Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Very few people are sending in wildlife photos, so if you have some good ones, shoot them my way, please. Fortunately, ecologist Susan Harrison has come through with another batch from Oregon. Susan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Mt. McLoughlin, Oregon
In southern Oregon at the tail end of summer, climbing a volcano to look for Gray-crowned Rosy-finches (Leucosticte tephrocotis) seemed like a fun thing to do.
Per AllAboutBirds, “This delicate pink-and-brown songbird is among the hardiest of all birds. Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches nest in the highest parts of the highest mountains in North America… they forage, seemingly at complete ease, on snowfields, forbidding talus slopes, and in high winds or snowstorms… (It) probably holds the record for highest-altitude breeding bird in North America.”
Who could resist looking for such superlative birds?? It required only a day hike to a 9,500-foot peak not far from my home base in Ashland, Oregon. The peak, Mt. McLoughlin, is just north of Mt. Shasta in the Cascade volcanic chain. The trail goes up its east (= right, in the photo below) side.
Mt. McLoughlin from the south:
Hikers often get lost as they descend the peak. Near the summit there is no clear trail in the loose ash and talus, and if you start a few degrees off-course you’ll end up far from your destination. Accordingly, there are many warning signs and route markers.
Trail warning sign:
The last half-mile to the summit is steep and slow going. This is the likeliest place to see Rosy-finches – which, alas, I did not see.
Approach to the summit, with trail on the left:
However, I did make it to the summit and back safely!
Summit:
The main birds I saw at the top were several Rock Wrens (Salpinctes obsoletus) and a pair of Sharp-shinned Hawks (Accipiter striatus) chasing around a Northern Harrier (Circus hudsonius).
Rock Wren:
Hawk chasing Harrier:
On the descent it became easier to pay attention to other small wildlife.
Scruffy juvenile Canada Jay (Perisoreus canadensis); or is it an “American Jay” now??:
Rounding out this photo set, a few other recent scenes from the southern Oregon Cascades…
Upper Rogue River just below Crater Lake, where it flows through the collapsed lava tubes of ancient Mount Mazama:
Lower Rogue River at Blossom Bar rapid, where it flows through a scary and occasionally lethal (to rafters and kayakers) feature called the Picket Fence:
The “ducklings”—if you can call them that now that they’re fully feathered and miniature adults—are almost six weeks old: they hatched on July 25 and came to the pond the next day. All is well with them: they all seem healthy and lively, and they eat heartily, though Miss Duck allows the babies to eat before she does. It’s hard to get food to her as her brood tends to scarf it up.
The babies are already starting to flap their wings vigorously, as you can see in the videos below, and I expect that in about 2-3 weeks they’ll be trying to fly, and levitating a bit. I suspect that the “zooming” behavior you see below is both fun but also practice for taking off.
But first some photos. First, Miss Duck, the ever-attentive mom who is still monitoring the babies closely. She’a also starting to molt, and during this period she will be able to flap and levitate a bit, but when she molts her flight feathers she’ll be pretty much grounded for a couple of weeks.
First, Miss Duck on the water. I love this photo, what with the reflection and all. (I posted it the other day.)
On the edge of the pond, watching her brood. Notice that her foot is on the side and not underneath her:
And a glamour head shot. If she returns next year I’ll be able to recognize her by this distinctive beak pattern.
Here’s the brood crossing the sidewalk in the morning so I can feed them in the channel. As soon as they plop in the water (I won’t feed them on land), they immediately turn and face me, waiting for their duck pellets. They know the drill!
Make way for ducklings! You can see that Mom is still larger:
Sleeping on the water six days ago (iPhone photo). Mom is floating:
Often Miss Duck and the brood will get the “zoomies” after a meal. Usually initiated by Miss Duck taking off and flying a short distance in the pond, the ducklings go wild, zooming across the pond at high speed chasing Mom, as well as dunking themselves and swimming underwater. I’m convinced that, with Mom’s prompting, this behavior prepares them for flight. Notice how they often flap their wings during the exercise.
