An Avian Sensory Organ

Male Northern Cardinal

I have suspected for a long time that birds must have some kind of organ that allows them to determine when a major weather system is approaching. There is a very obvious parallel between the number of birds at the feeder and severe weather. Turns out, there is a connection. Not only that, it was discovered one hundred years ago! That didn't take too long to enter into the stream of modern knowledge.

Female Northern Cardinal

The person who discovered this organ around 1912 or so was named Giovanni Vitali, an Italian anatomist. He was nominated for the Nobel in 1934 for the discovery of what is called the paratympanic organ (PTO) found in the middle ear of most birds. Yes, birds have ears. Vitali postulated that the sense organ functioned as a detector of minute changes in barometric pressure.

Tufted Titmouse

It is this receptor that puts birds in a frenzy to feed and find shelter before a storm arrives.  The PTO is like a built-in barometer which signals that air pressure is falling. It causes birds to change their behavior towards other birds. The sensory organ also causes them to change when they are active as well as their foraging habits.

Male House Finch

By surgically removing the PTO in pigeons, Vitali found that the organ was indispensable to flight. I am speculating here, but I would be willing to bet that eventually, scientists discover that the same organ plays a role in coordinating large murmurations (see my blog from November 27th) of birds, those large flocks of birds that seem to move and change direction as one organism.

Carolina Chickdadee

In the one hundred years since Vitali's discovery, there has been amazingly little research performed in the area. Birds are so sensitive to barometric pressure that the PTO essentially functions as an altimeter, helping to inform them of where they are in the air column. Not surprisingly, there is an equivalent sense organ in fish called the spiracular sense organ which has a similar function. When you think about how fish need to know where they are in the water column and how schools of fish can act very similar to large flocks of birds, it is not surprising that they would have a similar sense
organ.

Female Red-winged Blackbird

Navigation, migration, flight. There are modern mysteries in each of these areas that have yet to be understood. I wonder if the paratympanic organ isn't key in all of them. The difficulty of reaching and operating on this organ is to a large degree what has hindered research on it.

Male Common Grackle

Apparently, not all birds have a PTO. Then again, some birds that you might not expect to have the organ - flightless penguins, for example - do have the organ. When you consider that emperor penguins, for one, are known to coordinate their swimming (water column) in groups, perhaps it is not to be unexpected. Plus, penguins navigate over long distances of open ocean foraging for food before returning to feed their young. It is possible the organ plays a function here also.

Dark-eyed Junco

It will be interesting to see what scientists discover about this fascinating organ in the future.

Avian Weather Prediction

Over the years of feeding birds, I have noticed a correlation between the amount of activity at the feeder and the approach of a significant storm. This is especially true in the winter.

When a snow storm is nearing the area, the birds begin to act very similar to panicked supermarket shoppers stocking up on supplies. Suddenly, there is a much larger contingent of local birds than usual all wanting to take a turn on the feeder. I have gotten to where I trust their word more than the local weathermen.

The unusual thing about these photos is the number of Northern Cardinals at the feeder. Cardinals are really nasty birds. You may think they are beautiful and, yeah, I guess they are, but the have very nasty personalities. Plus, they are always wanting to hog the feeder. They will get on the feeder and sit there eating seeds and chasing away anyone else who tries to land - including other cardinals.

They are also very territorial. They are monogamous birds - at least through one breeding season - and once they pair off, they claim a territory and defend it pretty intensely. The feeder is more or less considered a neutral zone, but if a pair from a territory a little farther afield shows up, there will be a major brawl.

In this photo, there are thirteen Cardinals; some are pairs, some are not. What is interesting is that they suspended the normal animosity shown to one another so that they could all have a chance to get some seed. These birds have to represent several acres of territories in the surrounding neighborhood and some may even normally live a couple of streets over, but they are all here because of the weather.

Most of the pictures focus on cardinals because I thought it was so unusual to see so many of them all at one time, but cardinals were not the only birds coming to the feeder during the storm. Here is a photo which is more representative of the variety of birds that appeared. They include Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Tufted Titmice, House Finches, Carolina Chickadees, Snow Buntings and what looks like a female Red-winged Blackbird. In other words, many of the seed eating birds in the neighborhood were showing up.

It turns out, there is a sensory structure in many birds that actually "warns" them about an approaching storm. I don't think it is too well known and I never heard anything about it until recently. I will go into more detail about it tomorrow.

Hunting waterfowl 2

When I arrived at the river one morning, I was greeted by this boat blind. I almost immediately thought to myself, "Good luck with that." Having spent a lot of hours in the immediate area, I knew I had rarely seen any ducks in that spot. I was there for several hours and they never fired a shot. As blinds go, it probably isn't a bad one but, as they say in real estate, "Location, location, location."

It may look like I am right up on these hunters scaring off any chance of shooting a duck, but this photo was taken through a telephoto lens and I am actually several hundred yards away.

