falconspace

no longer at this location

2006-07-19T19:08:00.000-07:00

Join us in progress at blogFALCONSPACE. Blogger got to be too much of a hassle so I moved.

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2006-04-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

mex0171
Originally uploaded by bpx.

Wild animals stencil

2006-04-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

Wild animals stencil
Originally uploaded by Robyn Gallagher.

"More stencils on Ponsonby Road next to the fruit shop. This time it's two wild animals."

Tiger stencil on Ponsonby Road.

2006-04-18T17:42:00.001-07:00

Tiger stencil on Ponsonby Road.
Originally uploaded by Robyn Gallagher.

"A tiger stencil on the side of a building on the corner of Ponsonby Road and Pollen Street."

Bird stencil on Ponsonby Road

2006-04-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Bird stencil on Ponsonby Road
Originally uploaded by Robyn Gallagher.

"A mighty bird stencil takes flight behind a neighbouring fruit shop's flower display. It's a bit bogany."

horny lady sticker

2006-04-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

horny lady sticker
Originally uploaded by Hutch1000.

winged creature

2006-04-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

Nina
Originally uploaded by Mateus Reis.

Nina

playmate

2006-04-18T17:16:00.000-07:00

Detanger Germain "Nu Masculin Avec Faucon"
Originally uploaded by Mamluke.

Detanger Germain (1846-1902)

"Nu Masculin Avec Faucon"
oil on canvas
Private Collection

aliens among us

2006-04-17T20:52:00.000-07:00

Meet the Neighbors
Coyotes have moved into the Washington area.
The disturbing reality: They are here to stay.

Among Us
By Mary Battiata
Sunday, April 16, 2006; W06

As coyotes settle into the Washington suburbs, they provoke awe, anxiety and a fundamental question: Do they have to adapt to us, or we to them?

In the meticulously planned community of Fallsgrove, there are six homeowners associations to gavel through disputes over fence heights and the proper color for window shutters. A property management company oversees most of the raking and mowing. Nature has been trimmed and shaped into a tidy border for narrow streets of tall townhouses and cluster homes. Most days, the only sign of wildlife is the squirrels that race around the community pool.

So it was with some astonishment that Cheryl Hays looked out her kitchen window at about 8 one morning last fall and saw what looked to be a large dog in the yard, about five feet from the back door. For a moment, still groggy with sleep, she thought: "Why is that dog in my back yard?" Then she remembered. Three weeks earlier, at about 6 a.m., she'd heard barking and looked out her bedroom window to see a pair of coyotes trotting purposefully down the middle of Long Trail Terrace, toward Jersey Lane. "They were walking up people's driveways, sniffing around the houses!" Hays said. She heard a third coyote barking from a grove of trees on the other side of the house, and when she ran to look there, she saw not one but three coyotes. That meant there were at least three, and possibly five, coyotes sniffing around her house that morning. "They were in driveways, front yards and brazenly on the street!" she e-mailed a neighbor.

As most of Fallsgrove already knew, coyotes were afoot in Rockville. A trapper hired by the Fallsgrove property management company had already caught and killed at least 12, and possibly 14, around the 252-acre subdivision before a lawsuit by the Humane Society of Montgomery County temporarily shut him down. Two more coyotes had been hit by cars nearby.

And, although coyotes had not attacked anyone, their mere presence had provoked volleys of alarmed e-mail among community residents. Coyotes had circled one prominent Fallsgrove homeowner, J. Thomas Manger, the county's chief of police, and his kids on a walking path. (Since confirming the incident, the chief has declined further public comment about it.) One of Hays's neighbors phoned her to report that she, too, had been followed by coyotes, while walking her toddler and two border collies.

Hays, a real estate agent with a determined air, petitioned her homeowners association to raise the fence height limit from four to six feet, arguing that the extra two feet might make it harder for the coyotes to move around. She called the trapper to ask if he planned to return. (He didn't.) And she called the Rockville city manager to request that the city encircle an eight-acre green space in the middle of the development known as the Preserve with something even higher -- an eight-foot cast-iron fence.

Neither the city nor the homeowners association thought drastic fencing measures were needed. "The homeowners association seems to think that I am the only concerned person in the neighborhood," she e-mailed a neighbor. "It is appalling to me that the homeowners association and the city refuse to acknowledge the public safety issue to family and pets." Instead, Hays complained, local officialdom seemed set on a wait-and-see approach.

Hays, 34, stood in her tiny side yard on a recent evening and peered out into the dark corridor of grass between her house and the one next door. "They come through here and head to the shopping center dumpster," she said of the coyotes. "It's just like they're commuting!" Eight-and-a-half months pregnant with her second child, Hays wondered out loud how she was supposed to share her world with wild coyotes. "It's crazy! These are the most expensive homes in Rockville, and we're like hostages! We bought here for the walking paths. Well, how am I going to deal with a coyote on the path when I'm out there with an infant in a stroller, a toddler and a dog on a leash?"

Hays shook her head. "I don't think people should kill them -- I'm an animal lover. But it's just frightening."

A few blocks away, one of Hays's neighbors was having similar misgivings, but from the opposite point of view. Aubrey Bursch, a 27-year-old accountant and multimedia specialist, a newlywed who spends her spare time volunteering at a wildlife hospital, was less worried about the coyotes than about her neighbors' reaction to them. Things already seemed so charged -- trapping, the lawsuit and more than a dozen dead coyotes. And the coyotes hadn't even attacked anyone. Eyewitness reports of coyote encounters were sketchy and adrenaline-tinged. The fact was that no one in Fallsgrove, none of her neighbors, and not Bursch herself, knew very much about coyotes. The trapper had retreated angrily to his house on Maryland's Eastern Shore and wasn't talking publicly.

Bursch had joined the Humane Society lawsuit that put a temporary stop to the trapping. To her, the trapping seemed something of a rush to judgment. Everyone knew that Fallsgrove, only a few years old, had been built on the old Thomas Farm, a rare large parcel of agricultural land in the lower county. It was not far from two parks. Which made Bursch and others wonder: Wasn't it possible that Fallsgrove, not the coyotes, was the intruder? Wasn't it possible that Fallsgrove owed the coyotes some degree of accommodation? Or at least a thorough investigation of the problem before eradication began?

And what about the rats? Everyone in Fallsgrove knew there was a rat problem in some sections of the development. People stepped over them getting out of their cars. Wasn't it possible that this rat buffet had something to do with the proliferation of coyotes at Fallsgrove? And, if so, didn't it make sense to clean up the rat problem before wholesale killing of coyotes began?

There was a paradox in all this. Over the past 20 years, residents of suburban Washington had become accustomed to living amid ever-growing herds of azalea-stripping deer, flocks of lawn-fouling and territorial Canada geese, as well as raccoon and squirrel populations far more dense than they would be in rural areas. But coyotes were something different: medium-size predators, with a wolf-like appearance and a reputation for wiliness, who seemed to stir a primal fear of wolves that came to this continent with European settlement.

Hays said the coyotes of Fallsgrove could be heard at night singing along with the ambulances that arrived at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, just across the road. The sound they made, high-pitched yips and barks that culminated in long yodels, wasn't exactly a wolf howl. It was shorter, less haunting maybe. But it was thrilling and beautiful all the same. It was also anxiety-making, Hays said. It sounded like a whole lot of coyotes. What was going on out there in the dark? Whose subdivision was it, anyway?

ACTUALLY, THE COYOTES AT FALLSGROVE WERE ALMOST OVERDUE. Washington is the last major metropolitan area in the country to be colonized by coyotes. They arrived in Maryland and Virginia about 20 years ago, after expanding their range into every part of the continental United States except the southernmost tip of Florida. (They showed up there about five years ago.) By 2004, when coyotes first were sighted in Rock Creek Park, large populations already were ensconced in suburban Westchester County, outside New York City, as well as Boston, Nashville, Phoenix, Houston and elsewhere. Last month, a coyote on the loose in Central Park, at the latitude of 66th Street, made headlines -- "Beep! Beep! Wily Coyote Captured." It was the second coyote to show up in Manhattan in recent years. In downtown Chicago, coyotes have been spotted trotting back and forth across Michigan Avenue. Outside Boston, the presence of coyotes has provoked a fierce debate in the state legislature about reintroducing leg-hold traps, currently banned as cruel and unnecessary. In California, coyotes have been a fact of urban life for decades. On the beaches of Santa Barbara, when bathers go into the water, coyotes come out of the brush to sniff beach towels.

The coyote -- biological cousin of the wolf, fox and dog -- has roamed the Plains states for at least 15,000 years. The coyotes' outward migration began about a century ago. They moved east and west, filling the ecological vacuum left by human efforts to eradicate wolves from the lower 48 states. Coyotes expanded west first, toward California. Eastward expansion began a few decades later, along two routes, one due east and southeast, through the Gulf States, and the other northeast, into Canada, and eventually down into New England and along the East Coast. Wildlife biologists believe that the coyotes now showing up in the Washington area may be part of both eastward migrations: the smaller, Western coyotes -- 20 to 35 pounds -- of the due-east migration; and larger coyotes from the Canadian migration. Coyotes in this second group weigh 35 to 50 pounds, because of interbreeding with Canadian wolves.

Wildlife trappers in Washington's outermost suburbs -- Virginia's Fauquier County and Maryland's Washington County -- say coyote numbers have grown slowly but steadily. Coyote density in Western Maryland is now estimated to be about that of the American West.

Trappers have a saying about coyotes, said Fauquier County trapper Sam Poles. "The only thing that will survive a nuclear war is cockroaches and coyotes. Best thing I can tell you about coyotes is: Learn their habits, and be prepared to live with them. 'Cause once you get them in the suburbs, you're not getting rid of them."

But living with them may be easier said than done. "Coyotes are canids, and people have always had a love-hate relationship with canids," said Stan Gehrt, a wildlife biologist and director of the Cook County Coyote Project in suburban Chicago. "A lot of our wolf control was done more out of fear more than any damage they did. Wolves just made us uncomfortable."

Coyotes seem to have a similar effect. Around the country, the presence of coyotes seems to divide the human population into two groups: pro-coyote people, who advocate benign co-existence, and those who think even one coyote around is one too many. "Usually, for people to consider an animal to be a nuisance, that animal has to cause damage or cause inconvenience," Gehrt said. "But coyotes are the one species that can be considered a nuisance simply by being fleetingly seen. The question is: Can we adjust our level of tolerance to them as we find out more about them?"

COYOTES HAVE BEEN SEEN IN THE DISTRICT -- crossing Massachusetts Avenue in Rock Creek Park, running along Arizona Avenue, as well as on suburban lawns in Silver Spring and at Dulles International Airport. For all that, however, it isn't easy to conjure up a coyote on demand here -- not yet, anyway. But there is another city, clear across the continent, where a sighting of an urban coyote is almost guaranteed. That is Vancouver.

Vancouver is 10 years ahead of Washington on the coyote curve, biologists say. In 1995, coyote sightings in Vancouver were a novelty, as they are here today. But within five years, coyotes had become a public safety issue. In 2001, there were at least six reported coyote attacks on small children. The city's tabloid newspaper took enthusiastic note of each one. "Coyote Savages Baby Girl in City," screamed one headline. "Vicious Coyote Sunk Its Teeth Into Baby's Cheek," blared another. "Baby Ruth's Beastly Bite."

Public reaction was polarized. "The best way to get rid of coyotes is to shoot them," said one letter to the editor. Others held the opposite view. "Before our emotions get the best of us, and we go ahead with a coyote cull, we might consider the dire consequences," said another. "We'll be up to our ears in cats and rats." Others pointed out that dog bites, an average of 250 a year within the city, far exceeded coyote bites, and no one was calling for the mass eradication of dogs.

Before mass poisoning or any other measures could be proposed, however, a local wildlife biologist came up with a plan that quickly reduced the number of coyote bites to zero, where it has remained since. The plan, known as "Co-Existing With Coyotes" and run out of a small, one-man office on the grounds of Vancouver's huge Stanley Park, has been so successful that city managers from across North America phone regularly for advice and information.

Looking out over an audience of wriggling school kids at the General Brock Elementary School on Main Street in downtown Vancouver, Robert Boelens asked, "Okay, who knows how to tell a dog from a coyote?"

As Vancouver's point man for coyote management, Boelens has seen hundreds of urban coyotes, and chased many on foot with the only weapons he has found to be necessary: his voice and a homemade noisemaker, an old cookie tin filled with nails. Boelens, 35, is a self-taught naturalist and former television reporter who is sometimes referred to by school principals as the Coyote Man, a nickname he dislikes. Six-foot-two, with wire-rimmed glasses and light brown hair, he has the patient, quiet manner of a man who spent his post-college years caring for injured wolves and other animals at a wildlife hospital. Because small children are more likely to attract the attention of a coyote, at least half his time is spent visiting schools to talk about coyote habits. The balance is taken up investigating reports of nuisance coyotes and answering calls from homeowners to the city's coyote hotline.

"First," Boelens told the children, "coyotes have really big ears, and they always point up. They're two big triangles, and they never flop or lay back." Next, the eyes: never blue. Then, the tail: A coyote's is always down, even when the coyote is running. Finally, Boelens said, the coyote has a rim of white fur around its mouth. "So it looks like it's smiling," he said. That helped give the coyote its reputation among Native Americans as a trickster and clown.

Vancouver's coyote management program is based on three principles, all related to the one fact that all the local coyote attacks had in common: The coyotes had been fed by humans. All six coyotes trapped and killed after those incidents had human food in their stomachs: beef stew, perfectly cubed potatoes, dry dog food. The feedings -- some deliberate handouts, others inadvertent (i.e., trash) -- had undermined the coyotes' natural fear of humans and taught them that people were a source of food. So it was clear that an effective coyote management program would have to include management of human behavior, too. Large posters went up in city parks and at golf courses with messages that included: "Do not feed coyotes. A fed coyote puts your community at risk."

Now, in the school auditorium, Boelens went further. "If you feed a coyote," he said, "you are signing its death warrant."

Boelens ran down a list of the coyote's remarkable athletic skills: Coyotes can jump over a six-foot fence, using their paws to vault themselves over the top. They can run 40 mph. They can swim. And leap 15 feet to pounce on prey. They eat mice, snakes, grasshoppers, birds and rats, as well as woodchucks, squirrels and, in spring, small fawns. They move about by day or night, depending on when food is most plentiful and they feel most safe. They don't live in dens, except in spring, when they are raising young. Most of the year, they rest under trees or in any sheltered, out-of-the way place. While they may meet to groom and socialize in family groups as large as eight or nine (including that year's litter of pups), coyotes rarely move around in groups larger than a pair. Their prey is small enough that no pack effort is needed to bring it down.

Then Boelens came to perhaps the most important part of his presentation. He raised his voice and slowed his speech: "One thing you should never, ever do when you see a coyote is run. What you need to do is make yourself 'big, mean and loud.' Be as big, mean and loud as you can." He raised his hands over his head. "This is what we do when we see a coyote," he said, putting on a fierce face and lunging toward a group of teachers. "Go away, coyote!" he roared.

"I'm teaching the coyote not to come around," Boelens told the children. "If all of us behave like that, we'll have no problems."

After the presentation, Boelens got into his battered Honda Civic and drove to a well-to-do neighborhood of large Tudor-trimmed houses, tall trees and manicured lawns. Recently, homeowners there had reported coyotes crisscrossing the neighborhood's winding streets in broad daylight. They had snatched outdoor cats and even a small dog from behind fenced yards. (A coyote can sail over a four-foot fence. To clear a six-foot fence, the coyote uses the top of the fence to boost itself over; thus the spinning roll bar on a "coyote fence.") In this neighborhood, Boelens quickly discovered a typical coyote hangout: an empty lot, where overgrown blackberry bushes and tall grass were providing ideal cover. In Vancouver, the single most effective coyote management tool, said Boelens, has been persuading home and business owners to clean up empty lots and be more careful with trash, a change that ultimately required tightening the city bylaws.

In addition to public education and cleanup, there is a third leg of the Co-Existing With Coyotes program. Its peaceable goal and name notwithstanding, the program recognizes that, inevitably, there will be problem coyotes whose presence cannot be tolerated. These animals -- coyotes that have shown clear signs of aggression toward humans and do not respond to efforts to drive them off -- are reported to city animal control, trapped and euthanized. (Because a coyote that is moved even miles away will often make its way back, in most cases relocation of an aggressive animal is not considered an option.) But Boelens has almost never had to recommend trapping and euthanasia. In the vast majority of cases, coyotes that are making themselves too visible in places where they aren't welcome can be permanently chased away with minimal effort. This is Boelens's job, too. He does it by acting kind of like an aggressive beat cop who notices unsavory types lurking in the 7-Eleven parking lot. He chases the coyotes on foot, yelling and waving his arms and shaking the cookie tin filled with nails. After a few chases, the coyotes invariably get the message and move on, or at least switch to a more nocturnal hunting schedule.

"I've confronted 100 coyotes and never had one that didn't scatter," Boelens said.

The following afternoon, Boelens took me to Langara public golf course in the city. It was 4 p.m. and getting dark. The sixth fairway was a sea of frosted grass, and the final golfer was walking toward the clubhouse. The start of evening rush hour could be heard on the boulevard just beyond a row of dark fir trees. A sliver of white moon hung in the cobalt sky.

The golf course looked deserted, but, as Boelens and I walked on a paved path past the low skirts of a red cedar tree, there was a rustle of boughs and a gray shadow bolted out from underneath, toward a knoll 30 yards to the right. An adult coyote stood there, in the characteristic coyote stance -- its body facing away, in case quick escape was needed, but its head twisted back, watching us. Within moments, a second coyote materialized and stood beside the first. They were the size of adult German shepherds, but skinnier, with stick-like legs, long narrow muzzles and large, pointed ears. Their winter coats were thick and healthy-looking. Each time we stepped toward them, the coyotes took an equal step back, maintaining a constant distance. They looked wary and alert, but not afraid.

"That look they are giving us now means: Who are you? What are you going to do?" Boelens said.

This pair of coyotes had become comfortable with golf course life. Generally they were seen only at dawn and dusk, although last spring a female and her litter of rambunctious pups had kept the course's maintenance crew entertained for weeks.

Just beyond the golf course, however, there were garden apartments from which outdoor pet cats routinely went missing, some assumed to have been snatched by coyotes. "It isn't much fun to come out in the morning and find half of your cat on the front lawn," Boelens said. Coyotes had taken small dogs, too, even dogs walking at the end of a 20-foot flexi-leash. Sometimes the coyote's pounce snapped the leash, and the dogs came right out of their collars, leaving behind nothing but a frayed length of nylon and an empty collar ring.

Failing to show dominance toward a coyote is always a mistake, Boelens said. It undermines the coyotes' fear of humans and, with that, the urban coyote's best chance for peaceful coexistence with us. So now it was time for Boelens to go to work, to remind these coyotes that hanging around and staring at humans, even out of curiosity, was unacceptable behavior.

He turned and looked directly at them. He raised his arms, widened his eyes. Then he ran toward them, arms over his head. Before he'd taken three steps, the coyotes hopped in place, and then took off, so silently and fluidly that they seemed to float over the open ground. Within seconds, they were gone.

SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTIES ABOUT COYOTES, urban and otherwise, are few and far between. Coyotes are famously difficult to trap. Too smart to be tricked into box traps and fast-learning enough to step around all but the most cannily set leg-hold traps and snares, they have eluded wildlife biologists for decades. But as coyotes establish themselves in cities and suburbs, they are drawing renewed attention from a younger generation of scientists armed with new tools, such as DNA analysis, GPS tracking and radio telemetry. New and confounding facts about coyote behavior are emerging, and they highlight the vital ecological function that coyotes serve.

At Quantico Marine Corps Base, an hour south of Washington, one such study is well underway. Like many military bases around the country, Quantico functions as a de facto wildlife preserve. Its 60,205 acres are managed by an ecologist, and the land is home to several rare and endangered species of plants and birds. The base is more than 70 percent forested, but it also has miles of open field. These so-called edge habitats, where field and forest meet, are ideal terrain for coyotes. The past 200 years of land use in the eastern United States -- clear-cutting of forests for farming, followed by gradual reforestation -- has created plenty of it.

Five years ago, a wildlife biology graduate student at George Mason University named Kristi Robinson heard that deer hunters who use the base during hunting season were reporting the presence of coyotes for the first time. The hunters saw the coyotes as potential competition -- a threat to the base's large deer herd. Coyotes are considered nuisance animals in Virginia, as they are in most states, and can be shot at will by a property owner. What did the base intend to do about the coyotes, the hunters wanted to know.

Robinson suspected, based on the limited scientific data available about coyote diet, that the only adult deer coyotes ate were roadkill. She decided to find out for sure. She began traveling the base's 460 miles of paths and streams (on foot, mountain bike and kayak) collecting coyote scat, part of a five-year study that would eventually become her master's thesis.

