A melange today: birds, landscapes—and a cobra!
First we have some lovely bird photos from Pete Moulton:
Unfortunately, my plans to get out and make some new images for you over the holiday weekend didn’t work out very well, so these are mainly somewhat older images that I had stashed in the sock drawer, as one of my photo buddies terms her archived material. There’s a little bit of a theme here because I’ve been thinking about a post biogeographer Alan de Queiroz published at his website, The Monkey’s Voyage, back in August. Alan’s post concerned the ‘New Nature’ expressed by naturalist/science writer Lyanda Lynn Haupt, as opposed to the more hardcore pro-conservation ideas of EO Wilson and others, and specifically dealt with the issue of introduced birds. Rather than rehashing the entire post, though, I’ll just give you the link because Alan’s a far more gifted writer than I am.
But I’ve come to realize that the issue isn’t strictly one of introduced vs native species; what about those species which once occurred natively in a particular region in small numbers, but which have increased along with–often because of–human activity? Surely those must count as ‘introduced’ in some sense too. So, here are some of the species which have increased in, or expanded into, the Phoenix area along with, and often because of, human development.Surface water’s always prime real estate for both birds and humans. Some people like to fish, and now ponds and lakes exist where none did before. That’s increased our local population of Pied-billed Grebes Podilymbus podiceps, which are so water-adapted that they can hardly walk on land. This is one in its breeding colors last June at Papago Park. He’s the boss of the pond, and all the other birds know it.
And, of course, we must have a Green Heron (Butorides virescens), just because. Under normal circumstances, Green Herons are fairly secretive, but at the Phoenix area parks they’ve become reasonably acclimated to humans, which makes them stellar photo subjects. This one wanted to primp a little before sitting for its portrait.
The water attracts other herons too. This one’s an adult Snowy Egret, Egretta thula.
And, now to the poster children for this effect. This one’s a male Anna’s Hummingbird, Calypte anna. Before about 1960, Anna’s was a sparse migrant and winter visitor in Arizona, but with the development of the Phoenix area and the proliferation of backyard hummingbird feeders, it’s become our default hummingbird throughout the year. This increase has come at the expense of two other local species, the congeneric Costa’s Hummingbird C. costae and the Black-chinned Hummingbird Archilochus alexandri, because the Anna’s maintain territories year-round and get all the best spots for feeding and nesting, while the Costa’s and Black-chinneds only come in for the nesting season, and get marginalized to suboptimal areas.
And the Neotropic Cormorant Phalacrocorax brasilianus. When I moved to Phoenix in the mid-1980s Neotropics were quite uncommon in Arizona, and usually necessitated long trips to Painted Rock dam or Patagonia Lake on the off-chance of seeing one. Nowadays, this is the default cormorant at a number of locations around Phoenix and its suburbs, and the overall population is about equal to that of the Double-crested Cormorant P. auritus. To be fair about this, global climate change most likely has a lot to do with the Neotropic’s expansion into Arizona, as NW Mexico is suffering a drought even more severe than ours, and many of the Neotropic’s customary habitats in Sonora dried up just as humans were creating habitat for them in Arizona. The expansion isn’t finished yet, and Neotropics are now being found in southern Nevada and eastern Colorado.
I drove The Beast to Stanley and back yesterday, to open the cabin. Discovered that the tiny windshield wipers sort-of work when I hit a thunderstorm coming back. A fellow Cobra fan recommends Rain Shield and go faster.
Also, a colorful sunset this evening.
Gorgeous photos and I especially like the grebe and hummingbird. I am hoping to get some more and better hummer pictures this year. The poor things have been scarce lately and I’m worried the nasty frost we got last weekend may have been rough on them.
Pete, thanks for the link to Alan’s post and for raising this interesting question. My own view is a blend of E O Wilson’s “surrender” and Haupt’s “new nature” views. Organisms have always moved around, sometimes more than we might imagine. As Alan has explained in his book, 40 million years ago primates accidentally arrived in the New World–invasive species by any definition. They quickly radiated into new species that now play important roles in rainforest ecosystems. The forest itself has adapted to them, and some trees even depend on them for dispersal. That’s how nature has always worked. We now get upset when monkeys become locally extinct.
Yet these mixings often do lead to temporary severe losses in diversity. Starlings and house sparrows really did nearly drive some native birds to extinction (bluebirds especially). The honeysuckle, kudzu, and buck-thorn introduced to the US have greatly diminished the diversity of native plants.
