…a little pointy beak?

Here is this morning’s photo of the Anna’s hummingbird Hen on her Nid.  I began looking very carefully for evidence of nestlings yesterday, April 1, since that was my estimate of the earliest her eggs might hatch.  This morning, I checked first thing, and still didn’t see any sign of young birds.  But on examination of this digiscoped photo, there’s a tiny dash of a black line visible at the rim of the nest, showing against her gray fluffy undertail coverts.  Is it or isn’t it a little beak?  I can’t tell.

I’ll check back on the Nid when the Hen is away; more might be visible.  Stay tuned.

(Photo A.Shock)

…and rode out a major blow.

From the middle of the day yesterday until just after 10pm, a big wind storm ruffled the Phoenix area.  It made the blustery afternoons we’ve been having look like a gentle breeze.  There were sustained winds near 30mph, and a peak wind gust of 53mph.  Much of this was after dark, and the Aleppo pine’s thin boughs tossed and snapped, setting off the motion detector light in the back yard — in the light we could see the Hen’s slender bough whipping up and down, the nest riding high or low at each gust.  To discourage heavier predators, she’s built the nest in the flexible twigs at the end of a branch, so the motion was maximum and it looked like a wild ride.  I was sure it was the end of the nidification, but thanks to several miracles of nature: excellent building skills, parental determination, and pure luck, the Hen and her Nid weathered the storm.  For the whole event she sat in the nest, effectively corking it so that the eggs stayed in.  E saw her up there during the worst, sitting and being tossed around.  It’s hard not to try to imagine what she felt — panic and fear, or the zen-like calm of having no options?  Maybe she slept.  We can’t know.

We assume the eggs survived as well, as she is still very tight today.  It’s an amazing thing.

No picture of the Hen this morning, but the photo above is what the strength of the winds did nearby in our yard: a section of fencing blew down, nails ripped right out of wood, flattening annuals and a couple of shrubs.  Amazing that a tiny two-inch nest survived what a fence couldn’t.  Now, if only we could borrow a tool from the Hen’s repertoire and use spider web to stick the fence back up…

Not much larger than the Verdin is another small gray bird of the Sonoran Desert, the Black-tailed Gnatcatcher.  A tiny, long-tailed, streamlined bird with a narrow gleaning bill, both sexes sport cool gray plumage, and in breeding season the male has a full black cap.  They actively forage for insects in desert vegetation, and are almost always found in pairs since they remain with their mate year-round.  (The similar Blue-gray gnatcatcher comes through the desert around Phoenix in migration, but Black-tailed gnatcatchers are permanent residents here.)  Like the Verdin and hummingbirds, Gnatcatchers are champion nest-builders, and build complex and neatly constructed nests inside thorny trees and shrubs like Palo Verde and Catclaw acacia.  (For more detail, see this life history from the Sonoran Desert Museum website)

On a recent desert hike in the Hell’s Canyon Wilderness west of Phoenix, E and I watched a pair of Black-tailed gnatcatchers nesting, repeatedly disappearing into the interior of a Palo verde just off the trail, only about 4 feet from the ground, which is a typical nest location for these tiny birds.  In the branches midway to the trunk we could see the oblong cup-shaped nest they were working on.

They were working on it, but not in the way we first assumed.  On closer observation, we realized that although the Gnatcatchers were a nesting pair, they weren’t building the nest we could see — they were robbing from it.  Here’s a photo of the male (to the right of the nest) leaving the scene with a bit of white fluff in his beak, on his way to the current construction site somewhere else.  A second later, he flew off, but was back for more in less than a minute.  The bird and the nest are both very well camouflaged in the gray sticks and twigs spotted with sunlight in the depths of the green-branched Palo Verde tree.  (Photo by E. Shock)

And, speaking of camouflage:

Bonus Nidification Challenge — Find the Hen

Obvious hint: look for the bright black eye.  Here’s a bonus if blurry photo of the backyard Anna’s hummingbird hen, from an upper window.  During the morning the Nid-bough is in the sun, and when the Hen sits on the nest with her back to the hot sunlight, it makes her glow like an emerald in the needles. At times when the sun would strike either eggs or nestlings, her incubating actually provides shade and insulation from overheating, rather than the usual keeping warm of eggs or offspring.  A previous successful nest built in the same general area also had the morning sun issue.  Every morning, that Hen would stick tight to the nest until shade returned, holding her wings out over the two nestlings under her, the sun beating down on her own head and back.

(Photo A. Shock.  The resolution of the photo suffers from being shot through a window screen.)

