Readers’ wildlife photos

March 19, 2014 • 4:11 am

Reader Bruce sends photos and information about a local pair of red-shouldered hawks (Buteo lineatus):

For the past few years a pair of red-shouldered hawks has bred somewhere close to my house in Santa Cruz California (I live on campus) but I have not been able to find their nest.  This species has a strange disjunct geographic distribution— a population in eastern North America, a population in California and Baja California, and a vast area in central North America where they are absent. These hawks are gorgeous, as this photo of the male shows; the western population is distinctive and particularly colorful.

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Last summer the pair parked their two fledglings for a few weeks in trees very close to my house. One of the fledglings decided that its favorite perch was a branch a couple of feet from a neighbor’s bird feeder. Fortunately for the local birds visiting the feeder, red-shouldered hawks in our area eat mostly herps [reptiles] and some mammals (pocket gophers). The chick was also a complete klutz as a hunter and we watched it try and fail to catch earthworms on our lawn.

While the chicks lounged, the two parents hunted farther afield for food which they brought back to the chicks periodically. This chick got an alligator lizard and the photo shows the bird just about to polish off the lizards head.

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This one got a snake from a parent and this photo shows the tail end of the meal.

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Cheeky fledgling sitting in a tree ten feet from our back door.

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Here’s their curiously disjunct distribution, taken from the Cornell Ornithological Lab site (link above). The purple marks their year-round habitats.

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Jerry Coyne soon to be neutered and taken to Christchurch

March 18, 2014 • 2:33 pm

Gayle Ferguson, Cat Angel™ for Jerry Coyne and his Four Sisters, sends another picture of Jerry and reports on his growth:

He reached the 1kg mark on the weekend!  All the kittens have been through a growth spurt!  This is him sleeping with his sister Molly.

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Jerry (left, above) will see the last of his testicles either this Friday or next Tuesday, and after a short recovery will be taken to his Forever Home in New Zealand next week:

He flies in the evening of Sat March 29.  He’ll go in the same carrier I use to take them to the vet.  I can only just fit the five of them in there together now!

Gayle promises to send pictures of Jerry Coyne’s Big Trip.

 

Prince Rupert’s Drop

March 18, 2014 • 1:52 pm

Here’s another physics phenomenon that, despite being fascinating, I still can’t quite get my head around. It’s Prince Rupert’s Drop, a phenomenon created when molten glass is dripped in a tadpole-like shape into ice-cold water.  This object and its peculiar physical properties have been known since at least 1625, and are seen in this don’t-miss video by Destin of “Smarter Every Day,” famous for demonstrating how cats right themselves when dropped upside down. But this is not Cat Drop, but Prince Rupert’s Drop. Do watch it: the ultra-slow-motion videos (130,000 frames/sec) are amazing.

After watching this and reading about it, I still don’t understand it completely, so readers who do can weigh in. (Note: you have to explain it better than Wikipedia or Destin!)

Of course, as soon as I saw this, my first impulse was to go online and buy one of these drops, but for obvious reasons they’re not readily available. You can buy them at one place, but they can’t be sent to the U.S. Bummer!

Just because. . .

March 18, 2014 • 12:26 pm

I’m writing hard and have no neurons to spare after I exhausted them one my Ecklund post this morning. So let’s have some fun.  First, a contribution by a puckish reader, who has embellished Courtney Love’s diagram of the Malaysian Airline crash:

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See what you started, Matthew?

Read the Roolz!

March 18, 2014 • 9:30 am

I don’t know how often I have to tell new commenters (or remind the old commenters) to read the rules for posting on this website (“Da Roolz!” posted on the sidebar, or here).

See where they are?

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I will try to make this more obvious, perhaps changing the name to “Rules for commenting on this site”. But at any rate, every reader, new or old, should know these. I am continuing to get violations, ranging from people complaining about being censored when I haven’t yet approved their first comment, to people who are asking me to publicize their causes, or telling me that one of their suggestions “would make a good post.” Hey, guys, don’t do that!

Back to business as usual. . .