Birder Paydirt

I took another family trip to Doland, South Dakota for my wife's grandmother's 80th birthday. The town is fairly birdy but I've had little time to explore. I saw some good things there earlier this summer and brought my binoculars along just in case. It seemed generally quieter, no Western or Eastern Kingbirds, only one faint Western Meadowlark calling in the distance. One morning I went to check out a little pond near where we were staying and while there wasn't anything there I could see some gulls circling not far away. Hmm. The next day I had a spare moment so I hopped in the car and drove down the road. I took a right on the first road I came to and it was rural dirt road. There wasn't even a sign and I almost missed it. The only reason I slowed down was that I saw some power lines and I remembered the gulls being near the power lines. I drove down the road until I saw a little pull-off and the following sign.


This is birder paydirt. We are a sick lot who spend our time hanging out at sewage treatment ponds just because that is where the birds are. The wording of this sign brings up an interesting grammatical and perhaps ethical question. Are they saying keep out of the water or out of the entire facility? Luckily you can get good views of the ponds even without going over the barbed wire fence. Fall migration isn't in full swing yet but I did see some good birds. There was a flock of about 21 Black-crowned Night Herons flying overhead.

When they circled around I managed to snap a few closer shots. This is an interesting one since it is of a juvenile bird and they look quite different than the adults. They have a real American Bittern quality to them.There were also numerous ducks, including a lot of Northern Shoveler. The gulls all turned out to be Ring-billed Gulls. A smaller white bird was hanging out with them at one point but when I got close enough to see it had vanished. I found myself wishing I had brought a spotting scope. Here's an example of why. How many birds can you count in the photo below? I uploaded it full quality so go ahead and click on it and count. I'll wait.


All done? I count eight birds in the photo. All ducks swimming at the base of the rocks. In theory there is a ninth bird. Somewhere in there is supposed to be a Spotted Sandpiper but it has completely disappeared in the rocks. I swear it was there when I took the photo!

Also in the area were Yellow-headed Blackbirds, Barn Swallows, Mourning Doves, American Goldfinches, Killdeer and probably more things I missed. Next time I go back I'll have to stop in to see what else turns up.

Here's where the ponds are if you happen to be birding in the area.

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Climate Change Atlas

Hello All,

I've been swallowed up by the state fair so in the mean time I'm going to share an incredibly cool link with you. This is an online Climate Change Atlas from the Northern Research Station. You can use to see the effects global warming will have on different species. As an example, I brought up some results for the Minnesota State Bird, the Common Loon. Check out how the different predicted models will affect the distribution of this species.

I haven't had a lot of time to mess around with it. Please share any interesting observations you make in the comments below.

~Kirk

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Book Review: Wild America

With all the new books on the market it is easy to overlook a classic older text. For valentine's day many years ago, my wife scoured the shelves at a used book store and came up with a first printing of the 1953 classic, Wild America: The Record of a 30,000 Mile Journey Around the Continent by a Distinguished Naturalist and His British Colleague.

I was somehow unaware of this epic book and I didn't realize at first that the "distinguished American naturalist" was Roger Tory Peterson, as in The Peterson Field Guide to Birds. Who better to lead such an epic journey? I reviewed Return to Wild America last week so now I'll say a few words about the original.

Like a fine wine, this one gets even better with age. When it was originally published, it gave readers a look at their vast country. Now, it does that and more. It is also a look into America's past. The book opens with a transatlantic flight that stops in newfoundland because the constellation airplanes cannot make it all the way from London to Boston on one tank of fuel. Being from a different generation than Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher, it gave me insight into what the country and wildlife were like in 1953.

From Newfoundland, the pair make their way down the eastern seaboard of the US all the way to Florida. They then loop around the Gulf of Mexico, into the interior of Mexico and up the pacific coast all the way to Alaska. The entire book is filled with a fascinating look at the wild spaces that make America such a treasure.

Along their route, the pair search for the Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the legendary singer track in Louisiana, smuggle bird study skins across the Mexico-US border under the hood of their car, visit the newly formed Salton sea, run out of gas in the middle of nowhere two to three times, glimpse the elusive California Condor, and cap their trip off with a trip to the Pribilof Islands in Alaska. The book is fun and full of stories any naturalist or bird watcher can appreciate. At one point, Peterson misidentifies a bird in the distance and Fisher suggests he check the Peterson Field Guide.

