The Weekend Expedition to Reifel Bird Sanctuary with Wild Research was a fun outing, made better by the good company and great weather. Highlights of the trip were a Great Horned Owl, Saw Whet Owl and American Bittern. Only the Bittern was a cooperative model. I tried a few low angle shots on feeding ducks, but did not have much time to work out the kinks. I think I will try to do more of this in the future, as it is an interesting and humorous perspective.
Below is a selection of the photos…Check out that lovely Bittern!
Mike came along, and brought his 5D MkII and 16-35L!
wake up lazy Great Horned Owl!
This American Bittern was probably the highlight of the trip. Here it catches a stickleback.
Cooper’s and Bald Eagle in the same thermal
Song Sparrow
Bald Eagle
Love me some Bitterns!
The shovelers were getting a bit aggro with each other.
The Weekend Expedition plans have just been finalized! Tomorrow Mike and I will head back out to Reifel Bird Sanctuary to get some shots of another Wild Research Bird ID workshop. The weather is supposed to be great, so I look forward to a great outing!
So this is where I find myself: I am currently employed as a field assistant to my partner Catherine Scott, as she spends the spring and summer of 2016 doing thesis research on Vancouver Island. Over the winter and early spring, I had several interviews for postdoc positions, but ultimately did not get any offers. I am still in the market, as this field gig is not paying much, but this is where my employment situation stands.
Dang, that’s a long trip!
The fieldwork may not pay much, but it sure has been exciting. The first stage of the work involved a ridiculously long roadtrip from Toronto to Texas, and out to LA, up the coast and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria. Our objective in this was threefold: 1) we had to collect some beautiful “Texas widows”, a variety of western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) for later lab research, and 2) we had to attend a wedding in Los Angeles and 3) we needed to get our vehicle to BC for the fieldwork.
Of course, this roadtrip was a great opportunity to get some cool shots of the natural world along the way. In the following shots, you will get a taste of what we encountered.
Catherine taking notes on spiders we collected.
Joseph Lapp, an arachnologist in Austin graciously took us out for some spidering and lunch near the UT Austin field station. We met up with many great people along the way, including Bekka Brodie and Viorel Popescu in Athens OH (former labmates), Alex Wild in Austin, Terry McGlynn in Pasadena, Christy Pitto in southern Oregon, and Thomas Shahan and Kathleen Neeley in northern Oregon, who spent the day with us shooting photos and wandering the canyons. I apologize for not taking more people pictures!
Catherine collects a Texas widow in the boonies of southern Texas.
Here is what the Texas widows look like: the adult females retain the juvenile colour pattern, with flamboyant reds and yellows on the dorsal surface of the abdomen. The extent of this red varies, but this is pretty typical.
Southern Texas is awesome for birds. We saw a great many Crested Caracaras, which was a big highlight of the trip. I last saw these birds in Guyana.
We got to see 3 species of recluse spider. This one is the Big Bend recluse, found about 100 km east of the Pecos River valley.
Another highlight was finding Scytodes spitting spiders. We saw both Scytodes thoracica as well as this unknown (to us) species from southern Texas.
In the Seminole Canyon, we found the only Aphonopelma tarantula we saw on the trip.
It was extremely frustrating to have to burn through Arizona and New Mexico to get to the wedding, as there is absolutely stunning mountains and countryside to explore. Here we are passing by a wonderful region…
After the wedding in LA, we got some opportunity to change the oil, hang out with Terry McGlynn and see some hawks at Palos Verdes.
In Laguna Seca, near Monterey CA
The beautiful Diaea livens, a green crab spider found on oaks in California.
In Monterey, we met up with the invasive Badumna longinqua, a desid spider that makes messy cribellate capture webs very close to the ocean.
While searching for Badumna near the docks in Monterey, we came upon this sea lion chilling out. They are really quite tame in the harbours!
The $500 spidermobile passes north through the Golden Gate
Out for the day with Christy Pitto, at the headwaters of the Rogue River in southern Oregon, we found this beautiful Tibellus, and I found a new angle to shoot it from.
Our coolest spider find was with Christy Pitto, a gorgeous Mecicobothriid from near her cabin.
Catherine spidering with awesome macrophotographer Thomas Shahan in Salem, OR
Catherine giving an impromptu spider lecture to Thomas Shahan and Kathleen Neeley. The $500 spidermobile is in the background.
