forestry.gov.uk
Thankful county foresters were glad to forego firing up their new ‘green’ flue for fear of frying their feathered friends.
The Forestry Commission team were about to ignite their new environmentally friendly heating system when an eagle-eyed ornithologist called a dramatic halt.
RSBP volunteer Juliette Buttler was on duty at the foresters’ Fineshade base, near Corby, welcoming visitors to the Rockingham Forest Red Kite centre.
But when her binoculars went in the direction of the new boiler room she glimpsed a flash of steel blue streaking in through a gap in the roof.
Closer investigation revealed a family of swallows had set up home in the rafters near the hot-house chimney stack.
Forest ranger Cheryl Joyce, said: “We were relieved that Juliette spotted the birds just in time.
“Had we fired up the boiler as we planned the chicks would almost certainly have been lost.
“Now we’ve stopped all testing until the baby swallows have fledged and flown the nest.”
Miss Joyce said that steps would be taken to ensure that no more creatures could wander into danger.
She said that from now their new boiler’s mission would be to protect wildlife.
Once the high-performance system is turned on it will generate sufficient energy to supply the entire Fineshade complex.
However, its burners run on nothing but coppice timber taken from the Forestry Commission’s own woodlands.
As the new crop of fuel grows the plants will absorb more carbon dioxide from the air, and fix it in their cells, than the boiler gives off generating heat.
And as the new willow and hazel plantations develop they will also provide precious habitats for a huge range of wildlife, including butterflies and dormice.
More information about the many uses of coppice timber can be found on the www.forestry.gov.uk website.
NOTES TO EDITORS
For further information please contact Miss Cheryl Joyce, Forestry Commission Ranger, on 01780 444394.
e-mail: cheryl.joyce@forestry.gsi.gov.uk
March 13th, 2007
jb.oxfordjournals.org
Yoshihiro UCHIDA, Yoji TSUKADA and Tsunetake SUGIMORI
Kyoto Research Laboratories, Marukin Shoyu Co., Ltd. Uji, Kyoto 611
Neuraminidase [sialidase, EC 3.2.1.18 [EC] ] was found to be widely distributed in bacteria belonging to Arthrobacter. Among these bacteria, Arthrobacter ureafaciens, A. oxydans, and A. aurescens produced relatively potent neuraminidase activities. For the production of this enzyme, not only colominic acid, a homopolymer of N-acetylneuraminic acid, but also N-acetylneuraminic acid, the reaction product of this enzyme, are effective as sources of carbon.
An affinity adsorbent specific for neuraminidase was prepared by cross-linking colominic acid with soluble starch by means of epichlorohydrin. Neuraminidase from A. ureafaciens could be purified on this affinity column. The purified neuraminidase was shown to be free from protease, N-acetylneuraminic acid aldolase, phospholipase C, and glycosidases.
Aminoff’s assay procedure for sialic acid was modified to avoid the centrifugation step. The modified procedure gave a higher molecular extinction coefficient.
1A part of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Agricultural Chemical Society of Japan, Kyoto, April 1976.
March 12th, 2007
extension.osu.edu
Writer:
Kurt Knebusch
knebusch.1@osu.edu
330-263-3776
Dear Twig: Why do they call it birds’ nest soup? Is it really made out of birds’ nests?
In short: Yes. Birds’ nest soup is a Chinese dish that is made from the nest of a bird called the swiftlet. Swiftlets are small, fast birds of southeast Asia. They build their nests in groups high on cave walls. And they make those nests from something weird: saliva, or spit. Ick! The spit comes out in long, thin strands from glands that are located under the tongue. The strands are woven to make a nest that sticks to the wall like glue.
Ew. (But effective.)
It used to be the nests were harvested once or twice a year. The birds were able to raise their young. But lately, however, demand has soared. People are gathering more and more nests and are doing it more and more often.
Which, of course, is bad for the swiftlets. Scientists say their numbers are falling. If the harvest isn’t reduced, some types could be gone — extinct — in only five or 10 years.
The gooey, gluey, spitty nests actually don’t have much taste. The soup gets its flavor from other ingredients. And, contrary to folk belief, the nests have little nutritional value. They do have a special protein in them, one that boosts immunity. But cleaning the nest before cooking destroys it.
Loogily,
Twig
P.S. Swiftlet cousins in North America include the familiar chimney swift, Chaetura pelagica.
Note: Three swiftlet species are tapped for their edible nests: the aptly named edible-nest swiftlet, the also aptly named (and geographically more specific) Indian edible-nest swiftlet and the black-nest swiftlet. Some pretty thorough details about the swiftlets — their nests, the buying and selling of them, and the environmental issues — are at www.american.edu/TED/SWIFT.HTM, part of a “Trade Environment Database” Web site from American University. (Twig’s been under the weather (bug flu). This column originally ran May 9, 2004.)
“Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick,” a service of The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences — specifically, of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) and Ohio State University Extension, both part of the College — is a weekly column for children about science, nature, farming and the environment. For details and to receive Twig free by mail, e-mail or fax, contact Kurt Knebusch, News and Media Relations, CommTech, OSU/OARDC,1680 Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691, knebusch.1@osu.edu, (330) 263-3776. Available online at extension.osu.edu/~news/archive.php?series=science.
March 8th, 2007
An updated version of these notes can be accessed from a new “Avian Biology’ page
(http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/avian_biology.html).
Birds use nests to protect eggs and nestlings from predators and adverse weather. To minimize predation, birds may use or build nests that are inaccessible, hidden, or camouflaged. Nests may also help keep eggs and nestlings warm.
Orientation and microclimate of Horned Lark nests — Across their range, Horned Larks typically construct nests adjacent to & north of objects such as a tuft of grass or a rock. Hartman and Oring (2003) studied the importance of nest orientation to nest microclimate in Horned Larks in California. Nests showed a significant northern bias in orientation angle and were 49% shaded in the early afternoon, the hottest part of the day. Artificial nests of eastern, western, and southern orientations exhibited little to no shade during this time. A northern nest orientation ensures maximal shading by the grass tuft to the south, may protect nests from cool evening winds, and provides increased daytime ventilation of the nest through exposure to prevailing winds. In addition, shade may also help conceal nests from predators.
The position of vegetation (curved black bars) around Horned Lark nests relative to the direction of prevailing winds. The dashed circle represents the outline of a nest. Each individual curved black bar represents the vegetation around one nest. Each solid circle represents one entrance orientation. The dashed line designates the mean entrance orientation angle of 345° for all nests (n = 10; Hartman and Oring 2003).
Types of nests:
• Scrape nests are simple depressions in the ground (sometimes with a few stones added) or in the leaf litter. Such nests are used by some penguins, shorebirds, gulls, terns, nighthawks, vultures (e.g., Black Vulture nest below), and other species.
Are wader nest scrapes adaptively designed to minimize clutch cooling rate? - Arboreal avian nests likely function partly to insulate clutches. However, reasons for the construction of nest scrapes are poorly understood. Working on Pectoral Sandpipers, Dr. Jane Reid tested the hypothesis that using a lined scrape reduces the rate of clutch heat loss & investigated whether scrapes are effectively designed to minimize heat loss rates. The use of both an unlined scrape and of lining material reduced the rate at which a test object lost heat. Constructing a lined scrape is therefore likely to serve to insulate a clutch. The rate of conductive heat loss from within a scrape increased with scrape depth and decreased with lining depth. Convective heat loss increased with wind speed in shallow scrapes but not in deep scrapes. Mean observed scrape depth approximately equaled that which minimized convective cooling while minimizing conductive heat loss. Further, on average, Pectoral Sandpipers used approximately the lining depth that minimized conductive heat loss while minimizing material useage. Scrape dimensions therefore approximated those likely to minimize overall heat loss, given the conflicting thermal pressures of the environment. Available lining materials differed in insulative quality both when wet and dry. Pectoral Sandpipers did not use lining materials in proportions that reflected local availability. Instead, relative use was correlated with a material’s insulative quality when wet. Pectoral Sandpipers therefore used lining materials appropriate to minimizing heat loss given their damp breeding environment. - Jane M. Reid, University of Glasgow
Burrow nests are very effective at protecting eggs and young from predators & maintaining an appropriate microclimate for eggs & young. Some birds, like Bank Swallows and Belted Kingfishers (pictured below), usually construct their own burrows, while others, such as Burrowing Owls, may use burrows contructed by other species.
Spacing of Bank Swallow tunnel entrances (Ghent 2001) — Tunnel entrance distributions at six Bank Swallow sand-pit colonies showed consistently nonrandom, too-regular patterns, supporting the hypothesis that the distance between tunnel entrances is determined by territorial disputes at the Average nearest neighbor distances, and numbers of burrows per unit area of pit face, were both consistently greater than their random expectations, a paradox that is explained algebraically. Evidence of tunnel coalescence and communal nesting was found in a completely evacuated colony of 30 tunnels. Bank Swallow colonial behaviors may have evolved to maximize populations on small exposed bank faces along streams and rivers, and that they are still behaving as if only small fractions of large sand pit banks are available. On small areas, regular spacings help to avoid too close tunneling and concomitant bank collapse. It is argued that a tolerance for communal nesting, once coalescence has occurred, involves less tunneling than the forced evacuations of entirely new tunnels by ousted pairs.