By now I’ve managed to get a look at the nest from the upper window when the Hen is away, and discovered you can’t see the interior from the angle that view provides.  I was hoping to actually see eggs, but no luck…

Here is the Hen today, sitting tight on her tiny cup nest built on two pine cones in our backyard Aleppo Pine.  She fills the whole opening like a cork, horizontally oriented.  Usually we see hummers either air-born or perched, in vertical orientation: it’s the horizontal arrangement, with her tail sticking out behind her and her back practically parallel to the ground, that makes her so Henlike.

She sits absolutely still for long stretches of time, with only the blink of her tiny eyelid to give away her presence.

I’ve been peeking up at the Hen infrequently, so as not to stress her with “eyeball pressure”.  She seems to be on-Nid most of the day.  I’ve tried a couple of times to catch her away from the nest, looking down on the Nid-bough from an upper bedroom window, to try to see eggs, but she’s always been there, strongly suggesting there are.  (The views from above are through a screen, so efforts at pictures from there have been unsatisfactory.)

Assuming she’s incubating now, and has been for a day or two — I’ll use 16 March as an estimated laying date — she will sit on her eggs with no help from the male for about 14 -19 days.  The young will fledge around the 23rd to the 26th day.  That would mean if the nest succeeds (and my calcuations are in the ballpark) the eggs should hatch around April 1, and the young will be in the nest for about another week after that.  That puts the Hen right at the peak of Anna’s breeding phenology according to the Arizona Breeding Bird Atlas, which shows nesting records for the species in the state peak around the start of the month, with a second shorter peak near the beginning of May.

While she’s incubating, an Anna’s female will leave the eggs periodically to feed, primarily on tiny insects like gnats, but fueled with nectar from flowers or sugar water feeders.  We’re keeping our feeders well-stocked and particularly clean (thanks, E!), with the first hot weather of the year.  The garden is more than doing its part, with hummer favorites like penstemon, aloes, desert lavender and above all, chuparosa all in peak bloom.

(Digiscoped photo A. Shock)

Much building activity: as of today the Anna’s hummingbird hen in our Aleppo pine is still finessing her nid.  This morning, she could be seen bustling and fussing at the site (yes, I anthropomorphize, get over it please, I’m not an ornithologist!), making frequent trips away and to, coming back with light-colored fibers, some of which could be seen stuck to her beak in the morning sun.

Beautiful looks through the scope, but focus continues to be a challenge with the camera, as my digiscoping is low-tech (camera lens hand-held to scope eye-piece).  Above is a new shot from this morning.  It’s an action shot, with the downwards-pointed bill apparently in the act of applying fluffy material to the outside of the nest and smoothing it.  The nest is getting taller, and very slightly narrower.

To the left is a photo from this afternoon, where the Hen is screened through the needles at the top of the cones.  Again, click on the photo to enlarge it a little.  You can see her scattering of throat-spangles, which look black because the sun is on her other side.

She seems to be sitting tighter now than in the middle of the day.  Anna’s will sometimes lay before the nest is complete, or rather, continue improving the nest even as they are incubating.

(This photo is with a 250mm lens, not digiscoped, and focus seems a little easier, although obstructions like pine needles are still a bit of a problem for photography, clever nest concealment though they are).

More as it happens, or if I get better pics.

(All photos A. Shock)

The Anna’s hummingbird hen is on the nest! This morning I saw her bringing small beakfuls of fluffy white material like spider web or some kind of aerial seeds and adding them. She would then settle in the cup of the nest, and wiggle a little, as if to get the shape perfect, and run her bill across the outer surface of the nest in what looked like a smoothing gesture.  Being a clever little hen, she’s chosen her site well — it’s hard to see from either above or below, but here is a picture, not well digiscoped but recognizable.

The tiny nest is built on the top of a pair of pinecones about ten feet off the ground.  Though the angle of the photo is from below, you can see the well-compacted mix of material packed onto the cones, with the hen’s little head and beak (pointing to the right) above it.

We have the scope set up a reasonable distance away from the spot on a walkway below the pine, and we can check on her throughout the day. We don’t know if she’s incubating yet, although as I mentioned, construction was still underway earlier today.  Stay tuned!

Photo by A. Shock.

When I left the Mississippi River Valley to come back to the West, I thought, Hmmmmm, no chickadees in the low desert.  What’s that going to be like?

We were very accustomed to Carolina chickadees as ever-present “fee-bay-fee-bee”-ers in our St. Louis yard.  They accompanied us on hikes; we heard them in the parks, they were everywhere, all year round — active little birds that deserve the gooey description “perky”, sociable to the point of seeming to boldly hang with people if there was seed to be had (safflower, yum!), or nesting fluff (white dog hair, good!). And in Berkeley and Santa Cruz, we’d encountered Chestnut-backed Chickadees frequently.  So when we got to Phoenix it seemed strange to not have “dees” about the place.

