Category: Birds
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Sometimes you see a barn and you know it has owls. This one is airy, with many escape routes. As we walked to the door, a barn owl (Tyto alba) silently flew out. A helpful person had put up an owl box. Owls had accepted it. Not recently, judging by the size of the charnel…
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A certain member of the minor Scottish nobility has accused me of being “a bird person.” I deny it. Just as I refuse to choose between being “a cat person” or “a dog person,” I refuse to limit my interest in animals to, say, Class Aves (birds), Class Mammalia, or Class Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes). I…
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On remote islands where they breed, some small seabirds come and go at night. Thus they evade big daytime killers like skuas and gulls. Their secret nests are in burrows or under rocks. Leach's Storm-petrel (Oceanodroma leucorhoa) is one of these furtive little birds. They are smaller than robins, though with longer wings. It's said…
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A 2008 New Yorker story by Margaret Talbot on Irene Pepperberg's work with parrots and language made brief mention of unsuccessful work with mynahs and language. This was to explain why Pepperberg didn't train her eloquent parrot Alex with classic behaviorist methods of operant conditioning. I recognized the reference. While reading about animal communication for…
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It was morning. My spouse was dressing for the day. I was reading in bed, working through Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. “This is an interesting bar graph,” I said. “It shows a bunch of major living groups through time, and the only group that…
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Ten thirty at night, driving through Oakland's Chinatown, we glimpsed a large bird perched on a sign. We went around the block and there was a black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) on the LEFT TURN ONLY sign, two more on a jewelry store awning, and another on a pho restaurant awning. We knew that night…
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The Monterey county inn offered a special rate. The deal included a “breakfast basket.” Around 8:30 am someone would knock. On the step they would leave a basket with packaged pastries, juice, fruit, yogurt, and hardboiled eggs, which you could draw inside and consume at leisure. They warned that birds might steal from your basket…
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Killdeer are marvelous birds. They wear a handsome double necklace for easy identification by eye. They fly around shouting their name – KillDEER! KillDEER! — for easy identification by ear. (It would be impressive if they shouted their Latin name – ChaRAdrius voCIFerus! — but harder to remember.) ShutterGlow.com Famously, when any worrisome creature comes…
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The Brooks Park community garden sits on a knobby, windy hilltop with near views of San Francisco and Daly City, and a far view of the Pacific. With a plastic watering can left for the use of gardeners, I was dreamily watering lettuce seedlings in our nano-ranch when a high-energy individual sped up and gave…
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In late summer successful gardeners become superbly generous, even pushy. The fields of California burst with extra tomatoes. All over the Central Valley, tomato trucks bomb along blazing hot roads. You know they are tomato trucks because they have open tops and spill tomatoes, especially on bumps and curves. Roads with tomato-spangled corners mean the…
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