The Nature of the Beast (according to Susan McCarthy)

Fine man, fine bird

Rich Stallcup died December 15, 2012. He was a kind, wonderful guy and a brilliant naturalist. Once he told me a story about a bristle-thighed curlew, and the people who admired it. Before the story I want to say what a freakily great bird the bristle-thighed curlew is.

 

First, the bristle thighed curlew (Numenius tahitiensis) spends the summer in Alaska and the winter in Hawaii. Or Tahiti or other tropical Pacific islands. Nice work if you can get it. Maybe not that easy to get, since there are only about 7,000 bristle-thighed curlews in the world.

 

That might be tundra with dwarf willow, so I'm guessing this bird is in Alaska

 

 

They're hard to see. The Hawaiian birds aren't hanging around Oahu, they're out on uninhabited islands. And the Alaskan birds are off in low-lying, mosquito-infested tundra. If you do see one, you might mistake it for the very similar whimbrel. Hearing its distinctive call might be your best bet for identifying it. Birdwatchers, especially birders who are trying to see every breeding bird species in the US, or in North America, long for sightings of these rare curlews, but most have never seen one.

 

Bristle-thighed Curlews on a Pacific island beach. Not Waikiki, Midway.

 

This curlew is a large brown moth-patterned shorebird with a long sickle bill. From a distance they just look brown. You can't see the complicated plumage patterns or the bristled thighs. I don't know why they have bristled thighs. I haven't run across any speculations. If you held a gun to my head and made me guess (part of a really sick scenario), I'd say it might have something to do with courtship, and showing another bristle-thighed curlew of the appealing sex that you too are a bristle-thighed curlew and you'd like to get to know them better. (Please put the gun down now.)

 

They eat almost anything. Flowers, bugs, berries, land crabs, invertebrates, and the eggs of other birds. Here's a startling thing: they use tools to break open large eggs. The long sickle bills aren't the best tool for smashing things, so they grab rocks or pieces of coral and slam them down on the egg.

 

They're the only shorebirds known to use tools, a habit that has been beautifully documented in a paper by Jeffrey S. Marks and C. Scott Hall, published in the 1992 Condor.

 

Marks and Hall observed bristle-thigheds on Tern Island and Laysan Island, in the far northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago. When the curlews get a food item too big to swallow, like a largish ghost crab, they slam it against the ground or a rock until it breaks into delightful bite-sized morsels. Adults haven't been seen doing this in Alaska, but baby curlews there will slam bits of moss, lichen, or plastic flagging (presumably put up by curlew biologists trying to get their bearings).

 

When the young curlews arrive in the islands for the first time, having traveled 2,500 miles from their birthplace, they are in a slammin' mood, and will slam feathers, shells, or bits of seaweed. I presume they soon learn to focus on more edible things to slam.

 

From "Tool Use by Bristle-Thighed Curlews Feeding on Albatross Eggs," Marks, Jeffrey S. & Hall, C. Scott. Condor 94: 1032-1034. 1992. Used with kind permission of the Cooper Ornithological Society. Is this not the greatest bird? Note bristled thighs.

But sometimes a curlew comes across an abandoned albatross egg. It's too big to pick up and slam, and the shell is too thick for a curlew to puncture with its bill. That's when the tool use happens. Marks and Hall say it's probably an extension of slamming behavior, and I agree. But I still think it's clever. 

 

So: smart rare mysterious long-distance travelers. A bird I'd love to see.

* 

At one time Rich Stallcup led 30-day Alaskan birding tours for the company Wings, tours for the fanatical and obsessed. On his fifth tour his group – 20 devoted birders – was exhausted from days of camping. They flew to St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, arriving at 9 p.m. There were three hours of daylight left in the long Alaskan summer day, but word on the birder grapevine was that no notable rare birds were about. No vagrant Siberian birds had been spotted. The seabird nesting colonies – the two species of kittiwakes, three auklets, two murres, two puffins – would still be there in the morning.