English naturalist, James Fisher in particular is a wonderful reminder to us as North Americans. He sees our land and animals with fresh eyes and reminds us how marvelous a Blue Jay is to the outsider. All too often, we become jaded by the natural world we see every day. The route these two naturalists charted back in 1953 is still famous today. By the end of the year, Peterson spotted 637 birds that year while Fisher returned to Europe and ballooned his one year tally to 718. Both were new records. Wild America was re-issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1997. If you haven't read this classic natural history narrative you are in for a treat.

~Kirk

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Sticking Science up my Nose

I like to avoid sticking things up my nose. I find it is a good rule for a happy life. I wasn't the kind of kid who stuck crayons or pennies in my nose and I haven't sniffed up any drugs, legal or otherwise. I did once squirt a shot of Binaca fresh breath spray up my nose on a dare in high school but we all do stupid things once in a while, and for the record, yes, it does hurt.

I bring all this up because I think it is high time I stick something up my nose. I'd like to stick something up my nose for science. As a naturalist, I teach science and that means I take a lot of things on other scientists' word. This is what we have to do on a daily basis because we cannot possibly recreate all of the innumerable tests and experiments that have brought our greater knowledge thus far. Scientists, however, do test each other and repeat experiments and over time they weed out poor hypothesis by proving them false. Laymen don't have time to do this in their daily lives and luckily don’t need to because that is what scientists do. This isn't so much a matter of faith but rather understanding how and why the scientific method works. I am a naturalist though and I teach science all the time. While some of my knowledge comes from reading the latest scientific journals, some also comes from mentors and the elders of my field who have passed on their knowledge. What if some of this inherited knowledge is wrong?

Every year in late summer I bring a group out to the meadow at the Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center and when the group sees the glowing golden sea of goldenrod flowers often a fellow traveler well versed in the histamine self torture arts exclaims, “Ohh, goldenrod! I am soooo allergic to that stuff.”

I am no stranger to allergies and when August comes I suffer with the rest of the sorry lot of humans with out-of-control histamine responses. No mater how much brain power I allocate to assuring my body that pollen is not a deadly substance designed to destroy the core of my being it does no good. My body goes on the defense and I pay the cost of itchy, runny, blurry eyes and a runny nose. Being a naturalist, I teach outdoors and it can be difficult to teach about the outdoors when one cannot actually see the outdoors.

Goldenrod provides the perfect opportunity to test both my trust in the scientific process and my knowledge of plants. I’m going to stick goldenrod up my nose.
Even though thousands of people think of goldenrod as the scourge of the season, I've been taught and I actively teach otherwise. If you watch goldenrod you'll soon notice lots of insects all over the bright blooms. In fact, those blooms are the bright color they are precisely to attract insects. This is a clue to us about the pollination techniques used by the plant. Goldenrod is insect pollinated. For goldenrod to reproduce, pollen must get from one plant to another. This usually happens in one of two ways in flowers. Insects or wind. Pollen from insect pollinated plants is big and heavy (relatively speaking) whereas pollen from wind pollinated plants is small and light so it can be borne on the wind.

Logically, if you enter a field and begin to sneeze from pollen and you haven’t touched any plants then you are having a reaction to wind borne pollen. That pollen probably doesn’t come from any of the large showy flowers since flowers don’t have to be pretty to attract the wind. Late summer allergies are caused mostly by the wind pollinated ragweed which most people never notice as, since it need not attract insects, simply has tiny gray flowers no more than 2 millimeters across. The pollen is so light it can travel well over six hundred feet from the flower on a slight breeze.

I know all of these things but does that make them true? I need some Goldenrod. Goldenrod is a late summer bloomer. The idea of sticking it up my nose in the name of science came about last fall so I had a long time to wait. Spring saw the bloom of ephemeral wildflowers in the woods. In the summer, the prairie was full of yarrow and black-eyed susans, wild bergamot and giant hyssop that smelled and tasted just like licorice and anise. The goldenrod made me wait. On a late summer afternoon I marched out the prairie with confidence and more than a little curiosity. The goldenrod was in full bloom and I took it as a good sign that this purportedly insect pollinated flower was crawing with dozens of Chauliognathus pennsylvanicus, the Goldenrod Soldier Beetle. With a co-worker as my witness I stuck something up my nose for science. I am happy to report that goldenrod has a delightfully delicate smell and caused absolutely no allergic reaction no matter how hard I sniffed.