I’ll show two bouts. This first one took place after third breakfast a week ago (they get fed three times a day):
And here’s a vigorous case of the soomies yesterday:
The babies also “dabble” after meals. In the wild, they get most of their food by going butt-side up and thrusting their beak into the pond bottom, taking in some mud and then squeezing out the dirt but keeping the edible stuff (worms, other inverts, etc.). As I’ve shown before, ducks have “teeth”: serrations on their bill that allow them to get rid of the inedible stuff and keeping the food. In this way they’re like baleen whales.
Since the pond bottom is gravel and not dirt (a huge mistake in the pond design), the dabbling takes place in the dirt in the few pots of plants that they’ve put in the pond, which have dirt in them. Unfortunately, the plants cannot spread because the pond bed is gravel. It’s beyond my ken why they designed the pond this way, for it will prevent the luxurious growth of aquatic grasses and water lilies we were promised when the pond was reopened.
Here’s one duckling dabbling in an empty plant pot in mid-August. At this time they still had their duckling fuzz, but you can see the feathers coming in. Now they are fully feathered and fuzzless, but their flight feathers have a way to go.
And here’s a napping duckling with almost all the feathers grown in. There’s still a patch of fuzz on the butt and neck.
Ducklings napping on the edge of the pond. They always do this in the full group of four, and Miss Duck is among them, usually at one end of the line so she can watch them all. The “white” covering in the eye is their nictitating membrane.
The babies are starting to develop the speculum: the patch of blue secondary wing feathers that you can see on Miss Duck’s wing above. It is one of the landmarks of attaining adulthood. I’ve circled the nascent speculum in the first photo. Curiously, we’re not sure what this speculum is for. It’s present in both sexes, but could be the result of mutual sexual selection or selection for species recognition.
The nascent speculum is clear here:
The brood heading to one of the three Sacred Rocks to rest after a meal. There’s lot of dunking and preening before they settle down. Notice that Miss Duck gets up on the rock to let the babies know where to go.
DANGER! There is a nest of Cooper’s Hawks (Astur cooperii) in the quad, and the young hawks often inspect the pond. Miss Duck sees them before we do, and she warns the babies with a specific quack. They immediately become motionless. While I’ve seen the hawks fly low over the pond, they’ve never tried to take a duckling, thank Ceiling Cat.
These photos were taken three days ago by my friend Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist on Team Duck. The tree is adjacent to the Pond, but I let Peggy take a few pictures before I chased the hawk away.
The definitive ID comes from Bruce Lyon, who looked at the photos and said, “Yes I think it’s a Cooper’s. I had to double check that it was not a broad-winged hawk. Looks like it is molting its tail so it is shorter than typical and a long tail would indicate Coopers’.”
And we musn’t forget the turtles. We now have six of them. We originally had five but one died (I was told, without proof , that its shell was cracked when students were playing Frisbee with it). But then a student found a large red-eared slider on the Midway, far from the pond, and carried it over and let it jump in. That made five again. Then a smaller red-eared slider appeared, probably another willful introduction.
They are all well and many people come to watch them. A group of women who work in the Regenstein Library regularly visit, and they’ve named all the turtles after hamburger-ish sliders, like “Buffalo Chicken Wing” and “Beef”. Unlike me, they can recognize every turtle.
A few photos of our terrapins. Here are four sunning on the rocks and doing Turtle Yoga, stretching their limbs to catch the sun:
You can see why they call them red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans):
Finally, two videos showing the turtles. This first one also shows some of the seven species of fish we have in the pond. All are naturally-occurring (as are sliders and ducks), but there are four pesky goldfish that someone is going to remove and put in an aquarium.
