The Awesome Post In My Head

No, I don’t have a real post today. Hey, I warned you this month was going to be rough. But I feel bad. This’ll be the first week in a year and a half of this project that I haven’t posted- real posts- at least twice. And the thing is, I have, right now, a whole, entire, complete post- with an awesome tangent and everything- in my head. Seriously, if you were here in my office with me*, I could just tell you the post to your face right now, and you’d be like, “Wow, that was awesome!” You’d laugh, you’d cry- it would be better than Cats.

*Yes, I’m blogging at work. Aren’t I bad? Oh hey, give me a break- you’re probably reading this at work…

But I just do not have the time in the next 12 hours to put my thought-stream to “paper” and to come up with the graphics* a post like this deserves. Yet I don’t want you to think I’ve flaked, or run off to Argentina or otherwise gone dark**. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you what the post is about, and how awesome it’s going to be, so you can think about it over the weekend, and really have something great to look forward to when you come back to work on Monday. Sound good?

*It has occurred to me that I could both a) reduce my blogging workload and b) increase my posting frequency by abandoning graphics. And certainly there are many, many great blogs with no graphics. But I’m not doing that, for several reasons, foremost of which is this: the graphics are my favorite part of this whole project. Seriously, I absolutely love doing them. Remember, 90%+ of the things I blog about, I don’t know much of anything about until I get curious and start researching the topic. And somehow forcing myself to come up with a graphic makes me get the topic better. BTW, doing the graphics is the part of a post where I am most likely to start giggling to myself, so whenever I can I try to do them in private.

**”Going dark” is sales slang. It refers to when a once-promising client or prospect becomes completely unresponsive- no return calls, no email-replies- nothing. I use the term all the time, as does now my entire team at work, but I actually picked up the expression nearly a decade ago from previous boss, whom my peers and I referred to as “218”, because this was- no I am not making this up- the number of women he claimed to have slept with.

Monday’s post will be the first in a series of Astro-Updates, where we return to the navigational foundation we laid during AstroWeek (Man, was that a great week or what?), update our picture of the heavens as Winter progresses, and expand our view and understanding of the night sky. I’ll work to do these monthly, so we can chew off a little at a time, while keeping up with the changes above us.

Monday’s Astro-Update will include not only astronomy, but also- get this- religion, mythology, ethics, North Korea, nudity and the center of the freaking universe*. Really, it’s gonna cover all that, and yet it’s all gonna tie together, because it’s all in my head right now. I just need a couple free hours to let it out…

*Re-reading that I feel I must reassure you: The post will not have photos of Kim Jong Il naked**.

**Even though this one does. I’m sorry, I found it on a google search, and it was just too good not too use. Sorry if I ruined your lunch.

Fit & Stinky – All About Running At Work

Finally this weekend the cold snap broke. I don’t think it got above 22F until Friday, and the nightly lows at our house were in the 8-11F range. Even if I’d been willing to brave the temps, there was too much snow & ice around for biking, but frustratingly, not enough for decent skiing either*. It was the kind of Northern Utah week I typically can’t stand. And yet oddly, I was in a great mood all week. Thursday afternoon I finally realized why this was- I was having a great running week.

*Though there is now.

I hate exercising indoors. Like most cyclists I put in some foul-weather time on an indoor trainer, but it’s not something I enjoy. I loathe the monotony, the sweat and the endless searching for something watchable on TV. I enjoy skiing- XC or backcountry- but time doesn’t allow me to do it daily. So I run.

I started running at my first job after college, when I was an electrical engineer at a large computer company. The facility we worked in had a big shower/locker facility, and there was a group of guys who regularly ran at lunch. I didn’t pay them much mind for the first several months I worked there.

As a single guy my cooking repertoire was limited. The only 2 meals I knew how to cook were taco salad and tortellini in alfredo sauce, which didn’t bother me, since I enjoyed both, especially the latter. There was a scale outside the locker room at work, and one day I stopped on a lark to check my weight. 194 lbs. In 6 months I’d gained 14 pounds. I was 23 years old, and did some quick math; by age 30 things were going to get scary. I started running the next week.

Running was my main form of exercise for the next 4 years, until I started biking. And after biking, it was my primary exercise in winter, and later, after I’d switched careers to sales, while traveling. (Business travel, with its tight schedules and restaurant meals, can be tough on the waistline, and over 2 decades of selling and traveling I’ve run all over the US, Canada and Western Europe.) After that first job, at several succeeding jobs in Massachusetts and Colorado I worked at offices with similar facilities, and was able to run regularly.

In 1995 I moved to Utah. The first company I worked for, in downtown Provo, was run by a cranky former Mormon bishop* who thought that the only 2 worthwhile ways to spend one’s time were at work or church. Early on I asked him about the possibility of getting a shower at the office. “Shower? Exercise? Big waste of time!” he snarled. “All that changing, and then showering and changing back- huge waste of productivity…” He wasn’t putting in a shower.

*To clarify, he was a former bishop, not a former Mormon. I mean he was a current Mormon. Oh never mind, you know what I mean…

So, at age 31, I was faced with one of those fundamental, fork-in-the-road life choices. I could forgo running during weekdays, resign myself to the gradual weight gain toward middle age, and be well-groomed and sweet-smelling, if a bit chubby. Or I could be fit & stinky. I chose fit & stinky, and I’ve never looked back.

Tangent: Provo in 1995 was even… oh, forgive me, I just don’t have a better word- “dorkier” than it is today. On several of my winter runs, people actually laughed and pointed at my black lycra running tights. That’s right, like they’d never seen a man in running tights… Really, it was like someplace out the 1950’s. In particular there was a building by the BYU campus where school-age children would sometimes be filing in or out. One week, on 2 different days, the kids- probably about Bird Whisperer’s age now (10)- pointed and hooted and hollered at me and my tights. After the second day, I thought, “This is ridiculous…”

Note: I’ve told this story- which is true- several times. Anytime I’ve told it to a man, they’ve loved it. Anytime I told it to a woman, they thought I was a jerk. You’ve been warned.

So the next day I made sure to run by the building again at the same exact time. Sure enough, the boys saw me and started pointing, hooting, hollering right away. But this time I broke into a smile, turned and jogged straight up to them. As I did so, I reached into the pockets of my running jacket and pulled out a dollar bill in one hand, and a small envelope in the other. “Who wants a dollar?” I called out, holding the bill high above my head. Several boys shouted, clambered and reached for it. The loudest and most obnoxious jostled his way to the front. I looked down at him. “You want this dollar?” I asked.

Obnoxious Provo Boy: Yeah!

Me: OK, but you have to do something for it.

OPB: What?

Me: Give this note to your mother.

OPB: Uh… OK…

I handed him the dollar, the note and jogged off. The note read, “You shouldn’t have married your brother.”

It’s hard to get exact figures, but only something like 10% or so of the adult US population runs regularly. Which is funny when you really think about it, because there’s a fair amount of evidence that one of the most important selection pressures over the last couple of million years in shaping the form of the modern human body has been endurance running capability.

This may sound silly on the face of it, because compared to other running animals we’re familiar with- dogs, cats, horses, deer, squirrels- we seem pathetically slow, and certainly many, many animals can outsprint us. But when it comes to long distance endurance running- especially in high temperatures- it turns out we’re not half-bad. And when compared to other primates, we’re marathon-superstars.

Compared to chimpanzees, the human body is chock-full of enhanced running features. Some are obvious, like our feet. Our big toe is no longer opposable (like a thumb) but is adducted, or in-line with the plane of the foot along with the other 4 toes. This wasn’t a minor change; it necessitated the evolution of a new muscle- the Adductor hallucis- from the existing contrahens muscles in the feet of primates. With its adducted big toe, our foot can no longer grasp but is better suited for propulsion through the “toe-off” we take with each running step.

This lengthening of the foot and strengthening/enlargement of a single toe is interesting because it parallels running evolution in other animals. Horses run on a single enlarged toe (the hoof is a toenail) and the foot of an ostrich features one powerful giant toe, with a couple of atrophied minor toes on either side. Deer and antelope run on 2 toes, but the metatarsal bones in those 2 toes have fused, making them an effective single toe.

Side Note: Our metatarsals are of course not fused, and metatarsal stress fracture is a common overtraining injury among human runners, one that I have experienced twice.

Moving up from the feet, our legs are composed of a set of long spring-like tendons- such as the Achilles and the iliotibial (IT) band- connected to short muscle fascicles. This system of springs- which are largely absent in other apes (chimpanzees don’t have a real Achilles tendon)- captures a portion of the strain energy from each foot impact and releases it into the next toe-off.

What’s interesting about these tendon-springs is that they aren’t that important for walking, which is a very different gait from running. In walking, your center of gravity is lowest mid-stride, and highest when your legs are alongside one another. When running, it’s just the opposite; your center of gravity is highest mid-stride, when you’re actually airborne. The long-tendon-spring system in our legs doesn’t do much for walking, but it reduces the energy spent running by as much as half.

Side Note: It should be noted that our “running” is, from the perspective of a quadruped, a trot. We don’t have any equivalent gait of a canter or gallop (below), like horses or dogs do. Like a trot, our running is a bouncy up & down gate in which each forelimb swings in tandem with the hind limb.

What’s interesting about horses (and other running quadrupeds) is that there’s a speed range for which each of their 3 gaits is the most energy-efficient, and it will voluntarily switch from one gait to the next when changing “speed zones.” A horse will switch from walking to trotting at around 2 meters/second, and then from trot to gallop at ~ 4.5 m/s. We do the same thing, only with 2 gaits; most humans voluntarily switch from walking to running at ~2.5 m/s because it’s actually more tiring to walk at that speed than to jog.

Our long tendons allow the powering muscles to be located farther from the end of the leg, which means we don’t have to move as much weight back and forth with each stride. Although our legs are much heavier (due to length and muscle) than a chimpanzee’s, only 9% of our leg mass is contained within our feet, vs. 14% for chimpanzees.

Endurance running also provides an explanation for our most obvious unique feature among apes- our hairlessness, which combined with our increased number of sweat glands and our cranial circulation network- which uses sweat-cooled veinous blood to cool brain-bound arterial blood- makes our cooling system much more effective. But less obvious changes are also important. Unlike apes, the musculature of our shoulders is largely decoupled from that of our head and neck, allowing the head to aim straight ahead while the torso rotates side-to-side. And our “muzzles” are shorter, making our heads easier to support upright in a lean-forward position. We have a strong ligament- the atlanto-occipital membrane, also absent in apes- connecting the back of the head to the top of the spine, acting as a shock-absorber, and allowing our arms and shoulders to counterbalance our head while running.

Side Note: I’m guessing the price we pay for this decoupling is decreased upper body strength, which is why most of us can’t hang from a tree limb like a chimpanzee.

Tangent: Speaking of sweating, the “fit & stinky” thing works because a) I run in Utah, where it’s so dry that sweating isn’t as much of an issue, b) I run mainly in the winter, and so don’t get very hot and c) I do a Howie-shower. A Howie-shower- named for a friend of a friend’s former boyfriend- consists of a “tactical” sink-washing of armpits, face and neck. It ain’t perfect, but like I said- fit & stinky.

Nested Tangent: And of course I generally change in/out of my running gear in one of the restroom stalls. I’m the only guy in my office who ever changes in a stall, since no one else ever runs with me- or not for long, anyway*- so most coworkers know who it is when they see a man dropping his pants and changing shoes in the adjacent stall. Every once in a while though, someone still asks. Last week, “Lance”, asked, “Alex, is that you in there?” to which I replied, “No, it’s Senator Larry Craig.”

*Which will be the subject of another, future, running-related post, entitled “How All My Coworkers Keep Breaking Up With Me.”

The most dangerous part of my lunchtime run BTW is the start and finish, when I cross the giant parking lot of the Wal-Mart/”Family Center” shopping plaza in Midvale. That lot is like a magnet for spaced-out cell-phone-chatting minivan drivers from all over the valley…

Our knee, ankle and hip joints are all larger relative to our body mass than in the apes, and even our spinal vertebrae and disks- as problematic as they often are- are larger in diameter relative to body mass.

We have another partial-muscle-decoupling- also absent in apes- between our hips and our thoracic musculature, evident in our narrow* waists. And this brings me to one of the most fascinating differences between us and the apes, and a question that has most likely plagued all of us at some point in our lives: Why is my butt so big?

*Yes, all of my examples assume an “in-shape” human… There are many disagreements within paleoanthropology, but nobody postulates that 300 lb hominids were running down gazelles a million years ago…

OK, so you may say that’s a dumb question- people get big butts from eating too much, right? Well, yes, but I’m talking about the muscles. If you look at the gluteus maximus of a fit human, such as a runner or cyclist, our glutes are way bigger than those of a chimpanzee, gorilla or orangutan. Essentially, apes have no asses.

Our glutes connect our femurs to our trunk, and though they’re hardly used at all while walking, they flex every stride during running, keeping us balanced and preventing us from pitching forward. In short, wherever you look, the human body is packed with stabilization and thermoregulation-related enhancements to optimize endurance running. We are the running apes.

So when and why did this endurance running capability come about?

A Really Short Version of Human Evolution

Lots of questions in human evolution are still unanswered, but this much is certain*: Humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago. Between 3 and 5 million years ago our ancestors were one or more of the various forms of Australopithecus that lived in Africa over that time. (“Lucy” and the recently-famous “Ardi” were both Australopithecines, albeit about a million years apart, though of course we don’t know whether or not their particular species were our ancestors.) About 2.5 million years ago, the genus Homo- our genus- appeared, which produced a series of more and more modern-appearing (and bigger-brained) hominids, some group of which eventually led to us.

*Yes, it’s certain. Don’t get all bible-y on me or what-not. You can believe in both God and evolution and it’s just fine. You won’t turn into a newt or a lungfish or a democrat or anything.

Australopithecines seem not to have had most of these running-specific features*, yet we know, from things like Lucy’s footprints, that they were regularly- if not exclusively- bipedal. So presumably Australopithecus was bipedal, but not an endurance runner. Most of the cool running features don’t appear until Homo habilis (2.5 million years ago) or even Homo erectus (1.8 MYA)

*To be fair, there’s a lot of inference from fossils in making these judgments. For example, tendons don’t fossilize. But the size of the groove in the heel bone into which the Achilles tendon fits is much smaller in Australopithecus than in later hominids.

For hominids to have evolved for endurance running ~2 MYA, there must have been some selective benefit. In general there are 2 reasons to run: to evade something, or to catch something. Evasion seems to be a weak explanation; pretty much any predator of the African savannah can outrun a hominid*. So that leaves pursuit. On the face of it, it’s hard to think of people running fast enough to catch game, but there are modern-day examples- the Tarahumara of Mexico, the Khoisian peoples of Southern Africa- of people running down deer and antelope. They do so not by outsprinting the animal, but by overheating it to the point of collapse, leveraging the efficient human cooling system over the long haul.

