Readers’ wildlife photos

March 4, 2019 • 7:45 am

Reader Paul Peed sent a series of great osprey photos. His notes are indented:

Osprey

Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) have made an excellent recovery in Florida since the DDT ban.  At T.M. Goodwin Waterfowl Management Area, we are lucky to be able to watch and track Osprey individuals through the seasons.

Over the past year, I have been able to track the bonding and care of one Osprey pair from first sighting through the fledging of one chick.

The nest was positioned in a terrible place for photography but a wonderful location for the pair.  All images from 20 or more meters and I left as soon as they noticed me in order to minimize stress on the birds.

The Female

The Male

Hunting

The Nest

A Chick

Time to Fledge

Proud Ospreys Ready for Another Year

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

March 4, 2019 • 6:45 am

It’s a frigid and gloomy Monday in Chicago: March 4, 2019, with a temperature of -3°F (-19°C) and a wind chill of of about -20°F (-29°C). In other words, I’m cold. It’s National Pound Cake Day, a food too dry to eat unless smothered in something like strawberries. And its National Grammar Day in the U.S. (don’t correct me here).

On this day in 1493, Christopher Columbus arrived in Lisbon after his voyage to the New World, and made it back to Spain in March. On March 4, 1519, conquistador and bad guy Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in search of conquest and wealth. Within a short time the Aztec civilization has been brought low. On this day in 1789, the U.S. Congress met for the first time, putting the Constitution into force and writing and proposing the Bill of Rights.  Exactly 8 years later, John Adams was inaugurated as the second President of the United States.

On March 4, 1837, the City of Chicago was incorporated, and, of course, it’s still here—and as cold as ever. They should have incorporated it in southern California.  On this day in 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  She died in 1973 after fighting for women’s right and civil rights for her whole career. Here’s a photo of Rankin:

I remember this furor: on March 4, 1966, John Lennon, in an interview with the London Evening Standard, declared that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.” That’s probably true, but British Christians hated it and boycotted and destroyed Beatles records. In fact, there’s an entire Wikipedia page on Lennon’s statement and the ensuing controversy.

March 4 was not a day for famous people to be born or to die. Notables born on this day include Casimir Pulaski (1745), Knute Rockne (1888), George Gamow (1904), Jim Clark (1936), and Rick Perry (1950).

Those who fell asleep on March 4 include Nikolai Gogol (1852), Amos Bronson Alcott (1888), Willi Unsoeld (1979), Richard Manuel (1986), John Candy (1994), Minnie Pearl (1996), Thomas Eagleton (2007), and Pat Conroy (2016).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is being a stark realist, casting a cold eye on life, on death. Cat, hunt on!

A: There are more and more reasons for optimism.
Hili: Don’t make me laugh.
In Polish:
Ja: Jest coraz więcej powodów do optymizmu.
Hili: Nie rozśmieszaj mnie

A picture contributed by Heather Hastie:

From reader Barry, a first—a cat using a water cooler:

https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1102187940409573376

A tweet found by reader Malcolm.  My mallards didn’t much fancy peas, but these domestic ducks are in paradise!

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1102094361997787136

I found this on the same Nature is Amazing site:

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1101679522963968000

Tweets from Matthew. This first technique is very clever!

This hungry, tidy and ineffably cute raccoon is much lighter brown than normal American raccoons. It’s clearly a genetic variant (though not an albino), and Matthew tells me that many of the raccoons introduced to the wild in Germany have evolved coloration like this. Be sure to turn the sound up!

https://twitter.com/purenaturepage/status/1101374006333239296

Matthew adds that “Super Mario” (below) was a big favorite of the fans when he played for Manchester City (he now plays for Marseille). You can see his post-goal Instagram below and, after that, a video of what Balotelli was so proud of:

The goal at issue:

Tweets from Grania. First, a nudibranch:

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1100312691170729985

A pod of belugas and a NARWHAL tagging along!

https://twitter.com/LlFEUNDERWATER/status/1099909009589657601

This shows you the power of the catapults used on aircraft carriers to launch jet planes:

https://twitter.com/spectatorindex/status/1093962673945862145

Unresolved biology question of the day: Why do cats sprint out of the litter box?

