falconspace

Peregrine swoops to photo prize
By Jonathan Amos BBC News science reporter

A swirling image of a peregrine falcon sweeping into a flock of starlings has won Manuel Presti this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

The Italian caught the action scene, titled Sky Chase, high above a city park in Rome.

"Sky chase is a powerful image and, like it or not, it's one that you will never forget," said Mark Carwardine, one of this year's judges.

The competition has become one of the most prestigious in world photography.

It is organised by BBC Wildlife Magazine and London's Natural History Museum. This year brought 17,000 entries from over 55 countries.

SKY CHASE

Manuel Presti is an engineer by trade, but he has been taking photographs in his spare time for 20 years.

Through his creative images he aims to show the simple beauty in nature and hopes to inspire people to care for its conservation.

Right across Europe, starling populations have been in decline.

Nonetheless, thousands of the birds can be found roosting in city parks in Rome, where it is warmer in winter than the surrounding countryside and usually safer - except for the resident peregrines.

"I was photographing with two cameras; one was with a wide-angle zoom to capture all the shapes, and one - which is this picture - with a long lens to capture the up-close action, the chase," Manuel told the BBC News website.

"The sky was cloudy so I overexposed the image intentionally to make it white. A slow shutter speed - 1/50th of a second - gives it this dynamic of the starlings moving under the psychological pressure of the peregrine diving."

Roz Kidman Cox, a judge and former editor of BBC Wildlife Magazine, said: "The judges were unanimous. It's quite startling and it imprints itself on your mind. It's both a reality and an abstract.

"As a judge, you look for something that is surprising, and this has got it on so many levels."

The image won the Animal Behaviour: Birds category as well as the overall title.

Waiting for a big bird fly-by
Condor watchers gather at Hi Mountain to get an update on a species that's barely escaping extinction.
By John FitzRandolph, Los Angeles Times, 25 October 2005

SOMEWHERE OUT THERE, just miles from our pitched tents set around the Hi Mountain Condor Lookout, somewhere between the hazy Pacific Ocean on the horizon and the forested canyons far below, pairs of California condors in cliff-side nests stir in the chill of an October morning.

Up here at 3,198 feet, we're in the heart of the condor recovery range, a stone's throw from a bedrock outcropping used by Chumash Indians to grind acorns. There are 75 of us who made the steep trek up from Pozo Road, a pothole-plagued dirt track.

We watch, wait, sip steamy coffee and hot chocolate in small clusters and speak in whispers.

And though we've been advised that chances are slim of seeing a cameo flyover by a resurgent condor — its awe-inspiring nearly 10-foot wingspan it's the largest bird in North America — none of us are deterred.

Most of my fellow condor aficionados, who have come from as far away as Oregon, share my refusal to accept coordinator Steve Schubert's remark that — notwithstanding the mountain's strategic location between Big Sur and Ventura County's Hopper Mountain as a condor telemetry and tracking station — the odds are "1 in 100" that we'll see one.

But hey, so what if the chances for a close encounter are remote, says a bearded older man in our shivering cluster.

Let's all remember, he continues, that in 1979 the official chances offered were "slim and none" for the then pitiable population of 10 remaining condors to survive another year.

Twenty-five years later, thanks to an aggressive condor recovery program, we gather to celebrate the 125 in the wild.

Another 49 are being readied for release from captive breeding facilities. They currently are in survival training at the L.A. Zoo; the San Diego Zoo's Wild Animal Park; the Wild Birds of Prey Center in Boise, Idaho; and the Oregon Zoo.

After tedious behavioral instruction using condor look-alike puppets, most of the captive birds will eventually soar free over refuges in Big Sur, Hopper Mountain, Pinnacles National Monument and Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in Kern County.

Sudden wind gusts whip across the ridgeline, whisking away fog that sent the sun packing an hour earlier. U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokeswoman Denise Stockton steps forward to offer some not-so-pleasing condor updates.

It's a life-and-death struggle for the resilient birds, she says as we listen attentively in a tight circle beneath the west-facing tower of the lookout.

In fact, Stockton says, one adult condor and two condor chicks in the Hopper Mountain area recently died. It's troubling, she says, but not a threat to the program.

"Condor AC-2 was released last June but was found dead in late September," Stockton explains. "He may have been attacked by predators, or died of old age. He was found nearly totally eaten."

Also, an egg produced by a pair of Hopper Mountain condors was discovered to be infertile and was carefully replaced by a healthy egg from the San Diego Zoo. The replacement chick hatched, and the parents accepted it, but in a few months nest-watchers noticed that the chick was struggling.

The condor specialist who had replaced the original egg recovered the chick, and it was taken by helicopter to the L.A. Zoo.

"Trash was surgically removed from the chick's stomach," Stockton says. "It survived the ordeal and is expected to be returned to its foster parents in the spring."

Trash also was found in the stomach of a second sickly chick plucked from its nest in the Hopper Mountain refuge area. The chick died — not from trash, but from West Nile virus.

"It's the first condor to die of West Nile," Stockton explains.

A third Hopper Mountain condor chick also perished in September, this time entirely due to complications from trash in its diet.

Stockton says scientists are puzzled as to why condor parents feed their chicks food that contains bottle caps, shards of broken plastic and glass, spent casings from firearms and other micro-trash.

