Condor games

In elementary school they made boys play my least-favorite-except-dodgeball game. It consisted of everyone chasing after whoever had the ball, trying to mug them so that everyone could then violate the new ball-carrier. I was mortified by the aggression of it more than afraid of the assaults, as I made only transparently symbolic attempts to even catch the riot.

Over a decade later (December 2011) on a California mountain, I stepped out of a US government SUV to watch the world's largest flock of North America's biggest land birds playing this same game. The US Fish and Wildlife Service releases captive bred California Condors at Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge. Huge, ugly, smelly, fascinating, beautiful, precious birds, they are highly endangered and carefully managed. I was an intern on the Condor Recovery Program, and first thing every morning my assignment was to make sure we knew where they were. This morning I found them up Hopper Mountain with a Coke can. Condors, carrion eaters, are drawn to red, and prone to swallowing (and dying from) garbage. The Refuge is closed to the public, but trucks heading to oil wells in the mountains have to pass though, and we often found litter along those roads.

I radioed Mike Stockton, the flamboyant hippy cowboy biologist in charge. "Morning Mike, I'm looking at the whole flock standing on the road. They found a Coke can, and they all want it."

"You'd better just take it," was his only reply. "Roger that," I said, girding up.

This particular crumbling road, like many of those on the Refuge, had steep slopes up and down on either side. The condors, each four feet tall and armed with a beak that could disembowel a mastodon, were gathered at a bend in the road, a peninsula that ended in a cliff. Condors are too heavy to fly with anything in their beaks or feet, so R7, the dominant male, was cornered. Normally the whole flock was scared of him, but now his armament was full of Coke can. Several other condors charged him. He dropped it, jumped off, spread his ten foot wings and lifted skyward. He flew so close over my head I could almost taste his foulness, and could feel the heavy flapping of his wings. While I concentrated for a moment on not wetting myself, another condor grabbed the can and ran straight toward me. Fifteen birds, each incredibly important for this species' survival, each reeking of carrion and looking every bit like carnivorous dinosaur zombies prone to projectile vomiting, came running after the can and thereby towards me.

I took a step towards them and they stopped. I took a few more steps, and the lead bird, the one with the can, turned, ran right through the thicket of snapping beaks, and was back at the cliff's end, surrounded. I continued slowly forward.  A few more steps forward and most of the condors had jumped. Two more steps, the air filled with giant birds and their aroma, and it was just me and the condor with the can, still on the cliff's edge.

He hissed and flushed his face purple, trying to scare me off. "Boo!," I replied in kind, and he fled. Lunging after the can, I lay on my belly and examined my prize, a beat-up Coke can with one beak-tip-shaped bite snipped from its middle. I got to my feet, realizing I was now the one surrounded at cliff's end. I stuffed the can inside my jacket and tried to look fierce. We all stood there for a while. One condor after another stepped off the edge and floated into the morning sky. I finally won that god-awful game.

Never pass up the chance to visit a good pile of carrion

A persistent problem

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I have a particular fondness for condors, so when I see an article about California Condors published in The Condor (a major ornithology journal), I usually take a quick look.  The look in this case was very short, because I am on my way to other things, but I found it interesting enough to mention to you.

Captive bred condors have over the last couple of decades been reintroduced to both southern (Ventura county) and central (Bug Sur) California, and young birds in both places have begun nesting. Their success has been limited, especially around Big Sur, where many of the egg shells have been extremely thin, leading to dehydration of the egg, fragility, etc. Why, you may well ask, should the eggshells be so thin around Big Sur? The suggested answer is that these condors do a lot of feeding on dead sea lions that wash up on the nearby beaches, and those sea lions do a lot of their feeding off southern California, in an area where an old DDT factory used to discharge its wastes into the ocean. DDT, and its breakdown product, DDE, are extremely persistent toxins, and biomagnify. So even though DDT was banned in the US in 1972, the marine ecosystems in that area are still quite contaminated. Algae pick up the DDE, small fish eat many times their weight in algae, bigger fish eat many times their weight in small fish, etc., up the food chain through sea-lions and eventually condors, who get a highly concentrated dose from their picnic on the beach. The Ventura condors don't often eat sea lion, and so don't get so much DDE. The Big Sur condors can see sea lion beaches from their majestically placed release area, and get enough DDE to seriously impair their reproduction. This of course is not the first time they have had this problem, but it is a reminder that DDT, while banned, is far from gone.

More D

Old dried fruit bits mixed with crumbs of my daughter's favorite crackers, all spilling from a torn, unmarked plastic bag: an excellent find. Pumpkin seeds scattered on the shelf along with some paprika and vegi-broth powder: perfect. The back of the pantry is just the place when the bird-seed runs low. I have these bursts of energy, enough to refill the bird-feeder, before the coughing and the need to clutch the nearest wall return. The antibiotics have basically cleared the mycoplasma out of my lungs and ears, but the underlying virus is still there.

When the vitamin D deficiency was diagnosed, the nurse told me to take 10µg of supplement a day and come back in three months for another blood test. I didn't entirely expect to continue being sick for that whole three months, but that seems to be the result. A friend at work told me he takes 70mg of vitamin D a day, which is 7,000 times as much as I am taking, so I decided to do some research about dosage. He must mean 70µg, as he is still alive. 

Different countries recommend somewhere between 10µg and 30µg per day for a healthy adult, and levels up to 100µg per day are considered entirely safe, and EU guidelines recommend this level for patients with very low serum vitamin D levels (which I have). So my piddling 10µg plus whatever tiny bits I get from my diet (they don't add vitamins to dairy here, and I'm a vegetarian) and the no sunlight I encounter probably isn't alleviating my deficiency all that fast. So I've decided to take dosage into my own hands. I'm going to start taking 50µg per day, and scale back if and when my blood test shows that I have a healthy level. I would need to take thrice that much for several months to risk vitamin D toxicity. 