*With the obvious- and perhaps not insignificant- exception of fellow hominids.

Endurance running might have also helped early hominids just to get within projectile range (The head-shoulder muscle-decoupling may also have made us better throwers) or it may have aided a scavenger lifestyle. Being the first scavenger to a recent kill might have had a significant benefit, especially if groups of hominids were able to drive off predators or other competing scavengers.

So all this is interesting, but it begs the question: why are the vast majority of modern humans such sucky runners? The obvious answer is that we’re fat and out-of-shape, and certainly that’s the case for many (most?) of us. But here’s a little not-so-secret: the ranks of amateur bike-racing are filled with 40-something former runners. So many bike racers turned to the sport after repeated stress-related injuries from running, and this suggests 2 other possible explanations for our general running suckiness.

First, we’re bigger. Not just fatter, but bigger, and bigger bodies mean more impact-stress when running. I and many of my friends are over 6 feet tall, and human height through much of the world has increased in recent decades, largely through better nutrition. But more importantly, we live longer. I’m guessing not too many H. erectus made it past 35 or 40 and so they probably didn’t often face many of the debilitating wear-and-tear-related injuries that we middle-agers struggle with. In tuning our ape-bodies for endurance running, evolution did the best it could with the materials at hand. But our spines, knees and sacral joints were originally evolved for quadrupeds, not bipeds, and ultimately you can only do so good a job with the wrong tool.

I’ve had my share of running-induced injuries, which peaked 5+ years ago during a spate of marathon-related training. I’ve smartened up a bit since then, and this year have gradually worked up to a pleasant 5 miles a day without any soreness or discomfort. I ran every day last week in the cold, felt great, and weighed in Friday morning at 171, only a pound above summer “race weight.”

Note about sources: My main source for this post was the very layman-friendly paper Endurance Running and the Evolution of Homo, Dennis M. Bramble & Daniel E. Lieberman. Another helpful source was Bernd Heinrich’s interesting and entertaining book, Why We Run. Special thanks to Bird Whisperer for videotaping his dad running back and forth in a snowstorm.

Dan Pope Is Way Cool

Note: I had a couple of posts brewing for the latter half of this week, including one on running, and another on Scrub Jays, but I’m doing this one instead for 2 reasons. First, it’s a great follow-up to the open question from Tuesday’s post, and second, as I have warned previously, my work-life is pretty, uh, “full” right now, and will continue to be so through December, during which my available research time is pretty limited.

The Post

So after Tuesday’s post, and the excellent and insightful comments from several of you, I stewed on the Why-is-Nevada-so-damn-cold question some more. I woke up yesterday, and thought about it while I drank coffee and read the paper. I thought about it while I sat and spun on the trainer and watched the news on TV, and I was still thinking about it when the weather report* came on.

*No, no, no- I wasn’t watching the Univision/soft-porn “weather” report- I was watching a weather report in a language I fully understood, on KSL Channel 5.

And I as I watched the weather report, spinning and panting and sweating*, a thought slowly formed in my not-yet-quite-awake brain. It was: “Weather report… weather report… presented by a… meteorologist… who is a person who knows something about… weather…. Huh… I have a question about weather… Huh… Maybe, just maybe… I.. should… ask… (light bulb coming on) the… meteorologist!”

*In the running post, I want to get into the whole perspiration thing, which is really interesting.

And so yesterday morning I emailed KSL meteorologist Dan Pope with my bizarre, Why-is-Eastern-Nevada-so-cold? question, and within 2 hours he replied! Here’s Dan’s email back to me, with commentary added by me:

Note for non-Utah readers: KSL channel 5 is the NBC affiliate station in Salt Lake City.

Alex,

That’s a great, insightful question, and I’ll be pleased to answer it. But first, let me just say how wonderful I think your blog is! I'm absolutely amazing the range of topics you cover, and your Awesome Graphics are simply unparalleled. Really you have set a new standard for Informative Science Blogging.

Haha! OK, no he didn’t really say that. Here’s what he really said:

In fact, after reviewing your blog with senior KSL executives (and noting how well-informed, articulate and photogenic you are) we’d like to invite you to appear on KSL-5 News as Guest Science Specialist…

Haha! OK, really, really- I’ll quit messing around. Here’s what he said:

Last night skies cleared completely over Nevada, and clouds moved into Northern Utah. That combined with just enough air movement, kept temperatures a little warmer in Park City than what they will be tonight. As skies clear tonight, and with snow cover on the ground and with light winds, Park City will be colder. Elko and Ely were out of the wind movement last night, and both now have snow on the ground and the clear skies allowed both to drop significantly.

OK that makes sense…

Eastern Nevada can and does routinely get colder than the Wasatch Front and even Park City. Ely is about the same elevation as Park City, but the mountains surrounding Ely are higher, so the air gets puddled into the Ely Valley. Elko has mountains surrounding it as well, so the cold air gets puddled (inversion). The other thing in Eastern Nevada is that the air is often drier than near Salt Lake City (due to the influence of the Great Salt Lake there is more humidity). The drier the air, the greater the temperature spread from high to low can be. Not that Park City doesn’t get cold due to dry air. It does.

Ahh… OK, 2 good items in here. First, the lower humidity. I actually wondered about, as it- specifically minimal tropospheric water vapor- is one of the factors we talked about in Tuesday’s post that is involved in cooling cP air masses way up in Canada/Alaska. And of course the lake- with its frequent associated “lake effect” storms- is a logical source for increased water vapor along the Wasatch Front.

Side Note: Commenters cmsparks and Colin* both suggested the lake as a factor. Good job, guys!

*I know Colin (aka Clean Colin) in real life and he is Way Wicked Smart. In fact he is a Phd Organic Chemist. That’s right, both OCRick and Clean Colin are organic chemists. And in fact I have several more Phd-Scientist friends (including Vicente.) And then practically everyone else in my life (including Awesome Wife, Hunky Neighbor, SkiBikeJunkie, Young Ian, Brother-Phil, Sister-Elizabeth) has- or is getting- an advanced degree. Everyone that is, except me. I barely squeaked out a Bachelor’s degree, and am the least-educated, most ignorant person in my entire social circle. Man, what a downer. I need some new friends. If you are reading this blog and are a high-school drop-out, I would like to start pal-ing around with you.

Second, I knew of course that many Eastern Nevada valleys experience inversions, which we talked about in this post and this post last year. But what I hadn’t thought of was the height of the surrounding mountain ranges. The Snake Range, to the East of Ely, peaks out (Wheeler Peak) at about 1,600 feet higher than Twin Peaks (East Peak), the highest part of the Wasatch, along Park City/Snyderville basin*.

*But this isn’t the case for Elko. It’s at 5,200 feet, and Ruby Range, to the East of town, peaks out (Ruby Dome) ~100 feet lower than Twin Peaks.

Side Note: Commenter KanyonKris* suggested inversions, so great job, Kris!

*I also know KanyonKris in real life, and although I don’t think(?) he has a Phd, he is also Way Wicked Smart.

One final thing to think about...is that Park City Main Street is warmer than the Snyderville Basin and Jeremy Ranch. Those locations are always colder than Park City Main Street. I'm not sure where you got your morning temperature of 3 degrees from, but the lower areas of Park City...even around the Golf Course are always colder than the readings from the Ski areas.

I just looked at the final morning lows. Silver Creek Junction was -16. Kimball Junction was -14. Park City Golf Course was -7. Elko was -22 and Ely -19. Salt Lake City dropped to 2.

Another good point. I should be comparing apples with apples, and Kimball or Silver Creek junctions are both at the bottom of basin, while downtown Park City is on the slope rising out of it.

Again, I think the clouds last night made a difference in the low temperatures. It will be colder tonight in Park City, Jeremy Ranch and the Snyderville Basin.

Regards,

Dan Pope
AMS Certified Broadcast Meteorologist KSL-TV

P.S. How do I get one of those cool WatcherSTICKERS- they’re awesome!*

*OK I made up that “PS” part too. But the rest of the email is real.

So there we have it, from a real live meteorologist, who took time out of his busy day to reply with a thoughtful answer to a stranger’s question. Clearly, although meteorology is complicated stuff, one thing we can all agree on is that Dan Pope is Way Cool.

Note: Special- and serious- thanks to KSL Meteorologist Dan Pope. As always, I am exceedingly grateful to topical experts who go out of their way to help a curious amateur.

Thoughts About Really Cold Air

Note: Kind of a rambling post today. What can I say, it’s a crazy time for me at work. But you’re gonna love the graphics.

The seasons are officially tuned lockstep to the solstices and equinoxes, but I don’t think deep down any of us really believes that’s when they start and finish. Here in Utah, by September 21 Fall has already been underway for at least a couple of weeks; the real end of summer is more like Labor Day, or maybe LOTOJA. And the 2 or 3 weeks before the summer solstice, with their almost endless daylight, are surely more Summer than Spring.

Every season is like that, but none more so than Winter. Does anyone really think Winter doesn’t start till December 21? No, by then Winter is full-on. Depending on the year, it usually seems to start within a week or two, one way or the other, of Thanksgiving. This year, I know exactly when it started: Saturday, December 5^th, at 11AM.

Oh, it had already snowed a couple of times, and the week leading up to it was frigid- in the teens the 3 mornings before. But the foothills were still mostly dry and brown, and I’d still been mtn biking almost daily in the pre-dawn darkness. Saturday morning, hearing a change was in the forecast, OCRick, Vicente and I met at my place, pedaled over to the zoo, and started riding out Shoreline. The trail was frozen hard, as it had been the previous 3 or 4 days, and we rolled over the rock-hard ruts left by previous bikers during the thaws of the previous weekend.

Tangent: I a previous post, I mused that when you really get down to it, there are truly only 2 mysteries in life: the Mystery of Existence, and the Mystery of Self. I feel now that I misspoke, and that there are in fact 3 great mysteries in life: Existence, Self, and Why The Hell OCRick’s Camebak Is So Freaking Huge.

I’ve been riding with the guy for over 13 years and still have yet to figure out what exactly is in his camelbak. My current theory is that it contains one or more of the following: a) a ton of extra clothing, b)a cheesesteak, c) chemistry textbooks, or d) (dismembered & mummified) first wife. Knowing OCRick, it could be any of them…

Our plan was to ride to City Creek, then up to the radio towers and back, but as we crested the final rise before the City Creek descent, this is what we saw- the wall of the front.

If you think of Salt Lake Valley as a big room, the “window” of the room opens to the West/Northwest. In that direction you can see out past the mountains, across the lake, into the West Desert, even into Nevada on a clear day. And it’s from that direction that the weather comes. While we’d wound our way through the draws of the foothills, a dark gray front had rolled in through the window and into the valley. We stopped, stared West, and small fast-moving flakes started blowing around us. We turned around and started pedaling home.

As we sped back to the East, we could see the front roll into the valley. In this shot, looking South from 6,000 feet, you can actually see the front moving in, pushing out the week-old inversion ahead of it.

There was more wind than snow on the ride back, but what snow did fall didn’t melt on the well-frozen ground, and we left clear tracks through the dusting. The lead edge of the front was a patchwork of clouds and flurries, and we rode through repeated “sunshowers” of snow. Down, down, through Dry Creek, behind the hospital and back to the zoo we rolled buffeted along by Old Man Winter.

At home I jumped in the hot tub to warm up, accompanied by Bird Whisperer, and as we sat in the open air the flakes grew in size and carpeted the adjacent deck and lawn. Winter had arrived.

Side Note: Ever wonder why sometimes snowflakes are huge? It’s because they’re (relatively) warm and wet. Warmer flakes have a film of liquid water on the edges, and when 2 wet flakes come into contact, they tend to stick together*. When it’s colder, the flake-edges are frozen, and they flakes tend not to clump.

*This is because of the surface tension of water, which I explained in this post and showed in this Extremely Helpful (Albeit Ridiculously Obvious) Educational Video.

OK, you probably knew that already. But think about this: you ever notice that storms in the Wasatch often start up with monster-sized flakes, but as the storm continues, even though the snowfall continues, the flake size gets back to “normal”? Since leading edge of a storm front is where cold and warm air meet, and so the air temps are slightly higher, I’m guessing that’s why the flakes are big at the beginning. Once the storm “settles in”, the cooler air doesn’t melt the flake edges to the same extent.

BTW, I covered snowflake formation in this post last year.

The rest of the weekend was frigid, and we’re locked in for a while; temps won’t break freezing again till Friday at the earliest. Usually during cold snaps in Utah, you always have an “escape valve” in the back of your mind: St. George. You know that you could, just could, call in sick and drive 4 hours South and everything would be nice and Spring-like again. Even if you only actually do so once or twice a year, the knowledge that you could somehow makes you feel less “trapped.”

But this week we really are locked in; the polar air mass has covered the entire state. It may snow today in St. George, and it’s unlikely to break 40F! Up on Little Creek Mountain it probably won’t break 30F. This is it; Winter’s here, there’s no escaping, and I’ll just have to “man up.”

Side Note: The pay-off of winter-weather is of course skiing, but this week’s storm has arrived so far with fairly minimal snowfall and terrible winds. So far, it’s just the yucky part of winter.

When you think about it, the strangest thing about the seasons is how darn late they all are. Think about it. The Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year, is only 2 weeks away, but it just got really, really cold. A month before the solstice, in late November, the weather was still, on the whole, rather nice. But a month after the solstice, it almost certainly won’t be “rather nice.” Nor will it be much warmer 2 months, or possibly even 3 months after the solstice, even though the days will be so much longer and the sun far higher in the sky.

The reason of course is the oceans. They take a long time to heat and a long time to cool. It’s easy to forget about the ocean so far from it, but they act like a giant thermo-regulator throughout the year. Places far from the sea experience greater seasonal extremes in temperature. Utah is rough enough, but some of the wildest swings are in Central Asia, in places like Mongolia, thousands of miles from an ocean.

But what makes a week like this so rough is that the weather changes so suddenly. It’s not like every day for say 2 or 3 months, it’s like a ½ a degree colder or anything. No, it’s like in the span of a few days, the temps drop 20, 30, even 40 degrees. What’s up with that?

My first winter in Colorado was, on the whole, quite mild. Compared to a New England winter it was positively balmy, with daily highs in the 40’s and 50’s. Then one week, there was a minor snowstorm, following which it didn’t warm up for a full week. For a week the temps never climbed above 10F. The weatherman told us that an “Arctic Air Mass” had arrived. And every year I was in Colorado, once or twice a year- sometimes as early as October- an “Arctic Air Mass” would arrive, super-cooling the state down for a good 4-7 days.