"Maybe the condors need calcium," she speculates, noting that the birds may confuse shiny objects with potential nutrients.

The bad news settles in, but it's offset by firsthand accounts of encounters with the big birds by interns who watch nests and record condor movements, tracking the birds through radio signals from transmitters attached to both wings of each bird.

"By far the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me in my life was the day a condor showed up at Hi Mountain," says Jamie Miller, a fifth-year biology major and Hi Mountain condor telemetry intern. "It was my first sighting."

Miller, who attends Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, has spent more than eight months monitoring condor movements between Big Sur and Hopper Mountain.

"I was inside the lookout building, and my colleague out on the deck called out, 'Hey, Jamie, I've never seen a condor, but there's a big bird out here.' I rushed out, and there it was!"

The colossal bird "circled for a half an hour, looked down at us and seemed extremely curious, and then left," she says, noting that it was harassed by a red-tailed hawk for a few moments before the larger bird flew south.

In the end, the birds are no-shows. Miller's tale is the closest I'll come to a condor sighting this weekend. But as the moon rises and campers huddle around their tents, I can't help but hope that the recovery program would proceed despite human carelessness and disease, and that the condor's winged brushstrokes will increasingly adorn the canvas of our remaining wilderness.

*

For information on the Hi Mountain Condor Lookout Project or to arrange a visit to the center, call Steve Schubert at (805) 528-6138 or go to http://www.condorlookout.org =

Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

Almost 60 pilot whales die in Australian mass stranding, reports AFP (via Yahoo!) today.

Sad. A creature so magnificent apparently can't want to share the earth any longer with humans.

Elephants may pay homage to dead relatives
00:01 26 October 2005, NewScientist.com
by Shaoni Bhattacharya

Elephants may pay homage to the bones of dead relatives in their home ranges, a study of the creatures’ responses to skulls and ivory suggests.

Humans apart, only a few animals show any interest in their own dead. Chimpanzees show prolonged and complex behaviours towards a dead social partner – but abandon them once the carcass starts decomposing. But lions, for example, might sniff or lick a dead member of its own species before proceeding to devour the body.

African elephants have been observed to become highly agitated when they come across the bodies of their own, and they have been seen to pay great attention to the skull and ivory of long-dead elephants. However, this interest had not been tested experimentally.

Now research from a team in the UK and Kenya has demonstrated that African elephants pay a higher level of interest to elephant skulls compared with those of other animals and ivory compared to wood.

However, the team could not corroborate stories that elephants specifically visit the bones of dead relatives. The elephant families in their study were unable to pick out the skull of their dead matriarch from other families’ dead matriarchs.

“But their interest in the ivory and skulls of their own species means that they would be highly likely to visit the bones of relatives who die within their home range,” writes the team, lead by Karen McComb at the University of Sussex, UK.
Large brains, long lived

“It begs the question why do they do this? This interest in remains of animals, long-dead, hasn’t really been observed in any other species apart from humans,” McComb told New Scientist.

She also notes that recorded interest in the dead has been seen in elephants and chimps - “two very social species, with quite complex structures, large brains and who are long-lived”. She speculates: “It may be connected with particular cognitive abilities or aspects of social behaviour."

“Elephants are highly intelligent and highly tactile animals,” says David Field, head of animal care for London and Whipsnade Zoos in the UK. “The fact they are able to distinguish between their own skulls and those of other species is not surprising.”

“Elephants themselves are a matriarchal society filled with aunties and family members who have close bonds within a group," he adds. A death in the family might be a significant social event. “It could have an impact on social bonding and structure within the group,” he told New Scientist.

Smelling and touching

McComb and colleagues studied African elephants (Loxodonta africana) living in Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Families of elephants were presented with objects by placing them about 25 metres away from the nearest elephant and then driving away and observing the reaction of animals.

In one experiment, 17 families were presented with skulls from an elephant, a buffalo and a rhinoceros. The elephants showed considerable interest in the skull of their own species. They did this by smelling and touching individual objects with their trunks and occasionally touching them lightly with their feet.

In another experiment, 19 families were presented with an elephant skull, a piece of ivory and a piece of wood. The creatures showed a strong preference for the ivory over the other two objects, and for the skull over the wood.

The third experiment tested three elephant families who had recently lost the head of their family. Each was presented with three skulls of matriarchs including their own – but they did not show a preference for their relative’s skull.

The notion of elephant graveyards – where old elephants wander off to die – has been exposed as myth by previous studies, the researchers note. Nonetheless, they believe their experiments “cast light” on why elephants are often seen interacting with the skulls and ivory of dead companions.

But there is no way to tell whether the elephants are mourning their dead – although they get very excited when approaching carcasses, with secretions streaming from their temples.

[image]
The elephants showed a strong preference towards an elephant skull (middle) rather than the skulls of a buffalo or a rhino (Image: Royal Society/Karen McComb)

[image]
The elephants showed a strong preference towards an elephant skull (middle) rather than the skulls of a buffalo or a rhino (Image: Royal Society/Karen McComb)


Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2005.0400)
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Weblinks

* Karen McComb, University of Sussex
* http://www.sussex.ac.uk/psychology/profile1752.html
* Zoological Society of London
* http://www.zsl.org/london-zoo/
* Biology Letters
* http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/biologyletters.shtml