In the last post on scoters, I forgot to add that there is a surprising Arizona angle to these sea ducks. Some years, one or two are found wintering or in transition on desert lakes around and about the state.  They are categorized as “casual” here.  This winter (Dec. ’08), there was a handful of female or immature-type Black scoters (white cheek patches) seen along the Colorado River near Parker Dam, and a White-winged scoter at Kearney Lake east of Phoenix (Jan. ’09; white cheek patches and white on the wings).

Arizona lakes and rivers contain populations of what are locally called “mussels”, both native and non-native bottom-dwelling bivalves.  Presumably these are what these wayward scoters are living on.

The bird above is a well-documented female Black scoter (Melanitta nigra), photographed at Butcher Jones Recreation Area on Saguaro Lake NE of Phoenix in October 2007.  Find more info and photos at the Arizona Field Ornithologists page.  If you’d like to check out the view or hike or kayak from Butcher Jones beach, here is a link with a map and other info.  Saguaro Lake is an excellent place for birding and hiking Fall through Spring.

Etymology

The etymology of the word “scoter” is obscure, with no satisfactory concensus. The scoter genus, Melanitta, is a Greek compound from Gr. melas, black, and “nitta” which Choate says “appears to be a misspelling for Gr. netta, duck”.  Most scoters are mostly or entirely black, so the choice is apt.  The Black scoter species, nigra, is the feminine form of Latin niger, black, which makes it a black black-duck.  The Surf scoter species, perspicillata, is from Latin and means “conspicuous” (like the Spectacled owl, Pulsatrix perspicillata).  They should just get it over with and say “clownlike”, right?

Photo: A. Shock/Three Star Owl

I’ve been working hard on pieces for the San Diego Audubon Birding Festival, which is coming right up.  While glazing a wall tile with the portrait of a male Surf scoter and looking at photo resources of scoters, I realized I was being treated to another pervious nostril!

It doesn’t show so much in this photo, but scoters, like cathartid vultures, have pervious, or “see-through” nostrils.  In Audubon’s professionally terse words:

Nostrils sub-medial, elliptical, large, pervious, near the ridge.

–John James Audubon, Birds of America, Family XXXIX. ANATINAE. DUCKS. GENUS V. FULIGULA. SEA-DUCK.

If you don’t know scoters, they’re sturdy North American sea ducks who breed in Alaska and northern Canada and winter along both coasts of the U.S.  They dive for a living.  The picture above, by photographer Alan D. Wilson, is a male Surf scoter (Melanitta perspicillata) at Bolsa Chica reserve, in California.  It shows the handsome bird with what is too frequently described as a “clownish bill”, gliding in the blue backwater of Bolsa Chica Wetlands.  If you’re wondering why the “clownish bill” is so big, scoters eat hard food, some of which — like blue mussels — needs to be pried off of rocks underwater.  In summer, they favor marine invertebrates, in winter, mostly molluscs.

As for the pervious nostril in scoters, I haven’t turned up a definitive discussion yet, but most sea birds need to rid their systems of salt, often by sneezing or dribbling it out through the nostrils, and have evolved various nostrillar adaptions (again, a technical term) to do so: pervious nostrils would not easily become clogged with expelled salt crystals.

To the left is Audubon’s plate of Surf scoters — at the time called Surf Ducks — from Birds of America

Three Star Owl will be at the San Diego Birding Festival in Mission Bay San Diego, 5-8 March 2009.

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!

Great news!  Sharon Stiteler of Birdchick.com fame ran a contest for guest-bloggers while she’s out of the country, and Three Star Owl is her selection for Friday’s guest post!  Regular Three Star Owl readers will recognize the entry as a post from this web journal, Vertical Napping Bark, which is one of my favorites because of the lucky shot of the Great horned owl with downy chick in a snag, demonstrating the beauty of Owly Invisibility very well.

[The image to the right is a digitally-altered photo of the breast feather vermiculation (= Latin for “wormy pattern”) that makes Great horned owls so invisible.]

If you’ve found your way to Three Star Owl from the Birdchick site, Welcome (Cranky Owlet says Hmph!), and take a look around: there’s lots of birdy art in the Gallery and Shop, and posts at the Journal on a variety of topics like birds, clay art, natural history and more!  Make yourself at home, and come back any time.

