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Posts treating: "birds"

Friday, 30 August 2019

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We need to talk about teratorns 

markwitton.com blog [2019-08-30 11:16:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (156 visits) info
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Very awesome take on the teratornithid Teratornis merriami by Charles Knight. Like virtually all illustrations of teratorns, the implication of this image is that Teratornis is a scavenger, arriving to steal parts of this American camel (Camelops hesternus) from noble Smilodon. But how accurate is this widely portrayed view? Image © AMNH, borrowed from Gizmodo. Teratorns (formally known as Teratornithidae) are a group of large to gigantic raptorial birds that roamed the Americas for much of [...]

Winnemucca to Hwy 395 north of Susanville, Part4 

Looking for Detachment [2019-08-06 18:00:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (48 visits) info
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And now we’ll say goodbye to the Smoke Creek Desert, which we saw on the last leg of this cross-country journey, and make our way south for a very short distance, where we’ll turn off the road skirting the entire west side of the desert, and head west up Smoke Creek. Photos you’ll see in this blog post are from three different trips taken between the Smoke Creek Desert and Highway 395

How We Got To Now, by Steven Johnson 

Mountain Beltway [2019-04-25 15:31:34]  recommend  recommend this post  (116 visits) info
I was very impressed with Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air when I read it last summer. So recently, I decided to sample another of his books, this one a six-part microhistory about innovations that altered the course of human history. The six are: 1) cleanliness/hygiene (specifically in medicine and drinking water), 2) measurement of time, 3) glass (think lenses!), 4) understanding of light, 5) refrigeration, and 6) the recording … The post <i>How We Got To Now,</i> by [...]

The Feather Thief, by Kirk Wallace Johnson 

Mountain Beltway [2019-04-15 14:46:01]  recommend  recommend this post  (97 visits) info
In 2009, a thief broke into England's Tring Museum and stole hundreds of curated bird skins. The thief was a talented American musician attending school in London. He broke apart specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace and Lionel Walter Rothschild and sold the feathers to men who tie salmon flies (originally for fishing, but now an art form in its own right). The story of this crime is well documented by an author who became obsessed with solving the case of the missing birds. The post [...]

2018 Yard List 

Mountain Beltway [2019-01-01 11:30:23]  recommend  recommend this post  (109 visits) info
New year’s day is the time I tally up and report the bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain in Shenandoah County, Virginia. This is my seventh such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (51 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) 2017 (56 species) It’s been a good year. Two new “seen for the first … The post 2018 Yard List appeared first on Mountain Beltway.

Orbicular Granite 

Looking for Detachment [2018-05-22 18:00:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (69 visits) info
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I've been meaning to get to this post for sometime, seeing as how the trip was made in the summer of 2017, and the post related to this one, set earlier in the same day and not all that far back up the road, posted in September of last year. What we'll see here is some unexpected orbicular granite, found by MOH. In this post, you'll see several pictures of orbicular granite, which in

The Evolution of Beauty, by Richard Prum 

Mountain Beltway [2018-03-13 18:52:05]  recommend  recommend this post  (587 visits) info
This fascinating new work by ornithologist Richard Prum re-examines sexual selection (mate choice) as a driving force of evolutionary change independent of (and sometimes in contradiction to) the mechanism of natural selection (environmental adaptation). Prum positions himself as a modern advocate for the ideas Charles Darwin expressed in The Descent of Man, and that Alfred Russel Wallace argued against in the years following Darwin’s death. In The Evolution of Beauty, … The post [...]

2017 Yard List 

Mountain Beltway [2018-01-01 13:32:16]  recommend  recommend this post  (36 visits) info
New year’s day is the time I tally up my accumulated bird species seen in my yard on the forested slope of Massanutten Mountain. This is my sixth such annual list. Here are the previous iterations: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (52 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) 2016 (59 species) Here we go, in chronological order of first appearance in our yard: Red-tailed hawk Red-bellied woodpecker Mourning dove Raven

High Water Across the West: Rye Patch Dam and the Humboldt Sink 

Looking for Detachment [2017-06-20 18:00:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (300 visits) info
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Rye Patch Dam on April 19th. The water in Rye Patch Reservoir is high, but not at the high water mark that can be seen just past the spillway. I'm moving slowly on this mini-series about the Humboldt River while working essentially 12-hour days and while (hopefully) recovering from some long-lasting bug I caught on the road or out in Elko more than two months ago. Also, my current

Virtual owl pellet 

Mountain Beltway [2017-04-03 14:08:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (88 visits) info
Owls are nocturnal birds of prey that eat rodents and grasshoppers, digest the good stuff, and cough up the rest in compressed “pellets” of fur, bone, and chitinous exoskeleton. I found an owl pellet in my yard a few weeks ago, and imaged it using my GIGAmacro Magnify2. I rotated it around to get multiple views, as seen here. I’ve got both Flash and non-Flash versions of the GigaPan embed