March 3, 2019 • 2:45 pm

Not all cats do this, but many of them do. After defecating, a cat will exit the litter box on the gallop, sometimes running like crazy around the house. (They don’t seem to do it after urinating.) Some of mine did it, too, and I’ve seen this behavior in many other cats.  But why? There are many reasons given and many sites purporting to answer this vexing question (see here and here, for instance), but most of them don’t satisfy me. Perhaps there is a panoply of explanations, each of which might apply for some cats or some post-poop dashes, but I think the phenomenon is so general that there has to be an overarching explanation.

To show you how it looks, I wanted to put a YouTube video of the phenomenon here, and I was certain there would be one (after all, it’s the Internet and cats). But I couldn’t find one. If you do, send me the link. Here’s what it looks like, but this could simply be a cat “crazy hour”:

After contemplating every explanation, I think this is the solution: they feel better and lighter, and take off in celebratory joy.

That sounds wonky, but when I was in college I had a friend who would always raise this philosophical question: “When you feel better after pooping, when you’ve had to hold it for a while, is that pleasure or simply the absence of pain?” Now those can of course be conflated, but I think with cats it’s pure pleasure. After all, with a litter box there needn’t be any pain, as you don’t have to hold it until you find a bathroom.

Is there evidence for libertarian free will? Part 2.

March 3, 2019 • 1:30 pm

Earlier today I discussed some of my problems with Alfred Mele’s 2014 book Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. Like Dan Dennett, I agree that the book is somewhat tainted by being funded by and associated with a foundation (Templeton) that undoubtedly loves Mele’s ideas, but I’m not at all accusing Mele of writing the kind of stuff he knows that Templeton wants. Templeton skews academic discourse by selectively funding those scientists who find out stuff it wants, not by getting the scientists it funds to produce what the Foundation wants.

But onward and upward. There was one statement in Mele’s book that sounded weird to me, and it was about Drosophila, so I looked up the reference. On page 81 of Mele’s book we read this:

So is there hard evidence of deep openness? [JAC: Mele means that decisions are open regardless of what happened before them; in other words, true libertarian free will]. Some scientists say they’ve found something like it in fruit flies (Brembs 2011). If a fruit fly turned to the left a moment ago and time were wound backward a couple of moments, it might turn to the right in the rerun. There’s no evidence that fruit flies have free will. Instead, there’s evidence that something that people regard as necessary for free will—behavior-producing processes that aren’t deterministic—is present in fruit flies. And if such processes are present in them, they might be part of our evolutionary heritage; they might be present in us too.

What the hell? What evidence is there that at a given time a fly has behavior-producing processes that aren’t deterministic? (I assume Mele is not invoking quantum phenomena here, for, as he recognized earlier, such phenomena can’t really be part of “agency”.) So I looked up the Brembs paper in Proc. Roy. Soc. B, which you can see for free by clicking on the screenshot below (pdf here, reference at bottom of page).

 

Unfortunately for Mele, Brembs’s paper says nothing of the sort. The paper is largely about variability in animal behavior, and how varying your behavior can be adaptive, even in situations that are superficially similar to ones you’ve encountered before. And yes, animals do vary their behavior in seemingly unpredictable ways to avoid predators, find food, and so on, but that unpredictability says absolutely nothing about the absence of physical determinism.  This is the kind of “evidence” that Brembs adduces (and yes, he adduces it in support of free will):

For instance, isolated leech nervous systems chose either a swimming motor programme or a crawling motor programme to an invariant electrical stimulus [78–80]. Every time the stimulus is applied, a set of neurons in the leech ganglia goes through a so far poorly understood process of decision-making to arrive either at a swimming or at a crawling behaviour. The stimulus situation could not be more perfectly controlled than in an isolated nervous system, excluding any possible spurious stimuli reaching sensory receptors unnoticed by the experimenter. In fact, even hypothetical ‘internal stimuli’, generated somehow by the animal must in this case be coming from the nervous system itself, rendering the concept of ‘stimulus’ in this respect rather useless. Yet, under these ‘carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases’ (Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour).

. . . A great invertebrate example of the sort of Protean behaviour [31,32] selected for by these trade-offs is yet another escape behaviour, that of cockroaches. The cerci of these insects have evolved to detect minute air movements. Once perceived, these air movements trigger an escape response in the cockroach away from the side where the movement was detected. However, which angle with respect to the air movement is taken by the animal cannot be predicted precisely, because this component of the response is highly variable [33]. Therefore, in contrast to the three examples above, it is impossible for a predator to predict the trajectory of the escaping animal.