Rich assembled the weary group in the lobby of the King Eider Hotel, the island's only hostelry, run by Aleuts. He went over the next day's plan. Since there were no rarities around, he said they could all go to bed early, and sleep in.

 After five hours sleep, Rich found himself wide awake. He wandered down to the beach. “I'm just admiring the Kittlitz's Murrelets,” he told me, when he heard a bird call he'd never heard before. (He whistled this for me – Sibley gives the flight call as “teeoip.”) “I go, 'Ho, shit. What's that?'” Teeoip! 

“Straight in from Hawaii, here comes the Bristle-thighed Curlew, one of the most wanted and rare birds in America. It flies right in front of me – teeoip! – real low. I'm just quivering because it's so great.” The curlew flies away, low and to the west, whistling teeoip “as if it wanted to land,” leaving Rich on the beach, in awe and dread, wondering “What am I gonna say at breakfast?” 

The trip leader is not supposed to sneak off and see the good birds himself after telling everyone to sleep in. And the Bristle-thighed Curlew is an unspeakably good bird. 

Rich spent the day trying to atone. If only they could find the curlew again! He dragged the group all over the island, even when they whimpered about missing lunch. (They must have despaired of seeing the curlew by then, to complain about such a petty thing. And maybe they had been too agitated to eat their breakfasts. Still.) 

Late in the afternoon, at Stony Point Lake, the curlew sprang up. It landed where everyone could see it and drink in its exotic beauty, marvel at its thighs. They returned to the King Eider in triumph, rejoicing mightily. 

“That evening we went over in a bus. We brought most of the Aleuts, the seal-killers and the mechanics. Everybody wanted to see this wonderful thing.” That's not something that usually happens on birding trips. That Rich's excitement was so infectious, and that he was so intent on sharing the experience, tells you a lot about him.

This photo of Rich Stallcup appears in a lobby display at the headquarters of PRBO Conservation Science (www.prbo.org). The building is dedicated to Rich, who co-founded PRBO in the 1960s and served as Naturalist and Bird-A-Thon Committee chairperson until his death in December 2012. Photo by Janet Wessel.

At the lake the curlew was bathing in company with a Eurasian Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus phaeopus), a bird ordinarily notable in itself. Eventually the Whimbrel wanted to leave. “The Whimbrel jumps out of the water and starts screaming. Quiquiquiquiqui! The curlew gets out. Quiquiquiquiqui! The whimbrel's so anxious, it jumps up into flight, and finally the curlew jumps up too, and they tower up to a thousand feet – with oldsquaws chittering, and Black-legged Kittiwakes – kitti-weeik! Kitti-weeik! – and they fly off. People were on the ground weeping.”

 

Teeoip!

 

Teeoip, Rich.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fishing with my dad

On the whale-watching trip in Monterey Bay we were lucky enough to see not only humpback whales but also blue whales – the largest animal that has ever lived. The humpbacks and the blues both had calves with them. We had the happiness of seeing that these species were reproducing, and of glimpsing (barely) their maternal behavior.

 

A less glamorous species – small, dowdy, unremarked – was also displaying parental behavior. Here and there on the waves (oog, waves, where is that dramamine?) were twosomes of the Common Murre. (They're Uria aalge, and murre rhymes with purr. No y-sound.)

 

Murres live by catching fish. They dive beneath the surface and use their wings to fly underwater. Maybe it's something you have to practice doing to be good enough to make a living.

 

They're superbly formed for the life aquatic, but they must resort to land to raise a family. Murres nest in crowded colonies on rocky islets or coastal cliffs. A pair of murres raises a single chick a year, if they are lucky and things go well. Father and mother go to sea and bring fish back to the crowded screaming rookery.

 

Each chick shrieks at the top of its lungs, a piercing cry I translate as BABY'S HERE!!! BABY'S HERE!!! with maybe a touch of BABY'S HUNGRY!!! The adults recognize their child's scream, and bring fish to their own darling, and nobody else's.