But we didn’t need to worry — here we have Verdin (Auriparus flaviceps).   The default little gray bird of the Sonoran desert is taxonomically unrelated to chickadees, but they are superficially like them in that they are small, predominantly gray, active birds who are common permanent residents in their habitat, vocal, and fairly unabashed by humans.  In fact, though they aren’t related, the Verdin’s genus, Auriparus, means “golden parid”, or chickadee-like bird (Chickadees and Titmice are members of the family Paridae.)

“Small” may not be emphatic enough: tiny, or even dinky (the technical term) is more like it.  Verdin are in fact among the smallest of North American song birds: bigger than hummingbirds, but that’s about it.  They flit and glean busily among the thorny green-branched desert trees emitting chip notes and a three-note call that’s frequent and loud considering the size of its source.  Their sounds, along with the mechanical Drr-brrr-drr-brr-drr of cactus wrens and the Curve-billed thrasher’s quick “whit-wheat”, means home to me.

The photo at the top of the post, taken in our yard, is of a male doing nestling-feeding duties — you can see he’s got a little something in his beak.  He was so busy he allowed me to approach fairly closely, and you can see one of the most excellent things about Verdin: the color of their head.  They aren’t called  “flaviceps” (Latin for “yellow-head”) for nothing.  But it’s not just yellow, it’s a very particular sort of golden yellow — slightly green and slightly gray, too, mustard, perhaps, and by some amazing biological coincidence, it’s exactly the color of Creosote blossoms, as if the birds used them to powder their heads.  The bird above is in a creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), and though most of the blooms have become white seed puffs, you can still see a few yellow flowers over the Verdin’s back.  They exactly match his head.  You can also see another colorful field mark, his sharp little chestnut epaulette.  Both the head color and the epaulette are vivid in the close-up image here (photo by T.Beth Kinsey, from the always excellent Firefly Forest).  Notice the narrow, sharp beak of a gleaner, rather than the sturdy beak of a seed-cracker.

As bright as these plumage features seem in photos, they are not always easily seen in the field, unless you’re equipped with binoculars.  So, many folks don’t notice this industrious little desert-gleaner working above their heads in their xeric yards.  What is very easily seen are the nests of Verdins — messy round stick-wads built in thorny trees and shrubs, often placed out towards the end of branches, to catch cooling breezes.  Verdin are prolific nest-builders, and often have a couple underway at the same time.  They build both breeding nests and roosting nests, and you might say they’ve got a complex nest-culture.  The male starts a sample nest which the female helps him finish, probably strengthening the pair bond.  Here’s a photo of an active breeding nest in our yard with noisy hatchlings in it.  The adult birds are hard to pick out, but the same little gray papa in the top photo is hanging in the “front door” along with the female — you have to imagine away the foreground branch of the Little leaf Palo Verde that’s blooming.  The nest is the wad of brown sticks against the blue sky, and the nest opening is at the bottom of the wad, which is where you can see the gray backs of the parents (click to enlarge the photo; it’s easier to see the birds). The low placement of the nest openings make them rain-sheltered and somewhat protected from larger winged predators.

The materials Verdin use for the exterior of their nests are the same ones Cactus wrens prefer for their own, so Verdin nests under construction in spring are often the focal point of theiving-and-chasing interaction between the two species.  In general, Cactus wrens seem to enrage Verdin, and the smaller birds will gang up on any wren they find in their area — nesting material isn’t the only thing Cactus wrens will snatch out of Verdin nests.

Verdins enjoy a variety of food sources besides gleaning bugs and larvae from foliage.  They take a sip of nectar now and again, and often hop around inside the stems of Chuparosa, robbing the sweet nectar from the base of the red flowers (they’re delicious — pop a whole Chuparosa flower into your mouth sometime; they taste like sweet cucumbers).  And we frequently see them hanging upside down from the hummingbird feeders, sipping the drips on the bottom after the sloppy Gila woodpeckers are through.  This acrobatic hanging upside down of Verdins is a family trait — they are the only North American representative of the family Remizidae, or Penduline tits.  Whatever that may sound like, it actually means little birds that hang upside down.

So, although the desert has no chickadees, we’ve got other little gray birds. ( And I haven’t even mentioned gnatcatchers, Bushtits, and Lucy’s warblers…)  But Arizona is not “dee-free”.  When we need a hit of chickadee or titmouse, we have choices — there is actually one more species of Paridae here than in the Midwest: Mountain chickadees in the high pine forests above the Mogollon Rim, Juniper titmice on the Colorado Plateau, the fantastic Bridled titmouse (yes, its ornate facial markings put the Plain titmouse to shame!) in the evergreen oak woodlands of the foothills and mountains of central and southern Arizona, and even a small population of Mexican chickadees in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.  All we need to do is go uphill and it’s ‘Dee-a-Rama!

