Author: Seth Inman

The Blue-and-white Swallow

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A Blue-and-white Swallow with a view of Alajuela and the Santa Ana wind turbines

Nearly every day at Xandari you’re quite likely to spot some swallows zooming around anywhere between roughly ten and seventy feet above the ground, foraging for small insects on the wing. Chances are that these aerial insectivores are Blue-and-white Swallows (Pygochelidon cyanoleuca), although Northern Rough-winged Swallows have been seen here before too. The Blue-and-whites are typically in groups of five to twenty, but sometimes they’re solitary or in pairs, and you can also expect to see some swifts mixed in with the flock if there are lots of bugs in the air.

The footage above is from one afternoon last week when the swallows were enjoying Continue reading →

The Montezuma Oropendola

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A week or so ago, Jocelyn discussed the Montezuma Oropendola’s song as heard on Xandari property in Costa Rica. As you could hear from the linked vocalizations in her post, the bird makes an incredibly strange, gurgling/bubbling sound, recently described by a Xandari guest as “the sound of pouring water from one jug into another.” James and I have put up photos of the oropendola as Bird of the Day posts before, but I realized after reading Jocelyn’s thoughts on the bird that we haven’t featured any video of this common resident species at Xandari in the past. So I went out with my camera this weekend and was lucky enough to capture a minute of behavior footage to share here. The main thing missing is what the male often looks like when he’s vocalizing: perched on a branch, he typically leans forward as he calls, bending down so far that it appears he might suddenly fall off. At the end of his call he swings back up, and starts the process again.

Although the Montezuma Oropendola is a species commonly seen (or at least heard) from Xandari on most days, they don’t appear to have any nests on property. And you’d notice Continue reading →

Can a Casual Birder Have a 500+ Life List?

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A Swallow-tailed Kite – a relatively common CR species I first saw just last week – spotted from the El Copal Reserve in Cartago, Costa Rica.

About three years ago, I wrote in a post from Ecuador that “Even after taking a pretty intense ornithology class at Cornell University and working for the Lab of Ornithology, I don’t really consider myself a birder.” Last year I revised that statement a bit, clarifying that “now, as James and I add our observations around Xandari to eBird every day, my opinion may have changed slightly (though I can’t yet subscribe to the labels of bird-head or bird-nerd by a long shot).” Then, this January I wrote of myself and my friends John and Justin that, “Although none of us are the type of birder that pursue ‘life lists’ — a checklist of the thousands of bird species in the world that one has seen — we all use eBird and are definitely interested in seeing and identifying wildlife of any sort.”

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Revamped Xandari Pysanky

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Last time I posted about pysanky at Xandari was about six months ago, when I showcased some new designs revolving around simple geometric patterns and Costa Rican soccer teams. A few months before that I made a video that displayed the process of making an egg sped up quite a bit. Now, as you can see from the egg photos above with before-and-after wax shots, I’m working Continue reading →

Winnie-the-Pooh Wants to Save the Bees

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Planting a bee-friendly tree beneath Warwick Castle. Via The Telegraph.

Last month, I shared a story from Cornell’s orchards, where apple blossoms were pollinated this year solely by local wild bee species rather than commercial honeybees. Funnily enough, the same day I posted that story, the science editor for The Telegraph wrote a piece concerning bees across the Atlantic, where the British Beekeepers Association has partnered with one of the original Winnie-the-Pooh illustrators to make a new story encouraging children to care for these productive insects. As Pooh tells Piglet in the new story when they realize there is a shortage of honey, “you can only be careful for so long before you run out altogether.” Sarah Knapton reports:

Beekeepers are also hoping to engage children by encouraging them to bake with local honey, become beekeepers, visit nearby apiaries and throw seed-bombs to help the spread of wildflowers.

New illustrations show AA Milne’s characters Christopher Robin, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Pooh making a vegetable patch in the Yorkshire Dales, building a bee box in the shadow of the Angel of the North in Gateshead, and planting a flowering tree in the shadow of Warwick Castle.

The friends are also pictured dropping bee-balls in Birmingham, painting in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire and visiting a honey show in Glastonbury.

