Decrepit Old Fool

It’s just a few numbers, after all, but mind-blowing when you think about it…

Travelling on a route frequented by 20m of his closest friends, the Sooty Shearwater (which looks like a gray seagull to me) travels 64,00 km each year.  Sometimes it works out to 910km in a single day, and the bird dives 68m under water in search of food along the way. 

68m deep is nearly 8 atmospheres of pressure, or about 100 lbs/in².  That’s four times the pressure inside your car tires.

A bird does that.  Collectively they make up about 16,000 metric tons of squawking, fluttering carniverous biomass redistributing the nutrient value of fish, squid, and krill across the ocean.  How little we understand the ecology, let alone the creatures in it.

We just learned a bunch more about the Sooty Shearwater because scientists fitted some of them with tiny recording devices that kept itty-bitty journals along the trip.  That’s pretty amazing in itself.

In past years, I must have thought these were little bits of fluff from trees or something, but my son point out to me: they’re flies! 

About a half cm. in length, they float around almost, but not quite, by air currents alone.  Maybe they use the wings to steer.  Picture shows one that he coaxed to land on our DVD of The Telltale Heart.

The amazing, endless variety of our natural world…

Neither of our cats are very smart, but they’re accomplished hunters.  So when this one (Oscar) is lounging near the nest of a pair of cardinals (no coincidence, that) you’d think the cardinal would try to practice “The Art Of Not Being Seen”.

But nooooooo!  The daddy cardinal, shown at left, positions himself up on the clothesline, on the lawnmower handle, the treebranch, the guy wire to the phone pole… and peeps at the cat:  “Go away!  We have babies hatching soon!  You are not welcome here!”  Cat lays about on the warm pavement, dreamily anticipating the fun he’ll have devouring the interesting little bird.

MrsDoF has also written about this charming domestic scene: “The birds and the cat”

Update: 16 June 06… Oscar was walking through the cardinal’s territory, minding his own little furry business, when the cardinal landed on the ground about two feet behind him and started hopping along cheeping loudly at him, (I suppose) warning him to go away.

Man, no wonder they’re endangered…

Our campus (and the rest of our town) is annual winter home to an enormous murder of crows, which fill the tops of hundreds of trees at night.  In this early-evening picture, the crows are still arriving and will continue to arrive for another ten minutes or so. Airborne crows do not appear in the picture because the shutter was open for about two seconds.

They are very interesting creatures.  Crows obviously prefer the company of other crows, yet unlike most social birds they are relatively autonomous in flight.  They’re very intelligent birds, and can make an astonishing variety of sounds; some quite human.  They appear to be omnivorous, and despite taking quite a lot of their diet from the streets (in the form of squirrels who, it seems, will never learn), are seldom hit by cars.  After a hard day of doing whatever it is crows do, they return to town in a long, chaotic stream over a hundred feet wide and stretching a mile or so into the evening sky, roosting on trees 70 to 125 feet high.

But as interesting as they are, crows are not good neighbors.  They’re not… toilet trained, and a crow is a lot bigger than a pigeon.  Their droppings pile up under trees like this one.  City and campus workers can be seen out on nice winter days with pressure washers, cleaning off sidewalks but nothing hides the stench, and bird droppings are a real health hazard as they can result in serious lung infections. 

Ideally, the word “murder” should be pronounced in the deep, melifluous voice of The Simpson’s “Sideshow Bob” (AKA, Bob Terwilliger: “Muurrrder of crows”.