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.

Every once in a while, I find a clay pot — a tiny, perfect clay pot — on the wall of the house.  They look like little half-buried Mediterranean amphorae, without handles, with a narrow neck and a flared rim, the entire thing only half an inch across.  But they have no openings: like the false-necked vessels drachmai-conscious Athenian families left at the graves of loved ones — they looked full of precious oil while only actually containing a thimbleful — these tiny pots are sealed at the top.  Sometimes, however, they have a hole in the side, as if a micro-tomb-robber struck the belly of the pot with a spade, to sift through the contents.

A little spadework in books and on the internet turned up the answer to who the tiny potters in our yard might be : Microdynerus arenicolus, the Antioch Potter Wasp, who builds up this mud cell for its offspring one mouthful of clay at a time.

You would think a wasp bringing mouthful after mouthful of mud to a wall right by the front door might be observed easily, but I’ve never knowingly seen one of these wasps on the job.  What I can glean about the appearance and habits of the Antioch Potter Wasp is that they are about half-an-inch long, live in California, southern Arizona and New Mexico, and are solitary wasps.  The adults have creamy white or yellow and black markings, and there are subtle differences in coloring and morphology between males and females that are probably mostly important to other wasps and entomologists.  (The photo on the left is not our Potter Wasp, it’s a related species from Australia.)  The females have stingers, but are “docile”.  They are also “domestic”: it’s the female who does all the housework.  Here’s what an Arizona Game and Fish document says about the Antioch Potter Wasp:

These are solitary wasps, each female constructing nests and provisioning them for her own offspring. Each nest looks like a small jug, about half an inch in diameter, with a short sealed neck. When the female decides to make a cell, she selects a sheltered place, and then carries dollops of mud there for construction. This is a precision process with a thin walled pot resulting. When the pot is almost completed, with just room for her to get her head in, she starts to provision the cell with hairless caterpillars, which she has paralyzed by stinging them in the central nervous system. Once the cell is full she lays an egg on the prey and restarts the cell making process. She adds mud to the edges of the nearly spherical pot. Closing the sphere presents problems that are solved by simply adding extra mud and leaving a small neck. The larva that hatches from the egg eats the prey, spins a cocoon inside the pot and pupates. When the new adult is ready to leave the pot, it simply makes a hole in the side and leaves. Using the neck would be logical but that is where the pot is the thickest.

–Arizona Game and Fish Department. 2004. Microdynerus arenicolus. Unpublished abstract compiled and edited by the Heritage Data Management System, Arizona Game and Fish Department, Phoenix, AZ. 4 pp.

Unless you’re a hairless caterpillar, this is a fascinating process.  Especially for a potter: the technique of building a pot from the bottom up, adding little bits of clay at a time, and contouring it as you go is exactly the technique potters use to build vessels or vessel-like sculptures.  Vessels of any size and shape can be made as long as the supply of moist clay holds out: the potter wasp makes her own by carrying a mouthful of water to a dry clay source and mixing it up to the right consistency and carrying it to the construction site.  To the right is a picture of a Three Star Owl VLO (Very Large Owl) being constructed in the same way as a potter wasp builds her nest.  (It will be more than two feet tall and at this point lacked its face.  Please note that the finished owl sculpture was not provisioned with hairless caterpillars nor were any eggs at all laid during the process.)

I determined to keep an eye on the little wasp-pot, hoping to see a new wasp break free and fly away, to carry on the work of potter wasps in the yard.  Of course, the next time I looked, there was the hole, and the empty belly of the tiny clay amphora — the wasp had flown.  Here’s a picture of the hole made from the inside out by the wasp itself, not a grave robber after all:

Etymology

The common name, Antioch Potter Wasp, seems like a very appropriately Mediterranean name for an organism that makes structures that look like amphorae, the storage and shipping vessels found all over the Mediterranean region from about the 13th century BC until the 7th century AD.  But it’s mere coincidence, and not connected with the ancient city of Antioch on the Levantine coast of the Mediterranean (the stretch of land from which the earliest amphorae, the so-called “Canaanite jars”, come), a hub of commerce and shipping.  The species was given its name from the town of Antioch, California, also a hub of commerce and shipping, where the type specimen was collected and described.

(Photos: #1, 3, 4, A.Shock, Three Star Owl.  #2, from the following site: http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_wasps/images/MudDau7.jpg, no photo credit found)