We embark on the MV Coho from Port Angeles to Victoria
Catherine in the field at Island View Beach. We are working on the lands of the Tsawout First Nation, who have a large reserve near Sidney on the Saanich Peninsula.
initial mapping points for female western black widows we will monitor and observe over the next several months.
This is what we will be watching this summer: a male black widow courting on the web of a female at Island View Beach
We will shift to a largely nocturnal schedule to match the widows. Here Catherine observes courtship on the beach.
So yesterday was my birthday, I am a little older and a little wiser, I think. Because the weather was fine, and I had not been out to take pictures recently, I decided to treat myself to a day of photography in High Park. The weather here in Toronto is getting much colder now, so it was a good thing that I got some awesome presents from Catherine to keep me warm.
A thick, warm hat, a thinner lighter hat, a wonderful sweater and a cool mug!
It was even personalized for me!
This mug is based on a design I made for a t-shirt a few years ago. It derived from a photo, and I manipulated it in Photoshop to look like a woodcut. If you want one yourself, click here. All proceeds to the Caracara Research Foundation (actually most proceeds is profit for Zazzle). If we can sell 40,000 of these, we are in business!
So there is still a little bit of colour in the trees, but they are looking mighty stark. A deciduous forest in winter is a place with very little shade and you can see into it quite fa. As for arthropods, I did not see many!
I found four of these bald-faced hornet nests. I do not have the same rate of discovery in the summer, when there are actually hornets around!
This is what the Eastern Gray Squirrel looks like when alive in its native habitat. There are an absolute ton of them in High Park, about evenly mixed between black and gray morphs. These rodents feed on seeds, primarily acorns, as well as handouts from people. I saw another one eating a tortilla. With this abundance of squirrels, there are also squirrel predators, such as Red-tailed Hawks and a few owls. I saw a hawk, but no owl, but I did find this:
A raptor pellet comprised mainly of squirrel fur. I looked around in the few conifers nearby for hiding raptors, but did not see any. The way a still bird can hide against the bark though, makes me think one may have been there anyway.
One advantage of winter is how low the sun stays all day. Even near noon you can find this slanting angle of light that is much more flattering to subjects than full sun in summer.
The squirrels were the most abundant wildlife I saw, even outnumbering people on this cold Tuesday. I think Toronto could use a good crow population though, as I kind of miss them!
At the southeastern end of the park, I came upon a small flock of chickadees and a couple cardinals. This is a female that appeared to be accompanying a male. I wonder if their pair bonds persist through the winter….
The male remains pretty splendid, even in winter, and these birds are not very shy. They are certainly more brightly coloured than the cardinals I saw in French Guiana!
So that about sums up my birthday walk in the park. It was not the most productive trip, and as winter sets in I would hope to have better photography days once in a while. One of the difficulties of Toronto compared to Vancouver is that Toronto is a place that animals migrate FROM rather than TO, as it is pretty much smack in the middle of a very cold continental region. There will be no winter hummingbirds, or loons or even many ducks. Just the hardy chickadees, nuthatches, jays and others that make this cold place their home year-round.
It is a wonderful thing to give a talk to an enthusiastic audience, especially when comes with a chance to travel and meet new people. I was very lucky to have had this opportunity last week when I went to Houston Texas to give a talk on Red-throated Caracaras to the Houston Audubon Society.
Mary-Anne Weber, along with Juanita Perkins arranged for me to travel to Houston to give this talk, and were my most gracious hosts during my trip. I did not have to stay in a hotel, but instead stayed with my friend Cullen Geiselman, a bat researcher who I met at the Nouragues Station.
I am very grateful to have had this wonderful opportunity, and I thank all of the people who came out to hear me talk.
One of the first things I looked for at the Sanctuary was ants, and I was lucky enough to find this Leptogenys elongata colony.
These are members of the subfamily Ponerinae, and are much different in form from the myrmicines and formicines I am used to.
As their name suggests, they are gracile (slender and long limbed) and likely either run fast or climb trees. On this day, they weren’t going anywhere quickly because it was cold and rainy.
On Friday, after my talk, I went out with Mary-Anne Weber and Joe Smith for a birding outing. Here is something we don’t often see in Canada!