Part of the issue hinges in what we mean by “diversity” When Alan argues that diversity has increased because of these invasives, he is using the most simplistic measure of diversity, a simple count of species. But diversity also involves the degree of evenness of species abundances. Most measures of ecological diversity take evenness into account, and this is the ecologically relevant concept of diversity. If a new species replaces rather than merely augments individuals of native species, numerically dominating a habitat and driving everything else to near-extinction, this is a net loss in the kind of diversity that really matters.
Nevertheless, even that kind of impact has occurred naturally many times. The great collision between North and South America caused the mass extinction of an amazing set of large exotic mammals in South America, far greater than the relatively minor extinctions of Australian animals caused by invasive species introduced there by humans.
So I conclude that on the scale of human lifetimes, invasives that replace rather than augment native species are genuinely bad and we should not surrender to them, or to the “new nature”. We should not let the Galapagos be overrun by goats and rats and invasive trees. But in the long run, over scores of millions of years, after we are gone, those same invasive species will themselves have speciated into interesting endemic species.
Taking this view to the extreme, one might conclude that conservation doesn’t matter, and we might as well surrender. But we humans do live on a human scale of time, our pace is not geological. The appropriate timescale on which to judge impacts is, for us, the human one. I want my kids to be able to see marine iguanas on the Galapagos, rather than console myself with the thought that twenty million years from now there might be neat endemic aquatic algae-eating rats replacing them.
In brief, we may (as institutions rather than individuals) be able to limit or control (or even reverse) the effects of our actions on fauna communities in ecological time, but not geological. Ain’t nobody got time fo dat!
We have a great opportunity in the suburbs to plant natives and share our properties with local fauna. We have to move away from landscaping for aesthetics and towards landscaping that meets both human and wildlife needs.
Any argument that talks about invasion and extinction being natural, while true, does not console me when I contemplate the loss of the ivory-billed woodpecker. So yes, we must measure conservation efforts and results in decades not epochs.
Lovely photos.
The water birds are all very familiar — we see all of them on our pond. Almost every year, green herons successfully raise a brood in the trees around our pond.
On the Cobra: Yes, RainShield and DRIVE FASTER! It works.
Lovely landscape Stephen (though I’m not a big HDR fan).
Damn. I give up. My mind just can’t seem to come up with anything. I know it is probably obvious, but what the heck does HDR stand for? Please, tell me! It will bug me all day if you don’t!
High Dynamic Range.
Whew! Thanks. As I foretold, obvious. My mother always warned me this would happen.
Stephen, your mountains are looking lovely — looks like some new late-spring snow?
Stephen, I vote go faster when it rains. Especially if you have that top down.
I once had an adorable MG Midget and the top mounted, three blade wipers worked pretty well, but in a sudden storm simply driving faster allowed me to keep the top down!
I often miss that car. Not much compared to your Cobra tho.
If I remember correctly, Cobra’s aren’t convertibles. Most were topless. I think there were a few racers with hardtops, though.
Yes, I think they are all-open, all the time.
Mine has an optional soft top that has never been used. It’s supposed to be a bitch to assemble.
Gorgeous boids, Pete, and sunset, Stephen.
Wow. Sunset. That really makes the day worth living, right there.
I hope Stephen realizes that those with soft-top cars are the first to go in a zombie apocalypse.
I don’t say it often enough, but I very much enjoy the photos from every contributor.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Agreed…lovely photos.
Nice photos! Interesting discussion about the conservation issues surrounding native vs. introduced species. My own feelings are close to those of Ken Thompson.
These are spectacular, every one of them!
I’ve looked around for a link to submit my own wildlife/moggie pics… but I have missed something somewhere.
But, it is probably for the best, since this pic isn’t of the fantastic photographic quality of the pics that you post on a regular basis… but I do love it, nonetheless.
My fiancee and I are cat-lovers. Sadly, both my beloved cats (Five and Annette) have passed away. My fiancee has 4 cats (Alice, Wicket, Dipstick and Babs). I have been mostly accepted by Alice and pretty much adopted by the other 3… however, Dipstick has claimed me, completely. He has decided that he has two roles in life, to either be a gargoyle posed on my knee when I am sitting, or a scarf, at all other times.
I have been claimed:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11553/2015-05-25%2002.22.02.jpg
Nathan, if you go to the top of the page you’ll find on the righthand side an “About Jerry Coyne” section with a couple of linked entries as subtopics. If you click on the second subhead, “Research Interests”, you’ll get to a page that lists all the ways you can contact Jerry. His email address is listed there.
Lovely scarf🐾🐾