The 2009 National Wildlife Photo Contest

We’re back to share with you some of the winners from this year’s National Wildlife Federation photography contest winners. Not only are the photos great, each has something to teach us about the natural world.

As we noted last time, Rob Palmer of Colorado won the Grand Prize in this contest as well as the London Museum of Natural History’s prize.  In that photo, a Bald Eagle was about to dine on a Red-winged Blackbird.  In this one, a Bald Eagle is about to eat a Starling.

Rob Palmer

The lesson about nature from this photo is easily summarized: Starlings lack rear-view mirrors.

Next we have this photo, of another Starling, made by Karen Bloodworth. From it we learn that Starlings not only lack rear view mirrors: When young, they are easily confused about who is supposed to feed them.

Karen Bloodworth

Next is a photo made by Patricia Kline.  The Halloween message is clear:  Protect your pumpkins from Barn Owls wearing masks. That is a Barn Owl, right?

Patricia Kline

We leave you with this one, shot by Marcia Olinger.

Marcia Olinger

Two possibilites exist about nature’s lesson in this photo.  One hypothesis is that squirrels can’t read.  Or perhaps they can read, but are scofflaws.  Either way, signs warning them to keep away from the bird food won’t work.

__________________
You can see all the winners here and we recommend spending a few minutes with them. All of them remind us that we are not separate from nature, but a part of it.  Here is an article about the contest with larger photos but be patient, sometimes it takes a long time to load.

If the squirrels are eating the bird food you put out, here is a squirrel-proof feeder that doesn’t care if they can read.

Prize Winning Bird Photos

Last week, ravaged by pink eye, I lay in bed, scarce caring whether I lived or died.  Only Hilda, my toothless old Mother, bothered to bring me food and quinine.  When, at last, my strength began to return, Hilda brought me my computer.  With her old, red gums clashing she told me she had found me wildlife pictures to aid in my recovery, just like she used to do when I was a child and came down with the scurvy.  Mine was a poor childhood, without even Vitamin C to fortify me for the twenty-mile uphill trudge — both ways — to school through the driving blizzards.  Often I was lost for weeks at a time.

In the days of renewed vigor following my illness, I learned from the computer of the results of two wildlife photography contests which, with my increasing energy I am now able to tell you about by weakly click-clicking away on this keyboard.

In the first contest, run by the Museum of Natural History in far off London, a place I could only dream about during my poverty-encrusted childhood out on the endless prairies, Rob Palmer of Colorado, USA, won for this photo of a Bald Eagle snatching a Red-winged Blackbird out of the air. We’ve told you before about Palmer who is one of our favorite photographers of birds.

Rob Palmer

Palmer’s photo wasn’t the only bird photo that won a prize.  Several others were also winners. Here is one from Finland, a place almost as cold and dark in the winter as my childhood home.  That is a wolf approaching some carrion, driving Ravens and Magpies from his path. I remember the wolves howling as they tried to run me down when I plodded home from school during dark evenings.

Seppo Pollanen

I often shared my childhood home in the cliffs above the Yukon River with Peregrine Falcons.  Shivering there in the cold, I wished they would share their kills with me, but they never did, so I existed on rutabagas. Over in England a single Peregrine can cause panic among thousands of starlings, as in this photo.  The falcon is out of the photo on the left but you can see the wave of starlings departing.

Danny Green

Another prize winner, this one from France, reminds me of my childhood home deep in the Everglades.  Every so often I could take my eyes off the water-moccasin infested swamp long enough to glance into the trees where I would be rewarded with a glimpse of a woodpecker.  Like this photograph, that was long ago, when the world itself was still only in black and white, not like now with all the pretty colors.

David Hackel and Michel Poinsignon

Finally, my strength begins to wane — I’m not the man I once was you know — I leave you with another of the London prize winners.  This one doesn’t have a bird in it at all, but I include it because it reminds me of the jackals on the African savannah that used to hunt me as I slogged across the endless Serengeti on my way to school each day.

Lorenz Andreas Fischer

If I live long enough, we’ll be back next time with the winners of the other photo contest.
___________________

Congratulations to Rob Palmer. And, here is a hint about the next contest we’re going to cover; Palmer won that one too.

___________________________

Sharp-eyed readers will notice the shameless plagiarism of E.B. White in the first three and a half sentences.  Most of that was lifted from his essay, “Fierce Pajamas” which you can find in The New Yorker book of the same name at page 7.  I stole the idea of simply lifting somebody else’s sentences — just to get started, you understand — from Steve Martin’s “Writing is Easy!” in the same book.

Beverly Hills Declares War on Birds

Beverly Hills, home to generations of movie stars and other rich people, has declared war on songbirds. It may be part of a broader conspiracy. San Francisco, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Los Angeles have piled on.