So it would seem we can, in fact, trust the scientific method. I'll not be repeating my experiment with ragweed.

~Kirk

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Book Review: Return to Wild America

Revisiting the landmark 1955 book, Wild America, written by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher would seem to be at once an exhilarating journey across both the continent and time but it is also a daunting task. Author Scott Weidensaul proves it to be both but also shows that he is up to the challenge in Return to Wild America: A Yearlong Search for the Continent's Natural Soul.

I’d personally love to take the challenge of following in their footsteps and take on the task of revisiting the sites they saw but I’d not do it lightly. Fisher and Peterson took on an epic 30,000 mile journey and wrote about it in details that have made generations of naturalists drool and turn into fiendish page turners into the wee hours of the night, eventually dreaming of far away places. Weidensaul has accomplished the same task. I spent many evenings tucked into a warm bed with dry arctic air cascading down from the north as I read with rapt attention about the changes that have occurred to the wild lands of our country.

Weidensaul doesn’t attempt to follow the exact course of the original book. Some of the locations no longer exist and time has shown that while they visited some spectacular locations, had they traveled a few miles away from their mapped locations, even greater treasures awaited. By following Peterson and Fishers general course but straying a bit from the path, Weidensaul is able to visit a few places unknown to Peterson and Fisher and he is able take a barometer reading on the true state of today’s Wild America.

The book is written beautifully with the same attention to detail that draws fellow naturalists into a rich landscape. When Weidensaul sits atop a rock outcropping on the Olympic peninsula listening to marmots whistle as they watch the same adult golden eagle he watches, his descriptive writing style makes us feel like we are right beside him taking part in both his experience and a discussion about the landscape.

Some nature writers record only the journey, some discuss only the land, some merely tally flora and fauna and some discuss only the philosophical meaning of what they see. Too often, natural history travelogue books focus on just one of these and they become tiring lists of species or read like a dry itinerary. Weidensaul has avoided all of these traps and seamlessly weaves together the history of the land, observations from the original Wild America book, descriptions of species and their habits as well as the stunning landscapes he explores along the journey. He also spices up his writing with a dry wit that brings together a tight package of writing that is sure to please.

While I enjoyed the book immensely, I do still find myself wondering about those places that Weidensaul didn’t visit on his re-created tour. That’s part of the magic of reading about all there is for a naturalist to see on our enormous continent. Like the naturalists before me, I’ll have to hop in the car, hope the gasoline holds out a few more miles and explore our wild America.

~Kirk

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Do Dragonflies Bite?

Do dragonflies bite? Ask the people standing in this tent full of dragonflies.



The answer is no (unless you are another insect they are eating for lunch.) They do have sharp hooks on their legs and a small poke might feel like a bite to some people if a dragonfly lands on your sensitive arm skin. At work we just had our summer camp open house where we invited all the families of campers out to see what the kids did. This year, we added something new. We had a Dragonfly Tent.

This is a bit of a spin-off of the butterfly tents you find around these days where people can get an up-close and personal experience with butterflies. We took a simple picnic tent and filled it with mostly large darner dragonflies we caught just before the event.


If you decide to try out a dragonfly tent for yourself keep in mind that they cannot be kept in the tent very long. They will need to eat eventually but keeping them hydrated is a more immediate concern. They need to be sprayed with a spray bottle of water so they can lick the water off their faces and stay hydrated. huge dragonflies like this darner are incredible to see up close and they will sit right on you hand. This is a memorable experience for all.