In the mean time, I will slump against this wall and watch the birds on the feeder. The magpie really likes those paprika-flavored raisins.

Friendly advice for writing your first grant application, actually first edition

As a first year graduate student studying birds in a university natural history museum, I largely failed to learn how to make a decent specimen out of a dead bird. While there are many reasons for my failure, including a lack of aptitude and a lack of effort, at the time it felt impossible in part because the ornithology curator who was teaching a group of us how to do it was just too good at it. She would hold up the dead bird, make a tiny incision in its belly, and then her hands would spin around it and the entire carcass of the bird would be outside of its now inverted skin, which she would hold up to show us. Then she’d grab some bits of wood and cotton, and again her hands would whirl around the bird for a few seconds, after which the bird would be right-side out and restored to a life-like shape, its feathers unruffled, its head turned to the side just so and toes overlapping, as though it was patiently listening for something. I would try to repeat this process on my assigned dead bird, would screw it up somehow, and she would come over, sigh, take the bird for a few seconds and hand it back to me, several steps ahead from where I was. Then she would say, “See?”

I never did learn, or make it in ornithology. From this I learned that of the great challenges of good teaching is that you have to know the topic well, be interested in it and have a strong aptitude for it, but you also have to be able remember what it was like to not know it at all empathize with those with less inherent aptitude.

At the time, I was also learning to write grant applications. I wrote several that first year in grad school, none of which were funded. This was partly because the ideas behind the proposal weren’t well worked out, but partly because I didn’t really know what I was doing as a grant-writer. I have now written a lot of different grant applications, lets guess 40, almost every one to a different funding source. I don’t know that I can claim to know the topic well enough to teach it, or to have a particularly strong aptitude, but I can well remember what it feels like to not know where to begin, which is a very good place to start. So with that in mind, I’m going to offer some thoughts for those trying to write their first research grant applications. I’ve recently written what I learned about applying for grants from NIH and ERC. This is going to be a lot more basic.

First, consider this picture of the time my wife turned into a giant and flattened part of southern Denmark. Pretty cool, huh? Not even Photoshopped.

Okay, now down to business.

1. Don't panic. There is a good chance it seems to you at this point like you are somehow supposed to know how grant-writing is done, and that everyone around you magically knows how to do it, but there is a good chance that no one has ever provided you with any guidance on the subject. Or at least that is where I was at when I was in your shoes. Ask for help and advice frequently. Several times during the process, have people read what you are doing so they can point out your mistakes. There is a whole culture that you haven't been initiated to, and you need a guide. The basic formula for a grant application goes like this: there is a fundamentally important question that we don't know enough about. Here is what the question is and why it is so important. Here is the piece of that question I can address, how I would address it, why that is the right way to do it, why it is feasible and why it won't fail to answer the question. Here is why I am the right person to do it. I need these resources for this part of the plan, and can't do the work without them. Reiterate the importance of the question and your future results.

2. The place to start with a grant application is to have a question you need money to answer. While that may seem horrendously obvious, I have known a fair number of graduate students who were told to apply for a certain grant, or many grants, but didn’t have a clear conception of what they needed the money for. Either the question was ill-defined (as was mine that first year) or it wasn’t really clear what the money was needed for.

3. Writing grants is a pain in the ass, and there are very few academics who wouldn’t rather be spending their time on research. We do it because we need to. That said, writing grant applications is tremendously useful to your research planning, because it gives you a hard-deadline and strict format in which you have to clearly state your research plans in a succinct and clear way. My research plans have often improved dramatically through the process of writing them into an application. Some universities require graduate students to submit a detailed research proposal before starting work on their theses. This serves the same purpose.

4. The two most common types of funding you may be applying for are for research costs and for your own stipend or salary. Small grants available to students usually focus on research costs, fellowships usually fund only stipend or salary and related costs, although some do both or are for funding travel to conferences or other specific costs. Every granting agency has rules for what each grant can or can’t be used for, and so what you apply for depends on what you need to fund.

5. There are an effectively infinite number of organizations that at least occasionally give research grants, but the chance that any one of them is the one you need to apply for is almost infinitely small. This makes finding the grants you should be applying for very difficult. The way to go about this is to avoid doing what I did. I wasted a huge amount of time online looking at listing of things I could apply for, examining the websites of various foundations, etc. Instead, ask people at your university what other students have applied for successfully. Ask faculty, other students, and the administrative staff. Most every university has people whose job it is to shepherd grant applications.

6. Whenever possible, get a copy of someone's successful grant application. Get several if you can. The instructions for every grant are different, so it is best if the application you are reading is for the same grant you are applying for. That said, there is a certain grant-like style that you will find in most applications.

7. Know your audience. Most research grants are evaluated by a small group of very busy researchers who have to get through a big pile of applications and find just a few to fund. Find out as much as you can about who these people are, and design your grant to grab their interest, and tailor it to (or slightly below) their level of knowledge of your field.

8. You need to convince them that your ideas are compelling and sound, your goals achievable and the whole thing in line with the purpose for which the grant is given. You also need to convince them that you are the person to do it. Doing all of this is harder in less space than in more. When you only have a page or two, as is often the case with the grants available to students, you can't get bogged down in the details. Your writing needs to be crisp and to the point. I often write much more than I need and then edit it down repeatedly. No matter how much time you put into writing a section, if you find it isn't necessary, cut it.