I have noticed just from the birds on my back deck, they are very aware when something is different. Don't think you can float a boat in a spot and they are not going to notice. They become very wary of anything new. That is true of at least the birds that habitually visit a spot.

So there is a certain advantage to using a blind like this permanent structure that sits on the far side of the river. After a while, the birds accept it as part of the natural landscape and don't give it another thought.

These geese I saw the other day prove my point. They don't seem to see any danger in swimming near the blind. But, then again, I have never seen anyone actually using the blind to hunt. That immediate area is in an ideal location for hunting both geese and ducks because they both frequent that spot a lot.

The blinds make a convenient place for the birds to eat fish or just rest. I think it would be interesting to be able to go over and look at the roof on that blind to see what kinds of bones are there and how numerous they are. Besides eagles, I have seen osprey, kingfishers and great blue heron use it as a place to spot or eat fish. Whoever built it took the time to try to camouflage it with marsh grass, but much of it had fallen into disrepair.

Here is another blind a little farther down the river that was also being used by eagles as a dinner table. You can see the fish hanging down below the bird on the right.

I tried using a portable blind at one time to film birds, but I found it too restricting. It was difficult to see the sweep of the area and I never felt conclusively that it was an advantage. The birds knew I was there anyway. I decided that if I just didn't move around too much and stayed quiet, it would be just as effective.

Hunting waterfowl

I don't hunt myself. That doesn't mean I'm anti-hunting. I'm not. As long as the sport is not abused, I'm not against it. From my experience with fishing, however, I know that a sport like hunting can get very expensive. My wife and I were fishing fools for years and we were good at it. Saltwater, fresh water, lake, pond or river - we were there. You cannot put a price on enjoyment of a sport, but if you were simply weighing the money spent on equipment versus fish, pound for pound - even if you were highly successful - it would be expensive. Boats and trailers and rods and reels and licenses and registration and safety equipment and tackle and on and on. That is why I never got into hunting. Been there; done that.

If hunting is your thing, however, I say, "Go for it." I have seen a few methods of waterfowl hunting from time to time while I am out filming birds. Some of them have been interesting and motivated me to do a little research to find out about the methods they were employing. These guys were returning from hunting in a blind along the river.

The most interesting method I've seen is called "sneak boat" hunting. The method can be employed with or without the use of decoys. In this image, the hunter is has quite a raft of decoys. The group over on the left are probably live birds. The sneak boat normally has a very shallow draft and a very low silhouette. The hunter lies flat in the boat and only sits up to shoot when the birds fly over. The boat is suppose to be mistaken for a tree trunk or log floating around in the water. But, IMHO, birds are not stupid.

This method actually involves two boats. The other boat is used to tow the sneak boat into position and is there as support for the sneak boat. Those decoys take up a lot of space and have to be transported on the larger boat. That is probably what those containers are near the stern.

Here is another group of hunters on a different day using the same method. Looks like fun, doesn't it? I was out there in the same wind and cold that day, but while I was cold, they were probably cold and wet. The ducks in the foreground are probably thinking, as long as we don't fly, they can't shoot at us.

Here are the same guys calling it quits. Notice the sneak boat is now upside down on the bow of the boat. I imagine that is pretty tricky to do in a chop like what was going on that day. Were they successful? I don't know. I would hear their guns going off every once in a while, but I couldn't tell if they actually got any ducks.

Ahead of the Storm

This image is a composite of two photographs rather than a straight photograph. The two images were taken nearly thirty years apart. I took the photo of the working boat on Smith Island with a film camera circa 1975, while the cloud photo was taken with an early digital camera about thirty years later. They were composited in Photoshop, then taken into a program called Corel Painter. It is just as sophisticated as Photoshop, but is geared towards artists rather than photographers. Using the wonderful digital media and brushes in that program, I painted over the composited image to give it a painted look.

I wrote yesterday about how the islands of the Chesapeake Bay are disappearing, but it isn't just the islands in the Bay. Many of the barrier islands along the Atlantic coast of the Maryland and Virginia also suffer from the same problem.

Smith Island, however, is the prime example of this loss because of it's unique history and heritage. In the past 150 years, the island has lost more than 3,000 acres to erosion.

To visit Smith Island is to step back in time. Island residents can trace their lineage back to the original English colonists who first inhabited the island in the 17th century, about twelve generations. Even today, the residents can be difficult to understand because, living in a largely closed environment, they still speak in the Cornish dialect of their fore bearers. As the island has continued to erode, the population has also declined from roughly 700 people in 1960 to less than three hundred today.

Hearing that sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay and along the East coast were rising at twice the world average made me sceptical. After all, doesn't water seek its own level? I mean, you don't see water piling up on one side of a bathtub under normal circumstances. But having read articles about the problem in the Chesapeake Bay Journal have helped me to understand how worrisome the trend is. The entire microcosm of society on Smith Island could easily disappear over the next 30 to 100 years.

