Reader Tim Anderson sends two bird pictures from Tumut, New South Wales, Australia.
The first bird is a New Holland Honeyeater (Phylidonyris novaehollandiae) of the race longirostris on account of his elegant bill. The species is fairly common throughout southern coastal Australia.
He also plays centre-back for the Geordies. [JAC: This is cryptic to me!]
The second bird is a flame robin (Petroica phoenicea). Along with the scarlet, the rose, the red-capped, the pink, the dusky, the hooded, the Eastern yellow, the Western yellow and about twenty other types, Australian robins are reasonably common in urban and rural areas. They are not closely related to European or American robins. Nor should they be confused with the Spangled Drongo.
Ah, the diligence and skill of the beaver (Castor canadensis)! On November 18 reader Christopher sent in three photos of their extended phenotype:
Possibly of interest—I found a tree being gnawed by a beaver nine days ago (this is in Nova Scotia):
Two days ago I went back for another look and there was just about four inches of wood holding up a 35’ tree:
Two more days and it is down.
Wouldn’t it be fun to have a family of beavers, a configurable environment and watch them tackle various engineering problems until their algorithms for dam building are clear?
And some ducks from Stephen Barnard of Idaho:
Here are a couple of nice Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) photos.
This one clearly shows the origin of the phrase “like water off a duck’s back”!
Sub
I especially like the beaver tree photos. We get beavers as far south as Milwaukee. They have been spotted in the Milwaukee River and a couple of years ago I saw recently toppled trees in one of our county parks.
Beavers are fascinating. I once had an acquaintance who had to dynamite them ( greatly to his chagrin) when they turned 1 of his 2 acres nw of Toronto ( Speyside) into water. He tried many other solutions before resorting to the tnt.
You mean blowing up the beaver dams, of course!
No, I think poor Paul ( a gentle soul who loved animals(also a brilliant mathematician and techie))ended up blowing up some of the poor critters themselves. It’s been about 20 years and I don’t remember all the details but tender traps and other less drastic measures were tried first to no avail.
People are prisoners of their property boundaries, while beavers think in terms of significant chunks of landscape. Conflict is sadly bound to occur, but I don’t see why the humans always have to escalate to lethal force. Turn about is fair play.
I look at the overhang of that tree and shudder at the idea of putting my head between that particular Scylla and Charybdis and biting out another chunk … time and time again.
OTOH, the UK has at least one “official” beaver wild release project (in Appin, SW Scotland), and at least two unofficial ones (Tayside, Perthshire and somewhere on the Plains of Cornwallshire). Much squawking has ensued from the huntin’shootin’fishin’ brigade, but public opinion does seem to have roused itself from Strictly Limbo in favour of the beavers being left to do their flat-tailed thing.
Now all we need are some wolves. I wonder who is getting that project going [checks address book].
Geordie is a name for the people and dialect in the North East of England. It is also a nickname for the supporters of the Newcastle United football (soccer) team. Their colors are black and white.
There is also a Newcastle in New South Wales, presumably that is the team that he plays for.
I think saying’Geordie’ applies to the North East is too vague, it refers specifically to someone from Newcastle. Calling someone from Sunderland or Middlesbrough a Geordie would be fighting talk.
For some reason people from Sunderland are called ‘Mackems’.
Why would a beaver cut down a large tree? It cannot use the trunk to build a dam, as far as I know. It would be less work, overall, to cut down smaller trees and use all of it.
There are lots of smaller branches on a large tree. They taste great. And beavers don’t worry about the part of the trunk they don’t use.
That beaver does impressive work. There’s a river here called the Big Wood because it’s full of fallen cottonwoods, many taken down by beavers. Once when I was hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains (just north of here, near Stanley, Idaho), some tourists I ran into asked what had chewed up some aspens. I told them it was beavers and they were surprised and asked, “What do you do with them in the winter?” I lived in Stanley for 12 years and was several times taken aback by ignorant questions from tourists like, “When do the deer become elk?”
Technical details of the mallards in flight: Canon 5D3, Canon 500mm II + 1.4x extender, ISO 1600, f/11, 1/8000, hand held.
” . . . ignorant questions from tourists like, “When do the deer become elk?”
All being equal, perhaps at least slightly predisposed to take “selfies” with bears?
Yes, selfies w bears, while doing finger horns behind the bear’s head…
AFAIK It’s the sound of trickling water that triggers the behaviour. I have seen a video of someone who put a speaker on the ground and played a recording of water trickling. The beaver brought sticks and covered the speaker.
And everyone else in the vicinity had to pee…
👏
For no special reason:
“In computability theory, a busy beaver is a Turing machine that attains the maximum number of steps performed, or maximum number of nonblank symbols finally on the tape, among all Turing machines in a certain class. … A busy beaver function quantifies these upper limits on a given measure, and is a noncomputable function. In fact, a busy beaver function can be shown to grow faster asymptotically than does any computable function.
The concept was first introduced by Tibor Radó as the “busy beaver game” in his 1962 paper, “On Non-Computable Functions”.”
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver ]
Holey Jesus, those mallards are spectacular.