I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does

Ladderback woodpecker:

male and female phainopeplas:

Raven:

Male Scott’s oriole:

Female Anna’s hummingbird:

and a male of the same species:

female Costa’s hummingbird:

Male Costa’s hummingbird:

I did a gallinule (also known as a moorhen) and a western kingbird at the museum yesterday. Two weeks ago I began the process of documenting how to prepare a study specimen, but about 1/3 of the way through the process was when my camera took a crap. It was especially irritated because I was preparing a white-tailed kite, a nice sized bird that turned out very nicely.

Here’s what Phil sent out to our supporters and other interested parties after our trip last week (text only, I added the photos):

Dear San Jacinto friends and colleagues,

We found a junkyard

Last week Melody McFarland, Jim Berrian, and I spent from Monday to Wednesday, 8 to 10 September at Valle Vista (just east of Hemet at the west base of the San Jacinto Mountains ), resurveying the site Harry Swarth covered from 30 August to 5 September 1908.  Actually, the site we covered, along the wash of the San Jacinto River at the east end of Valle Vista, is about 2 miles northeast of the 1908 site, which is now covered by orange orchards and the concrete-lined channel of Bautista Creek.  We selected it as a surrogate, as it supports the only remaining alluvial scrub at the same elevation in the general area. It has been designated for conservation as open space and wildlife habitat.  It is under the jurisdiction of the Eastern Municipal Water District, and we thank Joe Lewis, Director of Engineering Services, for authorization and access to cover this site.

This visit was focused on birds and invertebrates; intensive surveys of mammals and reptiles will come on a subsequent visit when more of our team is able to participate.  But we wanted one survey to correspond in time as closely as possible to the time of Harry Swarth’s visit in 1908.  Like Harry Swarth, we experienced the “blistering heat” of which he complained (what do you expect in Hemet in late summer?!), but at least we did not endure the dust storms that afflicted him in 1908. 

Mockingbird

Ken Weaver also covered the site on the morning of 9 August 2008, and his results are tabulated with last week’s in the attached spreadsheet.

The Valle Vista site is interesting because it originally hosted a subset of what I am calling the “Aguanga fauna.”  That is, species of characteristically desert

green lynx spider

distribution that have an isolated population on the west side of the mountains, centered at Aguanga just north of Temecula Creek in south-central Riverside County.  Of birds these include (among others not reported from Valle Vista) the Ladder-backed Woodpecker and Black-throated Sparrow, of mammals the White-tailed Antelope Squirrel, and of reptiles the Zebra-tailed Lizard and Long-nosed Leopard Lizard.  Because the 1908 expedition did not extend south to Aguanga this biogeographically interesting region has gone underappreciated over the last century, and it has been questioned whether the birds were resident in the area or just postbreeding dispersers.  Ken Weaver has been studying the Aguanga region and is finalizing a paper on the area’s birds.

Our striking finding at Valle Vista for 2008 is that none of the “Aguanga fauna” may still survive at Valle Vista.  We hope to find some on future visits, but the Ladder-backed Woodpecker, Black-throated Sparrow, Zebra-tailed Lizard, and

Western toad

White-tailed Antelope Squirrel, at least, should have been seen easily in 4 days if present.  In 1908 Harry Swarth commented on the importance of cactus fruit, noting that the four antelope squirrels he collected were stained inside and out with juice of the fruit.  In 2008, prickly pear cacti were sparse, low, and not looking very healthy; I saw only one fruit, already nearly dried up.  So an important component of the ecosystem may no longer be functioning.  The decline of cactus undoubtedly contributed to the disappearance of the Cactus Wren too.  Similarly, Harry Swarth commented on yucca pods as a food source in 1908; in 2008 yuccas too (both schidigera and whipplei) were few and unimpressive, lacking fruit.

Bewick's wren

A couple of other characteristically arid-country species were barely present in 2008. In 1908, the California Gnatcatcher “was one of the most abundant species” at Valle Vista; in 2008, Ken Weaver found just one on 9 August and we found none from 8 to 10 September. In 1908 Brewer’s Sparrow was “fairly common,” with 3 specimens collected; in 2008 I saw just a single individual each on 9 and 10 September.  It’s not clear in what role Brewer’s Sparrow occurs at this site; most likely it is just a migrant, but a few years ago Bob McKernan found it nesting not far away at Winchester.

cucumber beetle

The message seems to be that when enough species are extirpated from a site interesting biogeographic patterns can be threatened with extirpation as well.  And in spite of the desertification of the climate, it is the seemingly desert-adapted species that have suffered the most in this case. Ken Weaver reports that all the species of the “Aguanga fauna” now missing at Valle Vista still survive at Aguanga, highlighting the conservation importance of that area.