She discovered that, for much of the year, coyotes at Quantico eat a diet that is more than 50 percent non-game, including berries, fruit and copious amounts of grasshoppers. The balance of the diet consists of mice, voles and other small rodents. Analysis of scat shows that deer meat accounts for less than 7 percent of the diet and tends to show up in the coyote droppings in the fall, coinciding with hunting season.

Coyotes do take spring fawns, however, which, once coyotes are established here, could help stabilize the size of the local deer population, which in the absence of predators, is now wildly out of balance. But mainly, Robinson said, her study shows that coyotes favor much smaller fare. "There's such a huge abundance of small mammals available here year-round," Robinson said. "There'd be no reason for a coyote, which is 35 to 40 pounds, to hunt a 100-pound animal twice its size with real sharp hooves."

Robinson's findings agree with a larger study of urban coyote behavior underway in suburban Chicago. The Cook County Coyote Project, led by wildlife biologist Gehrt, has tracked urban coyotes in a 700-square-mile area that includes 128 cities and towns and O'Hare International Airport. Gehrt, an assistant professor in the school of environment and natural resources at Ohio State University, and a team of graduate students have fitted 220 coyotes with ear tags and radio collars and set them loose. The information shows coyotes' remarkable adaptability to urban life. One of the study's animals regularly traveled more than 22 miles a night, across five cities and the runways at O'Hare. Coyotes particularly like the easements between interstates and malls and subdivisions. "They use the interstates like we do, to cover large areas quickly. I've seen them sitting by the highway, watching traffic."

Analysis of 1,500 scat samples has found that less than 1 percent of the Chicago coyotes' diet is trash or human food. Instead, mice and voles are the preferred meal. When those populations crash, coyotes readily shift their attention to rats. "Rats of a size that a cat or a fox might not tackle present no obstacle to an adult coyote," Gehrt said.

The Chicago coyotes also displayed a keen ability to learn and adapt. Coyotes generally do not hunt deer, and do not hunt in packs. But Gehrt and his research team have found one coyote group that does. The coyotes have figured out how to drive an adult deer out onto frozen pond or lake ice, knowing that the deer will slip on the ice and fall.

Perhaps the most crucial question Gehrt hopes to answer with the Cook County study is whether all coyotes living in close proximity to human settlements are fated to become so-called nuisance animals.

"Coyotes have to be taught that humans are boss," Gehrt said. "We believe it's easy to do that with animals that are just starting to test the waters. But with other coyotes, that have been habituated for decades, we just don't know. With each generation, they become a little bit more familiar with people and the landscape of people -- cars, small patches of land. Where that ends, nobody knows."

ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, the author of The Hidden Life of Dogs , a bestseller, has been watching coyotes at her home in rural New Hampshire since they first began appearing there in the 1960s. Seeing them interact with her dogs and with one another has made her think about our selective human affections.

"Having coyotes around could be very educational," for the people in Fallsgrove, Thomas said. Coyote behavior offers a valuable lesson about nature and our own place in it. Like most wild animals, coyotes observe strict rules of engagement and complicated protocols that determine who belongs where. Around her house, Thomas said, "the coyotes have the woods, and the dogs have the lawn and field." Sometimes the coyotes will trespass, and then the dogs bark. "All the members of the dog family -- domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, dingoes -- are very aware of territory. A group must control its own territory -- you can't have others taking it from you, because then you won't have enough food."

The coyotes singing along with the ambulances in Fallsgrove, she said, pose no threat. Instead, she said, they most likely are simply trying to "answer" the sirens and maintain order in their new world. "They may be trying to learn what the siren is saying. Does it say, 'Here is a large coyote?' In that case the coyotes may be answering, 'Don't come over, because we are already here.'"

The prodigious expansion of the coyotes' range in the past 100 years is the result of our own refusal, since the earliest days of European settlement, to tolerate the presence of wolves. With wolves out of the picture, new swaths of rabbit- and rodent-rich territory beckoned, and coyotes were free to move in.

Humans are uneasy with the idea of predators in their midst. But predation is in fact part of nature's design, a finely tuned and highly beneficial system by which sick or unwary animals are culled from the population, leaving more food for the remaining animals and increasing their chances for survival. Rancher and celebrated memoirist Dayton O. Hyde, a coyote defender, has described coyotes as vital partners in on his 6,000-acre east Oregon ranch, keeping the ecosystem in balance by checking mouse, grasshopper and squirrel populations. Biologists consider wolves and coyotes to be "nature's veterinarians," carefully selecting the weakest or least wary among the animals they hunt, leaving more food and terrain for the healthy animals that remain.

The federal government, through the Department of Agriculture, has been killing tens of thousands of coyotes annually on public and private lands for decades. But the control effort has had little effect on coyote populations.

"You can lower the population temporarily, but they will be back," Gehrt said. "Coyotes are made to deal with the adversity we thrust upon them. They can adjust very quickly." This is because of a highly intriguing and anomalous coyote behavior. Unlike deer or Canada geese, coyotes self-regulate their population size. When coyote numbers are falling, coyotes have bigger litters to compensate. When numbers are high, straining the food supply, litters get smaller. Scientists do not precisely understand the control mechanism, which may be hormonal, but they have replicated the effect in captivity by varying the proximity of caged coyotes to one another. This means that coyotes will never become as ubiquitous as white-tailed deer. But they are here to stay. And there are many people who are glad about that.

"Coyotes are a symbol of wilderness here in our midst," Gehrt said. "Even out West, where coyotes are unloved, people associate the call of the coyote with wilderness."

"The sound is different from a wolf howl," said wildlife biologist Robinson, who had coyotes 30 feet from her back door when she lived in Southern California. "One or two start with a very high-pitched yip-yip-yip. Not like a lap dog, but yipping. Then more will join in, and it builds to a kind of crescendo, and then they break out into howling. It's very haunting."

Gehrt and Robinson have come to see coyotes as highly useful members of the ecosystem. "There tends to be this knee-jerk reaction: 'Oh, we can't have another predator competing with us. Let's go kill it,'" Robinson said. "That's not only philosophically wrong, it's just plain ill-informed."

Coyote predation becomes a problem, however, when the weak or unwary prey is a small human. But such attacks on children are rare, despite coyotes' increasing numbers. Dog bites still vastly outnumber coyote bites. In the Chicago area, for example, there are an average of 3,000 dog bites annually, and there have been no coyote bites in recent memory. Coyotes rarely attack humans without warning, rarely carry rabies and almost never attack adults, according to Gehrt. "It's usually an accumulation of events that lead up to a biting incident," he said. "You'll see a coyote that was nocturnal becoming diurnal. You might have seen it in the back yard once or twice at dusk, now you see it every day. That's a bad sign. Also, if they're hanging around where children normally play. There have been a couple of cases where coyotes follow people fairly closely -- especially children to bus stops -- and that's not a good thing."

Another bad sign is a coyote that stands its ground and growls or barks when you step toward it. "In that case, the coyote is actually trying to assert dominance," Gehrt said. But that is still no reason for an adult to retreat. "The thing to do is back off at a very slow pace, keeping your eyes on the animal. I've never felt threatened, even by the ones that growl and bark," Gehrt said. "I would never be subordinate to a coyote, ever. People forget it's just a 35-pound dog. I'm 200 pounds. It's not hard to do what you have to do."

Fortunately, most of the time, successful coexistence is less charged than that. It's more a matter of teaching humans how to respond when coyotes cross a behavioral boundary and constantly reinforcing coyotes' fear of humans. "What we've found is that when coyotes start to change their behavior toward humans, it's a result of people feeding them. Coyotes are not like raccoons," he said. "It takes special circumstances to get a coyote to go to the dark side."

Our ambivalence about coyotes is not news to the people who make a living trapping them. "We have a saying about high-profile trapping jobs," said Fauquier County trapper Sam Poles, sole proprietor of Flat Tail Trapping Services. "They'll make you a hero or zero, right quick."

Michael Adcock, the trapper hired by Fallsgrove to kill its coyotes, likely knows something about that. The Humane Society's lawsuit was dismissed in January, after Adcock's lawyer argued that Adcock was not subject to state hunting regulations, as the suit contended. But before that, Adcock told Fallsgrove resident Cheryl Hays that the controversy had cost him thousands of dollars. And, at one point, when a process server showed up at his house, Adcock confronted the man, according to court records, yelling threats and throwing rocks at his car. Adcock declined to comment for this article. But other trappers, not entangled in court cases, are willing to talk about their trade.

Poles lives in a modest ranch house in the Virginia hunt country. He is middle-aged and mild-mannered, a married father of two who has been trapping beavers, coyotes and other animals for more than 20 years. When he started, no one saw coyotes in Fauquier County, he said. But in the past 10 or 15 years, "they've really taken off." Since then, he's trapped and killed coyotes regularly, mostly on estates and farms, for clients who report coyotes preying on small livestock -- chickens, lambs, calves -- and family pets.

Poles avoids high-profile jobs. "Bottom line -- people hate what you're doing," he said, sitting at his kitchen table. "A lot of people think what I do is wrong. They think it's not necessary. They think it's barbaric.

"I respect every animal that I catch," Poles said. "But I'm like a fireman or a policeman. I fill a need."

"The Canadian government has done a lot of tests -- so traps are more humane than they used to be," Poles said. Then he shifted in his chair and sighed. "But my job is to go out and trap an animal and kill it, so how is that humane? How is death humane?"

The tool of his trade is a small, two-pound leg-hold trap. The one he brings out of an outbuilding behind the house has seen plenty of use. Its metal is worn and stained a dark brown. Closed, it fits in the palm of his hand. The trapper buries the open trap in a few inches of dirt. When the coyote steps on the center disk, or "pan," the trap snaps shut. It holds the animal until the trapper returns. (In Maryland and Virginia, trappers are required by law to check their traps every 24 hours.) The trappers kill the coyotes by a shot to the head or, if a client wants a more "humane" end, with a lethal injection.

The tension created by the trap's piano-wire springs is not strong enough to break a coyote leg, or even a human finger, Poles said. Trappers sometimes demonstrate this using their own fingers at county fairs. Poles says he has caught his fingers by accident hundreds of times. But to demonstrate on this afternoon, he picks up a wooden stick, about an inch in diameter. The trap closes with a sharp "thwack." The impact breaks and splinters the stick, but that is because the stick is dead and dry, Poles says.

Poles and other longtime trappers argue that kindness is not the law of nature. Poles said he has found half-devoured foxes in his traps, the animals attacked by a coyote before Poles could return to kill them himself. "I have to laugh at how people say how cruel trappers are; there's nothing crueler than nature."

In any case, eradication is futile. "They've been trying to get rid of coyotes out West since the earliest days of settlement," Gehrt said. "It hasn't worked. So it really doesn't matter what our view of coyotes is. They're here."

In Fallsgrove, coyote sightings diminished over the past winter. But Aubrey Bursch, the volunteer wildlife rehabilitator and Fallsgrove resident who joined the Humane Society lawsuit, was busy researching coyotes and their behavior. She attended a meeting of Fallsgrove's nascent civic association and, in front of its president and the handful of other people who showed up, made a case for starting a community education program about coyotes.

"Basically, it didn't go over well," she said afterward. "No one wanted to hear about coyotes. Their thinking was, 'The trapper's done, it's over.' Basically, I was seen as a 'coyote lover.'" But the association's president did say that Bursch might come to a larger town meeting, this spring, and make her case again.

Bursch suspects that persuading residents to focus on the conditions that may have drawn coyotes to Fallsgrove will be a challenge. The Safeway and restaurant dumpsters across the street frequently are filled to overflowing, but it's unclear in whose jurisdiction that problem would lie. The shopping center is outside the community's boundaries but was built by the same developer. The residents of the townhouses who put their trash out in black plastic bags say they do so because their city-issued trash cans are too small. The city of Rockville says it can't give them bigger cans because the development's quaint alleys are too narrow for the large trucks that could lift them. Black plastic trash bags are a magnet for rats. And on it goes.

It all comes down to how much thought and effort people are willing to put into managing the coyote problem. Whether they want the quick but temporary relief of trapping, or whether they value the presence of coyotes enough to make larger changes that might, in the short term, require more work. In a way, it is like the question the researchers say coyotes ask every time they encounter us: "Who are you? What are you going to do?"

Cheryl Hays did not make it to Bursch's civic association presentation. But she has been listening at night. She reports that the coyotes are still out there, and they are singing.

Mary Battiata is a Magazine staff writer. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

peregrines in the concrete jungle

2006-04-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

Falcons Flock to Urban Perches
Peregrines Trading in Wild Life for D.C. Area Roosts

By D'Vera Cohn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 15, 2006; A01

Stephanie R. Spears leaned over the side of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge with a video camera as the drawspan opened to let a construction barge pass through. Spears, an environmental specialist with the bridge replacement project, was looking for the pair of peregrine falcons nesting there when suddenly one of them came after her.

The shrieking bird with a sharp beak and hooked talons shot into the air, wheeled around and dived. "Watch your head!" Spears shouted to a handful of onlookers just as the female falcon veered away. Peregrines are said to be the fastest birds on Earth, capable of diving at 200 mph. This one was protecting three eggs.

The eggs are on a jumble of powdery road grit inside one of the bridge's concrete supports, only a few feet down from the rumble and shake of thousands of vehicles a day crossing between Maryland and Virginia. "It's an interesting place to make a nest," Spears said. "It's probably why she gets nervous when we stop traffic -- it's so quiet."

The Wilson Bridge is a dangerous place for a bird, but more of the region's peregrines are nesting on bridges, skyscrapers or other manmade structures than on the mountain cliffs that are their natural homes. Falcons are living on more than a dozen bridges in Maryland and Virginia and have made nests on tall buildings in Baltimore and Richmond.

The falcons' willingness to live near people and noise has let them thrive in an urban region. But it has frustrated state wildlife biologists who have tried in vain to get them to nest in the back country.

It is harder for a falcon to make a living on a mountain than in an urban area, said researcher Shawn Padgett. "They can't just take a plunge off a bridge and get a starling going by," he said. "They have to go out and hunt."

The Wilson Bridge peregrines, like the bald eagles that have a nest near the bridge, have an avid fan club. Paula Sullivan of Fairfax County visits Jones Point Park on the Alexandria shoreline several times a week to watch the peregrines through a spotting scope and to trade stories about them with people fishing there.

"The first time I saw the bird come in with prey, it really screamed -- I assume to announce its arrival," she said. "Feathers were flying in all directions. My assumption was that it was a pigeon. . . . It's really thrilling. I've gotten such an enormous kick out of it."

This is the second year that peregrine falcons have nested on the 55-foot-tall bridge. This year's eggs are due to hatch early next month. The birds laid eggs last year that vanished -- taken, Spears thinks, by raccoons.

Spears has seen raccoons walking the girders under the existing bridge and says they could use the span to traverse the Potomac -- just like humans. In many ways, the bridge is a miniature ecosystem of predators and prey. Pigeons and rats live there. Waterfowl linger under it, and gulls fly over it to scout for trash.

Construction workers on the bridge being built near the existing one have not found where the raccoons live, but they have learned to lock up their food after the creatures broke into their lunchboxes to eat their sandwiches. The raccoons have left their distinctive paw prints -- the front one resembling a human hand and the rear one a footprint -- in fresh concrete on the new bridge.

Life on the bridge meets the falcons' three basic needs: a rough surface with good drainage to lay their eggs, a high perch from which to hunt and a good food supply of other birds. The Wilson Bridge peregrines often sit atop 200-foot-tall construction cranes, even riding them as the cranes move along the Potomac River by barge. The falcons have made a noticeable dent in the bridge's pigeon population, but they also grab gulls and songbirds.

Once so rare that there were no breeding pairs east of the Mississippi, the peregrine falcon population has rebounded in the past three decades after the deadly pesticide DDT was banned. They were taken off the federal endangered species list in 1999.

Padgett said there are at least eight pairs making their home on bridges in Virginia and about the same number in Maryland, including on the Bay Bridge and a bridge off Baltimore Harbor. Padgett, a research associate at the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary, plans to check a report of a pair of peregrine falcons on a highway bridge leading into the District from Virginia.

"Just looking at D.C., I can tell you there have to be more," he said. "We are looking for other pairs in the city."

But Padgett, whose center is deputized by the state to implement peregrine recovery efforts in Virginia, is concerned that more falcons are not nesting in the wild. So is Glenn D. Therres, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources associate director for wildlife.

In recent years, both states have removed baby falcons from nests on bridges and placed them in group nestboxes on mountain cliffs, where they are fed dead birds and have little interaction with people. The birds leave when they are able to fly on their own, and state officials hoped they would return when they were old enough to breed. The technique, called "hacking," has a proven track record.

Maryland has tried it for three years near Harpers Ferry, and although the first year's birds would be expected to return by now, none has. Virginia placed more than 60 birds in Shenandoah National Park in the past six years, and Padgett said only one pair returned to nest there, but others have been seen in urban areas.

"There's some art to this technique," said Therres, who has not given up on getting birds to live in the wild. "The theory is, you get birds acclimated to the cliff faces so they know to come back to them. But we really don't know when and at what age they actually imprint on the kind of habitat they should come back to."

Padgett said bridge life is perilous for baby falcons, which can easily drown or be killed in traffic when they try to fly. Most peregrine chicks die before they reach 6 months, he said. "It's definitely a bad setup," he said of the Wilson Bridge nest.

And although the odds for baby chicks also are bad in the mountains, Padgett said that is where falcons belong. He hopes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the falcon population, will choose to remove the Wilson Bridge chicks from their current location and put them in a nestbox in Shenandoah National Park.

Sullivan, who has posted photos of the birds on her Web site, http://www.pbase.com/paulasullivan/peregrine_falcons , said she has mixed feelings about any attempt to remove the birds. "I'd love to see them have success where they are," she said. "I know there are experts who I trust to make the right decision. They seem so determined to do the best for the bird."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

flamingo

2006-04-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

flamingo
Originally uploaded by MikiINtokyo.

Chã

2006-04-10T19:46:00.000-07:00

Chã
Originally uploaded by Mateus Reis.

falcons

2006-04-10T19:35:00.001-07:00

falcons
Originally uploaded by sovietzz.

My dad's Falcons on the way to an afteroon hunt

MainCamera_20060410-1451

2006-04-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

MainCamera_20060410-1451
Originally uploaded by blmiers2.

Falcon

2006-04-09T10:31:00.000-07:00

Falcon
Originally uploaded by corvidae.

"Coloured pencil"

falcon

2006-04-09T10:30:00.000-07:00

falcon
Originally uploaded by kelco.

hawks continue streak of good PR

2006-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

Ready to take wing
by Peter Rusland
The Pictorial
Apr 08 2006

Ed Harris, Ethan Hawke and Ronnie Hawkins aren't humans but they are local celebrities.

"Our three boys were bred here and they're the first babies fledged at Pacific Northwest Raptors," biologist Tina Hein says of the boisterous Harris hawks.
"Lots of them hatch but don't necessarily survive through fledgling, which is leaving the nest, flying and hunting on their own."

The trio of brothers was parent-reared by Queenie and Gollum after hatching in July.
They'll show off their young hunting skills during flying demonstrations this season at PNR.

"The time they would leave the nest naturally is when we started working with them," Hein says.

"We get them used to being with a person then we give them flying training introducing food.

"It's all about positive reinforcement. They hop a short distance to a piece of food and we increase that distance to what you'll see at a flying demonstration."
The hawks are trained raptors but remain "essentially wild with skills for the wild," she explains. "Most would survive in the wild if released. A lot of hunting is instinctive but with us they're honing their hunting skills every day.

"Birds are fed daily here but we do take them out hunting and they get some of that catch."

Hawks catch prey as large as themselves, "so Ed might catch a rabbit," Hein said.
PNR's breeding program prevents birds from having to be brought from outside B.C.

"It's about raptor education in general; how they live, hunt, and why they're important to the environment and spiritually. They're wonderful indicators of habitat pollution," she says. "These three brothers show our breeding program must be working and our program is about educating people."

Harris hawks are native to the American Southwest and range to Chile. "They're a wonderful educational tool because they're the only species of social raptors," Hein says. "They hunt in groups, but all other raptors hunt by themselves so we fly a pack of Harrises."

Hawks, eagles, and owls use their talons to kill prey.

During a flying demonstration they fly to a glove or a lure that looks like a rabbit or another bird.

"We show how a bird uses its aerial ability to catch prey."

Other species among 60 birds at PNR include red-tail hawks, eagles, owls and peregrine falcons all born in captivity.

Captive-bred birds are typically used for falconry.

"We do have some non-releasable, injured birds that are kept permanently that might otherwise possibly be euthanized," she says.

One of those recovering residents is Charlie, a one-wing bald eagle.

"Some are wild and non-releasable and a large majority are captive-bred flying birds and some are doing some breeding," Hein says of PNR, B.C.'s first bird-of-prey and falconry centre that opened in 2003.

"Our birds do in captivity what they do in the wild.

"They're the bosses; we work for them and they help us teach people about raptors."
PNR encourages folks to take injured birds found to a rehabilitation centre such as Errington's North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre.