This osprey allowed a close approach using the time-tested technique of pretending we didn’t see it!
A couple of local dogs who thought they owned the place!
Several osprey were fishing in the stormwater retention ponds.
A white pelican flies by some construction. This is likely to be another Canadian visitor to Houston.
White pelicans engaged in feeding. They are not spectacular divers like Brown Pelicans, but they sure are majestic. .
This is a juvenile Cooper’s Hawk, which Mary-Anne ID’ed correctly. I was thrown off by the white splotches on the back, which we do not often get on the West Coast.
From the front it looks much like our Cooper’s Hawks.
Everything is bigger in Texas, including the Great Blue Herons! Well, all over the east they are bigger than our West Coast form.
The closest approach of a White Pelican.
Back at the Sanctuary, I found some more ants, this time a very very tiny myrmicine. Any ideas about what this is?
The workers were dimorphic, with this large headed form being present.
I even managed to find a jumping spider, despite the cold wet weather.
And finally, a mystery ground spider, which we will be in a better position to ID after this summer, when Catherine and I will attend a workshop in spider taxonomy in Arizona.
After I left Houston, I took the opportunity to do some aerial photography of the western landscapes we flew over. Here the mountains and deserts look like an alien landscape with the desaturation of distance.
Thursday morning last week was a pretty special day; it was the day I defended my PhD thesis. For those of you who don’t know, a thesis defence is a formal examination, wherein the candidate (me) gives a public seminar on their thesis, and then is questioned by an examining committee, generally composed of their supervisory committee, plus an internal and external examiner, and all headed by a chairperson selected by the department.
Here is the room I defended in. We figure it had 45-50 people in total.
Catherine made some great caracara cookies to go with the coffee and water (which is required at defences!).
My examining committee was headed by Dr. Margo Moore, who did a great job keeping the event rolling and the atmosphere relaxed. Dr. David Lank was my internal examiner, a great guy I have always gone to with questions on bird research (we do not have a lot of institutional experience to draw on in a chemical ecology lab). My external examiner was Dr. Keith Bildstein, a researcher at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, with decades of experience in raptor research and in particular experience studying Striated Caracaras in the Falkland Islands and Patagonia. My advisory committee consisted of Dr. Sean O’Donnell, who was absent for the defence, but there in spirit (he is doing fieldwork in Costa Rica), Dr. Ron Ydenberg, an expert in bird foraging behaviour, and of course my supervisor Dr. Gerhard Gries.
I gave my 40 minute presentation, outlining my research on Red-throated Caracaras, focusing on several aspects of their biology:
It is not clear that Red-throated caracaras build nests, as our observations in 2008 and 2009 showed that they nest in cleared areas of large epiphytic bromeliads. They seem to have only a single chick per nesting, and have some of the most extreme cooperative breeding in the bird world, with up to 6 or 7 adults providing care to a single chick.
They are specialist predators on social wasps, and probably are responsible for a lot of brood mortality in these animals. They prey on a wide range of genera, mainly swarm-founders and almost invariably aerial nesters.
They are extremely social, vocal and territorial, with a repertoire of calls and displays, and even use physical conflict in territorial disputes.
Contrary to previous hypotheses, we found no evidence of a chemical wasp repellent, but discovered that the caracaras exploit the absconding response of their swarm-founding prey to avoid harm when attacking wasp nests.
The work in my thesis was not done single-handedly. I had great help from field assistants, granting agencies and the CNRS is Guyane. Here is Onour Moeri, my assistant in 2008 and 2011 with a Red-throated Caracara we had radio-tracked.
This is Tanya Jones, a biology graduate who is now a triathlon coach, who came to French Guiana with me in 2009 and 2010.
Catherine Scott, also known as @cataranea, came in 2012 for help with the army ant portion of the thesis (soon to be published!).
Patrick Chatelet, of CNRS Guyane was our good friend and host for much of our fieldwork. He has been at the Nouragues station for longer than most of the monkeys.
Philippe Gaucher of CNRS Guyane, is a great guy to have on your side when doing raptor or frog research in the rainforest. Here he is climbing the 2008 nest tree for the first-ever glimpse into a Red-throated Caracara’s nest.
My mom attended the defence, and it was great having her there. She has encouraged me through all the years of this process!
