The other Air Force Falcons.

Birds and Aircraft don't mix. Just ask Sullenberger about how well his plane dealt with the multiple bird-strikes. This is even more the case in high performance military jets, which are even more expensive to fix. So, what's an Air Force base to do? In the latest issue of "The Wildlife Professional" there was an article (p. 52) with a great number of approaches laid out a bunch of approaches, from Habitat modification to Non-lethal dispersal, and capture and translocation. Well, an Air Force base has an idea I think stands out because it's neat - they're fighting falcons with falcons.

More likely, they're using them to harass prey. Falconry has been around for thousands of years now, and I've always been fond of it. Although there's occasional bird smuggling (primarily to the Middle East), on the whole falconers are a force for good, in terms of outreach and education about bird of prey conservation. Many of them volunteer at wildlife rehab centres. So the idea of using falconry to limit other human-wildlife conflict is appealing to me.

Side note - anyone else notice the B-2s flying around Fairbanks about a week ago? I can definitely see how those could be mistaken for alien spaceships! If you didn't know what you were looking at, you could easily say "That's not from this planet."

Pictures

Make me smile, make me frown.

I woke up this morning and read about how Verison was charging a soldier's widow an Early Termination Fee on the deceased Marine's cell-phone contract, and it almost immediately left a bad taste in my head. Luckily, there was a story in the Tundra Drubs that made me smile just a bit:

Now, he's dishing up salmon-head soup, smoked smelt and Eskimo ice cream made with white fish, berries and Crisco, called akutaq.
And of course, almost every day is fry bread day.
"If we go a few days without that, we're getting complaints," he said.
The wild-food deliveries -- allowed under a state exemption for the hospital -- are a hit.
Usually, anyway.
A couple elders turned up their noses at roasted ptarmigan -- shot by Callahan during a snowmachine outing this winter. They'd apparently lost their liking for the bird.

Story here. I always find the description of akutaq funny - well, yes, it sound weird when you put it like that. But how would you explain meatloaf? :)

Here's a bird from this weekend, telling me where I can go stick my head:

Abstracts: Is it only humans that count from left to right?

An interesting bias experiment. Directional biases are well known in various critters, but not numerically! What they're talking about is how humans tend to put small values on the left, and large values on the right without thinking much about it. And apparently so do nutcrackers.
Link is here.

We report that adult nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) and newborn domestic chicks (Gallus gallus) show a leftward bias when required to locate an object in a series of identical ones on the basis of its ordinal position. Birds were trained to peck at either the fourth or sixth element in a series of 16 identical and aligned positions. These were placed in front of the bird, sagittally with respect to its starting position. When, at test, the series was rotated by 90° lying frontoparallel to the bird's starting position, both species showed a bias for identifying selectively the correct position from the left but not from the right end. The similarity with the well-known phenomenon of the left-to-right spatially oriented number line in humans is considered.

Pictures

Pictures

Abstracts: Lower Predation Risk for Migratory Birds at High Latitudes

L. McKinnon, P. A. Smith, E. Nol, J. L. Martin, F. I. Doyle, K. F. Abraham, H. G. Gilchrist, R. I. G. Morrison, and J. Bêty (15 January 2010) Science 327 (5963), 326. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1183010]

Quantifying the costs and benefits of migration distance is critical to understanding the evolution of long-distance migration. In migratory birds, life history theory predicts that the potential survival costs of migrating longer distances should be balanced by benefits to lifetime reproductive success, yet quantification of these reproductive benefits in a controlled manner along a large geographical gradient is challenging. We measured a controlled effect of predation risk along a 3350-kilometer south-north gradient in the Arctic and found that nest predation risk declined more than twofold along the latitudinal gradient. These results provide evidence that birds migrating farther north may acquire reproductive benefits in the form of lower nest predation risk.

There's a long standing debate on why birds migrate north to the arctic for the summer. This paper gives evidence that birds are migrating further to avoid predators. I suspect they're partially wrong, in that the initial (primitive) cause was more tired to taking advantage to seasonally available resources. Part of the lower predation risk is due to dilution effects (this is my suspicion), something the initial birds would not have enjoyed - dillution only works if there's many of you, not one or two.

I forgot! Annoyance Degrees C

I forgot to say what annoyed me about `Half of 40°C`! How absurd that phrase is becomes apparent when you ask "What is half of 40°C?" You might guess 20°C. Okay, what's half of -40°C? -20°C? 

The problem is 0°C and F are both not absolute zeros. You can't just take the magnitude from them and apply a fraction, and have it even remotely meaningful. .5 * 40 is not half the temperature or energy of 40 (in either C or F). You have to convert to a Scientific unit called "Kelvin," a system where the number does represent the magnitude in that way. 0K is 0K - no energy, whatsoever. So, half the temperature of 40°C is actually -116.575°C. Those are some seriously cold Hummingbirds!

I'm sure someone will correct my correction. But I know that 20° is not half 40°! :p

Annoyance °C

I was watching a little show on Sunday, about Hummingbirds (And in HD! It was very pretty). But the host said something that hit on a pet peeve of mine. So, let me ask you all, what is half of 40°C?

A lesser annoyance is how they treat the bird breeding systems. They presented a single view, where males are serial breeders, and females provide sole provisioning. This is a huge disservice to the massive diversity of systems, which span from social monogamy to promiscuity. It would also be a great time to discuss polyandry - that's a situation that is incredibly rare in mammals, where it's the males who are the most choosy. It typically arises because the male investment (in egg care) are greater than producing the eggs. So males choose who they want to breed with, and females go about recruiting multiple males to care for their young in various nests.

At least they didn't wax fanatical about how wonderfully monogamous they are.

Caugak ukuk?

Last week, we had this,


Which Flying Fish and Mr. Swift properly IDed as a Three Toed Woodpecker! Mr. Swift even got the Latin right, as it's Picoides tridactylus. Yugcetun, it's puugtuyuli, which is pretty much any woodpecker. Puugtuq- would be something like "divebombing" in English, and if you took a literal translation, puugtuyuli would be 'the one that's really good at divebombing!'

Here's two for this week!
Caugak ukuk?

Cauga una?

Oops! I forgot last week! Sorry! "That person who usually lurks" Got it right - the thing to the left (left side of the screen) is a coyote (Canis latrans). The yup'ik, Kayu, is borrowed from the kassacetun. Or, if it's not from English, it's a huge coincidence!
The coyote isn't endemic to Alaska, and to me, it's low population is somewhat of a mystery. Typically, when you get invasive species, they proceed to explode, frequently drowning out endemic species that fill a similar niche in the enviroment. Curiously, that's not what we've seen. Which makes me wonder a few things. Was there a species filling the coyotes niche that we don't see anymore? Were coyotes around an exceptionally long time ago, and left the niche vacant? Is there some factor limiting coyote population growth?

These are all questions I can't answer - obviously, because I wouldn't be wondering them if I could!

Here's this weeks':

I apologize the first one isn't in better focus. I'm just not fast enough with the camera, I guess! But here's a small hint: It's in Alaska, and it's not a Yellow Shafted Flicker.