Cavity nests (e.g., in trees or cacti) are used by numerous passerines, woodpeckers, owls, parrots, and some waterfowl. Some birds, such as woodpeckers (like the Gila Woodpecker below), construct their own cavity nests and are referred to as primary cavity nesters. Species that use natural cavities or cavities constructed by primary cavity nesters are called secondary cavity nesters.
March 6th, 2007
nasw.org
From The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, June 20, 1999
By Nancy Bazilchuk
HINESBURG — Four young ravens, glossy black and big as chickens, listened curiously as University of Vermont zoologist Bernd Heinrich called them. Old enough to fly but not old enough to fend for themselves, the birds looked warily at Heinrich through the open door of their aviary. He waved a bite-sized chunk of veal at them.
“OK, guys, come out. You guys hungry?” he asked, sounding like a parent coaxing anxious 2-year-olds.
Finally, one bird, called Orange for the orange band around its leg, hopped up on Heinrich’s hand. He fed the bird from an old Cool Whip container. The other birds opted for freedom rather than food and flew off. Heinrich wasn’t worried that his research subjects had, shall we say, flown the coop.
“They’ll be back in an hour, when they are hungry again,” he said with a smile.
Ravens have dominated Heinrich’s life for 15 years now. With the publication this summer of his 10th book, called “Mind of the Raven,” Vermont’s most well-known and most influential biologist once again poses tough-to-answer questions about the natural world. Why do ravens take baths? Not, Heinrich has found, just because they’re hot or dirty. Do birds such as ravens lord their power over other birds just because they can? Yes. Ravens can be as unreasonable as an overworked boss on a Friday afternoon.
“He is one of the few who combines a career as a first-rate scientist — he is a superb physiologist and ecologist, as well as a researcher in field behavior — with an extraordinary ability, as evidenced by his books, to conduct long, meticulous patient field studies,” said Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard professor, naturalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
At 59, with a well-muscled body that’s as fit as a 30-year-old’s, Heinrich climbs trees, hunkers down in bird blinds, hauls 1,000-pound carcasses to the back woods. He roams the woods in Maine and behind his Hinesburg home for his life’s work.
Learning to eat
Unlike many animals — and much like humans — ravens live in a variety of habitats, from high arctic tundra to mountaintops to the sea. Some birds, such as flycatchers or robins, survive by specializing and eating specific kinds of food. But a raven will eat a variety of foods, from maggots to grubs to woodchucks to eggs to frogs.
Heinrich knows.
He’s constantly scrounging for food to feed the growing birds, which can increase their body weight by 50 percent or more per day. The sticker on the bumper of his battered red pickup gives evidence of his passion for scrounging: “This car stops for roadkills.”
Six 5-week-old nestlings can eat a hindquarter of a Holstein calf in one day. Another day’s meal might consist of two gray squirrels, five frogs, six eggs and six mice. For those who want to know more, there’s a four-day menu in the book.
Studying the familiar
What’s most engaging about Heinrich’s quest is that he explores the world that’s found in many Vermont backyards and wild places. He studies ravens that “quork” and circle over Camels Hump, but that’s not all. He’s monitoring phoebes that nest over the light at his back door. He’s investigating wood frogs — the frogs that chorus from vernal pools along Vermont dirt roads.
“The researcher doing the work — that is where the fun is,” Heinrich said. “When I look at the book, this encapsulates a lot of the experience of doing the work.”
Testing and trying
Living in so many different environments, ravens need to be able to distinguish what’s edible from what’s not. Some of that’s learned from watching parents forage, Heinrich knows. Some of it, though, is learned by simply testing and trying. Like babies who constantly put things in their mouths, young ravens are always probing and poking at anything they find as a way to explore their world.
“Some behavior is hard-wired,” Heinrich said, like sitting on eggs to get them to hatch. “Where intelligence is involved, there is unpredictability.”
However, Heinrich said, if things are always the same, it doesn’t make sense to waste time or energy thinking about them. Here’s an example: If a bird lays eggs in its nest, does the bird need to distinguish its eggs from other eggs, or even other objects? Or is it so unlikely that any other object would find its way into a raven’s remote nest that it would be pointless for the bird to question what’s in the nest?
“Ravens have to respond appropriately to things that have been unchanged for millions of years,” Heinrich said.
When two of his older birds mated this year and built a nest, Heinrich was set. He painted rocks to look like eggs and put them in the nest before the female bird, Red, laid any eggs. She rolled them out. But once she had laid her own eggs, anything Heinrich put in her nest was left alone.
“She would accept chicken eggs, potatoes, flashlight batteries, rocks painted like eggs, anything,” he said of all the items he put in her nest. That made sense to Heinrich, based on what he knew. Then he saw something he’d never seen before.
