very close, but we did get some distant images of them, one of which is above.  The adults are gray, and you can see them on the very right-hand edge of the photo, behind a saguaro and a palo verde tree.  There’s a younger, darker animal visible grazing near the left side of the picture.  (Photo by E. Shock.)

These are the naturalized descendants of work-burros brought into the region by miners and others during the 1880s when gold prospecting and other pursuits were a big deal in the area. (I’ve read that Phoenix, on the Salt River, actually started as an ancillary vegetable-growing supply community for the then larger population around Wickenburg, where the local river, the Hassayampa, lives mostly underground.)  There are approximately 200 wild burros living in the desert around Lake Pleasant.  (The photo to the right is of a Burro I met in Veracruz last fall.)

But there’s a sorrowful angle to this tale which we didn’t know when we saw these guys the other day: just a couple weeks ago, an ORV rider found the bodies of 11 wild burros including several jacks, a jenny, and some colts, not far from this trail, on BLM land.  They had been shot by someone, which is a federal offense, and now there are investigations, a $5000 reward, a hotline (call 1-800-637-9152 if you have info about who did this) and a great deal of deserved outrage about the shootings.  Is it my imagination, or does the desert west of Phoenix harbor more gun-totin’, Saguaro-plugging, burro-murdering, gila-monster-kissing ignoramuses than necessary?

The discussion of whether feral animals like these should be in wilderness areas is not one I intend to engage in here — these issues are complex and I have no expertise (although I will say that the Federal Government allows cattle on these lands, and I can’t imagine cattle are gentler on the desert than a relatively small number of dainty-footed burros).  They certainly are part of the human history of the land, like a ghost town or an old stagecoach track, but of course, living.  What I do know is that I’m happy we saw this small family group of wild burros at home in this part of the desert.

Etymology

A bit of a stuffy etymological point unrelated to burros: although always used as a noun nowadays, the word ignoramus is actually a verb: in Latin it means “we do not know”.  So the proper plural really is ignoramuses, not ignorami, which is a “pseudo-learned blunder” (a favorite concept of mine — a common example of which is saying “pro-cess-eez” as if processes is a Latinate plural for process, incorrectly based on the thesis-theses model, which it isn’t: it’s just a plain old -es plural added to a noun that ends in a consonant.  You would never pluralize address by saying “ad-dress-eez”).

Tuesday night E and I heard a biomimicry expert speak at ASU.  Her name is Janine Benyus, and she’s a natural history author who’s been documenting the emerging cross-disciplinary field of biomimicry.  Before hearing her talk, I had a very primitive notion of biomimicry: “Dude, did you know a spider’s silk is 10 times stronger than steel — like, if we could do that, how cool would it be?”  And, like most over-simplified notions, it’s both right and not so much.

Here is the Wikipedia definition of biomimicry: Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning [imitation]) is a relatively new science that studies nature, its models, systems, processes and elements and then imitates or takes creative inspiration from them to solve human problems sustainably.

Benyus’s presentation was an overview of some of the work being done RIGHT NOW on deriving high-tech solutions to problems in engineering, health, agriculture, energy production and many other fields by observing organisms and natural systems.  Her idea: “We need to re-design everything”, as she admits is a tall order, but from her examples, there are a lot of smart people working on it 24/7.  Here are some of the things she mentioned:

• significantly increasing efficiency of wind-turbine blades by designing them with bumps like the tubercules on the flippers of Humpback whales
• making strong and very water-resistant plywood without formaldehyde using a soy-based adhesive similar to the glue mussels use to adhere to underwater rocks
• An aerodynamic 70mpg Mercedes car that looks like a box-fish and has an interior steel frame designed by bone-mimicking software (check it out on this link)
• apartment buildings with intramural structural cooling based on the cooling tunnels in African termite towers
• water-gathering technologies for arid areas based on highly efficient moisture-gathering organisms like a Namib beetle whose wings are capable of sieving fog-droplets out of a 50mph wind, and the Thorny “devil” (a horned lizard like reptile of the Australian desert) whose scale-borders act as capillary channels and can direct even tiny quantities of water, like dew, against gravity to its mouth.
• exterior surfaces for structures based on the pleated form of many cactus like saguaro, which are not only self-shading, but also direct rain to where it’s needed at the roots of the plant.
• self-cleaning paint for buildings and autos that works using the “lotus effect”: tiny surface bumps allow rain drops to skip down a wall, washing away dirt without using detergents, as do the surfaces of many plant leaves like water lotus.
  

These are only a small fraction of the projects she covered.  There’s more at the website Asknature.org, which is designed not only to introduce the public to the concept of biomimicry, but has a resource section for connecting people with nature-based strategies for the problems they need to solve: “sticking to”, “self-cleaning”, “break down,” etc.

What struck me most (apart from the really smart ideas biomimicry people are coming up with) were two things: 1) Biomimicry is a fantastic example of why Basic Research is important and should be funded.  The ideas involved are not vague tree-hugging notions of how we should all “learn from the animals”, but fact-based high-tech products, companies, projects, and enterprises created by biologists, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, scientists and others working together: commerce and science, business and academia tightly and productively intertwined.  And they arise from basic research: many are launched from studies that are undertaken to further our knowlegde of the world around us, and not originally intended to result in commercial applications.   And 2) The Arizona angle.  Not only did Benyus point out how the desert itself is full of organisms surviving under adverse conditions and so is a perfect system to study and learn from, but also how many people in biomimicry are working at Arizona State University.  Over and over, she mentioned names of scientists, teachers, and students who were sitting around us in the audience.  While this made me proud of ASU, it was painful too in light of the ongoing budget crisis created by partisan factions in the Arizona state legislature.  Even as we sat there listening to all the social, economic, scientific, and environmental advances ASU personnel are making in schools and departments from Design to Chemistry, money was being ripped away short-sightedly from those very programs and people in the name of fiscal responsibility.

Bad bad bad monkeys — what are the politicians thinking?  “Monkey see monkey do” — biomimicry and its educational foundations and commercial development — deserves staunch support, for the good of the future.  And Arizona, with its universities already deeply involved in such research, could be a leader in biomimicry studies and industry.  But only with a well-nourished educational system.   As Benyus said, the defiinition of the success of a species is not whether its offspring survive, but whether its 10-thousandth generation survives. To do that, a species must take care of where its offspring will live.  This is what a bird does when it builds a nest, this is what nature does on both a grand and a small scale: “Life creates conditions conducive to life.”  That is the lesson for individuals, for people in charge of policy and states: it is the lesson for the ages.

But in the interest of happy thoughts, I’ll leave you with this final fact, humorous visual image, and new word:  Supposedly, the “stiction” of a fully engaged gecko could support 200 pounds.  Imaging suspending a porky politician — by his waist of course — from the ceiling, with a just a gecko!  How sustainable is that?

Photos: I’m uncertain whom to credit the great photo of Ms. Benyus and a very large milipede to.  But in case this applies, I will credit AskNature.org, a project of The Biomimicry Institute.  The photo of the Thorny Devil is from Wikipedia, and is by Wouter.  The female hummer is a Black-chinned girl on a nest built above a footpath at the Nature Conservancy’s Hassayampa Preserve near Wickenburg, AZ, by A. Shock.