"We're not a rehab centre, but we will take bird in an emergency; we don't want to see anything harmed," says Hein.
Doubleday Canada Limited

more falcons unwittingly enlisted in cheesy marketing program

2006-04-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

Falcons make home atop high-rise bank

CINCINNATI, April 6 (UPI) -- An office building in Cincinnati has two tenants who hope to raise a family in a home on the roof.

Princess and Powerhouse, a pair of peregrine falcons, have four eggs in their nest, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. The Division of Wildlife of the Ohio Department of Natural Resources set up the nest at the PNC Building.

Peregrine falcons, exterminated in eastern states by DDT that caused a thinning of eggshells, have been making a comeback since use of the insecticide was restricted. Princess and Powerhouse are one of 39 pairs nesting this year in boxes provided by the state. Other pairs may have made their own nests.

Princess is no stranger to Cincinnati. She and a mate used the PNC Building nest in 2002. Powerhouse was born that year in a Division of Wildlife nest in a smokestack at a power station, the newspaper said.

Now, Princess spends most of her time on the nest while Powerhouse keeps watch nearby. He also sits on the nest when Princess needs a break.

"He keeps a constant vigil to protect her," Todd Channer, a graphic designer and volunteer falcon monitor, told the Enquirer.

© Copyright 2006 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved

feathers, beak, claws: the seven foot tall meat-eating, flying dinosaur

2006-04-06T21:17:00.000-07:00

Giant Raptor Dinosaur Discovered in Utah Monument

New “egg-thief” dinosaur roamed the southwest

Media Contacts

April 3, 2006 -- Scientists from the University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Natural History have discovered the remains of a new bird-like, meat-eating dinosaur in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah. Although represented only by the fossilized remains of hand and foot bones, comparisons with more complete skeletons found in Asia demonstrate that this animal was about seven feet tall when standing upright. Discovery of this Utah giant, which is much larger than its counterparts in Canada and the northern US, nearly doubles the documented range of these dinosaurs in North America, and demonstrates that they roamed much farther south than previously thought. A scientific paper naming and describing this animal, and published in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, was authored by Lindsay Zanno, a graduate student in the Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History (UMNH), and associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics.

The new dinosaur, formally dubbed Hagryphus giganteus, which means "giant four-footed, bird-like god of the western desert” in reference to the animal's outward resemblance to a large land bird, its giant stature, and its discovery in the Utah desert. Hagryphus is a member of the oviraptorosaurs, a group of bird-like feathered dinosaurs with toothless beaks, powerful arms and formidable claws. These enigmatic animals are thought by some paleontologists to have been omnivorous, feeding on a mixture of meat and plants. Although only the hands and feet of Hagryphus are known, the scientists were able to use the animal"s close relatives to estimate the size of the skeleton. The researchers say they do not know why this dinosaur was so much larger than its northern cousins but speculate that it may have been related to different environmental conditions in the south.

Ruthless Thief or Protective Parent?

The most spectacular finds of oviraptorosaur dinosaurs are fossilized skeletons from the Gobi desert in Mongolia. These dinosaurs were named oviraptors, meaning “egg-thief,” because their remains were discovered in close association with nests of dinosaur eggs, and it was thought that the raptors were eating the egg contents. In more recent years, however, eggs have been found with remains of baby oviraptors inside. And the adult oviraptors turn out to have been sitting on the nests, brooding the eggs just as birds do today. Thus, it appears that the adult oviraptors were protecting the embryos rather than devouring them! Nevertheless, the name has stuck.

Continental Connections

Oviraptorsaurs are known from a large portion of Asia but were thought to have invaded only the northern portion North America, since previous examples were known only from Montana, South Dakota, and Alberta, Canada. Discovery of Hagryphus in southern Utah demonstrates that this group of dinosaurs was much more widespread, living across much of the western United States. Hagryphus lived in a time of global warming, which melted polar caps and produced exceptionally high sea levels. As a result, the central portion of North America was flooded, isolating the eastern and western portions of the continent. The dinosaurs preserved in GSENM were stranded on the western landmass, which formed a narrow peninsula. The relationships between northern and southern dinosaurs that occupied this western landmass during the Late Cretaceous are part of a long-term research project undertaken by University of Utah scientists.

A Monumental Effort

Hagryphus is the first new dinosaur to be named from GSENM, and just one of many exciting finds made during a five-year collaborative project between the Monument and the University of Utah. The primary goal of this project, funded by GSENM, has been to conduct paleontological surveys and to excavate the fossils of dinosaurs and other lifeforms that existed in this region during a period near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. More specifically, the focus of this work has been the Kaiparowits Formation, which dates to a time near the end of the Cretaceous, between 76 and 74 million years ago. Over the past five years, GSENM and University of Utah and researchers, including dozens of students and volunteers, have spent almost 17 months conducting field work within the Monument boundaries.

GSENM encompasses 1.9 million acres, comprising a substantial portion of southern Utah. Sampson states that, “due to the extremely rugged nature of the terrain, this region was the last major area within the lower 48 states to be formally mapped. For the same reason, it now represents an untapped and perhaps the last major dinosaur graveyard in this country to be explored.” The central region of the Monument, known as the Kaiparowits Plateau, preserves one the most complete records of Cretaceous life anywhere in the world. However, access to the remote back country must be accomplished almost entirely on foot, and fossils must either be carried out under human power or, if the specimen involves a large dinosaur skeleton, via helicopter. Thus far, project teams have prospected approximately 20,000 acres of the central Kaiparowits Plateau in the search for dinosaurs and their prehistoric contemporaries. Yet this area amounts to less than 5% of the Cretaceous, fossil-bearing rocks preserved in the Monument.

To date, the results of this collaborative project have been spectacular. In addition to Hagryphus, discoveries include at least three other previously unknown kinds of dinosaurs—including a meat-eating tyrannosaur, a duckbilled dinosaur, and a horned dinosaur—all of which are under study and will be formally named in the near future. Remarkably, virtually every dinosaur species identified to date has turned out to be new to science. Many of the fossils from the Monument were buried quickly in sandy rivers and are exceptionally preserved. Several duckbill dinosaurs even retain fossilized skin impressions, which are very rare finds anywhere in the world. One bony claw of Hagryphus preserves the impression of the keratinous fingernail-like that would have covered the claw in life (see image CD). In addition to the charismatic dinosaur “megafauna,” fossil finds from GSENM include abundant remains of clams, fishes, amphibians, lizards, turtles, birds, crocodiles, and mammals.

Project investigators, aided by workers at several other US institutions, are currently researching this bounty of prehistoric life forms, as well as their geologic context, in an effort to reconstruct this 75 million year old ecosystem. Project findings, including many original fossils, will be featured in an entirely new UMNH facility, scheduled to open at the end of 2009. Meanwhile, Hagryphus and many other Monument fossils can be viewed on display at the current UMNH building on Presidents Circle at the University of Utah campus, as well as in the GSENM visitor’s center in Big Water, Utah.

For more information: http://www.umnh.utah.edu/

...this just in:

2006-04-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

The Universe trapped in its own web

Embargo Date: /
Posted: 4/4/2006, 9:46
Posted by: Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)

Astronomers from the University of Nottingham, UK, and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Spain), have found the first observational evidence that galaxies are not randomly oriented. Instead, they are aligned following a characteristic pattern dictated by the large-scale structure of the invisible dark matter that surrounds them.

... of course, it turns out to be the negative space ("invisible dark matter") that matters, not what we can see but what we can't see that provides the structure ("web") which rules the expression, that yadayada Jack built....

street heart

2006-04-02T18:04:00.000-07:00

street heart
Originally uploaded by dev null.

Sharing

2006-04-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

Sharing
Originally uploaded by LexiJoy.

"A pair of American Kestrels lunching on a freshly-caught shrew. The bird on the left is the male (you can tell by his bright coloring), while the dull one with bloody shrew guts hanging from its mouth is the female. As disgusting as it was to watch, it's still an amazing thing to see these birds of prey and their rituals."

human touch kills

2006-03-31T14:42:00.000-08:00

March 31, 2006
Coyote That Romped in Central Park Dies
By MARIA NEWMAN, The New York Times

Hal, the coyote with wanderlust who toured Central Park for days earlier this month until a posse of New York City police officers finally managed to capture him, died as he was about to be released back into the wild, state environmental officials said today.

Hal was to be taken on Thursday from a wildlife rehabilitation center on Long Island, and was about to be set loose in the California State Forest upstate in Putnam County, said Gabrielle DeMarco, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Environmental Conservation. As workers were trying to tag him for release, he stopped breathing.

They could not resuscitate him.

"It's truly so sad," said Ms. DeMarco, adding that pathologists would be conducting tests on the coyote to determine the cause of death, and whether the trauma of his New York escapade had contributed to his early demise.

The year-old coyote caused a stir when he was spotted in the meadows and woods of the nation's most congested city, scaring some park goers and delighting other people in a city used to intrepid newcomers.

For days, the coyote known as Hal, because he was first spotted at the park's Hallett Nature Sanctuary, was chased by breathless police department sharp shooters armed only with tranquilizer guns, park maintenance officials on golf carts and countless news media. There were news helicopters flying overhead in search of a Hal sighting and top park officials held news conferences on scenic knolls in the park.

But Hal managed to evade them for days more efficiently than a celebrity with a new secret lover dodges the paparazzi.

Finally, on March 22, a Wednesday, Hal's excellent adventure ended when a police officer landed a tranquilizer dart in his rump.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

flora & fauna come & go

2006-03-27T20:57:00.000-08:00

Britain's changing wildlife

What have the short-haired bumblebee and the red-backed shrike got in common? They are now officially extinct in Britain. Unlike the golden twin-spot moth, a native of North Africa, which quite happily breeds here now. Whether due to global warming, changing farm practices or loss of habitat, Britain's flora and fauna is changing. Stephen Moss charts some of the new arrivals - and those that have sadly departed

by Stephen Moss
Tuesday March 28, 2006, Guardian

People who trap moths are, as a rule, an undemonstrative bunch. But following a vintage year, even they could be forgiven the odd whoop of joy. For 2005 saw an extraordinary invasion of rare and exotic moths - from mainland Europe and beyond - into southern Britain.

The influx was spearheaded by a dull, greyish moth with a wonderfully eccentric name - Clancy's rustic - scores of which turned up on our coasts. These were accompanied by visitors with equally bizarre monikers: beautiful marbled, dewick's plusia and golden twin-spot, to name but three. The highlight, though, was the Tunbridge Wells gem, so called because the original specimen was discovered in the Kentish spa town in the 19th century. Despite its quintessentially English name, this species normally lives in North Africa, yet last year no fewer than seven were recorded here.

So are moth enthusiasts simply becoming more observant, or was the invasion an indicator of some wider phenomenon? Definitely the latter, according to Mark Parsons of the Butterfly Conservation Society. He believes that climate change, leading to shifts in wind-patterns, is responsible for bringing these moths and butterflies from the Mediterranean and North Africa to Britain.

These modest little creatures are not the only new arrivals to our shores. This winter there has been an influx of of cattle egrets, with at least 20 of these attractive herons wandering around southern England. In the past few decades this species has surged north from its Mediterranean home, and now nests as close as Brittany and the Netherlands. The cattle egret may soon become the latest addition to our growing list of British breeding birds.

Marine life is getting into the picture, too. How could we forget the unfortunate northern bottle-nosed whale, which took a wrong turn and ended up in the River Thames, where it expired before a huge crowd of onlookers? This was only the latest in a long line of sea creatures that are turning up in British and Irish waters, including the humpback whale, striped dolphin and leatherback turtle. "Many of the humpback-whale sightings involve mother and calf pairs," says Dylan Walker of Organisation Cetacea (ORCA), "which gives us even more optimism for the future."

But despite this good news, not everything in the British wildlife garden is rosy. Even as we celebrate these new arrivals, we are saying farewell to several native species. The red-backed shrike, known to generations of schoolboy egg-collectors as the "butcher bird" because of its grisly habit of impaling its prey on thorn bushes, finally disappeared as a British breeding species during the 1990s. At about the same time, the short-haired bumblebee was officially declared extinct in Britain. Occasionally, creatures do bounce back: despite apparently becoming extinct in 1990, the greater mouse-eared bat was recently rediscovered in Sussex.

Other rare plants and animals are managing to hang on by the skin of their teeth. Lady's slipper orchid is confined to a single site in Wharfedale in North Yorkshire, with a round-the-clock guard to deter plant thieves. And one of our most attractive butterflies, the marsh fritillary, survives partly as a result of protection by the military. The training area on Salisbury Plain provides just the right level of disturbance (from shells and tank cracks) to allow the butterfly's food plant - devil's-bit scabious - to thrive.

The species with the most tenuous foothold of all is the fingered speedwell, a tiny blue flower confined to the lawns and flowerbeds of a new housing estate in the Norfolk town of Thetford. It is not known what residents think about having one of Britain's rarest plants as a weed in their rose beds.

So why does our flora and fauna continually ebb and flow in this manner? Geography has a lot to do with it. The British Isles stretch across more than 10 degrees of latitude, from the Isles of Scilly in the south to Shetland in the north. As a result we are home to arctic species on the very southern edge of their range, such as ptarmigan, arctic skua and mountain hare; and southern species on the northern edge of their range, such as cirl bunting, southern damselfly and Lulworth skipper. When conditions change, most recently as a result of global warming, we lose existing species and gain new ones.

Our position on the edge of a vast landmass, sandwiched between Eurasia and the Atlantic Ocean, also makes us a global crossroads for migrating birds. These sometimes take a wrong turn, and instead of reaching their intended destination, end up in Britain. If conditions are suitable, they may breed. Several species, including a little egret, have recently colonised Britain as a result of such wanderings.

However, water can also present a formidable barrier to colonisation. Terrestrial species such as mammals, reptiles and amphibians can only cross the Channel with help from humans; while even some birds appear reluctant to fly over the sea, and grind to a halt at Calais. Such is the fate of the zitting cisticola, a tiny warblerlike bird spreading northwards through Europe, and long predicted as a potential colonist. A pair of cisticolas is currently residing on Jersey, but only a few individuals have ever reached mainland Britain, none of which has yet to breed.

But despite these natural arrivals and departures, by far the greatest changes taking place in Britain's fauna and flora are the result of human agency. A recent report by English Nature - "Audit of non-native species in England" - listed no fewer than 2,721 non-native species and hybrids currently found here in the wild. Most of these are flowering plants, but there are also 102 species of bugs and aphids, 101 species of beetle and almost 50 different butterflies and moths.

Only four introduced species, including game birds such as pheasant and red-legged partridge, are considered to bring any economic benefit; while many others, such as the Chinese mitten crab, American mink and Japanese knotweed, are known to have harmful economic and biological consequences.

In recent years, in an attempt to offset these disastrous introductions, we have tried to redress the balance by reintroducing native creatures. The most successful of these schemes, the restoration of red kites to England and Scotland, shows that despite our predisposition to meddle and destroy, we also have the ability to make things better. It may not be too long before kites resume their place over the streets of London, for the first time in more than a century.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Passage Guilhem #2

2006-03-27T14:53:00.000-08:00

Passage Guilhem #2
Originally uploaded by Aaltra.

American Kestrel by Tom Becker

2006-03-25T20:19:00.001-08:00

American Kestrel by Tom Becker
Originally uploaded by Darel H.

2006-03-23T19:37:00.000-08:00

Peregrine falcon in Hong Kong may carry H5N1 virus
www.chinaview.cn 2006-03-23 21:56:51

HONG KONG, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Tests on a Peregrine falcon found in the New Territories of Hong Kong suggest it may have contracted H5 avian influenza, Hong Kong Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said Thursday, adding more tests are underway.

The bird, which appeared injured, was collected in Tin Shui Wai of New Territories on March 21. It was sent to the department's Animal Management Center in Sheung Shui of New Territories and died the following day.

More than 6,000 dead birds have been tested for H5N1 avian influenza since late October, with 16 confirmed cases involving two chickens and 14 wild birds.

People are reminded to observe good personal hygiene by the department. They are suggested to avoid personal contact with wild birds as well as live poultry and clean their hands thoroughly after touching them.

Coyote Tours NYC: Central Park, then Anesthesia

2006-03-22T08:29:00.000-08:00

Coyote Loose in New York's Central Park Captured After 2 Days

March 22 (Bloomberg) -- A coyote loose in New York's Central Park was captured by wildlife officials this morning after eluding them for two days.

Officials had corralled the critter several times since it was first spotted March 20, though it managed to escape each time. They finally caught up to the full-grown creature and tranquilized it near the 79th Street transverse, according to Parks & Recreation Department spokeswoman Carli Smith. It will be sent to a wildlife reserve upstate, she said.

Televised video from today showed officials trying to corner the coyote before the animal jumped into a pond and disappeared through a hole in a fence. Officials speculated the coyote entered New York through the Bronx from Westchester County, north of the city.

Coyotes have lived in New York state since the 1920s in all regions except New York City and Long Island, according to the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The so-called Eastern coyote often looks like a German shepherd dog, and large males can weigh as much as 60 pounds (27 kilograms), the college said.

The last time a coyote was captured in the park was in April 1999, Smith said.

parlez-vous whalesong?

2006-03-21T20:58:00.000-08:00

Warbling Whales Speak a Language All Their Own

The songs of the humpback whale are among the most complex in the animal kingdom. Researchers have now mathematically confirmed that whales have their own syntax that uses sound units to build phrases that can be combined to form songs that last for hours.

Until now, only humans have demonstrated the ability to use such a hierarchical structure of communication. The research, published online in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, offers a new approach to studying animal communication, although the authors do not claim that humpback whale songs meet the linguistic rigor necessary for a true language.

"Humpback songs are not like human language, but elements of language are seen in their songs," said Ryuji Suzuki, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) predoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first author of the paper.

With limited sight and sense of smell in water, marine mammals are more dependent on sound—which travels four times faster in water than air—to communicate. For six months each year, all male humpback whales in a population sing the same song during mating season. Thought to attract females, the song evolves over time.

Suzuki and co-authors John Buck and Peter Tyack applied the tools of information theory—a mathematical study of data encoding and transmission—to analyze the complex patterns of moans, cries, and chirps in the whales' songs for clues to the information being conveyed. Buck is an electrical engineer who specializes in signal processing and underwater acoustics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and Tyack is a biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Suzuki, who began the project as an electrical engineering undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, worked with Buck and Tyack to develop a computer program to break down the elements of the whale's song and assign an abstract symbol to each of those elements. Suzuki wanted to see if he could design a computer program that enabled scientists to classify the structure of the whales' songs.

He used the program to analyze structural characteristics of the humpback songs recorded in Hawaii. To measure a song's complexity, Suzuki analyzed the average amount of information conveyed per symbol. He then asked human observers who had no previous knowledge of the structure of the whale songs to classify them in terms of complexity, redundancy, and predictability. The computer-generated model and the human observers agreed that the songs are hierarchical, confirming a theory first proposed by biologists Roger Payne and Scott McVay in 1971.

Suzuki said that information theory also enabled the researchers to determine how much information can be conveyed in a whale song. Despite the "human-like" use of hierarchical syntax to communicate, Suzuki and his colleagues found that whale songs convey less than one bit of information per second. By comparison, humans speaking English generate 10 bits of information for each word spoken. "Although whale song is nothing like human language, I wouldn't be surprised if some marine mammals have the ability to communicate in a complex way," said Suzuki. "Given that the underwater environment is very different from our world, it is not surprising that they would communicate in rather a different way from land mammals."

The structure of the humpback whale song is repetitive and rigid. The whales repeat unique phrases made up of short and long segments to craft a song. There are multiple layers, or scales, of repetition, denoted as periodicities. One scale is made up of six units, while a longer one consists of 180-400 units. The combined periodicities give the song its hierarchical structure.

Suzuki compared his new technique for animal communication research with more traditional models, such as the first order Markov model that is used to analyze bird songs, which are often shorter and simpler in structure than humpback whale songs. The Markov model proved inadequate for the whale song's complex structure.

Information theory, in contrast, proved perfect for analyzing humpback whale songs because it provided a quantitative analysis of the complexity and structure of the songs. "Information theory was the right choice because it allows one to study the structure of humpback songs without knowing what they mean," said Suzuki.

"I hope that knowing the hierarchical structure in humpback songs will inform research in other fields, such as evolutionary biology," said Suzuki. The technique he developed is already being used by a postdoctoral fellow in Buck's laboratory to analyze recently recorded songs of humpback whales from Australia.

kittyhawk...

2006-03-21T10:02:00.001-08:00

...young cat with wings.

My Little Ponies

2006-03-19T22:03:00.000-08:00

My Little Ponies
Originally uploaded by wellingtondany.

My Little

2006-03-19T22:02:00.000-08:00

My Little
Originally uploaded by wellingtondany.

wings

2006-03-17T19:53:00.000-08:00

DSC00421
Originally uploaded by jakedobkin.

banksygrimreaper

2006-03-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

banksygrimreaper
Originally uploaded by noisehead.