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Cornell Orchards Stick to Free Bees

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Bryan Danforth inspects apple blossoms and native pollinators at the Cornell Orchards. © Jason Koski/University Photography

Earlier this spring, instead of hiring commercial honeybee keepers to bring in their hives to apple orchards, Cornell decided to try relying solely on wild bee species for pollination of the blossoms at their Ithaca site. Based on research from the university’s entomology department, the Cornell Orchards knew it had a robust population comprised of twenty-six different wild bee species among the Ithaca apple trees. They counted on this local bee life to do all the pollinating work that the imported European honeybees would have done, and by the end of May it was clear that a full crop’s worth of flowers had been pollinated! We’ve featured plenty of stories about the deeply troubling colony collapse disorder in Apis mellifera and are always eager to emphasize the importance of pollination, so it may seem strange to celebrate the non-use of European honeybees in this case, but the main point here is that the value of wild native bee species should not be forgotten! If commercial honeybees continue to struggle, alternative methods of pollination will be necessary, and fostering local biodiversity is a great way to compensate for that potential eventuality.

As a fun coincidence, I heard about this story because the lead researcher in the wild bee population was my entomology professor sophomore year. You can read more about Professor Bryan Danforth’s role and the Cornell Orchards decision in the piece for the Cornell Chronicle below, by John Carberry:

As the state’s land-grant institution, Cornell University was born to explore science for the public good – a mission that can sometimes require a leap of faith.

Just such a leap is paying off now at Cornell Orchards in Ithaca, as researchers and managers from the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science and the Department of Entomology celebrate a solid spring pollination season for the site’s apple trees. While crisp apples and fresh cider Continue reading →

Back at Xandari

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My first Xandari sunset of 2015.

This week, after about six months away from Costa Rica, I’m working at Xandari again, and it’s good to be back! On Saturday morning I walked around the trails for a couple hours and logged thirty-one bird species seen or heard, which counts as a pretty good list for Xandari, in my experience. Among the usual suspects were a few birds that are relatively uncommon sights, though not rare by any means: Chestnut-collared Swifts, Sulphur-bellied Flycatchers, and a male Long-tailed Manakin, which is always a pleasure to see or even hear. I also got an uncharacteristically good look at a Rufous-and-white Wren, a species that long eluded our efforts to spot when James and I first got here a year ago, despite its eerily human-sounding whistle that frequently pierces the forest trails. And although it’s a very common bird around here, I did get an okay photo of the male Red-crowned Ant-Tanager, which can be tough given their predilection for skulking around among dense vines.

One of the plots of coffee planted last June, now shaded by banana and tiquisque.

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Casual Cultural Conservation Through Dance

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The only working Danish windmill in the US.

A few weeks ago I visited a friend from Cornell whose family lives in Nebraska and comprises a good portion of the Scandinavian Folk Dancers of Omaha. I’d seen them perform before at the New England Folk Festival in April, held in Mansfield, Massachusetts, but unfortunately at that point my phone’s camera wasn’t the right tool for the job of documenting their great dancing. This time, when the group performed on a much more intimate stage at the Danish Tivoli Festival in Elk Horn, Iowa, (Elk Horn and neighboring Kimballton apparently make up the largest rural Danish settlement in the US) I was ready with my camera and was able to take some half-decent videos of several of the dances. The audio quality isn’t the best given the slightly windy conditions, but hopefully you can get a general feel for the experience in the video below.

We’ve featured some thoughts on dance on the blog before, especially given Kerala’s Continue reading →

Another Step Forward for Merlin

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© Visipedia

I don’t mean the bird species, which is found in North America and also in different varieties elsewhere in the world. I’m not talking about the wizard, either. I’m referring, rather, to the Merlin Bird ID app that I wrote about last month. It turns out that Cornell Tech and Caltech, working together as a team called Visipedia, have been developing a new tool with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for Merlin Bird ID that involves computerized identification of bird photos. Called Merlin Photo ID, this beta-stage program can take an image of one of North America’s most common bird species (a pool of 400) and identify it after a human user has pointed out where its bill, eye, and tail are.

And after testing it out for a bit I learned that it doesn’t even need all of those Continue reading →

Bats can Focus Biosonar by Stretching Mouths

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While in Cockpit Country for our first expedition to Jamaica looking for the Golden Swallow, John, Justin and I watched in awe as hundreds and hundreds of bats flowed out of a cave and flew in a distinct path right by us over the course of half an hour. The slightly shoddy video below can only partly convey the sensation of having the flapping mammals zoom past in a steady stream. We’ve recently featured a couple stories of scientific developments in bat research on the blog, including wing-beat echolocation in fruit bats and singing for communication in other species.

A couple weeks ago, we learned via Discover Magazine’s science blog by Continue reading →

The Barred Antshrike

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Last weekend, a former minister of the environment for Costa Rica was staying at Xandari with his wife. Avid birders with life lists, they noticed a binder on the lobby’s coffee table with the cover image pictured above. The binder was the product of work James and I did last summer, highlighting forty interesting species of resident birds on Xandari’s property. After the table of contents, the first featured bird — the Barred Antshrike — was a surprise to the visiting couple. They’d been birding the Central Valley for years, but they’d never seen the species, and they simply didn’t believe that it could be found in such an accessible location.