Woe betide anyone Beverly Hills or those other California towns who dares declaw a cat!  All those places have just passed city ordinances outlawing the declawing of cats.

From what I’ve read about the fearsome debate in California, which apparently revolves around a political dispute between local communities and the state veterinarian association, not one word has been raised in defense of song birds, the leading victims of those claws.

That’s not fair. If you are at risk of death from a cat’s claws, shouldn’t you at least get your own spokesman? I realize it’s Hollywood, so maybe the birds aren’t entitled to a lawyer, but surely a publicist at least? Or somebody from PETA?  (Well, maybe not PETA. I see that the president of PETA now demands that we call fish “sea kitties,” so I suspect that PETA may have a bias in favor of cats and a prejudice against birds, the largest population of wild animals on earth.)

We’ve written before about the songbird death rate caused by both pet and feral cats.  Let us hasten to add that, of all the options available to ease that slaughter, declawing your pet cats should be a last resort.  Far better to keep your cat indoors — with a scratching post — where coyotes, owls, cars, dogs, and other cat predators can’t get at them. Indoor cats live longer, healthier, warmer, and happier lives. Here are some other ideas.

And why doesn’t someone invent a way to simply cover cat claws with some kind of padding? Ballet dancers have them for their toes.

Birds used to have claws themselves, like this. No cat would mess with a bird like that.

The downside of criminalizing cat declawing is that people who want to keep their cats indoors may decide that protecting their nice furniture — and we assume the denizens of Beverly Hills have very nice furniture — from the claws of their pets is more important than keeping the cat indoors. Being law abiding citizens they will then condemn their pets to an outdoor life and their pets will set about killing wild birds.

Of course, this may be nothing more than a ploy by those California communities to pander to the cat tourism industry.  Big business, cat tourism.  People are always driving half-way across the continent or flying half-way round the world just to get a fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s pet cat.  Not at all like birders, who hardly ever go anywhere in search of birds. Cat tourists leave no stone unturned in the quest to see just one more pet cat.

But at least now we know the reason why, when you look at lists of the best places to go birding in the world, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood are not on the list.

_____________________________
NBC and the Los Angeles Times reported the news about the ordinances, as did the Huffington Post. The quote from the PETA president came from this.

____________________________
Don’t forget to be a great citizen and shop at The Fat Finch this weekend.

The Language of Birds

The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical: little is said, but much is meant and understood.   Gilbert White – English naturalist (1720-1793)
______________

Be a Great Citizen

The world’s economy remains in trouble and all good people everywhere are asking, “How can I help?”

We’ve got the answer!

Spend money at The Fat Finch! Or, if you live close, come into the physical store, address below.

You’ll help the world’s economy, you’ll help keep us open for business in these hard times, and you’ll feel a sense of purity and serenity, knowing that you’ve done your bit to help the world.

Really.

No birds were harmed in the making of this blog post.

Prayer to the Snowy Owl

Out here, it’s the Season When Thunder Sleeps and the snows of winter begin to fall. Up north, in the Arctic, it grows dark.

But that does not mean all life, or even all bird life halts up there in the dark.  To remind us of that, here is John Haines’ wonderful poem about Snowy Owls:

Prayer to the Snowy Owl

Descend, silent spirit;
you whose golden eyes
pierce the grey
shroud of the world—
Marvelous ghost!
Drifter of the arctic night,
destroyer of those
who gnaw in the dark—
preserver of whiteness.

____________________________
The painting of the Snowy Owls is by Roger Tory Peterson.

Cats, Birds, and Bird Feeding

Recently, we had two customers in the store who are cat lovers.  Seeing the cat bib we sell, designed to passively interfere with cats’ hunting, one of them seemed offended that someone would put that on a cat and she remarked, “ Cats kill birds, it’s nature!”

Egyptian Cat Mummy

That’s wrong, at least in all the world except North Africa and the Near East.  Cats are indigenous there but nowhere else. In North Africa and the Near East birds have been evolving defenses against cat predation since the Pleistocene. Elsewhere though, cats are newcomers, brought by humans; instead of having hundreds of centuries to evolve defenses, birds have had only a few hundred years. Birds in places like North America have not had time to develop defenses against cats’ deadly effective hunting skills.

So, it is not “nature” nor is it “natural” for cats to be killing birds in North America, South America or Europe. Humans interfered with nature when we brought the cats.

And have we brought cats.  In the United States alone more than   150 million cats are alive as you read this, their ancestors brought here by humans. More than 82 million are kept as pets and the number of feral cats probably exceeds 70 million. And all of them are killing birds whenever they get the chance.

Here is the grim fact:  Cats kill millions of birds every year.  Pet cats don’t kill them for food, they kill them because cats are hunters.  Their hunting instinct is independent of their urge to eat and they hunt whether they are hungry or not. Feral cats kill many more.