A bird in the hand: at the end of the seminar, I was questioned for about 1.5 h. Most of the questioning was more in the form of a discussion and I found I had quite a bit to say to everything thrown at me. In the end, the decision of the committee was to accept the thesis with minor revisions. When that is complete, I will have fulfilled all the requirements for the PhD program, and the school will award my degree.
After the defence, we had lunch with teh committee, and then went to Trout Lake for a bit of a celebration. Here are some shots from the defence and the after-party. I know I have missed some important faces (Gerhard and Regine and Keith Bildstein!), but I hope you will forgive me, as I was just feeling relief!
I am always a fan of raptors, and have a special place in my heart for social and predation behaviour. Here is a story that combines all three! In the latest issue of Journal of Raptor Research, a remarkable observation of a large group of Golden Eagles harassing elk on a steep ridge is reported (but paywalled).
Matt O’Connell and Michael Kochert witnessed and filmed the astonishing sight of at least 8 eagles repeatedly stooping at a group of elk, either trying to drive them off a cliff, or perhaps just playing around.
Golden Eagles are known to prey on ungulates, sometimes by driving them off cliffs, but the authors are cautious at definitively stating the motivation of these birds. I would suggest that the hypothesis of play and that of predation are not mutually exclusive. I could certainly see a great selective advantage for these carnivorous birds to engage in “play” that sometimes results in the grisly death of a large ungulate.
If you would like to see the video, here it is below. What do you think?
References
Bergo, G. 1987. Eagles as predators on livestock and deer. Fauna Norvegica Series C, Cinclus10:95–102.
Deblinger, R.D. and A.W. Alldredge. 1996. Golden Eagle predation on pronghorns in Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin. Journal of Raptor Research 30:157–159.
Erwins, P.J. 1987. Golden Eagles attacking deer and sheep. Scottish Birds 14:209–210.
Zettergreen, B. 2006. Golden Eagle attacks and kills yearling mountain goat. Wildlife Afield3:27–28.
John Borden, a pioneer in Canadian chemical ecology research, steps up when the winner of his scholarship is announced.
Well, after a hectic 6 day trip to Guelph and back for the ESC/ESO Joint Annual Meeting, I am back in the mid-fall world of Vancouver. The conference was a big success, and was very well-organized. What I particularly liked about how it was run was having the Graduate Student Showcase and President’s Prize sections with no competing symposia, the multitude of workshops and schmoozing opportunities, and the great food.
Highlights of the conference for me were:
1)The photography workshop with Alex Wild, which brought a great group of people together to learn more about insect photography
2) The social media workshop, hosted by Crystal Ernst and Morgan Jackson, two masters of the art of Twittering and blogging, explaining exactly how social media can enrich and accelerate scientific work.
3) Laura Timms‘ Heritage Lecture, which brought a unique analysis of the ups and downs of Canadian entomology, with reference to the politics and economy of insect science
4) Steve Marshall‘s Gold Medal address, in which he sought to redefine the taxonomic impediment in more friendly and hopeful terms
5) Having a 20 min slot at the Graduate Student Showcase to bring my screaming, insect-murdering birds to the entomological world! This was a great honour and I think the talk went down really well. I made the argument that these birds are in fact true professional entomologists, being that their whole lives are devoted to finding and exploiting insects!
6) Brian Brown‘s fascinating talk on phorid fly biology and using a Los Angeles as a biodiversity research field site
7) The conference banquet, where Alex Wild gave a great talk on how digital photography has the potential to be revolutionary in the way people get out and view nature.
8) Hanging out with fellow entomologists, making contacts and being social!
John Huber and Alex Smith (who I first met in the jungle) in conversation.
Dr. Wild showing off some beautiful prints,
A meeting of the spider minds! Raphaël Royauté and Catherine Scott.
Check out the cuteness!
Crystal and Morgan brought insects to photograph, Alex brought his baby girl!
Morgan Jackson is honoured for all his great contributions to organizing the conference.
This is the moment when Thelma Finlayson gets a standing ovation in absentia!
Photo copyright Phillipe Gaucher, 2008. The fruit sitting near the chick is from the tree itself.