Note to Brembs (and Mele): “poorly understood” does not mean “determinism not at work”. Jebus, that’s an elementary mistake!

Does this unpredictability of behavior mean that it’s not controlled by physical processes—that it’s not determined by the laws of physics? Hardly. All it shows is that neither we nor other animals can predict exactly what a leech or a cockroach can do in circumstances that seem similar. But there could be plenty of determinism acting here. For instance, there could be an internal program that says, “If you swam recently, crawl now, or vice versa.” Or there could be all kinds of different things going on at the neuronal level that we don’t understand, yet are determinative in the animal’s behavior. This kind of stuff is simply the conflation of indeterminism with lack of predictability: a common error in discussing free will.

But on to the flies. Here Brembs is referring to studies of tethered fruit flies put in a chamber with a moving grate in front of them, to which they will respond as if they were flying and the grate was “moving” because they were flying by it. Their turning behavior, however, is variable:

For instance, in the study of the temporal dynamics of turning behaviours in tethered flies referenced above [63], one situation recorded fly behaviour in constant stimulus conditions, i.e. nothing in the exquisitely controlled environment of the animals changed while the turning movements were recorded. Yet, the flies kept producing turning movements throughout the experiment as if there had been stimuli in their environment. Indeed, the temporal structure in these movements was qualitatively the same compared with when there were stimuli to be perceived. This observation is only one of many demonstrating the endogenous character of behavioural variability. Even though there was nothing in the environment prompting the animals to change their behaviour, they kept initiating turning manoeuvres in all directions. Clearly, each of these manoeuvres was a self-initiated, spontaneous action and not a response to some triggering, external stimulus.

Yes, sometimes the flies’ turns were unpredictable, and they turned in various directions. Does this mean that their turns were not determined by physical processes, that, as Mele described the results, the turns “weren’t deterministic”? Not at all! All it says is that in a similar situation, “exquisitely controlled”, flies can do different things. Perhaps they have a program that, like Chuck Yeager in his crashing plane, says “Try X! Then try Y! Then try Z!”. They may have variable behavior, even in a constant environment, because they’re seeking some outcome that the experimenter doesn’t know, or simply because they have a neuronal program that evolved to produce variable results in nature and is also activated in this study. And it may not depend on any external stimuli, but so what?

In his paper Brembs talks a bit about chaos theory, which shows that in some processes tiny differences in initial conditions can be amplified into big differences in results. That might mean that, in such an experiment, there are imperceptible differences at different times in the “exquisitely controlled environment” that result in different directions of the turn. It’s another common error to think that chaos theory somehow negates determinism. Chaos theory is a deterministic theory.

You don’t have to be a genius to see that there are purely deterministic explanations for Brembs’ results. I believe, then, that in his book Mele has distorted Brembs’s results in such a way that they look like they favor his “ambitious free will” view. That’s why I argue that Mele’s book is tendentious.

Two last points. In an attempt to save libertarian free will, Brembs himself talks about the kind of unpredictability that would give humans moral responsibility—a system that has a way to generate nonrandom results. And so he highlights a two-stage model of free will. To wit (my emphasis):

 . . . it is precisely the freedom from the chains of causality that most scholars see as a crucial prerequisite for free will. Importantly, this freedom is a necessary but not a sufficient component of free will. In order for this freedom to have any bearing on moral responsibility and culpability in humans, more than mere randomness is required. Surely, no one would hold a person responsible for any harm done by the random convulsions during an epileptic seizure. Probably because of such considerations, two-stage models of free will have been proposed already many decades ago, first by James [94], later also by Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper, Henry Margenau, Daniel Dennett, Robert Kane, John Martin Fisher, Alfred Mele, Stephen Kosslyn, Bob Doyle and Martin Heisenberg (cited, reviewed and discussed in [7]), as well as Koch [9]: one stage generates behavioural options and the other one decides which of those actions will be initiated. Put simply, the first stage is ‘free’ and the second stage is ‘willed’. This implies that not all chance events in the brain must manifest themselves immediately in behaviour. Some may be eliminated by deterministic ‘selection’ processes before they can exert any effects. Analogous to mutation and selection in evolution, the biological process underlying free will can be conceptualized as a creative, spontaneous, indeterministic process followed by an adequately determined process, selecting from the options generated by the first process. 