"stencil, artist: banksy, near old street, in east london. taken on 12/03/2006"

Halloween 2004

2006-03-13T20:39:00.000-08:00

Halloween 2004
Originally uploaded by javi270270.

"Hotel Marriot. Lima, Peru"

graffiti ganesha

2006-03-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

Graffiti Ganesha
Originally uploaded by nice kitty.

hybrid strategy or chimerical delusion?

2006-03-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

DSC00022
Originally uploaded by jakedobkin.

Angel

2006-03-12T17:59:00.000-08:00

Angel
Originally uploaded by ektopia.

Perigrine Falcon Feeding

2006-03-12T17:55:00.000-08:00

Perigrine Falcon Feeding
Originally uploaded by sovietzz.

"Peregrine Falcon Feeding after an afternoons hunt with Falconer "

Egyptian falcon

2006-03-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

Egyptian falcon
Originally uploaded by Pashmin@.

Granodiorite figure of a horus-falcon
Late period after 600BC from Coptos
British Museum

planet detox

2006-03-09T06:47:00.000-08:00

[The University of Leicester]

NEWS - PRESS RELEASES

Mass Extinctions - A Threat from Outer Space or Our Own Planet's Detox?

University scientists suggest extraterrestrial theories are flawed and that more down to earth factors could have accounted for past mass extinctions

Earth history has been punctuated by several mass extinctions rapidly wiping out nearly all life forms on our planet. What causes these catastrophic events? Are they really due to meteorite impacts? Current research suggests that the cause may come from within our own planet – the eruption of vast amounts of lava that brings a cocktail of gases from deep inside the Earth and vents them into the atmosphere.

University of Leicester geologists, Professor Andy Saunders and Dr Marc Reichow, are taking a fresh look at what may actually have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and caused other similarly cataclysmic events, aware they may end up exploding a few popular myths.

The idea that meteorite impacts caused mass extinctions has been in vogue over the last 25 years, since Louis Alverez’s research team in Berkeley, California published their work about an extraterrestrial iridium anomaly found in 65-million-year-old layers at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. This anomaly only could be explained by an extraterrestrial source, a large meteorite, hitting the Earth and ultimately wiping the dinosaurs – and many other organisms - off the Earth’s surface.

Professor Saunders commented:

“Impacts are suitably apocalyptic. They are the stuff of Hollywood. It seems that every kid’s dinosaur book ends with a bang. But are they the real killers and are they solely responsible for every mass extinction on earth? There is scant evidence of impacts at the time of other major extinctions e.g., at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, and at the end of the Triassic, 200 million years ago. The evidence that has been found does not seem large enough to have triggered an extinction at these times.”

Flood basalt eruptions are – he says - an alternative kill mechanism. These do correspond with all main mass extinctions, within error of the techniques used to determine the age of the volcanism. Furthermore, they may have released enough greenhouse gases (SO2 and CO2) to dramatically change the climate. The largest flood basalts on Earth (Siberian Traps and Deccan Traps) coincide with the largest extinctions (end-Permian, and end-Cretaceous). “Pure coincidence?”, ask Saunders and Reichow.

While this is unlikely to be pure chance, the Leicester researchers are interested in precisely what the kill mechanism may be. One possibility is that the gases released by volcanic activity lead to a prolonged volcanic winter induced by sulphur-rich aerosols, followed by a period of CO2-induced warming.

Professor Andy Saunders and Dr. Marc Reichow at Leicester, in collaboration with Anthony Cohen, Steve Self, and Mike Widdowson at the Open University, have recently been awarded a NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) grant to study the Siberian Traps and their environmental impact.

The Siberian Traps are the largest known continental flood basalt province. Erupted about 250 million years ago at high latitude in the northern hemisphere, they are one of many known flood basalts provinces - vast outpourings of lava that covered large areas of the Earth's surface. A major debate is underway concerning the origin of these provinces –including the Siberian Traps - and their environmental impact.

Using radiometric dating techniques, they hope to constrain the age and, combined with geochemical analysis, the extent, of the Siberian Traps. Measuring how much gas was released during these eruptions 250 million years ago is a considerable challenge. The researchers will study microscopic inclusions trapped in minerals of the Siberian Traps rocks to estimate the original gas contents. Using these data they hope to be able to assess the amount of SO2 and CO2 released into the atmosphere 250 million years ago, and whether or not this caused climatic havoc, wiping out nearly all life on earth. By studying the composition of sedimentary rocks laid down at the time of the mass extinction, they also hope to detect changes to seawater chemistry that resulted from major changes in climate.

From these data Professor Saunders and his team hope to link the volcanism to the extinction event. He explained:

“If we can show, for example, that the full extent of the Siberian Traps was erupted at the same time, we can be confident that their environmental effects were powerful. Understanding the actual kill mechanism is the next stage….watch this space.”

More information is available from the website: http://www.le.ac.uk/gl/ads/SiberianTraps/Index.html

Note to editors:

Further information is available from Professor Andy Saunders, Department of Geology, University of Leicester, tel 0116 252 3923, email ads@le.ac.uk; or from Dr Marc Reichow, email mkr6@le.ac.uk

backyard bear boom

2006-02-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

Problems Proliferate as Bears Do
Bruins’ healthy total of 33,000 in the state partly reflects their taste for humans’ high-fat food.
by Gary Polakovicm Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2006

Humans aren't the only species undergoing rapid population growth in California; bears are proliferating too, especially near towns and urban centers tucked tightly against hills and mountain ranges.

When the weather warms, the big, hairy interlopers have been known to swipe pies from windowsills in Lake Tahoe, dumpster dive in Mammoth and Jacuzzi dip in Monrovia. Black bears have even shown up recently in such unexpected places as Riverside, Salinas, Santa Cruz and San Diego.

Last June, a 185-pound female bruin wandered down from the mountains into a Palm Springs subdivision, passing motorists and parents taking their children to school. The bear led authorities down several streets, then climbed a tree before authorities sedated the animal and released her in Chino Canyon.These early-summer follies are indicators of a broader trend because bruins are on the march not only in California, but also in many other states. The animals are in the midst of a population explosion, their numbers having grown up to eightfold in California in 20 years, according to state wildlife officials.

Though it may seem incongruous that bears can multiply so prolifically across an urban landscape where human development has pushed aside most other mega-fauna — including condors, elk and antelopes — many biologists say development and a taste for high-fat human food are contributing to the bear boom.

In certain areas such as Los Angeles County, Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Lakes, civilization creates conditions in which bears are more numerous near cities than in the wild.

Skilled opportunists, bears eat almost anything people consume, including pizza, fruit, hamburgers and sweets. As suburbia pushes farther into wild lands, the abundance of easy calories from rubbish, fruit trees and pet food has fundamentally changed the nature of California's bears.

"Bears with access to human food get bigger; females hit puberty quicker and have more cubs," said David Graber, a senior science advisor for the National Park Service.

For example, unlike wild bear food such as acorns and berries, garbage is high in protein and fat, which is why bears crave it. Fatter female bears produce more embryos, and many bears in Southern California are having litters of two or three cubs, compared to one or two naturally, said Kevin Brennan, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game.

A 2003 study of black bears in the Sierra Nevada found that those in urban areas and eating garbage weighed as much as 30% more than bears in wilderness areas. They also were significantly less active — restricting their range from about 150 square miles to just a few blocks in urban neighborhoods. The study was published in the Journal of Zoology.

The state Fish and Game Department estimates that 33,260 black bears inhabit California today — up from roughly 4,000 in 1984. Hunters have been taking about 1,800 animals annually in recent years, compared to about 1,000 per year 20 years ago, according to the department.

The bear resurgence also is occurring across much of the country. Pennsylvania has seen a sevenfold increase in bears in 20 years, and similar dramatic boosts have occurred in Virginia, Maine and New Jersey. Maryland and New Jersey had almost no bears a generation ago, but both states recently opened bear-hunting seasons.

"When you think of how much development has gone on in California — it is not as wild as it once was," Brennan said, "but we have bears as well as mountain lions showing up in neighborhoods." Monrovia Mayor Rob Hammond says he is proud that his city has learned to coexist with its wildlife. He lives on Norumbega Drive — a secluded street squeezed between civilization and the San Gabriel Mountains that bears frequent.

"I've walked up on bears in my yard when I come home at night," said Hammond, who last spotted two bruins on his property last summer. "It's like having a 400-pound Yogi staring you in the face. You ask yourself, 'Am I really in Southern California?' "

Some scientists say that although development has helped sustain large, localized populations of bears, more human development will be harmful to the animals in the long run.

Habitat loss to building threatens to reduce their range. And as more towns encroach on wild areas, they put bears in direct contact with people; many animals end up losing in that clash.

Though some bruins flee when humans shoo them, others are aggressive, such as the one that was killed after it attacked a hiker and a Girl Scout troop in the Angeles National Forest three years ago while trying to steal food.

Black bears are not known to have ever killed a human in California, though encounters often are lethal to the animals because they are struck by cars or shot as pests.

"As subdivisions are built up and people move into wild lands, they take away wildlife habitat. The relationship between growth and numbers of animals is an inverse relationship — more of one and less of the other" over the long run, said Doug Updike, senior wildlife biologist for the state Department of Fish and Game.

Other changes are contributing to the bear boom. Forests, logged after World War II, have grown back and support more of the blackberries, huckleberries, manzanita berries and wild strawberries that bears like.

"Bears are expanding into portions of California that were formerly grizzly habitat, in particular the Coast Range mountains from Mendocino into Santa Barbara and Southern California," Updike said. "We're seeing bears in places where we have not seen bears before."

Though sightings are increasingly common in the foothill communities of the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains, no town in Los Angeles County has more ursine episodes than Monrovia. Occupying only 12 square miles, about 40% of the town is built in the mountains.

"All the new buildings are against the foothills in areas where bears live," said Tom Wright, a patrol sergeant for the Monrovia Police Department. During spring and summer, when bears are most active, he said, police respond to complaints about bears every day.

"They go through trash, and eat avocados off trees," Wright said.

Monrovia even has a bear awareness campaign that includes an ordinance prohibiting their feeding, and trash cans booby-trapped with pepper spray. Six years ago, voters approved $9.5 million in taxes to buy hillsides for a 1,100-acre preserve to protect a wildlife corridor.

The city's most celebrated black bear was Samson, a pool-dunking bruin whose antics once competed for front-page news with the O.J. Simpson trial. Though Samson died in captivity at an Orange County zoo five years ago, Gary Potter, 55, remembers when the bear took dips in his swimming pool and roamed around his yard near the foothills.

As Potter, also a resident of Norumbega Drive, recalls: "He first came in the summertime when it got hot. At first, he came every now and then, and then it got to be more regular. He had a routine, and would come down from the mountains and go swimming in the pool or the Jacuzzi. Then he'd go down the street and hit the trash cans, then he'd go eat avocados from the orchards until dawn. He was a big dude, and he'd just sit in the pool."

Samson has been memorialized with a statue in Monrovia Canyon Park. But other bruins continue to follow in his path.

Potter found a sow and her two cubs in his yard this month. Unseasonably warm weather appears to have prompted bear activity earlier than expected this year.

"We see them almost every day," he said. "Sometimes I come home and the sprinklers are moved, the pool sweeper is moved and there'll be water and sticks, sand and berries in the pool, and I'll say 'Whoa, looks like there's been a party here.' "

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

who will stop humans from destroying Mother Earth?

2006-02-19T23:43:00.000-08:00

Note that local tap water pH has already dropped to 8.1....

Public release date: 20-Feb-2006
Contact: Dr. Ken Caldeira, kcaldeira@globalecology.stanford.edu
650-704-7212, Carnegie Institution

Oceans may soon be more corrosive than when the dinosaurs died

Increased carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly making the world's oceans more acidic and, if unabated, could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to one that occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology will present this research at the AGU/ASLO Ocean Sciences meeting in Honolulu, HI on Monday, Feb 20.

Caldeira's computer models have predicted that the oceans will become far more acidic within the next century. Now, he has compared this data with ocean chemistry evidence from the fossil record, and has found some startling similarities. The new finding offers a glimpse of what the future might hold for ocean life if society does not drastically curb carbon dioxide emissions.

"The geologic record tells us the chemical effects of ocean acidification would last tens of thousands of years," Caldeira said. "But biological recovery could take millions of years. Ocean acidification has the potential to cause extinction of many marine species."

When carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil, and gas dissolves in the ocean, some of it becomes carbonic acid. Over time, accumulation of this carbonic acid makes ocean water more acidic. When carbonic acid input is modest, sediments from the ocean floor can buffer the increases in acidity. But at the current rate of input--nearly 50 times the natural background from volcanoes and other sources--this buffering mechanism is overwhelmed. Previous estimates suggest that in less than 100 years, the pH of the oceans could drop by as much as half a unit from its natural value of 8.2 to about 7.7. (On the pH scale, lower numbers are more acidic and higher numbers are more basic.)

This drop in ocean pH would be especially damaging to marine animals such as corals that use calcium carbonate to make their shells. Under normal conditions the ocean is supersaturated with this mineral, making it easy for such creatures to grow. However, a more acidic ocean would more easily dissolve calcium carbonate, putting these species at particular risk.

The last time the oceans endured such a drastic change in chemistry was 65 million years ago, at about the same time the dinosaurs went extinct. Though researchers do not yet know exactly what caused this ancient acidification, it was directly related to the cataclysm that wiped out the giant beasts. The pattern of extinction in the ocean is consistent with ocean acidification--the fossil record reveals a precipitous drop in the number of species with calcium carbonate shells that live in the upper ocean--especially corals and plankton. During the same period, species with shells made from resistant silicate minerals were more likely to survive.

The world's oceans came close to an acidic catastrophe one other time about 55 million years ago, when the temperature of the Earth spiked and large amounts of methane and/or carbon dioxide flooded the atmosphere. There is no evidence, however, that this caused a mass extinction event.

"Ultimately, if we are not careful, our energy system could make the oceans corrosive to coral reefs and many other marine organisms," Caldeira cautions. "These results should help motivate the search for new energy sources, such as wind and solar, that can fuel economic growth without releasing dangerous carbon dioxide into the environment."

weird winged creatures continue to haunt artists' imagination

2006-01-30T06:43:00.000-08:00

by Rekal via Wooster:

Full Moon Vulture Roost

2006-01-13T23:53:00.000-08:00

Full Moon Vulture Roost
Originally uploaded by The Unpredictables.

early humans terrorized by aerial bombardment

2006-01-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

Face to face: a child killer and its prey
From Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg, Times Online, 13.01.06

THE African crowned eagle was found guilty yesterday of the murder about two to three million years ago of arguably the most important human ancestor found.

The mystery of how the Taung child, the continent’s first hominid discovery, met its end, aged 3½, has puzzled scientists for decades and could throw important new light on the theory of human evolution.

“This is the end of an 80-year-old murder mystery . . . We have proved conclusively and beyond a reasonable doubt, which would be accepted in a court of law, that the African crowned eagle was the killer,” Lee Berger, an American palaeontologist, said.

The end of the mystery “gives us real insight into the past lives of these human ancestors,” he said. “It shows it was not only big cats, but also these creatures from the air — aerial bombardment if you will — that our ancestors had to be afraid of. These were the stressors and stresses that grew and shaped the human mind and formed our behaviour today.”

In 1924 the discovery of the half-ape, half-man fossilised skull about 300 miles (480 kilometres) northwest of Johannesburg overturned the view that humans originated in Eurasia and focused the search for the “cradle of humanity” on Africa.

Announcing the verdict, Professor Berger, a reader in palaeoanthropology at Wits University in Johannesburg, said new evidence showed that the child was not killed by leopards or sabre-toothed cats, the previous suspects.

He said “small punctures and keyhole slots” inside the eye sockets and brain area could not have been made by such large predators.

“Carnivores cannot create that sort of damage,” he told a press conference in the margins of an international conference on the origins of man. “This child was killed by a single blow of a 14cm long talon into the brain . . . It was later disembowelled. The eagle would have used its beak to eat out the eyes and the brain — some of the most nutritious parts — and created these marks.”

The Taung child was discovered by Raymond Dart, a British professor who had recently arrived to take up a new post in South Africa. He published a paper in Nature saying that the child, a specimen of the human ancestor species Australopithecus africanus, was the famed “missing link” between man and ape.

The bold claim was widely dismissed at the time, but subsequently other, older hominids, such as Lucy, believed to be more than three million years old, were found in the Great Rift Valley that snakes across the continent from South Africa through Kenya and Tanzania to Ethiopia.

Professor Berger and Ron Clarke, a fellow palaeontologist, first mooted the theory that the killer was a predatory bird similar to today’s African crowned eagle about ten years ago.

“The one big problem was the lack of multiple areas of damage that could be linked to a bird of prey,” Professor Berger said. “We had one little flap of bone on the top of the skull that looked like some of the damage we see made by eagles and nothing else. It was the ultimate two-million-year-old cold case!”

Five months ago researchers from Ohio State University submitted what Professor Berger called the most comprehensive study to date of eagle damage on bones. Asked to review the paper for the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Professor Berger realised that he had stumbled upon his own missing link.

The study on primate remains from modern-day crowned eagle nests in the Tai forest in Ivory Coast showed that raptors routinely hunt primates much larger than themselves by swooping down at speed and piercing their skulls with their back talons.

The Ohio State paper also identified key features that distinguished damage caused by eagles from that of other predators. They include the flaps of depressed bone on top of the skull caused by the birds’ talons and keyhole-shaped cuts on the side made by their beaks.

They also identified puncture marks and ragged incisions in the base of the eye sockets, made when eagles rip out the eyes of dead monkeys with their talons and beaks.

Professor Berger returned to the skull of the Taung child and noticed a tiny hole and jagged tears at the base of the eye sockets. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, as thousands of scientists, including myself, had overlooked this critical damage. I felt a little bit of an idiot,” he said.

Professor Berger’s research, which has already been reviewed and accepted by experts in the field, is due to be published in the February edition of the prestigious American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

ORIGIN OF MAN
# Human remains from 3.2 million years ago were discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The early human, or Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy, was named after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds

# Last year Ethiopian and US scientists claimed to have discovered fossils of human ancestors from about 3.8 to 4 million years ago. The ankle bone seemed to show that the individual walked upright

# The Laetoli footprints, discovered in 1978 in Tanzania, are estimated to be 3.7 million years old. The footprints are almost identical to those of modern humans

# In 1959 a British the British paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a 1.8 million-year-old skull in the Olduvai Gorge, northern Tanzania. It was the first Australopithecus boisei skull found

# In 1984 a skeleton of a boy — homo erectus — who died 1.6 million years ago was discovered near Lake Turkana in Kenya

wives don't last, raptors do

2006-01-12T22:36:00.001-08:00

January 12, 2006

Falconers a rare breed in Santa Cruz County
By JULIE JAG
Sentinel Staff Writer

SANTA CRUZ — Glenn Stewart doesn't so much own his falcon, Sophie, as he does keep her.

Stewart is a falconer. Sophie, a 5-year-old peregrine, is his hunting partner, his responsibility and maybe even his friend. Yet she is far from being his pet.

"It's a partnership," Stewart says. "They are not working for you. If anything, you are working for them. They don't have to come back."

That becomes clear the moment Stewart raises his leather-glove-covered hand in an open pasture and sets Sophie free. Once she's begun her rapid ascent into the sky, his only connection with her is the tiny transmitter she wears around her right leg. But the chirping transmitter will only point the direction in which Sophie has flown; it won't bring her back. For that, he needs a lure — and her cooperation.

Stewart, 55, has gotten pretty good at getting his birds to cooperate. He's been a falconer for 30 years and has studied the birds for more than two decades as a staff research associate working with the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group, which is credited for helping bring the peregrine falcon back from the edge of extinction.

Yet in Santa Cruz County, Stewart and Sophie are both still rare birds.

While California counts the most falconers in the nation with about 630 — more than 200 of whom are expected to show up at the California Hawking Club's 35th annual field meet this week in Sacramento — Stewart estimates only a handful live in the county.

A big reason is falconry — which can be traced back to 2000 B.C. — is a hunting sport. Stewart and Sophie hunt ducks. Other falconers might concentrate on rabbits, squirrels or starlings depending on their environment and their birds. But in Santa Cruz, hunting grounds where dogs and birds can roam free are scarce at best. So, too, are houses with enough backyard space to house the birds.

Plus, falconry requires a full-time, lifetime commitment.

"It changes everything," said Stewart, who said he spends between 11/2 and eight hours daily training Sophie. "It affects where you live, what kind of car you drive, the job you have. People start working at night so they can fly during the day. ... It affects the way you take vacation because you can't get people to take care of a falcon the way they take care of a dog.

"They require more or less constant attention."

Stewart's wife and children have accepted his devotion to falconry as part of him, and so he considers himself lucky.

The commitment hasn't deterred Matisse Selmas, a 29-year-old Santa Cruz chef who has just dipped his beak into falconry.