On the plus side, we saw 35 species of birds Harry Swarth missed in 1908, more than doubling the list for Valle Vista.  Among these are many of the usual suspects, the Red-shouldered Hawk, Anna’s Hummingbird, Nuttall’s Woodpecker, Black Phoebe, Cassin’s Kingbird, American Crow, and Common Raven, not to mention the introduced House Sparrow, European Starling, Domestic Pigeon, and Eurasian Collared Dove.  In some cases local conditions at the site clearly contributed: the proliferation of the tree tobacco is providing nectar for 3 species of hummingbirds in 2008; Harry Swarth noted no hummingbirds at Valle Vista in 1908.  The percolation basins in the floodplain, dry in late summer, are grown up now with thickets of sunflowers, providing a bonanza of seeds for the American and Lesser Goldfinches; Harry Swarth noted no goldfinches at Valle Vista in 1908.

To me the most interesting addition among birds was the Rufous-crowned Sparrow.  Along with Snow Creek and Banning, Valle Vista makes the third site at which we have found this sedentary species missed completely in 1908.  Yet Harry Swarth found and collected them less than two weeks after leaving Valle Vista, in the Santa Ana Mountains on the opposite side of the San Jacinto Plain.  I suspect that the species has spread, aided at least by fires in the San Gorgonio Pass.

We were disappointed by the low diversity of reptiles, especially as Jim Berrian is an experienced herpetologist.  But I hope you enjoy Melody McFarland’s photo of the Red Diamond Rattlesnake, a species missed at Valle Vista in 1908.  The site is riddled by abundant rodent burrows, so it is likely to be interesting when our mammalogists are able to work here.  The seasonal flow of the San Jacinto River leaves dried mud, especially in the percolation basins, that is great for prints, so a tracker better than I should be able to identify from them species beyond the raccoon that I could confirm.  In any case, we look forward to future visits to this site, important as the only 1908 site at a low elevation at the west base of the San Jacinto Mountains.

honeybee

Thanks very much again to Joe Lewis for authorizing us, to Karin Cleary-Rose for her advice in this area and suggesting the site we covered as a logical surrogate site, to Ken Weaver for his help and knowledge of this area, and to Melody and Jim for their help in the field.

The Valle Vista trip was our last of the summer; the next will be to Little Paradise in Palm Canyon in the third week of November, beginning our winter surveys.

Thanks for your interest in our study.

We started Sinbad on pehnobarbitol and were told that “he should have about a two week adjustment period” in which time he might be lethargic or otherwise show symptoms of drug use, but after that he’ll be fine. So we started giving him the drugs and waited for him to pass out into a stuporous haze. Nothing happened. He runs around here with his usual vigor and purpose with no ill-effects. I was loathe to give them to him since I’d hate to see anything dampen his spirits but we couldn’t allow the seizures to continue. He’s so cheerful and lively and I want it to stay that way.  Hopefully it’s a high enough dose to suppress the seizures.

Lake Hemet bird photos:

Least tern activity is winding down for the summer and a few last straggling nesters are depositing an egg or two here and there.  Most of the chicks have hatched…and, unfortunately, a rather large number of them have been eaten by a larger species of bird, the gull-billed tern. Gull bills nest on a nearby beach and until just a few years ago, weren’t a problem. For an unknown reason they’ve started making easy meals of least tern chicks in recent years. Matt, my coworker, has spent a considerable amount of time documenting the gull bills’ predatory behavior in writing, still photographs and video. They fly back and forth over the lest tern nesting area hunting for chicks. When one is spotted, they swoop down to take the chick and it’s eaten whole. Unhatched eggs are oftentimes damaged in the process. This is a big deal when you’re dealing with an endangered species.

We’ve found a lot of damaged eggs that are clearly the result of gull bill activity, but we’re not sure what’s going on. The eggs don’t appear to be eaten, just ruined. It’s possible that the terns are anticipating that the egg is far enough advanced in its development that they’ll get a nicely packaged meal. If there is no chick inside and only an embryo, the egg is crushed in their bill, leaving behind a mess of yolk and eggshell. I don’t think this kind of thing has ever been documented and our group is the first to record these kinds of behaviors.

There is nothing we can do at this stage to fend off the gull bills. They’re endangered too, but have not yet made the federal list. Why, I have no idea. It’s a federal offense to molest or kill migratory birds, so we can’t do anything but sit and watch as the chicks are eaten. And nobody knows if we even should do anything. After all, the gull bills need to eat too.  No doubt another ecological catastrophe of human origin.

Here’s Matt setting up the video camera. This is our office:

How many people can call the beach their office?!