 

When the chick is old enough it jumps off the rock. It can't fly yet, so it falls into the sea. And screams BABY'S HERE!!! The chick's father finds it there, attracted by his child's voice. The chick's mother does not appear. She's done her bit. She laid the damned egg, remember?

 

Father and child swim away, and travel together for a few weeks. It seems likely that the chick is learning how to make a living in the exacting murre profession, although it is also possible that it's simply under its father's protection while it matures. The two are good at staying together, aided by the cry that can be heard over crashing seas: DON'T FORGET BABY!!!

 

Occasionally a juvenile bird comes into a wildlife rehab center and it's desirable to put it in an outdoor pool as soon as possible, so it can be in its favored medium, practice swimming and diving, and so its earsplitting cries of BABY'S HERE!!! will have a less painful deafening effect.

 

Whale children are tended by their mothers for all their childhoods. Murre children get time with both parents when they live on land, and with their fathers after they bravely leap into the ocean. 

 

Those saintly men. I am sure father murres love their chicks, take pleasure in their company, perhaps enjoy seeing them become more skilled. But there must be times, there must be, when they are tempted to scream back BABY SHUT UP!!!

 

Urban sophisticates

Pier 39 on the San Francisco waterfront is an open mall, with music, performers, a merry-go-round, people who will do a caricature of you-with-an-enormous-head, and stores for the left-handed or sock-mad. There's an aquarium and a marina. You can catch a ferry.

The pier was originally for commercial shipping. Then it was redeveloped as a tourist attraction. There was an opening ceremony in 1978, at which then-mayor Dianne Feinstein wore a “discreet but attractive swimsuit because of a bet with the developer,” according to the New York Times of that era. (Sadly, I can't find a photo.)

In 1989, some small boat docks on the north side of the pier were vacant during repair work. Unexpectedly, sea lions started hauling out on these docks. They napped. They grunted. They barked.
 

Business owners and boat owners complained. Noisy! Stinky! Unsanitary! Bad for business. A permit was requested to scare them away by detonating explosive charges. Others objected to the request. The controversy made it into the newspapers. This alerted residents who didn't ordinarily go to Pier 39 about the easy-to-view sea lions. We rushed to the spot to view the pinnipeds (Zalophus californianus). It was a great angle, and the sea lions were very close, and delightfully blasé about being viewed.

Since we were there, we drank lemonade, bought left-handed scissors and gala hosiery, and were manifestly good for business. We made plans to bring our out-of-town visitors.

The permit request was hastily dropped. Pier 39 began promoting the sea lions.

Most of the sea lions leave in the summer, to catch breeding season in the Channel Islands, and return in the fall.

What are the sea lions doing here? Resting. It is said that the sea lions who hang out at Pier 39 used to hang out at Seal Rock, but moved for some reason. How mysterious. Why on earth would they do that? Why wouldn't a wild animal prefer to hang out in a wild place? Look how great Seal Rock is:


The two places aren't that far apart, but Seal Rock is outside the Bay, and Pier 39 is inside. It's  speculated that there are fewer predators inside the Bay. Fewer predators makes it easier for scrumptious types to relax.

San Franciscans pay close attention to the doings of the sea lions. Earlier this year, almost all of them vanished from Pier 39 and there was much worry and much press coverage. Were they starving? Had a shark or a killer whale scared them away? Was that them up in Oregon?

Then they came back. There was much rejoicing, especially among the merchants.

Things don't seem normal among the sea lions this year. Mothers are giving birth to pups early, and in unusual places. Five were actually born at Pier 39.

El Nino may have something to do with it, or domoic acid, or declining fish stocks. The species isn't endangered, but it's not having a good year. If there's anything I can do to help, just say the word. And I know I speak for the small-business community when I say so.

Easy birding

Ten thirty at night, driving through Oakland's Chinatown, we glimpsed a large bird perched on a sign. We went around the block and there was a black-crowned night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) on the LEFT TURN ONLY sign, two more on a jewelry store awning, and another on a pho restaurant awning. We knew that night herons scavenged fish parts in local dumpsters, but no dumpsters were in view.