Selmas has been Stewart's apprentice for one year and is looking forward to graduating to a general falconer after another. In five years, he'll be considered on par with Stewart as a master falconer. Just getting his apprenticeship has been time-consuming. The sport is closely regulated by the federal and state governments. So, burgeoning falconers like Selmas must spend months studying falconry and then pass a standardized test before they are allowed to take on a bird.

"From beginning to end it was seven to eight months of research and the test before I could even meet Glenn, who is a master falconer, and before I could even think about trapping a bird," Selmas said.

Falconers must also follow strict rules on how they can obtain their birds from a breeder or through trapping and even what types of birds they can train. In most states, apprentices like Selmas are limited to either the redtail hawk or the kestrel falcon. Master falconers like Stewart have their choice of at least a dozen different types of birds, but even they have to ask for permission to hunt with eagles, which can be dangerous to themselves and the falconer.

Most falconers abide by the regulations because, Stewart said, they are there to protect the populations of wild birds. With the regulations, he said, "there's almost no impact on the wild population. It's almost like buying a Labrador retriever."

Once Selmas had finally trapped a kestrel falcon, which hunt mostly starlings, he spent most of his free time training it. He stayed up one entire night holding the falcon on his wrist to teach her to perch there, and he kept her on a long leash as he taught her to chase his lure. After several weeks, she was ready to fly off the leash.

"It's scary," he said. "You're ready to either lose her or have her come back."

To Selmas' delight, she came back. If he wasn't hooked on the sport before, he was when she returned.

"The first time she's sitting on that post over there and looking for food and you call her and she comes back to you, it's an amazing feeling," he said.

But after several months of training and hunting with his bird, Selmas learned first-hand that she still wasn't his. One day during a training session, Selmas lost sight of the bird for a moment and it disappeared. Selmas searched everywhere for his kestrel, a breed too small and light to easily carry a transmitter, but never found her.

Now he's looking forward to trapping and training another falcon. In the meantime, he's enjoying joining Stewart, Sophie and Stewart's hound Riley on their duck hunts.

The hunts work like this: The whole crew will load up in Stewart's green Jeep Cherokee and head out toward Davenport to one of the few open spaces where Stewart has permission to hunt. When they find a pond with ducks on it, Stewart will release Sophie. She'll climb high in the air and circle around as Riley the dog points out the ducks. On Stewart's command, Riley will flush the ducks into the air. Sophie will dive toward one, reaching speeds of up to 200 mph as she bears down on it.

"They will come down at an amazing speed," Selmas said. "You're just flabbergasted."

If Sophie is on target, the impact of the collision is enough to knock the duck out. She then applies her razor-sharp notched beak to its neck to finish the job. Then, while Sophie sets to work plucking the duck so she can eat it, Stewart uses the transmitter to track her down. Once he reaches her, she will climb onto his wrist, ready to receive her reward, which is usually a portion of the bird she successfully attacked.

Stewart can take the duck home and have it for dinner, or keep it to feed Sophie for a few days. But the spoils of the hunt aren't as much of a reward to him as the hunt itself.

"It's been described as an extreme form of bird watching," Stewart said. "If you want to kill a duck, you get a shotgun, to be honest. I don't kill many ducks, but for me it's seeing my falcons go up a couple hundred feet and come down at 200 mph. That's the big thrill, and if she happens to kill something, that's an extra bonus."

When Stewart finally fits a blinding hood over Sophie's gray and rust head and gets her settled back onto his wrist, he breathes a sigh of relief. He doesn't say as much, but he's happy to have his hunting partner back. She has made the choice to stay, at least for one more day. There's a saying that if you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. Stewart knows Sophie isn't his. But she comes back, and that's what matters.

"This is what lasts," Stuart says. "The marriages, the jobs, they don't."

"But this," he said, looking at the proud falcon perched on his wrist, "this lasts."

Contact Julie Jag at jjag@santacruzsentinel.com.
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You can find this story online at:
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2006/January/12/sport/stories/05sport.htm
Copyright © Santa Cruz Sentinel. All rights reserved.

rescued peregrine flies away, doesn't look back

2006-01-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

Lisa Konie of Wildlife Rescue prepares to release a 15-year old peregrine falcon at Shoreline Park in Mountain View.

Posted on Fri, Jan. 06, 2006

Rescued peregrine falcon released into the wild

By Lisa Fernandez
Mercury News

He was bruised and couldn't breathe very well. Less than two months ago, someone found him hopping around, too injured too fly, on Palo Alto High School's athletic field.

But today, the 1.5-pound rare bird -- a peregrine falcon -- was released into the wild, flying high into the clouds above the Mountain View shoreline.

``He's been vigorously flying around in my backyard cage, and he's been going nuts,'' said Lisa Konie, 33, of Saratoga, an attorney and ``raptor team'' volunteer with Wildlife Rescue Inc. ``He's ready to go.''

Most people, including the wildlife rescue team, have never seen a peregrine falcon up close. The small but powerful birds, which can kill a duck in mid-air with their talons and dive at speeds of 200 mph, were removed from the federal endangered species list in 1999 but are still considered endangered in California.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates there are between 1,650 and 3,000 breeding pairs in North America. They love coastal and mountain areas, choosing spots such as Morro Bay and Big Sur to live.

This particular black-headed, yellow-toed falcon, however, made his home for a while on top of Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara. The bird was hatched in a lab at the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group and tagged before being released into the wild as a chick. Scientists at the research group have followed his movements for 15 years, hoping he'd mate.

To their knowledge, he didn't, and no one knows how and why he ended up at the high school Nov. 22 with a chest injury and fluid in his lungs, said Lauren Hasenhuttl, another wildlife rescue volunteer. The falcon released today doesn't have a name but goes by ``2/3'' because of the tags on his right talon.

Not only were wildlife rescue volunteers thrilled to send the falcon back into nature, but the event gave them an opportunity to highlight their cause. The non-profit group on Middlefield Road in Palo Alto annually sends about 2,100 rescued animals into the wild, with a paid staff of three employees, 200 volunteers and an operating budget of less than $30,000, Hasenhuttl said.

The group relies on grants, dues, fundraisers and small amounts of funding from the cities of Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills, she said. The group is looking for funds and volunteers. Anyone interested can call (650) 494-SAVE.

While the group routinely rehabilitates hawks, mourning doves and gopher snakes and sends them back into nature, the rescue volunteers said the peregrine falcon is definitely the most unusual and exciting animal they've nursed back to health.

Patric Kearns of Los Altos, who secured the falcon's daily diet of smaller birds from a friend who owns a quail farm in Sacramento, came to the shoreline today to watch the recovered bird fly into the wild.

``The point is not to be sad,'' she said. ``It's to set them free.''

For more information on Wildlife Rescue Inc., click on http://wildliferescue.ws
Mercury News researcher Leigh Poitinger contributed to this report. Contact Lisa Fernandez at lfernandez@mercurynews.com or (510) 790-7313.

© 2006 MercuryNews.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.mercurynews.com

raptor squad into the fray!

2006-01-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

Mexico City airport tries to scare off bird species

El Universal
Sábado 07 de enero de 2006
Miami Herald, página 1

Mexico City´s international airport has been using falcons and other birds of prey to scare off the large numbers of migratory birds that seek food and refuge at the facility and its surrounding area.

Four Harris hawks, two peregrine falcons, a European goshawk, as well as two dogs belonging to the pest-control company Fumiplag are being used at this airport, Mexico´s largest, to prevent hundreds of migratory birds from endangering flight operations.

The falconry manager of Fumiplag, Rafael Sánchez, told EFE in an interview that these "guardians" of the airspace are needed at all times to scare away birds that fly through the area year-round, posing a risk for pilots landing at or departing from the airport.

"Over the past three years, when we began this work, 60 different species of birds, mostly migratory, have been spotted, observed and scared off by our team," Sánchez said.

He added that the falcons and hawks also keep the rat and mouse population of the area under control, since, he said, "they are the main food source for the migratory birds." Two dogs especially trained to pursue rodents also help with that task.

Sánchez said the birds of prey do not tend to kill the various species of birds that migrate to the airport, but rather just frighten them off. He added that his team keeps the birds well fed so they do not need to hunt for food.

The Mexico City International Airport, where there are 870 daily arrivals and departures, is located in the northwestern part of the city near Lake Texcoco, a popular stopping-off point for the migratory birds that pass through the area.

© 2005 Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online

sad start for the new year: whale mercy killings

2006-01-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

Stranded whales shot dead in NZ

cali Grapes beat Bears, badly

2005-12-28T10:45:00.000-08:00

Bears as 'wine country casualties'

Editor,

I was appalled after reading Peter Fimrite's article, "Wine country casualties" (Dec. 26). It describes the slaughter of bears and deer because they damage wine grapes in Napa County.

There are thousands of acres of open, forested land in California's northern counties that would make a suitable habitat for these animals. Wouldn't relocating them to these areas be a more humane solution to the problem?

If there is a reasonable argument against relocation that I haven't thought of, I'd really like to hear it.

RICH FOLEY
Sausalito

Editor,

I was saddened but not surprised by the article about the plight of our native bears and even cougars being targeted for death by vintners.

As humans further encroach on these majestic animals, of course sightings and "incidents" increase. We have driven many animals to extinction, and most others have been exterminated from their normal ranges by human "development."

It is sad that human greed and shortsightedness keep pushing these original inhabitants of "our" lands ever further into retreat and decline. Ideally, we could set up a grassroots-driven "Wildlife Conservation Act" akin to the original Coastal Conservation Act. But the state proposition process has been so co-opted by powerful industry lobbyists that it is likely impossible to achieve anything meaningful by that route. Still, it is worth a try.

In the meantime vintners and ranchers should be required to set up stronger, and electrified, fences before any "depredation" (execution) permits are approved. Vintners and others wishing to destroy our wildlife should be required to try to trap and relocate animals several times first.

We California citizens also need to wrest the "depredation" permitting process away from the feds. If Californians aren't willing to curtail further intrusive "development" into wildlife's last safe places, we must take steps to ensure our native fauna's dignity, safety and right to survive and even thrive.

DAVID SHEFIK
Berkeley

Editor,

Seems to me that we've got a lot more vineyards in the coastal mountains than we have bears. I'd rather see the bears.

ERIC JEWETT
Los Gatos

[cross-posted from To the Editor, must-read letters to the editor]

meet zephyr the peregrine falcon!

2005-12-27T17:13:00.000-08:00

'Special' falcon lands in the Poconos

by Susan Koomar, Pocono Record
December 27, 2005

He's not a turtle dove or even a partridge in a pear tree but the new bird in town is pretty darned special.

Meet Zephyr, a peregrine falcon adopted by Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation Center.

Zephyr, a peregrine falcon recently adopted by the Pocono Wildlife Rehab Center in Cherry Valley. [Mark A. Genito/Pocono Record]

He's a retired Air Force fly boy bred in captivity and used to prevent bird-plane collisions by chasing smaller birds off runways.

Sleek and stunningly handsome, Zephyr embodies the royal mystique of falconry with the ability to achieve blinding speeds while airborne.

"Truly regal. You can just tell from his demeanor," said Kathy Dubin Uhler, director of the wildlife rehabilitation center.

Uhler donned long elkhide gloves and carefully removed Zephry from a wooden box.

He flapped briefly before settling into a proud pose.

His dark eyes flashed as he probed the crisp December air with his sharp, hooked beak.

"Can you see why we're enthralled?" asked Uhler. "There's just something about him. He's quite special."

Peregrine falcons are an endangered species. Like other birds of prey, they were decimated by the pesticide DDT in the 1950s and 1960s.

They were reintroduced in the 1970s after DDT was banned.

A pair of peregrines nested on a cliff above Delaware Water Gap in 2003 stirring excitement among birders.

Uhler has been trying to obtain a peregrine for her educational programs for 10 years.

"When you have a new animal in an area people want to see them close up," she said.

Uhler found Zephyr through an instructor at a conference she attended. She was the only person in the class who could define operant conditioning — basically "teaching a dog to sit because you gave him a biscuit," she said.

The instructor tossed her a toy falcon as a prize. Uhler spoke to him after class and discovered he could help her adopt a real falcon.

"See, education is a wonderful thing," Uhler gushed. "It got me a bird."

Uhler and her husband, Eric, traveled to Buffalo in an ice storm to get the prized bird on Dec. 16.

"He's magnificent," said Eric Uhler as he took a turn holding Zephyr. "I'm in awe of this thing."

Zephyr will have his local debut when Uhler presents wildlife programs at elementary schools after the holidays.

The falcon will also be featured at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day program at the new DaVinci Science Center in Allentown.

The Pocono Wildlife Rehabilitation Center will host an open house in spring where the public can visit Zephyr and some of the 1,500 animals that recuperate there every year.

One of the latest patients is a captive bred bobcat that was given a latex ball to play with. He ate it and the plastic lodged in the bottom of his stomach, requiring surgery.

Uhler is available to present programs for school and community groups.

The center is seeking donations to cover about $300 in costs associated with Zephyr's adoption.

Kathy Uhler, director of the Pocono Wildlife Rehab Center in Cherry Valley, shows off Zephyr, the new peregrine falcon adopted by the wildlife center to help promote awareness of this endangered species. [Mark A. Genito/Pocono Record]

Prairie Falcon Waiting on Fist II

2005-12-23T14:15:00.000-08:00

Prairie Falcon Waiting on Fist II
Originally uploaded by AviWolf.

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

Lady's Valor

2005-12-23T13:28:00.000-08:00

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.

"Bats" Rasmussen decodes foul-smelling elephant love potion

2005-12-22T21:23:00.000-08:00

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 ape-human, tastebud-free super-warriors

2005-12-21T20:41:00.000-08:00

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

merlin watching

2005-12-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

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.

human genome shaped (warped?) by "civilization"

2005-12-19T19:21:00.000-08:00

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)

Related Articles

Can biology do better than faith?
02 November 2005

Human brains are still evolving
17 September 2005

Evolution: Blink and you'll miss it
09 July 2005

Weblinks

Robert Moyzis, University of California

SNP fact sheet, Human Genome Project

Evolution special report, New Scientist

peregrine closeup

2005-12-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

peregrine closeup
Originally uploaded by Lamerie.

the falcon archetype's shiny mask & shadow

2005-12-16T19:11:00.000-08:00

US deploys new top fighter jet
by Jim Wolf, Reuters, 16 December 2005

The futuristic F-22A "Raptor" fighter jet, designed to dominate the skies well into the 21st century, joined the U.S. combat fleet on Thursday, 20 years after it was conceived to fight Soviet MiGs over Europe.

The Air Force said "initial operational capability" had been achieved at the 1st Fighter Wing's 27th Fighter Squadron at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia.

Pilots in the squadron, the Air Force's oldest in continuous operation, have been training on the F-22, the Air Force's most advanced weapon system, for about a year.

"If we go to war tomorrow, the Raptor will go with us," Gen. Ronald Keys, head of the Air Force's Air Combat command, said in a statement. He said an initial group of 12 was ready for combat worldwide or for homeland defense.

The squadron may swing through the Pacific next year, probably flying from Guam and elsewhere, though no decision has been made about where to best "showcase" it, Keys said in a later teleconference with reporters.

With the Soviet Union gone, defense analysts have cast the F-22 as the weapon of choice for any future U.S. conflict with China, for instance over Taiwan.

"There is a clear role for F-22 here," said Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon strategist now at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia, research group with close ties to the U.S. defense establishment.

The aircraft's role is to "kick the doors down" in a conflict, as Pentagon officials put it, knocking out defenses on the ground and in the air to clear the way for other warplanes and forces.

The radar-evading Raptor is twice as reliable and three times more effective than the F-15C Eagle it is replacing as the top U.S. air-to-air fighter, according to Lockheed Martin Corp., its developer.

"It's a fighter pilot's dream," said former F-15 pilot Col. Walter Givhan, lauding the plane's integrated avionics, stealth and speed. Givhan is wing commander at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where the latest round of F-22 testing was completed.

Lockheed described the fighter as the world's most advanced and said it was "relevant for the next 40 years."

Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp. are top F-22 subcontractors. United Technologies Corp.'s Pratt & Whitney unit makes the aircraft's two engines.

STEALTHY AND SUPERSONIC

The Raptor combines low-observability, or stealth, with supersonic speed, agility and cockpit displays designed to boost greatly pilots' awareness of the situation around them.

At a "fly-away" cost of about $130 million each for the most recent batch, not including research and development, it is also one of the most controversial U.S. warplanes ever.

Critics have termed it unaffordable overkill in a world without the potential threat of a Soviet Union able to send swarms of MiGs into a dogfight, which prompted its inception in 1986.

The Air Force is planning to stretch F-22 production until 2010 to keep Lockheed's production line open pending arrival of its more affordable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter family of aircraft that will also go to the Navy, the Marines and co-developing nations that include Britain, Italy and Turkey.

The F-22 also has a ground attack capability to drop 250-pound (113.5-kg), small-diameter bombs or 1,000-pound (454-kg) Joint Direct Attack Munitions while flying at supersonic speeds.

Gen. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, has said the F-22 is needed against threats such as Russian-built surface-to-air missiles sold overseas.

Moseley said on Tuesday he hoped to buy 183 F-22s, four more than currently in the budget and enough for seven combat-ready squadrons, down from the 750 F-22s once planned.

Final assembly has been completed on 67 of the 107 F-22s already purchased by the Air Force, Lockheed's program manager, Larry Lawson, said in a statement.

Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

street dreams of future flight past

2005-12-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

rocket21
Originally uploaded by Loso.

IMG_8089: African Pygmy Falcon

2005-12-16T11:19:00.000-08:00

IMG_8089: African Pygmy Falcon
Originally uploaded by ac4lt.

hungry ants show teamwork

2005-12-15T17:09:00.000-08:00

Ability to capture large prey may be
origin of army ants' cooperative behavior
EurekAlert! Public release date: 15-Dec-2005

Scientific insights come at the darnedest times.

Animal behaviorist Sean O'Donnell was having an afternoon cup of coffee when a giant earthworm exploded out of the leaf litter covering the jungle floor in an Ecuadorean nature preserve. The worm, later measured at nearly 16 inches long, was pursued by a column of hundreds of raiding army ants that quickly paralyzed or killed it.

That sighting, and another involving what turned out to be the same species of army ant feeding on the carcass of a snake, has led O'Donnell of the University of Washington and several colleagues to offer a new theory on the origin of cooperative hunting behavior in army ants, which are among the most socially complex animals known.

Writing in the current issue of the journal Biotropica, O'Donnell and biologists Michael Kaspari of the University of Oklahoma and John Lattke of Universidad Central de Venezuela, propose that mass cooperative food foraging, a key element in the behavior of army ants, may have begun as a way to subdue large prey.

The species that O'Donnell observed is called Cheliomyrmex andicola and it lives mainly underground in New World tropical rainforests. It had been previously identified, but little was known about its behavior or prey until the two chance encounters at the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, an ecological preserve in eastern Ecuador.

The ants are brick red in color and their size would be considered medium or large when compared to most common ant species found in United States. What makes Cheliomyrmex such a fearsome predator is that its workers have claw-shaped jaws that are armed with long, spine-like teeth. These teeth may serve to help Cheliomyrmex workers attach themselves to their prey's skin during attack

O'Donnell, who was bitten and stung when he collected Cheliomyrmex specimens, said the ants' stings were particularly painful and itchy, comparable to the stings of fire ants. He and his colleagues believe the venom in a Cheliomyrmex sting is toxic and/or paralytic, considering how quickly the giant earthworm became immobile after being attacked.

The researchers said the species is apparently unique among New World army ants in removing and consuming vertebrate flesh, based on the observation of the ants feeding on the dead snake. They noted that raiding parties of other New World army ants occasionally sting and kill small vertebrates such as lizards, snakes and birds, but do usually not consume them. Other New World army ants prey heavily on insects and other invertebrates.

O'Donnell said Cheliomyrmex is related to Old World driver ants in Africa, which also have large-toothed jaws and feed on large-bodied prey. The ancestor of Cheliomyrmex may have split from Old World army ants as long as 105 million years ago, at around the time when Africa and South America separated during the breakup of the giant continent Gondwana.

"Cheliomyrmex may be telling us that cooperative hunting of large prey is an evolutionary predecessor of going after smaller prey," said O'Donnell. "Typically, army ants follow a lifestyle of attacking other social insect colonies. But Cheliomyrmex is not following this lifestyle."

The discovery of Cheliomyrmex 's predation was part of a larger project to sample the number of army ant species and their activity at four New World tropical rainforest sites in Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador. The research was funded by the National Geographic Society.