Politely, the couple smiled at the binder-creators’ mistake and set out Continue reading →

Cave Swallows in Jamaica

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Our last big video from the Jamaican Golden Swallow expedition was from the Blue Mountains. This time I have some footage of a colony of Cave Swallows we found at the end of our trip when we were driving along the north coast of the island. About fifty or sixty birds live in this shelf of rock overhanging the ocean, having created nests in the walls with mud pellets.

In the video above, you can see Justin swimming under the natural bridge to get a better view of the birds as they circle around to check on their nests, possibly Continue reading →

Avian Alarm Calls

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A Tufted Titmouse calling in flight.

When you’re walking in the woods or even on a city block, chances are you’ll hear birds chirping at some point. Whatever they’re trying to communicate, it certainly isn’t the joyous celebration of life that cartoons and our active imaginations often make out birdsong to be. Males might be trying to attract a mate, individuals could be declaring their territory, and if it’s the right time of year, chicks may be begging for food. Another reason for a bird to vocalize is to create an alarm call in the interest of its general foraging flock, whether to flee from or mob a potential predator.

I’ve watched small birds like sparrows and chickadees mob a pygmy owl, crows, and a Red-tailed Hawk, but I’ve never had the chance to experience the beginning of the action, which apparently starts with just one alarm call, which turn out to be variable enough in some cases to communicate predator size and danger. Christopher Solomon reports for the New York Times‘ science section:

MISSOULA, Mont. — In the backyard of a woodsy home outside this college town, small birds — black-capped chickadees, mountain chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches — flitted to and from the yard’s feeder. They were oblivious to a curious stand nearby, topped by a curtain that was painted to resemble bark.

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“The Great Empty,” more Full than its Sobriquet Implies

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Photo © Gerrit Vyn

What will you be doing this Wednesday 5/20 at 8pm EDT? If you’re in the United States and have a television, you should consider watching a PBS Nature documentary on the Greater Sage-Grouse (male in mating display pictured left) and other wildlife members of the vast community that lives in the sagebrush plains that span eleven western states and hundreds of thousands of miles. Titled “The Sagebrush Sea,” the film is the first of its type shot and produced by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and it promises to be quite entertaining and educational about this vast and daunting landscape. A friend who was in one of my freshman-year classes at Cornell has been helping out in the editing room as an employee at the Lab this spring, and he tells me that its been a really rewarding experience. Just from watching the trailer below you can see why!

You can check out the PBS Nature schedule webpage to see when the broadcast Continue reading →

Merlin App Recognized in 2015 NSF Showcase

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Prairie Warbler © Gerrit Vyn

Last week, an online video event was held to celebrate and showcase work funded by the National Science Foundation, called the NSF 2015 Teaching and Learning Video Showcase: Improving Science, Math, Engineering, and Computer Science Education. 112 videos featuring innovative work in these fields were shared on the website, and 21 were recognized as Facilitators’ Choice, Presenters’ Choice, and/or Public Choice projects.

From the Showcase website’s About page, here are the criteria for recognition in each category:

During the event, facilitators from each resource center will select a few videos, which will recognize extraordinary creativity in the use of video to share innovative work to determine the “Facilitators’ Choice.” In addition, all presenters will have the opportunity to vote for their favorite videos to determine “Presenters’ Choice.” Finally, all public visitors to the event will be asked to select those videos that they find most compelling. Those with the greatest number of public votes will receive “Public Choice” recognition.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID app was one of only 3 projects to Continue reading →

A Brief Global Big Day Summary

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Bush Thick-Knee, Brisbane, AU. Photo by Brian Sullivan, via eBird.

On Saturday, while visiting Chicago, I was only able to get a very short amount of time birding for a total of seven species. In the meantime, over twelve-thousand people around the world, across about 110 countries, saw 5,892 species (reported so far, and including the paltry seven I saw).

The photo on the left is of a Bush Thick-Knee, an Australian species that was the first seen during the Global Big Day. In Panama, the Lab’s Team Sapsucker got 320 species, and in New Jersey, at the World Series of Birding, the Cornell Redheads defended their championship title from last year.

One of the species I saw on Saturday was the Chimney Swift, a bird I hadn’t seen before, so that was exciting! If you want to follow more about the Global Big Day, check out eBird’s page!