This turtle is going after some leftover duck food, but they do get fed a healthy diet of turtle food (not by me):
This video shows how they swim around. They’re quite fast in the water when they’re in a hurry, in contrast to their slow ambling on land:
Susan Harrison of UC Davis is back with some nice photographs of birds, including Barred Owls. Nearly half a million of these owls are scheduled to be shot in what I see as a misguided attempt to save the Northern Spotted Owl. I think Susan agrees with me here, but I won’t speak for her. At any rate, her IDs and captions are included and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Large birds of the Oregon Coast, August 2026
One fog-bound morning on the central Oregon coast, a fellow camper hailed me with “There’s an owl by the outhouses!” This wasn’t a total surprise since, in the middle of the previous night, the distinctive “who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you” call of a Barred Owl (Strix varia) could be heard. We watched as the large grey specter glided along the edge of a meadow, perching here and there in classic hunched-owl position to look and listen for camper-attracted rodents.
Barred Owl:
Sadly to me, the US Forest Service has announced plans to kill large numbers of Barred Owls in a desperate measure to save endangered Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). It’s a complicated issue upon which reasonable people (i.e., owl lovers) disagree, and you can read and decide for yourself here and elsewhere. But I will not reveal the location of any Barred Owl!
JAC: Let me add that the Northern Spotted Owl is a subspecies of the Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis) and is not itself a distinct species. There are in fact several subspecies of Spotted Owls.
A nearly full-grown Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) begged incessantly to be fed by one of its parents; the other sat silently in a neighboring tree. The juvenile finally flew off to preen, but was quickly displaced from its perch by a Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) that repeatedly chased the young Osprey around the meadow.
Red-Shouldered Hawk:
At the nearby coast, Elegant Terns (Thalasseus elegans) and Brown Pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) held a bathing party, and the preening pelicans stretched their unearthly pouches:
Evolutionary ornithologist Bruce Lyon has sent us a batch of lovely photos from his field work in Alaska, including baby Arctic foxes! (He works on birds, though.) Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here is a post on the arctic foxes (Vulpes lagopus) of Saint Paul Island, Alaska, where I spent the summer studying songbirds. Two years ago I shared some photos of foxes and text (here).
Arctic foxes are native to St Paul Island and virtually all individuals are blue-morph rather than white-morph foxes. Occasionally, white morph individuals do get to St Paul by crossing the winter sea ice. The morphs are apparently produced by a single Mendelian gene (the MC1R gene).
This year we had two dens that were very close to each other (150 meters apart). We could observe both dens from the windows of our lodging. Often the foxes are nestled away out of sight down in their dens. However, because we could watch the dens from our apartments we noticed whenever the pups were out and being active (mostly playing). If the activity seemed particularly fun I would hop in our truck and drive the 30 seconds it took to be right next to the dens (plus the vehicle serves as blind for close observations). One den had nine pups, the other five, and the pups sometimes joined together in a giant heap of fuzz all playing together , with some of the more excited ones jumping up and down like fleas. I am not sure how typical it is for pups from adjacent dens to have playdates!
The view of the salt lagoon and downtown St Paul and harbor in the back. At low tide the area to the left is one huge beach and the foxes frolic here. The dens are out of view to the left of the photo:
Portrait of an adult fox. The eyes are an interesting amber color:
The harbor sometimes has a large numbers of foxes; they scavenge the discarded parts of fish after the fish are cleaned. On one harbor visit we saw 20 foxes hanging around the harbor rocks, all fairly close together. A plethora of foxes!
A typical dark colored fox on the rocks:
A rare white morph individual:
The individual below looked like a sheep badly in need of shearing and we thought it was amusing—sadly, it turned out to be a sign that the animal is not doing well. All of the foxes molt their winter coats but arctic fox expert Paula White told me that the animal in this photo probably has a disease called Shaggy Lame Fox Syndrome. Paula thought this because the animal has a swollen ankle and animals in poor condition often molt later than healthy animals. This disease is apparently found only in Pribilof populations of foxes. Symptoms include “failure to shed winter pelage and moderate to severe polyarthritis”. Paula pointed out to me that this animal has a swollen front ankle:
The pups are adorable and I will share a few photos of them. I think ‘cute and fuzzy’ pretty much captures their essence:
Whenever I made a mouse-like squeaking noise the pups would cock their heads:
A sibling makes a good pillow:
One day from my window I saw an adult fox trotting across the sand flat near its den carrying what I thought was a gull but turned out to be a northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis; seabird related to albatross). The adult dropped the prey on the sand some distance from the den and the pups from the closest den (with nine pups) raced out and piled onto the carcass. I quickly drove out to get closer and noted the adult was concerned about something. It then gave an alarm bark and everybody scattered. Less than a minute later the pups returned. Then an adult showed up, wrestled the carcass from the pups and took it to the other den. It seems that an adult from the second den came in and stole the prey. I am not sure why the fox who brought the fulmar in did not try to chase the thief off. The two dens do not seem hostile to each other generally because sometimes the pups from the two dens mingle and play together. Perhaps the adults are related?