For more information, contact O'Donnell at 206-543-2315 or sodonnel@u.washington.edu

Contact: Joel Schwarz
joels@u.washington.edu
206-543-2580
University of Washington

A front view of the army ant Cheliomyrmex, showing its fearsome jaw and teeth. [photo: Michael Kaspari, U of Oklahoma]

if wings had ears

2005-12-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

Bats Use Touch Receptors on Wings to Fly, Catch Prey, Study Finds
Thursday Dec 15, 2005
by MELISSA CALHOUN, Ohio University Office of Research Communications

Bat wings show a series of raised domes with touch receptors. [photo: John Zook]

ATHENS, Ohio -- Bats have an “ear” for flying in the dark because of a remarkable auditory talent that allows them to determine their physical environment by listening to echoes. But an Ohio University neurobiology professor says bats have a “feel” for it, too.

John Zook’s studies of bat flight suggest that touch-sensitive receptors on bats’ wings help them maintain altitude and catch insects in midair. His preliminary findings, presented at the recent Society for Neuroscience meeting, revive part of a long-forgotten theory that bats use their sense of touch for nighttime navigation and hunting.

The theory that bats fly by feel was first proposed in the 1780s by French biologist Georges Cuvier, but faded in the 1930s when researchers discovered echolocation, a kind of biological sonar found in bats, dolphins and a few other animals. Bats use echolocation to identify and navigate their environment by emitting calls and listening to the echoes that return from various objects.

Zook believes the touch-sensitive receptors on bats’ wings work in conjunction with echolocation to make bats better, more accurate nocturnal hunters. Echolocation helps bats detect their surroundings, while the touch-sensitive receptors help them maintain their flight path and snag their prey.

Touch receptors take the form of tiny bumps, or raised domes, along the surface of bats’ wings. The domes contain Merkel cells, a type of “touch” cell common in bumps on the skin of most mammals, including humans. Bat touch domes are different, however, because they feature a tiny hair poking out of the center.

When Zook recorded the electrical activity of the Merkel cells, he found they were sensitive to air flowing across the wing. These cells were most active when airflow – particularly turbulent airflow – stimulates the hair. When a bat’s wing isn’t properly angled or curved during flight, air passing next to the wing can become turbulent. Merkel cells help bats stay aerodynamically sound by alerting them when their wing position or curve is incorrect, preventing the creatures from stalling in midair.

“It’s like a sail or a plane. When you change the curve of a wing a little bit, you get improved lift. But if you curve it too much, the bat – or plane – may suddenly lose lift, hitting a stall point and falling out of the air. These receptor cells give bats constant feedback about their wing positions,” said Zook, who has studied bats for more than 30 years, focusing on echolocation and the bat auditory system. The bat’s sense of touch has been a side interest since the early 1980s.

To test his hypothesis, Zook removed the delicate hairs from bats’ wings with a hair removal cream. Then he let them fly. The bats appeared to fly normally when following a straight path, but when they’d try to take a sharp turn, such as at the corner of a room, they would drop or even jump in altitude, sometimes erratically. When the hairs grew back, the bats resumed making turns normally.

“It was obvious they had trouble maintaining elevation on a turn,” he said. “Without the hairs, the bats were increasing the curve of their wings too much or not enough.”

The bats’ flight behavior also changed based on the area of the wing where the hairs were removed. For example, when Zook removed hairs along the trailing edge of the wings and on the membrane between the legs, the bats were able to fly and turn effectively, but they tended to pitch forward because they couldn’t control their in-flight balance.

Zook’s research also points to the importance of a second type of receptor cell in the membranous part of bats’ wings. Nerve recordings revealed that these receptors respond when the membrane stretches. Zook calls areas on the wing where these stretch-sensitive cells overlap “sweet spots” because they are where bats like to snag their prey. In the lab, Zook shot mealworms covered with flour into the air and recorded how the bats caught them. He could tell from the flour imprints on the wings that the bats caught their prey almost exclusively in the stretch-sensitive sweet spots.

Copyright © 2005 Ohio University. All Rights Reserved.

Contact: John Zook, (740) 593-2269, zookj@ohio.edu
Media Contact: Andrea Gibson (740) 597-2166, gibsona@ohio.edu

medicated owl meditates on season's joys?

2005-12-15T09:53:00.000-08:00

Owl discovered in Christmas tree found with marijuana in system

Posted: 12/15/2005 11:24 am
Last Updated: 12/15/2005 11:36 am

Sarasota, FL - Here's a holiday story you just won't believe.

A family found an owl in their Christmas tree, and the bird apparently had a little hooter in him.

A small screech owl was found in a live Christmas tree that a family bought.

They kept the tree for five days before they decided to decorate it.

When they did, they found the owl.

Animal control officers came to get the owl, and when they did, they made a shocking discovery!

"I kept smelling him and smelling him, saying 'What is that odor'. It was lying there as happy as can be,"says one animal control officer who was at the scene.

"Curiously enough, the owl's feathers smelled very, very potently like marijuana," says Animal Control Officer Dering. They examined the owl, looked at its eyes, big owl eyes, and the owl was, in the vernacular, stoned."

Blood tests confirmed the owl was flying high, on marijuana.

They checked him out, fed him and named him Cheech.

He'll be released in a few days.

"Each person has a reindeer guardian angel"

2005-12-13T21:28:00.000-08:00

Mr. Vitebsky's happiest pages are devoted to the reindeer, the harsh beauty of the taiga and the intimate bond between the Eveny and their animals. Each person has a reindeer guardian angel, and on the trail, wrapped in multiple layers of reindeer-skin clothing, the herders look a little like reindeer themselves. Reindeer hair, which is hollow and traps body heat, has nearly magical insulating powers, which is a good thing, because a herder who leaves his tent without a coat on can freeze to death in minutes.

...from: A Home in the Arctic, Where the Reindeer Still Roam
by William Grimes, New York Times, 14 December 2005

narwhal's tusk is a sensory organ

2005-12-12T22:21:00.000-08:00

It's Sensitive. Really.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times, December 13, 2005

For centuries, the tusk of the narwhal has fascinated and baffled.

Narwhal tusks, up to nine feet long, were sold as unicorn horns in ages past, often for many times their weight in gold since they were said to possess magic powers. In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth received a tusk valued at £10,000 - the cost of a castle. Austrian lore holds that Kaiser Karl the Fifth paid off a large national debt with two tusks. In Vienna, the Hapsburgs had one made into a scepter heavy with diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds.

Scientists have long tried to explain why a stocky whale that lives in arctic waters, feeding on cod and other creatures that flourish amid the pack ice, should wield such a long tusk. The theories about how the narwhal uses the tusk have included breaking ice, spearing fish, piercing ships, transmitting sound, shedding excess body heat, poking the seabed for food, wooing females, defending baby narwhals and establishing dominance in social hierarchies.

But a team of scientists from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology has now made a startling discovery: the tusk, it turns out, forms a sensory organ of exceptional size and sensitivity, making the living appendage one of the planet's most remarkable, and one that in some ways outdoes its own mythology.

The find came when the team turned an electron microscope on the tusk's material and found new subtleties of dental anatomy. The close-ups showed that 10 million nerve endings tunnel from the tusk's core toward its outer surface, communicating with the outside world. The scientists say the nerves can detect subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and probably much else, giving the animal unique insights.

"This whale is intent on understanding its environment," said Martin T. Nweeia, the team's leader and a clinical instructor at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Contrary to common views, he said, "The tusk is not about guys duking it out with sticks and swords."

Today in San Diego, Dr. Nweeia is presenting the team's findings at the 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, sponsored by the Society for Marine Mammalogy.

James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where Dr. Nweeia is a research associate, said the exposed nerve endings appear to be unparalleled in nature.

"As far as I can see, it's a unique thing," Dr. Mead said in an interview. "It's something new. It just goes to show just how little we know about whales and dolphins."

He noted that no theory about the tusk's function ever envisioned its use as a sensory organ.

In the Canadian wilds, the team recently conducted a field study on a captured narwhal, fitting electrodes on its head. Changes in salinity around the animal's tusk, Dr. Nweeia found, produced signs of altered brain waves, giving preliminary support to the sensor hypothesis. The unharmed whale was then released.

With the basics now in hand, the team is working to understand how the narwhal uses the information. One theory is that the tusk can detect salinity gradients that tell if ice is freezing, a hazard that has killed hundreds of narwhals. Tusk readings may also help the whales track environments that favor their preferred foods.

"It's the kind of discovery," said Dr. Mead of the Smithsonian, "that opens up a lot of other questions."

Little about the narwhal's appearance or behavior offers clues to the tusk's sensory importance. The whale has eyes, though small ones. It also has a thick layer of blubber and no dorsal fin so it can swim easily under the ice. Like any whale, it must surface periodically to breathe air. And as in dolphins, its mouth is set in a permanent smile.

The word narwhal (pronounced NAR-wall or NAR-way-l) is said to derive from old Norse for "corpse whale," apparently because the animal's mottled, splotchy coloring recalled the grayish, blotched color of drowned sailors.

Though shy of humans, the animals are quite social. They often travel in groups of 20 or 30 and form herds of up to 1,000 during migrations.

Males weigh up to 1.5 tons, grow about 15 feet long and are conspicuous by their tusks, which can grow from six to nine feet in length. A few females have tusks and, in rare cases, narwhals can wield two of the long teeth. Though often ramrod strait, the tusks always grow in tight spirals that, from the animal's point of view, turn counterclockwise.

The long ivory tusk "looks like a cross between a corkscrew and a jousting lance," Fred Bruemmer, an Arctic explorer, wrote in "The Narwhal" (Swan Hill Press, 1993).

Narwhals live mainly in the icy channels of northern Canada and northwestern Greenland, but they are found eastward as far as Siberia.

The whale's close cousin, the snowy white beluga, thrives in captivity. The shy narwhal tends to die.

Arctic explorers have often observed them at a distance because narwhals frequently raise their heads above the water, their tusks held high. Jens Rosing, in his book "The Unicorn of the Arctic Sea" (Penumbra Press, 1999), tells of seeing them during expeditions off Greenland. There the whales would frolic and apparently mate.

"Over a hundred can be seen at once," he wrote. "They often rise vertically out of the water, lifting themselves with strong movements of their tail fin so that half their body is above water."

Mr. Rosing added: "There is great confusion of movement - both females and males take part. Often one can see a male and female shoot up from the water, trembling, belly to belly."

When luxuriating on their backs in the water, narwhals often turn their heads so their tusks point straight up. Dr. Nweeia of Harvard said the Inuit, the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, who know the narwhal intimately, have a name for the whale that translates as "the one that is good at curving itself to the sky."

Around A.D. 1000, the narwhal tusk debuted in history as a profitable lie. Historians say people in the far north learned of narwhals from Norsemen or perhaps from finding animal bodies occasionally washed up on northern shores. It is known that the Vikings hunted the narwhal and acquired tusks from Arctic natives.

Unscrupulous traders passed them off as one of the most prized objects of all time: unicorn horns.

The ancient Chinese, Greeks, Romans and other peoples had accepted the unicorn as real, and the arrival of the beautifully spiraled objects seemed to prove the animal's existence. The supposed horns sparked huge interest because they were said to have the power to cure ills and neutralize poisons.

Kings and emperors, eager to foil assassins, had cups and eating utensils made of the precious horns. A London doctor advertised a drink made from powdered tusks that could cure scurvy, ulcers, dropsy, gout, consumption, coughs, heart palpitations, fainting, rickets and melancholy.

The horns became an icon of power, both earthly and divine, in part because of their religious associations. In medieval times, the unicorn was seen as a symbol of great purity and of Christ, the motif common in religious art. The fantastic beast appeared in many thousands of images, Mr. Bruemmer wrote, and "All carry a horn that is unmistakably a narwhal tusk, the only long, spiraled horn in all creation."

Churches put small pieces of "unicorn horn" in holy water, giving ailing commoners hope of miracle cures. Meanwhile, the bishops of Vienna carried staffs made of the precious ivory, while St. Mark's Basilica in Venice displayed a horn wreathed in purple velvet.

By the 17th century, the deception began to falter amid the expansion of New World exploration and multiplying reports of bizarre whales that bore long tusks. Ole Wurm, a Danish zoologist, investigated the matter and in 1638 exposed the horn's true origins in a public lecture.

As the unicorn myth died a slow death, the reputation of the narwhal grew larger than life. Explorers claimed its tusk could punch holes in thick ice, and that males battled with their long tusks for supremacy. In 1870, Jules Verne told how a narwhal could pierce ships "clean through as easily as a drill pierces a barrel."

Dr. Nweeia, a general dentist in Sharon, Conn., with an interest in dental anthropology, developed a taste for exotic investigations while doing research on Indian tribes in the Amazon and children in Micronesia. He lectured on how animal and human teeth differ, and eight years ago he began to wonder about narwhals and their odd tusks.

"They defied most of the principles and properties of teeth," he recalled. Many narwhal reports proved contradictory, he found, and "my interest spiraled like the tooth."

In 2000, Dr. Nweeia decided to investigate the animal closely and first trekked to its icy habitat in 2002, going to Pond Inlet, a tiny settlement at the northern tip of Baffin Island. There he met David Angnatsiak, an Inuit guide who agreed to help. Under international agreement, the Inuits are allowed to hunt narwhals, which they eat and harvest for their tusks.

During expeditions in 2003 and 2004, aided by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Dr. Nweeia was able to gather head and tusk specimens, which he brought back for analysis. He and his colleagues tracked a clear nerve connection between the animal's brain and tusk, finding the long tooth heavily enervated. But why it should be so remained a mystery.

The investigators zeroed in on the riddle with sophisticated instruments at the Paffenbarger Research Center of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal organization in Gaithersburg, Md. The American Dental Association finances the research center.

Rough deposits of calcified algae and plankton coated the outside of the tusks Dr. Nweeia brought back. The scientists decided to remove them in an acid bath to get down to the surface of the tooth before viewing it under an electron microscope. First, however, they decided to give the uncleaned tusk a cursory microscopic examination.

It was a shock. There, contrary to all known precepts of tooth anatomy, they found open tubules leading down through the mazelike coating to the tooth's inner nerves and pulp.

"That surprised us," recalled Frederick C. Eichmiller, director of the Paffenbarger Research Center. "Tubules in healthy teeth never go to the surface."

Extrapolating from a count of open tubules over one part of the tooth's surface, the team estimated that the average narwhal tusk had millions of openings that led down to inner nerves.

"No one knew that they were connecting to the outside environment," Dr. Nweeia said. "To find that was extraordinary."

His collaborators include Naomi Eidelman and Anthony A. Giuseppetti of the Paffenbarger Research Center, Yeon-Gil Jung of Changwon National University in South Korea and Yu Zhang of New York University.

Increasingly, the investigation centers on how the whales use their newly observed powers. One central unanswered question is how sensory abilities in males might relate to herd behavior and survival.

The scientists, noting that the males often hold their tusks high in the air, wonder if the long teeth might sometimes serve as sophisticated weather stations, letting the animals sense changes in temperature and barometric pressure that would tell of the arrival of cold fronts and the likelihood that open ice channels might soon freeze up.

Dr. Nweeia noted that the discovery does not eliminate some early theories of the whale's behavior. Tusks acting as sophisticated sensors, he said, may still play a role in mating rituals or determining male hierarchies.

He added that the nerve endings, in addition to other readings, undoubtedly produce tactile sensations when the tusk is rubbed or touched, and that these might be interpreted as pleasurable.

This tactile sense might explain why narwhals engage in what is known as "tusking," where two males gently rub tusks together, Dr. Nweeia said. He added that the Inuit seldom report aggressive contact, undermining ideas of ritualized battle.

Dr. Nweeia said that gentle tusking might also be a way that males remove encrustations on their tusks so tubules stay open, allowing them to better function as sensors. "It may simply be their way of cleaning or brushing teeth," he said.

He called the basic discovery mind boggling, especially given the freezing temperatures of the Arctic.

"This is one of the last places you'd expect to find such a thing," Dr. Nweeia said of the large sensory organs. "Cold is one of the things that tubules are most sensitive to," as people sometimes discover when diseased gums of human teeth expose the tubules.

"Of all the places you'd think you'd want to do the most to insulate yourself from that outside environment," he said, "this guy has gone out of his way to open himself up to it."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

x marks a species facing extinction

2005-12-12T20:54:00.000-08:00

New study pinpoints epicenters of Earth's imminent extinctions
Groups rally to safeguard hundreds of imperiled species

Safeguarding 595 sites around the world would help stave off an imminent global extinction crisis, according to new research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (www.pnas.org).

Conducted by scientists working with the 52 member organizations of the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE –– www.zeroextinction.org), the study identifies 794 species threatened with imminent extinction, each of which is in need of urgent conservation action at a single remaining site on Earth.

The study found that just one-third of the sites are known to have legal protection, and most are surrounded by human population densities that are approximately three times the global average. Conserving these 595 sites should be an urgent global priority involving everyone from national governments to local communities, the study's authors state.

Th United States ranks among the ten countries with the most sites. These include Torrey Pines in California, a cave in West Virginia, a pond in Mississippi, and six sites in Hawaii. The whooping crane and the recently rediscovered ivory-billed woodpecker are two spectacular American species that qualify for inclusion. Particular concentrations of sites are also found in the Andes of South America, in Brazil's Atlantic Forests, throughout the Caribbean, and in Madagascar.

"Although saving sites and species is vitally important in itself, this is about much more," said Mike Parr, Secretary of AZE. "At stake are the future genetic diversity of Earth's ecosystems, the global ecotourism economy worth billions of dollars per year, and the incalculable benefit of clean water from hundreds of key watersheds. This is a one-shot deal for the human race," he added. "We have a moral obligation to act. The science is in, and we are almost out of time."

"We now know where the emergencies are: the species that will be tomorrow's dodos unless we act quickly," said Taylor Ricketts, lead author of the study. "The good news is we still have time to protect them."

Among the 794 imperiled mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and conifers are monkey-faced bats, cloud rats, golden moles, poison frogs, exotic parrots and hummingbirds, a hamster and a dormouse, a penguin, crocodiles, iguanas, monkeys, and a rhinoceros. Among the most intriguingly-named are: the Bloody Bay poison frog, the volcano rabbit, the Ruo River screeching frog, the Bramble Cay mosaic-tailed rat, the marvelous spatuletail (a hummingbird), and the Sulu bleeding-heart (a dove).

While extinction is a natural process, the authors note that current human-caused rates of species loss are 100-1,000 times greater than natural rates. In recent history, most species extinctions have occurred on isolated islands following the introduction of invasive predators such as cats and rats. This study shows that the extinction crisis has now expanded to become a full-blown assault on Earth's major land masses, with the majority of at-risk sites and species now found on continental mountains and in lowland areas.

Also published today are a site map and a report that details the actions required to save these sites and species. These items, along with a searchable database of sites, web links and media contacts for the Alliance's 52 member organizations, and photos of AZE sites and species for media use, can be found at: www.zeroextinction.org/press.htm.

EurekAlert! Public release date: 12-Dec-2005

Contact: Tom Lalley
tom.lalley@wwfus.org
202-778-9544
World Wildlife Fund

L and Manuka

2005-12-12T09:10:00.000-08:00

L and Manuka
Originally uploaded by sometimes silent e.

be nice to bees, they recognize human faces

2005-12-12T08:50:00.000-08:00

Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images of human faces

Adrian G. Dyer1,2,*, Christa Neumeyer1 and Lars Chittka3

1 Institut fur Zoologie III (Neurobiologie), Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, 55099, Germany,
2 Clinical Vision Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia
3 School of Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

* Author for correspondence at present address: Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EA, UK (e-mail: a.dyer@latrobe.edu.au)

Accepted 13 October 2005

Recognising individuals using facial cues is an important ability. There is evidence that the mammalian brain may have specialised neural circuitry for face recognition tasks, although some recent work questions these findings. Thus, to understand if recognising human faces does require species-specific neural processing, it is important to know if non-human animals might be able to solve this difficult spatial task. Honeybees (Apis mellifera) were tested to evaluate whether an animal with no evolutionary history for discriminating between humanoid faces may be able to learn this task. Using differential conditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a standard face recognition test used in human psychology. Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials and bees discriminated the target face from a similar distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level of choices for the target face, indicating an ability for face recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180° there was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible disruption to configural type visual processing.

Key words: visual processing, face recognition, honeybee, brain

sad orca discovery

2005-12-12T08:33:00.000-08:00

Arctic orcas highly contaminated
By Paddy Clark, BBC News, 12 December 2005

Killer whales have become the most contaminated mammals in the Arctic, new research indicates.

Norwegian scientists have found that killer whales - or orcas, as they are sometimes known - have overtaken polar bears at the head of the toxic table.

No other arctic mammals have ingested such a high concentration of hazardous man-made chemicals.

The Norwegian Polar Institute tested blubber samples taken from creatures in Tysfjord in the Norwegian Arctic.

The chemicals they found included pesticides, flame retardants and PCBs - which used to be used in many industrial processes.

Chemical sink

Animals at the top of the food chain are particularly affected, and whales - like polar bears - can reflect the health of the marine environment.

The researchers are particularly worried about the flame retardants, because unlike many other harmful chemicals, some are still legal.

The international environmental group, WWF, says the Arctic has become a chemical sink.

It says the findings dramatically underline the need for European Union ministers to decide on strong legislation when they meet this week.