Here in Salt Lake we don’t experience ‘Arctic Air Masses’ of the same severity, but we still do get them. This week it won’t break 30F until Friday, and freezing until Saturday (if at all.) So what is an “Arctic Air Mass” anyway, and why does it act like this?

Tangent: To be fair, the winter weather- and weather overall- of the Colorado Front Range is, on the whole, better* than the weather of the Wasatch Front. Their winters are warmer, their summers cooler. But we don’t get- by and large- those whacky Arctic freezes whereby it will stay under 5F or so for a week. I’ll explain why in a moment.

*Except for those annoying, clockwork-like summer afternoon T-storms. Nope, we don’t get ‘em.

An arctic air mass is just one of several types of air masses (graphic right, not mine) that form over a particular part of the planet, and then create significant weather changes when they change location, often as a result of a shift in jet stream. These air masses are huge, often something like 1,000 miles across. There are maritime air masses and continental air masses, and polar and tropical air masses. What we call an Arctic Air Mass is a Continental-Polar air mass, designated “cP” in meteorology-speak.

Way, way up North, in Eastern Alaska and Northwest Canada is the birthplace of the cP air masses that affect us down in the lower 48. Over long, stable periods of high pressure, the troposphere- the part of the atmosphere below 30,000 feet (the part that we can breathe in) becomes very cold. The reasons for this may seem obvious, and some of them are, namely the low sun angle and super-short daylight hours. But there are other compounding factors at work. The low sun angle means greater tropospheric length, which is the distance a beam of solar radiation must travel between the tropopause (boundary with the stratosphere) and the surface. The longer the distance, the more of that radiation is scattered. (This is why sunsets/sunrises are orange- the tropospheric length is huge.)

There’s also much less tropospheric water vapor. Water vapor is actually the most important greenhouse gas in most of the world because of its quantity. (CO2 is a much more powerful greenhouse gas, but there’s way less of it.) But the cold polar regions evaporate little water into the air, the air retains less radiation, the air gets colder, the surface gets colder, and so on. And then there’s the high albedo of the arctic land-surface. Snow and ice are wonderful reflectors, and good amount of the radiation that does reach the surface is reflected back into space.

So the air is cold up in Canada. Tough luck for them. But what makes it tough luck for us is when these super-cooled cP air masses make their way South. The force that drives them South is the polar jet stream. Jet streams are powerful air currents up in the upper troposphere, just below the tropopause that move from West to East*. They’re caused by solar heating of the atmosphere and rotation of the planet**.

*Usually. Lesser, easterly jet streams can form in the tropics.

**Jet streams also occur in the atmosphere of Jupiter, where the planet’s internal heat is also a causative factor. For more on Jupiter, and its Way Cool Moons, see this post.

The thing about jet streams (diagram right, not mine), and the polar jet stream in particular is that they don’t just go West to East. It’s a Westerly air current, but follows a meandering path across the continent. This path is called a Rossby wave. Rossby waves are caused by shear in rotating fluids. In the case of the Earth’s atmosphere that fluid is the atmosphere, and the shear is caused by the Coriolis effect with latitude.

Tangent: Rossby is for Carl-Gustaf Rossby, a Swedish-American meteorologist who organized the training of military meteorologists in WWII. He’s probably the closest thing we have to a National Meteorological Hero, but of course you never heard of him because, well, we, uh… don’t have National Meteorological Heroes.

I think part of the reason is that meteorology- specifically weather-forecasting- has a bad rap among the public. We all love to go on about how inaccurate weather forecasts are, which is funny, because if you compare weather forecasts to, say economic forecasts, which arguably affect most of us much more, weather forecasts are far more accurate. Really, weather forecasts- like automobile tires, fuel injection, and LED headlamps- are one of those things that have consistently and quietly gotten better and better just within our lifetimes. In fact, the average 3-day forecast today is more accurate than the average 1-day forecast was in 1980.

All About The Coriolis Effect

The Coriolis effect is all about conservation of angular momentum. Let’s pretend you wanted to kill your Arch Enemy, who lived in Tempe, Arizona. And fortunately, you had a Wicked Powerful Rifle (WPR), capable of shooting a bullet 1,000 miles in a straight line. So you stood in the middle of Salt Lake Valley and fired your WPR exactly due South. Guess what? You’d miss him. As your perfectly-aimed bullet sped South, it would appear to veer right. And if he shot back at you with a similar WPR, his bullet would also veer right.

The reason is that Tempe is moving faster than Salt Lake City. Both spin around the same axis, but Salt Lake, sitting about 800 miles higher up on the globe, is spinning more slowly. When both bullets are sitting- unfired- in their respective WPRs, the Mesa bullet already has significantly higher angular momentum than the SLC bullet, and as it travels North, across more slowly-rotating earth surface, that angular momentum is expressed by its rotating faster around the Earth’s axis than the land over which it is traveling, which manifests itself as moving more rapidly to the East (the direction is which the Earth spins) and to the right.

Conversely, the SLC bullet as it travels South, with its lower angular momentum, falls behind the land over which is passes with respect to the Earth’s rotation, and veers to the West, which is its right.

Tangent: I picked this example because I thought guns would hold your attention, not because I have an arch-enemy. In fact, as I was thinking about this example, there’s really no one in the world I’d want to shoot, even if I could get away with it. Oh, sure I might crack off a shot at Osama bin Laden or Kim Jong Il if the circumstances presented themselves, but I mean someone I actually know. Really, there’s just no one I have strong enough negative personal feelings toward that I’d want to hurt them.

Now, having said that, there are people I Really Don’t Want To Run Into. You know what I’m talking about- maybe a past co-worker you didn’t care for, or an annoying former neighbor, or an ex-girlfriend/boyfriend where you maybe handled the break-up poorly, or your wife’s friend-of-a-friend who manages to work every conversation into a pitch for why you need to start seeing her psychic*- that kind of thing. And I think about this because it gives me an idea for an awesome smart-phone application: The Proximity-Annoyance Alarm. I got the idea from some iPhone commercial I saw where a couple of unbearably-hip yuppies are trying to meet up for sushi or facial wraps or some such and they’re sending each other directions, and monitoring each other’s locations on- what else- their iPhones. Who cares? I don’t need to see where my friends are- if I really care I’ll call ‘em up and ask them. But I would like to know where the people I Really Don’t Want To Run Into are, and more importantly, whether I’m in imminent danger of running into them. So the Proximity Annoyance Alarm would allow you to input the mobile #’s of those people and then an alarm would go off when one was nearby, and the app would give you directions to avoid them. Now that would be a useful iPhone app.

*You probably thought I made that one up. I didn’t. I swear, I have the weirdest friends-of-friends.

South of the equator, the effect is in the opposite direction, and North-South trajectories veer to the left. These forces work not just on make-pretend bullets, but on real-world air currents, and the North-right/South-left distinction is why cyclones always rotate counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern*.

*It’s also the reason why cyclones rarely form near the equator; there’s little Coriolis effect.

Anyway, this effect causes shear that alters Rossby Waves, and so from time to time the Polar Jet Stream bobs way South, driving a thousand-mile wide cP air mass down into the heart of the Lower 48. But as it does so, the brunt of the mass is deflected by the Rocky Mountains, and this is why Denver’s cP air masses are so much more icy than ours. The cP air is frigid across the upper plains, but as it slowly makes its way East across the Mid-West and the Appalachians the mass is gradually warmed and broken up, and this is why I never even heard of “Arctic Air Masses” growing up in New England.

So that explains what an “Arctic Air Mass” is, why they really are worse in Denver than in Salt Lake, and why I never heard of them in New England.

Tangent: But what it doesn’t explain is why Central Nevada is so much freaking colder than the Wasatch Front in Winter. Surely, any Wasatch Front resident who’s looked at a wintertime weather map has noticed this: Central Nevada is an icebox. The lows in places like Elko and Ely are usually 10-15F lower than in Salt Lake. Why is that? The latitude is the same, the altitude more or less the same, and they’re far from the Polar Jet Stream path. Why is Nevada so damn cold?

The first real week of Winter always seems to come on a bit heavy; it’s dark and cold and Spring seems years away. But solstice is just around the corner, and then every day is just a little bit lighter, hinting at the Living Year to come.

A Map of the Mesa

I’ll get to the real post in a moment, but first, a little background. As long- (really long) time readers know, possibly my favorite place in the world is Little Creek Mountain, a flat-topped 5,500 – 5,800 foot mesa in extreme Southwestern Utah, about 2 miles North of the Arizona border. What brought me there was the wonderful maze-like network of mtn bike trails built by the legendary Harris brothers, but the botany, geology and archeology are all fascinating as well.

Several years ago, trail-builder and local Morgan Harris told me about some rock art sites in the area. One stuck in my mind. He described a location in the interior of the mesa where there was a petroglyph atop a flat pad of slickrock alongside a shallow wash. And the interesting thing about this glyph was that it appeared to depict a map. A map of the mesa.

As- again- long-time readers know, I am fascinated with maps and geography, and the idea of this ancient map completely captivated me. A few years ago, on a solo trip with an extra hour of daylight to spare, I tried to locate the glyph, following Morgan’s directions from memory, but with no luck. A couple of years later, on a trip with the guys* I talked them into killing another hour helping me search, but again we came up empty.

*I think it was OCRick, Clean Colin, Rainbow-Spirit Paul, and maybe Hunky Neighbor, but not sure.

Perhaps I had the directions wrong, or maybe we walked right past it; petroglyphs can be like 3D pictures- invisible till you see them, then blazingly obvious. And besides, was it really a map, or was Morgan seeing something more than there was? After all, most of the rock art I’ve seen seems to be people and animals and geometric patterns and such- I hadn’t heard of any maps. Anyway, finding it has languished on my desert to-do list for probably a couple of years now…

The Post

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post, we spent Thanksgiving down in St. George, repeating our winning formula from last year: just the nuclear family, rent a nice condo with pool & a hot tub, pick up to go Thanksgiving dinner on the way out of town, and bring bikes. Seriously, it’s awesome. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Friday morning we packed up turkey sandwiches and headed on over to nearby Land Hill, to hike the Tempi’po’op trail. Land Hill is a bluff that overlooks the Santa Clara River, and the rim of the bluff is packed with petroglyphs. This was our second time there, and we know there’s still plenty of great rock art we haven’t found yet.

Side Note #1: The Tempi’po’op trail is also open to bikes. And it looks like it was be a pleasant little ride. But, my strong advice is not to bike it your first time, and the reason is that probably >95% of the rock art is off the trail, along the rim. If you want to find the art, you need to be about 20’ south of the trail, hopping from slab, to slab, looking down and paying attention. Now, on a subsequent trip, if you can remember the sites you want to visit, then by all means ride your mtn bike. But walk it the first time.

Side Note #2: There’s some interesting botany on this trail as well, including several Ironwoods and a couple of tree-sized Cliffroses that are really impressive. And the lichens are fantabulous.

We had a wonderful time. The whole family got into it, each of us making our own finds and discoveries. There were human figures and masks and Bighorn sheep and giant bear-paw-prints and snakes and fascinating geometric patterns- grids, checkerboards, intersecting patterns of lines and all sorts of things. Really, I can’t recommend this trail highly enough, especially as an easy family-friendly outing.

I’ve seen a fair amount of rock art, and already knew a bit of the pre-European history of the Virgin River valley, but that evening, back at the condo, I spent a couple of hours researching rock art in the area.

Humans have been living in or passing through the valley for something like 10,000 years, and this is reflected in the rock art in places like Land Hill; many glyphs are only 800 or 900 years old, but others date back maybe 5,000 years or more. Around 450 AD* Indians started arriving and settling in the Virgin River in greater numbers through an apparent series of in-migrations, and engaged in farming and village-building in flattish sites by the Virgin and Santa Clara rivers that were suitable for irrigation. Over the next several centuries this area became part of a broader culture, extending from near Las Vegas to South-Central Utah, known to archeologists as the Western Anasazi.

*Found multiple dates for this one. May be more like 0 AD.

The Western Anasazi don’t get nearly the airplay of the Mesa Verde Anasazi, Kayenta Anasazi, or Chacoan cultures further to the east. In part that may be because their ruins lack the spectacular cliff dwellings of some of their Eastern neighbors, but for centuries the Western Anasazi thrived in Southwest Utah and Southern Nevada, and had clear, regular trade links with cultures to the East and South, as evidenced by art, architecture and pottery. The culture persisted until ~1150 AD, when the Pueblo Indians of the valley appear to have left the area for destinations further South.

Extra Detail: The whole topic of the migration, abandonment, decline, disappearance or whatever of the Colorado Plateau region by the Anasazi- of all types- is a huge, complex and controversial issue that I’m not going to get into in this post*. In the specific case of the Virgin River Anasazi, a common suspect for the last 20 years has been a 30-year drought around the mid-1100’s. Other researchers however, question this drought-hypothesis, and propose other possible explanations, such as climate change on plateaus higher up and to the East, which could have forced people down off those plateaus, and into places like the Virgin River valley, changing the population dynamics and leading to conflict or collapse.

*But I just read a fantastic book on the topic that I’ll mention in a reading-list post I hope to do soon.

An interesting thing about the final out-migration though is that it appears to have been preceded by an earlier out-migration, around 950AD, in which Virgin River Puebloans left the valley for destinations North.

In researching the Land Hill petroglyphs, one of the sources, Odyssey of the Pueblo Indians, by William M. Eaton, detailed several of the glyphs in the area. Many represent legends or religious or mythological figures. Others seem to represent specific clans, or basket designs or warriors. Still others have astronomical significance or alignments. And some appear to be… maps.

Here’s an example detailed in Eaton’s book. Now the shot I’m using here is not mine- I think this one we have yet to locate it.

Now in this pic I’ve overlaid the same shot with a topo map of the area, and highlighted many of the geographic features that Eaton IDs in his book.

The match isn’t perfect, and as Eaton notes, the Santa Clara River channel has changed over the thousand years since, but there does seem to be somewhat of a match. And Eaton includes several more map examples, including several down in Nevada, and another close by, downstream a few miles, just South of and below the St. George airport runway.

Side Note: Of course, once you see one map, you start to see them all over the place. Here’s an example- a boulder below the cliffs along the Santa Clara River (I’ve cranked up the exposure & contrast to bring out the glyphs in the shadow.)

Is this a map of this stretch of the river, or just a serpent* with some doo-dads?