The baby birds hatched, and then, one by one, they disappeared. There were no predators — Red was nesting in a chicken-wire fenced aviary. Finally Heinrich figured it out: Red was eating the babies. Heinrich doesn’t know why — he thinks it’s because Red was too immature to understand how to rear her own young. She’s well-fed in the aviary, and might have matured sexually earlier than she would in the wild. Most ravens nest when they are 3, and Red was only 2, with her mouth lining still pink, colored the way only immature birds are colored. He continues to wonder. Animal cannibalism, particularly parental infanticide, doesn’t make evolutionary sense, unless it’s an unrelated animal doing the killing.
“I still don’t have an explanation,” he said.
Having fun
Heinrich attributes part of his lifelong curiosity to his childhood during World War II, living off the land for five years with his familyin an abandoned nature club cabin outside of Hamburg, Germany. Heinrich picked berries, poached trout, looked for beechnuts and acorns, birds’ eggs and mice. The family ate everything, and wasted nothing. They caught mice to skin them and sell the skins to natural history museums around the globe. They even collected the fleas off the mice for a British researcher. Then they ate the mice. Heinrich savors fried mice to this day.
Eventually, he found his way to the United States to study zoology. He became fascinated by temperature regulation in sphinx moths, bumblebees and other insects. Part of his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Los Angeles, involved performing heart surgery on sphinx moths to see how circulation helps insects keep cool.
Heinrich’s inventiveness and curiosity drive his research still. It’s what keeps him studying ravens, or thinking about why wood frogs breed in tiny ephemeral spring pools (he’s put six artificial pools in his back woods), or what exactly happens after a female moth emerges from her cocoon (the males find them within hours he’s got a female Polyphemus moth tied with sewing thread to a red oak outside his house, where she mated and laid eggs).
“Detailed observations are important,” he said. “You are talking about very subtle differences here. That’s what interests me. Looking at the details, you see how complex … (organisms) are.”
For fans like Harvard’s Wilson, Heinrich’s insatiable curiosity is just what the field of biology needs.
“Bernd is generally regarded, and I heartily agree, to be one of the best naturalists in this country,” Wilson said.
Still questioning
The date Heinrich first decided to study ravens is fixed in his mind, like the date of a wedding, or the birth of a child: Oct. 29, 1984. A crowd of young birds was loudly calling in other birds to a moose carcass. Why, he wondered, would they want to share?
“I had no idea I would be working with ravens this long,” he said. “I saw them calling in other birds. It was behavior that reminded me of insects and I got going.”
Heinrich eventually discovers the reason for their behavior, detailed in his 1989 book, “Ravens in Winter.” The birds that call are juveniles. They gather like roving teen-agers who converge at the mall, thus outnumbering any nearby nesting pairs that might want to claim the kill as their own. Along the way, Heinrich has found more and more questions to ask. He’s asking questions still. While he spends much of his research time in the woods and watching birds on the wing, he’s also arranged his Hinesburg home as an informal laboratory.
He’s built two chicken-wire aviaries into the wooded hillside behind his cedar-sided house and not far from the large vegetable gardens and chicken coop. He can watch the birds from the big picture window in the small, wood-paneled study where he does his work. There are paintings and drawings on the walls — Heinrich illustrates his writings — and books aplenty. And yes, there’s even a copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven.” But there is no computer. Heinrich writes all his books in longhand.
“I thought I would be done with ravens when I wrote ‘Ravens in Winter,”’ he said from the study as he watched the ravens playing with bath water he put out for them. “But with ravens, there is always something new, all the time,” he said. “I am still trying to make sense of ravens.”
BOX: A Bernd Heinrich reader
University of Vermont zoologist Bernd Heinrich has written or edited almost a dozen books in the past 20 years. Some are scholarly and some are for the general reader. One is a children’s book. Here’s a list of his books and their publication date:
“Bumblebee Economics,” Harvard University Press, 1979
“Insect Thermoregulation,” Wiley and Sons, 1981
“In a Patch of Fireweed,” Harvard University Press, 1984
“One Man’s Owl,” Princeton University Press, 1987
“Ravens in Winter,” Summit Books, 1989
“An Owl in the House: A Naturalist’s Diary,” Little Brown, 1990
“Hot-blooded Insects: Strategies and Mechanisms of
“Thermoregulation,” Harvard University Press, 1993
“A Year in the Maine Woods,” Addison-Wesley, 1994
“Trees in My Forest,” Cliff Street Books/Harper Collins, 1997
“The Mind of the Raven,” Cliff Street Books/Harper Collins, 1999
March 2nd, 2007