Category Archives: Nature

The Bluebirds of Ultra-violence

Sorry to bum y’all out again about the joys of spring, but…

You remember my post the other day about the green bird at our feeder? Down in the comments, I shared a beautiful bluebird photo from Jim Greene up in Virginia, who has a much better camera than my iPhone.

Well, in an email over the weekend, Jim shared some less-lovely images from bluebirddom.

Above, you see a couple of males engaged in combat. Down below, you see something more unusual — a fight between two females.

The good news is that Jim says there appeared to be no injuries. More of a harmless bluebirds-will-be-bluebirds matter. But it’s not always that way. A couple of weeks back, my wife was shocked to see images on a South Carolina birding Facebook page of a fight to the death between two males. It kind of darkened her perception of a beloved species.

Have they always been like this? Jim said he’d never seen bluebirds acting this way, despite his years of nature photography — and now he has documentation of both males and females mixing it up! Is this evidence of a recent breakdown in bluebird culture?

What could have caused this increase of bitter polarization among the members of this handsome species? Social media? Probably. Yeah, let’s go with that. Remember, you read it here first…

But this was nice. What was it?

Just so y’all won’t think I’m a total curmudgeon about springtime, or that I hate nature or whatever, I thought I’d share this.

This inexplicable (to me) green bird visited our deck feeder this morning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in my yard. I’m used to the dull greys and browns of wrens and the like, occasionally relieved by a cardinal or bluejay.

But green?

Can anybody identify it?

I thought it was pretty nice. Regrettably, as I was texting it to my wife, who was out of the house, I missed a better shot when two dull grey-and-brown birds landed next to this one on the feeder. It really made the green pop out more. But I couldn’t get my phone into position to shoot it before the green one flew away.

But despite the limitations of my iPhone shooting through a window at several yards distance, I think you can tell that this is an unusual bird…

An even darker sign of Spring

Excuse me for being such a bummer at this beautiful time of year. Perhaps as you read, you can listen to a bit of “Le Sacre du Printemps” as a way of keeping your own head in a nice place.

But of course for me, one of the most allergic people you know, this season is less than pleasant. Not always, but a lot of the time. Especially the last few days. I go out to enjoy one of my walks, and then I pay for it all day and night. So I’m sticking more to the elliptical here in my office for getting my steps in.

People complain about their “seasonal allergies.” I have allergies all the time, and take several drugs every day to keep them in check. But of course there are times when the allergies are worse, and not in check, even with extra drugs. This is one of them.

So, when I went out for a walk over the weekend, I knew I was letting myself in for some unpleasantness. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the sight above, which I encountered a couple of blocks from my house.

This is not an unusual sight in my neighborhood. Copperheads abound, and a lot of them seem to like to slither on the paved road, regardless of traffic. I’ve found at least a couple of them in this condition alongside my own yard in recent years.

But that’s usually in the summer. Remember when my wife and I encountered a live copperhead traveling down the street back in 2020, as bold as though he owned it? That was… well, it was late summer, but still summer (Sept. 13).

So it’s particularly creepy to find this rather mature pit viper on March 23. Even creepier, it occurs to me that maybe not all of them are this stupid. Before I got home from the walk that day I tweeted this:

For those who have been looking forward to copperhead time: They are out and about now. And I wonder, for each one I find dead in the road, are there 100 others that were smarter? pic.twitter.com/9VtM2bVyG0

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 23, 2024

Maybe they’re all that stupid, but I doubt it. So stop and smell the beautiful flowers, if you’re not allergic to them. But watch where you’re putting your feet…

I shot these back on March 5, which also seemed early to me — but more pleasant that the snake.

Catching up, with a few photos

Just got back from the beach a couple of hours ago. Sorry I haven’t posted. I’ve been busy, you’ve been busy. You know how it is.

I’ll just try to catch up with some pictures, starting a couple or so days before Christmas…

Did you check out the big sale in the last few days of Barnes & Noble at Richland Fashion Mall? This was taken three days before Santa came.