The adult trotting with the fulmar:
What a northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis) looks like when it is not dead in the mouth of a fox. They are quite pungent smelling—to me it is almost a mothball smell. I can imagine that they have a funky flavor but these foxes seem to eat almost anything.
I do not know how the fox got the fulmar. Perhaps scavenging a dead one? However, these foxes are very good at climbing cliffs and it is possible that the fox ambushed a fulmar near its nest on the cliffs. In the photo below, a fox takes a nap half way up a cliff:
Back to the drama. After dropping the fulmar on beach the parent seemed to be wary of something, and gave an alarm bark:
A bit later, the adult thief comes in to take the carcass while a pup bravely tries to scare it off”:
A tug-of-war followed:
Of course the adult won, and ran with the carcass the 150 meters to its own den:
The Jason Arday mess his died down (I hope), there’s not much news save the U.S. national debt is pushing 40 TRILLION dollars, so now is a good time for some restful and beautiful wildlife photos.
Today we present part 2 of the photos that Bruce Lyon of UC Santa Cruz posted; the photos were taken during his field work in Alaska on birds. (Part 1 is here.). There’s one video at the beginning. Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here’s Bruce’s introduction to the last part, and I forgot to put the video in. This time it’s here:
I spent the summer researching songbirds on St Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands way out in the Bering Sea in Alaska. On a few different days I took a break from our study of songbirds to enjoy the fabulous seabirds. St. Paul is famous for it seabirds and a lot of naturalists visit the island to see several seabirds that are endemic to the Bering Sea. By my count, 13 species of seabirds breed on St Paul.
Here is a video to give a sense of the seabird cliffs. At some of the best cliffs one can see most of the seabird species at at single location.
Bruce added this:
The video shows Ridge Wall, a favorite with naturalists and photographers because several species are easily observed at eye level from a fairly close distance. The trumpeting noises are murres.
And today’s photos:
Thick-billed murre (Uria lomvia) with its penguin-like plumage. Murres are completely unrelated to penguins but a relative of the murres, the great auk, did give its name to the penguins. Apparently the Welsh called great auks pen gwyn and the name was given to the lookalike penguins by early south polar explorers:
Murre eggs are hypervariable for individual recognition and some individuals have particularly gorgeous eggs. This murre has the prettiest of the colors—bright turquoise:
Common murre (Uria aalge). This species lacks the white line on the beak and is browner than thick-bills. In some lighting they almost look coppery:
Common murre trying to land in a strong upblast:
We even had a dovekie (Alle alle), extremely rare for St Paul Island. These are convergent with least auklets (tiny) but come from the murre lineage in the auks, not the auklets:
Black-legged kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla), a small cliff-nesting gull. When I took the kittiwake photos below it was very windy and the kittiwakes were playing in the updrafts. They would sit in one place and spin around like tops and sometimes even flip upside down. I love the bright orange mouth-lining and tongue, both of which are prominently displayed when the birds are screaming (which is most of the time).