2016 Yard List 

Mountain Beltway [2016-12-31 14:47:03]  recommend  recommend this post  (90 visits) info
Eastern bluebird (and its lunch, a camel cricket) Purple finch (male) At New Year’s, I post my “yard list” here. It’s a list of all the bird species observed in my yard in Fort Valley, Virginia, over the course of the previous calendar year. I have been posting this list every year since I moved here: 2012 (39 species) 2013 (52 species) 2014 (58 species) 2015 (65 species) Yellow-billed cuckoo

Scenes from the Wildlife Camera 

Mountain Beltway [2016-11-28 14:31:13]  recommend  recommend this post  (40 visits) info
Here’s a look at some of the wild critters that have been visiting my yard this year: The video’s organized in alphabetical order, so it starts with bears, and ends with a walking stick insect. See how many you can identify! Plus, here’s a compilation of 125 still photos of black bears from June of

Putting dinosaur decline into context 

Raptor's Nest [2016-04-27 16:57:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (173 visits) info

 Cretaceous,Jurassic; US
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It is probably safe to say that to many, the idea that dinosaurs were slowly in decline, or that they weren't 'evolving' as fast as they should have been, is an uncomfortable thought.I thought some context will make this idea easier to appreciate.Palaeontologists are generally happy to say that Velociraptor is a very close relative of birds. It is morphologically very similar to birds, and there is even strong evidence that it possessed secondary feathers on its forearms (Turner et al., 2007. [...]

Maniraptoran Dinosaurs Show No Decline In Disparity Before Mass Extinction 

Reporting on a Revolution [2016-04-26 18:03:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (203 visits) info
Its hard to unravel and unpack complex phenomenon like patterns of faunal turnover during mass  extinctions. The methods chosen, the materials (fossils) available for study and the granularity of the study influences the results. My last post was about a modeling study that concluded that for 40 million years before the mass extinction,  extinction rates exceeded the evolution of new species

Meet Pepperoni the Robin, and Friends 

State of the Planet [2016-04-22 21:01:04]  recommend  recommend this post  (602 visits) info

 CA,US
Natalie Boelman and colleagues are tagging American robins near Slave Lake, Alberta, Canada, as the birds migrate north to nesting grounds. In a recent blog post for NASA, she put up videos about their work. You can watch some of them below, or go to the blog page at NASA’s Earth Observatory to see and read

Who ate the woodpecker? 

Mountain Beltway [2016-04-20 14:24:13]  recommend  recommend this post  (161 visits) info
Occasionally, our big windows get in the way of birds. The latest casualty was a hairy woodpecker, Leuconotopicus villosus. While it’s sad that our home being where it is caused the end of this bird’s life, its body was an opportunity to teach my son something about wildlife and ecology. We have a motion-sensitive wildlife camera trained on our compost pile, and so I put the woodpecker’s body there in

My 14th Pair of Reviews 

ART Evolved: Life's Time Capsule [2016-04-17 23:36:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (284 visits) info

 US,IN
As an Art Evolved member, I post a pair of my reviews here every so often, the 1st being positive & the 2nd being negative. I'd greatly appreciate you reading & voting "Yes" for said reviews in the bolded links below. Besides wanting to make sure said reviews give a good idea of what to expect, they need all the "Yes" votes they can get because 1) the 1st is for a great book that deserves more attention, & 2) the 2nd is outnumbered by opposing reviews (which don't give a good idea [...]

DRAGONFLIES: ANCIENT PREDATORS 

ARCHEA [2016-03-31 23:18:00]  recommend  recommend this post  (110 visits) info
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Dragonflies, from the order Odonata, have been around for over 250 million years. The most conspicuous difference in their evolution over time is the steady shrinking of their wingspan from well over two and a half feet down to a few inches. Voracious predators, today they dine on bees, wasps, butterflies and avoid the attentions of birds and wee lizards --  but back in the day, they had a much larger selection of meals within their grasp. Small lizards and birds who today choose [...]

Birds of the Southern Wilds 

JOIDES Resolution blogs [2016-02-22 12:28:53]  recommend  recommend this post  (148 visits) info
In recent days we have been seeing increasing numbers of wildlife--albatross, giant petrels (like the one in the photo) and even a sperm whale. read

Lots of dogs and cats, but where are the birds? 

JOIDES Resolution blogs [2016-02-10 11:44:05]  recommend  recommend this post  (140 visits) info
We have a "pet wall' in the stairwell of the JOIDES Resolution...it would seem that dogs have the advantage over cats. Curiously, there are no rats, birds, or fish in evidence...not to mention, hamsters. I'm contemplating posting my picture of "Fred" the scorpion but it might give some of my shipmates the willies! read
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