But this doesn’t take the determinism out of free will—not unless the “options” generated in Stage 1 are generated by quantum-mechanical processes. Mutations might involve such processes, but brain functions? We have no idea. And even if the “options” (presumably the range of things you are capable of doing and know you’re capable of doing) are generated by quantum mechanics, that is still physical determinism.

Second, Brembs trots out the old canard that we should believe in free will because without it people would behave badly—a conclusion often drawn from the reference below:

Finally, there may be a societal value in retaining free will as a valid concept, since encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating [103]. I agree with the criticism that retention of the term may not be ideal, but in the absence of more suitable terms, free will; remains the best option.

The reference here is to the well known Vohs and Schooler 2008 paper (citation below), which has failed to be replicated at least twice since it was published (see here). Further, an extensive analysis last year showed no evidence that belief in free will correlated with either prosocial or antisocial behavior. It’s time to stop citing the Vohs and Schooler paper as evidence that we should believe in free will as a kind of social lubricant. (We shouldn’t, of course, accept what isn’t true just because it makes us behave better, but that’s another issue.)

There’s more in Mele’s book that is dubious, but I think I’m done for the time being. All I can say is that people will go to great lengths to take the determinism out of free will. Compatibilists do it by saying that you can have your determinism and free will at the same time, while mushy writers like Mele and Brembs do it by positing some kind of indeterministic process that affects one’s choices but doesn’t involve quantum mechanics. In the end, if you think that determinism simply means that your behaviors must obey the laws of physics on all levels, then you can’t have agent-determined you-could-have-done-otherwise free will.

________

Brembs, B. 2011.  Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 278:930-939.

Vohs K. D. and J. W. Schooler J. W.. 2008. The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating. Psychol. Sci. 19: 49–54.doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x)

Is there evidence for libertarian free will? Part 1.

March 3, 2019 • 11:00 am

I’ll try to put up two posts on this topic today as a single one would probably be too long, falling into the TL; DR category.

About two weeks ago, kvetching about the Templeton Foundation’s incursion into and corruption of philosophy and biology, I wrote about Dan Dennett’s criticism of Templeton. This came up when Dan reviewed a book by Alfred Mele,: Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (2014). At the end of his review, Dennett “threw shade” on Mele for taking so much money from Templeton. (Mele responded, of course). But because Dan liked the book, and it’s short (less than 100 small pages), I went ahead and read Free. I’m going to ignore Templeton here and concentrate on Mele’s book. I’ll just say that Mele’s conclusion, that contracausal free will may be pervasive, is clearly something Templeton would throw money at.

I wasn’t impressed with the book. Mele does point out a few alternative interpretations to experiments like Benjamin Libet’s which apparently show that some decisions can be predicted with accuracy of up to 80% by brain-scanning as far as ten seconds before the actor is conscious of having made a decision. Some of Mele’s criticisms are useful, while others are not. Mele’s main objection is that the real decisions we make are based on rational pondering and consideration, and these decisions are very different from the simple binary choices predicted by brain-scanning studies. To that I reply “so what”?

First, it’s possible that you can engage in complex reasoning before making a binary decision, and I can think of lab experiments that could see if those decisions could also be predicted by brain scanning. (It would be harder, since training the subject to do the experiment beforehand would be more difficult.) More important, “reasoning” and “cogitation” are just complex computer processes that go on at various levels in many species of animal, and why should those be independent of the laws of physics? The input may be complex, but the output is still limited.

Mele’s conception of free will in this case is similar to that of Dennett’s in Freedom Evolves: free will is the fact that when an agent arrives at the ability to ponder different scenarios, cogitate, and then make a “rational” decision, that process constitutes free will, regardless of whether (as Dennett believes), such decisions are purely deterministic. This is a form of compatibilist free will, in which “free will” is conceived as something that is perforce compatible with determinism. (By “determinism, I mean “obeying the laws of physics, including purely indeterministic phenomena like quantum mechanics”.)

But Mele actually considers two forms of free will. The one above he calls “modest free will”, defined as “having the ability to make—and act on the basis of—rational informed decisions when you’re not being subjected to undue force” (p. 78).

