Tour of the Matanzas River

Here is something you don't see every day - a bunch of Roseate Spoonbills roosting together in a tree. It was almost comical to see. Usually you see big birds like this gracefully wading around in the water looking for fish. They are too big to gracefully perch in trees.

There are 7 spoonbills here - the pink blob at the right end is actually two spoonbills. The bird in the water toward the left is a Tri-Colored Heron (aka Louisiana Heron). You can see his main color of gray and his white belly in this photo, but he is too far away to see the third color, which is a reddish patch at the top of his throat.

We saw this very cool sight in St. Augustine, Florida, on a pontoon boat tour on the Matanzas River. Along with these and many other birds, we also saw lots of dolphins. The boat had a hydrophone, so we could hear the clicks of the dolphins along with those of "snapping shrimp".

Snapping shrimp (aka pistol shrimp) have the amazing ability to snap their claws so quickly that they produce a bubble that makes a loud snap when it pops. This snap is loud enough to stun small fish that swim by, which the shrimp then grabs and eats. It is as if the shrimp is shooting the fish, hence the name pistol shrimp.

Other highlights of the trip were the mullet fish jumping out of the water all around us, and the beds of "spitting" oysters. No one seems to know for sure why mullet jump so much. A couple of theories are to increase their oxygen intake, or to escape from larger fish who are trying to catch them.

As for the oysters, they spit as part of their feeding process. They take in a "mouth" full of water, filter out the nutrients, and loudly spit out the water high into the air. Besides putting on a fun show, they are also serving an important purpose by cleaning the water.

Parque de las Palomas - Pigeon Park

Parque de las Palomas in Old San Juan has been surrendered to the birds. Don't bring any food there unless you want to be perched on and pooped on!

Paloma is Spanish for "dove", as in rock dove, the traditional name for the common pigeon (they are now called rock pigeons, or just pigeons). "Rock" refers to their native habitat, the rocky cliffs of Europe, Asia and North Africa. I don't know who would be more surprised, a sherpa finding a beautiful rock dove scavenging a city street, or a city-dweller on an exotic Nepalese vacation finding a "rat with wings" in the Himalayan mountains.

Pigeons love to roost in areas that resemble their natural, cliffy habitat. The nooks and crannies of buildings fill this bill perfectly. So do "pigeon holes", which are nooks and crannies man-made just for this purpose. Someone has dug pigeon holes into the ancient walls of Parque de las Palomas, and the pigeons love it.

These birds are feral pigeons (as are all city pigeons), meaning their ancestors escaped or were released from captivity and returned to the wild. True wild pigeons are all colored the same, bluish-grey with an iridescent neck, and two black bars on each wing. Pigeon breeders call these birds "blue bars".

Through selective breeding over the years, many other colors and patterns have developed. In the photo above, the cute couple in the upper right is a "spread" and a "red". (Purists might argue with me, but I am using the simplified naming convention developed by Cornell University's PigeonWatch.)

"Red" is self-explanatory. "Spread" refers to the way the pigment molecules are arranged in the bird's feathers. Bluish-grey feathers actually contain the same pigment as the feathers in the black bands. The pigment molecules in the black feathers are just spread out rather than clumped up, causing light to be absorbed more than reflected. So a pigeon that is completely black or dark grey is called a "spread". The bird in the lower right is also a spread.

The bird in the lower left is called a "pied". "Pied" means means "blotched", and in the pigeon world means "blotched with white". So more specifically, this is a "red pied".

To learn how you can help scientists collect data on pigeon colors and courtship displays, visit Cornell University's PigeonWatch. To learn the science behind these varied colors, check out this Pigeon Genetics website.

I'll close with a photo of the San Juan wall. San Juan was settled by the Spanish in 1521. They built this wall around the city during the 17th and 18th centuries, to keep out their European enemies and plundering pirates.

Chukar Partridge on Mount Haleakala

The chukar partridge is a type of bird known as an "upland ground bird". This means that it prefers the "uplands", away from the water, and prefers being on the ground. Other types of birds perch only briefly, spending much of their time in the air. Some birds love water; swimming, wading and diving. Upland ground birds are happy just walking around.

The chukar in the photo above was giving a new meaning to "upland". I found him almost 2 miles up, on Mount Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. Like other upland ground birds, chukars are good eatin'. They were introduced into the United States as a game bird from their native Pakistan, where they are the national bird. (Don't laugh - Benjamin Franklin suggested the turkey, another upland ground bird, for the national bird of the United States. At least the birds of the US and Pakistan get along better than the people!)

Being such popular game birds and not very good at flying, chukars are known for their speed in running. Not as fast as that famous upland ground bird the roadrunner (meep-meep), but pretty fast. Since Mount Haleakala is in a national park, maybe this particular chukar was not used to being chased by hunters. He let me walk right up and take his picture. Or maybe he was just trying to obey the posted rules of the park:


According to Pakistani legend, the chukar is deeply in love with the moon, and stares at it longingly. If that is true, my bird picked a good place to live. Mount Haleakala is well known for its clear, dry, still, dark night air. Astronomers from around the country and around the world have set up telescopes here. They have learned what the chukar already knows about the great view of the moon from Haleakala.