Note that I am standing with my back almost to the opposite side of the store from the cash registers, and the line in front of me extends all the way to the registers. And I’m not even at the back of the line. I waited in the queue while my wife continued browsing. We came away with a dozen or so books, marked down by 50 or even 75 percent. One was for me — something I never got around to reading in school (A Separate Peace). The rest were gifts…

On the next day, Saturday, my middle daughter and I decided to take a last-minute swing through Five Points. It was the first time I’d spent much time roaming around there since the Götterdämmerung — the closing of Yesterday’s. I also had occasion to mourn the missing Starbucks, and my daughter and I had to help a man from Cayce find another musical instrument store when he was disappointed to find Pecknel’s closed as well. But Papa Jazz was still there, as was Loose Lucy’s!

Here’s the store!

And here’s persistent proprietor Don McAllister, who reports that he’s had his best year ever! He and I chatted nostalgically for awhile about retired local leaders such as Duncan McCrae and Debbie McDaniel, and the late lamented hero Jack Van Loan. And I learned a shocking thing: Don himself is 12 years younger than I am! I thought he’d been running this store forever…

OK, now we’ll skip over Christmas, because that’s all personal family pics. We went to the beach Wednesday…

I did a lot of walking — managed to catch up on my steps for the month so I didn’t even have to walk today to meet my goal. And on my first morning I was surprised to find this interesting rose on someone’s front fence. Yes, three days after Christmas. We are living in weird times. Not that I’m any expert on when flowers are supposed to be out. In fact, I’m only saying this is a rose because of the leaves and the thorns. I’m sure it would smell as sweet by another name…

Later that same day, the 28th, my wife and I took a longer stroll on the beach, and found more cool bits of nature than we would have found amid the crowds in August. I’ve seen starfish there before, of course, but this is the first time I’ve spotted a sea urchin that still had some spines on it. I used to see live ones at low tide on the Pacific coast of South America when I was a kid, but this was my first one in South Carolina, I think…

Back here in the Midlands, I often marvel at grown men out walking wearing winter coats over short pants. This kid had them beat. A jacket and a toque… with pants rolled up so he could wade barefoot in the winter brine…

We found quite a few beautiful, fully intact nice shells that we had to put back in the water because when you turned them over the critters were apparently still living in them — such as the one above…

We ran across an interesting confrontation between two avian species. (Click on it to see it better; I left it big.) Note the way the gang of gulls on the left is glaring as one at the pigeons, who are doing their best to ignore the gulls. Obviously, the gulls have a strong case on their side. I mean, it’s their turf, right?…

Alas, this magnificent crab — from port to starboard, he was about a foot across — was no longer among the living. But still, an impressive find. No idea what caused his (or her — I know even less about crabs than about flowers) demise…

Later that same day, I went to check, and Murrells Inlet was still there, with a pelican presiding…

That was a pretty full day of walking and shooting pictures. I thought this one I took that night was pretty good, for a phone camera….

And then, fairly early the next morning, I went for a similar composition, only of a bridge across a freshwater pond, rather than the ocean. Yeah, the moon and the sun kind of blew out on both of them, but I like them…

On Saturday, I made a significant archaeological find on the beach. This is the first sand castle I’ve discovered that the builder actually used stone as a significant part of its construction. Still, I see no evidence of use of tools…

Finally, later that day, we were walking back a block or two off the beach when my wife spotted this flag in the gutter below it. (A bit of unconscious political commentary on the state of the nation?) Since it was nylon and in good shape — it seemed to have simply blown off its staff — I went around to a couple of nearby houses to see if anyone would claim it. (Rather than, you know, burning it as I heard we should do with flags that touch the ground when I was a kid.) When no one did, I clipped it securely to the tree, hoping the owner would more easily find it…

That’s all. No actual commentary. Just, I’m back and hoping we all have a fine 2024…

I don’t want to bother Rudy Mancke again…

So I thought I’d see if any of y’all know what these things are…

One of them’s a snake, and in the past I’ve asked Rudy about snakes — here and here — but I hate to bug him about a tiny snake.

