Natural History Journal

"I'm so glad we live in a world where there are Octobers." L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gable s Like Anne Shirley, I adore the season of autumn and the month of October, but, it must be said, I loathe Halloween.  America's fastest growing consumer holiday, I could probably write for days about why I despise it so much... but suffice it to say much of my reasoning is bound up in that one word, "consumer." This year, Americans are expected to spend  over $8 billion  on Halloween paraphernalia.  That is a disgusting amount of [largely plastic] costumes, masks, decorations, candy wrappers and other stuff which will, mostly, end up in the garbage. But since I do enjoy colorful fall foliage, old-timey barn dances, pumpkins and apples, harvest celebrations and that piece of classic literature, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow ( read it here ), the season still holds its charms.  (It would hold more of its charms if Halloween hadn't become  an ecologi...

A few days ago, I wrote about the impending arrival of large flocks of Snow Geese  in the Central Valley.  And while hundreds of thousands of white (or "light," as they used to be known) geese descend on the valley, blanketing our local fields and wetlands in snowy drifts, I would be remiss if I let you assume they are all Snow Geese. In fact, some of the snowy white geese that will be showing up in the Valley this fall and winter are not Snow Geese at all, but their smaller cousin, the Ross's Goose ( Anser rossii ). Discovered in the late 1700's by arctic explorer Samuel Hearne, the Ross's Goose was originally dubbed the "Horned Wavey."  (It's likely that the term "wavey" came from the Cree word for goose.) In 1795, Hearne wrote, "Horned Wavey.  This delicate and diminutive species of the Goose is not much larger than the Mallard Duck.  Its plumage is delicately white, except the quill-feathers, which are black.  The bill ...

Change is in the air.  Literally, in the air, on the wing, migrating in our direction.  Very soon, the weather will shift and our local forecast will call for something new: snow in the Central Valley! Flocks of thousands of Snow Geese ( Anser caerulescens ) are on their way south along the Pacific Flyway, following ancient migratory paths from their breeding grounds in the Arctic to the comparatively mild wetlands of California's Great Central Valley where they will spend the winter.  While the Valley only rarely sees an actual snowfall, the decent of breathtakingly large flocks of white Snow Geese are an annual phenomenon, which I am so thankful we still get to witness. Snow Geese are medium-distance migrants, following narrow pathways nearly due south from their breeding ranges, stopping at the same staging areas and overwintering grounds year after year.  According to Cornell's All About Birds, some Snow Geese that spend winter in the western U.S. breed in...

One of the things I love most about nature (aside from the sheer breathtaking beauty of it all) is its order.  I love the way everything has a place, and each intricate piece fits together with all the other pieces in ways that are, for the most part, both irreducibly complex and logical.  North America's falcons are a good example of this order.  They remind me of a set of graduated mixing bowls or models of car, stepping right up the scale from the smallest to the largest option. The largest of North American falcons (family Falconidae), and indeed the world's largest falcon, is the Gyrfalcon ( Falco rusticolus ), an Arctic-breeding bird with a head-to-tail length of 22 inches and a wingspan of nearly four feet.  In the mid-to-large size range are the Peregrine and Prairie Falcons ( F. peregrinus and F. mexicanus , respectively), the Peregrine being just slightly larger than the Prairie on average.  (Sort of like the difference between a Toyota Avalon and C...

While Sandhill Cranes seem to get all the glory and praise this time of year (for example, Merced NWR is hosting Crane Day  on October 19th, and November 2nd is Lodi's annual  Crane Festival ), plenty of other species worth mentioning are turning up all over our local wetlands and farmlands these days as well, including a lineup of Arctic-breeding geese. During the fall and winter, a vast assortment of birds (largely waterfowl) which have spent the breeding months far to the north return, as they have done for millennia, to overwintering grounds in the fertile Great Central Valley of California.  Today, of course, this habitat has been severely reduced.  But some places have been mercifully preserved as National Wildlife Refuges as well as a few state and private preserves, and when the migrants arrive, these patches of wild land absolutely fill to the brim with life.  And geese probably contribute the greatest amount in terms of sheer mass to this great winte...

"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.  Like winds and sunset, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them." Aldo Leopold, 1949 Last week, on September 19, 2019, the journal Science published the results of a groundbreaking study, the first of its kind to document, with certainty, that North American birds are in big trouble. Young male House Finch Observant folks who have been around a while have been saying it for some time: "There just aren't as many birds around now as there were back in my day."  Indeed, numbers of birds have dropped dramatically over the past 50 years, and now we have the data to prove it.  It's not just a hunch, not just a feeling, not just the tendency to look at the past through lenses tinted with nostalgia for the "good ol' days."  Grandpa is right: there are fewer birds today than there were "in his day." Birds really are in dec...

Three days into autumn, and the thermometer remains stubbornly above the 90 degree mark.  Last week, the Central Valley experienced what a tease nature can be as temperatures dropped, skies clouded over, and a few tentative raindrops fell.  But, despite how it feels outside today, newly arrived White-crowned Sparrows are hopping around the garden, harbingers of autumn! The species composition in California's Great Central Valley is about to undergo a dramatic transformation, as many of the small songbirds and tropical migrants of the Sierra Nevada and northern reaches of the state head south to warmer, insect-rich regions in Central and South America.  But while the warblers, vireos, flycatchers, grosbeaks, tanagers, orioles, et. al. are leaving us, a whole new suite of birds is just about to arrive.  For many birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway , Central California is  "south."  We are, believe it or not, the destination. Sandhill Cranes, th...