35.99920 years in science communication
Taking a flight of fancy with our feathered friends
Selected photos of birds I’ve shot recently with a 600mm Sigma on my 6D, allows you to get quite close without disturbing our avian friends, at least until they are startled by the sound of the camera shutter. Click the kingfisher to open my Flickr gallery or visit the Fluidr version of the page here.
Some of our summer visitors, the common swifts (Apus apus) have already headed south to their winter homes in southern Africa (in fact I think they departed before we migrated (temporarily) to Malta. The common house martins (Delichon urbicum) and (barn) swallows (Hirundo rustica) seem to be readying themselves, circling close to the ground in groups in the countryside and on the village green.
The BTO (British Trust for Ornithology) based in Thetford, Norfolk, has a nice map showing the tracked routes taken by swifts as they migrate to and from southern Africa they seem to skirt around the coast rather than crossing due North across The Sahara Desert, which makes sense. Click on the thumbnail to see the BTO map full size.UPDATE: The robin and the blue tit both feature in my free 10-bird ebook sampler “Chasing Wild Geese”. Send me an email [email protected] to get the link for the PDF.
Well, the blue tits didn’t settle in our birdbox, but a family of robins (Erithacus rubecula) set up home in some ivy on the fence at the rear of the garden. The chicks have been making their high-pitched “feed me now” tweets for a few days. Just now, noticed one on the lawn with two parents in frequent attendance. They’re fast moving and in the shade so quite hard to get a sharp photo, but here goes. One of the chick alone and another post-prandial with parent.
Robins used to be classed as part of the thrush family, Turdidae, but they have been reclassified as chats (old world flycatchers). The American robin is definitely still a thrush though Turdus migratorius and strikingly different to the European robin, but both have the famous “red” breast, which is, of course, orange, because there was no word for that colour until the 16th century (hence redhead, red shank, red admiral, all prominently orange!); we had the fruit by 1300 but didn’t call the colour orange until much later.
The courtship ritual of the Dunnock (Prunella modularis) is peculiar. I observed a pair on the lawn in our garden last week while I was sitting at the garden table working at my laptop. The female had raised her tail feathers and was fluttering them up and down rapidly while the male pecked repeatedly at her rear end, well her cloaca to be more specific. It went on for a minute or two until they both flew up quickly into a hedge, presumably to mate.
It’s not a ritual I’d observed before and Googled the bird to discover that female dunnocks are quite promiscuous. The pecking of the cloaca by the male is thought to stimulate rejection of sperm from a previous male’s mating and so increase the chances of the new mate fathering her offspring.
In my garden observations I could have sworn I could see something curved and white protruding from the female, an egg, perhaps. So maybe the male’s pecking stimulates her to lay an egg outside the nest before he takes her back to mate. Either way, it’s apparently not an entirely efficient paternity-assurance strategy as genetic testing of dunnock broods has revealed that the female can lay eggs fertilised by several males.
I only had my phone to hand so this is awful footage and the voyeuristic blackbird is a distraction.
Sheer coincidence that we were visiting the East Riding of Yorkshire last week when the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) opened its new visitor centre at Bempton Cliffs. We approached the reserve on two walks first from North Landing on Flamborough Head where I photographed coble fishers landing and unloading their boat and then from the village of Speeton with its tiny Anglo-Saxon church (St Leonard’s and its flock of rarebreed Leicester Longwool sheep).
Bempton Cliffs plays host to England’s largest nesting colony of Northern Gannets (Sula bassana), graceful and quiet in flight and far more beautiful than their rather ugly name. The cliffs also host countless kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, fulmars and puffins as well as pigeons, rooks and herring gulls.
Carl Zimmer offered some insights at TED-Ed into how dinosaurs got their plumage and evolved into the flying birds, excellent birds, we see today. This is witty animation plucks up the courage to fill in the gaps.
On an entirely unrelated note, I wrote a song about flight, which you can hear on my SoundCloud page or via my Songs, Snaps and Science site.
Is another bird flu on the rise? Report from Nature on H7N9 type A influenza virus and reported outbreak in China.
Scientists and public health officials worldwide are on alert after China announced on 31 March that two people had died and a third had been seriously sickened from infections with a new avian flu virus, H7N9, that has never been seen before in humans.
via Novel bird flu kills two in China : Nature News & Comment.
There are numerous subtypes of flu, labelled with an H number, referring to the specific type of protein hemagglutinin and an N number, neuraminidase enzyme type. There are 17 H antigens (H1 to H17) and nine different N antigens (N1 to N9) and any combination might be possible. The newest H antigen type, identified as H17 by researchers, was isolated from fruit bats in 2012.
US scientists have identified a new strain of influenza in New England harbor seals – H3N8. They say the strain, presumably made the species leap from birds, might now be a reservoir for an emergent human flu virus.
H3N8 is an influenza type A virus (Orthomyxoviridae) endemic in birds, equines and dogs and although highly contagious was not as such considered a risk to people. A flu outbreak in people in 1889 or 1900 was blamed on this strain but evidence suggests that it was due to H2N2. If H3N8 has mutated and evolved from an avian form into one that infects harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), there is a chance that it could now infect people. Indeed, the virus already has the relevant structure to attack a protein in the human respiratory tract.
Experts have for some time recognised that emergent flu viruses need not only come from East Asia, swine flu, H1N1, being a case in point, the pandemic of 2009 emerging from South America. So, the emergence of a putative pandemic strain in the waters off New England, USA, is worrying, but perhaps not surprising.
It is worth noting that a paper in the same group of journals from 1984 reports on the emergence of an avian influenza virus (H4N5) in harbor seals in the early 1980s. There are presumably other instances so this would suggest that transfer to harbor seals from birds is not an uncommon leap.
BBC News – New flu virus found in seals concerns scientists.
Moscona et al, 2012, mBio; DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00166-12
Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes based on the antibody response to the viral proteins hemagglutinin (HA), neuraminidase (NA). This distinction gives us the different names, e.g. H5N1, H1N1, H3N8 etc. There are 16 H and 9 N subtypes known, but only H 1, 2 and 3, and N 1 and 2 are usually found in people.