Kitten Eating a Rabbit

We’ve written in this space before about the well-intentioned efforts of cat lovers to trap, neuter, and return feral cats.  (TNR) Now comes yet another piece of scientific evidence that it doesn’t work.  Biologists recently studied a feral cat colony in Tucson, Arizona, and discovered that local coyotes were eating them. And, another anecdotal piece of evidence arrived in our in-box:  At one feral cat colony in Southern California, coyotes discovered the cats and killed most of them.  Then, the coyotes kept coming back to eat the cat food set out by the people maintaining the colony.

We doubt that our customer who thinks that cats are just being true to nature when they kill birds would be as blase if a coyote kills one of their pet cats.  But, just as cats hunt birds, coyotes hunt small mammals. And the coyotes are indigenous.

Bird-Saving Cat Bib

Because this slaughter of birds by cats is human-caused, we ought to do as much as we can to lessen the impact on wild bird populations.  Here are some suggestions:

1.  Keep your cats indoors.  This is the most humane solution, indoor cats lead longer and healthier lives.

2. Hang birdfeeders out in the open and far enough away from trees so that cats can’t hunt them from underneath or inside  a tree.

3. If you live where cactus grows, surround the birdfeeding station with cactus.

2.    The best recent invention we’ve seen for preventing cats from killing birds is a catbib.  Invented by a backyard, bird-feeding, cat lover, the CatBib (a thin neoprene bib) disrupts the cat’s hunting skills, without interfering with any other kitty activities. It acts as a barrier between cat and prey by getting in the way just as the cat strikes out for the bird. Because birds see in color, it also functions as a colorful visual warning to the birds. Birds can see the cat coming. The best part about the catbib is that it doesn’t interfere with the cat’s ability to eat, drink, run, etc. and enjoy being outdoors. Cat owners who have used it report great success. (By the way, bells on cat collars don’t work. Cats can creep along stealthily and hunt without the bell ever ringing. Like we said, they are great hunters.)

And everybody should neuter their pet cats. Over time, that would even help reduce the number of feral cats.

__________________________
Full Disclosure: Until a few weeks ago, when his time to die finally came, we had shared fifteen years of our life with a cat.  Waldo wasn’t much of a hunter in his final years because his eyesight faded and he was content, as an old cat should be, to sleep in warm places. And we had him pretty well trained to stay in the front yard and out of the back yard where the bird feeders are.  But he no doubt killed many birds in his younger days and we didn’t always follow our own advice of keeping him indoors.  We miss him, but we’ve decided to forego further cats. Responsibility for ameliorating this human-caused slaughter of birds starts at home. Besides, our next door neighbor has upwards of ten cats so, anytime we want to hold a purring cat, we can go to her house.

________________________________
The latest TNR study, Observation of Coyote-Cat Interactions” by Grubbs and Krausman is in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Wildlife Mangement.

The number of pet cats in the U.S. comes from  “Market research statistics – U.S. pet ownership“. American Veterinary Medical Association. http://www.avma.org/reference/marketstats/ownership.asp. Last visited November 10, 2009.

For more on feral cats see,  Mott, Maryann (2004-09-07). “U.S. Faces Growing Feral Cat Problem“. National Geographic News, http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/09/0907_040907_feralcats.html. Last visited November 10, 2009.

The photo of a feral kitten eating a rabbit is by Jake Berzon and the Egyptian cat mummy photo was taken by E. Michael Smith.

Off the Subject

We’re off the subject of birds today in order to bring you this photograph:

The Gamma Ray Sky NASA Photo

That is a visible light rendering of the gamma-ray sky, stitching together an entire year’s worth of observations from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.  One measurement made with that telescope proved, yet again, that Einstein was right that the speed of light is constant, no matter its color, its energy, its direction, or how you yourself move in relation to it.  After traveling 7.3 billion years, gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths made it to earth within nine-tenths of a second of each other, precisely as predicted by Einstein’s theory.

Being a physicist after Einstein must be like being a poet after Shakespeare, a landscape photographer after Ansel Adams, or a painter of birds after Audubon.

_________________________
The photo and information is from today’s New York Times Science section.

Songbird Creation

Modern science tells us that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  Other stories are told too, such as this one from the Navajo creation story which tells about the creation of the smaller birds.

It is said that Monster Slayer went to his mother Changing Woman to ask where he would find the Bird Monsters. (Tsé Ninájálééh) At first, his mother refused to tell him, fearing that her son would be killed by the awful bird-like monster that lived in those days on Tsé Bit’a’í, the Rock with Wings, now called Shiprock in northwest New Mexico on the Bilagáana maps.  But Monster Slayer was insistent and eventually she told him and he set off, intending to kill those monsters.

