Tag Archives | Peregrine Falcon

Birds – Variety and Extremes

Somali Ostrich

The ten thousand species of birds in the world come with tremendous variety. The ostrich can stand nine feet tall, tip the scales at 280 pounds, and run at over forty miles per hour. The bee hummingbird is less than two and a half inches long, weighs one twentieth of an ounce, and can’t run at all, or even walk.

Bee Hummingbird

Bee Hummingbird

A red-breasted merganser flew even with a plane at an air speed of over 80 mph, ground speed over a hundred. Peregrine falcons stooping on prey have sped to at least 186 mph. Hummingbirds can hover in place, a flight achievement of zero mph.

The engine of a plane in Africa sucked in a Ruppell’s griffon vulture–at an altitude of 36,100 feet! Penguins “fly” only under water. New Zealand’s kiwi has stubby little wings, perhaps as useful as a T-rex’s hands; it cannot fly.

Killdeer nest in open flats, maybe gathering just a couple pebbles to mark the site. Orioles weave hanging baskets of plant fiber or other debris. Cliff swallows build with mud, swiftlets use saliva, and hummingbirds gather and form lichen and spider webs. Kingfishers nest in tunnels they dig, as much as eight feet into the ground. Emperor penguins’ feet serve as nests. Eagles build with sticks, adding more as they re-use the nest over years and generations; a nest in Florida was 9.5 feet across, 20 feet deep, and estimated to weigh over two tons. Gyrfalcons in Greenland use a cliff nest that is 2500 years old.

Chimney Swift on Nest

Chimney Swift on Nest

Osprey flap over water looking for fish to catch. The thick-billed murre has been found swimming 690 feet under water.

Goatsuckers and owls wear camouflage feathers that blend into the gray-brown bark they press against. Tanagers, orioles, and honeycreepers blaze brilliant colors with stunning richness and iridescence.

Western Screech-Owl

Western Screech-Owl

All this variety of behavior and physical features is the result of the distinctive habitats that grace our planet. The diverse opportunities, requirements, and happenstance of survival hone the qualities of plumage, flight, size, color, and nest building, as well as the shape and strength of feet and bills, flocking behavior, and everything else about the birds.

The thing about these adaptations is that they do not just permit living a certain way in a certain habitat; they require it. An eagle can’t catch flies from the air to have its dinner. A woodpecker can’t paddle like a duck and skim algae off the water. Like all living things, birds need the habitat they are designed for.

Amazon Fires

Amazon Fires

But now the world is changing. The Amazon is burning, the ice caps are melting, and the reefs are dying. What are the birds to do?

Many have begun the spiral toward extinction. Depending on how fast and how extremely the changes come, some will adapt, as they always have on the changing Earth.

The uneven pattern of evolution is normal. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould termed it punctuated equilibrium, long periods of relative stability “punctuated” by brief periods of rapid evolutionary change.

Generally speaking, when change comes fast, creatures with short generations do well. Bacteria, for instance, can “grow up” and reproduce–which in their case means divide in two–in as little as twenty minutes. The quick regeneration allows for more mutation and more rapid genetic development of adaptations to the new environment. We humans reproduce more slowly, so don’t do well by this measure. However, we are capable of considerable non-biological adaptation–say, build and operate an AC unit.

As for birds? So much depends.

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Wintu Audubon Outing to Dye Creek Preserve

Located in the foothills below Mount Lassen, the 37,540-acre Gray Davis Dye Creek Preserve is an expansive landscape of blue oak woodlands, volcanic buttes, and rolling wildflower fields. The landscape is dissected dramatically by Dye Creek Canyon with its vertical cliffs, clear-water creek, and diverse riparian forests. The forest widens as it leaves the canyon mouth and flows westward, through wetlands, to its confluence with the Sacramento River. Join Larry Jordan, trip leader, for a hike up Dye Creek Canyon. Golden Eagles, Peregrine Falcons and Canyon Wrens are a possibility. Wild flowers should be abundant. The trail is rough and a small stream crossing should provide some excitement. Bring water, a lunch, and sturdy shoes for this all day outing. Meet at 7:30 sharp at the Kutras Park on Park Marina Drive to carpool and bring a lunch for this full-day trip.

