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.
Reader Rick Longworth sent us a largesse of not one, not two, but three wildlife videos he made. Turn up the sound, as there’s music or bird sounds, too. Rick’s captions are indented:
Fox squirrel(Sciurus niger) acrobatics. This fussy female is checking out the left over apples and crab apples from last season. She is very shy of my camera, so I had to shoot through window glass.
A pair of wood ducks (Aix sponsa) have been checking out my new duck box. The entrance hole is on the far side, and the female is trying to see if it suits her taste. The drake stands guard and fends off a competing female. I hope they stick around and raise a brood.
A time-lapse of the full moon setting over the Snake River at the end of March. Sound is in real time.
Origami artist and physicist Robert Lang has contributed several batches of photos to this site, and today proffers an especially nice contribution of photos and videos. Bocats! I’ll let him tell you about it.
This email combines two of the great passions of WEIT: Reader’s Wildlife Photos™, and kitties! Last year I moved to Southern California, and my studio window looks out into the Angeles National Forest, from which I get regular visitors of the four-legged and winged kind. In January, a mother bobcat (Lynx rufus) and her two kittens visited the meadow outside my window and spent some time playing together, giving me the opportunity to shoot the photos below:
When I asked which were the kittens, and which was mom, and whether there was a color difference, Robert replied.
Yes, the kittens are the oranger ones. In the videos [below], it’s a bit easier to tell, because the kittens are a bit smaller than the mother, but they’re close to full-grown.
But wait! There’s more!
I also shot two videos [JAC: and there are two more below these]:
That was early January. In late February, I walked out my front door and another bobcat was sitting about 20’ away. I didn’t have my long-lens camera with me, but shot two videos.
Robert added this:
I’d seen bobcats briefly twice before in the new studio, but usually it was just a glimpse as they went trotting by. This was the first time any stuck around. If indeed the second one was the same female, then it suggests that (a) my meadow is part of her home range, and (b) she’s comfortable with my presence (since she obviously knew I was standing there filming her), so I hope that means I’ll be seeing more of her (and her offspring)!
Note the origami sculpture:
When it walks away in the second video, it looks pretty heavy-bodied, which makes me wonder if it might be the same female, pregnant with the next litter (this would be the time of year for that).
This subject is especially fitting for WEIT The Website, because my wife’s copy of WEIT The Book has a hand-drawn bobcat in it, drawn by you in 2012!
Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, flickr page here) was so stimulated by some of the comments on her recent video—remarks about why a fishing egret would bob its head and neck—that she produced a new one, also showing a piscivorous bird (an American bittern) swaying its head and neck. I asked her how she thought this behavior was adaptive (if it is), and she replied: “I did some very minimal research, and it’s said to imitate grass swaying in the wind – which makes perfect sense for the Bittern; however, it seems to me that the Great Egret may be trying to distract the prey with the movement of its very visible neck, but that’s just my 2 cents.”
Here are the Vimeo notes; be sure to watch with sound on and the video enlarged:
I had so many comments on the way that the Great Egret moved its head and neck in the Great Backyard Bird Count video that I decided to reach back into some five-year old American Bittern footage that I’d been meaning to edit to show the master of bird swaying.
I regularly change the speed in my videos depending on what effect I’m trying to achieve, but I did want to mention that the flight scene at the very end was slowed down by 50 percent. The Little Blue Heron actually flies at the speed depicted in this clip, but the American Bittern has a very fast wing beat, twice as fast as in this video.
By the way, I’ve also discovered that Tara has a pair of cowboy boots, which are nice ones. Here they are, along with her omnipresent binoculars:
Nature videographer and regular Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, flickr page here) has a new video, one that features some of my favorite waterfowl. I think it’s one of the best videos she’s done to date, so be sure to watch. Tara’s Vimeo notes are indented. I’ll be speaking in Tallahassee next month and have been invited to visit Tara’s home and see her famous blind. Perhaps I’ll see my first wood duck in the wild!