The bird monsters had two chicks and, like all bird chicks everywhere, they were ravenous and kept their parents busy all day, every day just feeding them.  But their parents brought only people for them to eat.  The two adult bird monsters flew over the land, grabbed living people, flew back to Rock with Wings and then dropped the victims from a great height onto the huge rock where their chicks could feast on the bodies.

Which is why Monster Slayer set out to find and kill them.

Finding them turned out to be easy. The male monster bird saw Monster Slayer coming from miles and away and, after making three passes at him, grabbed him in his huge talons, flew high above Rock with Wings and dropped him on the rocks far below.

But Monster Slayer came prepared.  He had an eagle feather his father had given him and he used it to float gently down to the rocks.  Once there he cut open a bladder of blood from a different monster he had slain so blood flowed over the rocks as if Monster Slayer had really died.

Satisfied that his chicks could now eat their latest meal, the male bird monster flew off in search of more food for them. But the chicks were in for a surprise.

As they approached Monster Slayer, he leapt up and demanded that the baby bird monsters tell him exactly when both of their parents would return and where they would land on the Rock with Wings.  Terrified, the chicks told him.  Their father would return with the next male rain and their mother with the next female rain.  They also pointed out exactly which rocks their parents would land on.

Soon a male rain came with its lightning, thunder, wind, and hard rain.  The male monster bird returned as foretold by his chicks and Monster Slayer killed him by hurling a lightning bolt right through him.

Later, a female rain, with its soft, gentle, quiet rain arrived; the mother monster bird arrived, and Monster Slayer killed her too.

The baby chicks started an awful howling, fearing that they were next.  But Monster Slayer saw that they were still little and could be turned into useful birds and so he made one into an eagle and the other into an owl.

But now it was late afternoon, the sun was declining in the west, and Monster Slayer was stuck high up on the Rock with Wings with no way to get down.

Just then he spotted Bat Woman walking on the ground by the great rock and he called to her, asking for her to help him down.  But Bat Woman did not want to help because she thought of herself as being very ugly and she did not like for others to look at her.

Eventually though she agreed to help Monster Slayer down based on his promise to her that she could have all the feathers from the male Monster Bird with which she could adorn herself and become beautiful.  So Bat Woman helped him down, though not without trouble because Monster Slayer kept ignoring her commands to keep his eyes shut.

After he was down, he gave her all the feathers which she put in her basket.  But she did not want Monster Slayer or anyone else watching her put the feathers on and become beautiful so she started walking off toward a field of sunflowers.

Monster Slayer warned her not to go that way but she ignored him, just he had ignored her when she told him to keep his eyes shut.  As she walked, something fluttered in her basket but she kept going, right into the field of sunflowers.  Suddenly birds of all kinds started flying out of the basket containing the feathers of the monster bird.  When she realized that all those birds were coming out of her basket, she tried to stop them but couldn’t.

Finally she gave up trying to keep them in the basket, set the basket down and just watched as all those birds flew away.  “They flew away as wrens.  They flew away as warblers.  They flew away as sparrows. They flew away as titmice.”  All of them flew away until her basket was empty.

And there she sat, in the middle of the sunflowers, “. . .as ugly as she ever was and as ugly as she would always be.”  Which is why, it is said, that bats are still ugly and fly only at night so no one can see them.

And that is where songbirds came from.

We leave it to you to speculate on this question: How did this creation myth, which was told long before modern science discovered that birds evolved from dinosaurs, know about the Monster Birds from which, according to modern science, all songbirds derived?

___________________________
The entire story of the Navajo creation story about small birds can be found in Zolbrod, Dine Behane: The Navajo Creation Story, UNM Press 1984, pp 230-241.

The photo of Shiprock is from the NPS, the bat from the USGS, and the feathered bird monsters from the Dinosaur Museum.

Night Crane

A cold front passed through three days ago, leaving us with three crystal-clear autumnal moonlit nights which, if you were warmly dressed, were well-suited to sitting out in the back yard, listening to the trumpets of evolution. The Sandhill Cranes are migrating and this year many have chosen the night flight, probably because the winds aloft, swirling around a departing low pressure blow in the right direction.

And the sunrise this morning brought hundreds more, flying right over the house. One group was accompanied by a hawk, soaring just below them, perhaps catching a ride on their wing-waves.  Being cranes, they appeared utterly unconcerned about the hawk and the hawk seemed only to be interested in tagging along for a bit.

The crane migration, along with hummingbirds, thunderstorms, and Border Collies aging, mark the passage of time for us.  When the autumn cranes arrive, we know that another summer died peacefully in her sleep. Surrounded by birds, we know that the cranes will come tell us when spring heads north again next year.

Happy Autumn to all our readers.