This little guy — he’s barely a foot long — was poised at the entrance of my garage when I came back from a walk yesterday. (See how he’s mostly lying in a crack? The nearer darker concrete is my driveway, the concrete he’s moving onto is the garage floor.)

I shot this picture, and then went inside, and texted the picture to my wife, who promptly asked me to keep him (or her, if you can tell) out of the garage. She didn’t want to get a surprise upon opening one of the many containers of junk out there.

So I went back out, and immediately saw one of our resident cats standing over the spot where the snake had been. When I walked toward her, she slipped away — she’s not the world’s most sociable cat. Near as I could tell, she didn’t have anything wriggly hanging out of her mouth as she did so.

A closeup…

And the snake was gone. I figure the cat scared it off. I hope so.

The other picture is the oddest assortment of little anthills (or something) I’ve ever seen. These were covering a large portion of a neighbor’s yard where erosion had eliminated greenery.

I’m used to seeing huge, multi-family anthills around here. This looked like ant suburbs, with little hills made of ticky-tacky crowded together.

What kind of ant — or some other creature — does this kind of thing? If you know, let me know…

Sometimes, things just get better, don’t they?

We are living in a mad time, when it seems we can’t fix anything. Our country is so divided, and our politics even more. Congress has been completely dysfunctional for so long that younger people — such as those who have no memory of the things that got done during the Johnson administration — think it was always this way.

So whether you’re looking at global climate change, or race relations, or the national debt, or even something as immediate and narrow-gauge (but alarming as all get-out, if you are so blessed as to have a baby in your house) as the baby formula shortage, it just doesn’t seem like anything will ever, ever get better.

And yet, if we turn from that and just watch Nature, we see the most amazing things happen — with no effort at all on our part.

For instance — on Saturday, the rain came down hard for awhile. After that, the hanging flower pots on our deck didn’t look too great. See the picture above. They had been beautiful, and my wife — who had put them there — took delight in them. And then they looked like something practically destroyed.

Then the next day, wow. See the picture below. No, this wasn’t a surprise. We figured they would make a comeback. But I thought I would still tell about it here, because I think that too often, we assume too much, and don’t appreciate enough.

I’m reminded of one of my very favorite Bible passages:

25
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat [or drink], or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
26
Look at the birds in the sky; they do not sow or reap, they gather nothing into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are not you more important than they?
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Can any of you by worrying add a single moment to your life-span?
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Why are you anxious about clothes? Learn from the way the wild flowers grow. They do not work or spin.
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But I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was clothed like one of them.
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If God so clothes the grass of the field, which grows today and is thrown into the oven tomorrow, will he not much more provide for you, O you of little faith?

Yep. Solomon was a smart guy, but he couldn’t have done anything like this…

Why is this snake all crinkly?

This guy was in our backyard yesterday. Actually, my wife says he’s out there a lot. It is a considerable understatement to say that she spends a lot more time outdoors than I do, so she would know.

Of course, he might be a she. I have zero idea on that. Fortunately, it’s the official style of this blog to use the inclusive “he” for reptiles. I’m still allowed to do that, right? I don’t want to tick off any feminist snakes or anything.

Beyond that, I’m pretty sure he’s harmless. Sure enough not to kill him, anyway. Of course, how reliable is the opinion of someone who can’t tell the difference between male and female?

If y’all know what it is, tell me. In advance, though, I’m not going to trust the expertise of any of y’all who told me that copperhead was nonvenomous awhile back.

Actually, I might do what I did then, and send it to Rudy Mancke. But not so much to ask him the species. What I want to ask him is, Why is this snake all crinkly? I mean, why is his body all compressed in a sort of sawtooth pattern? Kind of weird-looking. Is he just tense because I’m standing next to him (although he looked like this from a distance)? Is he about to shed his skin or something? Is this some variation on coiling — is he contemplating springing forward dramatically? Or does he not feel well?

I dunno. I dunno much about Nature, as I said in my second post about the copperhead. I really need to learn more. We all do…

Where are all these stupid cicadas, anyway?

