Nature’s Q and A

Published Saturday, March 28, 2009

My neighbor Crandall stops by.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

“Things are nearly copacetic. I do have a conspiracy theory.”

“Not another one,” I say.

“Did you know that you are the major cause of the rapid decline in the average IQ of this area? People speak in whispers all the time! If you ask them to speak up, they keep repeating themselves, endlessly mouthing the same silent message until they’re red in the face! What do they think I am, a lip reader? I’ve noticed that young people are younger than I was at their age. On the other hand, people my own age are much older than I am. And the phonebooks are being printed in such small type that no one could ever find a number in them! The government is doing all this to get our minds off the economy. I don’t know why the government is doing these things to me when I have the answer to turning the economy around.”

“What is your remedy?” I ask.

“There are about 40 million people over 50 in the workforce. The government should pay each of them $1 million in severance pay, with certain stipulations. They must leave their jobs. That’s forty million job openings—unemployment problem fixed. They must buy new American-made cars. That’s 40 million cars ordered — auto industry fixed. They must either buy a house or pay off their mortgage/housing crisis fixed. Why I haven’t been offered a cabinet position is beyond me.”

     

Nature lessons

A wild turkey’s gobble can be heard up to a mile away.

I watched crows building a nest. I am amazed at their intelligence. Scarecrows do not work to discourage crows. That’s because crows are so smart, they bribe the scarecrows.

Flowers smell best just before a rain.

I spotted four rows of corn running across a field. It was a minor windbreak, a snow fence, or the result of a forgetful farmer. The rows of corn were filled with at least 50 wild turkeys. All the turkeys aren’t in the straw.

According to an experiment done at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, the heaviest weight a 12-pound eagle could lift off the ground was 5 pounds.

“Chippy” is a piece of American slang that is believed to have come from “chipping bird” or “chipping sparrow.” Chipping sparrows are a common North American bird with a trilling song.

Q and A

“Which bird has the longer wingspan, the bald eagle or the turkey vulture?” The bald eagle with an 80-inch wingspan compared to 67 inches for the turkey vulture. An American white pelican has a 9-foot wingspan and a red-tailed hawk a 4-foot one. A great blue heron’s wings stretch 6 feet, a Canada goose 5 feet, a sandhill crane 73 inches and the wingspread of a great horned owl is 44 inches.

“I put thistle seed in my feeders. Is it really thistle?” Nyjer, niger, and thistle seed are names used to identify a tiny, black birdseed cultivated in Asia and Africa that is high in calories and oil content. I don’t know why nyjer seed started being called thistle seed. Maybe it was because goldfinches, that devour nyjer seeds, do eat the seeds of thistle plants.

To protect us from any invasive weed seeds that may enter the country with the nyjer seed, all shipments are heat sterilized to prevent germination. Nyjer is a favorite of not only goldfinches, but of purple and house finches, pine siskins, and redpolls as well.

About 50,000 tons of nyjer, valued at $64 million, were imported from India and Ethiopia in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nyjer is used as cooking oil overseas, but almost all of it is used as bird feed in the United States.

“Which is larger, a bald eagle or a golden eagle?” A golden eagle is 30 inches long and has a 79-inch wingspan. The bald eagle is 31 inches long with a wingspread of 80 inches.

From Pheasants Forever

This is from a publication produced by Pheasants Forever in cooperation with Dr. William Clark of Iowa State University, “No single predator gets more blame than coyotes, but research over several decades has proven that coyotes focus their foraging on rodents and rabbits and do not take adult pheasants or nests as frequently as the other mammalian predators (red fox, striped skunk and raccoon). In addition, the larger home range and territorial nature of coyotes can actually result in lower populations of these other, more destructive predators. Predation accounts for three-fourths of unsuccessful nests, and nearly all of adult mortality (excluding hunting) is directly predator related. The problem can be exacerbated when insufficient habitat and severe weather make pheasants more vulnerable.”

I’ve been reading

This from “The Canon,” by Natalie Angier, “What happens in subsections of seconds? In a tenth of a second, we find the proverbial ‘blink of an eye,’ for that’s how long the act takes. In a hundredth of a second, a hummingbird can beat its wings once. Five-thousandths of a second is the time it takes a Mexican salamander to snag its prey. In one microsecond, 10 to the -6 power seconds, nerves can send a message from that pain in your neck to your brain. On the same scale, we can illuminate the vast difference between the speed of light and that of sound: in one microsecond, a beam of light can barrel down the length of three of our metric-resistant football fields, while a sound wave can barely traverse the width of a human hair. Yes, time is fleeting, so make every second and every partitioned second count, including nanoseconds, or billionths of a second, or 10 to the -9 power seconds. Your ordinary computer certainly does.”

2009 annual BBRP Conference

On Saturday, April 18, The Bluebird Recovery Program Statewide Annual Conference will be held at the Elk River School in Elk River. For more information, contact Jenean Mortenson at clmjmm@ll.net or at (507) 332-7003.

Albert Lea Audubon Society

Larry Dolphin of the Hormel Nature Center will be speaking on the ecology of the Nature Center at the April 7 meeting of the Albert Lea Audubon Society that will be held at 7 p.m. at the Albert Lea Art Center. The public is welcome.

Thanks for stopping by

“For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” — Winston Churchill

“Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting.” — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

DO GOOD.

  Al Batt of Hartland is a member of the Albert Lea Audubon Society. E-mail him at SnoEowl@aol.com.

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