faunascope

Hummingbird Story

It's always fun to find someone else doing similar stuff on the Internet.  On YouTube I found this great story of a hummingbird nest, made by netplaceus. (I'm not sure what species of hummer it is.)

If you know of other good wildlife videos, let us know through the comment mechanism below or our Contact Us link at the right side of this page.   We'll try to spread the word.

Check out these live video feeds

These days a small number of zoos and aquariums are breaking new ground by offering live webcam views of their residents. On our new Live Video page, we've collated some of the best ones, and we'll be adding more as we go. You can reach this from any Faunascope web page by clicking on "Live Video Feeds" in the menu on the right side of the page.

Fishing for raptors

This red-tailed hawk alighted on Potrero Hill in San Francisco.  Besides being a nice photograph, the photographer (jwixn on Flickr) provides a great backstory behind the shot, which you can read here.

 

Your word of the day: sciurid

Sciurus is the Latin word for squirrel, and sciurid means squirrel-like. The sciurids are the family of rodents to which all squirrels (and marmots/woodchucks) belong.

The name itself describes the hallmark of all these rodents: their big bushy tail. As explained by this New York DEC brochure,

sciurus is derived from the Greek skia (shadow) and oura (tail). Anyone who’s seen a squirrel run across a street or lawn with its tail undulating and waving can appreciate the concept of shadow tail. And typically, a squirrel sits with its tail curled over its back– "in the shadow."

One member of the sciurids is the always-amazing (and rarely seen) flying squirrel. You can find some great videos of these creatures at FlyingSquirrels.com.

Hey, I'm just gonna hang out here for a while, ok?

Seems like it's been awfully cold in the Northeast this winter. To keep in the spirit of that, let's look at this video filmed in the Neumayer Channel in Antarctica.

The orcas are toying with a Gentoo penguin. The Gentoo (which happens to be the fastest of all penguin species) goes through all sorts of gyrations to escape, and then finally gets a really good idea!

Gentoos' Mass Return to Rookery Intrigues Experts

Continuing our Gentoo penguin theme, check out this footage from Cuverville Island in Antarctica. This was filmed by tourists in mid-November 2008 who happened to arrive at the Gentoo rookery site only to find it nearly deserted. As you'll see, they didn't leave disappointed. The penguins arrived suddenly and en masse.

Hoping to learn more about this, I looked in some books on penguins, and did some googling. Yet I found no mention of gentoos exhibiting such mass behavior.

So I asked Dr. David Ainley of PenguinScience.com, who in turn referred me to Dr. Bill Fraser, president of the Polar Oceans Research Group. Dr. Fraser's field team studies Gentoos as well as the other members of their Pygoscelid genus, Adelie and Chinstrap penguins, at nearby Anvers Island.

Both found the footage remarkable and highly unusual. Dr. Fraser says that this year was a strange one for all 3 Pysgoscelid penguins. He says his field team

recorded a nearly 100% increase in breeding Gentoos at our research site, which is not too far from where the video was taken. Particularly relevant, though, is that peak nesting for Gentoo penguins occurred about 1 month earlier (mid-November) than usual (early December), and although my field team did not witness the arrival of the birds, they made the comment that they were all "just suddenly there". So I am going to speculate that the video may in fact be showing the similar arrival of Gentoos on Cuverville to begin breeding given the date and location.

Another hypothesis, offered by Dr. Ainley, is that

perhaps this colony was finding feeding conditions to be difficult but then some conglomeration of foraging critters (whales, seals, flighted birds, etc) in waters just offshore got their attention and they all split for the ocean.

This might account for their mass return, although if this were the case it have to be at the very beginning of the breeding season since otherwise the rookery would not have been deserted.

Both of these men have studied penguins for decades, so I guess it just goes to show you how much still remains unknowable about our world.

References
Reilly, "Penguins of the World", 1994.

Williams, "The Penguins", 1995.

The first Sunday in November

I have a flowering dogwood tree in my yard. This fall it's produced a bumper crop of bright red berries. Possibly due to my generous application of Tree-tone for the past couple of springs?

Now that its leaves have dropped the berries are easier for the birds to spot. Happily this translated into a visit from a gregarious flock of about 10 cedar waxwings. They wasted no time picking off the berries and swallowing them whole. I've never seen waxwings on my property before; they seem to ignore the raspberries and barberries that are the more usual fare there.

Another benefit of the absent leaves is that you can see farther in the woods. Earlier this week I managed to spot a fox looking for brunch when he was at a nice distance and heading straight for me. I froze with a tree at my back, and he got within twenty feet of me before he finally wised up and took off like a rocket!

Octopuses take a page out of the hermit crab playbook!

Here's footage of octopuses near Indonesia using coconut shells as shelters. For more info, check out this article from the BBC.

And by the way, if you feel that I should use the term octopi instead of "octopuses", the Oxford English Dictionary feels differently. :-)

To spot a fox... listen for the crows

It's 6:30 in the morning. I'm out of bed at the insistence of my 20-month old toddler, squawking in the next room.

He demands a glass of milk. We both shuffle into the kitchen. As I'm rooting in the fridge, another part of my brain is registering the raucous cries of our resident horde of crows. I think to myself, "Gee, the crows and hawks are squabbling awfully early this morning."

Suddenly my boy, at the picture window, shouts "Fox!". I'm a little skeptical; as far as I know he only has one picture book with a fox. But then again he does have a lot of Richard Scarry books that have foxes in their cast of characters. And what about that racket from the crows?

Sure enough, I look out the window in time to see an orange fox trotting along the edge of our yard with the crows haranguing him!

This isn't the first time the crows have helped us spot predators. Earlier this year I spotted a coyote crossing through our woods, again because the crows were harassing him.

So why do crows track and harass foxes and coyotes? I would think that most of the time they don't pose much threat to crows. I haven't been able to find a definitive answer, but perhaps it's because they compete over carrion. I imagine it's even possible, though unlikely, that a canid could catch and kill an unwary crow feeding on a deer carcass. I also suspect that their divebombing might cause a fox to drop any dinner he might be carrying in his mouth, resulting in a free lunch for the crows.

In any event, I'm certainly not the first to learn the trick of following the crows to spot foxes. Courtesy of Google, here's an article from a 1906 Washington newspaper that mentions it.