Thanks, Sharon, and have a great time in Guatemala!

Oh, and in my excitement, I forgot to mention that Swarovski Optik, makers of excellent binox and scopes, and beeooteeful crystal, is helping Sharon sponsor the contest.

Here are the exciting final steps of Jack’s King Vulture.  (Previous increments can be viewed and read about here.)

This first photo, Increment 3, is a close-up of what the piece looks like after it’s been bisqued (fired the first time) and then glazed. Pretty crappy looking, isn’t it?  That’s because glaze is a chalky-looking liquid suspension made of clay, mineral pigments and oxides, a flux or glassy component to create various levels of gloss after melting, plus water. If Pepto Bismol came in a lot of different icky-pale flavors, they would look like glazes. Because of this, glazing a piece you’ve already spent hours on can be an act of faith, and once the raw glazes are on, it’s often hard to escape the feeling that now you’ve gone and ruined it, which sometimes you have.  Fortunately the more you glaze, the better able you are to predict what the chalky colors will look like after firing, so the more you trust the materials and the process (=faith, for a potter).  It’s only after the final firing that the glaze colors take on any kind of brightness and glassy quality. Here is Increment 4, Jack’s finished King Vulture, Sarcoramphus papa, photographed in the wilds of Scottsdale:

Check out the pale eye, it’s not a mistake: the King Vulture’s iris is white, which to our eyes looks pretty weird.  In Mayan glyphs King Vultures are readily identifiable not only by the fleshy knob or caruncle atop their strong, hooked beak, but also by the bold concentric depiction of the staring white eye.  Below is a plate from Animal Figures in the Maya Codices by A.M. Tozzer and G.M. Allen (1910) that shows a selection of Mayan King Vulture glyphs.  Of course, I’m not an expert, but Tozzer and Allen report that the King Vulture represents Cib, the 13th day of the month.  And, on an ornithological note, figure 4 in the plate below shows a King Vulture entwining necks with an Ocellated turkey, the turkey of the Maya, which puts our Wild Turkey of North America to shame in terms of colorful plumage and warty wattly facial skin, which is saying something.  I photographed the Ocellated turkey below at Chan Chich in Belize, where they inhabit the immediate area along with King Vultures, like the one in a previous post who tried to hide behind a leaf.

By the way, if you live in the Phoenix area, there are two King Vultures on display in a large aviary at the Phoenix Zoo.  You could drop in any time to visit them.  E and I just did, on Valentine’s Day.  I guess we missed Cib by one day!

…your guarantee it’s a genuine artefaux.

Pseudopod waltz…you never know which foot is when.

Watch for it.  It’s the only way you’ll know…

Here’s a red subject for Valentine’s Weekend:

In Phoenix there are cardinals.

Everybody knows the football Cardinals, aka “the Redbirds”, who  nearly won the Superbowl recently.  But fewer people, even native Arizonans, know that we also have real Northern cardinals, (Cardinalis cardinalis), aka cardenal comun.  You can’t imagine how surprised some people are when they find out the familiar peaky-headed, conical-billed redster lives in the desert.  I can’t explain this, except that so many folks who live here are originally from the leafy Midwest and Eastern US where the bird is an iconic resident of yards, gardens, and woodlands.  The classic Redbird is so common in the East that it’s the state bird of no fewer than seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia, more than any other bird (just edging out the Western meadowlark with six and the Mockingbird with five).  But the spiny, dry desert?  Nope: in many people’s minds, the cardinal doesn’t figure in this land of Cactus wrens, buzzards, and roadrunners.  Without going off on a much of a rant (see “PS” below for a short one), I blame popular culture —  especially cartoons — which are such a pervasive influence on what we “know” about the world around us that they can override actual observation.