The other form, which is libertarian, he calls “ambitious free will”, requiring what he calls “deep openness”. In this form of free will, says Mele, “free agents have open to them alternative decisions that are compatible with everything that has already happened and with the laws of nature” (p. 79). This is clearly contracausal or “you-could-have-done-otherwise” free will.

Which one does Mele adhere to in his book? Well, it’s not clear, since he lays out different varieties at the outset, and the last paragraph of his book implies that science has refuted neither of the two versions described above. He’s wrong about “ambitious” free will.

Mele:

So, you ask, does free will exist? If you mean what I call modest free will, I say yes without hesitation. If you mean what I call ambitious free will, I say the jury is still out. In fact, this point about the jury is the main moral of this book. Scientists have most definitely not proved that free will—is an illusion. For all we know now, ambitious free will is widespread. If it isn’t, at least modest free will is.

That’s a pretty weaselly statement. What I would say is this: “For all we know now, ambitious free will—contracausal, you-could-have-done-otherwise free will is NOT widespread.” That’s because such free will requires violating the laws of physics in such a way that at a given point in time, with every molecule in the same place and everything leading up to a “decision identical”, you could have decided differently. Now the only thing that could create such different behavior is quantum mechanics, and we don’t know if quantum mechanics can even play a role in human decisions. And even if it can, that is not “free will” in the sense that an agent you, would be making the decision instead of an indeterministic movement of a particle.  If you are going to promulgate the idea that at a given point in time you can really make “alternative decisions”—decisions that you (rather than an errant electron) decide, then you are suggesting that humans can flout the laws of physics. This is magic.

While some people punt and say that you can have contracausal free will without flouting those laws, I don’t see how that’s possible. Such an attitude is profoundly anti-naturalistic given that are brains are made of molecules.  Compatibilist free will? “Yes”, of course, because you can define anything as free will so long as it doesn’t disobey the laws of physics. But the form of free will to which most people adhere is a contracausal free will, as surveys show. True, philosophers adhere to compatibilist free will, but I’m not so much concerned with what academic philosophers think about the topic than I am about what the average person thinks about free will. It’s just like I’m more concerned with what the average believer thinks about God than what Sophisticated Theologians™ like Karen Armstrong think about God.

But Mele’s “ambitious free will” does flout the laws of physics, and in that sense the jury, which is physics, has already decided against it. I am in fact surprised that Dan liked Mele’s book so much given that Mele leaves open the possibility of contracausal free will, something that Dan rejects.

There are other problems with Mele’s book as well. He uses as evidence for free will the fact that in some “identical” situations, such as Milgram’s famous “shock the subject” experiments, not everybody behaved the same way. Some people continued to up the fake shocks as the subject pretended to be in pain, while others desisted. In Zimbardo’s famous “prison experiment”, some of the guards were nasty to the prisoners, while others weren’t. As Mele argues:

If situations really did completely determine behavior, then everyone in the same situation would act the same way. But only some of the guards acted cruelly; others didn’t. This pessimistic view of decisions isn’t true to the facts.

Mele does this over and over again, ignoring the fact that the “situation” isn’t the same for everyone: the subjects have different genes, different life experiences, and had different experiences of the prisoners or subjects of these experiments. To say that determinism and a lack of free will predicts that everyone will act the same in an experiment is to evince shoddy thinking. And that, in fact, is the subject of the next post in this series, describing an experiment that Mele uses in his book to support “ambitious” free will.

Unlike Dan, I can’t recommend Mele’s book. It is tendentious, regardless of whether Templeton had a hand in funding the research (there’s a long and butt-kissy acknowledgement to the Templeton Foundation at the beginning). In fact, while reading it I felt that I was stuck in Fulsome Prison.

 

The BBC touts creationism

March 3, 2019 • 8:45 am

Here’s a new 2-minute clip from the BBC’s faith-friendly “Heart and soul” series (click on screenshot). It’s a narration by Charles Duke, an astronaut who in 1972 became the tenth man to walk on the Moon. In 1968, though, he was an Earth-based observer of the Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the Moon without landing and returned safely to Earth. As the BBC notes:

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis as they orbited the Moon. It was the most watched television broadcast at that time.

Astronaut Charlie Duke was listening from Earth. He was a ‘Sunday Christian’ back then – but hearing the message of Genesis was part of the reason why he’s come to personally believe that God created the world in seven days.