9. Beware of giving too much methodological detail. The committee reviewing the grants generally won't care what concentration your solution will be at, where you will order the food pellets or what software package you will use to analyze your data. That said, if one of those details is key to understanding what you plan to do, of course you need to include it.

10. Try to write it long enough in advance that you can set it aside and come back to it a few days later, perhaps more than once. Once you've worked it over more than a few times, you need some time away from it before you can really see it again. Very good writers can produce very bad writing when they've lost their ability to take a step back and just read.

That's my ten cents (inflation). I'm sure there are things I've missed, but those are the main lessons that I can remember learning. Good luck. Now quit browsing the internet and get back to writing.

Genus species

When writing the genus and species of an organism, the genus name is capitalized, but the species name is not. Also note that both are usually italicized to differentiate them from common names.

Right: Homo sapiens
Wrong: Homo Sapiens, homo sapiens, Homo sapiens

This is a long established rule that is consistently followed by scientists but generally ignored by many science reporters and other non-scientists. It becomes very useful when taxonomic level could be unclear.

For example, the extant members of Bison are bison (the American bison) and bonasus (the European bison, or wisent). While bison has been out of immediate risk of extinction for some decades, bonasus populations remain small and have started to rise only recently in captivity and intensely managed reserves. Commercially available bison meat is bison. It is more commonly sold as buffalo meat, although the term buffalo is more properly used for Syncerus and Bubalus, rather than Bison.

It is prefered, but not in all contexts, that in scientific writing one put the abbriviated genus name ahead of the species name. This is done in part because many genera have identically named species. For example, Dendrocopos major, Parus caeruleus and Parus major are all birds of Europe. While P. major is clearly in Parus, P. caeruleus is sometimes placed in Cyanistes.

See no seagull

One advantage to living in the tallest building in town is that we can see who's sneaking around on the roofs of other buildings. That is in fact part of why our building was built so tall. Back when this was the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), this building was occupied mostly by the  Stasi (secret police) whose job it was to keep an eye on everyone all the time and their families. 

The building next to ours was the Stasi office building for the state. It has not only been taken over for university use, but there are Herring Gulls nesting on its roof. I spotted two big chicks wandering around yesterday. It is a great place for nesting: high up, with a rim so the chicks won't jump out, and fitted with the finest 1970's surveillance equipment. The roof is even roughly chick-colored, which is probably why until now I have seen no seagull.

Egg-maculate conception

I've long said that if I was a benevolent deity the first thing I would do was give penguins the ability to produce live offspring at sea, the way whales and otters do.  My opinion has been that all birds lay eggs that need to be kept warm and be exposed to air, and no bird can give live birth, and therefore it would require the intercession of a god to produce a bird that could develop its eggs either internally or under (cold) water.

Well, that may still be true, but consider the following  from the BBC today:

'Eggless' chick laid by hen in Sri Lanka 

Instead of passing out of the hen's body and being incubated outside, the egg was incubated in the hen for 21 days and then hatched inside the hen.
The chick is fully formed and healthy, although the mother has died.

Let's assume for a moment that this is true, and neither a prank nor a misunderstanding. What seems to have happened is that the egg was retained inside the mother's reproductive tract. This (technically called dystocia) happens occasionally, especially to older hens. The egg just gets stuck, and usually eventually breaks and comes out in pieces, which can often kill the mother, and which also smells terrible, as the egg is usually quite rotten. But in this case it appears that the retained egg developed successfully, and the mother wasn't killed until the chick was viable. So assuming this is true, it is the first example of live birth in a bird I can find.

Now before all you penguins trade in your carefully maintained rock scrapes and hole-nests for shrines to the fertility god, keep in mind the following:
1. The mother died, probably quite painfully, and therefore is not around to feed the chick.
2. It would be hard for a trait like that to spread through a population, as each mother could produce only one offspring, and sexually reproducing mothers need to produce at least two adult offspring to reach replacement.
3. It probably isn't true anyway.

Still, it is an interesting story. If a group of birds could for some other reason first evolve to have un-calcified eggs, then it seems more likely that live birth would have a chance of evolving.

Friendly advice for your first NIH grant application

I've just submitted my first National Institutes of Health grant application (or rather administrators at my collaborator's university have submitted an application that I wrote most of). In preparing to write it, I read a lot of online advice ranging from the general 'how to write an NIH grant' to the specific 'the clause-structure I use while writing my cover letter for maximizing the chances that it will be sent to my preferred review committee.' People who regularly apply for NIH money refer to NIH funded research as an industry, and like any industry, there is a lot to know to compete successfully. NIH pays or invites some people to write advice on 'good grantsmanship' and many others, for a variety of reasons (perhaps on their blogs) write advice essays. Most of this advice starts with a paragraph or two along the lines of, "I've been conducting NIH funded research since 1982, and am currently involved in seven NIH funded projects, four as PI (Primary Investigator). I've served on 12 review panels and helped to amend the rules on permissible administrative expenditures on research grants in 2002 and again in 2006." And so on. The message is, "I am an expert on NIH funding applications and therefore qualified to advise you." While these people certainly are qualified and anyone planning to apply should read as much of their advice as bearable, there are two points I would like to make about this that they may not have considered. The first is that the way they write their advice, including the way they lay out their qualifications, reads very much like an NIH application. It makes me wonder if becoming expert in these applications makes it hard to write a love letter that isn't in the form of a funding application."Specific Aim 2: Produce a rapid natural release of endorphins, aiding current pleasure, speeding forgetfulness of discomfort and fomenting pair-bonding."

