Author: Seth Inman

Swallow-tailed Kite Conservation

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Bird of the Day 9/19/15: Swallow-tailed Kite (Reserva El Copal, Costa Rica)

I’ve had the fortune of seeing this long-rumped raptor outside of the United States, where they are now considered rare despite their wide range throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. And although the population did decrease in the last several decades, the IUCN does now list the species as having an “increasing” population trend. This interesting article in The Nature Conservancy, however, does raise concern over habitat loss and the species’ vulnerability. Ginger Strand reports:

Maria Whitehead yanks her feet out of the water as something crashes into Bull Creek next to the boat. Seconds later, a 10-foot-long alligator surfaces a few yards away. As the prehistoric reptile glides off, leaving a sinuous wake in the tannin-brown river, Whitehead casually retrieves her binoculars and goes back to watching a nest of swallow-tailed kites near the top of a soaring pine.

A project director for The Nature Conservancy in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Whitehead seems unfazed by nearly losing a toe on the job. So does Craig Sasser, manager of the Waccamaw National Wildlife Refuge. Wading into primeval cypress swamps, scaling 100-foot pine trees, paddling up tidal rivers through clouds of insects in triple digit heat: These are all part of researching swallow-tailed kites, a spectacular but poorly understood raptor.

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The Minecraft Generation

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Screenshot of the first hour of survival mode in Minecraft

In this past week’s edition, the New York Times Magazine published a very interesting story by Clive Thompson about the popular video game Minecraft, which he argues is becoming an educational tool in a way, particularly in the arena of coding and problem-solving. I’ve played the game myself for a number of hours (probably somewhere between 50-150, which among the “Minecraft generation” would be considered pennies). I can affirm that this Swedish blockbuster–the game is built on cubes of different materials that you can break down and build up–is addictive, a creative outlet, and a fun way to spend time with friends.

As Thompson states, the STEM educational movement, where science, technology, engineering, and math are especially encouraged in the US system to increase competitiveness in students, can benefit from some of the habits and skills that Minecraft helps develop for those interested enough. The article is worth reading if you have kids who might play, enjoy playing yourself, or are interested in checking the game out:

Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap.

An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks, from dizzying towers to entire cities.

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Another Addition to the Annals of Dung

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We’ve written about dung before, when it came to beetles rolling it for the poop’s role (ha) in their life cycle, and when it’s been used for recycled paper, and even household cooking gas derived from biodigested manure. Now, we’re learning via Audubon Magazine about another use for the dried doo, and we figured that would be a good time to share about another interesting excremental story from the natural world, which happens to be the fastest moving organism, in a sense.

Both the Black Lark, a bird species found in Europe and western Asia, and the genus of fungi called Pilobolus, more widely distributed around the world, have to deal with something called the Zone of Repugnance when it comes to dung. Although the ornithologists in the Audubon article aren’t quoted using this phrase, it is accepted in mycologist parlance for those who study livestock excrement or something related to it: animals will avoid eating grass or greens in an area where fecal matter is present. Around every pile of poop is a perimeter that the grazers try to not chew on. Black Larks take advantage of that fact to build their nests in no-step zones, and Pilobolus need to shoot their spores behind enemy lines. Matt Soniak, for Audubon:

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Creative Conservation

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White rhinos in South Africa. Photo © Michael Jansen / Flickr via Cool Green Science

From our counterparts at TNC’s blog Cool Green Science comes a second post on the wacky strategies sometimes implemented to save endangered wildlife species. Poisoning rhino horns so people can’t use them for so-called medicine, treating bats for fungus with banana bacteria, killing invasive snakes with acetominophen-filled dead mice thrown from helicopters, the list goes on. Justine Hausheer writes:

Consumers of illegal rhino horn products might be in for a bit of a nasty gastrointestinal shock. In an effort to protect their population of rhinos from poachers, the South Africa’s Sabi Sand Game Reserve is injecting parasiticides and pink dye into their rhinos’ horns. The chemical cocktail isn’t lethal (to humans or the rhinos) but it will send anyone that ingests powdered horn racing for the nearest restroom. Reserve staff have already treated more than 100 rhinos and put up sign warning poachers of the treatment.

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Digiscoping in the Tropics

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A male Scarlet-thighed Dacnis before zooming in with the camera in the digiscope setup

The first time I digiscoped, I wasn’t aware of the term, and I was using a small, borrowed point-and-shoot camera with a guide’s spotting scope. The results ended up here on the blog, though the images are, in retrospect, fairly low quality. In certain cases, however, digiscoping–basically the pairing of a scope with a camera for photography–can yield quite good shots of wildlife, and is arguably more versatile than having a big camera with a telephoto lens attached. Just check out Sharon Stiteler’s photos in her digiscoping article on Audubon’s webpage last year, or simply look up “digiscoping birds” to find some stunning images. Note, however, that digiscoping almost always refers to using a scope, or, in other words, a high-end piece of optic technology that costs anywhere between $400 and $3000–and that’s without the tripod.

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Boquete and Barú

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The first waterfall on the Lost Waterfalls Trail

During Easter weekend, I took an eight-hour bus ride from San José, Costa Rica to David, Panama, and then a 45- to 60-minute bus ride from David to Boquete, a mountain town in the foothills of Barú, Panama’s only volcano and the country’s highest peak at 3,474 meters above sea level. Barú Volcano National Park is adjacent to the international park that Costa Rica and Panama share, called La Amistad (The Friendship), though it is far smaller than La Amistad, at around 14,000 hectares compared with 207,000. I was joined on the four-day weekend trip by my friend and coworker, Jocelyn, who had never been to Panama before, and we enjoyed hiking the conservation areas above the town of Boquete, admiring the many waterfalls in the region and also looking for the high-elevation bird species native to the cloud forest, many of which are endemic to Costa Rica and western Panama, as I wrote in my previous volcano-related post.

