Running Commentary 9/2/2024

Derek Edwards -

Hello,

I got the chance to show some friends one of my favorite birding spots yesterday. We found a bunch of herons in a pond: great blues and a couple of great egrets, but, most excitingly, some green herons, including a juvenile that we were able to approach pretty closely and watch catching fish. My friends had never seen a green heron before.

If you look past the obvious heron you can see a second, blurrier green heron standing in front of a bush | Photo by Derek Edwards

Be sure to take a chance to share your love of birds, especially as the fall migration gets underway.

Anyway...

Eating...

In honor of Labor Day, I have a story from work. I don't really talk about my work here, and I'm not really about to do so now, so much as I'm going to mention something that happened at work. My company buys all the employees bagels at regular intervals, and the most recent order included pumpkin bagels just in time for fall, or for the very first changing leaves, at least. This sounds like a great idea*, except they were not sweetened. There was clearly pumpkin and probably also some ginger and clove in the dough, but they were otherwise just bagels, and tasted pretty bland. Except they weren't bland, because they were heavily spiced, just not sweetened. The overall effect was a bagel that tasted very strongly of the aftertaste left by pumpkin pie. So, as we start September and the season for pumpkin things approaches, please remember to sweeten things as needed, and watch out for attempts to cash in on trends.

*If you're a NYC bagel purist, this probably sounds like a terrible idea, as would the cinnamon-sugar crusted bagel that I wound up having instead of the terrible pumpkin ones. I can at least say I ate it the proper New York way, by folding it in half around the cream cheese before I bit into it.

Bird of the Week

Half of all birds are songbirds; out of 11,017 described species, 6,595 of these fall within the Order Passeriformes; ducks, woodpeckers, penguins, ostriches, toucans, chickens, parrots, and other sorts of birds all fall among the other 4,422 species that are not songbirds.* I could list the birds-of-prey as among these non-songbirds, as indeed hawks and eagles, falcons, and owls each fall in their own orders. But there are some birds that are both songbirds and birds-of-prey: the shrikes, such as today's bird, the Red-backed Shrike.

The shrikes are a family of around three dozen species of songbirds-of-prey. That is to say that they are the only non-herbivorous songbirds; thrushes, for instance, eat insects and worms, and the shrikes close cousins the corvids are noted carrion eaters. But the shrikes are hunters, of vertebrates. Shrikes are not especially large; the smallest falcon would dwarf most shrikes. To make up for their small size, they do what we do when we eat larger animals: they butcher their prey.2 When they've caught a lizard, a rodent, another songbird, or even an especially large insect, they'll impale that prey on a convenient spike, a thorn traditionally, although the modern shrike is also a great fan of barbed wire. Once their prey is impaled it can be dismembered, or else saved for later. Shrikes often produce "larders" or multiple carcasses impaled closer together. Shrike larders become a source of food not just for the shrikes themselves but for other birds who scavenge food, such as crows.3

Shrikes are not just fierce hunters; they are fierce defenders of their nests. Red-backed shrikes have been observed attacking other, larger birds that approach their nests (although much larger birds, such as ravens, are intimidating enough to bully their way into the nesting zones).4 Red-backed shrikes have also been found to be formidable against another, different sort of nest threat: cuckoos. The common cuckoo is infamous for nest parasitism, laying their eggs in the nests of other birds. A study of birds in Hungary revealed that red-backed shrikes have, in recent decades, become completely successful at identifying and removing cuckoo eggs from their nests, despite formerly hosting cuckoos at low but recordable levels.5

To science, the red-backed shrike is Lanius collurio. The shrike genus is named the Latin word for "butcher". The species name is taken from the writings of Aristotle; it's not entirely clear what bird "kolluriōn" referred to, but the Renaissance-era French naturalist Pierre Belon prepared it might have referred to a shrike, and so the name was given to this shrike by Linnaeus.6

*These figures include extinct species that were first described from living specimens.

  1. Taxonomy in Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman et al. editors), Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca.
  2. Yosef, Reuven. “Prey Transport by Loggerhead Shrikes.” Ornithological Applications 95, no. 1 (February 1, 1993): 231–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1369407.
  3. Elbert, Daniel & Valerie Fellows. “Loggerhead Shrikes: Tales From the Larder." Open Spaces, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (August 30, 2024). https://www.fws.gov/story/loggerhead-shrikes-tales-larder.
  4. Němec, Michal, and Roman Fuchs. “Nest Defense of the Red-backed Shrike Lanius Collurio Against Five Corvid Species.” Acta Ethologica 17, no. 3 (November 19, 2013): 149–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-013-0175-z.
  5. Lovászi, Péter, and Csaba Moskát. “Break-down of Arms Race Between the Red-backed Shrike (Lanius Collurio) and Common Cuckoo (Cuculus Canorus).” Behaviour 141, no. 2 (January 1, 2004): 245–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853904322890843.
  6. Jobling, J. A. (editor). The Key to Scientific Names in Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman et al. editors), Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca.

Pour One Out | Tim Requarth, Slate

The 1990s saw red wine being touted for its health benefits, with moderate consumption of wine, and perhaps alcohol generally, being linked to reduced risk of heart disease compared to strict teetotalling. But it now seems this link was a data interpretation error, and that the way studies of what we eat and drink get muddied by the involvement of food and beverage companies played a role in pushing that flawed idea to the public.

Who Was Pinocchio's Mysterious Blue-Haired Fairy? | Antonia Mufarech, Smithsonian Magazine

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