Second, and more seriously, I have the impression that none of these people nor the people writing the instruction books or the FAQs on the NIH websites have any memory of what it is like to not already know how to apply for NIH funding. The instruction book is full of rules that are explained not in terms of what you have to do, but in terms of how what you have to do is different than what it was before the changes to regulation #SF5326BB777. They use all sorts of words that are normal English words but don't mean what they normally mean, without explaining, because however NIH usually uses a word is its normal meaning to them. (This, by the way, is very close to the technical definition of jargon).

So I'd like to offer a few pieces of advice to people considering applying for their first NIH grant. I am not an expert, have never served on (or been invited to serve on) a review panel and may or may not ever have any NIH funding, but when I was a kid my dad worked just a few blocks from NIH headquarters, and I once spilled an incredibly powerful neurotoxin on myself inside an NIH laboratory. Before I start, consider this unrelated photo (of a 2.5 inch long weevil I once found in my hair) that helps to break up the text:

Notice that its sharp mouth parts are at the end of its huge nose. Cool huh?

Okay, here goes:

1. Before doing anything else, ask yourself if you can spare the two or three hundred working hours your first NIH application is likely to take you. If you can't, don't. Subsequent applications may take an order of magnitude less time, but this is going to be a slog.

2. Before doing anything second else, find colleagues who know all about applying for NIH grants and buy them beer, chocolate, whatever it takes. Wash their cars, baby-sit their kids, fix their refrigerators, do their laundry. This will save you so much time. If you are very lucky your department/institute/whatever may even have someone whose job includes guiding you through the process. If so, flowers and a gift-certificate to a nearby spa are in order. If you can by any means obtain copies of past successful grants to use as Rosetta Stones in figuring out what the instructions mean, then you have some chance of retaining your sanity.

3. Next, find out who is your SO (Signing Officer, an administrator officially authorized to sign legal documents on behalf of your organization). You don't submit the grant, the SO does. She also has to do various other registration tasks, meaning that they need to know that you will apply several weeks before you actually do. If you just found out that the deadline is in three weeks, relax. There will be another deadline some months in the future, and by then you may have found some other way to fund your work. The SO will need all the forms you are to prepare at least a week before the official due date, as there are a whole bunch of other forms they have to fill out seperately.

4. Don't panic. Download the 264 page instruction book (a.k.a. "SF424 (R&R)

Application Guide for NIH and Other PHS Agencies"). Here is a picture of a moorhen to help you not panic as you download:

Can you see how long its toes are? Fricken' long. Imagine soaking your extra-long toes in a nice summer pond.

5. Do not print out the instruction book. It is 264 pages. You will need to constantly jump from section to section to hunt down the clues and riddles needed to fill out each of the approximately 30 forms you will complete. Keep it digital so you can search for relevant terms.

6. Do print out this glossary of NIH terms. Then read it. Then read it again to see if you understand it any better. Keep in mind that while necessary, this glossary is wildly incomplete, because NIH people can't guess what terms non-NIH people won't understand. Also keep in mind that when they use a term to define itself, they mean well.

7. The National Institutes of Health are called "Institutes" because they have quite a few different topic-specific Institutes, plus a bunch of Centers and several Divisions. You are supposed to know which of these is most likely to be interested in funding your work, contact the appropriate PO (program officer) and pitch it to them before then writing in your cover letter than you contacted that PO and she encouraged you to apply to that Institute, Center or Division. There are very detailed guidelines you should follow in writing to that PO. You are supposed to already know which PO within the appropriate branch is the appropriate PO. The only way I found of finding this out was to spend countless hours on the NIH web pages learning about the structure of NIH, then countless more hours reading those pages before making a wild (and wrong) guess. Luckily the person I wrote to (who wasn't even at the Institute I thought she was at) directed me to another person, who told me that I was heading the wrong way. Eventually I made a decision.

8. Go through the instruction book and make a list of all the forms and attachments you will need. Depending on the specifics, there could be anywhere from 15 to infinity of them. On your list, make notes as to the purpose of each form and what is an attachment to which extension to which sub-form. Also note which parts you have to do and which parts the SO has to do, and then confirm this with the SO. Then look at these pieces in the pile of example applications you've gathered.

9. Don't plan any vacations for before the due date. Plan a vacation for after the due date.

10. You may notice that I have not yet mentioned anything about science. At least once a week, think about the scientific goal of your application. It is very easy to lose track of the fact that there is some reason you are putting yourself through this.

The dead blackbird thing.

Much has been made of the news that 5000 dead blackbirds fell from the sky onto a small Arkansas town at the turning of the year. ~11:30PM on New Year's Eve. Conspiracy theories and omens abound, but I will propose my own theory: a conspiracy between fireworks and the migratory behavior of blackbirds.

There are several species of blackbirds in North America (e.g. Red-winged Blackbirds, Grackles, Starlings), that tend to migrate in large mix-species flocks. And when I say large, I mean blot out the sun, river in the sky, ornithophobe's nightmare large. Frequently in the hundreds of thousands, not rarely in the millions of birds. I was working at the Long Point Bird Observatory (in southern Ontario) one day in late November when one of these blackbird flocks went by, too thickly to count, for an hour and a half. As soon as we saw them we rushed out and closed the mist-nets we had put up to catch birds. While these nets work well for catching a flock of a dozen chickadees (which we would then measure, band and release), a thousand blackbirds hitting the nets all at once will collapse them, potentially killing large numbers of the birds. Many of the nets had several dozen blackbirds in them within the first minute, and it was a struggle to free them faster than new birds got caught. We couldn't close the nets until they were empty, and we couldn't stop catching them without closing the nets, so thick and fast they came, despite the fact that the main stream of birds was far above our heads, and despite each bird tending to avoid places where humans were standing. We put brightly colored cloths in the nets to make them more visible, but still we couldn't keep up. The nets began to sag under the weight of birds, each of which weighed only a few ounces. Only when the course of the avian river shifted significantly to one side were we able to empty and close the nets, and then stand and gape at the immensity of the flock. That night they all settled in a nearby wetland, densely and within a surprisingly small area.