Determining the diet of birds is difficult undertaking. Because predation is so difficult to observe in the field, a relatively unbiased way to gather data on food habits is to place a camera in the nest to record the types of food brought to chicks. In my literature search on Red-throated Caracaras, I had come upon several references of gut content examination from shot specimens [1], as well as some field observations by J.M. Thiollay [2] and Whittaker [3], but little in the way of quantifiable data on the diet of caracaras. Because my research project was on the adaptations of a specialist predator of social wasps, we needed to first determine whether Ibycter americanus was in fact a specialist!
There are lots of delicious wasps in the jungle, like these Apoica albimacula, but are the caracaras eating them?
In 2008, my field assistant Onour Moeri and I were extremely fortunate to discover a nest of Red-throated Caracaras not far from the Inselberg Camp of the Nouragues Station in Central French Guiana. They appeared to be nesting in a large bromeliad, 45 m up a Chrysophyllum lucentifoliumtree. These big trees in the Sapotaceae produce a large hard fruit, that despite its copius latex, is a favourite food of spider monkeys (Ateles paniscus).
There were certainly lots of spiders coming to the tree every few days, raining down discarded fruits from high above. We evacuated the area as soon as they reached the tree, as the hard, heavy fruits were travelling very quickly when they hit the ground!
This find was a great breakthrough for us, as we now had a reliable focal point to find the birds and observe their behavior. We were extremely excited, because this was only the third nest ever observed by scientists, and as such was an amazing opportunity to gather data on the habits of the birds. We spent the first few weeks on the ground below the nest tree, watching with binoculars as adult birds arrived with food. We observed them bringing wasp nests and fruit, arriving roughly every half hour. This was not the most fun thing to do, as sitting still in the jungle looking up all day is actually kind of difficult, especially when it rains. The data we were getting was spotty and probably quite biased…Not good!
The nest bromeliad!
We also found another nest in 2009, in another bromeliad 40 m up a different tree. We have good reason to suspect it was made by the very same group. I am not showing any footage of this, due to its low quality! We got good data from it however.
Luckily, going above and beyond the call of duty, Philippe Gaucher (the technical director at Nouragues, and a good friend) was kind enough to track down some video recording equipment in Cayenne and bring it back for us to set up a nest camera. On Feb 2 he climbed the nest tree to install it. The nest contained a single caracara chick, which we later sexed as a female, via a genetic analysis from a plucked feather. The still pictures Philippe took up there were the very first (that I know of) ever taken of a Red-throated Caracara chick. Evidently, these caracaras had not constructed the nest at all, but rather had torn the bromeliad leaves to make a platform to lay an egg on. Like many insects and frogs, the Red-throated Caracaras are bromeliad breeders!
The photos also showed evidence of predation on both wasps and millipedes! We were extremely excited to have this equipment installed, and that very night we started getting video from the nest.
Philippe climbing the nest tree to install the camera.
Each evening, I would go down to the nest after dark (there were a lot of tarantulas I became quite familiar with) and lug the DVR and usually the 20 kg battery back up the hill. Then every morning before dawn, I would take the recharged battery down and replace the DVR for that day’s recordings. The setup involved a large plastic box, to shield the DVR from rain, plus a tarp to do more of the same thing. With the DVR running in the box, there was little danger of water damage (it was the rainy season), but to leave it there at night without power was out of the question. Unpowered electronic devices (that are not making heat) often succumb to the near 100% humidity of the rainforest.
The DVR in place under the tree. The tarp protects from falling fruit and rain, and the DVR stayed cosy in the Tupperware!
The camera in place over the bromeliad, about 1 m above the nest. Photo by Philippe Gaucher.
After a couple days of recording, we quickly discovered that the “waterproof” camera was less than watertight; our lens had fogged up with internal condensation. A whole day of wasted recording! Phillipe had flown back to Cayenne, so there was nothing for it but to go up the tree myself and fix the camera. I had trained in tree climbing back when I was an environmental activist, so I knew what to do, but still, this was a 45 m straight climb up to a spiky bromeliad, with possibly murderous birds protecting their nest.
The climb was exciting, though relatively uneventful, and I retrieved the camera and dried it out. Then, after jamming a silica gel dessicant pack into the housing, I carefully wrapped every threaded connection with Teflon tape. With the camera returned to the nest, we continued filming.
A Polybia nest brought via an overhead branch.
