One last set of owls

April 21, 2012 • 1:18 pm

by Greg Mayer

By special request I obtained photos of a population of burrowing owls in Florida featured last fall here at WEIT. They are now breeding. (See update below.)

Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) in Cape Coral, FL, April 20, 2012.

One parent is on the mound, and three chicks are visible. Here, the other parent is visible.

Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia) in Cape Coral, FL, April 20, 2012.

There are five chicks altogether.  Here’s the report I received on them:

It’s so cool to see how the parents act.  They are always positioned the same way, one at the entrance of the burrow watching the chicks and the other hidden behind a tuft of grass a little bit in front of the burrow, standing guard. They’re getting big so fast.

These are not necessarily the same owls pictured in the previous post, but it’s the same population. In the U.S., as discussed in the previous post on them, burrowing owls are mostly western in distribution, with an isolated segment in peninsular Florida. There are also scattered populations in the West Indies.

UPDATE, May 4, 2012. I’ve just received the following note on the baby owls’ development from my correspondent:

The babies are now indistinguishable from the adults in looks, but they still haven’t left the nest. You can tell which ones are the parents by their behavior- mom or dad is usually shooing the babies into their burrow when we walk by.

Owl Week ends with reader photos

April 21, 2012 • 6:22 am

Without any solicitation on my part, no fewer than five readers have sent me pictures that they took (or obtained) of owls.  So let’s finish off our tribute to the Strigiformes with some reader photos.  As always, click the photos to enlarge them.

Reader Sean sent pictures of great horned owls (Bubo virginianus) taken at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he works:

Here’s a just fledged great horned owl, after being raised on a ledge on a large concrete building at SLAC (nee the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center).  He had just attempted to fly and was found under some equipment roughly earthward from his/her former perch.  Pretty much claws with wings, IMHO.  The photos were not taken by me, but were in the SLAC on-line newsletter (I have no idea who took them).  The second photo of same bird after a another few months of rehab/fledging, looking much more like a (small) great-horned owl.  The third shot is of the two owlets and mom(?) still on ledge.  Chronological order of pix is 3-1-2. [JAC: I’ve put them in chronological order.]

The details are that end station B is one of the large concrete buildings on the SLAC site that was used for electron scattering experiments (electrons from the accelerator hit a target inside the building and are scattered into a detector).  It produced the first experimental evidence of the quark model of the nucleus, which was awarded a Nobel way back when (in end station A, but that is a different story).  It has been under-utilized in recent years.  I’ve been retired from the facility for a few years but have a real fondness for the place.  The ledge where these owls hung out is about ~50 feet off the ground and inaccessible to cats and other predators.  In one of the articles it was mentioned that the owls wouldn’t make their own nest but would appropriate a raven nest that was already there.

*****

Regular Ben Goren sends a picture he took.

Thought you might enjoy this portrait of a denizen of the Phoenix zoo, one of their Burrowing Owls (Athene cunicularia). Notice how the pupils are differentially dilated in response to the different light levels on each eye….

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Another burrowing owl from reader Pete Moulton:

In case no one sends other photographs of them, here’s a Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) for your owl extravaganza. Not the most Arcadian setting, I’m afraid, but you play ’em as they lie, as it were. A pair of these ultra-cute little brown R2D2s has lived in a storm sewer at the Scottsdale Community College campus for as long as I can remember.

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Reader Dave sends two photos of a barred owl (Strix varia):

I’ll see your Great Gray Owl and raise you a Barred Owl from HELL.

Took these photos right outside my back door in northern Ontario in February of this year. He was a big fellow but didn’t seem the least bit perturbed with me taking flash photos of him.

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And finally, my old friend Avis James (her mother is an ornithologist, and gave her a birdy name) sent me photos of a great horned owl who lives in a Home Depot (to non-Americans, that’s a big chain that sells fix-up-your-home stuff) in Las Cruces, New Mexico:

The most reliable place to see a Great Horned Owl in Las Cruces is at the Home Depot.

They have been nesting there for at least ten years. Note that the garden center has two pallets that are left alone for the owls to nest on (marked “OWL NEST” in one of the pictures), which I find endearing. You can see where there have been hanging out because there are streaks of poop on the wall. They do fly off to forage, but nest there in the garden center. They have successfully brought off chicks!

So ends Owl Week.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this taloned and feathered marvel of natural selection that is known as an owl.

 

Caturday felid: Stopping a nightmare—do cats dream?

April 21, 2012 • 5:31 am

Paula Kirby, who likes dogs better than cats, nevertheless graciously called this to my attention. It certainly looks like the kitten’s having a bad dream:

Is this kitten dreaming? Perhaps.  It’s well established that cats—and most mammals—show the REM (“rapid eye movement”) sleep that occurs during dreaming.  But better evidence comes from old work reported in USA Today:

Older studies, done decades ago in cats, involved temporarily releasing the suppression of motor activity that happens during REM sleep so they’d act out their dreams.