This story on my Washington Post app this morning was the last straw that caused me to write this.

Have you heard enough about the stupid Brood X cicadas? I have.

I mean, one story saying, “Hey, it’s the year when this one big bunch of cicadas will be out and buzzing” would have done me. A take-note-of kind of thing. Although it would not have hurt my feelings not to have even that one story, because when the cicadas come, I can hear them.

And that’s the thing. I keep seeing, and hearing (via NPR One) all this coverage. But I haven’t heard, much less seen, any big noisy bugs. I’m hearing a lot more from bullfrogs this year than I have in recent years. I hear them in the evenings near the two lakes in my neighborhood. It’s nice that we’re hearing from them, because I’d been kind of worried about them.

But I haven’t noticed any cicadas. Or if I have, they’ve blended into the background, so they’re not at a volume that would demand attention.

But let me try to read any of the national newspapers or magazines to which I subscribe, on any day, and I see as much coverage of these bugs as I do the insurrection in Washington on Jan. 6. Here are headlines from just one of those publications — The Washington Post — in the past week.

A cicada’s life

People love Brood X so much they’re taking cicada-cations

Want to try cicadas? Give the Brood X insects this spicy popcorn treatment

Freaked by cicada swarms? You could just stick a fork in ’em

A fungus could turn some cicadas into sex-crazed ‘salt shakers of death’

Wet hot cicada summer: An endless buffet for hungry animals and entomologists

My life in cicadas

Wet hot cicada summer: A timeline of Brood X

As we enter cicada peak bloom, here’s where they’ve already emerged

Zombie-like cicadas strive to mate despite losing the necessary parts

An open letter to the emerging cicadas in my backyard

All hail Queen C: Female cicadas are choosy and in charge

Partly cloudy with a chance of cicada pee

Who’s all in favor of eating cicadas? The scientists who study them.

Billions of cicadas blanket the Washington region. The Smithsonian is looking for a perfect few

Periodical cicadas are an evolutionary marvel. Enjoy the show.

So as you see, I’m not making this up. We are subjected to an actual plague of cicada stories. Throw this many cicada stories at Pharaoh, and he’d have let Moses’ people go in a skinny minute.

You’ll note that a bunch of them are about humans eating cicadas. Something that, again, if you must tell me, once would suffice. For awhile, the great fad was tongue-in-cheek features that pretended cicadas were intelligent beings who needed to be brought up on all the news they’d missed over the last 17 years. Which, again, was a mildly cute concept maybe once. Here’s one of those, from that same paper. Here’s another from elsewhere. And another. Oh, and yet another. I’ll stop now…

So again, I’m wondering, Where are these blasted bugs?

The answer, apparently, is not here. I found this in a newspaper in Ohio, which apparently is Cicada Central. Or at least it’s next door to Cicada Central, which is Indiana.

The story said that mainly, this is where you’d find them:

The southeast corner of Pennsylvania, almost all of Maryland, parts of Delaware and New Jersey, and a few areas in New York.
Ohio, almost the entire state of Indiana, a few areas in eastern Illinois, and northwest and eastern parts of Kentucky.
Western North Carolina, east Tennessee and a scattering around west Tennessee and the northern part of Georgia.

So not here. Our own cicadas won’t emerge until 2024. So now you may ignore this blog post, and all those other stories…

Closing our busy restaurant

Our busy restaurant. Note the thief down at the bottom.

You’ve read or heard the news about taking in birdfeeders.

Well, we had already essentially closed our busy restaurant on the deck. We haven’t put any new seed in it for a week or so (and it runs out fast). My wife runs the establishment, and her rule is, when it starts turning warm, the birds need to fend for themselves. Get up early and get the worm, etc.

It’s been a busy season, as you can see above. Here’s a closeup of the feeder, to give you a better idea:

The new restaurant has twice the seating, above and below.

