Starlings are impressive vocal mimics

Published 9:55 am Saturday, March 12, 2011

Column: Nature’s World

My neighbor Crandall stops by.

“How are you doing?” I ask.

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“Everything is nearly copacetic. I ran out of cereal. My sister Cruella gave me some kind of super-bran. It was good. I had four bowls of it along with a gallon of coffee for breakfast. That much caffeine and fiber makes for an exciting day. I was ice fishing the other day. The ice was really biting and so were the fish. I was fishing with a guy I met at a hole in the ice. His name was Cube. He was in love with ice fishing. Well, sir, we’re sitting on a couple of five-gallon pails. Each of us had a line into a hole in the ice when a funeral procession went by. Cube stands up, takes his cap off, freeing his ears from earlaps on a cold day and bows his head. I don’t mind telling you that I was touched. I told him so.”

“That was nice of you and him. Did Cube have anything to say when you told him how good it was of him to pay his respects to the deceased?” I say.

“Cube put his hat back on and said, ‘It’s the least I could do. I’ve been married to the woman for over 30 years.’”

The starling is not everyone’s darling

Photo of a starling by Al Batt.

I heard the call of a red-tailed hawk in my yard. It wasn’t a hawk. It was a starling mimicking a hawk. All the European starlings in North America descended from 100 birds released in New York City’s Central Park in the 1890s. A group that wanted America to have all the birds mentioned by Shakespeare introduced the starlings. Because of this introduction, all the starlings in North America are closely related. Individuals from Minnesota are nearly genetically indistinguishable from starlings in Maine or California. Slight genetic variation often means trouble for a species, but starlings appear to suffer no ill effects. Starlings are able to fly at speeds up to 48 mph and are impressive vocal mimics. An individual starling could imitate the calls of 20 different species. Starlings regularly mimic the songs of the peewee, meadowlark, robin, flicker, killdeer and others. African gray parrots are one of the most accomplished of bird mimics. One is in the “Guinness World Records” as having a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words.

Whooping whoopty do

My wife and I took a boat out of Rockport, Texas, into Aransas Bay. We did so to see wintering whooping cranes. The cranes feed on blue crabs there. A crane could eat up to 80 blue crabs in a single day. The cranes also feed upon clams, snails, mice, voles, berries, fish, snakes, grasshoppers, crayfish, shrimp, eel, clams and acorns. The whooping cranes leave Texas sometime between mid-March and mid-April. There are around 400 of these large birds in the wild. It is important to preserve endangered species like these cranes. As Aldo Leopold said, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”

The amazing memory of a chickadee

A chickadee gathers seeds each fall and stores them in hundreds of hiding places. During the winter, it revisits those caches to feed. The chickadee’s flawless spatial memory is extraordinary. In the fall, as the chickadee stores seeds, its hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for spatial organization and memory, expands by about 30 percent. In the spring, when memory isn’t so critical, the chickadee’s hippocampus shrinks to its normal size. Many neuro-degenerative diseases involve the hippocampus. In humans, strokes can affect the hippocampus and limit the ability to form new memories. The hippocampus shrivels in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Scientists hope that studying the chickadee’s brain may hold a key to the prevention of memory loss in humans.

Opossum patrol fails to please

In a peculiar attempt to outfox Mother Nature, Brooklyn, N.Y., city officials introduced opossums to eat the rats running amok in the borough. The rats continue to thrive and the opossums have become an epidemic. The opossums amble through yards, ransack garbage cans and rob fruit trees. The opossums were released into local parks and under the Coney Island boardwalk. This is what happens when city officials play opossum.

Q and A

“How many times do sparrows and starlings nest each year?” I’m guessing you mean the house sparrow. The house sparrow has two to three broods and the European starling has one or two.

“When do monarchs start their northward migration?” Some are heading north now. They leave Michoacán in Mexico when the dry season forces them to find water to drink.

“What is the most numerous bird in Minnesota?” This is difficult to ascertain. Birds migrate through and don’t complete census forms. If I were to guess, I’d say the red-winged blackbird. It might be the most plentiful bird species in North America.

Nature lessons

The halcyon was a mythical bird, identified with the kingfisher that mythology says nested at sea at the time of the winter solstice and charms the waves into being calm. The mythical thunderbird was believed to carry rain on its back and to have created thunder and lightning. Superstition said that storm petrels were the souls of drowned sailors seeking the prayers of the living.

Listen for singing robins.

A nightjar is not a chamber pot. It’s a bird of the family Caprimulgidae. It has a short bill, wide mouth and feeds on flying insects. Most have small feet of little use for walking and long pointed wings. These nocturnal or crepuscular birds are also called goatsuckers, as they were once believed to suck the milk from goats. Common nighthawks and whippoorwills are nightjars.

Birds of a feather flock together and aim for your car.

Thanks for stopping by

“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.” — Bradley Miller

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You don’t blame them on your mother, the ecology or the President. You realize that you control your own destiny.” — Albert Ellis

DO GOOD

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