~Kirk

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Of Pirates and Naturalists

(photo credit Britt Slattery USFWS) On cold winter's day I decided to do a little office cleaning. Naturalists must have a genetic affinity for Neotoma cinerea, the pack rat. Stuffed up on a dusty top shelf in the office, I found an old cracked green plastic binder with a small peeling typed-out label affixed to the top reading, "PROGRAM MATERIAL." Buried inside this treasure trove of nature center history was a neatly typed up booklet called "Nature Safari" This was my kind of booklet. It was a self-described treasure hunt and I assume it was intended for summer campers back in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Kids love these types of take home reminders of summer. This one had them locating all kinds of materials outdoors and required them to find answers such as "What color is the iris of a garter snake's eyes?" Great question! The kids had to go find a snake, catch it and look it in the eyes. This is direct experiential education. The last two pages of the booklet interested me the most. They were titled, "TREASURE HUNT FOR THE BEAUTIFUL RATTLESNAKE ORCHID" Rattlesnake orchid? In my time at the nature center I knew of three orchids growing on the property. I have personally seen the yellow lady slipper and the rose pogonia. We've had purple fringed orchids as well, though in seven years I've never seen them bloom. I have found suspicious green orchid-like leaves in the right places so perhaps there is hope. I have never seen nor heard of rattlesnake orchids on the property. With somewhere around 600 acres of land, it shouldn't be surprising if I miss something out in the less explored areas. Fellow naturalist Paul Smithson and I read through the directions but there were problems right off the bat. "1. Proceed west along south shore of Terrapin Lake following a lightly used game trail for about 175 yards." It took a moment for the confusion to set in. Perhaps we had read it wrong. There is no southern shore of Lake Terrapin. The very first direction seemed impossible. As any good pirate knows, X may mark the spot but it would be foolish to make a treasure map too easy to solve should it fall into the wrong hands. The best way to keep the treasure hidden is not to hide the treasure but rather to hide the starting spot. There was no X telling us where to begin. We poured over the treasure hunt directions trying to decipher their meaning. We felt like members of the Goonies having discovered a treasure map in Mikey's attic. The lake does have one east-west arm that is bound on the southern side by a glacial esker. One could conceivably call the stretch of land on the south side of this arm, "the south shore of Terrapin Lake." We started to get excited. Based on how we use the area today, and a fair deal of pirate-naturalist type thinking, we agreed on the most likely location for the secret starting point. We knew where to start, would we be able to find the treasure? It was months until the snow melted and I had the time to look. On a summer day, I followed a game trail looking for the rest of the clues. I followed the lakeside trail with an eye out for glacial erratics. An erratic is a boulder brought down from the Canadian shield riding on the glaciers. Large boulders are relatively common in the woods and lakeshores. I was looking for a particular formation of boulders mentioned in the treasure hunt directions. I was pressed for time that day and I didn’t find the rocks I was looking for. Still, I knew I was close. Months later I stumbled upon an old, downed barbed wire fence that was surely the one talked about in the hunt directions. I was even closer and more of the pieces were coming together but some of the clues, such as specific trees, were no longer standing. I'm pretty sure I was close and I searched around the area but there was no sign of the rattlesnake orchids. I still hold out some hope that they are there and I missed them but I know this is probably not the case. The forest has changed in the past thirty years. The oaks are getting old and dying off while the maples are taking over. Exotic species such as buckthorn and garlic mustard are on the rise as well. We once thought earthworms were good for the forest but now we see that the introduced nightcrawlers are slowly changing the forest too. These non-native worms eat away the duff layer of decaying leaves too quickly and it is this layer where most woodland wildflowers grow. The rattlesnake orchid may simply not be able to grow in our forest anymore. For me, it remains a legend. When you go on a treasure hunt you may not always find the treasure but the effort is always a reward. I may never find them, but I'll keep looking. Sometimes you just need an excuse for a hike in the woods. ~Kirk

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McKibben on Colbert Report

I wasn't able to attend the Bill McKibben and Will Steger forum last night but here's a clip of McKibben on the Colbert Report two days ago. He's calling for an international day of action on climate change on October 24.

You can still join the Summer Institute on Climate Change TODAY at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus or via the web. See http://www.willstegerfoundation.org/ for details.

~Kirk

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10 Most Beautiful Birds in Minnesota

I debated a lot about this post. Do I just go for the flashy birds or subtle beauty? I decided subtle beauty will be another post for another day. This is a list of the must see flashy colored birds of Minnesota that even a non-birder would find beautiful.