However, WWF says it fears pressure from the chemicals industry could lead to any new laws being so watered down that they will protect neither the environment nor human health.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/4520104.stm

Published: 2005/12/12 02:19:05 GMT

© BBC MMV

like a bird

2005-12-11T13:26:00.000-08:00

like a bird
Originally uploaded by lepublicnme.

Prairie Falcon Launch

2005-12-11T13:22:00.000-08:00

Prairie Falcon Launch
Originally uploaded by AviWolf.

superior surgery success

2005-12-11T09:52:00.000-08:00

Injured falcon survives sugery
Sunday, December 11, 2005

Perrysburg, Ohio - Superior,a 6-month-old peregrine falcon,underwent surgery Saturday at the Perrysburg Animal Hospital to fix his broken left wing,said Mona Rutger, director of the Back to the Wild Wildlife Rehabilitation& Nature Center near Castilia, Ohio.

Veterinarians inserted two vertical pins into the falcon's humus bone, which extends from the shoulder to the elbow, then attached a Kirchner apparatus,which will hold the pinned bone in place, Rutger said.

"We were worried because peregrines typically stop breathing during surgery because of the anesthetic,but he came through fine," she said.

Superior will have his wing wrap removed in three days,then undergo therapy to keep his shoulder joint mobile. He will live in a small conditioning cagefor about 2 1 / 2 weeks before being moved to a large flight cage,Rutger said.

Superior could be released in early spring if he shows good flight, she said.

To find out more about the center,go to its Web site:

www.backtothewild.com

© 2005 The Plain Dealer © 2005 cleveland.com All Rights Reserved.

Feathers- light, delicate, tasty!

2005-12-08T14:32:00.000-08:00

Feathers- light, delicate, tasty!
Originally uploaded by AviWolf.

Abu Dhabi worries about bird flu

2005-12-07T08:18:00.000-08:00

Bird flu prevention in UAE begins at falcon hospital
Authorities in Abu Dhabi are keeping close tabs on the comings and goings of local stock of falcons.

by Sam Dagher - SWEIHAN, United Arab Emirates - Three peregrine falcons drugged with anaesthetic are perched quietly on the floor of the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital awaiting their turn to be checked for avian influenza.

They were confiscated at Abu Dhabi airport where their owners tried to smuggle them in with forged documentation, according to the hospital.

Although no cases of bird flu have been reported yet in the United Arab Emirates, authorities in the country's oil-rich capital Abu Dhabi are taking no chances.

An elaborate prevention programme has been rolled out and a contingency plan involving the army drawn up to face the threat of the disease, which has killed nearly 70 people in Asia since 2003.

All exotic birds and raptors such as falcons have been banned from entering the country and authorities are keeping close tabs on the comings and goings of the local stock of falcons using a mandatory registration system.

Emiratis, who are passionate falconers, can only train their falcons inside the country and are forced to practice the sport itself in places like Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Morocco as Asian destinations are off limits this year due to the risk of bird flu.

The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu has surfaced in neighboring Kuwait as well as in China, Croatia, Romania, Indonesia and elsewhere since October.

"Falconers and falcons have close contact. The falcon is like a child for them, it's part of the family," says German doctor Margit Muller, director of the falcon hospital, located in the desert town of Sweihan near Abu Dhabi.

She says falcons can catch avian flu if they fly behind or hunt infected birds, a real risk given that the UAE is on the path of migrating birds and given the possibility that some falconers may not abide by the rules.

"There is a possibility, we cannot rule it out," says the Bavarian vet, recruited four years ago to head the state-owned hospital, the largest of its kind in the region.

In addition to treating nearly 4,000 falcons a year, the hospital has a quarantine facility for suspect birds of prey and a sophisticated laboratory to test for avian flu in all birds.

Muller says the laboratory currently runs almost 1,000 test samples per day from all over the UAE, but can double that if need be.

"This gives us the chance to detect it in a few hours even if it's H5N1," she says over the shrieks of a falcon being treated in a nearby room.

"This in my eyes is one of the most important things: not only to know if you have avian influenza but really to detect if it is pathogenic (contagious) for humans."

Muller says the UAE is taking the lead in the Gulf in terms of its readiness to tackle the threat of bird flu.

A national committee is heading the effort, which so far has involved closing down live poultry shops inside cities, inspecting farms, training municipal and health workers on how to deal with the disease and launching a public awareness campaign.

Migrating birds are also being tested and quarantine facilities to house suspect birds are being built around coastal areas and at airports, says Majid al-Mansuri, the committee's secretary general.

"We are taking our precautions. We are not in danger," he says.

He dismisses the threat of bird flu from falcons, arguing that unlike most Far Eastern countries, residents of the UAE rarely come into contact with live poultry, which is bred at state-of-the-art farms outside city limits.

Mansuri says the only threat to the UAE would be an Asian bird flu pandemic given the country's dependence on low-income workers from southeast Asia.

Mansuri has a detailed flow chart outlining actions to be taken in the event of human infection in the UAE.

"Health officials quarantine the patient with the army's help. In the event of death: bury the body in an isolated area or burn it," reads one box.

DSC02281

2005-12-06T20:55:00.001-08:00

DSC02281
Originally uploaded by Topdog1.

DSC02306

2005-12-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

DSC02306
Originally uploaded by Topdog1.

birdhands

2005-12-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

elbow-toe
Originally uploaded by Luna Park.

Falcon

2005-12-06T10:29:00.000-08:00

Falcon
Originally uploaded by baby7.

baby7 says:
"I saw this nice Falcon in Duabi safari trip at night in desert..It was so hungry"

Peregrine Falcon_5808

2005-12-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

Peregrine Falcon_5808
Originally uploaded by robphoto.

wanted: good christian dino hunters

2005-12-04T14:03:00.000-08:00

Project Pterosaur

[....] I have also contacted "Johnny" Kimbuso, my African guide from my last expedition, to see if he would be willing to help. It was he who managed to take the picture of the apatosaur we uncovered. Hopefully, I can convince him to join me again on another Creation Science adventure, although he still suffers trauma from his close encounter with the charging dinosaur.

[....] Besides supplies that are common to all animal capture expeditions, we have determined that we need the following special equipment:

* Metallic pterosaur effigies based on Biblical designs (for herding into traps.)
* Frankincense smoker (to disorientate the animals for capture.)
* Nets, including large butterfly-style nets for use on smaller rhamphorhynchi.
* Calming hoods (designed based on Deluge-era pterosaur skull remains.)
* Reinforced bird cages.
* Climate controlled egg transport containers. [....]

What Are Pterosaurs?

Pterosaurs (ter’ə·sôrs) are flying reptiles with leathery or membranous wings attached to the sides of their bodies and supported by an elongated fourth digit on their forelimbs. They were created by the Lord on the fifth day of His Creation Week (Genesis 1:20-22) and were a constant presence in the skies over Eden, where they peacefully ate fruit and plants. After the Fall, many of their descendants degenerated to a carnivorous diet and became feared by man, although non-wicked specimens preserved on the Ark helped to temper this degenerative tendency after the Flood. Various Pterosaur kinds were common throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa up until the early Middle Ages and interacted extensively with Man. Today, although Evolutionists falsely insist that they are extinct, pterosaurs can still be found, hidden away in the unexplored wilds of our world.

There are two main baramins of pterosaurs: rhamphorhynchoid and pterodactyloid. Rhamphorhynchoid kinds are small to medium sized (usually no larger than a sea gull) with long tails, short heads and necks, and teeth. Pterodactyloid kinds are medium to very large (in fact, they include the largest flying animals that ever lived) with short tails, longer necks and limbs, often crested heads, and usually lack teeth. It's still debated whether these groups are monobaraminic or holobaraminic, and it is one of Project Pterosaur's science goals to answer this question (if we find specimens of both groups, we can determine baraminicity by using Intelligent Design Theory to measure their specified complexity and apply the Dembski-Shannon equation to extrapolate the amount of relative informational loss due to genetic degradation from their perfect Creation.) [....]

Pterosaurs, including the ancestors of pterodactyls (middle left) and rhamphorhynchi (middle right), lived peacefully with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. (Artistic reconstruction by Peggy Miller.)

During the Exodus, Israelites within sight of Moses's brazen pterosaur-scaring device (pictured above) were safe, but many stragglers still perished from the persistent bites of the serpentine pterosaurs. (Artistic reconstruction by Peggy Miller.)

Manson guests treated to falconry

2005-12-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

Marilyn Manson marries burlesque dancer
CBC Arts, 4 Dec 2005

Goth rocker Marilyn Manson has married his longtime girlfriend, burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, in Ireland, say the MTV and People magazine websites.

Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, got hitched to his 33-year-old girlfriend in front of 60 guests at Castle Gurteen in Country Tipperary, the reports say. The castle is owned by Manson's friend, Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein.

MTV says a Manson spokesperson confirmed the non-denominational ceremony was performed by Chilean underground film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, a friend of Manson's. Jodorowsky directed Santa Sangre.

The Limerick Post newspaper recently reported the wedding celebration was to last four days, from Friday to Monday, and include traditional Irish fare such as pit-roasted pig, duckling, Dublin prawns and lobster.

Manson has been dating Heather Sweet, whose stage name is Dita Von Teese, for four years. He proposed to her in Los Angeles March 2004.

The 36-year-old singer is in the midst of completing his sixth album, which is still untitled.

According to MTV.com, Manson had already revealed in October his wedding would be a small affair because he wanted it to be "meaningful and something to remember" and would be a "drama within a drama," with guests dressed 19th-century style.

He told MTV that guests would be treated to activities such as archery and falconry in the days following the nuptials.

Manson enlisted designer John Galliano to create his groom's outfit, a black silk taffeta tuxedo, which he topped off with a hat. Von Teese wore a purple silk taffeta gown designed by Vivienne Westwood.

The wedding is a first for both.

Copyright ©2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation - All Rights Reserved

wild parrot man: once homeless, now an author with a movie in theaters everywhere

2005-12-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

Look who's squawking

The Guardian, Friday December 2, 2005

No one knows how a flock of Peruvian parrots made it to San Francisco. But one thing seems certain: they're about to become international stars.

Head to head: Mark Bittner communing with the parrots.
Photograph: Daniela Cossali

The view from the top of Telegraph Hill is breathtaking: fog rolling in across the Golden Gate bridge, ferries chugging across the bay to Alcatraz. The parrots like it, too. Scattered across the cypress trees, their bright green feathers and red faces vivid against the khaki leaves, they stare out across the water, just like the tourists - except now the parrots are tourist attractions themselves.

In matters of real estate, Peruvian wild parrots have taste. Telegraph Hill, in the sunny north-east of San Francisco, is a dense neighbourhood of steep, narrow streets - implausibly steep pavements are forced to morph into staircases, when they don't give up and revert to being cliffs - with wild, jungly gardens and little houses that cost the earth. It climbs through North Beach - San Francisco's great bohemian neighbourhood of strip joints, jazz clubs and beatnik cafes - ending 540ft up on Coit Tower, the priapic monument modelled on a hose-nozzle, erected by a millionairess with a thing for firemen.

For the longest time, only locals knew about these avian lodgers - all cherry-headed conures except one. But since the release last year of Judy Irving's successful documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and Mark Bittner's book of the same name, the parrots have become national stars. Soon to be international, judging by overseas interest. When the next Time Out guide is published, there'll probably be parrot-spotting walks alongside the entries on Coit Tower, City Lights bookshop and Caffe Trieste.

Quite how the parrots got from Peru to North Beach, no one knows, though the movie offers plenty of theories: lorries crashing en route to pet shops; parrots hitching rides on container ships. But it's a tolerant place, San Francisco - as America goes, remarkably tolerant - so a flock of exotic birds sharing a few city blocks with the native sparrows and pigeons is as unremarkable as a street with Chinatown down one end and Little Italy down the other.

Tolerance, in fact, is one of the movie's underlying themes - along with freedom, connecting, materialism, ecology, Zen, and love. Which makes it a gentler, more bittersweet avian blockbuster than March of the Penguins, and very San Franciscan.

Irving has specialised in environmental films (Dark Circle, about the nuclear power industry, won a Sundance festival award) but this was her first "portrait film", the story of Bittner, an enigmatic, endearing, fiftysomething - homeless, jobless, but contented and self-sustaining - and his remarkably close relationship with the parrots. Irving, a cockatiel owner - it's perched on her knee as we talk - saw an article he wrote about it in Bird Talk magazine and immediately thought of a film. But the article said he'd had to leave the hill. When she heard he'd moved back, she contacted him. Keen to have a "visual memory" before he was forced to leave again, he gave her the go-ahead.

What started out for Irving as "sort of a hobby, with four rolls of 16mm film I had left over from another shoot" grew over four-and-a-half years from a 20 minute short to "this thing that changed my life". It would spoil the ending of the film to say precisely how.

After we've come to know and recognise Connor, the blue-headed parrot loner, Mingus, who nods like a junked-out jazzman whenever Bittner plays guitar, the hoodlum Sonny, coquettish Sophie and her big mate Picasso; after we've seen Bittner tend the sick and injured parrots and heard insights into their behaviour learned from spending hour upon hour sitting among them with a bowl of sunflower seeds, like a Buddhist Saint Francis, it's a shock when the camera cuts to an old homeless woman feeding pigeons on the streets. Irving asks Bittner what makes him different from the bag lady. He has no answer.

Asked the same question now, he says: "Really, the only difference is a lot of homeless people have drug and alcohol problems and I didn't." Bittner says he became homeless "by accident" in the 1970s when he moved from Seattle to become a musician and was disillusioned by an untrustworthy manager, his own egotism, and the break-up of a love affair. Since "it had all come apart at the seams", he decided to be a "seeker", as people did back then; he read a lot, crashed with friends, slept outdoors and relied on the kindness of strangers.

"I didn't work very much, but all I really needed was to feed myself and wash my clothes. Seeds are not that expensive." When vet bills for the birds needed paying, he'd pin a notice on the grocery shop wall and within hours get a call telling him a well-wisher had left a $100 bill.

Bittner says he was reading a book by San Franciscan beat/nature poet Gary Snyder when he first noticed the parrots. By another accident, for the next few years they became his full-time job. "I loved them, cared for them, just became absorbed with them, and in the end they brought me everything." He and his new partner have just bought a cottage on Telegraph Hill, where he is writing his second book - not about parrots. "I didn't see myself as the Parrot Man for life."

But he and Irving are still watching out for them. The film and book have become a focus for a campaign against a Connecticut utility company trying to gas a wild parrot flock. And, closer to home, they're meeting this week with a neighbour who has chopped down three of the five cypress trees on Telegraph Hill that the parrots call home. Such is the flock's fame that wire services and national newspapers are vying over which will be first to get the results. Bittner is hoping that the new DVD release will keep the wild birds a priority. "We want to celebrate wildness," he says, "not destroy it."

· The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is released on December 9.

distributed memory, but not a "hard disk"

2005-12-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

Tracking the memory trace

Memory formation follows a dynamic pattern, allowing for retrieval from different areas of the brain, depending on when an organism needs to remember, said a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine.

That is what Dr. Ron L. Davis, professor of molecular and cellular biology at BCM, theorizes, based on his most recent report on the topic that finds a memory trace in Drosophila or fruit flies is formed in a pair of neurons called the dorsal pair medial neurons, but only 30 minutes after the fact and only through the mediation of a gene called, ironically, amnesiac. (A memory trace is a chemical change in tissue that represents the formation of a memory.) The study appears in the current issue of the journal Cell.

Davis and his colleagues were one of the first to actually record a memory trace being formed. That one was first stored in the insect's antennal lobe (where odors are processed). The flies are trained to associate an odor with an electric shock. The change in these neurons was immediate, but lasted only five to seven minutes.

In the more recent report involving the DPM neurons, the change can be seen 30 minutes after the formation of the memory, but it lasts about two hours.

"The other intriguing thing we don't understand is that this occurs only in one branch of the DPM neuron," said Davis. "Our impression now is that maybe what guides the behavior after training in the first few minutes is the antennal lobe. That is the important part that guides behavior for the small window of time after training. The DPM neurons have that role from 30 minutes to two hours."

The finding belies the commonly held precept that a memory is formed in the same way that data are stored in a computer – always in the same place.

"It's not as if we are forming memories that are then being written to a "hard disk" area of the brain, and it's there and recalled from the same location at any time after learning," said Davis. "We now think that different areas of the brain have dominion over small intervals of time after training. One area might have dominion and then another." Others who participated in the research include Drs. Dinghui Yu and Anjana Srivatsan, both of BCM, and Scott Waddell and graduate student Alex Keene, of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.

EurekAlert! Public release date: 2-Dec-2005

Contact: Ross Tomlin
htomlin@bcm.tmc.edu
713-798-4712
Baylor College of Medicine

Funding for this study came from the National Institutes of Health, the Mathers Charitable Trust, the R.P. Doherty-Welch Chair in Science and the Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr., Foundation.

This image is easy to remember, no matter
how memory might accomplish that.

walking mermaid

2005-12-02T08:41:00.000-08:00

by SAM2, via Wooster.

hunger-crazed squirrels said to kill, gut & eat stray dog

2005-12-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

Russian squirrel pack 'kills dog'

Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.

Passers-by were reportedly too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.

They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people.

A "big" stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.

"They literally gutted the dog," local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

"When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

This proud and noble beast is not known to have participated in the attack.

Mikhail Tiyunov, a scientist in the region, said it was the first he had ever heard of such an attack.

While squirrels without sources of protein might attack birds' nests, he said, the idea of them chewing at a dog to death was "absurd".

"If it really happened, things must be pretty bad in our forests," he added.

Komosmolskaya Pravda notes that in a previous incident this autumn chipmunks terrorised cats in a part of the territory.

A Lazo man who called himself only Mikhalich said there had been "no pine cones at all" in the local forests this year.

"The little beasts are agitated because they have nothing to eat," he said.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm

Published: 2005/12/01 18:14:15 GMT

© BBC MMV

line blurs between early dinosaurs & birds

2005-12-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

Oldest bird had dinosaur feet
19:00 01 December 2005
NewScientist.com news service
by Jeff Hecht

The oldest known bird was closer to a dinosaur than previously thought – a discovery that confuses the evolutionary tree as we currently understand it.

An exceptionally well preserved new fossil reveals a foot and skull that more closely resemble those of a group of two-legged predatory dinosaurs called the known as dromeosaurs, than modern birds.

With jagged teeth and a dinosaur-like skeleton, the archaeopteryx is unlike any modern species of bird. But flight feathers on its long front limbs have led palaeontologists to identify the creature as the oldest known species of bird.

Nine previously known specimens of archaeopteryx have led palaeontologists to conclude that birds probably evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs, and are closely related to the dromeosaurs, a group that includes the velociraptor. Yet precisely how archaeopteryx is related to the raptors has remained unclear – key pieces of these previous specimens are missing.

But the newly revealed fossil appears to fill in many of the gaps. The specimen comes from the private collection of a worker at the Solnhofen limestone quarries in Germany, where the first archaeopteryx fossil was discovered. It has remained unknown to science until its owner's death, when the new owner made it available to scientists at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in the US.

With jagged teeth and raptor-like features, the feathered archaeopteryx is unlike any modern species of bird (Image: G Mayr/Senckenberg)

Computer model

A complete foot reveals that archaeopteryx had an extensible claw on its second toe, which is a hallmark of raptors, but is absent in all known birds. Its first toe, or "hallux", is also at the side of the foot and not reversed as it is in perching birds, which use it to grasp branches.

The skull is also well preserved and shows that the animal had a skull bone known as the "palatine", which is shaped in the same way as in many two-legged dinosaurs.

The new traits were added to a computer model, enabling palaeontologists to analyse the relationship between extinct species. "It's now very difficult to distinguish between [early] birds and [early] dromeosaurs," says Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, who studied the specimen.
Question of class

Mayr told New Scientist that there are no unique traits shared by archaeopteryx and other early bird-like fossils that are not present in dinosaurs. This would either mean that archaeopteryx cannot be classed within the same evolutionary group as birds or that this group needs to be redefined.

Ultraviolet light enhances details of a complete foot, showing that archaeopteryx had an extensible claw on its second toe – a hallmark of raptors – which is absent in all known birds (Image: G Mayr/Senckenberg)

But Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US, says those results are shaky because Mayr's group considered only three bird-like creatures; archaeopteryx, confuciusornis and a primitive bird called Rahonavis, that lived much later.

In October 2005, Makovicky carried out a separate study that links Rahonavis directly to the dromeosaurs and suggests this species may have evolved flight separately from archaeopteryx and other birds. Makovicky told New Scientist he found no change in the shape of his evolutionary tree when he added the new traits found for archaeopteryx.