*Maybe Balolokong, the Great Water Serpent in Pueblo Indian Mythology. Just a guess…

Saturday Awesome Wife had a massage appointment at Red Mountain Spa, so armed with Eaton’s description and crude map, I enlisted the Trifecta and set out in search of Eaton’s second map. Well, we didn’t find the map- or rather I’m not sure if we did, but what we did find was an Absolute Home Run, one that you absolutely have to check out on your next trip to St. George, and that I’m going to share with you Right Now.

There are great rock art sites all over the Colorado Plateau. But many of them are a pain in the ass to get to. One of the great things about the Land Hill site, as I’ve mentioned, is how easy it is to access. But this place is even easier. It’s a hillside chock-full of fantastic rock art, and it’s located- I kid you not- on the hillside immediately behind the St. George Maverik on Hilton Drive.

Seriously, this place is so easy to access, so close to the Interstate, that if you pass through St. George without spending 10 minutes to check it out it would be criminally negligent. We pulled into the Maverik lot and Twin B was the first to spot glyphs on the hillside. Here’s a shot- with no zoom- that I took from the lot; click on it and see how many you can pick out.

There are glyphs all over the hillside, and several cool panels. This boulder atop the hill (left, Bird Whisperer for scale) may be the most impressive, but scrambling along the hillside revealed a number of surprises not visible from below. Here’s one of my favorites; this panel (right, with my foot for scale) faces straight up. The map, which again I don’t think we found*, is thought to indicate the network of irrigation canals around 950AD. I should mention that this site is far from unique in the St. George area. Both the town, and neighboring Bloomington to the South, have all sorts of rock art sites, sometimes in the middle of suburban neighborhoods. What makes archeology in St. George so interesting is that a thriving modern community is smack-dab atop of a once-thriving ancient one.

*But I’m not sure. There are many indeterminate and worn “squiggle-glyphs” that could conceivably be maps of sorts.

Note for Non-North American Readers: Yes, I know, you’re thinking “So what? Every city in Europe is built atop of countless ancient sites…” But that’s not the case for us North Americans. We generally have to go to odd backcountry locations, out-of-the-way national parks, or down to Central America to see this kind of stuff.

The next morning I did my usual family vacation schtick of tip-toeing out before dawn to go mtn biking*. Off to the East, in the dawn gloom, shaded under a low cloud layer, I could see the flat table of Little Creek Mountain.

*I rode the “Rim” network- Rim Runner, Rim Rambler, Rim Reaper- just South of Barrel Roll, and accessed from the same trailhead. It was my first time and I’d rate it as OK but a little unexciting. Barrel Roll is a better ride.

As I mentioned earlier, Little Creek is filled with potshards and other signs of Indian use and occupation, but the earliest stuff dates from around 500AD (Basketmaker III)*. That’s a lot more recent than the evidence of Archaic period peoples down in the valley, and it might reflect later and more advanced cultures having the tools and technology to be able to utilize the higher mesas in ways the Archaics couldn’t. I think about that when I look up at Little Creek from St. George. If it’s true, then for thousands of years, the mesa was unknown. Countless generations would’ve lived their whole lives down in the valley, looking up at the high, dark, table to the East, as unknown to them as another planet would be to us.

*My main source here is the 1980 Master’s Thesis of James L. Heid, which I accessed (and copied) several years ago from the UNLV library. I’m sure more work has been conducted in the decades since, and so this info could well be wrong.

So the Puebloans did make maps after all. I thought about the Mesa. And I thought about that map. I need to go find it. I need to give Morgan a call.

Meep! Meep! Everything I Knew About Roadrunners I Learned From the Cartoon

Saturday morning I was biking with the Twins in St. George. No, we weren’t mountain biking; St. George, and neighboring Santa Clara have a wonderful networks of paved bike paths running all over the place. They pass through neighborhoods and pretty open spaces featuring slickrock outcrops, lava fields and shrubland, and are perfect for a parent who wants to bike with his kids while not worrying about traffic.

Here’s a quick clip of a typical stretch of path. Most of the shrubs along here are Thread Snakeweed, Gutierrezia microcephala (also called “Matchweed), Winterfat, Ceratoides lanata (also called “White Sage”), or Spiny Hopsage, Grayia spinosa.

Early on in the ride we spotted this- a Roadrunner* (pic below, right).

*They move fast and don’t sit still for long. As such, only this photo is mine.

We got a good look at him zipping about, and the early wildlife sighting got the ride off to a good start. Now, when we spot wildlife as a family, I always try to tell the kids something interesting about whatever it is we’re seeing. With Bird Whisperer this is getting tough; it’s likely he already knows more about any bird or mammal we see than I do. But with the Twins I can still usually manage to impart a new factoid or two. So I thought about Roadrunners and what I knew about them, and as I did so realized that I knew the following “facts”, all of which I had gleaned from watching ‘Roadrunner” cartoons in my formative years:

1- Roadrunners have 3 toes per foot, 2 facing forward, 1 backward (see pic right).

2- Roadrunner run faster than coyotes.

3- Roadrunners cannot fly.

4- Roadrunners are herbivorous, subsisting primarily on birdseed.

5- Roadrunners say, “Meep! Meep!”

6- Roadrunners inhabit Monument Valley, Canyonlands National Park, and other areas of the Colorado Plateau Semi-Desert, as evidenced by the numerous and frequent sandstone monoliths appearing in the cartoons*.

*And which frequently play a role in the demise of the pursuing coyote.

So as you can see, I knew quite a bit about Roadrunners. Unfortunately, every single one of those “facts” is flat-out wrong.

Tangent: Was anybody else besides me rooting for the coyote? I never sought out the cartoon; it was one of several packed into the “Loony Tunes” hour I watched religiously every Saturday morning growing up. When a Roadrunner segment would come on I’d wince. Because I knew what was going to happen: the coyote would never catch him, and would die- and apparently be reincarnated*- like 10 times while trying, and the roadrunner would never get caught and he would always be all smug and snarky-like about it. And it wasn’t like the coyote wasn’t trying; he’d get some big box delivered from Acme, Inc. and he’d be all excited, the way I am when a box of bike parts shows up in the mail, and he’d come up with some catapult or rocket or giant spring but it just never worked out- usually for no good reason. As a perennial mechanical hack, my sympathies were firmly with the coyote**.

*Really, what was up with that? Was the coyote supposed to be a metaphor for Jesus or something? Or maybe he was just a precursor to Kenny in South Park…

**And still are, despite that biting incident.

But I could never look away. It always turned out the same, but each time, some little voice inside my 10 year-old head would say, “Maybe, just maybe, he’ll catch him this time! I can’t break away to pee or get another bowl of Quisp now- this could be it! I might miss it!” But of course it never turned out any different, and I think another little piece of my fragile 10 year-old soul died with each episode. Man, I hated that f$@#ing bird.

Wow, I started this tangent thinking it would be all light and whimsical, but it turned out kind of Nietzsche-meets-Janis-Joplin. That’s the thing with tangents- when I start them I really have no idea where they’re going.

All About Roadrunners

But I know where this post is going. The Greater Roadrunner, Geococcyx californianus (pic right, not mine), is common to the Southwestern US and Northern Mexico. It’s actually a Cuckoo, or more specifically, one of the 142 species of bird comprising Cuculidae, the Cuckoo Family. There are cuckoos of one sort or another all over the world, on every continent except Antarctica. If you know anything about Cuckoos you probably may be familiar with them as brood parasites, sneakily laying their eggs in the nests of other species, but most of the cuckoos involved in that monkey business are Old World Cuckoos*. Geococcyx is one of 4 genera in the subfamily Neomorphinae, or New World ground-cuckoos, and the Greater Roadrunner is the only member of this subfamily found in the US.

*The common avian brood parasite around here is the Brown-Headed Cowbird, which is not a cuckoo at all and which we checked out during Bird Feeder Week last January.

Side Note: The Lesser Roadrunner, G. velox, looks almost identical but a little smaller. It lives down in Mexico in a couple different areas, including the Yucatan Peninsula. So if you go to Cancun and do a day-trip to Chichen Itza, keep an eye out while driving that (phenomenally boring*) toll road to get there.

*The Northern Yucatan is flat as a pancake and covered in dry, view-obscuring, scrub forest. Driving solo across the peninsula in a VW Bug without radio or CD player- as I did several years ago- is mind-numbingly dull…

This brings us to the first bad “fact”. Roadrunners don’t have 3 toes; they have 4. The inner 2 toes face forward, while the outer 2 face back. This arrangement, called Zygodactly, is common to all members of the Cuckoo family but is not (quite) unique to them. It also occurs in parrots, woodpeckers and owls and seems to be an effective foot-form for grasping trunks, branches and twigs.

With roadrunners it’s been adapted to running, and, true to the cartoon, that’s what roadrunners do, usually preferring a sprint to flying.

Where the cartoon gets it wrong on the running part is around the bird’s relation to coyotes, or predators in general. Roadrunners (pic left, not mine) can sprint up to 18 – 20 MPH, but a sprinting coyote can beat 30MPH. So the scenes you see in the cartoon of the coyote closing in on the roadrunner, then the roadrunner saying “Meep! Meep!” and then kicking in the afterburners and leaving Wile E. behind are bunch of baloney. In the real world, a roadrunner being chased by a coyote will just fly away. Roadrunners aren’t great flyers; they don’t do it well or far, but they can get airborne for a few minutes, which is often all it takes to evade an oncoming canine.

But roadrunners overwhelmingly run (or jump) (vs. fly) to hunt. And this brings us to the fourth bad “fact”: Roadrunners are omnivores, and aggressive, skilled hunters. They routinely hunt small rodents, scorpions, tarantulas and small reptiles, including- get this- rattlesnakes! No, they’re not immune to the venom, just fast. And clever. Roadrunners are usually solitary birds, but they’ll often pair up to take on a rattler. One will feint and distract the snake while the other goes in and nabs it behind the head with its beak.

Once caught, the roadrunner dispatches its prey by repeatedly bashing its head in against a rock. Not quite like the cartoon, eh?

Roadrunners also regularly hunt at or around suburban bird feeders, preying upon smaller birds like swifts and swallows. They’ve even been observed leaping up out of hiding and nabbing low-flying birds in mid-air!

Also unlike the cartoon is their call, which not only is not “Meep! Meep!”, but is not anything remotely like it. It’s a repeated “cooing” on a declining scale, reminiscent of a Mourning Dove, but with a sort of gurgling undertone, like it needs to clear its throat. You can listen to it here if you’re curious.

Side Note: Speaking of Mourning Doves, I got this nice shot of one down in St. George. Someday I’m doing a post on them.

OK, so that’s 5 “facts” down. The last “fact” is its range. I’m pretty sure you will never see a roadrunner zipping through Monument Valley or Arches NP, or pretty much any of the places depicted in the cartoon*. The roadrunner is a bird of hot deserts- the Mojave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan. As I mentioned in last Thanksgiving’s series on the amazing botany of St. George, Southwest Utah is completely unlike the rest of the state in that it dips down into the Northernmost reaches of the Mojave and that’s why it’s full of cool stuff you don’t see anywhere else in the state- stuff like creosote and Joshua trees and desert tortoises and several species of rattlesnake that don’t occur elsewhere in Utah. The Greater Roadrunner is another “Mojave Indicator”; you generally won’t see it outside of this area in the state. Occasionally one will be sighted just a bit out of its typical range; they sometimes show up in or around Cedar City or even Parowan and in 1932 a decomposing one was found outside of Provo(!), but they never breed so far North. Roadrunners are territorial, so it may be territory/population pressure that pushes them Northward every once in a while.

*In fairness, Saguaro cacti also frequently appeared in the cartoon. And though they don’t occur in the Southern-Utah-type canyonlands so often depicted in the cartoon, they are endemic to the Sonoran desert, where roadrunners do in fact live.

Side Note: The first roadrunner I ever saw was down in the Chihuahuan, driving across West Texas in the spring of 1990. It was crossing the highway. Less than 5 minutes later, a coyote ran across the highway, in the same direction. I thought, “Wow- just like the cartoon! I’m in the real West now!”

Yeah, so everything I “knew” about roadrunners was wrong. But if anything, they’re cooler than the cartoon- Roadrunners are fast, mean, clever, bold desert hunters. And there’s another thing that fascinates me about them: they’re an “in-between” thing.

When we think about other animals, we tend to categorize them. We think of animals as herbivores or carnivores, as little timid creatures, or big lumbering ones, or means and scary ones. And certainly we think of birds in different categories: waterfowl, raptors, little brown birds at our feeders, etc. But probably the biggest mental division we make among birds is between those who fly and those who don’t. We’re of course familiar with all sorts of birds that fly, and even if we don’t see them every day, we’re at least conceptually familiar with birds that don’t, such as ostriches and emus. But a roadrunner is in-between. We know of other in-between birds of course- chickens and quail and grouse and pheasants, but we tend to think of them as well, sort of lame. Like they would certainly want to fly, right? They just can’t seem to get it together… But a roadrunner- a fast, resourceful desert killer- clearly has its act together; there’s no way it’s “lame”. It’s not like other birds. It’s an in-between.

We think of in-betweens as transitional because we know that animals who live in environments and ways very different from their ancestral environments must have passed through such in-between stages in their evolutionary past. Here’s an example: whales. We know that whales and hippos shared a common ancestor sometime in the last 50-60 million years. And we know that that common ancestor was a 4-legged mammal that walked around on the land. But in-between that proto-hippo and modern whales there must have been some “in-between” ancestors. What would be an example? Well, maybe something like a seal or a sea lion. And what would be in between a seal and a whale? Well, maybe something like a manatee, or dugong.

What about the other way? What’s in-between a seal and something that walks around on land, like a dog or a cat or a rabbit? Maybe an otter? Or a beaver?

As it turns out, even though you can line them up along a spectrum of in-between-ness, none of these things- whale, seal, otter, manatee, are particularly closely-related to one another. But here they all are in front of us, appearing to fill out an almost continuous march to the sea.

But they’re not a continuum, and from their own perspectives, none of them is in-between anything. Some pinnipeds may someday evolve into more whale/fish-like forms, or maybe they’ll evolve the other way, back toward land-living. Or maybe they’ll keep on living like they do till the end of the world.

The animal world* is full of these kinds of in-betweens, with flying squirrels and loons (which can barely walk on land) and mud-skippers and amphibians. Ostriches descended from birds which evolved flight and then lost it, Vampire bats descended from flying mammals that evolved sonar and then lost the high-frequency component, and apes descended from reptiles who lost color vision and then re-evolved it. Evolution isn’t a continuous line; it’s a meadnering, endless soap opera.

*So is the plant world, but that’s another post. So is fungi, a great example being yeast, who’ve apparently “lost” the multi-cellularity their ancestors evolved.