In total, we managed to get about 100 hours of recording done over 10 days. During that time, we recorded 186 items being brought to the chick, most of which were the nests of social wasps, but also fruits, millipedes and a single snail. Back in the lab, I watched these hours of footage, timing the arrivals and departures, the types of prey, and other aspects of the footage. I organized all of this in a database, which is the best way of storing large amounts of data and retrieving it in a format for analyses.
The chick receives a delivery of an Angiopolybia or Pseudopolybia nest. Notice how packed the brood comb is with larvae and pupae.
Breakdown of the diet over 2 years. Most of the items (and definitely most of the biomass) were the brood-filled nests of social wasps.
A large spirostreptid millipede is brought to the chick.
The large spirostreptid millipedes were brought intact, and were decapitated by the adults, after which they generally tried to feed bits to the chick. Usually, the chick ate very little or perhaps none of this material. These large millipedes are well-defended with a lot of noxious benzoquinones, which are toxic, irritating and carcinogenic compounds. My suspicion is that these are in some way related to chemical defense against ectoparasites, as some birds as well as capuchin monkeys are reported to anoint themselves with the millipedes’ secretions [4].
Onour with a millipede on a stick!
The nasty, nasty secretion from these docile animals. It burns the skin, and seems to stain it purple. Oh yeah, and then your skin smells of millipedes.
Though we had no birds marked, on a few occasions we saw more than two adults bringing prey to the chick, confirming Thiollay [2] and Whittaker’s [3] observations of cooperative breeding . In 2009 we captured and colour-banded four adults and were able to determine that as many as 6 and most likely 7 birds bringing prey to a single chick [5]! This is highly unusual in raptors, and another reason I love these caracaras so much. What kind of remarkable social system is this? Which individuals get to breed? Are all the helpers young from previous years (delayed dispersal) or are there joiners from other groups? We still do not know the answers to these questions, but I hope to find out in the future.
Two adults deliver fruit, while a third remains in the nest with the chick.
Watching the videorecordings of nesting behaviour has been one of the highlights of my career so far. Seeing this drama unfold for the very first time was so exciting; no one had observed this species ever before, and my job was to describe it to the world. What a treat! And to watch closely at all the magical moments in a young bird’s life was just priceless. Check out this caracara chick observing an insect flying overhead. The interest she shows in this event is so cool to see, and you get the notion that she is learning lessons every waking moment that will help her out when she is out foraging for herself.
This young caracara is a truly professional entomologist!
By March 17, we had no more time left in the field, and no one to continue the camera work. We had to take down the setup and get packed up to return to Canada. When I went up the tree to retrieve the camera, it was bittersweet, as we had succeeded in getting great data from our first field season, but our lovely caracara chick would grow up and fledge without us being there to see it. In just a few weeks of observation, she had already stolen our hearts.
Of course, I brought my camera up to take a farewell portrait.
Farewell, little caracara chick! Best of luck, and thanks for all the data! By the way, what is that on your beak?
Yesterday, I crawled my sick ass out of bed to meet Catherine and attend an important event in downtown Vancouver: the Stand Up for Science Rally. This Canada-wide action was a call to arms for citizens and scientists alike to protest the Canadian Conservative Government’s abysmal track record on science.
Hopefully this event will raise public consciousness about the current threats to science and science policy in Canada, and our voices will be heard. Catherine and I were glad to do our part and felt the day well worth it. So sit back, enjoy the photos and click some links to find out about some of the great science advocates we have in this country.
Joe Foy of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee explains how exactly the Conservative War on Science will affect wildlands management.
Dr. Sarah Otto of UBC makes the leap from evolutionary biology to science policy, by outlining the failure of the Canadian Government to take seriously the Species At Risk Act . Of over one hundred SARA submissions in the last 2 years, representing years of effort by conservation scientists, only 2 have made it to Cabinet.
Dr. Alexandra Morton, former whale researcher and now staunch defender of the wild coast, gave an impassioned appeal for unfettered research and science communication at the federal level. Her organization has had to undertake their own research and monitoring in order to help police the coast, something that the Feds should have been on long ago.
Dr. Thomas Kerr, an addictions specialist working with the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS explains the Conservative-led attack against the proven results of Vancouver’s Insite safe injection site and other harm-reduction initiatives in Canada.