Enjoy the sunset below, with the telescopes of "Science City" to the left and a crescent moon just starting to appear to the right. My chukar is sitting somewhere on that hill waiting for his love.

The Post of the Modern Mariner, or Seagulls Following Boats

And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Like the albatross led the ancient mariner out of Antarctica, the seagull above led us modern mariners across the bitterly cold and windy New York Bay. It was almost too cold to stand on the outside deck, except that the view of the Manhattan skyline, the Statute of Liberty, and the bustling tugs and barges was too captivating.

The huge gusts of wind tossed this poor gull about, but amazingly he was able to steer himself, avoiding crashing into the boat and occasionally even dipping down to snatch up a fish filleted by the boat's propellers. Like the albatross, he seemed to be both playing in the wind and picking up some easy food. He never had to flap his wings, he only used them as rudders to navigate the air currents.

If you look at the photo above, you might feel you were still in the 18th century with Coleridge. I'm sure the boat we were on was not as romantic as Coleridge's tall-masted sailing ship, but it was still pretty nice. You can judge for yourself from the photo below.

And I couldn't resist throwing in a completely unromantic photo, but one that really shows a feeding frenzy of seagulls. The photo below is on the Elizabeth River in Virginia, on a tour of the Norfolk Naval Station. The tour boat, followed by a tug and a container ship, chopped up enough fish to cause a seagull riot.

Red Tailed Hawk Chases Squirrel

"Mommy, there's an eagle in our tree!" I knew this was probably not the case, but I'm easily distracted from household chores, so I went out on the deck to investigate. Our neighbor's little girls were pointing up into the huge oak that spans our two yards. With a little direction from their mom, I was able to find the "eagle". I was pretty sure it was a hawk, but I didn't try to explain the difference to them. "Eagle" sounds cooler anyway.

I went back inside to grab my camera and binoculars. As I was busy writing down field marks, the neighbor two houses away came down. He had followed the hawk from his yard, where he told us it had snapped up a vole.

His belly must not have been full, because he was carefully scanning our yard for his next snack. Every once in a while he would crane his neck or tilt his head, his interest piqued by one of the many small animals that run from the shelter of one bush or deck to the next. You can see this by comparing his relaxed stare in the left photo below to his "squirrel alert!" on the right.













After a long while, it seemed like he was more interested in digesting the vole. I thought it was safe to sneak inside and grab my field guide. Of course, when I came back, the neighbors told me how I had missed him leap out of the tree and soar across my yard. He was now on top of the wooden swing set of the neighbors on our other side.

As I walked across our yard, I saw what had caused him to move - a squirrel in the neighbor's yard behind us. He jumped off the swing set, and the squirrel ran up a pine tree. If the squirrel was scared, he didn't show it. He ran with the same bounding stride that squirrels always seem to use.

But the hawk behaved uncharacteristically, climbing up the tree after the squirrel. The two of them went up the tree in a spiral, always on opposite sides of the trunk. The squirrel was in his world, so easily beat the hawk up into the dense branches at the top of the tree. The hawk's talons were made for pouncing on squirrels from the sky, not climbing trees. His broad shoulders and large wings made his job even harder.

Defeated this time, the hawk dropped to the ground. He slowly ran and flapped his long wings, having a difficult time getting airborne from this awkward position. He crossed the road in front of our neighbor's house right about at the height of a car radiator grille. Now I understood why I sometimes saw road killed hawks.

I really wanted to follow this bird to his next perch, and watch his next attempt to scoop up a rodent. But my leaking toilet calls me...

Eurasian Eagle Owl

Today we visited the American Indian Arts Festival at the Rankokus Indian Reservation. One of the performers was Jennifer Pena, from the father/daughter team Flight of the Raptor. The photo above is of a Eurasian Eagle Owl.

I was really amazed by the bright orange color of this bird's eyes. I looked around and was not able to find any evolutionary reason for this unusual eye color. But I did find some interesting information about owls' eyes in general.

Owls' eyes are tubular in shape rather than round like ours. This gives their eyes a longer focal length, like a telescope, which is great for picking out critters for dinner. But this tubular shape means their eyes cannot rotate in a socket like our "eyeballs". So, they have to turn their whole head, which they are very good at because their necks have twice as many vertebrae as ours. This guy was constantly turning his head around, so I had to snap quite a few pictures to get this lucky one of him looking right at the camera!

To learn more about owls' eyes, check out this website. To really have fun, order some "owl pellets" online and pick them apart. Owl pellets are the regurgitated remains of the owl's meal, which contain the parts that can't be fully digested. We did this with my son's Cub Scout pack several years ago and the kids loved it. You can reconstruct the skeleton of the mouse, mole, etc. that the owl ate. Gross and educational at the same time, and what's better than that?

To learn more about the Rankokus Indian Reservation, home of the Powhatan Renape Nation, click here.