falconspace

"Waiting to get busy ..." writes AviWolf.

The Hawk Lady of Los Altos
by Doug Hammond, Long Beach Beachcomber,

Most people enraptured with the idea of flying in California end up with a pilot’s license. But for Lori Prichard Beller, mother of three school-age children and one of only 300 licensed falconers in California, flight is a more vicarious experience.

She has finished her two-year apprenticeship and is in her first year as a general falconer with four years to go until she becomes a master falconer.

It is hard to imagine a more improbable sight in Los Altos than that of this trim athletic woman standing in the suburban twilight of her front yard, an imposing hooded bird of prey named Valor perched on her leather-gloved hand.

Beller has always loved birds. “At my children’s elementary school I heard about a small American Kestrel falcon that was coming to the custodian and I started going to the school there at six in the morning and it was coming to me as long as I held out a little mealworm. It was just the most majestic feeling to have this wild bird coming to you!”

Beller, who is also a state women’s longbow champion, went online and looked into the California Hawking Club and made some inquiries. She wondered, “Is this good for the birds?” She was worried initially about the loss of their natural and well-warranted fear of humans.

But as falconry is considered a form of hunting in California and highly regulated (like everything else in the state) she dived into the series of tests required of licensed falconers. An experienced sponsor is required and Beller was fortunate to find one in Long Beach. Hunting and gun safety courses followed.

“Falconers have to follow the same rules as general hunters as far as to where we are allowed to hunt. We have to know all about the various hunting seasons and restrictions.”

Beller caught her female red-tailed hawk, Valor, in Sand Canyon, “where there’s still some agriculture left.” She placed a rat in a cage covered in small nooses of monofilament fishing line out in an open field. As hawks catch prey with their talons, her fledgling became entangled in the filament line, the weighted cage too heavy to carry off.

There is a different bond at play when hunting with hawks and falcons.

There’s no hand or face licking. The level of companionship is a bit different with the birds of prey. Though some falconers do use dogs to help flush out the rabbits, Beller does not, citing space limitations. As Valor flies high above the field in lazy circles Beller beats the brush and tumbleweeds below.

According to Beller, the birds come to accept humans as partners in their hunt. Humans, in turn, get to enter nature’s circle becoming intimately familiar with not only predator but with the habitat and habits of their prey as well.

Despite ferocious looking talons and an eagle’s gaze, Valor is surprisingly gentle and still somewhat shy of humans. She is a “passage bird” (meaning a bird less than a year old that has been on its own for at least six months) and she assumes a defensive posture when set down, back to the ground, talons up, motionless.

Red-tail hawks can live 35 years in captivity compared with a survival rate of only 20 percent in the wild. Natural hazards include other red-tails, which are extremely territorial, eagles, foxes and coyotes. Even the kick of a jackrabbit or the bite of a squirrel can cripple a hawk. “The biggest threat of all is power lines. More large birds of prey are killed this way.”

As to human hunting of the birds, “dult birds are illegal to trap. They have found mates and established territories. They are a protected species and you’re not supposed to shoot or catch them without licensing. Those that are licensed care for these birds tremendously.”

Feeding time is not handled by a quick trip to Petco. Beller drives to San Diego to pick up quail in bulk, buying 100 at a time. “I buy frozen quail and you just warm it up (don’t cook it she advises) like your own food. It costs about $1.30 per quail.”

As to why Beller chose hawks over, say, a parakeet, she explained, “I think there is a lot of truth to the idea that people choose pets that are like themselves. I look at my first bird and I feel like there is a connection. I’m so much like her and there is a bond in that sense. Ever since I was a very young child I wanted to fly and I knew I was going to. When they fly, I feel like I’m flying.”

Beller usually takes Valor out to hunt in Ontario. “It’s still in a building-out stage but there are still some fields left. I used to go out to Cal State Dominguez Hills. They had some fields but now they’re gone. In fact, it’s really sad but there was a red-tail nest right on campus near the Agricultural center and now it’s just a parking lot.”

Asked if this is a life-long relationship with Valor, Beller replied, “No. I do intend to release her. I want her to have her own family. Hawks mate for life and I want her to experience that so I will release her in one to two years. I’m only allowed to have two birds on my license and after that I was thinking about training an owl.”

For those interested in falconry, www.calhawkingclub.org has general and apprenticeship information, photos, forums and much more.

Study unveils bull elephants' sexy secret
Thursday, December 22, 2005
by RICHARD L. HILL, The Oregonian

A complex chemical cocktail emitted by older Asian bull elephants makes them more attractive than younger males to some females, a study by Oregon and New Zealand scientists has found.

The delicately balanced potion sends a clear message that influences elephants' behavior in an older bull's neighborhood. By giving a better understanding of the mysteries of elephants' chemical communication, the study may prove useful in helping conservationists manage the animals in the wild and in captivity.

L.E.L. "Bets" Rasmussen, a scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, and researchers at the University of Auckland in New Zealand report the discovery in today's issue of the journal Nature.