We always find something neat while surveying the beach. Here’s a dead sea lion and a nest of mourning dove chicks:

When we find newly hatched chicks we affix color-coded bands to their legs which allows us to identify individuals in successive years when they return as adults. We also take wing and weight measuments.

Here’s a lousy photo of an adult least tern with a fish. My lens just isn’t cut out for this kind of photography:

My specimens at the museum continue to improve and today was my best day yet. We worked on some birds from Project Wildlife – I did an American robin that was found by someone unable to fly and a common poorwill that had been hit by a car. The robin was thin and the poorwill had a broken wing, but were otherwise in excellent condition. My work has improved so much that there is even talk of including me on the San Jacinto Centennial Resurvey in both avian and entomological capacities.

In 1908 Berkley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology began an expedition to the San Jacinto Mountain area of California which was a pioneering endeavor in that it was the first real exploration of southern California’s biology. This year, on the the 100th anniversary of the expedition, the San Diego Natural History Museum begins to document another snapshot of the region’s biota in order to see how wildlife has changed since that time.

From the website:

In 1908, the University of California sent out the first of its expeditions to explore the biology of California—to the San Jacinto Mountain region of Riverside County. Two teams of biologists stayed in the field continuously from May to September, traveling throughout the area, from the valley floor to the mountains’ summit, collecting vertebrates, taking copious notes and photographs, and ultimately publishing their results (Grinnell and Swarth 1913). This expedition is one of the cornerstones of understanding of southern California’s biology: it, and similar expeditions led by Joseph Grinnell to the San Bernardino Mountains in 1905–07 and along the Colorado River in 1912, were the only intensive surveys of the fauna of any area of southern California before the region was transformed forever by the flood of humanity. The expedition of 1908 thus stands as a unique benchmark, giving us the longest historic perspective possible on how the wildlife of southern California is responding to environmental change.

I would be honored to be part of such a historic and important endeavor. As I look through insects and birds at the museum and read their accompanying tags, I always wonder about the collectors – who they were, what the were doing, if the weather was awful at that moment, where they camped. Of course, most are long since dead.  The museum has a significant number of old specimens. It’s fun to think that in 100 years someone will find a specimen I prepared, read my name and wonder the same thing.

Last week we received a dwarf cassowary from the zoo that had died. A bird like that is just too large to stuff and keep as a whole specimen, so Phil decided that we prepare the skeleton only.

There are three species of cassowaries which are large, flightless birds native to New Guinea and Australia. The dwarf cassowary is the smallest of the three and lives in the mountains of New Guinea. The largest, the Southern or double-wattled cassowary, is native to northern Australia, New Guinea and some smaller islands in the vicinity. Gene and I had the experience of a lifetime when we saw a live wild cassowary in Queensland last year. It was absolutely thrilling. These birds are over 6ft tall and weigh up to 180 pounds. We were advised to not walk through the forests without a stick and were briefed on how to behave if we should run across one of these birds. They’re infamous for their ability to eviscerate humans with one kick. In the photo on the left you can clearly see the modified inner talon that’s used for defense. Looks just like a sword and I wouldn’t want to get one of those in the gut. Even on the dwarf cassowary, the power in the legs is staggering. It’s upper legbones were almost the diameter of my forearm bones. That’s some serious kicking power in a bird that’s only 3.5 feet tall. Imagine what one of the big ones could do to your guts!

These birds are important to forest health because they’re frugivores (fruit eaters) and are integral in seed dispersal. Unfortunately, like virtually every other animal on the planet, they are endangered because humans just can’t control their greed and population levels.

I began volunteering in the Entomology Department at the museum which increases my time in the museum to three days a week. The bug department has about 1,000,000 specimens, largely lepidopterans (butterflies and moths), none of which are cataloged. “Not cataloged” means that they are not in any kind of database, anywhere, with identifiers for easy location. I began the monumental task of getting these things organized last week, starting with the type specimens. Each insect will be assigned a museum identifier number and its accompanying information (collector, date, species name, location, etc) will be entered into a computerized database. The best part about this whole project is access to one of the marvels of modern photography, the Canon 65mm MP-E macro lens. A bitch to wield, but take a look at the results:

and that’s not even as good as it gets. This lens can do 5 times life-size, that photo is only 1 or 2. If you’re not camera-geek enough to understand what that means, trust me when I say it’s enough to give me goosebumps.  I would love to have this lens, but I can’t justify the purchase of it just yet without having a wide-angle lens first, something that has a much greater utility and that would nicely round out my basic lens set-up. Its use is very specialized and limited to tiny subjects. It’s extremely difficult to use in the field and its purchase also necessitates the additional purchase of a good tripod and ring flash attachment, bringing the total investment for this lens to roughly $2800. The insect pictured above is probably 1/4 of an inch long.  But the detail! Wow! Take a look at these:

All of the insects pictured here were collected in the early part of the last century, maybe around 1910 to 1930. They remain in remarkably good condition when properly maintained.