Journal reference: Science (Vol 310, p 1483)

Related Articles

Raptor inflicted death by a thousand bites
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18825224.600
22 October 2005

Can 'feather foot' knock oldest bird off its perch?
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524874.700
19 February 2005

Flying dinosaur needed a bird's brain
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6244
04 August 2004

Weblinks

Science
http://www.sciencemag.org/

Field Museum of Natural History
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/

Senckenberg Research Institute
http://www.senckenberg.de/

scary, ancient human-sized water scorpion only ate fleas

2005-12-01T09:41:00.000-08:00

Times of London:
The footprints of one of the most fearsome creatures ever found in the British Isles — a water scorpion the length of a person — have been discovered in Scotland.

Tracks in rock on the east coast of Scotland were created 330 million years ago by the six-legged Hibbertopterus, which was 1.6m (5ft 3in) long and 1m (3ft 3in) wide. The water scorpion, which is distantly related to its small modern cousins, had two claw-like arms, an armoured exoskeleton and a powerful tail tipped with a large, flat spike — although it was not poisonous.

“I think it would have been a pretty fearsome sight,” said Martin Whyte, of the University of Sheffield, a geologist who found the tracks. Despite its formidable appearance, the creature would have presented little threat to people. It fed on smaller prey such as water fleas and as an aquatic animal would have been easy to outrun on land. The discovery, published today in the journal Nature, is the first of its kind in the world.

[photo: Associated Press]

lament for the Maltese falcon

2005-12-01T09:28:00.000-08:00

Wildlife conservation in Europe: Lament for the Maltese Falcon

Every year, around two million wild birds are massacred on Malta as they migrate from Europe to their winter quarters in Africa. Some species, such as the peregrine falcon, have now disappeared from the island altogether. The European Union has the hunters in its sights, but as Anne Penketh reports from Valletta, they are proving an elusive - and defiant - quarry

At the entrance to the Buskett bird sanctuary in Malta, a notice warns visitors that "no hunting or trapping is allowed within the nature reserve" and gives them a telephone number to report violations. Less than 200 yards away lies a red spent cartridge, proof that Maltese hunters are prepared to risk being reported to the police by shooting their prey in one of the island's few protected zones.

Hunting birds has been part of Maltese life for hundreds, if not thousands of years. "Go to the port, how many seagulls do you see? None - that's because they shot them all," says a shopkeeper in the capital, Valletta.

He is not joking. Every year, according to the bird protection society BirdLife Malta, up to two million birds are massacred on Malta, which lies in the very centre of the migratory route between Europe and Africa. Other estimates put the death toll much higher. There are 12,500 registered hunters and 4,300 trappers on an island with a population of 400,000 crammed onto its rocky outcrops. They trap finches for breeding and sale, and shoot anything that flies, from birds of prey to quail and skylarks. Some, like thrushes and turtle doves, end up on the dinner table, others are kept caged on rooftops, but most are stuffed as trophies and displayed in cabinets by the hunters for bragging rights. In Malta, they shoot swallows for target practice.

But now the European Union has the hunters in its sights. Since Malta joined the EU last year, it is supposed to have implemented the EU's Birds Directive, which protects birds and their habitats throughout Europe, and regulates bird hunting. It notably bans trapping, and forbids the hunting of birds on their way to breed and during the breeding season.

But the country's hunting lobby is powerful. In an attempt to keep the hunters' vote in the run-up to Malta's referendum on EU membership, the government promised it would preserve turtle dove and quail hunting in spring - the height of the shooting season, when hundreds of thousands of birds return to Italy and the Balkans from Africa.

Malta has one of the shortest close seasons in Europe, from 22 May to 31 August, but even that is rarely observed. It was only in 1980 that the government enacted laws to control hunting, and set up the protected zones. But for many years they were ignored by the hunters, and not enforced by police.

The president of BirdLife Malta, Joseph Mangion, says the situation in the reserves has improved over the past five years, but elsewhere illegal hunting is rife. The shooters, who have resorted to vandalism and violence in the past to protest against hunting restrictions, "are not so blatant about it, they no longer put up hunting hides in the park". But he says that "smash-and-grab raids" are still taking place. "This past week, we had regular reports of illegal hunters in Buskett. There's been a good migration of woodcock, that's why they're trying their luck."

On the windswept, barren scrubland of the Dingli cliffs, just south of the park, the landscape is dotted with stone-built hides that stand among the cacti. Finch-trapping is another popular activity - nets are dropped on the birds, sometimes catching entire flocks. Maltese trappers who were setting out their cages last Saturday afternoon said they were waiting for greenfinches. One, dressed in army fatigues, already had a boot-load caged in his car, covered with a sheet and twittering faintly.

The sale of birds is now only permitted if they have been bred or legally imported. Illegal tradesmen have moved their market stalls from Valletta to Mdina, Malta's ancient capital further inland, in hopes of escaping the attention of the police. But they carry out successful raids from time to time. Such is the Maltese obsession with birds that some of the breeders experiment with cross-breeds, in the hope of producing the perfect birdsong.

They cross linnets, greenfinches, canaries and goldfinches, resulting in much-prized, but sterile, birds known as baghal (mule). To strengthen their song, they have to be kept with the species that the breeder or trapper wants them to imitate - otherwise, they mimic the wrong songs and become worthless.

Mr Mangion is furious about the government's foot-dragging in implementing the EU directive, and says that it cannot impose a derogation until that is done. "Our main issues are: firstly, get the directive transposed into law and implemented, which means no spring hunting and trapping. Hunting in spring is just a 'no go' for us. The deaths are too high. Hunters know they have to change their ways.

"Second, we need law enforcement and increased resources. Unless we have a good police presence, hunters won't change their behaviour."
The protected zones are currently monitored by an arm of the police, the Administration Law Enforcement section, which monitors the environment and has raised awareness of illegal hunting. But according to locals, some police are also hunters.

The hunters know they are under pressure: on Saturday they were very much on the defensive. One, wearing a woolly jumper, emerged from a hide to wave his arms aggressively and say repeatedly, "I see nothing", while another volunteered the information that he was trapping the birds for breeding before any questions had been asked.

At first glance the hunting debate seems to reflect a generational conflict in Malta, with young and urban professionals joining the Alternattiva Demokratika green party and BirdLife Malta, which now has 3,000 members under the presidency of Mr Mangion, who is a fire and security surveyor for an insurance company.

But the Maltese say that is a false impression. In fact, many young people are joining the huntsmen, buying a licence at the legal age of 18. According to Maltese experts, the damage done to the hunting culture in the past was by people who did not come from hunting families, and would fire at anything that moved. Those were the days when marsh harriers would go straight into a casserole, and when the stuffed heads of protected species would be proudly displayed by drivers on their rear-view mirrors.

Because of EU membership, the two sides in the bird war have been forced to meet. But it was not always so: in the past relations were violent, with hunters carrying out vicious protests. They have poured oil into wetlands, and punched an environment minister who then had to take on police protection.

The hunters are represented by an association now called the Federation for Hunting and Conservation. They maintain that Maltese shooters and trappers form an important part of the economic, social, cultural and political life of Malta and Gozo, "and any sportsman thus expects to exercise his legal right to practise hunting and trapping in the traditional manner, so long as he is fully aware that his harvesting does not constitute any threat to any particular species".

The association's president, Lino Farrugia, rejects what he calls the "no use" approach favoured by the "protectionists", and says the hunters stand for a "wise use" of natural resources.

The association is also concerned about precautionary measures introduced by the government to protect against bird flu, pointing out that there is no direct evidence that it is caused by bird migration. The hunters are notably fighting a temporary government ban on live decoys of golden plovers in the wetlands, aimed at preventing the spread of bird flu. (One of the jokes doing the rounds in Valletta contends that thanks to bird flu, for the first time nobody minds the hunters shooting.)

Malta's bird-hunting traditions have meant that entire species, such as kestrel, jackdaw, barn owl and peregrine falcon, have been wiped out. Only a dozen resident species remain, including the Spanish sparrow, but none are birds of prey. Even rabbits have been hunted almost to extinction: the rabbit stew on the menu in local restaurants is certain to have been bred.

Maltese falcon

Natalino Fenech described the history of Maltese hunting in a 1992 book, Fatal Flight: The Maltese Obsession with Killing Birds, which chronicled the annual death toll of three million finches, more than half a million thrushes, 500,000 swallows, 80,000 golden orioles, 18,000 shearwaters and 50,000 birds of prey.

Malta has destroyed its own heritage: when the island was ceded by Charles V to the Knights of St John in 1530, it was on condition that an annual rent of two Maltese falcons was paid - one to the Spanish emperor and the other to the viceroy of Sicily. Maltese falcons were reputed to be the finest of the peregrines. By the 1970s, the species had been all but destroyed by hunting. The last pair was shot off Ta' Cenc cliffs in 1980.

It may have been no accident that the bird in Dashiell Hammett's classic detective novel, The Maltese Falcon, is not a real falcon, but a statue. But in the ultimate irony, Malta's national bird, the blue rock thrush, still features on its one-lira coin.

250-million-years-ago gas-powered mass extinction predicts next one?

2005-12-01T09:13:00.000-08:00

No safe ground for life to stand on during world's largest mass extinction

The world's largest mass extinction was probably caused by poisonous volcanic gas, according to research published today.

The research, published in the journal Geology, reveals vital clues about the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period, 250 million years ago, when mammal-like reptiles known as synapsids roamed the earth.

Many scientists had previously thought that an asteroid hitting the earth or a deep-sea methane release had caused the extinction, which obliterated more than two-thirds of reptile and amphibian families.

However, analysis of a unique set of molecules found in rocks taken from the Dolomites in Italy has enabled scientists to build up a picture of what actually happened. The molecules are the remains of polysaccharides, large sugar-based structures common in plants and soil, and they tell the story of the extinction.

The molecules date from the same time as a major volcanic eruption that caused the greatest ever outpouring of basalt lava over vast swathes of land in present day Siberia.

The researchers believe that the volcanic gases from the eruption, which would have depleted earth's protective ozone layer and acidified the land and sea, killed rooted vegetation. This meant that soil was no longer retained and it washed into the surrounding oceans.

The chemistry of the rocks reveals that although the sugar molecules were found in marine sediments, they derived from land, supporting the theory that massive soil erosion caused them to end up in the sea.

Soil materials in the oceans would have blocked out light and soaked up oxygen. Analysis of rock chemistry suggests that after the soil crisis on land, the marine ecosystem succumbed to the stresses of environmental change and oceanic life faltered, completing a global catastrophe.

Dr Mark Sephton, from Imperial College London's Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering and lead author of the research, said: "The cause of the end Permian extinction has been highly controversial. We show that the terrestrial ecosystem was the first to suffer. The continent-wide nature of the event implies that it was caused by something in the atmosphere. The unique chemical data indicates that something fast and catastrophic happened on land."

Prof Henk Visscher of Utrecht University, also part of the research team, commented: "Similar to the 'Dead Zone' nowadays spreading in the Gulf of Mexico, the soil crisis could have caused a worldwide expanse of uninhabitable low-oxygen conditions in shallow marine waters. So what began on land ended in the sea. It seems there was no place to hide at this time of great dying."

Dr Sephton believes that lessons can be learned in the present day from the damage caused by the end Permian extinction: "Land degradation is a worsening global problem thanks to human activity and soil erosion has caused the loss of a third of arable land over the last forty years. 35% of the Earth's land is now soil-free. Identifying the nature of the end Permian soil crisis may help us understand what is in store for us in the years ahead," he said.

The research was carried out by an international team of scientists from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States.

Contact: Laura Gallagher
l.gallagher@imperial.ac.uk
44-020-7594-6702
Imperial College London

EurekAlert! Public release date: 1-Dec-2005

mouse brain online

2005-11-30T17:16:00.000-08:00

Interactive 3-D atlas of mouse brain now available on web

UPTON, NY -- Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have just launched a web-based 3-D digital atlas browser and database of the brain of a popular laboratory mouse (see http://www.bnl.gov/CTN/mouse/).

"Neuroscientists around the world can now download these extremely accurate anatomical templates and use them to map other data -- such as which parts of the brain are metabolically active and where particular genes are expressed -- and for making quantitative anatomical comparisons with other, genetically engineered mouse strains," said project leader Helene Benveniste, who is a researcher in Brookhaven's medical department and a professor of anesthesiology at Stony Brook University.

The database was created using high-resolution magnetic resonance (MR) microscopy at the University of Florida in collaboration with researchers from Brookhaven Lab's Center for Translational Neuroimaging. The work was done in parallel with an international collaboration, the Mouse Phenome Database (MPD) project, which was created to establish a collection of baseline phenotypic data from commonly used inbred mice.

The new brain atlas database consists of 3-D anatomical data from 10 adult male mice of the strain C57BL/6J, and contains data on 20 segmented structures, including variability of brain structures across the strain, and downloadable visualization tools.

The research that makes up this database was published as a cover article in the October 2005 issue of the journal Neuroscience.

###

This research was initially funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and then by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The development of the web-browser and database was supported by both NIBIB and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research within the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. A variety of brain-imaging techniques including magnetic resonance imaging are a direct outgrowth of DOE's support of basic physics research.

One of the ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization. Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom

EurekAlert! Public release date: 30-Nov-2005

Contact: Karen McNulty Walsh
kmcnulty@bnl.gov
631-344-8350
DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory

researchers prove bees can fly

2005-11-28T12:41:00.000-08:00

Secrets of bee flight revealed
by Helen Phillips 28 November 2005, NewScientist.com news service

Combining robotic modelling with slow-motion videos of airborne honeybees may have helped researchers explain the curious aerodynamics of bee flight.

Aeronautical engineers had previously “proven” that bees cannot fly. So Michael Dickinson, an insect flight expert and colleagues at Caltech in Pasadena, California, US, decided to investigate the forces actually at work during honeybee flight.

In 1996, Charlie Ellington at Cambridge University, UK, showed how vortices rolling along the leading edge of many insects’ wings were a vital source of lift.

Most flying insects beat their wings in large strokes – typically flapping in arcs of 145° to 165° at a frequency determined by body size – to generate aerodynamic forces sufficient for flight. But this cannot explain how a heavy insect with a short wing beat, such as a bee, generates enough lift to fly.

Exotic forces

Dickinson and his colleagues filmed hovering bees at 6000 frames per second, and plotted the unusual pattern of wing beats. The wing sweeps back in a 90˚ arc, then flips over as it returns – an incredible 230 times a second. The team made a robot to scale to measure the forces involved. See a video of a bee in a flap, here (5MB, .avi format).

It is the more exotic forces created as the wing changes direction that dominate, says Dickinson. Additional vortices are produced by the rotation of the wing. “It’s like a propeller, where the blade is rotating too,” he says. Also, the wing flaps back into its own wake, which leads to higher forces than flapping in still air. Lastly, there is another peculiar force known as “added-mass force” which peaks at the ends of each stroke and is related to acceleration as the wings’ direction changes.

The work may help engineers design rotating propellers or more stable and manoeuvrable aircraft. But “it proves bees can fly, thank God”, adds Dickinson.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073_pnas.0506590102)
Related Articles

* Power lines may provide a haven for bees
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7910
* 26 August 2005
* Creepy crawlies to explore other worlds
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18725096.700
* 23 July 2005
* Flight of the Martian bee
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17022932.700
* 03 June 2001

Weblinks

* Michael Dickinson’s lab, Caltech
* http://www.dickinson.caltech.edu/
* Charlie Ellington, Cambridge University
* http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/elling.htm
* Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
* http://www.pnas.org/

rich falconers v. houbara ecologists

2005-11-27T21:31:00.000-08:00

houbara chick

Rage soars over Arab falcon hunting
By Isambard Wilkinson in Islamabad, Telegraph
(Filed: 28/11/2005)

Ecologists in Pakistan are outraged at the government's decision to issue permits allowing falcons to be trapped and trained to hunt the most prized Arab delicacy, the houbara bustard.

The decision has enraged conservation groups that have lobbied for the government to resist Arab demands to buy falcons for the bustard hunt in Pakistan's southern deserts.

However, the Arab interest in the sport, although illegal for Pakistanis, is worth millions of pounds each year to the exchequer.

The government has issued a record number of 15 falcon-trapping permits - each costing £2,000 - which allow holders to trap two species of falcons, such as the peregrine or the rarer saker falcon.

It comes despite the government saying no permits would be granted this year.

The decision has provoked a legal challenge by Brig Mukhtar Ahmed, the president of the Houbara Foundation, a conservation group dedicated to the protection of falcons and the houbara bustard. He said that the falcon population faced being "crushed".

In 1912, the British banned the hunting of houbara on the subcontinent. But since the 1960s, when the bustard was hunted to near extinction in the Middle East, Arab sheikhs have carved up Sind and Baluchistan into unofficial hunting fiefdoms. Successive Pakistani governments have bowed to the sheikhs' wishes, allowing them to indulge their belief that bustard meat has aphrodisiac qualities.

As a result, falcon trapping has become a big business with peregrine falcons, the most popular, selling from £30,000 to £500,000.

Islamabad justifies the hunts by saying the sheikhs contribute to development of the local infrastructure.

But they are not always popular with locals. In 2003 tribesmen in the Punjab fired on a team belonging to Crown Prince Sheikh Sultan bin Hamadan al Nuhayyan, the grandson of the emir of the United Arab Emirates.

Carcará

2005-11-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

Carcará
Originally uploaded by Alexandre Duarte.

Prairie Falcon- Morning Hunt

2005-11-27T16:59:00.000-08:00

Prairie Falcon- Morning Hunt
Originally uploaded by AviWolf.

prey turns on hunter in bloody last-gasp attack

2005-11-26T11:29:00.000-08:00

Bear shot by hunter bites back, dies

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) -- A black bear bit and clawed a hunter who had just shot it four times in what game authorities said appeared to be a first for the state.

Samuel H. Beauchamp, 47, said he was approaching the downed 320-pound bear in Rothrock State Forest in central Pennsylvania on Monday, the first day of bear-hunting season, when it came after him.

Beauchamp, of nearby Newville, had just shot the bear with a .444-caliber rifle and was within 15 feet of it. He turned to run, but the bear put a claw around his hip and bit him twice, once in each thigh, before dying.

"The bear wasn't attacking 100 percent. I mean really, it was dead on its feet when it came up. If it would have been 100 percent I wouldn't have been standing there," Beauchamp said Friday.

Other hunters heard a growl and came to Beauchamp's aid.

"It was shock at first. It's like he came alive, like 'boom.' I guess he growled, like the other people heard. That motivated me to turn around and start running away," he said.

Game commission bear biologist Mark Ternent said the attack was the first case known to state officials in which a bear had attacked a hunter who had just shot it and was attempting to recover it.

Beauchamp was released from the hospital after about two hours of treatment. One bite went down to the bone.

"I didn't feel any pain after it happened," he said Friday. "I'm a little sore now."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/11/25/bear.attack.ap/index.html

Swimming with dolphins can alleviate depression

2005-11-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

24-Nov-2005

Contact: Emma Dickinson
edickinson@bmj.com
44-20-7383-6529
BMJ-British Medical Journal

Swimming with dolphins can alleviate depression
Randomised controlled study of animal facilitated therapy with dolphins in the treatment of depression BMJ Volume 331, pp 1231-4

Swimming with dolphins is an effective treatment for mild to moderate depression, say researchers in this week's BMJ.

Their findings support the theory of biophilia, which shows how human health and wellbeing are dependent on our relationships with the natural environment.

The study was carried out in Honduras and involved 30 patients diagnosed with mild or moderate depression. Half were assigned to the experimental group and half to the control group.

Over a two-week period, participants in the experimental group swam and snorkelled in the water with dolphins for one hour a day. Participants in the control group were assigned to the same water activities, but in the absence of dolphins, to control for the influence of water and the natural setting.

All participants discontinued antidepressant drugs or psychotherapy at least four weeks before entering the study, and were not allowed to take drugs during the study. Depression scores were measured before the study and at the end of treatment.

Although some participants dropped out of the study, the average severity of the depressive symptoms was more reduced in the experimental group than in the control group.

Animal facilitated therapy with dolphins is more effective than water therapy in treating people with mild to moderate depression, say the authors. Despite some study limitations, the effects exerted by the animals were significantly greater than those of just the natural setting.

The echolocation system, the aesthetic value, and the emotions raised by the interaction with dolphins may explain the mammals' healing properties, they suggest.

Three months after the study, participants in both groups also reported lasting improvement and did not require treatment. This suggests that in patients with mild or moderate depression, using drugs or conventional psychotherapy may not be necessary when biophilic treatment with animals is used, they conclude.

eagloid

2005-11-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

"fresh stuff from Dr. Blade"

Riverwalk(2): American Kestrel

2005-11-24T10:13:00.000-08:00

Riverwalk(2): American Kestrel
Originally uploaded by Al Andersen.

Al Andersen:

I took a walk down on the San Pedro river for my birthday, with camera gear in tow.

This guy was sitting on top of a mesquite tree, scoping out the area. He let me get quite close. This is an extreme crop, about 1/4 of the total frame.

Nikon D100 using a Nikon AF VR Nikkor 80-400mm 1:4.5-5.6D lens at 400mm, f6.3, 1/2500s, ISO 400, pattern metering, normal program, auto exposure.