Saber Tooth Cat once in Minnesota

Scientists now have proof that saber tooth cats Smilodon fatalis once roamed Minnesota because of a skull found in John Ackerman's Karst Perserve in southern Minnesota. I've taken kids caving in one of the Karst Preserve caves, Spring Valley Caverns I. This skull was found in a different cave called Tyson Spring Cave. The skull was found in June 2008 and more bones were discovered in 2009. Previous to this find, it was thought that saber tooth cats only came as far north as Arkansas. An antler of a Stag Moose Cervalces scotti was also found in the cave, a relic of the last ice age. This too was a first for Minnesota. I love exploring caves and hope to get back into caves again some time soon.

You can read the whole story online for more details.

I'm leaving the state soon on a trip so hopefully I will have some new bird photos and stories to post over the next week. Paul and I will be working on the first pilot episode of the podcast when I return.

~Kirk

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Peregrine Falcon is a Traffic Stopper

Thanks to Liz for the tip on this one! A Peregrine Falcon decided to eat a pigeon the other day and police officer Bob Winsor decided to stop traffic to let him continue eating in the middle of the street. This, my friends, is progress. It also happens to be the street I live on which is exciting as well. This was bird 27a Elspeth. I'll have to keep my eyes open around the neighborhood.



~Kirk

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Very Gradual Change

I just love these new posters from Mike Rosulek. Here's to a very old school naturalist who inspires continued scientific research to this day. Charles Darwin would have turned 200 years old this year. I recently read a great biography of Darwin by nature writer David Quammen called, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. If you've ever been curious about the man I recommend it.

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Getting Ready to Podcast

Paul and met this Friday to hash out some of the details of the show over some amazing calzones. We ironed out some technical details and did some test recordings. There will be a short test recording posted later this week and then some time around mid-March we're going to record Episode 0. This will be a pilot episode of sorts where we test putting together a whole show and posting it. After that, our plan is to start putting out one Twin Cities Naturalist podcast per month. Stay tuned.

~Kirk

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Look at ME!

The first warblers are back and local song birds are really ramping up their spring courtship songs. In honor of spring mating season and all of the bird song now in the air, I present some vintage David Attenborough.

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Northen Finches

I've been delighted by all of the Common Redpolls showing up at the feeders at the nature center this winter. First there were three, then seven, then twenty-one, then, I stopped counting. We've also had a Sharp-shinned Hawk hanging out at the building and I think he's had his share of redpoll dinner. I haven't seen it catch any but I was treated to a chase right outside my office window. It was quite the display of acrobatics. I first realized it was hanging out when I strolled past the windows overlooking the feeders and the only bird was the hawk sitting on the line the feeders hang from. I could look right into the deep red eyes which was splendid.

Being from the boreal forest, the redpolls are less feeder dependent than the local finches. I sometime see the whole flock hanging out foraging for wild seed on the opposite side of the building from the feeders. While they aren't real into the feeders, they do love the ground under the feeders. Recently, some of them have figured out that the seeds on the ground are just the dregs and the good stuff is hanging in magic tube above them.

What I've really been waiting for are the pine siskins. "Where are the siskins?" I keep asking. I reminded our intern Jen to keep her eye on the redpoll flock because the siskens would insinuate themselves into the flock and if we weren't watching closely they would go unnoticed. She ran up to me yesterday when I was in the basement with an excited look on her face. "Siskins!" she yelled.

At least three Pine Siskins had joined their northern brethren at the feeders. Luckily, I had brought my good camera into work. I was also delighted because the sun peaked out and lit them up beautifully.

I think even the Redpolls were surprised to see the Siskins. This one here looks like it is looking up and saying, "Woah, is that a Pine Siskin? I haven't seen one of those since I left Canada!" Check out the beautiful crown on that redpoll too. It turns blood red in the sun. It is a shame that these birds show up in the most cloudy months of the year.












The birds were very active at the feeders and there was a lot of jostling around trying to get the best feeding spot. I was hoping to capture some flight shots and some feeder aggression. I scored on both accounts. The first action shot is of a male Common Redpoll coming in for a landing with wings spread. Note the Pine Siskin in the background.


Here's a Common Goldfinch in an aggressive posture while another goldfinch flies away. I can't say for certain if the one flying away was scared off by the agressive one or whether it was leaving another perch. I like this photo because you can really start to see the extent of yellow feathers returning to the goldfinches. Spring is coming soon.

~Kirk

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Partial Leucistic American Goldfinch

While strolling past the windows that overlook the feeders at work, I noticed something a little odd the other day. At first I thought one of the American Goldfinches on the thistle feeder was getting some of the first spring feathers as I thought I saw some yellow on the head. I zoomed in with a camera and when I looked at the photo on the tiny screen I thought at first that the camera white balance was off on this gray dreary day. What I discovered was that the feathers were not yellow but white. This is an example of a partially leucistic American Goldfinch. Leucism is sometimes confused with albinism so here's a quick primer.