The Great Backyard Bird Count, an annual, worldwide event, took place on February 14-17 this year, and over a quarter million lists have been submitted to eBird.org so far. The second day was a spectacular winter day in Florida, and I spent the first two and the last three hours of daylight in my photo blind, which is currently located in our backyard cypress swamp that we manage as a wildlife sanctuary. This video represents the highlights of five hours of viewing condensed into five minutes. Enjoy!
As I reported, Andreas Kay, a superb photographer of Ecuadorian biodiversity, died last October at the young age of 56. It was a tragic loss, but he left behind a big legacy: nearly 30,000 unpublished photos of insects and plants from Andean Ecuador. These were inherited by reader Lou Jost, a biologist who inhabits a field station in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Lou has promised to send samples of Andreas’s photos from time to time, so we’ll be able to enjoy them and remember the man.
What I didn’t know until Lou wrote last is that Andreas took videos as well, and very good ones (you can see his YouTube site here). Two days ago Lou sent me one of Andreas’s photos and a link to a video of the insect in the picture. First, the photo with Andreas’s caption:
These moss mimic Stick Insects (Trychopeplus thaumasius?) were filmed at Finca Palmonte near Baños in the cloud forest of Ecuador. During daytime they hang nearly imperceptible between moss covered twigs and only become active at night to feed on leaves. They not only look like moss but even move like waving in the wind.
Can you spot it?
Now look at the video and see how the thing moves erratically. It shows that natural selection for mimicry can operate not just on appearance, but also on behavior. (Sound up).
I can’t help but add Andreas’s post from Facebook (forwarded by Lou) when he knew he was dying of a brain tumor. It always makes me tear up. A naturalist to the end. . .
Tara Tanaka (Vimeo page here, Flickr page here) has graced us with two more of her videos, one very short. (I’ll see her, her famous blind, and her wetlands, the site of many of her videos, in March when I give a talk in Tallahassee.) Tara’s captions are indented, and be sure to play the videos on big screen with sound.
First, a short one: “They’re back!” from January 25:
On 1/6, the only Great Blue Herons [Ardea herodias] we had in the swamp were our winter Great Blue Heron and one new arrival. Within the last week, at least 20 other Great Blues have arrived, and it appears that most of them have found mates and that they’re building nests. I was in the blind the other morning and suddenly saw about 20 birds flying chaotically from the area of the nest trees and into the open where they all landed in tall cypress trees that surround the swamp. I’ve never seen 7 Great Blues in one tree before, but on this morning there were 7 at one time in the tallest cypress before they slowly started returning to the privacy of the interior of the swamp. This tree is approximately 700’ from my blind.
And a longer video, posted yesterday:
In early June 2019, when some of our young Wood Storks had already fledged, two pairs of storks surprised us with two hatchlings, each in a tree that we could see from the living room window. These were the first nests we could see from the house, and it was quite a treat to get to watch the little guys grow up, and I even videoed their first flights and shaky landings. I had much better views of these nests from a vantage point to the east of the nest, which is where I videoed the parents and then the adorable little nestlings when I shot the clips in this video.
Last week, as I videoed a Great Blue Heron landing in the top of a cypress, I realized that it was the stork’s nest tree that I’d watched for months. This heron made multiple trips to this and another tree to recycle nest sticks that the storks had worked very hard to collect last year. Wood Storks are very large birds, and they frequently land in a large water oak in our backyard to get nest material. They feel branches with their beaks for just the right size and flexibility, and then throw their weight back to break the branch, using their wings for balance.
In the past I don’t remember the nests being so intact the following year, but we didn’t have any hurricanes or tropical storms last year, and most of the nests look to be in almost as good shape as when the birds fledged last summer. I can’t help but wonder if there are any birds that might use some of the old nests this season – if the herons don’t completely deconstruct them. Last year we had quite a few Great Egret nests that had incubating birds that were taken over by Anhingas – hopefully they’ll use some old stork nests this year and leave the egrets alone.