Business wasn’t great at the start, but not on account of COVID. Remember when we had those trees cut down? Well, the woodsmen did a great job, with one exception — a branch from that one, biggest pine in the backyard fell on the corner of our deck, smashing the railing and destroying my wife’s feeder. (Note that this was unintentionally foreshadowed here on the blog, when I wrote that “Then, they’ll get to the one we’re most concerned about, the massive one with ominous branches that project out over the deck we’ve spent so much time rebuilding…”)

So I got her another one for Christmas. But I upgraded — it was the same kind of feeder she’d had before, but two-story. Twice the seating space, above and below.

Of course, this leads to at least twice the mess below — bird poop, inevitably, and a huge amount of dropped seed. This can be avoided by swinging the feeder out from the deck, over the yard, but then we can’t see the birds as well from the kitchen window. And we like seeing them. My wife has acquired a couple of birdwatcher’s books, and she’s gotten good at identifying them all, and even I’ve learned the names of some of them — the wrens (some actual Carolina wrens, but a number of impostors as well — such as the ones pictured above, I believe), chickadees, those big bullies the cardinals, titmice, Eastern towhees, and so forth.

So my wife put out a big sheet of cardboard under the feeder, which catches most of it. And there’s enough seed there that some undiscriminating diners feast down there — including, as you see in the first photo above, the squirrels.

The squirrels. They figured prominently in my shopping decisions (the new feeder was a Christmas gift from me) for the iron rod from which the feeder hangs. I got an extra big, heavy, LONG iron bar, in an effort to keep the squirrels out of the feeder.

I failed, of course, as you can see below. They were very… enterprising. Sometimes I get the impression that we have the squirrel equivalent of SEAL Team Six living in our backyard. They have the skill, the training, and the determination to overcome any obstacle.

They had two methods. Some would take huge, suicidal leaps from the wooden benches built into the corner of the deck, several feet away. They’d just barely make it, snagging the perch with their little paws and pulling themselves up so they could dig in. What’s pictured below is the less dignified manner. It involves walking out on the new, long iron bar, holding on with their toes to the top of the feeder, and then eating while hanging upside-down.

When I see these things happening, I sometimes step out and scare them off. Other times, I figure, if they’re that determined, let them eat.

But really, the feeder is for the birds…

Have y’all had similar experiences?

It looks ridiculous, but I guess he’s really hungry.

I got a ruling from Rudy Mancke: It’s a copperhead

We went back and forth on that last post about the snake — here and on social media. We were starting to stagger toward a consensus that these creatures all over my neighborhood are indeed copperheads. But we were far from certain.

And you know, when I’m practically stepping on these things right in the middle of the street, I kind of want to know.

Rudy Mancke

So I stopped fooling around. Last night I wrote to Rudy Mancke himself for a ruling.

I hated to bother him with something so common. On his segments on public radio, people have usually sent him a picture of something rare and interesting. But based on what I’ve been seeing, these snakes are as common as Republicans in my precinct — maybe more so.

But Rudy got right back to me, and I’m very appreciative:

Brad, The photo you sent is of a Copperhead (Agkistrodon contortrix), the most common venomous snake in SC. The dark, wide-narrow-wide bands across the body and the copper-colored head are diagnostic. They are found throughout SC. I have seen more of these snakes this year than I normally do. They feed on any animal small enough to eat. During hot weather they are active mostly at night…

I thought that was really nice of him, especially since as he himself mentioned, these critters are, you know, common.

Which brings me to another subject…

Look at us. We’re pretty smart people, generally speaking. We have a lot to say about a lot of things, and we flatter ourselves that what we have to say has value.

But when it comes to something as simple as staying alive while walking down a suburban street — much less in the woods, or tall grass — we are shockingly ignorant. With the exception perhaps of Jim Catoe, who owns some land out in the country that has a crowd of snakes on it, we’re kind of a bunch of dummies.

What’s happened to us, people? Our ancestors used to know the creatures around them, and the names of the trees, and what was edible and what wasn’t (to us, “edible” means packaged for sale in a supermarket, but not on the detergent aisle).

But when confronted by an animal that can kill us — a common animal, in fact the most common venomous snake in SC — we are clueless!