Albinism is the total lack of pigment in the body. A bird will have all white feathers, pink legs and pink eyes. A leucistic bird has regular colored eyes and legs and the feathers are either paler or they have white patches. These birds with white patches are called pied or piebald. (Though it has nothing to do with leucism, this is where the term Bald Eagle comes from. It is a shorter version of Piebald Eagle in reference to the white tail and head.) The cells of a leucistic bird are damaged and cannot make the coloration necessary for the coloration of some of their feathers. Only the affected cells are white and leucism only affects feathers which is why the legs and eyes remain the correct color. In contrast, albino birds lack the pigment melanin in all of their cells so their eyes and legs are also not the normal color. Interestingly, some animals have skin pigments other than melanin so a totally leucistic individual of a species could be whiter than a true albino of the same species which might appear yellow. This is sometimes seen in lions. Ecobirder locally in the Twin Cities had some great shots of a partially leucistic Canada Goose and Female Mallard back in December.

Here's the bird I spotted at our feeders. You can see the white patch on his head.


Are these new spring feathers or old fall feathers? According to the page turner, "The Molt of the American Goldfinch" by A. L. A. Middleton, "The prenuptial (prealternate) molt was restricted to the replacement of the body feathers only, which resulted in the acquisition of the dimorphic breeding (alternate) plumage. The first signs of this molt occurred in late January when isolated pin feathers reappeared on the throat and head. This resulted in a gradual reappearance of yellow on the throat and the reappearance of the black cap in males. The number of pin feathers on the face and head increased in late February ..." (emphasis added)

This suggests that the spring molt begins on the throat and head. If you look carefully you can see a few tiny yellow feathers coming in on this bird but the white crown looks like a big patch and not random new feathers coming in. I'm going to guess these are feathers from the fall.

When I went back to the feeders a few days later I was again able to spot this same bird and another partially leucistic individual as well.

The moral of the story? Get out there and take a more careful look at your feeders. There are subtle differences in individuals that makes bird watching more interesting.

~Kirk

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Professional Naturalist

There's a lot of great things about being a professional naturalist. I get to do for a job what a lot of people do for a hobby, only with more paperwork.

The term "naturalist" in the past often referred to a person who studies natural history. These were the "Gentlemen Naturalists" who were often wealthy individuals who studied nature as a way to pass the time. This is not to say they didn't make important discoveries , take Darwin for example, but there were many a wealthy gentlemen who went about collecting natural curiosities for their wonder rooms with little attention paid to that thing we call Science.

Professional Naturalists these days usually make their way by teaching about natural history. Which is another way of pointing out an additional difference between naturalists of the past and the modern naturalist. We're not wealthy. The joke in the field is , "What's the difference between a professional naturalist and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four."

The funny thing is that I first heard this joke as "What's the difference between and airline pilot and a large pizza?" The starting salary of an airline pilot is DOUBLE the starting salary of a naturalist and the salary of a 10 year Captain pilot is 6 times that of a naturalist. Snow me a naturalist who makes a six figure salary.

The benefits are great though, fresh air and job satisfaction. There are of course odd things. The photo below is the actual reason I started this post. How may work places have a trash can with a sign on it like this? It can be strange being a professional naturalist.


~Kirk

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Silent Love

This is the first official post for the Twin Cities Naturalist Blog. The blog is a companion to the forthcoming Twin Cities Naturalist Podcast.

Silence. This is the sound of love in the woods in February. It is a dark evening in a frozen landscape with the moon hidden behind a winter blanket of clouds. My snowshoes crunch through the bare woods of maple and oak. The sound doesn't seem to travel far. The porous snow absorbs and deadens sound. When I stop, it is silent. There is no wind tonight, there are no animal calls, there is nothing and it is this absence of sound that tells me something is happening.

Back in the first week of December, Ron Lawrenz, our Director at the Lee and Rose Warner Nature Center excitedly shouted "owl!" from his office. His corner office view of the hardwood forest gives him a constant reminder of the reason we do what we do. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted movement in the woods. He looked up just in time to see a barred owl alight on a small tree about 125 feet away.


He struggled to point it out to us as we huddled at the windows but it was difficult to discern, owls are masters of camouflage. Finally, it moved and we watched it fly closer. It landed on the edge of the woodland clearing the building sits in. The tree it chose was the same tree we had seen a barred owl in last February. Could this be the same owl?

Over the following months, the owl moved about the forest searching for a nesting site and calling out for its mate. We could hear the owls in the woods, their voices threading through the bare branches like auditory shadows. They sang as we walked to our cars in the evening surrounded by the early darkness of winter. The barred owl calls out "Who hoo hoo hoo, Who hoo hoo HOOoo." The call is commonly described as the questions, "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?" Sometimes, our female captive barred owl calls back but she's injured and not allowed to fly around the woods with the other owls, nor is she free to find a mate. That doesn’t stop the occasional confused male from perching near her enclosure and hooting to impress her.