1. Scarlet Tanager
Many people dream of one day taking a trip to an exotic Central American birding locale and taking in beautiful brightly colored tropical birds without realizing many of those tropical birds come to Minnesota in the summer. The Scarlet Tanager is one of my favorites. I'm fortunate to work at a nature center with large unbroken tracks of forest so I get to happen upon Scarlet Tanagers all summer. (photo credit Vincent Lucas)

2. Red-headed Woodpecker
I was initially going to say Pileated Woodpecker on this top ten list as it is an enormous bird and the red crest is impressive but as I was browsing though my photos I came upon some shots of a Red-headed Woodpecker and I was reminded that I would rather see a Red-headed Woodpecker any day. This is probably partly because they are rare but the red on the head of this bird is just incredible. It is even more striking in contrast with the completely white breast and belly and the black back with patches of white on the wings. Photos cannot hope to do this red justice. When you see a well-lit red-headed woodpecker for the first time it is though you have been living a lie and have never actually seen the color red before. "Ah," you say, "So THAT'S what red looks like!" (photo credit Kirk Mona)

3. Baltimore Oriole
This one was easy. The Baltimore Oriole is a showstopper. When I took the photo to the left, it was still a gray dreary spring. I think it may have even been raining that day. That eye-popping orange is a sight to behold. I never tire of watching orioles. I don't think we take this one for granted as much as some others but it is easy to forget that the western half of the country never sees this gorgeous bird. This is another example of a tropical bird in Minnesota. Baltimore Orioles winter in Central America. (photo credit Kirk Mona)

4. Blue Jay
Go ahead, leave hateful comments in the comment section about this choice. Why do people dislike Blue Jays so much? This is one of the most spectacularly beautiful birds on Earth. Look a the iridescent blue on the wings, the crest, the contrast of black and blues on the tail and wings, the black collar. This bird is incredible yet some people despise this bird. I think there are two things people hold against it. First off, they are common. People see Blue Jays all the time and the wow factor wears off. I guarantee, if this were a tropical bird only found on some remote, hard to get to island, birders would write entire books about their quest to see this bird. They would make derisive remarks about other birders claiming you aren't a real birder unless you've seen a Blue Jay. The other reason people don't seem to like this bird is some misplaced notion that they are mean. That's ridiculous. Birds aren't mean. That's ascribing human emotions to evolutionary adaptations. Blue Jays know how to scare other birds away from the food they want. If we're going to ascribe human characteristics to them, let's call them clever. (photo credit Mdf)

5. Wood Duck
The male wood duck is one of the most beautiful birds in the world and since iridescence comes into play a photo can only capture part of their beauty. They need to be appreciated in person. They are truly a marvel to behold and a wonderful example of the evolutionary adaptation of coloration to attract mates. It makes one wonder what wood duck drakes (the males) looked like 10,000 years ago and what they will look like thousands of years in the future. Will selection pressures make them even more flamboyant or at some point are there diminishing returns due to predation? (photo credit Adrian Pingstone)

6. Blackburnian Warbler
Probably the least common and hardest to locate bird on this list. The first time I saw a Blackburian Warbler, time stood still and I thought it was a little piece of burning hot plasma from the sun dancing about in the tops of the trees. The orange on the head of this bird defies effective description when the sun shines on it. I'll simply do my best and describe it as ocular bliss. (photo credit Mdf)




7. Great Blue Heron
In terms of color, this is probably the least showy bird on the list. This is an incredible bird though. It makes up for lack of bright colors by size, grace and delicate breeding plumage. I just love all the delicate feathers coming off this bird. The long black feathers on the head are particularly striking. I could just watch these guys all day. (photo credit Patrick Colin)











8. American Goldfinch
I have to admit, I swapped the American Goldfinch in at the last minute. I had a photo all picked out of a Common Yellowthroat and was prepared to talk about the wonderful coloration from olive to white to black to yellow on their head. I realized though, that I was selling the American Goldfinch short by not having it on this list. My bias against common birds was peeking through. I think in times like these I need to refer to the ultimate authority. Kids. When we do bird-banding at the nature center pretty much every warbler we show the kids gets from a polite yawn to an interested smile. When the banders pull a goldfinch out of the bag, the kids gasp and cheer. This is a beautiful little bird and when the sun is right and you it hit the peak of breeding season the yellow feathers seem to blaze. (photo credit Mdf)

