I know, them is fightin’ words…

I had been meaning to post this for a while. You know how life gets busy.

Last Saturday, my wife and I tagged along with Ross Dawkins1 to band birds. Ross is a chemist by trade, but has banded over 164,000 birds since he started some 35 years ago.

Some of you may wonder — what is bird banding and why band birds? We setup lines of fine-meshed nets, and then carefully take the birds out, slap a near weightless aluminum band that contains a unique number around their leg, record some information about the bird, and then let it go.

The idea is to catch birds again that are already banded. Most of what you catch are birds that you’ve banded yourself. But everynow and then, you catch a bird that’s been banded somewhere else, or someone catchs one of your birds. For example, the other day Ross recently a Swamp Sparrow that was banded on Whitefish Point, Michigan (which is on the upper peninsula).

By keeping track of this information, you get an idea how long different species can live in the wild, and how they move around. For example, Ross was telling me that the first record of Mississippi Kite in Bolivia was banded in San Angelo. (A kid unfortunately shot the bird, noticed the band, brought it to a priest, and the information made it’s way back to the US). In another case, a White-winged Dove that was banded on the Texas coast was recaptured in Guatamala. We’d have no way of knowing that a bird in Guatamala had been in Texas, if not for the banding.

The location we were at was Dan Brown’s hummer house near Cristoval, TX, in Tom Green County. He has an estimated population of 2,500 Black-chinned Hummingbirds that nest on his property, and has become a favorite place to visit for birders all around the state. He uses 800 lbs of sugar a summer, in making his sugar water for his feeders. With one cup sugar to four cups water, that’s thousands and thousands of gallons of sugar water each summer. He also feeds 20 to 30 tons of corn to deer and turkey. It’s quite a place.

We setup nets down by the creek and by Dan’s house. Most of what we caught was pretty common, but there were a few nice things. In particular, I accompanied Ross the day before when we caught a Brown Creeper. (I brought my camera only to realize that my memory card had gotten left at the house). Also on Saturday, I saw an adult Red-headed Woodpecker along the Concho River, which may be common for you birders out east, but is a dang good bird here in west Texas.

One of the things I enjoyed most was catching lots of Hermit Thrushes.

These birds are a member of the robin family and spend their winters in Texas. We caught six or seven of them in the nets, more than you’d see in the field in a given morning of birding.

Be sure to check out the picture gallery to see all the pictures, including the red in a Ruby-crowned Kinglet and a Northern Cardinal that literally plays dead.

Tara Smith has an interesting post over at Aetiology about chicken pox parties… They’re not nearly as harmless as some may have thought.

I know that many people still view chickenpox as “just a harmless childhood illness.” Sure, for many of us, that’s the case. So far, I’ve escaped with little more than a few scars on my forehead… However, there’s a very real possibility that I could develop shingles later in my life. Additionally, the wild virus just ain’t as benign as we’d like to think. It can cause severe pneumonia or encephalitis. Additionally, I mentioned here that deadly infections with the group A streptococcus are becoming more common. Guess what’s a major risk factor for these infections? Yep–chicken pox. Check out, for example, this manuscript on invasive group A strep disease in Alberta, Canada, which notes that “varicella virus infection preceded invasive GAS disease in 25% of children 8 years of age and under.” It has the potential to be much more than just an inconvenient itch.

I wanted to wish everyone a happy Valentine’s Day. Be sure to tell those around you how much you love them. Whether it’s a spouse, a special someone, or a family member.

A year ago today, I was a nervous and excited wreck. I can’t believe it’s been one year since I popped the question. Afterwards, her dad gave me a hard time and warned me that all future Valentine’s Days would pale in comparison. I think the memory is all the sweeter.

Via Grrlscientist, I stumbled across a site that makes learning geography fun. Really fun.

If you’re like most Americans, you’re knowledge of geography is probably embarassing. Mine is.

This site has flash based “games” where you attempt to locate the countries or states in different parts of the world. They have many different levels for each country or region that range from easy to difficult to ridiculously hard.

So the next time you meet someone from Burundi, don’t ask them where it is and then stare blankly at them when they tell you it’s south of Rwanda and west of Tanzania. Instead, ask them how the fishing at Lake Tanganyika is. (Okay, the game won’t teach you that much geography…)

Olduvai George has a new piece up with an incredible illustration of a Cooper’s Hawk and a story as good as the picture to match.

As always, his artwork amazes.

Last week, at least one person asked about The Bruce’s ears, if he was a Siamese with the Scottish Fold ears… The answer is yes, and this picture shows well his unique facial composition. Round face, puffy cheeks, and very cool ears.

Read quickly. I’m in deep trouble when my wife finds this…

Coming back from church tonight we drove by Sonic, and she asked if we couldn’t stop for drinks, fully expecting me to say no. To her delight, I said sure. As we pulled in, I felt so much like that guy in the American Express commerical, who’s girlfriend orders a small popcorn at the movies, and he takes the bold step of saying, “make it a medium.” His girlfriend hugs him with joy, the cashier asks if he wants a drink with that too, and he looks downright scared and shakes his head no. Yeah, like him, I’m a cheapskate. (Not that I have a choice since neither of us have real jobs at the moment.)

So my wife’s getting over a cold, and her voice sounds really hoarse. After ordering, she looks over at me and says, “I think my voice sounds cool. Sort of husky and sexy, don’t you think?”

I kept a straight face for all of two seconds before I started laughing. “Honey, I’m not sure if husky and sexy are normally words that go together…”

While some in our country, and sadly our churches, stick their head in the ground and deny the very existance of global warming, small towns in Alaska are getting destroyed by it.

Some changes have been spectacular. Edwin Weyiouanna of the Inupiat Eskimo village of Shishmaref presented the latest on well-documented changes to his island community of about 600 people in the Chukchi Sea just north of Bering Strait.

No longer protected by early winter sea ice or ground that’s permanently frozen, the community has been pounded and eroded by storms. Villagers in 2002 voted to relocate to the mainland and hope to obtain millions in federal dollars money to make the move.

MSNBC had a couple of articles about frogs that were worth sharing.

The first indicates that a widespread pregnancy test from the 30s to the 60s may be to blame for the spread of a fungus that’s currently killing off frogs worldwide.

What was this pregnancy test you might ask?

That test involved taking the urine of a woman and injecting it into an African clawed frog. If the woman was pregnant, the hormones in her urine would stimulate ovulation in the frog and it would spawn within a matter of hours.

The species was exported to labs around the world in huge quantities from South Africa from the 1930s — the decade in which [South African biologist Che] Weldon has traced the first recorded case of the fungus by examining preserved frogs in museum collections.

The second article talks about the exact same fungus that threatens to wipe out Panama’s Golden Frog, its national emblem.

The mysterious mold threatening the frog is spreading quickly in Panama, according to a report published by Southern Illinois University on Monday. It grows over the animals’ skin, sealing it up and effectively choking them to death,

“Many frogs use their skin as we use our lungs. If it gets blocked up, they die,” said zoologist Karen Lips at Southern Illinois.

A separate study published last month in the journal Nature cited global warming as a probable cause for the proliferation of the fungus.

I think this should serve as a good reminder how much damage we can cause when we move species around to places they don’t normally occur. You don’t think this applies to you? What do you have planted out in your yard? Native plants? Or whatever they sold you at the store?