Now by New Years Eve, these flocks would not be in Ontario, but in places more like Arkansas. It is reported that a wooded area in Beebe was being used as a nighttime roost for several hundred thousand blackbirds. My guess is that somebody was setting off fireworks near that wood, and scared the bejesus out of at least half a million blackbirds. Fireworks are used in agriculture to scare blackbirds out of fields, and to uninitiated birds, they are quite terrifying. So this river of blackbirds leaps into the air whirl around and around as the rockets and fountains go up. Now blackbirds, like most songbirds, have very poor night vision, and frequently smack into things if startled up at night. So maybe one in a thousand in the whirling disoriented mass smacked into a lamp, a sign, a building, each other. They go quite fast enough to kill themselves crashing headlong into hard objects, and can rebound several feet. The birds seemed to have died of blunt trauma, as from a crash.

Or it could be a sign of the end times.

Fall

Sunrise splashes across autumn-spangled tree tips. A hooded crow, black and gray and flapping methodically, meanders between the swaying, glowing, multicolored peaks. Wingtip sweep up, flashing into horizontal sunlight, and down, into shadow and raucous foliage.

The flapper in winter

It was -10C this morning, and fresh snow on ice made an unbroken expanse of flat whiteness where the harbor usually is. The small ferry constantly crossing back and forth kept one thin line open, and the water birds congregated around that oasis; compared to sub-freezing air, freezing water is relatively warm. A few birds seemed not to have gotten the memo and instead made lumps in the snow at random points on the ice. One large lump the color of dirty ice seemed bird shaped, and I looked at it on and off seeing if it moved. It was the right size and about the right shape and color to be a juvenile swan, but it could also be a pit of trash or a chunk of refrozen slush someone slid out onto the ice.

My colleague, who also watches birds came into my office to ask if I had noticed it, and if so what I thought it was. He said there were footsteps in the fresh snow near it. He was right. Through my binoculars I could see swan prints leading to where it sat. And that lump on top might be a bit of neck leading to a head tucked entirely under a wing. But it must be dead I thought, why else would it sit so still for so long in such a windy spot on the ice?

I glanced at it occasionally though the morning, and it didn't move. Then some people walking their dog passed by, and the dog made like it was going to run out onto the ice to get the swan. A long gray neck snaked out from under the wing and looked straight back at the dog. The dog must have realized the ice was too thin to hold it. As soon as the dog was gone, the head disappeared under the wing again, and there it stayed.

In the early afternoon a fire department rescue truck pulled down the road to the harbor near the swan. Two guys, one holding binoculars, got out and looked at the swan for a while. I wondered if they thought it was a child. They drove away and came back with a third guy, who threw snowballs near the swan and yelled at it until it got up and walked a few steps. They left again, and the swan sat back in its usual spot, head under wing. The snow got heavier and started to pile up on the windward side of the swan, but it stuck to its spot, and still was there when the sun went down.

Lovers in the snow

The UnterWarnow is frozen, and snow is building up on the ice. Sunset will come 7 hours and 45 minutes after sunrise today. The crows and blackbirds are digging in the snow looking for food, and the birds that usually haunt the harbor all winter are gone, perhaps to the south, perhaps out to the Baltic where the water isn’t solid.

But in the tree in front of my office window, two magpies are carrying fresh twigs into a crook between three branches. There is only one reason I know of why they would be doing this: they are building a nest. Most birds, including magpies, only build nests to lay eggs in, and now is not the time to lay eggs. It is too cold for the eggs to develop (even with mom sitting on them), and if they did hatch , there would be nothing to feed them. Any nest built now isn’t even likely to still be in good enough shape to use come spring. The spot where they are putting the twigs is near the top of the tree, on the branch closest to the river, and shakes whenever the wind blows, which it does frequently.

This raises the question of why? When other birds in the neighborhood are struggling just to keep from freezing or starving, why are the magpies wasting their time and exposing themselves to the cold building a nest they can’t use? Perhaps the cold has driven them mad? Maybe they are pulling food out of the dumpster of the near by grocery store, and having plenty of food, think it is time to breed? A genetic disorder?

There may be some perfectly good reason for this (pair-bonding activity?) but I’m not sure I buy that.

When my colleagues and I were writing a paper on the definition of behavior, many of previously published definitions we came across specified that behavior is adaptive, that it will tend to increase the fitness of the individual performing the behavior. We omitted this from our definition, because there are so many behaviors whose adaptive significance is uncertain, or which seem maladaptive. It is certainly true that most behaviors are adaptive, some, like building a nest in a snow storm, probably are not.

To survive and reproduce in good times and bad

jte asks:

Is there reason to believe, or evidence to support, that the forms of evolution occurring among species during a period of abundant resources is different from the forms of evolution occurring among species during a period of deficient resources?

It seems that a lot of the argument in evolutionary theory is that it takes a lot of energy to grow extra and useless appendages or what have you, so if they really are useless, you'd expect them to evolve away. But if resources are abundant--energy is not a particularly limiting factor--do you then get a scenario in which all kinds of wacky and useless appendages appear and are not attritioned away? Which gives those appendages time to hang around enough to be available when the environment changes and all of a sudden they are useful and confer an advantage?

Or something like that?