Adult male elephants secrete a foul-smelling compound during their annual bouts with musth, a period of heightened sexual activity and aggression. A bull in musth discharges the dark, oily substance from a temporal gland on each side of its head about midway between the eye and the ear.

The study found that older males emit a more balanced mixture of two versions of a pheromone, or chemical signal, called frontalin, than younger males. Ovulating females are attracted by the balanced secretion of the older bulls, while other elephants tend to stay clear and even run away.

"We were surprised, because this is the first time that this precise chemical signaling has been identified in mammals," said Rasmussen, a biochemist at OHSU's OGI School of Science and Engineering in Hillsboro. Bark beetles use frontalin in a similar fashion to attract other beetles. Although the compound is an attractant, she said, it's not considered a sex pheromone, because "it doesn't elicit overt mating behavior."

The subtle chemical signals involve the ratios of what are called enantiomers. An enantiomer is one of a pair of chemical compounds whose molecular structures are mirror images of each other. Young males tend to produce secretions that primarily contain one enantiomer, while older males have a 50-50 ratio of both forms.

An analysis of secretion samples from six male elephants found that the pheromone is first detectable when the animals are in their late teens. The ratios of the two forms of frontalin became almost equal between the ages of about 31 and 43.

"As they get older, the ratio of the forms of frontalin evens out," Rasmussen said. "So the message they're sending out is changing as they grow older."

David R. Greenwood, a biologist at the University of Auckland and the study's lead author, said team members were "quite surprised" by the findings because scientists had assumed elephants made only one form of frontalin. With the changing ratios of the two forms, "you end up having a signal that is essentially different. It's not just a single message."

For the past two decades, Rasmussen has been collecting temporal gland secretions from elephants in musth, when they can be dangerous. Samples used in the study were from elephants at the Oregon Zoo, the Auckland Zoo, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida and Riddle's Elephant and Wildlife Sanctuary in Arkansas.

Rasmussen is a leading expert on chemical communication signals in elephants. A decade ago, she identified the sex pheromone -- (Z)-7-dodecenyl-1-yl-acetate -- that female elephants secrete in their urine to let bulls know they're ready to mate.

In a Nature article four years ago, Rasmussen described how male Asian elephants use two fragrances to indicate when they are in musth. Young bulls emit a honey-scented secretion when they are between 8 and 12 years old but the more foul-smelling substance when they reach their 20s.

The new findings might be useful in studying how the scent-detecting process may relate to behavior at a basic level in other animals, including humans, Rasmussen said. "That's why I'm more excited about this discovery of any of my past research."

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors
by CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL (via BoingBoing)

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Last updated: 20-Dec-05 10:36 GMT

Cold of Winter Leavened By The Joy of Watching Graceful Merlins in Flight
by JOE EATON Special to the Planet
Berkeley Daily Planet
December 20, 2005

Winter, I have to admit, is not my favorite time of year: The cold and the dark have no appeal for me. (I may have been an emperor penguin in a past life). I begin to get seasonally affected around Halloween and it doesn’t really let up until Groundhog Day. But there are compensations. The waterfowl are back in force, and the winter complement of songbirds are here. And along with them come the merlins. If winter has a single redeeming feature, it’s the opportunity to watch a merlin at work, dogging a flock of shorebirds at the edge of the bay.

It would be nice if there was some kind of association between the falcon and the wizard, but it seems unlikely. Ernest Choate’s Dictionary of North American Bird Names derives “merlin” from the Old English marlion, the falconer’s term for the female of the species. In the hierarchy of falconry, the merlin was the lady’s bird.

Catherine the Great flew merlins, as did Mary Queen of Scots who at one point in her difficulties with Elizabeth I was in the custody of the royal falconer, Sir Ralph Sadler. Sadler allowed Mary out of her confinement for short hawking excursions. Trained merlins specialized in hunting larks; the quarry’s tendency to evade predators by flying straight up made for interesting contests.

These small, dark falcons have a distinctive flight profile and hunting style. In their classic Hawks in Flight, Pete Dunne, David Sibley, and Clay Sutton comment that a merlin is to a kestrel what a Harley-Davidson is to a scooter. A merlin’s flight is strong and direct, with short, powerful wing strokes. They can be sneaky on the approach, hugging the treeline; at eastern hawkwatch sites, the typical response is “There went a merlin.” On the attack, they may fly low over the ground, tailchasing an individual target and climbing above it for the final stoop.

At rest, merlins can be distinguished from kestrels by their more compact proportions and weaker facial pattern; the falcon mustache is present, but pencil-thin. They can also be mistaken for juvenile sharp-shinned hawks, with which young merlins sometimes associate during migrations; merlins have the characteristic falcon pointed-wing silhouette and narrower banding on the tail.

Some years ago, there was a mockingbird in my South Berkeley neighborhood that had learned to imitate the sound a telephone makes when left off the hook. After enduring this for a couple of months, I came home one afternoon to find a merlin atop a tall conifer next door, methodically plucking something as falcons do—something resembling a mockingbird. And I never heard the phone-off-the-hook noise again.