It turns out there are a number of factors affecting sea levels. The loss of glacial ice in Antarctica has more of an impact on the East coast of the continental U.S. then almost anywhere else in the world. This has to do with the global positioning of continents as well as gravitational forces, tidal forces and strong storms that devastate coastal areas through erosion. And, believe it or not, subsidence of the entire region as a result of the last ice age is still occurring.

Like I said yesterday, these types of environmental stories are not something you see in the regular news media. The Bay Journal has been my go to source for understanding issues unique to our region. I highly encourage you to visit their website, friend them on Facebook, and subscribe to either their email version or hard copy of their monthly newspaper.

At the time I completed this image several years ago, I entitled it "Ahead of the Storm." Little did I realize at the time how appropriate the title was.

Islands of the Bay

Many of the islands of the Chesapeake Bay are slowly disappearing. Due to the presence of people on Smith Island and Tangier, their predicament is a little more well known. But the disappearance of Bay islands has been going on for decades.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman both vacationed on Poplar Island. It once had a small town with a population of about one hundred people in the late 1800's. By 1990, the island was gone.

It is back on the map, however, because of a project which takes the dredging from the shipping channel leading into Baltimore Harbor and deposits it in the location of the former island with the goal of restoring it. Eventually, it is hoped the island will have over 1500 acres.

Unfortunately, as promising as the project sounds, human intervention in environmental problems often doesn't work nearly as well as natural processes. The island is suppose to be habitat for shorebirds and waterfowl, but the dredging contain bacteria which actually sickens birds. This past summer, more than 700 birds died of botulism on Poplar Island. The dead birds attracted maggots which then attracted more birds which then became the next wave of sick birds.

While you may not hear about these kinds of problems in the normal news media, there is a way to be informed of environmental issues affecting the Bay area. There is a monthly publication in the form of a newspaper of (usually) around forty pages that I highly recommend. It is called the Chesapeake Bay Journal. You can subscribe to it by accessing their website at www.bayjournal.com. It is a 501 (c) (3) organization, so donations are tax deductible.

Not only do they cover the news, but they also have an extensive bulletin board feature which lists a host of current outdoor activities in the region that would be of interest to many parents who would like to teach their children to appreciate and respect the environment. I would encourage everyone to subscribe. They will send the newspaper for free, but after reading a issue or two, it would be nice to make a donation.

Last Day

I have paid my last visit to the river for this season. It surprises me how quickly seasons change and the look of the river changes. Most of the birds that do migrate are gone leaving the river to the few that stay, such as the Bald Eagle. In many more northerly parts of the country eagles migrate too, but they generally stay in the Chesapeake Bay region year-round. Many of the eagles that do migrate make this area their destination. The eagle population at the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna increases dramatically this time of year from the forty or fifty residents to a couple hundred or more.

At this time of year, I am mainly interested in capturing Fall foliage at the river and any birds are a bonus. There was a sizable flock of Canada Geese that may have been there all night. They were there when I arrived, so I don't know. I was hoping to capture photos of them flying off.

Tides can vary enormously for a number of reasons including the moon's position, recent precipitation and wind. The dark stain on the dock pilings indicates how high the tide can reach. The water level in this photo is a good two to two-and-a-half feet below the high tide mark on the dock. I have rarely seen it this low. I think it had to do with the wind blowing water out of the Bay. I don't know what the attraction was for the seagulls. I had never seen them there before.

Some waterfowl can take off straight up into the air from the surface of the water while others need to be able to "walk" across the water. Cormorants fall into the latter category. I love to film them taking off because it is a process that occurs too fast to be able to examine with just the naked eye. They have these huge floppy feet which actually pull the water up in piles rather than create a hole where their feet slap the water. This photo was taken at 1/2000th of a second, so it freezes the water in place pretty well.

One of my favorite scenes in the stretch of river. It is always nice if there is an Eagle or a Great Blue Heron sitting on the dead falls, but that was not to be on this morning.

The nice thing about geese is they will let you know when they are getting ready to leave. They chat it up before leaving, maybe talking about where they want to go. Who knows? I just know when you hear it, get ready. This is the type of iconic shot I think of when I think of geese in the Fall.

There are not too many places in the county where you can see an expansive view of an area. Although there are a lot of rolling hills, there are a scarcity of places you can see more than a few acres at a time. The river, though, has the advantage of allowing quite a bit of room between the camera and the scene so that more landscape can be included as well as more of the sky.

Throw in a few geese and you have the makings of a nice scenic. The geese get very restless this time of year. They don't like being shot at. At our house, I notice in the early Fall when they first begin to return to the cornfields with their young, they fly fairly low. Once they have been shot at, however, they travel much higher, out of range of the guns.

The geese fly up and down the river looking for a safe haven from the guns. Some flocks are huge. This photo represents only part of the flock. There were many more behind this disorganized clot of birds.

There are other places to film birds that allow someone with a camera to get much closer. So as the seasons change up, it is time for me to change up too. I have done a little scouting around over the summer. I hope to have some success over the next few months filming waterfowl in other locations.