9. Indigo Bunting
Speaking of blazing color, the Indigo Bunting wins the award for mastering the color blue. This coloration is achieved through the reflection and refraction of light instead of through pigmentation in the feathers which makes it all the more impressive. If Bluebirds are pretty, Indigo buntings are stunning. They are another bird that must be seen in person to appreciate how their color changes with each subtle shift in angle. (photo credit Dave Menke, USFWS)




10. Northern Cardinal
The Northern Cardinal is easy for many people in Minnesota to take for granted. I hear the males singing every spring day when I step out my back door. I think of them as such a common bird that it is easy to forget they aren't even found everywhere in our state. Interestingly though, they are pushing their range further north and are not as rare in Northern Minnesota as they once were. A good reminder as to how incredible this bird really is came when I was down in Arizona doing some birding at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. I had an incredible day of birding adding lifers left and right. There were hand fulls of hummingbirds and even a Vermilion Flycatcher. At one point we saw a group of very excited birders standing on a small foot bridge. We meandered by and asked what they were seeing. "A Northern Cardinal!" they shouted with glee. We shrugged our shoulders and continued on. They were from the Pacific Northwest and the cardinal was a real rarity for them. I try not to forget that while it may not be rare where I live it is still a spectacular bird. The males are a beautiful red with a nice crest and the black on their face adds an interesting contrast. Just like the blue jay, if this were a bird I'd spotted on a rare visit to a tropical locale I would probably be shouting and cheering just as those people on the bridge were. This is a beautiful bird.


Now then, if you have read this far you probably disagree with at least one of my picks. You probably think I hugely overlooked your favorite bird. Please feel free to leave other ideas in the comments section but...if you're going to suggest another bird then you have to also tell me which species it would bump off the list.

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Free Climate Talk Tonight with Steger & McKibben!

Climate change shouldn't be something we need to convince people about anymore. The science behind it is well understood and documented. While films like An inconvenient Truth have raised awareness of the issue recently, I think of a different film when it comes to climate change.

In sixth grade my science teacher showed us the Bell Laboratory Science Series films. I use the word "film" deliberately because I grew up before the days of a DVD player or even a VCR in every classroom. We watched our films on an old green 16mm projector. One of my favorites was Unchained Goddess. It was made in 1958. Let me stress that that was FIFTY ONE YEARS AGO.




I didn't see this film until about 1988, thirty years after it was made. Here we are fifty years after it was made and people are still dragging their feet on global warming.

Tonight is a free public forum with Bill McKibben and Will Steger at the beautiful Leo Fick Auditorium at Edina High School. The forum is titled, "Our Clean Energy Future." It begins at 7:30 and should be quite interesting as they discuss the global movement to develop a meaningful Global Climate Agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in December 2009.

I wish I could go. I watched the film "Unchained Goddess" and learned about global warming just a mile and a half down the road at Countryside Elementary. Fitting since the science is elementary. Making people care doesn't seem so easy.

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The Bird Name Quiz

Part of what I teach as a naturalist is how to speak bird. Birds are superb communicators and it is fun to teach groups to listen and work to pick out the individual voices of different species of birds in the woods. We are fortunate that a number of birds have their common call or song as their name. For example, the call of the Chickadee is "Chick-a-dee dee dee." The same can be said for the Whip-poor-will, the Bobwhite, Phoebe and Pewee.

These are simply examples in English where the common name derives from the call or song of the bird. Often we follow taxonomic conventions that refer to the appearance of the bird rather than the sound. Still, birding by ear is so important that any birders reading would no doubt know what I was talking about if I said I heard a "Conk-a-ree," Peter Peter," or an "Oh Sweet Canada."

I've been interested in the phrases we use to remember and name birds so I was delighted when fellow naturalist, author and friend Tom Anderson sent me a link to a fun bird a name quiz online. Incidentally, after you take the quiz be sure to check out Tom reading his poem about bird calls on Minnesota Public Radio.