Although they’ll take other avian prey, including horned larks, pipits, and flickers, most of the merlins that winter in California are shorebird hunters. To a merlin, a mudflat between tides is a smorgasbord. Thirty years ago, Point Reyes Bird Observatory biologists Gary Page and D. F. Whitacre kept tabs on a female merlin at Bolinas Lagoon for an entire winter season. They estimated that she caught 264 sandpipers, along with a smattering of warblers, sparrows, and blackbirds, with a success rate of 12.8 percent on 343 observed hunts. Apart from birds, merlins hawk for large insects like butterflies and dragonflies, and catch the occasional small mammal.

Most of the merlins we see around here are of the subspecies columbarius, or what Sibley calls the taiga form. (Sibley has an aversion to Latin, for some reason). It’s the middle-of-the-road merlin; there’s also the darker subspecies suckleyi, Sibley’s Pacific (black) merlin, which I’ve spotted a couple of times, and the rarer pale richardsoni, the prairie merlin. Richardsoni, as the common name suggests, breeds in the northern prairies, and has become a city bird in places like Edmonton and Saskatoon. Suckleyi comes from the wet coastal forests of mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island. But columbarius is, in fact, a bird of the taiga, the great boreal forest of North America; other forms inhabit the same zone from Siberia west to northern Europe.

Taiga merlins tend to avoid the deep woods, hunting and nesting in edge environments: near treeline or alpine timberline, or around lakes, bogs, and regrowing burns. Where available, they’ll take over the old nests of crows and magpies, although tree cavities are sometimes used. After a brief aerobatic courtship, a merlin pair starts its family late in the northern spring, timed to take advantage of the annual crop of fledgling songbirds (which in turn depend on the spring flush of foliage-eating insects).

It hasn’t received nearly as much press as the tropical rainforest, but the taiga is crucial habitat for North American birds. Over 300 species—ducks and gulls as well as raptors and songbirds—nest there, and 96, including the merlin, have more than half their breeding population in the boreal forest region. It’s an ecosystem under intense pressure. Canada, which contains most of the North American taiga, fells 2.5 million acres of forest per year, mostly in clearcuts. Forestry companies own almost a third of the Canadian taiga, and oil and gas interests are also active; only 6 per cent has any form of protection. And the whole boreal community—trees, insects, birds—is vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The loss of taiga habitat may already be affecting bird populations. Data from Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts shows alarming declines in several boreal-nesting species, including the once-abundant rusty blackbird. The one taiga breeder that bucks the trend is the merlin. Although their numbers plunged during the DDT years, the small falcons have made a dramatic comeback; Count numbers from 1965 through 2002 document an increase of 3.3 per cent per year. Credit their adaptability, and probably a large measure of luck. Let’s hope it holds.

Civilisation has left its mark on our genes
Bob Holmes, New Scientist, 19 December 2005

Darwin’s fingerprints can be found all over the human genome. A detailed look at human DNA has shown that a significant percentage of our genes have been shaped by natural selection in the past 50,000 years, probably in response to aspects of modern human culture such as the emergence of agriculture and the shift towards living in densely populated settlements.

One way to look for genes that have recently been changed by natural selection is to study mutations called single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – single-letter differences in the genetic code. The trick is to look for pairs of SNPs that occur together more often than would be expected from the chance genetic reshuffling that inevitably happens down the generations.

Such correlations are known as linkage disequilibrium, and can occur when natural selection favours a particular variant of a gene, causing the SNPs nearby to be selected as well.

Robert Moyzis and his colleagues at the University of California, Irvine, US, searched for instances of linkage disequilibrium in a collection of 1.6 million SNPs scattered across all the human chromosomes. They then looked carefully at the instances they found to distinguish the consequences of natural selection from other phenomena, such as random inversions of chunks of DNA, which can disrupt normal genetic reshuffling.

This analysis suggested that around 1800 genes, or roughly 7% of the total in the human genome, have changed under the influence of natural selection within the past 50,000 years. A second analysis using a second SNP database gave similar results. That is roughly the same proportion of genes that were altered in maize when humans domesticated it from its wild ancestors.

“Domesticated” humans

Moyzis speculates that we may have similarly “domesticated” ourselves with the emergence of modern civilisation.

“One of the major things that has happened in the last 50,000 years is the development of culture,” he says. “By so radically and rapidly changing our environment through our culture, we’ve put new kinds of selection [pressures] on ourselves.”

Genes that aid protein metabolism – perhaps related to a change in diet with the dawn of agriculture – turn up unusually often in Moyzis’s list of recently selected genes. So do genes involved in resisting infections, which would be important in a species settling into more densely populated villages where diseases would spread more easily. Other selected genes include those involved in brain function, which could be important in the development of culture.

But the details of any such sweeping survey of the genome should be treated with caution, geneticists warn. Now that Moyzis has made a start on studying how the influence of modern human culture is written in our genes, other teams can see if similar results are produced by other analytical techniques, such as comparing human and chimp genomes.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0509691102)

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Weblinks

Robert Moyzis, University of California

SNP fact sheet, Human Genome Project

Evolution special report, New Scientist