Red-legged kittiwake (Rissa brevirostris), another Bering Sea endemic. Note the very short legs; the beak is shorter than in black-legged. 90% of the world’s population of red-legged kittiwakes breeds on nearby St George Island:
Kittiwakes use mud and wet vegetation to build their nests on the cliffs:
And kittiwakes build pretty substantial nests, plastered onto the rock so the nest does not fall off and plunge into the sea. Red-leggeds prefer sites that are tucked under overhangs:
A gathering of both species of kittiwakes on a beam in the harbor:
A glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens) nest, apparently the first successful nest of this species on St Paul Island although they have bred on nearby islands:
Head shot of one of the parents. Close ups of gull heads show that gulls are rather nice birds. Gull species differ in the color of the iris and the fleshy eyering:
The aptly named and permanently embarrassed red-faced cormorant (Urile urile). Endemic to the Bering Sea:
A couple of red-faced cormorants with a nice rock arch and nesting seabirds in the background:
It’s been a while since Bruce Lyon has sent us photos, but he’s been off the in the wilds of Alaska studying birds. Here’s the first part of his odyssey, starring everyone’s favorite seabirds: puffins and auklets. Bruce’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them:
I spent the summer researching songbirds on St Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands way out in the Bering Sea in Alaska. On a few different days I took a break from our study of songbirds to enjoy the fabulous seabirds. St. Paul is famous for it seabirds and a lot of naturalists visit the island to see several seabirds that are endemic to the Bering Sea. By my count, 13 species of seabirds breed on St Paul.
Here is a video to give a sense of the seabird cliffs. At some of the best cliffs one can see most of the seabird species at at single location.
The light often sucks on St Paul (dense fog) but on a few days the light was nice for photography (cloudy bright) so I rushed out to the seabird cliffs to try and get some nice photos. I find it particularly fun to get photos of seabirds in flight. Landings are particularly tough for the auks (Alcids; puffins, murres and auklets) because they are very heavy relative to their size of their wings and thus have to fly faster than most birds to stay in the air. Landing during strong and unpredictable gusts is even more of a challenge and it is not uncommon for an individual bird to have three or for failed attempts at landing before success. If they don’t stick the landing, they loop out over the ocean in a huge circle and try again. Sometimes the airspace off the cliffs looks like an airport with a bunch of planes circling, waiting their turn to land.
Tufted puffin (Fratercula cirrhata) coming in for a landing
Tufted puffin heading out to sea:
Tufted puffins nest in burrows and apparently line their nest with plant material:
I’ll be damned if this puffin doesn’t look like Boris Johnson, the former wacky British Prime Minister! The gusty winds sometimes make for a bad hair day for the tufted puffins:
Horned puffin (Fratercula corniculata). It gets its name from the horn-like fleshy projections above the eyes
One puffin is nice, but two are better! Note that the sexes are similar—both molt into somewhat fancier plumage for breeding and grow colorful extensions on the bill. In one seabird species, this mutual ornamentation has been attributed to mutual sexual selection, an idea Darwin proposed and then instantly rejected (he thought males are too randy to show mate choice):
Turning away from the cliff after a failed attempt at landing:
Parakeet auklet (Aethia psittacula). St Paul has three of the world’s four auklet species—auklets are endemic to the Bering Sea:
Parakeet auklet after an aborted landing:
Crested auklet (Aethia cristatella), a personal favorite. They smell like tangerines but I have never smelled one:
The tangerine scent is apparently strongest on the neck and here a courting group sniff each others’ necks (from a previous year):
One of my favorite photos from the summer—I like the dark auklet emerging from the dark background:
The crests play a role in the mutual sexual selection and both sexes prefer a mate with a large crest:
The crested auklets are often in quite large flocks—they always make my heart skip a beat! Here is a small group, which is better for photography that a large group that is not all in one focal plane:
This crested auklet liked to hang out with the least auklets. Perhaps this makes its crest seem more magnificent:
Least auklet (Aethia pusilla), a tiny (the smallest) auklet. About the length of a robin but chunkier. Small but very feisty and there is lots of fighting in the groups that perch together on boulders:
Please send in wildlife ph0tos if you have some good ones. This feature has become pretty intermittent.