I wouldn't go so far as to say the "forms of evolution" are different. In good times and bad evolution acts through natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and all the same basic mechanisms. Rather I would say that selection acts of different traits, or favors different forms of those traits, depending on if times are good or bad. One excellent example of this has been documented by Peter and Rosemary Grant in long term studies of Darwin's Finches on the Galapagos Islands. The climate in the Galapagos is impacted hugely by the El Nino/La Nina climate cycles. In some parts of the cycle, the islands are cool and damp, vegetation grows lush, and there are lots of big seeds to be had. In other parts of the cycle, it is very hot and very dry and only the desert plants with their tiny little seeds are producing. In the good years, the finches with the big bills can eat lots of big seeds, and reproduce like mad. In only a few years the population of one finch species is dominated by big-billed finches. Then when the rains stop, the population starts to crash, and the finches with the little bills good for extracting and opening small seeds are much more likely to survive. After a few years of that, the population of that same species is again dominated by small billed finches. This isn't individuals developing differently depending on the food supply, this is just massive, cyclical natural selection driving the population's genetic make-up around in circles.

On a much larger time scale, generalists are much more likely to survive large extinction events, while specialists often dominate in habitats that have been very stable for millions of years. Consider which of each of these pairs of species is in greater danger of extinction?

German Cockroaches or Lord Howe Island Woodeating Cockroaches
The Black Rat or the Salt-Marsh Harvest Mouse
The Common Pigeon or the Mariana Fruit Dove
The Common Raccoon or the Cozumel Raccoon
Goats or Alpine Ibex
Humans or Sumatran Orangutans

In each case the generalist are doing fine, while their specialized relatives can't cope with change. The fossil record shows multiple examples of large groups going extinct when the coprolites hit the fan, but one or two very generalized species in those groups making it through and giving rise to many new species. The amazing thing is that over and over most of those new species are specialists, evolving to be increasingly good at dominating increasingly narrow sets of resources. Give Rattus rattus a few tens of millions of years and no other mammals on the planet, and they would evolve into many thousands of separate species, filling a vast array of niches, and most of those species would be specialists. If another great collapse came, the ones most likely to make it through would again be the super generalized rat.

As far as the "useless appendages" argument goes, remember that even when resources are abundant, there is still the race to see who can convert those resources into the most offspring the fastest. Plus, the ideal situation rarely lasts very long. Usually within a few generations the population of predators has increased, the food supply has diminished, or population density has gotten so high that pathogens are spread easily. Exponential growth is not to be underestimated. So with the possible exception of humans over the last couple of hundred years, it is almost never the case that a population goes on growing for many generations without selection knocking back those who spend their energy recklessly.

That said, there are traits that are advantageous in bad time and costly in good times, or the opposite. Sometimes species evolve plasticity, such as the ability to grow a thicker coat when the winter is colder, but not waste the protein in mild winters. And sometimes, like Darwin's finches, they just evolve back and forth. The camel's hump is probably something of a hindrance when water and food are plentiful, but it bears that cost because more often than not things will get dry again, and that hump will save its life. If camels lived in an environment where it didn't get dry for some thousands of years, they might end up sans hump, looking more like big llamas. Or they might just die out, vanquished by cows and goats. Camels, after all, are specialists.

Choughs in the wind.

Pilatus is a minor alp at 2132m (7000ft), but impressive for its sheer ruggedness, and the way it hangs over Lucerne Switzerland and several large lakes and forests. Its peak can be reached by a cog-wheel railroad, except in the winter, when snow and ice block the tracks. In these months, only the aerial cable cars, leaving from Lucerne, reach the top. The large gondola that carried us the last few thousand feet to the peek hung from a great cable with no support between its two ends, excepting one tower, which stood atop a sheer drop of close to a thousand feet. The top half of the mountain was snow covered, with evergreens petering out some hundreds of feet below the top. As we stepped out of the Gondola and into the visitor center on the mountain's top, it began snowing.

Standing outside the visitor center we could see impressive peaks, valleys, lakes and forests stretching far and wide. A stiff wind was blowing, and within two or three minutes we couldn't see much beyond the peak we were on. We went inside and had hot chocolate and pastries. As we sat and sipped, gazing through floor to ceiling windows, visibility continued to drop. We noticed that the staff were starting to close up, which seemed odd, as it was still morning. A smiling suited man with a managerial manner came through announcing something in Swiss German and everyone started moving towards the cables cars. Our friend Annette explained that the wind was picking up so much they were afraid they wouldn't be able to run the cable cars, and they were sending us all down the mountain before that happened. By the time we got down one flight of stairs the wind was too strong, the cable cars couldn't safely operate. We and a couple of hundred other visitor and staff waited perhaps half an hour before the manager came through and announced we would just have to wait the storm out. He invited us all back to the restaurant for free refreshments. So we sat in the big exposed glass walled restaurant consuming free soup, hot beverages, pastries and good bread and watched the blizzard lash the mountain. Chunks of snow the size of small cars broke off the cliffs and were thrown up and out. A wooden bench which had been left outside was hurled into a metal fence hard enough to snap some of the welds. Visibility was perhaps ten meters.

In the middle of this frozen hurricane, this onslaught of white fury, something, no two somethings black and sleek and solid appeared on the edge of visibility and simple hung in the storm. It seemed ridiculous that anything could live on a mountain peek in such a blizzard, but these forms seemed not only unconcerned, but rather playful. Annette and I, both former ornithologists, each had binoculars out and pointed within five seconds. Too slow, for the seemingly magical forms rotated slightly and in unison shot at amazing speed down wind and into the white-out.


"Alpine Choughs!" announced Annette, and several tables-full of other tourists turned around to look for the now vanished birds.