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Wintu Audubon Outing to Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

The Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge is a national gem, well worth the short, 90 mile drive to Willows. Enormous numbers of waterfowl fill the sky and the impoundments in fall and winter. Snow, Ross’s and Greater White-fronted Geese, Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers and Gadwalls are assured. Possibilities are White-faced Ibis, Green-winged and Cinnamon Teal, Black-necked Stilts and various raptors, including Bald Eagle and Peregrine Falcon. Most of the birding is done from cars. We will provide 2-way radios to report sightings and alert people in other cars to look for them. Meet your leader at 7:30 am sharp at Kutras Park on Park Marina Drive to carpool and bring a lunch for this full-day trip. Fees to enter the refuge are $6 per car for the day. Most carpool drivers have senior lifetime passes and can enter for no additional fee. For more information call Larry Jordan @ 949-5266

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A Thanksgiving Celebration                           of the part of the bird we don’t eat

Peregrine Falcon

Peregrine Falcon

Bill, neb, schnoz – whatever it’s called, a bird’s beak is its second most important appendage after its wings. Since birds’ upper limbs are devoted to flight, the beak is vitally important in manipulating objects for feeding and nest building. Although some species are able to use feet for those purposes, many rely entirely on their bills.

The upper and lower mandibles comprising the beak are bony structures covered with keratin, a substance similar to human fingernails – and also similarly, constantly growing. The keratin layer may be very rigid and powerful as in the woodpeckers, whose beaks can drill nest holes or tease out insects in hardwood trees. In some species such as puffins and White Pelicans, the keratin forms projections during breeding season, presumably to enhance their attractiveness to prospective mates. These ornaments are shed after nesting time.

Icthyornis dispar

Icthyornis dispar

So, how did the toothed jaws of ancestral dinosaurs become transformed into modern beaks? A strong hint is offered by the recently reconstructed fossils of an ancient sea bird, Icthyornis dispar, that lived alongside dinosaurs 87 to 82 million years ago. Although it had dinosaur-like teeth, its long, narrow jaw was tipped by a tiny beak that it could have used like tweezers to grasp objects. The scientist that led the effort to reconstruct this bird said that it pecked like a bird, but bit like a dinosaur.

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Over the millennia since then, adaptation to many different foods and environments has led to the vast variety of bills seen in modern birds. Form follows function, and so we have finch and sparrow beaks that act as crackers for seed-opening; eagles with shredders to tear apart meat; woodpeckers with chisels to bore into wood for insects; hummingbird probes used to reach into flowers for nectar; heron and kingfisher spears for skewering fish or frogs; and the warblers’ tweezers for grabbing insects. Not all birds have beaks specialized for a single purpose – the omnivorous crow has a versatile beak that all by itself can be likened to a Swiss army knife.

American Crow

American Crow photo courtesy of Ingrid Taylar

Most birds have little or no sense of smell, but there are notable exceptions. Vultures find the carrion they eat by odor – a characteristic taken advantage of by oil pipeline companies. By including a decay molecule in the crude oil, oil companies attract a cloud of vultures to leaks. The vultures, in turn, are followed by pipeline tenders with repair equipment. At sea, the tables are turned. Some seabirds can follow an odor plume to locate dead fish – and in this case the birds take advantage of the humans to detect fishing boats and their discards.

Generally, nostrils are on the part of birds’ beaks close to the head. However, New Zealand’s distinctive kiwi has nostrils near the tip of the beak where its well-developed sense of smell helps it find the insects and earthworms that it eats in the leaf litter.

Kiwi

Kiwi

The flamingo feeds in a manner as distinctive as its tropical appearance. It partially submerges its beak in prey-rich water, holding it upside down so that the upper mandible is below the lower mandible. It draws in large amounts of water and sieves out small organisms by means of hair-like projections on its beak. Thus, it is a filter-feeder, a characteristic it shares with baleen whales and oysters!

American Flamingo

American Flamingo

Our familiar hummingbirds have tropical cousins with amazingly long or fantastically curved beaks that match the corolla tubes of the flowers they feed from. Scientists who study them think that they are partnered in an “arms race” against other flowers and birds. As the flower and the hummingbird team becomes increasingly matched to just each other, they become physiologically committed to just their unique flower-bird relationship, and they exclude other species from their activity. It is as if they are in a long process of being wedded to each other.

Anna's Hummingbird

Anna’s Hummingbird

You don’t have to travel to exotic places or visit zoos to see these amazing beaks in action. Notice the different ways the house finches and the nuthatches that visit your feeders get into the seeds that they eat. Look at the bills of the birds in your yard – do they look like tweezers, probes or chisels? Then watch and see how the bird uses its beak. This makes another way to enjoy the birds around us.

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Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Outing

Peregrine Falcon

This nationally known gem is well worth the 90-mile drive. Enormous numbers of waterfowl fill the sky and numerous impoundments in fall and winter. Snow, Ross’ and Greater White-fronted Geese, Northern Pintails, Northern Shovelers and Gadwalls are assured. Possibilities are White-faced Ibis, Green-winged Teal, Black-necked Stilts and various raptors. We hope to provide 2-way radios to report sightings and alert people in other cars to look for them. Most of the birding is done from cars. Meet at Kutras Park on Park Marina Drive to carpool. (See map.) Bring a lunch for this full-day trip. Mike Carion will lead.