Today’s wildlife photos come from reader Jan Malik, who sent bird photos taken in Poland. Jan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
In July, I had an opportunity to hike in the northern, Polish section of the Tatra Mountains. This part of this alpine range is probably less biodiverse than the substantially larger Slovak part, where a large portion of the slopes are south-facing. Still, I saw a few animals—both vertebrates and invertebrates—that were new to me.
A sample of the habitat at the entrance to a valley in the limestone Western Tatras:
Just as I stopped by this creek to eat my breakfast on the go, a bird appeared, forcing me to postpone consumption and switch to photography mode. The bird was a male Grey wagtail (Motacilla cinerea), which in its breeding plumage is actually bright yellow. He was hopping lively on the cliff, collecting arthropods to feed his chicks. The white, woolly-looking flower by the wagtail is the emblematic Edelweiss (Leontopodium nivale), a hallmark of limestone alpine mountains (it grows only on basic substrates). The flower’s woolly appearance may be an adaptation to low temperatures and intense ultraviolet radiation:
The wagtail disappeared for a moment and then returned, having fed his chicks. Its flight is highly undulated, and when resting it, well, wags its tail vigorously:
Another successful hunting run finished, and the wagtail is ready to return to his nest with a beak full of insects. Judging by their opaque wings and long antennae, these are caddisflies (order Trichoptera):
The wagtail left, and just as I was going to resume my hike, another bird landed on the same spot—a good lookout in the middle of the creek. This was a White-throated dipper (Cinclus cinclus), a close relative of our American dipper, which I had once searched for in vain in the American Southwest (Zion National Park and the like). This genus is unique among songbirds in that it is mostly aquatic when feeding. It nests close to the banks of fast-flowing streams and forages by wading and diving underwater in search of arthropods, sometimes using its wings for underwater propulsion if the current gets too strong. I think in this picture the bird holds a caddisfly larva (stripped of its protective debris case) and possibly a couple of adult caddisflies.
Dipper females and males are monomorphic, and both sexes sport a white bib, which their American cousins lack:
Apart from a nearly identical body structure, what they have in common with our American dipper (or, as some say, the water ouzel) is a white upper eyelid, visible when the bird blinks. Unlike wagtails, they fly in a dead straight line, patrolling and defending their stretches of waterways:
For the next 20 minutes I watched the bird collect food above and under water, but capturing its underwater feeding was harder than I thought, with the bird being restless and the autofocus being thrown off by the turbulent water. They usually start nesting as soon as the water is free of ice, which in this location can be mid-April. If they are still nesting in July, it may mean they are raising a second brood:
They are called “dippers” because of their habit of bowing and bobbing. While they are songbirds, I didn’t hear any calls, but I read they do call and sing, like any songbirds. It is reasonable to assume that, since they live in the fairly noisy environments of fast mountain creeks, they communicate visually via displays like wing-quivering. It was a real treat to see these birds in action, especially in the crowded environment of Tatra National Park, which sees more than 5 million visitors annually. To put it in perspective, that is more visitors, in a much smaller area, than Yellowstone National Park receives. During my 30-minute impromptu birding session, an incessant stream of people kept streaming into the valley right behind my back, but the birds were completely habituated to the human presence:
After ascending for a while, I reached the krummholz and alpine meadow zone. A notable distinction between this and a similar zone in the Adirondacks of NY or the White Mountains of NH was the presence of a specialized high-altitude dwarf mountain pine (Pinus mugo), forming dense thickets. In the US, these zones feature dwarf, bonsai-like variations of spruce and balsam fir from the boreal forest zone:
I noticed a little commotion in the dwarf pine thicket; it was a fledgling following its parent, begging to be fed:
After a while, the adult bird appeared. It was, I believe, a Black redstart female (Phoenicurus ochruros); the “black” part comes from the male’s coloration. They nest in rocky areas across Eurasia;
Comparing the Tatra Mountains to mountain ranges in the US Northeast, it is surprising that, even though the Tatras are about 5 degrees closer to the North Pole and higher (I believe the last three pictures were taken almost at 6,000 feet altitude), they are more biodiverse.