In the big picture, nothing’s really an in-between, because everything is. Certainly we- hairless, giant-headed, crazy-breeding, bipedal chimpanzees- are in no position to call anything an in-between.

Back To The Point I Was Trying To Make But Got Distracted From By Trying To Draw A Seal

So back to the roadrunner. It often strikes people as intuitively odd that birds would ever “give up” flight. If you could fly, why wouldn’t you keep flying? Many examples- most now sadly extinct- come from islands, where birds, lacking land-based predators, no longer needed to fly, resulting in such creatures as the Dodo, Raphus cucullatus, of Mauritius. Dodos (pic left, not mine) were part of Columbidae, the same family as pigeons and doves, and presumably evolved flightless-ness after some number of their flying ancestors wound up on the island. But other examples, such as the ratites- a group which includes ostriches, emus, cassowaries and rheas- apparently evolved flightless-ness on a continental landmass*. For whatever reason, running and greater size worked out to be a better deal for them than retaining flight capability.

*Which would be… yes, that’s right, Gondwanaland! I am telling you, that place was rocking!

Side Note: A bit of a head-scratcher for me are “island ratites”, such as the kiwi and now extinct moas of New Zealand and Elephant birds of Madagascar. These are/were ratites, and so presumably evolved flightless-ness prior to the break-up of Gondwanaland. (It’s pretty certain, from both fossil and modern physiological evidence*, that ratites were already flightless before the Southern supercontinent broke up.) But you have to wonder if, having wound up on island-sized Gondwanan fragments with an absence of predators, was the Dodo-effect then also at play in their continued evolution?

*Specifically, ratites lack a keel on their sternum upon which to anchor large wing muscles. So even if somehow an ostrich or an emu was endowed with giant wings and wing-muscles, its skeleton couldn’t support them.

Ratites are impressive birds, but none of the living species in the group are anywhere near carnivorous as roadrunners. And it makes you wonder, if we do think of the roadrunner as an in-between, what exactly is it in between? On one end of the spectrum are its cuckoo-cousins, but what lies on the other end of the spectrum of possibilities for a running avian carnivore?

Just a couple million- and maybe as recently as 15,000*- years ago, a 300+ lb carnivorous flightless running bird, Titanis walleri, roamed North America (drawing right, not mine). At 8’ tall, this was a top of the line carnivore- no coyote was chasing him around on rocket roller-skates. And T. Walleri wasn’t the first time a bird of that form and scale appeared. ~50 million years earlier, several Diatryma species (genus = Gastornis), at 6’ tall, appears to have led a similar lifestyle.

*How recently it became extinct is debatable.

Side Note: I mentioned both these birds back last January during Bird Feeder Week. (Man, was that a great week or what?)

So we know that 6’+ flightless avian carnivores evolved at least twice in North America. Though not at all closely-related to either of these prehistoric horrors, G. californianius is, to the best of my knowledge, the modern day North American bird closest in form and lifestyle to them. Makes you think twice about that cute little fella in the cartoon. Now maybe I know why I was rooting for the coyote.

Weekend Cleanup Part 2: All About Yellowjackets

Note: Yes I’m late. I said I’d get this post up Wednesday. Then I said over the long weekend. But I didn’t get it up till now. Here’s the deal:

1) The post required some research. Seriously, all my posts do. It’s not like I just throw this crap together*, you know…

*Expect for my “filler” posts, which are wonderfully research-free and totally stream-of-consciousness**.

**Kind of like this note.

2) No one reads blogs over the weekend anyway. Why waste a great post like this- oh, and yes it’s great alright*- on a weekend?

*Especially my new Expand-O-Graphic. Man it is so awesome you are totally going to pee your pants when you see it!

3) OK the real reason. I blew off everything this past long weekend. We (Watcher-Family-Unit) went down to St. George for the holiday. And I just wanted to hang out with AW and the Trifecta. And it was great.

The Post Already

Like every North American suburban homeowner, I’ve had my run-ins with Yellowjackets, including many summer outdoor meals that were scuttled due to their persistent interference. And like so many homeowners, we turned to traps. When I spotted the 2 dead yellowjackets on the garage windowsill (pic left) I belatedly remembered that our 2 traps from the summer were still hanging in the back yard, and given that it was almost Thanksgiving, I really ought to clean them out.

Tangent: You’re not a real man until you can regularly kill yellowjackets with your bare hand. It’s not as hard as it sounds. They just have to land on a hard surface for a second so you can swat them. They key is not to crush them, but just lightly stun them so they fall to the ground where you can follow up with a vigorous stomp*. Remember- the stinger always points down, so if you hit it quick from the back it can’t sting you.

*If it falls to soft earth you may have to augment your stomp with a thorough and heartfelt back-and-forth grind. Obviously this doesn’t work if you’re barefooted.

All About Yellowjackets

But first, what is a yellowjacket?

Yellowjackets are one of about a dozen different wasp species belonging to the genus Vespula. Oh wait, I guess I should first explain what a wasp is…

OK, a wasp is a type of hymenopteran. Hymenoptera is a huge and very successful order of insects that includes lots of things we’ve blogged about including ants, bees and tarantula hawks. There are thousands and thousands of species, generally sharing many anatomical features including well-developed mandibles, ovipositors, apposition compound eyes* and 2 pairs of wings which lock together via a set of specialized bristles, called hamuli.

*Which I explained in this post. And actually I should put in a qualifier; I know all Apocrita (Ants, Bees, Wasps) have apposition compound eyes, but was unable to confirm that Symphata (sawflies, horntails) also do in time for this post.

Probably the 2 most interesting things about hymenopterans are this: First, sex is determined by number of chromosomes, as described more fully in this post. Females are chromosomally diploid, with 2 sets of chromosomes, one from her mother, one from her father, just like us. But males are chromosomally haploid, with just a single set of chromosomes, which they get from their mother. Hymenopteran males have no fathers.

Second, the order Hymenoptera includes- with one notable exception*- all of the world’s social** insects- namely ants, bees and wasps. However, not all hymenopterans are social; many that we’ve looked at- like tarantula hawks and orchard mason bees- are solitary. Hymenopterans have been around since the Triassic period, but social Hymenopterans didn’t appear till the Cretaceous.

*Termites.

**The term entomologists seem to usually use now is “eusocial.” The “eu” part means “good” and it’s meant to describe specifically social living for a common reproductive system, as in a beehive with a queen, etc.

Hymenoptera is divided into 2 sub-orders. The first, Symphyta, includes stuff like Sawflies and Horntails and a bunch of things we’ve never covered but maybe I’ll get around to someday. These guys are thought to be the more “primitive” hymenopterans, closer to the ancestral form.

The second, Apocrita, includes ants, bees and wasps- all the social hymenopterans- and is characterized by the classic “wasp-waist”, or petiole.

A wasp is any species of Aprocrita that is not a bee or an ant. But that doesn’t mean that all wasps are more closely-related to each other than a given wasp is to bees or ants. In other words, “wasps” per se are not a monophyletic group*. Below is one of my Very Crude Phylogeny-Graphics to help you understand how all these wasp/bee/ant critters are related.

*I explained what a monophyletic group is in this post.

Like all my Phylogeny-Graphics it looks kind of complicated and dull, but as you go through the rest of the post you can bounce back up whenever you get lost to remind yourself of what’s what. Got it?

Tangent: “WASP” is of course also an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which I heard used often when I was growing up, but probably haven’t heard more than once or twice during the last decade. Maybe it’s a regional thing. Or maybe- hopefully- people just don’t care about that stuff as much anymore.

Nested Tangent: My father’s side of the family are WASPs. Once in the late 1980’s my sister- let’s call her Elizabeth- and I were having dinner with a slightly-older paternal-side female cousin. The cousin was bemoaning her single status and how hard it was to “find a nice guy.” We asked what kind of guy she was hoping to meet, whereupon she answered- completely seriously, “Oh, he doesn’t have to be perfect… just, you know, white, Ivy League-educated, Anglo-Saxon, Episcopalian…”*

*Yes, she really said that. To my sister and me (who were neither Anglo-Saxon nor even Protestant.) And yes, she’s still single.

Anyway, the guy who cooked up the acronym was a University of Pennsylvania Professor named E. Digby Baltzell, who was widely regarded as some big-shot intellectual for his book The Protestant Establishment. My senior year at Penn I took his sociology class as an elective.* Digby had a (rather odd) policy that if you got an A on his first exam you didn’t have to take any more exams, and what’s more, he took you to lunch at the faculty club.

*Because I was a EE major about to start job-hunting and desperately needed to boost my GPA, and yes, Soc classes are easy…

Appealing as this policy did to my innate sense of laziness, I studied my ass off and aced the exam. Digby took several of us to lunch, which I remember being rather boring, the talk focusing mostly on collegiate sports. I mentally checked out, smiled and ate eggs benedict.

OK so yeah anyway yellowjackets are a small genus of wasps. There are about a dozen different species, strung mainly across the Northern hemisphere, but also introduced to places like Australia and New Zealand. And on the surface of things, they’re sort of like bees. They have queens and drones and workers with stingers and live in hives. But where bees run around collecting nectar* and pollen to make honey, yellowjackets are hunters, targeting caterpillars, flies, spiders and hemipterans (like box elder bugs.) Basically they’re carnivorous bees.

*Yellowjackets and many other wasps will also visit flowers for nectar, but just to consume directly; they don’t make honey.

And they’re adaptable and willing to try and/or raid new food sources. They’ll often try to invade bee hives and steal honey*. A large, healthy hive can usually fight them off, but if the hive is weakened by illness or Colony Collapse Disorder, they can be overrun.

*Lest you feel too sorry for the poor bees, you should know that bees of different hives also raid each other for honey.

From our standpoint, this adaptability has a downside: many yellowjacket species* are persistent and aggressive scavengers, frequenting cook-outs, picnics and garbage cans with annoying predictability.

*Primarily the V. vulgaris group, highlighted in the Phylogeny-Graphic above

Oh, and there’s another difference between yellowjackets and bees: yellowjacket stingers aren’t barbed. This makes sense an insect that hunts for a living; if her stinger got torn out on the first sting, she’d never live to eat a meal. But for us humans it means that unfortunately, yellowjackets can sting repeatedly. And they’re much likelier to sting*.

*Which makes sense, given that they get to sting more than once…

The lifecycle of yellowjackets is a bit more somber than that of bees. While bees huddle together and consume stored honey reserves to survive the winter, yellowjackets just die. The workers die, the drones die, the founding queen of the colony dies. The only yellowjackets who survive the winter are impregnated “new” queens.

Come Spring, the pregnant new queen emerges and seeks out a nest site, where she starts to construct a nest out of paper that she creates out of chewed plant matter mixed with saliva. She lays eggs in the nest, and when larvae hatch, feeds them with food- hunted or scavenged- which she brings back to the nest.

The first generation are all workers. Yellowjacket queens and workers are similar in form, though the queens are about 30% - 50% larger, and have slightly different abdominal markings, as we’ll see in a moment. After Generation One is raised, they take over the nest-provisioning and young-rearing duties from the queen, who then focuses her efforts on laying eggs. More generations of workers are produced, but as the summer progresses, the queen switches to laying eggs for reproductives- drones and queens. In some species the switch is dramatic and complete, while in others it’s more of a gradual mix and changeover. Later in the summer the reproductives go out on mating flights, and as Fall settles in the newly-impregnated queens hunker down for the winter and the cycle starts anew. Every winter is the end of the world for a yellowjacket colony.

Interestingly there’s some evidence that food preference changes throughout the summer. Early on, when workers are being reared, yellowjackets seem to prefer fresher food, and meat. Later in the summer they seem partial to decomposing food. (So it may well be that they’ll raid your cookouts more often in the early summer, and garbage cans later on.)

Our trap had probably ~40 yellowjackets inside. Curious as I was to make a species ID, I opened the trap and spilled the contents out onto a large plate.

The most common yellowjacket in the Western US is the Western Yellowjacket, Vespula pensylvanica. It’s an aggressive, annoying scavenger, and loves human garbage. Another garbage-loving yellowjacket, common to both North America and Europe, is the Common Yellowjacket, V. vulgaris. I expected that our trap would contain one or both of these 2 species, or possibly the Forest Yellowjacket, V. acadica, which is also common in the Western US, but only hunts live prey, and so isn’t much of a nuisance.

Side Note: in the Eastern US the Common Yellowjacket is still common as are a couple of other species, including the Eastern Yellowjacket, V. maculifrons, and the German Yellowjacket, V. germanica, which is native to the old world but has been introduced to t he US. Both are pest/scavenger species, and interestingly, the German Yellowjacket seems to be in the process of displacing the Eastern.

So how do you tell different yellowjacket species apart, anyhow? By the markings on their abdomens. Each species has distinctive black-on-yellow marking patterns for its queens, drones and workers. Here are examples I pulled from this extremely helpful Canadian site.*

*I love Canada.

But when I examined the yellowjackets in the trap, I failed to make a match. So I uploaded a shot to my friends over at bugguide.net and had an ID within 20 minutes.* And it turns out that my yellowjackets weren’t quite so ordinary after all. They were Prairie Yellowjackets, V. atropilosa, a species native to the US, but which- according to the good folks at bugguide.net- shows up much less frequently in traps. Prairie Yellowjackets often nest near yards and golf courses**.

*Those guys are awesome. I love that site.

**We live 2 blocks from one.

Their nests are small, with a maximum of ~500 workers, or only about 10-20% the size of a Common or Western Yellowjacket nest.

Most important to humans though, V. atropilosa hunts only live prey; it’s not supposed to be a scavenger, and generally doesn’t bother humans. This last bit is a bit of a head-scratcher for me; we were absolutely hassled during outside meals this past summer, but of the ½ dozen or so carcasses I checked from the trap, all were V. atropilosa. Hmm…

Side Note: None of these species however was what I was really hoping to find. No, what I really wanted was to find a Cuckoo Yellowjacket, V. asutriaca. If I had, it would’ve been a queen (or a drone) because there are no V. austriaca workers.

Cuckoo YellowJackets are social parasites. The queens invade the nests of other species- most commonly Forest Yellowjackets- and systematically hunt down and kill any queens. They then take over the colony, directing the workers, who then (unknowingly?) rear the Cuckoo Queen’s eggs, which are all queens and drones, and which eventually take flight to mate, then seek out, invade and subvert other Yellowjacket nests. It’s like something out of a sci-fi horror flick!

The "take-over", specifically the killing of the resident queens, is followed by a period of apparently aggressive bullying behavior by the new austriaca queen, including forced trophallaxis. Trophallaxis, common to most (All?) social hymenopterans is an exchange of regurgitated foodstuffs. With yellowjackets it commonly occurs between adults, who regurgitate pre-chewed meat, and larvae, who secrete a sugary substance in return. It's thought that the new queen asserts control through some combination of force, threat and pheromones.