We pulled over and watched from the car. A heron might fly from an awning to the top of a NO PARKING sign, or shuffle along an awning. They weren't alarmed when cars drove by, or when waiters from the restaurant on the corner came out for a smoke. They flew to more distant spots once when a pedestrian appeared. (Clearly they found him suspicious – what's he doing here at this hour? Our presence in the car didn't bother the herons, though the waiters seemed to find it strange.)

Mostly they stared intently down toward the sidewalk. Odd. Night herons spend much of their working life staring intently into water looking for swimming prey. I could not see the sidewalk from where we were, because parked cars were in the way, but nothing seemed likely to be swimming there. If the restaurant had kindly put fish offal out, why wouldn't herons just go down and get it?

I speculated that the night herons were waiting until dumpsters got put out, and staring intently just because staring intently is their habit.

A heron suddenly popped into view, flapping up from the sidewalk, as if fleeing a kerfuffle of some kind. We realized there were more night herons on the sidewalk, either consuming or awaiting some fishy bonanza. The ones we saw peering intently were envious bystanders. Perhaps they were low-status birds – young birds? – wondering when it would be their turn.

The scene was one of social complexity, awaiting its naturalist, a Goodall of the dumpsters, a Schaller of the streets.

                                                                       Frankyboy5, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Don't mention religion, politics, or salmon

Yesterday we went to see salmon spawning and of course it ended in a fight in a bar.
 

We went to Lagunitas, California, to the lovely Leo Cogan Fish Viewing Area, and eventually saw a large female coho on her redd, redd being the word for the nest area she excavates in the gravel, where she lays her eggs. In clouded water, her whitish tail gleamed.

 
At St. Mary's Pub to celebrate the 800th iteration of David's Pointless Minute, I told a wildlife-aware friend about this. I used the word nest. He said the correct term was redd. I agreed, acknowledging that I had talked down to him by using simpler terminology. He alleged that he was offended. I alleged that in that case my work was done.
 
 Salmon: always a contentious subject.

Me next! Me next!

Doug Bertran, a filmmaker who made Orca Killing School, told a story after the showing at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City. This is the film about which the program cautions, “Warning: violent animal scenes.”

He was at Peninsula Valdez, Argentina, filming some orcas who've perfected a trick of lurking offshore at high tide and then suddenly shooting up onto the beach to grab a sea lion. In order to take the sea lions by surprise, the orcas don't echolocate (which creates tell-tale clicking sounds). They rely on hearing to detect their prey. Bertran's assistant was setting up a heavy piece of photographic equipment in the shallows. It occurred to no one that the sound of the eighty-pound device scraping against the beach pebbles might be a lot like the sound of a tasty sea lion pup scraping against the beach pebbles. Suddenly the assistant looked up into the faces of five orcas. They'd hurtled up for a look.

After viewing him, the orcas hurled themselves back into deeper water.

“I shot it,” said Bertran happily. It wasn't in the film, though. Is it because the sight of a photographer's assistant not being eaten lacks drama? No, according to an interview Bertran gave to The Union, it's because local authorities don't want ecotourists to get ideas.

I certainly hope you brought enough for everybody

Long long ago, people brought dingoes to Fraser Island, a big sand island off eastern Australia. The dingoes went wild and self-supporting. Nowadays, dingoes in most of Australia have had the chance to breed with more recently imported dogs. (Don't get silly. I do not speak of the dingopoo, the cockadingo, the dreaded dingohuahua.) The Fraser dingoes are among the purest old dingo stock, so dogs are forbidden on the island.

Photograph by ogwen, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Fraser Island is in Queensland. It has miles of shimmering beaches, a hundred lakes of pure fresh water, and lofty, ferny rainforest, so a third of a million people drop by each year.

Tourists, and some of the few hundred people who live on Fraser, sometimes feed the dingoes. Authorities advise against feeding dingoes. Residents say they can handle themselves around dingoes. But in 2001 dingoes killed a 9-year-old whose family was camping there. To protect both humans and dingoes, the government shot some of the bolder dingoes and built sturdy dingo fences, surrounding areas where people live. Many island residents protested, finding the fences destructive, annoying, or pointless.

