The Urban Pantheist

On one morning of our trip, we went to Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens. And while I loved their animal and plant collections, their visible and well-organized animal training program, and the fact they use bicycles instead of golf carts for many purposes, I really liked their signage.

Most zoos can't afford to have staff in all locations, and so the signs have to do a lot of work keeping the guests safe and informed.


This is the fist time I've seen a zoo sign that is about reading the signs. I don't know if this increases the amount of attention that the zoo guests pay to the other signs, but I like it.
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It's baby songbird season, and the poor stupid things are everywhere. I call them stupid with a lot of affection. They hatch from tiny eggs, grow ridiculously fast, and are out of the nest in just a couple weeks. Fledglings like this one take the plunge out of the nest and then, unable to really fly, hop around like idiots while their parents fly down and stuff insect larvae into their gapes.

The mortality rate for songbird chicks is up to 75% for some species. As I often tell people, if they weren't supposed to die young, they would only lay two eggs. They get smart or they get dead, and they do it really quickly. Most songbirds are sexually mature after a year or two, if they make it that far they usually live 4 or 5 years total. Exceptional individuals can live 10 or 20 years. I'll state it again at the risk of overstating it: most die young, like within a month of the egg being laid.

In most cases, when a fledgling bird appears to be in distress, my advice is to try to forget about it. Probably the parents are nearby, but with or without their help the baby has a better than 50% chance of dying. Your help is not wanted nor required. But...

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We had to walk by this view on our way from our room in the convent to the elevator.

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4454558.html

Police shut down 10 blocks of businesses in the heart of downtown early Monday after dozens of birds were found dead in the streets, but officials said preliminary tests showed no dangerous chemicals in the air.

As many as 60 dead pigeons, sparrows and grackles were found overnight along Congress Avenue, a main route through downtown. No human injuries or illnesses were reported.

The reaction to this event is interesting to me. "Canary in a coal mine" seems to be the implicit message of closing the downtown area to human business. An airborne chemical strikes me as pretty unlikely, as these three bird species aren't going to be clustered together where a concentration of gas would kill them all--what are we imagining here? A dense cloud of poison gas hovering over the city? Have they detained the Joker?

I do love an urban nature mystery, and I hope they figure this one out in a hurry. Hopefully some brainiac has made the step of ordering necropsies of the birds to see what killed them. My prediction is that they will find that the birds were deliberately poisoned.

Urban Species #080: Common grackle Quiscalus quiscula

To many people, a grackle is a mundane sight: a common blackbird feeding in a field or a suburban lawn. But in Boston, in March, we need all the harbingers of spring we can find, and the grackles' return should be as welcome as any. Their black feathers, caught in the sunlight, contain some of the loveliest irridescence of any of our common birds. And their grating call, like that of the European starling, is surprisingly complex. They return in early spring in huge numbers, all glossy purple and bronze, sounding like a hundred rusty hinges creaking and clattering (My partner, cottonmanifesto has described the sound of a flock of grackles as a "continuous car accident.")

Human use of the land over the past few centuries has been beneficial to the grackle. The clearing of the dense forests of the east helped their spread, and the farmland that replaced the forests provided new sources of food: not only the crops, but especially the rodents and insect pests of the crops. To the west, the ornamental shrubs and trees that now pepper the suburbs have allowed grackles to spread in that direction. In the south and southwest the common grackle is joined by much larger relatives. Along the coast of the southeast, and the Gulf of Mexico, there is the boat-tailed grackle Quiscalus major; throughout the southwest and expanding northeast, is the great-tailed grackle Quiscalus mexicanus. These two species are very similar--in fact they are sometimes considered the same species--and look a lot like common grackles but are much larger, with a much larger tail. Also the male and female look more different from one another than in the common grackle, females of the large species are brown and smaller than the males. All three grackle species are urban--in parts of Las Vegas for example, a challenging city for an urban naturalist, the great-tailed grackle is the most conspicuous urban bird.