July Science Café

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The cicadas are calling.
First it was the scissor-grinders!

Learn more at...Science Café: July 11. 

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catbird

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“He is neither the rare plover or the brilliant bunting but 

as common as the grass.” 

Today we open with a bit of Mary Oliver from her poem "Catbird" sent to us from Betty Thompson in Nebraska.

Gray catbirds are shy, often going unseen hiding in the understory especially blackberry thickets. But their real claim to fame is that like Northern mockingbirds and brown thrashers they are mimics, open-ended learners that add phrases to their repertoire all their lives. But these mimics punctuate their long songs with an occasional "meow" like a tabby which is where their name comes from.

Without the "meow," you can tell the three species apart even without seeing them by counting the number of times they repeat each phrase. With catbirds it is only once; with thrashers it is generally twice; and with mockingbirds it is three or more times.

Thank you, Betty.  

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compadres

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One of the good things about going out of town is that you make new friends.

So was the case when I journeyed to the Trails & Trilliums Festival in Monteagle to speak about birds at The Dubose.

There, I met and made friends with Dr. Jim Peters, Professor of Philosophy and Coordinator of Environmental Arts and Humanities at Sewanee: The University of the South. Jim and I talked for two hours, and although we became fast new friends, karmic compadres, it was like I have known him for over 20 years, some sort of a past life connection. I know. Easy to write, hard to fathom. 

We bonded over birds and natural history. I write about and draw birds and Jim takes the most wonderful photographs of them, sometimes even catching them in mid-wingbeat. 

Once asked why I am so fond of birds? I answered "it's simple, they are such splendid creatures that do not foul their own nest, home or planet."  

Jim sent me one of his recent prizes. A photo of a male pileated woodpecker tending to the young at the nest. Pileateds normally chisel out their nest hole in a dead tree 15- to 80-feet off the ground. So how did Jim manage this photograph at virtually eye-level? That's his secret. 

It also shows that woodpeckers are EXCELLENT fathers! At my "Bad Dads, Good Fathers" talk last Saturday at Wild Birds Unlimited: 7240 Kingston Pike, I shared this very same sentiment. Growing up is so much easier when you have a good father. 

But don't stumble over the name. Pileated comes from the Latin "pileatus" and it means capped or crested. 

Keep up the splendid work. See you again soon, Jim!   

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kestrel visits

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The American kestrel is the smallest falcon native to the Americas. Weighing only four ounces, they are also the smallest raptor in our part of the world. They are generally found watching over meadows and other grasslands where they eat a wide range of prey animals including grasshoppers.  

Dox, or Doc's, the kestrel pictured above, is a non-flighted male that was brought into the University of Tennessee Veterinary Hospital last January. He had a badly broken and infected right wing and sadly, will never fly again. He was treated by Dr. Cheryl Greenacre and it was the Doc's good care that brought him to me after he spent time on antibiotics with local wildlife rehabilitator Lynne McCoy. 

Dox is now a wildlife ambassador for the State of Tennessee under my care and state education permit. He makes routine public appearances to raise awareness of kestrels and their current status in the wild. The kestrel subspecies (Falco sparverius paulus) found in the American Southeast has suffered a population decline of 83 percent since 1940 and no one is completely sure why.

Does Dox feel the pressure of representing kestrels everywhere? So far, he hasn't shown it.  

He recently made two visits to Wild Birds Unlimited: 7240 Kingston Pike.

Thank you to all who stopped by for a "Meet & Greet." And thank you to Liz and Tony Cutrone for all you do for the local wild birds and the rest of the WBU staff for making us feel welcome. 

And thank you to Vickie Henderson and Shirley Hamilton for the photos of Dox.
  

Tony and Liz Cutrone

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love nest

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"Birds do it, bees do it

Even educated fleas do it

Let’s do it, let’s fall in love"

Sang Broadway composer and songwriter Cole Porter

The renowned French philosopher René Descartes believed that animals were “insensible, soulless machines” to be lorded over by humankind. They experience neither pleasure nor pain but are merely “animated mechanically, like clocks." Perhaps it is wrong to use the word "love" when talking about animals but that is precisely what is happening here and there when discussing non-human pair bonding.