The interactive quiz on bird names is really interesting. It gives you a pair of words from the language of Peru's Huambisa people. One word is for a fish, the other for a bird. You have to guess which one is a bird name and which is a fish name. This is a small sub-set of words from a much larger quiz given by ethnobiologist Brent Berlin from the University of Georgia. He had students read fifty pairs of words and guess which were the bird names. It would be expected that they would get about 50% right just by guessing since none had any experience in the language. It turns out that they got about 58% right which is interesting and might say something about how we as humans name animals. When I took the condensed version of the quiz, I did better than the average of the students. I got 90% right, I only missed one out of the ten questions. I wonder if that has to do with my experience listening to bird calls? I also wonder how many of the bird names in the quiz are phoneticlaly linked to the sounds the birds make?

How many can you get right?

~Kirk

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10th Annual Great Minnesota River Birding Day

Just a quick reminder that the 10th Annual Great Minnesota River Birding Day is scheduled for September 11th and 12th. This is the final year of the event and it will be pretty laid back. Basically you just go out and bird in the designated area and then send in your tally. On the 11th, birding is restricted to the area west of Highway 15 but there are no restrictions on the 12th.

Send lists of what you see to Bob Williams. He will tabulate the results and post them to the local listserves.

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Trilobite Tracks at Lilydale

Last week's geology camp yielded a number of good fossil finds at Lilydale Regional Park in St. Paul, MN. Today's example is a trace fossil and it is a new one for my collection. If you look at this piece of rock you can see small circular imprints and other marks. When I picked up the rock in the field I could see perhaps four of these impressions. The only ones I could see were the four starting on the left. When I took the piece home and cleaned off a thin layer of shale mud I found there are more like 29 impressions in the rock as well as some really fine drag marks visible in the upper left. The more I look at it, I think the area on the far right was a burrowing or resting spot. When I look with my 10x triplet loupe I can see that the impressions immediately to the left of the far right area look more scratch-like as though something had to apply more pressure to crawl up and out of the depression. Instead of being round holes as the other ones are they are more elongated.

This trace fossil is an example of a repichnia or a fossilized trackway from a walking or crawling creature. My best guess is that it is from a small trilobite, perhaps Eomonorachus intermedius or a similarly small sized trilobite. Here are some examples of other trilobite trackways.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Diplichnites.jpg
http://drydredgers.org/jack5a3.gif
http://www.trilobites.info/Diplichnites_Isotelus.jpg
http://petrifiedwoodmuseum.org/Images/TrilobiteTracks1230.jpeg

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Perseid Meteor Shower Imminent

Get ready for a good show Twin Cities. The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight! You can start watching for shooting stars (meteors) after sunset tonight, Tuesday, August 11th. The show will last all night but the expected peak of activity is in a window of time between 0800-0900 GMT (3:00-4:00 a.m. CDT) on the 12th. Set your alarm clocks for that one! I know it is early but so it goes. The reason for the window is that at that time, the Earth is expected to pass through the filament of dust from comet Swift-Tuttle. Swift-Tuttle is the comet who's dust trail produces the Perseid meteor shower.

There is speculation that this year's show will be particularly good owing to a denser than normal trail of comet debris. Some are predicting rates peaking at 200 meteors per hour which is a fair clip. Of course, if you live in the city you will see far less and the moon will be up at that time with a 61% illumination and about 40° away from the constellation Perseus. Those people outside of the cities will likely see many more meteors.

On a positive note, the radar looks good so far in terms of cloud cover.

~Kirk

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An Unexpected Fossil

I found this small scrap of rock while teaching my Rocks and Fossils summer camp this past week. It was collected from the Decorah Shale in St. Paul. This fossil bed is a little over 400 million years old from when a shallow sea covered what is now Minnesota. More on that in a later post. The reason I had picked up this scrap was that it contains a trilobite tail. You can see it in the upper left hand corner of the photo above. It is the reddish fossil embedded in the rock. This is about half of a tail covering that shed as the trilobite grew. These shed pieces are far more common than finding the actual animal fossilized. This makes sense since each animal sheds many times the shed parts will outnumber the animals that shed them.