Over the next hours, as the storm slowly passed, we watched the choughs hovering, flipping, clearly playing, in conditions that would kill any normal bird long before it could flee down the mountain. They seemed to seek out the crevices through which wind blew fastest, so as to make their acrobatics all the more impressive. When it finally stopped snowing, we could see dozens of choughs racing and chasing with no apparent goal but to use the still gale force winds to show off for each other. As the winds slowed most of the choughs settled into a snow bank a few meters below the absolute top of the mountain. Their bright yellow beaks and red feet did not hide within their thick black feathers, but stayed exposed to the ice and wind, as though the weather was warm and sunny. They danced on the barbed wire that keeps animals away from the weather station at the peak, swinging in time with the wind.


And with that the manager stopped handing out the free refreshments and herded us down to the cable cars. Our car, rated to hold up to 3000kg, was stuffed with 2985kg of tourists. The wind swung the car side to side as we slid down the cable and over the cliff. It took at least four cars to get everybody down.

Safely back in Germany, I've been reading about the choughs, and they are pretty amazing. They can be found at the tops of high mountains from North Africa to western China, and unlike most other wildlife often do not move to lower elevations in winter. Being corvids (members of the crow family) they are smart and social. They are omnivores, feeding in rapidly moving flocks on insects, seeds, eggs and anything provided by tourists. They eat a lot of berries in winter. They will eat from people's hands at ski resorts and other places where they are fed regularly. Their bills are smaller and their feathers thicker than other crows, but otherwise nothing about their appearance would make one think they were so immune to cold. They likely store food in rock crevice where the cold keeps it good until they want it. They may nest at higher elevation than any other birds. Seeing them play was well worth being stranded on a mountain top for, especially when the stranding was accompanied with free soup, hot chocolate and pastries. I would gladly have shared the pastries with the Choughs, if I wouldn't have had to go out in the storm to give it to them.

EvoDemo: "Senescence rates are determined by ranking on the fast-slow life-history continuum"

Jones, O.R., Gaillard, J.M., Tuljapurkar, S., Alho, J.S., Armitage, K.B.,
Becker, P.H., Bize, P., Brommer, J., Charmantier, A., Charpentier, M.,
Clutton-Brock, T., Dobson, F.S., Festa-Bianchet, M., Gustafsson, L.,
Jensen, H., Jones, C.J., Lillandt, G., McCleery, R., Merila, J., Neuhaus, P.,
Nicoll, M.A.C., Norris, K., Oli, M.K., Pemberton, J., Pietiainen, H.,
Ringsby, T.H., Roulin, A., Saether, B.E., Setchell, J.M., Sheldon, B.C.,
Thompson, P.M., Weimerskirch, H., Wickings, E.J. & Coulson, T. 2008.
Senescence rates are determined by ranking on the fast-slow life-history continuum.
Ecology Letters.

Abstract:

Comparative analyses of survival senescence by using life tables have identified generalizations including the observation that mammals senesce faster than similar-sized birds. These generalizations have been challenged because of limitations of life-table approaches and the growing appreciation that senescence is more than an increasing probability of death. Without using life tables, we examine senescence rates in annual individual fitness using 20 individual-based data sets of terrestrial vertebrates with contrasting life histories and body size. We find that senescence is widespread in the wild and equally likely to occur in survival and reproduction. Additionally, mammals senesce faster than birds because they have a faster life history for a given body size. By allowing us to disentangle the effects of two major fitness components our methods allow an assessment of the robustness of the prevalent life-table approach. Focusing on one aspect of life history - survival or recruitment - can provide reliable information on overall senescence.

Keywords: Aging; comparative analysis; demography; generation time; metabolic rate; senescence

Comments: One of the authors is applying for a position here in the next few days.

Malards on my mind

My office here at the institute has a beautiful view of the unter-Warnow, the tidal harbor area just before the Warnow River flows into the Baltic. The city of Rostock and many of its suburbs are arrayed along both banks of the unter-Warnow, and the Institute is right above the banks, allowing marvelous views. There are some drawbacks to this for a person easily distracted by birds, as I am. I frequently find myself watching the gulls chasing each other, the swans terrorizing the mallards, or the rooks, hooded-crows and jackdaws playing in the wind.
The last several days I have noticed that the same two groups of mallards are always in the same two spots. In the river, near the institute there is a consistent group of six males and five females, always floating in about the same spot. In a drowned foundation on the abandoned port-facility just west of here, there are always four male and three female mallards, with one of the males showing the white splotching indicating it has some ancestry among the domestic mallards. These several birds always seem to be in the same two groups, in very similar spots, and I can only assume they have found something good to eat there, as they don't seem to move elsewhere to feed. I wonder if they will stay all winter. I wonder what I should have done in the time I spent censusing mallards.

Crazy like a crow

I've seen a lot of birds doing a lot of bizarre things. But I couldn't figure out what the heck this crow was doing. Yesterday afternoon, as I was leaving work, I saw a hooded crow (one of the common urban birds hereabouts) flying in the most bizarre bouncy way. Flap hard to climb, drop sharply, pull up, flap upward, attempt to hover, sliding from side to side, drop sharply and repeat. It weaved and bobbed 30 meters above a road full of moving cars. All I could think was that it was playing (which was surprising because crows usually play when there are other crows around to impress, and this was the only one in my line of sight). Then I noticed it had something in its beak. A small ball on a string, or something such. It repeatedly, and obviously intentionally dropped it, only to dive downward and catch it again, then regain altitude for another drop. Several times I thought the what-ever-it-was would fall on one of the moving cars, but the crow always caught it before it could fall that far. After a couple of minutes of this, the crow changed position, flying high over the broad and mostly empty sidewalk on which I stood. After a couple of false starts it dropped its cargo, which plummeted to crash in the middle of the sidewalk, in a clear area with little leaf debris and no people within 20m . As the crow came in to land, I ran over to see what the thing was. It watched me, keeping maybe 5m back, but obviously not ready to take off. The something it had carried, dropped and broken was a large chestnut, now cleanly cracked in half, with the meat easily accessible through the shattered shell.