What researchers witnessed is sleepwalking cats doing things they’d normally do while awake — walking, swatting their forepaws, even pouncing on imaginary prey.

That’s not absolute evidence of dreaming, of course, for it doesn’t let us into the cat’s brain; it could simply reflect sequences of motor patterns that are wired in its brain. But it’s certainly suggestive that some dreaming is going on.

But another site says this about those studies:

During sleep, our brain releases inhibiting substances to prevent us from acting out our dreams fully, although we may toss, turn and even talk in our sleep. The feline brain works similarly. In laboratory experiments where unfortunate feline subjects have had their brains tampered with so that those substances aren’t released, the cats act out their dreams in full. Even laboratory-bred cats which have never hunted, or even seen prey, have been observed to ‘catch birds’, ‘chase mice’ and ‘bat prey’ in the course of their dreams.

How can you envision in your dreams an experience you’ve never had? Is this a Jungian thing? Could it be that the neurological wiring that acts when a cat catches prey can also cause images to form in the brain? That seems doubtful, especially if a cat has never seen a bird or a mouse.

Congratulations, Professor Steve Jones, FRS and Professor Russell Lande, FRS!

April 20, 2012 • 1:39 pm

by Matthew Cobb

This year’s crop of newly-minted Fellows of the Royal Society (FRS) has just been announced, and I am overjoyed to see that Steve Jones (University College, London) has been given the highest scientific honour the UK can bestow. The citation says:

Steve Jones is our Number One communicator on evolution and on many other aspects of genetics. His distinguished experimental studies on the ecological genetics of snails and fruit flies have given him the authority to build an enviable career in public lecturing, radio and television, as a newspaper columnist and in writing hugely successful and influential books. Through his balanced but incisive commentaries the public has come to trust him to interpret the breathtaking advances in genetics and genetic modification that have characterised the last couple of decades and that continue to perplex and worry many non-scientists.

What they don’t say is that he’s a lovely bloke, and incredibly generous with his time, to both students and colleagues alike.

Also on the list is Jerry’s good pal evolutionary biologist Russell Lande, from Imperial College, London, who only a few months ago scooped the Balzan Prize. Russell’s citation reads:

Russell Lande is one of the world’s leading population biologists. He pioneered the field of quantitative genetics and phenotypic evolution in natural populations with a series of theoretical papers on mutation and maintenance of heritable variation, sexual dimorphism and sexual selection, life history evolution, phenotypic plasticity, plant mating systems, and the measurement of natural selection on correlated characters. His concepts of the G matrix and the selection gradient are now standard tools in evolutionary biology. He is an expert in stochastic demography and population viability, and achieved international prominence as a conservation biologist for both his conceptual and applied contributions.

I don’t know Russell personally, but I’ve tried to read his work and his 1981 paper ‘Models of speciation by sexual selection on polygenic traits’ (open access here) impressed me no end at the time, when I was a PhD student.

I’m sure Jerry will want to say something about the great recognition bestowed on these two people – both good friends of his. For my part, I will raise a glass of good red wine to both of them, and to evolutionary biology!

Jerry’s update: Yes, these are both good friends of mine, and since it’s the FRS, let me say that I’m enormously chuffed that these two have garnered this long-overdue hono(u)r.

I did field work with Steve in Death Valley when I was a postdoc, and continued to work with him over the years, as well as finding frequent and hospitable refuge in his Camden Square home.  He’s an honest, unpretentious, and erudite man, with a wide-ranging knowledge of literature and evolutionary genetics, as well as an unstinting love of snails.

Russ, although American, now has a Royal Society Professorship at Imperial College London. He was in grad school with me, and intimidated us all with his brains. His penchant for nonselective models of evolution earned him the nickname “Dr. Drift,” which he retains to this day. Having nabbed the extremely prestigious Balzan Prize last November, Russ certainly deserves membership in the U.S.’s National Academy of Sciences, and they’d better elect him pronto! Are you reading this, Drs. Hillis and Felsenstein?

Congrats to my two pals for being able to append “FRS” (sarcastically known as “Former Research Scientist”) to their names.

Coolest cat alarm clock

April 20, 2012 • 1:10 pm

I am in Arizona, and it’s gorgeous and about 70 degrees F.  I can’t post any readers’ cats today, as they’re in a folder in my office, but let this video of Boo, an extremely inventive orange tabby, be this week’s substitute.

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A powerful weapon for atheism

April 20, 2012 • 9:45 am

On The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta has unveiled a new, completely inoffensive atheist billboard that will be used to advertise Skepticon, the freethought convention in Springfield, Missouri in November.  This is not a joke, folks:


 Now I like teh kittehs as much as the next person, but is there a point here?  Or is this just a nefarious use of felids to make people think kindly about atheism? Or could it be that we’ve gotten so much flak for relatively innocuous billboards that are still seen as militant that we’ve retreated to the ultimate refuge of cuteness and lovability?  Regardless, for some reason I can’t get behind it.