They are pretty cool anyhow and I usually pick them up or give them to one of the kids. I decided to keep this one for some reason and slipped it into my pocket. I later looked at it under a low power microscope and marveled at all of the interesting other bits of marine life found in the specimen. There are some brachiopod pieces, bryozoans and even a crinoid ring. One structure caught my eye under magnification. It was something I had passed over as a bit of broken shell when looking with the naked eye. In roughly the middle of the photo there is a vaguely butterfly shape structure. I've isolated it in the photo below to make it stand out more.

Under magnification I could see that while the top section was broken, the open part at the bottom was not missing. The arch-like structure is original. Whatever this was, it is supposed to be shaped like this. It is for sure not a broken shell. Not being able to make out what it could be I set it aside and went on to other tasks.

Last night I was browsing around online looking for photos of trilobite tracks and I came across the wikimedia photo library of Mark Wilson, a professor of Geology at the College of Wooster. He has a fantastic collection of geology photos uploaded to the wikimedia commons including this photo of the hypostome (mouth plate) of the trilobite Isotelus.


As soon as I saw that shape I knew it was very similar to what I had seen earlier in my specimen. Frustratingly, I had left the sample at work so I had to wait to compare. I did a restoration photo in photoshop tonight since parts are missing and they are symmetrical. Here's a slightly more complete view of the one I found with the corresponding parts from the other side added back in. You can see the similarity in shape but it is not the same. I think this is indeed a trilobite hypostome but perhaps from a different species. My sample is 15mm across total whereas the above one is about 85mm across.
I don't know what species of trilobite this is from. There are three species listed as most commonly found at the Lilydale site. It seems the size would be most appropriate for Bumastoides milleri.

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4th Annual Summer Institute on Climate Change 2009

Hey Twin Cities. Has the hot muggy weather got you thinking about climate change? If you're interested in climate change be sure to check out the Will Steger Foundation's 4th Annual Summer Institute on Climate Change, this year featuring Will Steger and author Bill McKibben. It will be at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul Campus on Wednesday August 19th, 8:30-4:30 pm.

You can register online at Go to www.willstegerfoundation.org

Here's the official message about the event from the organizers:

The 2009 Summer Institute invites YOU to join us in-person, or by webinar, for a full day of interactive exploration of international climate solutions and related curriculum.

The 2009 Institute will focus on the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen and unveil a brand new curriculum on international climate solutions for grades 9-12.

Visit www.willstegerfoundation.org to learn more about the 2009 Summer Institute and how to register. 


Expedition Copenhagen 2009 – Citizen Climate Curriculum

Follow along with polar explorer Will Steger as he and a group of young people embark on Expedition Copenhagen, a mission to bring the youth voice to the international climate negotiations in December. First give your students the basic knowledge they need to follow the news coverage of the climate negotiations and the skills they need to make their opinions heard. Then send your students’ statements to the youth delegates headed to Copenhagen and follow the Youth Delegation’s multimedia blogs. Download free standards-linked high school lesson plans from the Will Steger Foundation. These lesson plans build on the Will Steger Foundation’s original six lesson plans on the basics of global warming. The new lessons cover the carbon cycle, target levels for atmospheric levels of greenhouse gasses, cap and trade, carbon tax, new technologies, concerns of developed and developing countries, and how to formulate position statements. Lessons are free and available at www.globalwarming101.com in June 2009.
Attached is an informational flyer and application you can mail in, as well.

~Kirk

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Canada Goose x Graylag Goose Hybrid

I've been away from blogging a bit but will return shortly with some updates on the Rocks and Fossils class I taught this past week. In the mean time, I thought I would post this photo I took in Norway back in September of 2006. While I was there I shot some photos and I'd forgotten about this one. That is clearly a Canada Goose on the left but the bird swimming with it on the right sure looked strange. The body seemed pretty normal but there are a number of strange plumage issues. First off, the neck is brown rather than black and it fades out at the bottom instead of having a sharp line. The white stirrup on the head is likewise wider than normal. It starts to extend down the neck and has a poorly defined edge. There is also a white ring around the base of the bill and it has a white eye ring. What was up with this bird?

As the title of the post suggests, I recently figured out what the issue was with this bird. I had my suspicions since this bird was also hanging out with a pair of Graylag Geese. I did some research on line to confirm the cross but this is indeed a Canada Goose X Graylag Goose hybrid. I found several similar examples online. Pretty interesting.

~Kirk

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