I backed off and let the crow enjoy its well-earned meal.

Wadden Sea

Imagine if you will a big flat muddy seabed. Various rivers and ocean currents deposit mud, silt, and sand onto it for ages. Currents may dig a slightly deeper part here, cause a raised area to form there, but basically its flat. Next, suppose global sea level drops. The top of the water is about equal with the top of the accumulated sediment at the bottom of our flat sea. Where the sediment is piled high, it might stick a meter or two above the water. Where the sediment is low water will remain, but not be very deep. And everywhere there will be mud.

Something very much like this has, over the eons, repeatedly occurred in what is currently the Wadden Sea area. Wadden Sea is the Anglicization of the Danish 'Vadehavet' which means mud-flat sea. In southwestern Jutland (the part of Denmark on mainland Europe), down through northwestern Germany and west across the northern Netherlands, simple daily tides still move the shoreline in and out by some miles. In between are extensive mudflats. As was done in Holland, the people of southwest Denmark gradually, over centuries, drained much of this tidal area with dikes, building walls over which the tide cannot climb (except during large storm floods, which throughout the middle ages would occasionally overcome the dikes and drown thousands of people). Despite the dikes, and the normally small tides of ~1.5m, the inter-tidal zone is many km wide in this area.

Iris and I spent a day on Mandø, an island in the Wadden Sea. The Danes long ago surrounded the island, which is only a few kilometers across, with dikes, and most of the interior is grazing land for cows and sheep. There is also a village of about 50 people, and an environmental education center/hotel, where we stayed. Outside the dikes, which are basically just 3-5m high slope-sides earthen walls grazed by sheep, there are wetlands surrounded by huge areas which daily alternate between being land and sea. At low tide one can drive to Mandø, or go for long walks on the mud-flats. At high tide it is water on every side for miles.

100m or so outside the dikes most of Mandø's shoreline (if it can be called that when it is often miles from the water) is ringed by fences that are about knee high. Each fence is made of two rows of sticks driven vertically into the mud, with thinner sticks, bits of brush and whatever else tied into bundles and wedged into the space between the two lines. Iris and I were mystified as to what function this short fence could perform, other than giving homes to billions of barnacles and perches to the preening shorebirds. It turns out these funny little fences, over generations, wrest land from the sea. At high tide water with sand and mud in it pours through, over and around the fence. As the tide recedes, much of its sediment gets caught in the bundled brush, like krill in the baleen of a whale. The area within the fence eventually fills with soil up to the top of the fence, and another fence is built further out. Repeat for 1000 years and add sheep.

Danish policy, now that they finally have the technology to seize the entire mud flats in years rather than centuries, is to let the boundary stand where it is. Let the shellfish, the shorebirds, the mud worms and the crabs keep what they have, and let the farmers keep their hard-won dry land. This summer Nationalpark Vadehavet became the largest national park in Demark. (Germany has also made large portions of its piece of the Wadden Sea into national parks.) It is bizarre, mysterious and wonderful to visit, and a glorious piece of wildness on the edge of all too tamed northern Europe. Global climate change may well doom the Wadden Sea to return to just being a flat seabed, so I suggest a visit sooner rather than later.

Here are a few photos:

Iris on the mud flats

Disintegrating coastal fence encrusted by shellfish

Oystercatchers like this one are extremely numerous in the Wadden Sea. Their long stout bills are perfect for wrestling invertebrates out of the mud.

New York's Geese are exploding in another way

The Christmas Bird Count is one of the great success stories of Citizen Science. Every year in late December, tens of thousands of volunteers across North America brave snow and sleet and Christmas Shopping traffic to go out and see how many birds they can see. Everyone writes down how many individual birds they see of each species, and where they were looking, and all these data are collected into a central database. The Audubon Society's scientists know how many people were looking, and where, and they have large numbers of observers, so they can calculate pretty reliable winter range maps, and calculate rates of population change in each area.

Looking at their data for Canada Geese, a pretty remarkable number emerges. The number of Canada Geese in New York State in December has, for quite a while, been increasing by 22% per year! At that rate of increase, population would double about every three and a half years (1.22^3.5=2), and the population doubled at this rate starting about 1955 and leveled off about 1990, so it had time to double about 10 times. 2^10=1024. So for every goose in New York in late December before the 1950s, there is now a kilogoose in the same area at the same season. To put it another way, most CBC observers in NY in the first half of the 20th century saw not one geese. The average NY state observer these days sees 50 or 60 geese.

Here is a graph from the CBC historical query page.


There is a lot of noise in the data, but the trend is very clear.

So why are there so many more geese in NY in the winter? Partly, there are just more geese everywhere. Humans have been good to Canada Geese. Lawns, golf courses and grain stubble are all feasts for geese. We've killed off a lot of the natural predators, and we don't hunt them ourselves as much as we used to. And New York winters aren't nearly as cold and snow-buried as they used to be, especially around the city, which means fewer of the geese bother migrating any further south than New York.

In considering the causes of the bird-plane collision that caused yesterday's much publicized crash, we should keep in mind that a few decades ago, there would have been no geese to hit in January above the Bronx.