We’re not having such a good day around here. Sinbad had another seizure at 6:00 this morning. He’s fine now. There’s not a whole lot we can do about it except give him some valium while he’s seizing.  Even if he has them every month or two, that’s still not enough to warrant putting him on medication.  This sucks.

East coast bird fanciers, did you know that some of the house finches out here are yellow? The typical red color is more common, but it seems to me that they are less purple than those back east.

I am positively ashamed to say that before two weeks ago I had never been to Longwood Gardens in Kennet Square. Me, nature-lover extraordinaire, never visited.  My sister came up with the most excellent idea to take our guests there for the day and it was fabulous. We were there just at the time the fruit trees were blooming and the weather was perfect.

We did a few more things later on during the week, but I’ll post photos of them in the near future. I had a fairly exciting two days at work today and last friday. Plover chicks are hatching and we’re banding them as best we can. Since they leave the nest within just hours of hatching, you’re dependent on a lot of luck and a little bit of perseverance. For instance, just this morning we checked on a nest and saw the tip of a tiny bill poking through a small hole in the center of a network of spider-web cracks on the egg. We returned just two hours later and the chick was out of the egg and hiding under a plant adjacent to the nest. Any later and we may have missed the bird completely. These birds are born precocial, meaning they are ready to go at birth as opposed to altricial birds which need parental care.  They are probably the cutest baby birds I’ve seen (these are from last week):

Notice their coloration. They’re almost indistinguishable from the surrounding sand. Here are some shots from today. The new chick is still wet.

Other news, Sinbad and I have started taking obedience classes at the San Diego Humane Society. Tonight is our second night of class and he’s doing very well…of course, every time I say or write that to someone he does something like pull the blankets out of his crate and pee on them or climb up on the ottoman, proclaim himself king by showing his teeth, and then refusing to move.  But lately he’s taken on more of a submissive role in response to Gene and I which has been a nice change.

Here are some other shots from my visit to the seabird rehabilitator extraordinaire, Meryl. This bird is the first listed in field guides, the red-throated loon. They live along the entire coast of North America, both east and west as well as up into the Arctic and Canada:

I had to be a little cautious in taking that photo. The spear-shaped bill is powered by very strong neck muscles and I wasn’t about to be impaled like a fish.

Contrary to what a lot of non-bird types think, this western grebe is not a duck. It is a member of the Podicpedidae family of birds which includes several other types of grebes. The distinguishing characteristic of this family is the birds’ feet – they have lobed toes instead of webbed feet. Note the irregularly sized pupils in this bird’s eyes, an indication of head trauma:

A surf scoter (a type of duck) drying off after a dip in the pool:

The subject of my employment, a western snowy plover:

One of the benefits of being so close to the San Diego zoo is that the museum recieves all of their dead animals. The byproduct of all those deaths is the growth of the museum’s collection and knowledge repository as well as an exciting opportunity for volunteers such as myself to get our hands on rare and exotic animals, even if they are deceased.

In typical specimen preparation, the birds are carefully skinned and stuffed so as to retain their natural shape and plumage arrangement. Some of the skull, wing, and leg bones are left intact. However, all deceased animals at the zoo are required to have a necropsy which significantly compromises our ability to preserve the animals’ integrity. Whoever does the necropsy chops them up fairly severely which makes it impossible for us to do a stuffed specimen. Instead, we prepare a skin and save the entire skeleton. We denude the skeletons of flesh and then take them offsite where a large colony of dermestid beetles does the fine tuning.

Last week I had the chance to work on a bird called a Kagu, a long-legged, grayish-blue bird endemic to the mountain regions of New Caledonia. This week I prepared a hooded pitta and a Cuban amazon parrot, birds native to Asia and the Caribbean, respectively.  It is impossible to capture in either words or photographs how beautiful the feathers are on birds when you see them up close. The two photos here show the interesting refractive light properties of feathers. I took the same photo, just at a slightly different angle. The blue you see in birds’ feathers has no blue pigment whatsoever. In fact, there is no blue pigment in nature at all and the brilliant blues and purples you see in birds like this parrot (and more common birds like jays, starlings and grackles) is all due to just how the light hits them. Note that in the second photo the green feathers appear as they would if the blue were taken away – as yellow.

Gene, Little Buddy and I are off tomorrow for a 4-day weekend in Carmel and Monterey. I found that elephant seals are pupping this time of year so w’re going to stop at San Simeon on the way there to see them. Check back next week for photos. Carmel is supposedly spectacular.