 

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In addition to the national park, which charges $5 for entrance and has two main trails (one to the peak of the volcano, which takes about five hours to ascend, and one across the forest and part of the mountain ride, called Sendero Los Quetzales), there are some private forest reserves that charge a small admission fee. One is called the Lost Waterfalls Trail, which features three cascades and costs $7; another is called the Pipeline Trail, which follows a series of water tubes to the source and costs $3.

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New Egg Art

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In the past I’ve shared some of my egg-based artwork, known in Ukrainian as pysanky, that’s for sale at the Xandari Resort gift shop in Costa Rica, including a sped-up video of the process. But my painstaking handiwork, with wax and dye, can now be replicated to some extent by a machine called the Eggbot, which is an open-source robotic machine that can draw on eggs or other spheroids. Most often it uses pens but it can also even work with an electric-heated “kitska” or wax stylus similar to the flame-heated ones that I use.

The video above displays the various works of an Eggbot used by Jiri Zemanek at Continue reading →

Map the Herps You Spot

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Spotted Salamander by Brian Magnier

In the spring of my penultimate year at Cornell, I took a Herpetology class that introduced me to the world of reptiles and amphibians, or “herps,” as they’re affectionately known. Thanks to that exposure, I was able to enjoy the spring migration of certain salamander species and learn the basics of the main families of frogs, lizards, snakes, and other herps like alligators, crocodiles, and all the other slimy or scaly animals in the classes Amphibia and Reptilia. If I had known of the existence of the citizen science project HerpMapper at the time (it wasn’t released until September of the same year as that salamander migration) I’d have certainly submitted some observations and photos to the organization! From their About page:

HerpMapper is a cooperative project, designed to gather and share information about reptile and amphibian observations across the planet. Using HerpMapper, you can create records of your herp observations and keep them all in one place. In turn, your data is made available to HerpMapper Partners – groups who use your recorded observations for research, conservation, and preservation purposes. Your observations can make valuable contributions on the behalf of amphibians and reptiles.

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Birding Apps Re-reviewed by Boucher

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I visit Tim Boucher’s blog on The Nature Conservancy’s website every week or so to see what’s new, and this last check-up I noticed an old post from 2013 that’s been edited to include observations on fresh updates for phone apps that help identify birds, like Merlin, which I’ve covered in the past.

So far I haven’t purchased any bird identification application for my phone, mostly because there are good ones like Merlin and Audubon available for free in the US, but I’ve been considering a $9.99 app for the birds of Costa Rica, made by bird-watching guides both in CR and Panama.

Boucher doesn’t rank the apps in his order of preference, but it looks like from his reviews that he prefers the Audubon and Merlin apps for the fact that they’re free and utilitarian, though Merlin is geared more towards beginners. He’s also pretty positive about the Sibley and Peterson apps, both of which started with physical book versions of their guides.  Continue reading →

The Nechisar Nightjar

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Cover Art © Pegasus Books

Although I haven’t read this book yet, I do know what it’s like to be on an expedition to find a bird that hasn’t been seen in several decades, which is the subject of Vernon Head’s book, freshly published in the US this month. “The Rarest Bird in the World” tells the story of the search for a bird related to potoos called the Nechisar Nightjar, which had been identified as a new species in the 1990s by Cambridge scientists who found a single wing of the bird in a remote area of Ethiopia.

The publisher blurb makes it sound pretty engaging:

Part detective story, part love affair, and pure adventure storytelling at its best, a celebration of the thrill of exploration and the lure of wild places during the search for the elusive Nechisar Nightjar. In 1990 an expedition of Cambridge scientists arrived at the Plains of Nechisar, tucked between the hills of the Great Rift Valley in the Gamo Gofa province in the country of Ethiopia. On that expedition they found three hundred and fifteen species of birds; sixty one species of mammal and sixty nine species of butterfly were identified; twenty species of dragonflies and damselflies; seventeen reptile species were recorded; three frog species were filed; plants were listed. And the wing of a road-killed bird was packed into a brown paper bag. It was to become the most famous wing in the world.

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Volcán Barva

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The lagoon in the crater of Barva Volcano

This weekend, I visited Braulio Carrillo National Park for the second time, but at a different sector: Barva Volcano. I’d been to the Quebrada González area further east in July of last year, where the ecosystem is more tropical rainforest than the high-altitude cloud forest of a volcano. The Quebrada González eBird hotspot has 382 species reported in 288 checklists at the time of writing this post; in stark contrast, the Volcán Barva hotspot on eBird has 82 species in only 8 checklists, including my own contribution despite arriving at the national park at around 11am, nowhere near ideal circumstances for birdwatching.

This discrepancy is likely explained both by the fact that Barva is at a higher elevation and therefore less diverse in terms of species count, but also a pretty small chunk of this massive national park. The lower diversity, however, is compensated by a higher rate of endemism, which is what occurs along high mountain gradients where habitat needs are specialized. For example, I spotted a Spangle-cheeked Tanager that’s endemic to the highlands of Costa Rica and western Panama, and there were lots of special bromeliads and mossy, licheny trees to admire. Continue reading →

Roasting Xandari Coffee

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About a month ago I reported that coffee was going strong here at the resort, and since then we’ve been serving our own Xandari-grown coffee here at the restaurant during breakfast hours nearly every day possible, based on availability of the roasted product. In the video above, you can see Continue reading →