Several nonfatal dingo attacks have occurred just outside the fences. In April, Mike West, of Birds Queensland, said that goannas – huge, speedy, monitor lizards, (Varanus) – are multiplying dangerously because of the dingo policy.

“We're up to our armpits in bloody great big goannas at Kingfisher Bay and Eurong because there's no dingoes inside the fences to chase them off,” West told the Courier-Mail. (I found this story on the comprehensive website herper.com.)

Goannas can get nearly seven feet long. They can harm people, although they are unlikely to try to eat us because they cannot swallow us whole. Their bite may be a little bit venomous. Apparently, many people who are not bothering goannas get injured while watching someone else bother a goanna. The goanna lashes its huge tail, and bystanders suffer. That's not all. “Alarmed goannas can mistake standing humans for trees and attempt to climb off the ground to safety, which is understandably painful, as well as distressing for both man and beast,” according to Wikipedia.

John E. Hill, GNU Free Documentation License 1.2

West told of being personally menaced by goannas. “I got chased by one and had to drop an Esky on it. It's the same problem as dingoes. They are not frightened of people.” (An Esky is a cooler, sometimes even an Eskimo brand cooler.)

In lots of places goannas have learned that people have food, either food which they will give a hungry lizard, or which a hungry lizard can just help itself to. Authorities advise against feeding goannas.

Frank P. Mahoney

West says the dingo fencing has been a failure, and should be scrapped. Inevitably, he says, a tourist will get bitten by a goanna. “Are they going to start shooting goannas next? They've already shot kookaburras for pecking people and they are trying to trap a crocodile off Fraser. Where's it all going to end?”

Authorities say they are reviewing dingo management strategy. In the meantime, they advise against feeding wildlife. Recently, a litter of dingo puppies was discovered underneath the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service headquarters. They are insanely cute. Malcontents suggest the rangers are... feeding them.

I long to travel to Fraser Island to view wildlife. I will join the other tourists balanced on top of the sturdy government fence, with dingoes eyeing us from one side and goannas from the other, and all of us keeping an eye cocked to the sky for flocks of killer kookaburras. Look for me there! I'll be wearing body armor and a NO DINGOHUAHUAS T-shirt, and I'll be carrying a picnic basket.

Let's Lurk Behind these Ecotourists

It's hard work being high on the food chain, and predators are always looking for labor-saving ways to catch prey. In national parks in Kenya, the lions have not only gotten blasé about trucks full of ecotourists, they've started to use them as cover. They'll sneak around behind a vehicle and then rush out to lunge at a wildebeest. Imagine you're the wildebeest – one minute you're making sure they get your good profile, and the next minute you're running for your life. 

 

In the Canadian Pacific, biologist Alexandra Morton was observing killer whales She was disconcerted by the way one of them, Kwatsi, kept surfacing directly behind her boat. “No matter how I tried to alter my course, his 5-foot fin stayed right behind my engine. After a while I realized what he was doing: Kwatsi was using my boat and its engine noise as a moving hunting blind.” Great minds think alike. “These humans mean me no harm. They are friendly! Friends help friends catch dinner.”

I performed a similar function once, without actually being a human shield. Driving across Florida, I pulled over to eat lunch at a picnic table, and tossed crumbs from my sandwich to minnow-sized fish in the waterway next to the road. The tiny fish were thrilled with the crumbs and mobbed them enthusiastically. As I gazed at them I heard a small clomp! and then another clomp! Two minuscule alligators had cruised up, disguised as minuscule floating logs, and were snapping up the fish I had lured to their doom. Oh yeah, they call this road Alligator Alley.

To be fair, I should have thrown the fish an alligator purse. They could have nibbled on it after it decayed a bit. But I didn't have an alligator purse. That's how it is. You try to pack everything, and you pack all this stuff you never use, and then the one thing you don't pack, you wish you had. It's hard to be a responsible ecotourist.