As I stand in the woods this February evening though, there are no hoots. There's only the sound of snow crunching lightly under my shifting feet and the quiet rhythm of my labored breathing. The silence speaks. What I am tempted to say is that Barred Owls are clever, that they fall silent in February with purpose and careful thought but this is ascribing too much human thinking to an evolutionary adaptation. They are silent in February because there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. They have already mated and they do not hoot because they are incubating eggs. Now, around Valentines Day, is the time for silence. They do not want to give away the location of their precious young-to-be.


It seems funny that we have a day devoted to love in February and the origins of tying romantic love to the pre-existing day celebrating Saint Valentine are far from clear. What I do know is that February is a time of deep cold. Perhaps that's why we feel the need for a day devoted to something that warms us. It reminds me of the ancient rituals of bonfire lighting on the solstice. Create that which is missing. Kids give out cards with hearts and cherubs, or these days, Sponge Bob Squarepants and Hannah Montana but what do these things have to do with love and the season and bringing warmth? We need valentine's cards with owls on them. Owls pair bond for life. They choose one mate and stick with it. It is in this cold dark month of February that they mate and work their hardest to bring forth new life. That seems like a wonderful symbol of love to me. But why February?

Owls nest and mate long before other animals who wait for spring. In doing this, they get a jump start on their food source. The female owl will incubate the eggs for a month and by the time the young owls are ready to leave the nest six weeks after hatching, the rest of the animal world has mated in the more traditional spring and there is an abundance of small critters to eat. Young owls are well fed on the bounty of spring.


I stand in the cold silence knowing that there are small white eggs silently being kept warm in a nest somewhere nearby. Snow begins to fall and the collected sound of all those millions of flakes touching down on the ground is a barely auditory whisper. I whisper, "good luck" to the owls and head home through the snow to rejoin my love and celebrate warmth on a cold winter's night.

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Over the last week we've been having a fox squirrel at our feeders at the nature center. We don't see them very often as they are more solitary than grey squirrels. They are slightly larger and you can see the belly is reddish like a fox instead of white like a grey squirrel. Interestingly, the habits of gray squirrels and red squirrels are reversed here in Minnesota and more southern cities. Several people I have spoken with who used to live in states south of Minnesota say that it is fox squirrels who frequent the feeders and gray squirrels are only seen in the woods. I wonder why that might be? The range of the fox squirrel does extend further to the west than the gray squirrel so it is possible these people lived on the very western edge of the gray squirrel range and as such they were fewer in number which allowed the better adapted fox squirrels to increase in number. More fox squirrels would mean that more would be found at feeders. This does not explain why gray squirrels would be less frequest visitors to feeders. I would think feedres woud allow them to survive better outside or at the fringes of their range.

The number of redpolls under the feeders at the nature center has increased over the last week as well. We're now seeing a flock of about 21 birds every day though with the warm spell we're seeing I wonder if they may start heading back north. They seem to prefer feeding off the ground rather than the feeders and as Birdchick pointed out when I talked to her about it she said, "Well ya, they've never seen a bird feeder before." Good point!

On my yearly bird tally I've added four new species, two of them lifers! I saw a Purple Finch at work on the last day of January and then a Northern Cardinal on the feeder at home. I'm slowly making our open wasteland of a yard more bird friendly and the fly-through feeder is a favorite addition for the birds.

Today, Sunday February 9th I had the opportunity to sneak away for a little birding as my inlaws were in town and watching Camden. There was a report of a rare bird just down the street from my house so I had to go. I didn't realize until I got there that the bird was hanging out about 3 houses away from the house of someone I know. That was pretty fun. There were a lot of people there and the neighbors were wondering why on earth there street was full of people with binoculars, spotting scopes and huge camera lenses as long as my arm. The bird in question was a Varied Thrush which is related to the American Robin and usually only found in the Pacific Northwest. A lone male has been hanging out with a flock of robins and eating crabapples. After waiting abot half an hour it finally showed up but only briefly. I managed to get a photo from a long way off. This was through a 480 mm lens and then cropped in. Unfortunately, the focus is on the berries in front of the bird but you can see it clearly and tell what it is. This is from over 200 feet away so it was a bit hard to judge focus and bird flew off just seconds after I snapped this.


While I was waiting for the Varied Thrush to arrive I noticed some movement at the top of a very tall spruce tree and I turned my binoculars on the cones at the top. My hope panned out. There was a beautful male and female white-winged crossbill. People have been seeing them like crazy this year but I had yet to come across any. I'd never seen one before so that was a lifer bird as well. Not bad to get two new life list birds in the span of 30 minutes on a Sunday afternoon in February.


2008 Running Bird Tally
27. Purple Finch
28. Northern Cardinal
29. White-winged Crossbill
30. Varied Thrush

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