In those books I love — as do Bryan Caskey and Mike Fitts — there are certain things Jack Aubrey assumed any man knew back 200 years ago. And when the smartest person he knows — physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin — asks him something any ship’s boy would know, such as, “When is the dark of the moon?”… Jack hesitates to answer, hoping that Stephen is making a joke by asking such a thing. (But he never is. Stephen’s more like us.)

Personally, I have no idea when the dark of the moon will be. Occasionally when walking with my wife at night, I’ll look up and recognize Jupiter in the sky, and Saturn off to the left of it, and I’ll say so in a vain attempt to be impressive. But she knows I only know that from wondering “What’s that bright thing in the sky?” and looking it up on my phone’s astronomy app. And she’s tired of my mentioning it.

The problem is, if you’re walking at night and holding up your phone to the sky to figure out what that bright thing is, you’re likely to step on a small creature that can kill you.

Sheesh.

Anyway, thanks very much, Rudy!

I think the snake made me forget the rules

The distracting creature.

I kind of lost my head last night. I walked up to two people, and got right in their faces, and none of us had masks on. My wife witnessed this, and said she was really surprised to see me do something so careless.

I blame it on the snake.

We were out walking around the neighborhood, at dusk. There was still enough light to clearly see the snake on the road right in front of us, but I didn’t, until my wife warned me to watch out. Which is weird. My brain must not have been functioning right, because I don’t like snakes at all, and the sight of one, even a photograph, usually sets off alarms. Any such movement — and there’s nothing else on the planet like the movement of a snake — in any corner of my field of vision should have had me on full alert.

It was interesting that we saw it right there, because it was only a few yards from one that had been run over a couple of days earlier. Its flattened carcass had still been in the street when I had walked that way earlier in the day.

But this one was very much alive. And we stopped to observe it and debate its nature. I immediately said “copperhead,” but admittedly I tend to call almost anything that has a visible pattern of those colors a copperhead. My wife said its head lacked the menacing triangular shape we tend to associate with pit vipers. I acknowledged this, but stuck to my standard policy of treating it as a copperhead until proved innocent. Which meant staying away from it.

I assure you, I used the limited zoom feature on my phone to take the above photo, which I thought came out rather well, considering the low light. I still don’t like looking at it.

Anyway, about a block and half past that, with the light further dimming and the shade of trees lowering it further, we saw a blackness in the middle of the road that looked remotely like it could be another snake, curled up. A bigger one.

As we cautiously approached and debated, and I had just about decided it was a clump of foliage of some kind, someone asked what we were looking at. It was a teenaged boy who I think had just rolled a garbage bin out to the street. I told him. And I told him about the snake just up the street — well, the two snakes, counting the dead one. And he seemed interested. And I thought, Maybe this is one of those people who are into snakes, and maybe he knows something…

So I said, “I’ve got a picture. Want to see it?” When he nodded, I walked straight over and showed it to him on my phone. Only when we were looking at it with our heads about a foot apart did I realize we weren’t wearing masks.

Then a woman — possibly his mom — arrived and asked what it was, and I immediately forgot what I’d just realized, and went over the show it to her. Only this time I handed the phone to her rather than standing right next to her. Still, too close, not to mention handing the phone back and forth.

I don’t think either offered any expert advice. I didn’t get a ruling on the type of snake it was.

Do y’all know? I’d send it to Rudy Mancke, but I don’t think anything this common would interest him.

Anyway, I waited until we were about half a block away before expressing to my wife my surprise at myself for having forgotten basic COVID precautions. She said she was pretty amazed, too. I don’t think she had fully realized what an idiot I can be.

I blame it on the snake….

‘Where are all the birds?’

‘We’re after eatin’ all of dem,” he said, without missing a beat.

We were on a carriage ride through the beautiful Killarney National Park on March 19, and our driver was a guy who had no problem playing to tourists’ expectations. He was a burly guy in a cloth cap whose previously broken nose made him look like an ex-boxer — an Irishman who embraced all stereotypes, cracking a steady stream of jokes that prominently featured Guinness, leprechauns and Irish whiskey.

