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re: Stan Moore, Woodpecker Red, Snowy Owl



Hi Carolinabirders,

Just to add a hair more detail to Norm Budnitz' great post, the color red
in birds usually comes from pigments called carotenoids that birds cannot
manufacture internally. They have to get it from their diet. The research
on house finches has established pretty strong links between male finch
foraging ability, carotenoid intake, intensity of red color, success with
the lady finches, and subsequent success raising little finches. While the
amount of red on woodpeckers' heads is not nearly as variable as that in
House Finches, there may be a common theme. On the other hand, the fact
that so many woodpeckers have identical red on males' and females' heads
might interfere with this theory...

As for the alleged Snowy Owl in Chapel Hill, we shouldn't be too hard on
either Jerry for his report or Mike for his skepticism. I'm glad Jerry
took the interrogation so well, where some novices would quit birding
rather than put up with scrutiny of their reports. In Mike's defense,
reporting a Snowy Owl in Chapel Hill is a little like shouting "fire" in a
crowded theatre. If believed, it's going to trigger a great deal of
traffic, burning of fossil fuels, spending of time away from work and
family, loss of sleep, etc. And the report sounded suspicous at first
because, among other things, it happened at night; Snowies are almost
always found during the day. The yellow eyes sound good though; if I only
had a car (the wife's got it again), I might play hooky and go search
myself!

And if I only had a car, I might also investigate the Barnacle Goose in
Hillsborough. There has been a massive irruption of Barnacle Geese in the
eastern US this winter, with at least two birds in Virginia, one in New
Jersey, two in New York, one in Connecticut, and probably a few others I'm
forgetting. I haven't heard yet of *any* of these birds being proved a
captive, and *all* of them are with flocks of apparently wild, migratory
Canada Geese. Assuming the Hillsborough Barnacle hasn't been there for
months, and isn't hanging around with obvious barnyard fare and eating
bread crusts, this might be a legitimate candidate for wild vagrancy...
maybe.

Many thanks to Eric Harrold for forwarding Stan Moore's latest
pontification on Sage Grouse and land management. I love Stan's posts,
which appear with great frequency on the Ornithology listserv at
http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/ORNL.html
but with my ongoing attempts to get work done and keep our house in order,
not to mention watch the occasional bird, I don't get to read that
listserv too often anymore...

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Armstrong, Craig wrote:
>
> Can't forget to look at the whole picture.  The cowboy wouldn't exist if
> there weren't a demand for his product.  Any person eating meat products in
> their diet or purchasing leather products made from those cowboy's cows is
> contributing to the harm done by theat cowboy, including the harm to the
> ecosystem and the grouse.

Not quite that simple, I'm afraid. Most of the western lands used by the
cowboys are publicly owned, and are leased by the government at far below
fair free-market value. The government also supplies most of the
infrastructure (roads, water) and cleans up the messes made (endangered
species, riparian corridor damage), paying for it all with our tax
dollars. The beneficiaries are mostly big corporations who can sell
burgers and steaks at less than their true cost. If these lands were run
under a proper free-market system, most of these ranchers would go out of
business, and the land and wildlife would be much better off, plus our
taxes would be lower. But then, beef would cost more, and people would be
eating other foods, and that just wouldn't be American...

Good birding,

Josh


Joshua S. Rose
Duke University
Department of Biology (Zoology, R.I.P.)

jsr6@duke.edu
http://www.duke.edu/~jsr6/