If you listen for the two minutes, you’ll hear Duke say this at the end:

“I look back now and I believe not in evolution but I believe in a creation by God—of everything: the heavens, the stars (which he calls each by name), life on the earth and I believe that process is described in Genesis. So I’ve come from an old Earth, ancient days, to a young Earth. And I have a lot of arguments with people about that and I said, ‘Look—it’s a matter of faith! You can’t prove your point, and I can’t prove my point scientifically, so we both stand on a matter of faith. What do you believe? And belief is faith. I believe in God’s creation. I used to believe in accidental life and here we are, you know, four billion years later or whatever, but I changed my mind.”

Sorry, Mr. Duke, but I have scientific evidence in favor of evolution and scientific evidence that conclusively disproves your creationist view. Read my damn book, which overrides your book. Finally, belief is not the same thing as faith. I “believe”—in the vernacular use of the term—that the sun will come up today, but that “belief” means “confidence born of experience.” That’s different from religious faith like yours, which is “belief in the absence of convincing evidence.”  As for evolution being “accidental life,” well, that’s just deeply misleading.

So here we have the BBC showing someone who gave up their acceptance of an old earth and of evolution in favor of pure woo. Why did they put this up? Just to show one astronaut’s delusions? I don’t think so: the BBC loves to osculate faith and is getting worse about that all the time. Do they put it up to show how easily someone can slip into confirmation bias? I doubt it.  Will the BBC put on 2 minutes of an atheist evolutionist like me refuting Duke’s nonsense? Are you kidding me? It’s the Beeb!

As reader Laurie, who found this broadcast, wrote me:

How someone could have had any existence in space and NOT be cognisant of the deep time required to form the solar system?  Not that deep time connects “directly” (more of an indirect factor) to evolution; but, that belies the ten minutes Christians think it took to form the cosmos AND life here.  Jerks.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

March 3, 2019 • 7:30 am

In honor of World Wildlife Day, we shall have mallards (and a falcon).  The ducks come from Al Blazo, whose commentary is indented. It’s a good reminder that we should take care of our wildlife—even the humble mallards (Anas platyrhynchos).

First, a photo and Al’s notes from August 28 of last year.

I thought to share this wonderful photo with you.

About a month ago five ducks who were born on our property showed up looking around for some nosh. I showered them with a mixture of cracked and whole corn.  In about a week 10 ducks showed up.  Last week about 50 showed up.  Today I was able to count 62!

These guys show up religiously twice a day.  They all come at around 6:30am, wait around the tree you see until I come out with food, and gobble it all up like Pacmen. They then fly to the other side of the lake for siesta and eventually all take off for parts unknown.  At about 6:30pm they repeat their fly-in visit and just loiter around the tree until I come out with more!  Each time I give them approximately 5 lbs of a cracked and whole kernel mix that I spread all around the tree.

It is a fantastic event to watch.

These photos were sent on February 6. They’re BAAAAACK, and in even larger numbers!

I don’t enjoy dredging up memories of your beloved Honey but I want you to know that if she and hubby flew east and hooked-up w/ a NE Ohio gang that made our lake their winter home, they’ve been very well cared for. The pictures below were taken during last week’s “polar vortex.”

1) I step out a door leading to a deck where I store whole and cracked kernel corn.  The moment they see me stepping out, they start their trek towards me.  The large, circular, unfrozen area you see is the result of an aerator that runs 24/7 to bring water from the bottom of the lake to the top.  They spend most of the day frolicking in that area despite the frigid weather.

2) Within seconds they’re amassed on the lawn waiting for me to start spreading their meal over a wide area.  This strategy gives them all an opportunity to eat without fierce competition for the food.

3) They all approach their meal and gobble it up in  a few minutes.

4) I spread a lot on the deck and stairs.  They come right up and provide great amusement for us and our kitties.

The number of mallards that assemble here range from 150-200.  We given them a good meal 2-3 times a day. They’re all pretty plump!

And we have a predatory bird from Joe Dickinson:

I don’t have a complete new set for you, but I thought you might like this single to put in with other contributions.  I consider this to be a once in a lifetime close encounter with a peregrine falcon [Falco peregrinus].  Eating a pigeon near the end of the “cement ship pier” in Aptos, CA, this beautiful bird allowed us to approach within about ten feet.  Just amazing!