Backyard and Beyond

The Blue Jay’s “flying zoo” includes “one flea, six species of lice, five types of ticks, and eight species of mites, in addition to being infected by nine kinds of flukes (trematodes), three tapeworms, one acanthocephalan (thorny-headed worm) and sixteen kinds of roundworms.”

Michael Stock’s The Flying Zoo: Birds, Parasites and the World They Share can get a little gross. Nasal leeches, anybody? Your adorable bird may be laden with parasites externally and internally, fighting off feather-chewers, blood-suckers, and gut-robbers.

A birding friend and reader of this blog (thank you, Janet!) thought I would like this book, and how right she was. The details are fascinating.

A few tidbits: Black swans have black lice, white swans with white lice, good camouflage for the lice. Different species of lice can be found on the wings, head, and body (not unlike the three specialized species that enjoy H. sapiens). A species of soft tick can stay dormant for 18 years, particularly helpful in bleak, isolated, seabird colonies. A nest being a great place to get lice, researchers can find out which bird species fostered Brown-headed Cowbird chicks by identifying the lice.

But beyond the details is the co-evolutionary story between parasite and host. “It does seem clear that intense selection pressure involving the immune system by birds against fleas has promoted flea specialization and likely flea speciation as well.” Eastern Screech Owls transport Blind Snakes to their cavity nests, where the snakes live off fly larvae, beetles, and fleas. “Owl nestlings in nests with snakes grew faster and lower mortality rates.” Fleas in the nests of Great Tits make it too humid for blowfly larvae; blowflie can have a worse effect on nestlings, so the fleas “may actually be helpful to their hosts.”

Using the example of a Black-capped Chickadee, Stock notes that a lot isn’t known about even common birds and their parasites.

This is a book that will make you look at birds with very different eyes.

I came across some research that showed a Bombus bumblebee species whose members got physically smaller in competition with the commercial livestock that are honey bees.

I was reminded of this when I read Richard J. King‘s reference to the shrinkage in the size of whales killed between 1900 and 1986, when the international moratorium on whale-hunting finally went into effect. Sperm whales showed the most dramatic declines: ones killed in the 1980s were one average 13.1 feet shorter than those killed in 1905.

The diminishment of whale populations in absolute numbers and size has had ricocheting effects throughout the oceans. Whale excrement was a major source of nitrogen, essential for phytoplankton, before the run-off from farms and suburban laws poured too much nitrogen in. The death of a great whale was an enormous boon to deep sea creatures.

The more whales there were, the more other lifeforms in the sea.

Japanese cast iron whale, paperweight or totem, piloted into our ken by a friend.

What do we know about dinosaurs now and, perhaps more interestingly, how do we know these things? Michael J. Benton lays it out in Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology . Origins, taxonomy, intelligence, reproduction, diet, locomotion, and, of course, the cause(s) of extinction are topics covered here.

Surely the most notable and surprising thing in our understanding of dinosaurs in the last couple of decades has been the discovery of dinosaur feathers. Colored feathers! (Good gravy, there were ginger dinosaurs!) With the added brain-expander that these feathered creatures were not fliers. They were using feathers for insulation and/or sexual attraction before feathers for flight.

Those scaly toes, those beaks! Most of the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. But not all of them.
Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season by Roger F. Pasquier is a compendium of research. From migration to toughing it out, our feathered dinosaurs are no slouches when it comes to the cold. (The absence of cold, on the other hand, is already telling in our warming planet, especially for sea birds who depend on cold currents that enrich the seas at the base of their food chain.) There is no no one size fits all to this, by the way. The great takeaway from this relentless collection of natural history observations —there are thirty pages of bibliography — is that variety is all.

Just one example: American Kestrels cache food throughout the year. In the non-breeding season, they’ll often store food for later in the day, and sometimes even the next day. Vertebrate prey can obviously hold up longer in the cold. Our breeding pair seemed to store food overnight. I’ve seen no winter caching myself. Research suggests that the birds will eat before the long cold night.
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And this just in: colorful bird eggs, not something seen in reptiles, are another inheritance from dinosaurs.

I’m just catching up to the Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America by Jeffrey Glassberg. Glassberg is an old butterfly hand, who’s written a couple of other guidebooks to the subject. (Never enough guidebooks!) He takes a firm stand against amateur netters and collectors (i.e. killers), commercially raised butterflies, and butterfly releases at weddings (I didn’t know this was a thing). This is a photo-based guide with a lot of rarities who show up in the LRGV (took me a second to track this down: Lower Rio Grande Valley, which is, of course, essentially Mexico). A lot of the very similar species are next to each other, which is of course helpful. I’d rank it pretty darn good, so let’s see if the next butterfly season presents me some puzzlers to solve with this book.

Princeton University Press has really gone in hard for the field guide market. A brand new addition is the Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America. They profile over 400 fly species, mostly using museum specimens with some photos of live insects in situ. This is a case where drawings might have worked better, but that would have taken a monumental effort. As in many examples of the varied world of Insecta, some species can’t be identified beyond genus level without the body in hand. Still, a valuable addition to the shelf, not least for telling us how many fly species are out there doing pollination.

Fraud in the Lab by Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, translated by Nicholas Elliot, is quite important. This should be read by everybody, but especially people in the science communication business, whose job it is to translate scientific discoveries from the arcana of the literature to every-day language. Media hype over scientific discoveries that may be powered by ambition, prestige, and/or plain old greed are an awful combo. Was interested to see that Charles Baggage’s 1830 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England had a taxonomy of scientific fraud that still holds up.

On the to-do list:

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick by Richard J. King. King’s two other books suggest this one will be fun.

Tarka The Otter, by Henry Williamson, coming in April. First published in 1927 and never made into Disney codswallop because it makes Watership Down look like a bunny story. It’s really a re-telling of the First World War with an otter and a hunting dog for veteran Henry Williamson and the Hun. Just add a T to Hun and you get hunt: otter hunting used to be a thing in the UK. From 1900-1950, some 200 a year were killed in sanctioned hunts; as these are official numbers, this is probably an undercount. The population was halved during the 1960s. Only about 8 a year were hunted into the early 1970s, before the wretched practice was banned. Fox hunting, meanwhile, that other orgy of upper class sadism, was finally banned in 2002 (Scotland) and 2004 (England and Wales); it’s still legal in Northern Ireland, evidently.

What’s on your natural history to-read list?

All my book notices and/or reviews are found here.

Based on DNA evidence, the Great Auk was in no danger of extinction before humans started slaughtering them. How very Megafaunal.