And he did it in such a natural, unstudied way, and seemed to be enjoying himself so, that it was for me a highlight of our trip to Ireland.

As we rode through the park admiring the scenery, the medieval ruins, the miniature deer and other attractions, one of the ladies in our carriages noticed something I had not. She asked the driver, “Where are all the birds?”

He didn’t miss a beat. Looking over his shoulder with a smile, he said “We’re after eatin’ all of dem.”

As I tweeted at the time, I hadn’t kissed the Blarney Stone, but someone had…

My wife later said she would have liked a serious answer to the question. Me, I was delighted because I’m pretty sure that’s the only time during our almost two weeks in the country that I heard someone use that famous Irish construction of “after” followed by a gerund. Word guy that I am, it made my day.

So much for the anecdotal lede.

For those of you still after wanting a serious answer to the question, I’ll be after giving it to ye, soon as I finish me Guinness…

OK, here you go…

It was in The New York Times today, an opinion piece headlined “Three Billion Canaries in the Coal Mine:”

A new study in the journal Science reports that nearly 3 billion North American birds have disappeared since 1970. That’s 29 percent of all birds on this continent. The data are both incontrovertible and shocking. “We were stunned by the result,” Cornell University’s Kenneth V. Rosenberg, the study’s lead author, told The Times.

This is not a report that projects future losses on the basis of current trends. It is not an update on the state of rare birds already in trouble. This study enumerates actual losses of familiar species — ordinary backyard birds like sparrows and swifts, swallows and blue jays. The anecdotal evidence from my own yard, it turns out, is everywhere.

You may have heard of the proverbial canary in the coal mine — caged birds whose sensitivity to lethal gasses served as an early-warning system to coal miners; if the canary died, they knew it was time to flee. This is what ornithologists John W. Fitzpatrick and Peter P. Marra meant when they wrote, in an opinion piece for The Times, that “Birds are indicator species, serving as acutely sensitive barometers of environmental health, and their mass declines signal that the earth’s biological systems are in trouble.”

Unlike the miners of old, we have nowhere safe to flee….

It’s an ominously interesting piece, so I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

And now this picture I took last year of a dead bird on a street in my neighborhood comes in handy:

I was struck by the beauty of this dead bird. Can anyone identify it for me?

Joel Sartore photographs his 8,000th species

The Pyrenean desman, which on Friday became the 8,000 species photographed for the Photo Ark.

Y’all remember my old friend and colleague Joel Sartore, the National Geographic photographer who for more than a decade has been trying to photograph every animal species currently in captivity before they can disappear?

Well, in the last few days he added his 8,000th species to his Photo Ark!

And he’s celebrating that putting forth a special offer:

As announced Friday, the Pyrenean desman marked the 8,000 species for the Photo Ark.

To celebrate this momentous milestone, this week I am giving away eight, signed 8×10 prints, one print of each milestone species that brought the Photo Ark to 8,000.

Four winners will be chosen from Instagram and four will be chosen from Facebook.

Each person may only win once per platform. Due to the limited number of prints, selection and winners will be chosen at random.

Winners will be announced on my Instagram story and my Facebook page Wednesday, May 9th.

How To Enter:

Follow me on Instagram @joelsartore or on Facebook at Joel Sartore, Photographer.
Tag three friends on my Monday contest post on Instagram or Facebook.

Good luck!

Take him up on the offer, and help promote the Photo Ark…

This Persian leopard at the Budapest Zoo was the 5,000th animal on the Photo Ark.

I’ll call this one ‘Cardinal Wolsey’

Christmas before last, my wife received a bird feeder for our deck. Things were going pretty well with the Wagner’s Eastern Regional Blend, except for the squirrels.

Initially, we defeated them by swinging the boom holding the feeder out over open space off the deck, but a few months back they figured out how to defeat that, and basically whenever we weren’t looking, they emptied the thing. I don’t know what it was they were so crazy about; maybe the sunflower seeds.

So a month or so ago I bought some seed at Lowe’s that would only attract smaller birds — and cardinals.

So what’s happened? The cardinals tend to hog it, and run the sparrows and wrens off.