Nested Side Note: The need for such "bullying" makes me wonder a) how thoroughly the workers are "fooled", if at all, by the queen-switch, and b) are workers always bullied- in “normal”, non-parasitized colonies- to some extent into compliance? Meaning, we sort of assume that workers in wasp, bee and ant colonies do what they do because they "want*" to do it, but is that the case, or are they actively bullied/threatened into doing what they do?

*When I say "want" here, I'm not suggesting that a wasp or bee sits there and thinks about it; I mean that the wasp or bee naturally does the thing, without prompting, force, threat or direction.

This socially parasitic takeover schtick BTW, is not unique. There are other (non-yellowjacket) wasps and a number of ant species that are socially parasitic as well.

So the contents of my trap turned out a bit more interesting than I’d expected. But my thoughts returned to the garage, and the 2 dead yellowjackets that had started this whole little project. Clearly they were different from the Prairie Yellowjackets, but I was unable to make an ID. Again I turned to bugguide.net and again I quickly had my answer.

It turns out I couldn’t make the ID because- after all this- they’re not yellowjackets. They’re Paper Wasps, specifically Polistes dominula, the European Paper Wasp.

Paper wasps, like yellowjackets (who are sometimes lumped in with them) construct paper nests out of chewed up plant matter mixed with saliva. But a true paper wasp nest always conforms to a specific design with open combs and a small stalk, called the petiole (no, not a typo; it’s the same word as for the “waist” connecting the hymenopteran thorax and abdomen.) They usually build nests above ground, in places like eaves. Yellowjackets more often build below ground, or in rotting stumps, logs, compost heaps, etc. A yellowjacket nest usually has a single or few openings; a paper wasp nest*, with its open cells, has many openings.

*The nest in these pics was also a result of weekend cleanup- located inside the hollow base of the patio-table umbrella.

Native paper wasps don’t look too much like yellowjackets; the coloration is different, and the rear legs hang down while in flight. But the P. dominula does look like a yellowjacket, with its black-on-yellow abdomen. The giveaway is the antennae: Euro-Paper Wasp’s are orange, yellowjacket’s are black. In general paper wasps are far less aggressive than yellowjackets, with one exception. That’s right- the European Paper Wasp.

Probably the most interesting thing about the Euro-Paper Wasp is that it is common and widespread clear across the US, yet didn’t exist here when I was born. It’s not clear exactly when it was introduced- sometime between 1968 and 1981 for sure. The likeliest scenario appears to have been two separate introductions: the first in the late 1960’s in New Jersey, and the second in the late 1970’s, probably in or around Cambridge or Somerville Massachusetts. Think about that second introduction for a second: There’s a 50/50 chance that the 2 Euro-Paper Wasps I found in the garage last weekend were the ~30X great-grandchildren of a queen introduced to North America when I was 13 or 14 years old, within 10 miles of where I was at the time*. Wow.

*Awesome Wife would’ve been about 7 at the time of the New Jersey introduction, living in- that’s right- New Jersey. It’s like these things tracked us down across the continent.

Long before P. dominula showed up, there were nearly 2 dozen native species of paper wasp in North America, the most common of which is Polistes fuscatus (pic right, not mine). P. dominula, in the course of its rapid expansion, appears to be displacing and replacing the far less aggressive native species, so keep an eye out for it; it may not be around for your grandchildren.

So. All those cool bugs and stories in just a couple hours of weekend “clean-up” work. We were down in St. George this weekend, and had a wonderful time, but part of me couldn’t wait to get back home. Back to my garage.

Note: Special thanks for “Vespula vulgaris”* over at bugguide.net for the V. atropilosa and P. dominula IDs. I’m always extremely grateful for the effort and consideration shown by topical specialists who take the time to help out motivated laypersons.

*His handle. Don’t know his real name. Why am I saying “his”? Don’t know that either. Only he comments like a man. Specifically, he said, “Nah” in a comment. Only guys say “Nah”, right? OK, starting tangent in footnote to thank-you-note. Must stop now.

Weekend Clean-Up Part1: The Garage

This past weekend wasn’t that exciting. I cleaned the garage.

Well, actually, seeing as Awesome Wife sometimes reads this blog, I better stick a little closer to the truth: I cleaned part of the garage. OK, OK, I organized part of the garage. Really it wasn’t all that much of a cleaning. I just wanted to move stuff around so that when the snow finally hits I can access the snow-blower.

Tangent: I think some psychology student should do his or her dissertation on what’s in people’s garages, and what it says about them. Better yet, I think they should come up with new branch of psychology- called Garage Psychology- whereby a certified Garage Psychologist would come to your house, check out what’s in your garage, and diagnose you accordingly. He’d open the door, look around, check out the junk and clutter in your garage and be like, “Yeah, OK. 4 mountain bikes, 3 broken rakes, 10 pairs of skis, a case of Rock Star and a disassembled Volkswagen Carmengia*; you’re an OCD-agoraphobe, with an oedipal complex and dependency issues.” And then he’d prescribe something or have you committed or whatever.

*OK that’s not actually in my garage. But all the other stuff is.

What’s fascinating to me about garages is that no matter how big they are, they always fill up. I’ve had 3 houses in Utah. My first house had no garage. And you know what? Life was just fine. Yes, I had to brush/scrape snow/ice off the car and that was annoying, but it wasn’t really a big deal. My second house had a 1-car garage, and that was fine too. My current house has a 3-car garage, and it’s bigger than pretty much any of the apartments I lived in before owning houses. Seriously, if you had a time machine and you went back to 1989 and brought me back and put me in my present-day garage, I would be like, “Awesome!” I’d set up a cot, live in it, throw parties* and be totally happy. But in the real world, in just 7 years I’ve managed to completely fill it up with crap.

*I threw way better parties in 1989 than I do today.

Nested Tangent: I started to write about countless examples of crap before I caught myself and decided to share just one example. In my garage is a pair of skis- Volkl Snowrangers- that are completely, 100% beat-to-crap. The p-tex has actually been torn off the base in chunks in several spots. But I keep them because one day I “plan” to strip off all the p-tex down to the base metal underneath and make “sand skis” out of them. Sand skis. I’ve skied sand dunes once, 6+ years ago, thought it was kind of lame, have no plans to do so again, live several hours from the nearest decent dunes anyway, but still keep the skis. My garage is like a cry for help.

So anyway, I spent most of the weekend “cleaning” the garage, which might not sound like a very exciting weekend, but it turned out- surprisingly- to actually be really interesting, albeit in a creepy-crawly bug-geek kind of way.

Tangent: OK, not even that part’s true. It was like just 2 hours on Saturday afternoon. And I actually got a bunch of good biking in, both days, road and mountain.

Sunday OCRick took Vicente and me on a new trail he found just below the BMX park above City Creek near Shoreline trail.(Pic right. 2 things about this pic, BTW: 1- if you click on it you will note that my beard still looks awesome, and in this context it does so in an I’m All Grown Up And Know What I’m Doing kind of way, and 2- it’s the last photo in this post that is not absolutely packed with close-up creepy-crawly shots, so if that’s not your thing, quit while you’re ahead.) It was one of these wonderful but frustrating trails through a tight, eroded high-walled gully that’s super-cool, but only for like 60 feet, and then it’s over. Doesn’t that drive you crazy?

Cleaning the garage means moving stuff around, and specifically moving stuff that hasn’t been moved in a long time. And when you do that, you find bugs. Dead bugs. The most common dead bugs in my garage are these things- Woodlice, also called Pill Bugs or Sowbugs. Woodlice aren’t lice, or anything like them. They’re not “bugs” or even insects, and they’re not arachnids either. They’re crustaceans, like lobsters or crayfish. The majority of the world’s crustaceans are aquatic, but woodlice have done quite well on land, with hundreds of species worldwide.

One of the most interesting things about woodlice is that they never seem to have quite adapted to land in the way insects and arachnids have. Their exoskeletons lack a waxy cuticle, and so are not water-tight. Woodlice need to stay moist, which they do by seeking out damp conditions and avoiding direct sunlight. They drink water directly and also absorb it through their 2 rear, tiny, tail-like appendages, called uropods. Female woodlice carry their eggs around in a little marsupial-like pouch between 2 exoskeletal plates on their undersides, called- appropriately enough- the marsupium. She keeps the marsupium water-filled and the eggs moist until hatching, when the young woodlice scuttle out and away. And they don’t breathe via trachea- like insects- or book-lungs- like spiders, but through modified gills, called pseudotrachea, which need to be kept wet.

I didn’t make a species ID on our garage woodlice, but my likeliest suspect is the Common Pill Woodlouse, Armadillidium vulgare. Woodlice that can roll up into a defensive sphere (“rolly-poly bugs”) belong to the family Armadillidiidae, and A. vulgare is one of one of the most widespread species in the family, tolerating both drier and colder conditions than most other woodlice. It’s native to Europe, but is now common in North America.

But then again- as we’ll see in a moment- I may be completely wrong.

The important thing about finding dead woodlice in your garage is this: there are spiders about. Spiders chow on woodlice, leaving the sucked-out exoskeletons behind. In fact the last time we visited woodlice, it was a year and a half ago, when I was chasing down that Black Widow in the garage. So if you’re moving stuff around and come across a bunch of dead woodlice and maybe a cobweb or two, you need to start watching where you put your hands.

Side Note: The coolest thing about that Black Widow post was that Black Widow venom contains 7 separate neurotoxins, one of which is specifically targeted for crustaceans.

And as I moved other boxes around, I found more dead bugs. I found several millipedes, which, like woodlice, aren’t insects or arachnids either, but something altogether different. There are somewhere around 10,000 species of millipedes in the world. Some are quite large, growing to several inches in length. The ones in my garage are tiny, maybe 1” long. Millipedes BTW never have 1,000 feet; most species have between 30 and 400, and the record-holder is around 750.

Legs are generally 2 pair/body segment*, in contrast to centipedes, who have one pair/segment. Also in contrast to centipedes, which are generally predatory, millipedes are usually detritivores, consuming primarily dead organic matter. The first known land animal BTW was a millipede that lived 428 million years ago**.

*I learned this back in the Spring from Ted over at Beetles In The Bush. Thanks Ted!

**That would be during the Silurian period, which came about following the Ordovician period, possibly- as we saw during AstroWeek- as a result of a nearby supernova. Isn’t it cool how all this stuff just keeps tying together?

OK, so here’s the confusing thing about millipedes. 2 orders of millipedes, called the Pill Millipedes (superorder = Oniscomorpha) have evolved a way different body form, with fewer body segments (11 to 13) and corresponding leg-pairs, a broader, flatter profile, and the ability to roll up into a ball when threatened. That’s right- they’ve evolved- completely independently- into “rolly-poly bugs”, that look just like woodlice, but aren’t at all closely-related! (pic left from Wikipedia) So the truth is I don’t know what I’ve got in my garage- woodlice or pill millipedes, and suspect I’ll have to explore the question further when Spring returns and the Trifecta catches me some more “rolly-poly bugs” out in the yard.

Side Note: I’m leaning toward Woodlice though, for 2 reasons. First, when I rooted out that Black Widow last year, her lair was littered with these things, and we know Black Widow venom has a crustacean-specific neurotoxin. Second, check out the layering of exoskeletal plates in the very rear and compare with the Wikipedia comparison-photo.

In addition to all these dead non-insects, I stumbled upon a fair number of dead insects as well, including this cricket (pic left), but mostly flies. I found several Green Bottle Flies, Lucilia sericata. This fly shares a largely familiar anatomy with the Common Housefly which we looked at earlier this month, and you can see several of the typical housefly features we covered in that series. Below is a view of the right haltere (flight-stabilizer).

And here’s a great shot, with both an eye close-up (check out the individual facets- is my camera awesome or what??) as well as the tarsal claws on the end of the right foreleg (her right, not yours) and the pulvillus visible in between.

Better yet, I managed to get another anatomical feature that I missed in the Housefly series: the ovipositor. In that series I mentioned how one can use the separation between the eyes in houseflies as an indicator of sex. You can also tell via the opposite end by checking out rear end. This Green Bottle is a female, and the bump on the tip of her abdomen is the ovipositor in its retracted position. A female fly’s abdomen has 9 segments, only 5 of which are normally visible. The ovipositor consists of segments 6 through 9 and is contained within segment #5, but extends like a telescope when utilized to deposit eggs.

So what about the spiders? Who’s eating all these “bugs”? I spotted a few. First I found this wolf spider, with a nice view of one of the “big eyes.” About 99% of spiders have 8 eyes, 2 of which are big, image-forming eyes (the remainder serve mainly as light/dark indicators.) Unlike insects, the eyes of spiders are not compound eyes, but “simple” lens-type eyes, more like ours structurally than those of insects.

Wolf spiders are not orb-weavers, but spin small funnel webs. They’re hunting spiders, relying on speed and camouflage. Along with jumping spiders, wolf spiders have some of the best eyes in the arachnid world, complete with telescopic components. Here’s another shot of the spider running along a guideline at the top of a window frame (below, right).

Wolf spiders are common in most homes (and harmless). There are hundreds (thousands?) of species; many of the most common belong to the genera Hogna or Pardosa, as I believe this one does.

Tangent: What is it about spiders and (some*) women? Twin B, who will happily pick up nearly any insect, is absolutely terrified of spiders- especially wolf spiders- and will immediately summon me to dispatch any she spots. Why is a spider scarier than a box elder bug or a moth or an ant or a rolly-poly-bug?

*Yes, yes, this tangent's all sexist and all. Fine, go ahead, let me have it- I'm the Bobby Riggs of amateur entomology. But you know it's true. So many women are freaked out by spiders- why? (And besides, I said "some"...)

But wolf spiders don’t spin real big webs, like those in the nooks and crannies in my garage. So I poked around a bit (with help of KanyonKris’ Miracle Light) and found a likelier suspect: The Triangulate Cobweb Spider, Steatoda triangulosa.

Steatoda is a worldwide genus of about 120 species. S. triangulosa is believed to be native to the Old World but was introduced to North America early on in European colonization and is now widespread throughout the US. They love garages and basements, and prey upon woodlice and ants and ticks and millipedes and flies and all sorts of other arthropods, including… other spiders, which we’ll come back to in just a moment.

In form these guys sometimes appear similar to “widow”-type spiders, but they’re a whole different deal. Their bite isn’t dangerous to humans, and apparently they practically never do bite us anyhow. But even better, they hunt other spiders, including the dreaded Brown Recluse, Loxosceles recluse, and Hobo Spiders, Tegenaria agresti, which also show up in your garage and whose bites can be both painful and medically significant. S. triangulosa is in particular both a habitat competitor and a predator of hobo spiders, and in area where it occurs appears to play a significant role in reducing T. agresti populations*. So check out this guy and remember it: this spider should absolutely be on your do-not-kill list when you encounter it in the garage.