For example, this is a typical conversation:  Friend:  Hey, what kind of a bird did I see at the Desert Botanical Garden yesterday?  It looked exactly like a cardinal, but I know it couldn’t be, because they don’t live here! Me: Was it all red with a black mask and a point on its head, a little smaller than a robin? (We don’t frequently see robins here, but it’s a meaningful comparison for most non-birders because everyone knows robins).  Friend: Yes.  Me: Then it was a cardinal. Friend: What do they do, stock them there or something? etc…

But cardinals do live here, and they are more or less native. By that I mean according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology whose range map this is, Northern cardinals were “first sighted” in south-central Arizona in the 1870s.  (Were they here already, and some white guy just noticed them and told some official ornithology guy back east?  I don’t know.)  But their range is expanding northward, and now they’re found along the Colorado River, among other western locations, and there are even insular populations in Los Angeles and Honolulu, although somebody put them there, they didn’t wing themselves over.  Our desert cardinals like desert scrub and riparian areas, especially if there is water convenient.  They are found in some neighborhoods in Phoenix, but not all.  We see them occasionally in our yard, but the only evidence I’ve personally seen of breeding sadly involved a female cardinal feeding a cowbird chick.

Nothing looks redder than a male cardinal against greenery, and the cardinals of the Sonoran desert are no exception; in fact, they may look even redder.  There could be a couple of reasons for this.  Our subspecies, Cardenalis cardenalis superbus is the largest of the subspecies, and its crest isn’t significantly less red than its breast, and its black facial mask is slightly less extensive than that in other subspecies.  All of this adds up to More Redder.  Above is a picture of a Cardinal in front of a fully leafed-out Ocotillo.  He has a grub in its beak which he flew away with, which means he was feeding young or a female at the nest.  Otherwise he would have gulped it down himself.

So, in the interest in promoting the broader image of cardinals in all of our minds, the photo to the left is a replacement iconography to “cardinal in the snow”: a male cardinal in the Sonoran Desert.  This one, along with about six others heard or seen within a half-mile of the trailhead, was singing out his nuptial qualifications loud and clear on the Peralta Trail in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix last March.  Feel free to click on the photo to see a larger image.

Photos: #1, male Northern cardinal at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, AZ (A. Shock). #2, male Northern cardinal and Ocotillo, Rancho Esmeralda, Sonora, Mexico (A. Shock).  #3, male Northern cardinal and saguaros, Superstition Mtns, Pinal County, AZ (A. Shock).

P.S. — Please note that none of the real cardinals pictured in this post has a yellow bill.

Rant warning (this makes me see red).  The prevalent and imaginary species “yellow-billed cardinal” has been a pet-peeve of mine since we lived in St. Louis.  Both the baseball Cardinals and the football Cardinals (who were still in St. Louis when we were) use jazzy redbird logos that show Cardinals with yellow bills.  The baseball Cardinals’ mascot, Fredbird, has a yellow bill, too.  The artist in me understands that the second spot of color makes for livelier graphics. Unfortunately, I think it’s also another example of pop culture infesting our knowledge of the real world: robins have yellow bills, duckies have yellow bills, therefore cartoon crows have yellow bills, and therefore all bird’s bills are yellow.  And it’s not just the two Cardinals teams — start looking at images of birds in advertising and popular graphics: most birds have yellow bills.  Having made the complaint, I’m not saying sports logos should all be biological illustration (although the Baltimore Oriole is pretty realistic).  But for me the redbird logo loses some “cardinal-ness” with the bill color inaccuracy — it is shifted away from cardinal and toward generic bird, which is less interesting.  But I empathize with an artist who has to make a cardinal look tough, and I do admire the result, from a graphics point of view.  Here’s the Arizona Cardinals logo, and I have no idea if I’m infringing on copyright to post it here; I hope not.

However, I don’t think there’s any hope of biological integrity for Fredbird.  Sorry.  I have never seen a Cardinal with yellow gloves on.  And what’s with the primary-colored primaries?  A real cardinal isn’t colorful enough?  It’s just not right…

Bonus Bird with yellow bill absolutely free:

Now, if you want to see a real desert-dwelling cardinal-like bird with a yellow bill, check out the fabulous Pyrrhuloxia at an excellent post from Firefly Forest, which I can’t improve on.  Except to add, here’s a Pyrrhuloxia portrait magnet, from Three Star Owl:

…to describe his devotion to vole

(for lunch)

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

VOLE = LOVE

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.