And some of them have gotten pretty fat.

Get a load of this guy. Yeah, his feathers are kind of fluffed out, but he’s still rather large.

And he’s not even eating. He’s just sitting there, staking out territory. Very political, very wordly for a bird of the cloth.

I think I’ll call him “Wolsey”…

Hear Joel Sartore and Photo Ark tonight at Harbison Theater

I’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of talented people over the course of my career, and no one fits that description better than Joel Sartore.

Joel Sartore

Joel was a photographer at The Wichita Eagle-Beacon back when I was news editor there, and I knew he was something special then. Part of my job involved deciding what went on the front page, and I had the privilege of using his work a lot. The times I spent with him at the light table peering at negatives through magnifying glasses and discussing them persuaded me that here was an all-around fine journalist, far more than just another shooter.

And he had an incredible eye for exactly the right shot. I’ll post a couple of prints he gave me back in the day when I’m at home. Amazing stuff.

Well, he’s not in Kansas anymore. Not long after my stint in Wichita, Joel started working for National Geographic, and he’s been with them ever since.

Lately, he’s been working on a monumental project called the Photo Ark, which The State described thusly in their story about his appearance in our community tonight:

National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore is trying to save the planet with his camera….

The project is called Photo Ark, and his goal is to take studio photographs of the roughly 12,000 species in captivity.

“My job, my passion, or what I’m trying to explore and share is the fact that we are throwing away the ark,” Sartore said, adding that he wants “to document as many of the world’s captive species as I can before I die.”

In the past 11 years, he has photographed about 6,500 of these animals. He estimates it will take another 15 years or so to photograph the rest….

So, you know, a herculean task. But Joel’s up to it, I assure you.

He’ll be talking about his work tonight at 7:30 at Harbison Theatre at Midlands Technical College.

I hope to see you there…

Life, clinging…

See this photo I took of scraggly trees desperately clinging to a clump of fertile soil on a bleak, muddy, flood-swept landscape?

Actually, it was a tiny weed, about four inches high, in the driveway next to the ADCO building on Pickens.

I was amazed that none of us had run over it. I thought I’d immortalize it before that happened. The very essence of fragile life, clinging on against the odds.

That’s all. No political message…

A wild, beautiful vision in the heart of downtown

I’ve got this thing about hawks. Whenever I’m driving through the countryside and I see one gliding above the road or the woods and fields to the sides, it’s special to me. I’m like, “Look! A hawk!” And my wife is like, “Yes, I see that — yet another hawk…”

Well, she would have been impressed had she been with me a few minutes ago.

I was eastbound on Lady Street, waiting at that light (which must be one of the Top Five longest red lights in Columbia) to cross Bull. The light finally changed, and as I put the truck in gear and started to move, a hawk came swooping across the street at me, no more than four or five feet off the ground.

It was carrying something furry and rather large — maybe a big squirrel, smaller than a ‘possum or raccoon — and I think maybe that was retarding its effort to gain altitude. It passed my window, almost within arm’s reach. I saw the working of its wings, its fierce, proud visage (which would never show that it was having a hard time), close-up and in action.

As I rolled across Bull, I glanced in the rearview and saw the hawk glide around, rather than over, another vehicle behind me (anything but let go, in keeping with the First Law of the Foot). Then I saw it rise, maybe 12 or 15 feet, toward a tree branch. Then I lost sight of it.

But what I did see was a treat. If you have a thing about hawks, the way I do. I wish I could have gotten a picture. But even if I were wearing Google Glass, it was probably too quick to get the shot — unless I just happened to be shooting video, and it’s hard to imagine why I’d have been doing that at the most boring intersection in Columbia.

I’m sure it was less of a treat for the furry thing. But that’s nature for you. As Woody Allen observed in “Love and Death” (in answer to Diane Keaton’s observation, “Isn’t nature incredible?”):

To me, nature is…I dunno, spiders and bugs and big fish eating little fish, and plants eating plants and animals eating…It’s like an enormous restaurant.

bradwarthen.com

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