*2 other Steadota spiders are even more significant hobo spider predators: the Western Bud Spider, S. hespera, which looks like a small brown black widow, and S. grossa, the “False Black Widow”.

Thinking about this assortment of “bugs”, 2 things jump out at me. First, insects, arachnids, crustaceans and myriapods are all represented. None of these things has a shared a common ancestor in over half a billion years- nearly twice as long as the time since we and magpies shared our last common ancestor- and yet here they all are in my garage. Isn’t that wild? And at least 2 of them- the Woodlouse and the Cobweb Spider- aren’t even native to North America. It’s like my garage is this little arthropod United Nations! “Cleaning up” turned out not to be quite so dull after all…

There were a bunch of other dead bugs in the garage, including these 2 yellowjackets (pic left). Which reminded me- it was probably time to clean out and put away the yellowjacket traps out back.

Next Up: Yellowjackets = Bees Gone Bad

Note: Special thanks to Andrew Williams over at bugguide.net for the S. triangulosa ID. I love that site.

Monday Filler: KanyonKris’ Miracle Light

I have a cool post brewing, but it’s not quite ready yet.* But I’ve got good filler.

*Wanted to check a couple bug ID’s over on bugguide.net. Those guys are awesome.

I think one thing every blogger struggles with is whether and how much to evangelize. It sure is tempting sometimes to just go off about something you feel strongly about, whether it’s religion, gun control, abortion, wilderness protection, healthcare reform or Sarah Palin. But really, if you start evangelizing all the time, you’re just another middle-aged white guy spouting off on the Internet. That’s right- you’re Glenn Beck, without a, uh, TV program. So I think that in general it’s important not to evangelize on your blog. Or, if you really can’t help yourself, pick one topic that you’re going to evangelize about and come back to it every now and again, but just don’t do it every post.

Tangent: Oh man, know what? I’m going to break my own rule right now. I’m going to blog about Sarah Palin.

People have all kinds of reasons for being appalled by the idea of Sarah Palin running for president. So do I, but it’s not the same reason you’re appalled. No, I’m appalled because Sarah Palin is exactly the same age as me, and every time I see her speak I am reminded of my High School Girlfriend (HSG).

My HSG was a great girl. And on the surface it may not seem to make sense that I’d associate her in any way with Palin, because my HSG was kind, fairly liberal, didn’t wear glasses, thought you should help out poor people, and had a thorough understanding of how birth control worked. But there was a moment we had one night that somehow I am reminded of whenever I think of Palin.

It was the summer of 1982 and we were driving home to Boston from my parents’ cabin in Maine, where we had spent the day… well that’s not important. Anyway, we were driving South on I-95 through New Hampshire, and it was a beautiful night with a full moon, and there were a few clouds in the sky as well, and we were just driving along, not talking much, when HSG said, “Alex, which is higher, the moon or the clouds?” And I knew right then, that wonderful and kind as HSG was, that this was not going to be a Long Term Thing, and indeed it turned out not to be.

I don’t know why, but whenever I see Palin on TV, I am instantly transported back to that moment on I-95 in New Hampshire. I just hope it doesn’t turn out to be a Long Term Thing.

OK, that’s good advice, and you should do it, because I don’t. Here at WTWWU I actually have 2 evangelical causes. One is high-minded and noble and altruistic, while the other is self-indulgent and juvenile. The high-minded/altruistic cause is of course the whole theme of this blog, which, if you haven’t figured it out by now*, is this: pay attention to the natural world around you. It’s full of wonder and amazement and absolutely incredible stories behind everything little thing, and once you start paying attention to it and understanding it and realizing how you’re connected to it and really seeing it, then well everything just changes, including you, in a really great way, that you couldn’t ever have understood if you hadn’t started paying attention to it.

*Really? You haven’t figured it out by now? This is post #285. How much longer do I have to keep at this before you get it already?

The self-indulgent and juvenile evangelical cause is this: Go night-riding. No, it won’t change your life like watching the world wake up will, but it sure will add some zing to it, as I have blogged about previously.

Mtn bikers are always making excuses for not night-riding. Most of them- cold, time, etc, - are totally lame. But there is one pretty good reason: light. A decent mountain bike light set-up costs a few hundred dollars, and represents a pretty big commitment. What if you don’t like it? What if you spend a bunch of money and never use the lights again? That’s a valid concern. Until now.

Well over a year ago KanyonKris did a post called Mountain Bike Lights for under $65. He mentioned it to me a couple of times, but seeing as I already had a fairly high-end HID light, I didn’t think much about it*. I just kept riding with my bar-mounted HID light and my rather clunky-but-effective TurboCat S-15 mounted on my helmet.

*Actually that’s not true. I did think about it. Specifically I thought, “$65? Gotta be a piece of crap. I’m serious about night-riding and I like to go fast. I’m not bothering with it.”

But then last month in Fruita, when the rain finally let up and we wheeled out for our night-ride, Vicente turned on his new light. And we all stopped and checked it out. It was bright, it was strong, and it was from Hong Kong. It was the TrustFire TR-801 from DealExtreme, spec’d from KanyonKris’ post. Since then I’ve bought 2, Hunky Neighbor’s bought 2, and SkiBikeJunkie is about to order. I received mine last week and have been thrilled. First, because of the light. Check it out.

Here’s my existing lighting system, the NiteRider Firestorm HID, It’s plenty bright, runs for 4 hours. The battery pack is about ~1lb, and the light itself is a titch heavy/bulky; it’s a much better bar light than helmet-light.

Now here’s KanyonKris’ Miracle Light, the TR-801. It’s a spot, not a flood, but the illumination within the spot is at least as strong as the HID.

Together, the spot and flood complement each other nicely. Coming from slightly different angles (bar vs. helmet) the 2 lights act to mitigate harsh shadows and provide a more 3-dimensional view of the trail ahead.

So the light’s great. But the second great thing is the weight and size. Here it is mounted on my helmet. The weight is negligible, and it runs for >2 hours on a single lithium battery. (The batteries, which are about 30-40% bigger than AAs, are small enough to pop a spare in your pocket for longer rides.) And the third great thing is no chord. No external battery pack, no tricky routing, no removing your helmet to add/remove a layer of clothing, etc.

But best of all, it’s cheap. $65 for 2, or just $37 for 1 plus charger and batteries. There goes your last excuse not to night-ride. And now’s a good a time as any to mention that these lights are great for non-cyclists as well. If you’re into night-hiking or wildlife spotting, this little light is fantastic.

As longtime readers know, I like to whine about the future, and how lame it turned out- no flying cars, no robot friends, no moon-base- just a bunch of guys looking up directions on their iPhones... But lighting is a notable exception. In just 15 years cycling lighting systems have gone from old-style flashlights to halogen to HID to the new generation of super-LEDs. The change is absolutely amazing.

Tangent: 2 other exceptions for me are fuel injection and radial tires. Does anyone remember carburetors? And flat tires are rare enough these days that when we do get one, we have to dig out the owner’s manual to remember where the jack is…

Anyway, I can’t say enough how thrilled I am with this light. Do yourself a favor and put it on your Christmas list. But order early- shipping from Hong Kong takes ~ 2 weeks.

Thanks KanyonKris!

Magpies Part 2: Alien Intelligence

When I learn and think about other creatures, the thing that interests me most is their perspective. What must it be like to see the world as a pentachromatic Pigeon sees it? Or as a Dragonfly with ~360 degree vision and a 200Hz flicker rate? Or what would it be like to “see” the world through sound, like a bat or a dolphin? Or even weirder, and harder (at least for me) to envision: what must it be like to “see” the world through smells, like your dog? Think about it. You’re probably around dogs at least once a day. But your whole life, you’ll never really understand what it’s like to see the world how a dog sees it. There’s probably no animal more familiar to most of us than a dog, and yet when it really comes down to it, their perspective is forever alien to us; we can understand and get to know and maybe even love them, but we can’t ever get inside their heads.

Tangent: In fairness, dogs could say the same of us. No matter how familiar they become with us, so much of what we do must be forever cloaked in mystery. Certainly they can never understand what most of us actually “do” all day (work), but on a more mundane level, I often wonder if they truly “get” cars. Oh sure, they understand that we all get in the car and go someplace. But do they understand that the driver’s actions control where the car goes?

Or for that matter, does it even occur to them that the driver decides where the car will take them? Or do they assume (quite logically, actually) that our relationship to the car is more like theirs: you get in, close the door and it takes you someplace- someplace you don’t decide. Then you get out and do stuff for a while before getting back in the car which then takes you home.

In my darkest moments, I wonder if this fundamental alien-ness really applies to all “selves”, whether “self” can ever, really truly communicate with “other.” Certainly politics, religion and workplace meetings are all routinely characterized by people talking past each other, and regularly failing to get inside other people’s heads and see the world from their perspective. When you really get down to it, can any of us ever really communicate with our colleagues, our friends, or even our spouse? Or are we simply engaging in a never-ending verbal and non-verbal dance of positioning, assessing and bilaterally manipulating each other, each of us ultimately alone, inside an impenetrable shell of “self”?

OK, lighten up. I don’t really think that*. And I’ll tell you why. Because the longer I live and the more I learn about people, the more I see that most people are more or less the same, with similar hopes and dream and worries. And as I’ve gotten to know about animals, I’ve come to gain a similar perspective about them. Because even though we perceive the world radically differently than horses or coyotes or chimpanzees or porcupines do, we all think. And we all think with brains that, while different in size and form, all share a basic, fundamental structure, with parts and components that do more or less the same types of things in all of us. And so while we may never “see” the world as dogs see it, I’m convinced that we know what it is like to think, to experience, many things- hope, surprise, sadness, fear, affection, satisfaction, and maybe even wonder- much as they do. And when I think about that, the world doesn’t seem quite so lonely.

*Not most of the time anyway. Usually only after elections in Utah.

But then there’s birds. The most interesting thing about Magpies isn’t their nests or tails or the color of their bills- it’s their brains.

Among birds, corvids are regarded as some of the most intelligent*. Nearly all of us have heard some smart crow or raven story- how they cleverly stole food or outwitted a dog or some such. Rather than just recite a whole list, I’ll tell you my absolute favorite:

*The other contenders, which may be even more intelligent, are large parrots and macaws.

2 New Caledonian Crows, Corvus moneduloides (pic right), were in a cage*. In the cage was a little bucket with a handle down below where the crows couldn’t reach. Also placed in the cage were 2 wires, one straight, and the other bent into a hook. The idea of course was to see whether the crows would pick up the hooked wire and use it to retrieve the bucket. This in and of itself wouldn’t be all that shocking. Several corvids have been known to use other objects as tools. Caged Blue Jays for example have been observed using folded strips of newspaper to obtain food from cracks/crevices where their bills or talons couldn’t fit.

*OK, this sounds like the set-up for a geeky ornithological joke, doesn’t it?

But what actually happened was this: One of the 2 crows- the male*- snatched the hooked wire away. Then the female bent the straight wire into a hook and used it to retrieve the little bucket. Wow.

*Of course it was the male, right?

New Caledonian Crows are the champion tool-makers of the avian world; in the wild they’ve been observed fashioning twigs and leaves into tools to extract grubs from holes and crevices. Several corvids use tools, but C. moneduloides is the only one known to make them. And perhaps even cooler, they teach other New Caledonian Crows how to fashion the same tools. The only other animals known to use tools with the same proficiency as corvids are primates.

Tangent: New Caledonian Crow. Which is endemic to- that’s right- New Caledonia. Are you kidding me? That place again? How many times do we keep winding up back there in this blog? At least 10, that’s how many! Rare trees, parasitic conifers, ratites and now genius crows, all on the fragment of an ancient supercontinent- seriously- How. Cool. Is. That. Place?

I’m not superstitious, but this project keeps leading me back there again and again and again. OK that’s it- I’m saying it right now, right here: Some way, somehow, in the next 5 years, I am getting my ass to New Caledonia. Enough is enough.

Closer to home many of our local corvids display impressive mental faculties as well. A favorite of mine is Clark’s Nutcracker, Nucifraga columbiana, which- incredibly- keeps track of the locations of up to 2,500 seed caches made over the year over a range of ~150 square miles. If I leave my keys in 1 room, my wallet in another, and my phone in a 3^rd, it is guaranteed that I will lose one of them within 15 minutes.*

*And that, once I break down and ask for help, Awesome Wife will locate the item in question in just 30 seconds.

Corvids also score well in tests of object permanence, the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight, something which takes a human a year or so to figure out*. Object permanence is measured and rated through a series of tests, in 6 stages, 6^th being the highest. Eurasian Jays (Garrulus glandarius) (pic left) have achieved stage 6, a level matched only by primates. Magpies (specifically the Eurasian Black-billed Magpie, Pica pica) have clearly achieved stage 5, and possibly stage 6. Interestingly, Magpies don’t become fully independent of their parents until reaching stage 4 or 5.

*This has been the accepted conventional wisdom since the 1950’s. More recent research has begun to question this however, suggesting that human infants display a sense of object permanence when just a few months old.

But even more interesting is the social intelligence of many corvids. Ravens, crows and magpies in particular display many advanced forms of social intelligence, including the formation of coalitions and alliances (like chimpanzees and dolphins), social learning and tactical deception. For example Ravens will typically delay caching food items until out of sight of other ravens, and will even make false caches in view of their fellows in hopes of throwing them off.

Getting back to Clark’s Nutcracker for a moment, another corvid that regularly collects and caches pine nuts is of course the Piñon Jay, Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus (pic left). While Clark’s Nutcracker is pretty much of a loner, Piñon Jays are highly social, with apparently higher social intelligence. When tested on ability to perform various tasks- opening food containers, discriminating between different colored containers- Piñon Jays learned much faster by observing other Piñon Jays, whereas Clark’s Nutcrackers benefitted little by watching other Clark’s nutcrackers perform. Similarly, Piñon Jays and Clark’s Nutcrackers both display impressive ability in re-locating their own nut caches, but Piñon Jays show much greater ability in locating the caches of other Piñon Jays. Clark’s Nutcracker is smart, but a Piñon Jay shows higher social intelligence.

Tangent: Know what Clark’s Nutcracker reminds me of? Orangutans. An advanced primate, very intelligent, with a huge neocortex- which should mean a high Dunbar number- but largely solitary. Orangutans are suspected to have evolved from more social primates, but subsequently taken up a more solitary lifestyle. Similarly Clark’s Nutcracker is thought to share a common ancestry with more social corvids, and perhaps later followed a more solitary path. There’s something both weird and strangely admirable in such a possible story- if true- for either primate or corvid: a creature that turned away from socialization, that applied its impressive mental faculties away from its fellows and toward the physical world around it.