I received this nature story from my naturalist friend Michelle Wilson. I first thought, "Is this for real?" Yep. It surely was.

Michelle emailed, “All of sudden in the tree behind my living room, all the birds were gathered and alarming. I knew something was up when my two cardinal guys were together and not fighting, and looked out to see some wrens mobbing a rat snake. We watched this snake for hours, up and down the tree it crawled. Waiting to see what it would find. But it got dark."  

"I got up this morning, and I looked out thinking, it surely had moved on, the birds are really on this," continued Michelle. "But I was, again, surprised. Now I seem to have an unexpected love nest. And I have a front row view. As far as I know there hasn’t been a bird nest in the top one, and the chickadees fledged two weeks ago.”  

And so for now it seems the two pair bonding snakes used the lofty hideaway for their tête-à-tête. 

So if you believe Descartes and that snakes do not feel pain when they are killed or comfort when they are bonding, then look at the inset photo to the left. I certainly think that they feel the solace of each other's company. Sorry René, but they sure look happy.

Thanks Michelle. And Happy Birthday in two days!

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grand flora

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Somehow, you know summer is almost here when the Southern magnolia begin to bloom.

In East Tennessee, we have seven species of magnolia: cucumber, umbrella, bigleaf, Fraser, sweetbay, Southern and tuliptee, but it’s the Southern magnolia with its enormous (up to 12 inches in diameter) citronella-scented white flowers that is so associated with the Deep South and sultry, hot afternoons; it's the polished, aristocrat of Southern trees. The evergreen with large glossy leaves was often planted near the house, where with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade, it could be admired from the shade of the front porch.

In 1703, Charles Plumier described a flowering tree from the island of Martinique. Plumier gave the species, known locally as “Talauma,” the genus name Magnolia, to honor renowned French botanist Pierre Magnol from Montpellier, thus establishing the generic name for the group.

Three decades later, in his “Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands,” published between 1731 and 1743, English naturalist Mark Catesby writes about a tree he found in his travels in the New World. He called the tree Magnolia virginiana. Today the Southern magnolia that grows from coastal Virginia to Florida and across the Gulf Coast states is known as Magnolia grandiflora, or "Magnolia with the large flowers." Simply put.

Indeed, no other tree in this region has a flower so enormous and satisfyingly grand.


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high hopes

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High Hopes

"Just what makes that little old ant

Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant

Anyone knows an ant, can’t

Move a rubber tree plant

But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes

He’s got high apple pie, in the sky hopes”

Sang Frank Sinatra in the 1959 movie A Hole in the Head

It seemed to me that the above box turtle had high hopes as he looked at the obstacle in front of him on Maryville Highway. Was there a female on the other side?  

May and June are when you are apt to see turtles trying to cross the road. It is breeding season and the females are looking for safe out-of-the-way places to dig a hole and bury their eggs. And the males are gallivanting for females. 

The Eastern box turtle is the only land-based turtle in my area. Simply put: they cannot swim. All the other species of East Tennessee turtles (Eastern musk, Eastern painted, common snapping, spiny softshell, river cooter, red-eared slider and Northern map) are aquatic but the females still have to leave the water to also find a safe place to dig a hole and lay their eggs. The ground incubates the clutches and the next three months are the hottest of the year. Young turtles tend to hatch September into October. 

Box turtles can live up to 150 years. Most of that time hidden away on their home woodland territory of perhaps only a few acres. But during mating season they may leave home and even get into harm's way to find a mate.  

The above box turtle was headed west-to-east but somehow he took a left-hand turn and went north for awhile onto a railroad overpass. He then became trapped between a pair of three feet high sold concrete walls on each side of the two-lane road. 

Seeing his predicament. I pulled over and moved him to safety where he maintained his high hopes, I would assume. 

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