Even further off-topic, I can’t help but notice another possible parallel: humans with Aspberger’s syndrome. Is there some common thread? Something switched off, or even cast aside? Could Aspberger’s “suffererers” be not disabled, but just going following a different mental path?

Unsurprisingly, these birds, and corvids in general, have big brains. As a rule birds have a smaller brain weight-to-body weight ratio than mammals, though a much larger ratio than reptiles, who in turn have a much larger ratio than fish. But corvids have a ratio more like that of mammals, or even specifically primates*.

*But again, large parrots and macaws may be even more impressive, with a ratio almost 2/3 as big again. It’s interesting that while corvids have thrived world-wide, parrots and macaws have remained restricted to a far narrower tropical (and neotropical) range which is now under pressure from human expansion and development. Kind of like… chimpanzees.

So great. Magpies are smart. They have big brains. So what?

One of the most interesting things about birds is that they’ve solved so many of the same problems mammals have solved- color & foveal vision, thermoregulation and sex-determination are examples we’ve looked at in this blog- in fundamentally different ways*. The evolution of intelligence is another.

*The evolution of the ear is yet another example, which I had hoped to blog about before doing this post, but I felt I’d put this one off long enough.

I’ve mentioned in passing in this blog that I used to be into science fiction when I was younger, but gradually lost interest, probably in part because I “grew up”, but also in part I suspect because I found so much of the genre formulaic and unimaginative. In particular, I was almost always disappointed by depictions of aliens, who were invariably creatures who thought more or less like us, except they were generally less fun. Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, War-Of-the Worlds Martians, Cylons, the Borg, the Visitors- they were all so dull, because they really weren’t different from us. And yet that’s what makes- or should make- the very idea of alien intelligence so darn interesting- that it would be different from us.

Tangent: The aliens of Star Trek- the original series- were particularly disappointing. The very first alien race we were introduced to were… Humorless White Guys with Pointy Ears. Really? That’s “alien?” Hell, at work I can work over to IT and see that anytime. And the Klingons*? Dark-Complected Sweaty Angry Guys with Facial Hair. You know, that’s pretty much me half-way through a bike race. And then the Romulans- still more Humorless White Guys with Pointy Ears- oh come on! Give us something else- a long nose? A third eye? Anything! I swear, you see more diversity at a Utah Republican Party convention…

*Again, in the original series, before Next Generation tarted them up with skull-ridges and such…

So here’s the thing about corvids: they’re the closest thing to intelligent aliens any of us will likely ever meet- far more alien than any of the fictional aliens listed above. Because corvids are living thinking creatures with exceptional memories, powerful tool-using capabilities and advanced social intelligence- just like primates- but with a radically-differently structured brain that evolved along a completely independent evolutionary path.

Side Note: Corvids (and many other birds), BTW, like primates, engage in social grooming. With birds it’s called allopreening. We humans no longer engage in social grooming of course*; the pop-anthropology explanation is that we now accomplish the same social bonding through chit-chat.

*With the notable exception of picking nits out of our children’s hair.

All the mammals I listed above share a common brain architecture which I touched upon in the Dunbar Number post last Spring. The top hunk of the mammalian brain is the cortex, which handles things like memory, awareness and perception. The outermost layer of the cortex is the neocortex, which is big and wrinkly in things like people, apes and dolphins, and which is associated with both higher-order intelligence in general and specifically social intelligence. I won’t repeat the whole story here; you can go check out the that post if you’re interested in the details. But the thing with birds- even smart birds like corvids, who use tools and have obvious high social intelligence- is that they have no neocortex.

Birds and mammals last shared an ancestor probably around 280 million years ago. That common ancestor almost certainly had a brain that would be characterized as “reptilian” today. You can think of a reptile’s brains as a stripped-down version of a mammal’s; it lacks a neocortex or a limbic system (hippocampus, amygdala), which is thought to be responsible for emotions beyond fear and anger. Over the ensuing 280 million years, mammals evolved these additional components, leading to the brains- and minds- we experience today.

Bird brains (diagram right, not mine) also evolved, but along a completely independent path which is reflected in their brain-structure. In birds the forebrain has developed and expanded, creating a structure called the nidopallium*, which appears to perform the same kinds of higher-order cognitive and social intelligence functions handled by the neocortex in mammals. Both neocortex and nidopallium developed out of an area called the pallium in the reptilian brains, but are constructed very differently. While the neocortex is organized in a layered structure, the avian forebrain appears more “nucleated” without any real layering**. It’s suspected- though yet unproven- that the nidopallium may contain a higher density of neurons than the mammalian neocortex, enabling greater brain activity in a more limited space.

*It used to be called the hyperstriatum, but was renamed within the last decade. You’ll still find the old name in many sources.

**An exception is a small area called the Wulst region, consisting of 3 or 4 layers, which seems to be involved in visual processing.

So the structure of bird brains is very different. Here’s one more Magpie story: In 2008, German researchers produced evidence that Magpies recognize themselves in a mirror, as shown by “mirror-induced self-directed behavior”, in this case using a mirror to reach and manipulate a mark on their bodies not visible without the mirror.

The sample size was small (5) and the success rate modest (3 out of 5) but this is more significant than you might think. Clear mirror self-recognition has been observed in chimpanzees and orangutans, but only maybe/possibly in gorillas. And even in chimpanzees, the self-recognition rate was only 75% in young adults, and lower in older and younger animals. In apes, such mirror-induced behavior has been taken as evidence of self-recognition, or a sense of self. Magpies, with their completely separate-from-us evolutionary history and their totally alien brains, appear to have independently evolved a sense of self.

That’s right- those annoying squawking birds, those “flying rats”*, with their fundamentally alien minds, are apparently self-aware, just like us. Now that’s a cool bird. (Pic right = Yellow-Billed Magpie in Yolo County, CA, taken by reader Alexis. It’s the best shot in this series- make sure to click on it. Thanks Alexis!)

*Coworker Sid’s description.

I’m not sure why, but I like that self-awareness, even intelligence, can evolve in different ways. It somehow makes the makes the world seem just a little less lonely, and hints at all sorts of crazy possibles across the big, wide universe. I’ll wrap up the post here; there’s something I want to go chat about with Awesome Wife.

Wednesday Filler: The Current Drama In My Personal Life

OK, so I meant to get the Magpie post Part 2 up this morning, but I’m not done yet, and want to catch a pre-dawn night-ride this morning, so I’m just going to post this whiny, self-centered filler post today, and then finish the Magpie post tomorrow. Honest. And it’ll be totally worth the wait because it’ll include science and philosophy and anatomy and evolution and amazing factoids and tangents about pets and Star Trek and you’ll read it and you’ll laugh and you’ll cry and it’ll be better than Cats and will Fundamentally Change Your Life*.

*Not really, but it’ll be a cool post anyway.

The Current Drama In My Personal Life

So for today’s Filler, let’s talk about me, and the Current Drama In My Personal Life.

Pretend that you came home from work one night, and you gathered your spouse and children together, And you explained to them that even though you loved them and had had a wonderful life together, you were going to leave them for another spouse and some other kids, who, while not really better people than they, had goals and likes and plans for the coming year that were a little closer to your goals and like and plans, and so you’re sorry but you’re leaving.

Man, that would suck, huh? And you’d feel really bad about it, and it would be totally appropriate that you felt really bad, because if you did that you would be a Way Big Jerk*.

*I used a worse word here initially (part of the anatomy, starting with the letter "A".) But I'm on this thing where I'm trying to to clean up the blog language because Bird Whisperer has been asking questions about the blog and I know it's just a matter of time till he reads a post...

OK, now think about how you’d feel and then lessen that by 2 orders of magnitude, so you only felt about 1% as bad. Clearly that wouldn’t be the end of the world, and you’d get over it and all, but you still probably wouldn’t feel great about it right then, would you? And maybe you'd still feel like just a teensy-weensy bit of a jerk...

That 1%-as-bad is pretty much exactly the feeling you get when you switch bike-racing teams.

That’s right, I switched teams. It wasn’t in the plans, but I got an unexpected invite last week. If it were from any other team I would’ve said thanks-but-no-thanks, but this is the one team that made me pause. I like and respect these guys; they’ve got a great Cat3 core group, one I’ve worked with and against before, including in some of the races I’ve covered in this blog, such as High Uintas Classic (Tyler2) and Tour de Park City (Perry, Josh, Legendary Courtney.)

So it would’ve been an easy switch, except that I already had a great team, with strong, loyal teammates who supported and sacrificed for me many times on the race course over the past 2 years. So this past weekend I was more or less the Hamlet of bike-racing, changing my mind at least 5 times. But late Monday, after countless emails and phone calls, I made up my mind: in 2010 I’ll be riding for Wright Medical Team Cycling. I’m excited and already motivated for another year full of training and racing.

My Spin colleagues took it well, like the gentlemen and good friends they are. Spin Cycle Racing has been a wonderful part of my life over the last 2 years, and I’m richer for it. Thanks guys.

In the bigger picture, when I step back and look at things, I know this is just life. People are always forming, changing and shifting teams, coalitions and alliances. We do it when we change jobs, when we move, and as we change and develop new goals and interests. Most other primates do, too. So do dolphins.

Know what else does? Magpies.

Magpies Part 1: The Basics

In May, 1990, my then-girlfriend and I quit our jobs, put our stuff into storage, and started driving cross-country. Over the next 3 months we wandered all over the Western US and Canada, partly vacationing, partly looking for a place to live. Finally in mid-August we parked it in Boulder, Colorado, and over the next few weeks, while she registered for business school classes at the University of Colorado, I zipped around the Boulder-Denver metro area on a couple of hundred errands associated with securing an apartment and a job.

We’d been through the area earlier in the summer, so it wasn’t entirely new to me, but as I drove around the neighborhoods and strip malls of the Front Range I kept noticing these funny black & white “crows” everywhere; growing up in New England, I’d never seen a Magpie before.

In the 2 decades since, Magpies have been around pretty much everyplace I’ve lived*. I drive, walk, run and bike past them routinely. For months in the summer, when so much is going on, I won’t really notice them, but when the cold settles in and the branches are bare and the songbirds have largely flown South or just shut up, I suddenly notice them again**, going about their business. Magpies aren’t the most beautiful or elegant or melodious or charming of the birds in my life, but they’re the most constant, some of the most common, and arguably, the most interesting. They’ve been on my “List” since day one of this project, and in some sense I think they’ve been on the “List” since before there was a list or a project, or even blogs, at all. They’ve been on the “List” since I parked it in Boulder almost 20 years ago, and it’s time to check them out.

*The notable exception was a 3 year period in the early 1990’s when I lived in Evergreen, Colorado, in a Ponderosa forest at ~8,000 feet. Magpies were replaced by another corvid up there, the Stellers Jay.

**And in fact this is the time of year when I always start re-noticing corvids again of all sorts. I mentioned last week the Stellers Jays hanging out in Mill Creek Canyon; in past autumns they’ve been common in Dry Creek. And there are dozens of Scrub Jays (pic right) right now across the street from the zoo, in the scrub oaks around the Shoreline trailhead.

All About Magpies

Magpies look like Crows because they’re closely-related to them, part of the Corvid family we keep bumping into. They’re super-common throughout the Western US, but (strangely) mostly absent from the East, and elsewhere they span the Northern hemisphere, stretching clear across Eurasia. Here in the US they have somewhat of a bad rap. They’re loud; their decidedly non-melodic squawks are harsh and make for a rough wake-up call, especially in Winter, when they often roost communally. They regularly prey upon the eggs and nestlings of other birds-especially songbirds, and they’re even rumored to peck at and enlarge open sores on the backs of livestock.

All of these things are true, but in their defense they’re dedicated spouses and parents, hard-working and industrious providers, and arguably way smarter than any of the pretty little songbirds we oo and ah about at our feeders.

Magpies are omnivorous generalists; they eat berries, seeds, nuts, carrion, small rodents, and lots and lots of insects, which comprise a larger portion of their diet- it’s believed- than they do any other corvid. And yes, they also regularly eat eggs and fledglings of other birds. But in fairness so do lots of other birds, including many we greatly admire, such as eagles and hawks, and in fact the eggs and fledglings of Magpies are regularly preyed upon in turn by hawks, owls and ravens, a factor that strongly influences the architecture of their nests as we’ll see in a moment. (And besides, most of the people I know eat plenty of mammals, so give ‘em a break already.) Unusual for birds in general, but not for carrion-eating birds, Magpies seem to have a well-developed sense of smell.

Serious Nests

Magpies live about 5 or 6 years in the wild*, and like most Corvids, are committed monogamists, mating for life**. But while pairs are closely-associated during breeding season (March-July), they’re a bit less so during the off-months. Every year, as early as January, romance seems to be rekindled and the pairs become closer again. As breeding season approaches, Magpies can often be seen flying about with twigs in their mouths, indicating that nest-building has begun. Their nests are the most impressive nests in Western suburbia, positioned in large trees 25’+ above ground, up to 4’ high and 3.5’ wide. And not only are they big- they’re roofed, with thick, protective domes covering them from above.

*Which isn’t all that long for corvids. Ravens for example can live for over 40 years in the wild, and Blue Jays up to 17.

**Although Magpies, like most corvids and in fact the majority of monogamous bird species, do “cheat” fairly frequently, engaging what biologists call “extra-pair copulations.” I blogged about this at length in last month’s Blue Jay post.

Magpies- male and female- spend 6 or 7 weeks diligently building their nests, a process which involves 5 stages. Stage 1 is the Anchor Stage, in which a clump of mud is transported up and packed into a base for the nest.

Stage 2 is the Superstructure Stage. The birds build up the base and roof of the nest, as well as the frame of the sides. But the sides are left largely open in this stage, probably for interior access during succeeding stages.

In stage 3 a mud bowl is built inside, and atop the base of, the nest.

After the bowl is built, it is then lined (stage 4) with grasses, tiny rootlets, hairs and other fine materials the birds find.

Finally (stage 5) the sides are built out and filled in, leaving only one or two small side entrances, which are small enough to keep out larger predators.

Magpie nests aren’t just some slapped-together bunch of twigs; they’re carefully architected and painstakingly crafted with a level of attention and care comparable to that of a beaver’s den.

Magpies nest just once/year, though they’ll sometimes start again if the first attempt fails. Mating usually, but not always, takes place in the nest and is pretty quick- less than a minute. Females lay (usually) 6 or 7 eggs, which they incubate for 2.5 weeks, during which time the male brings all of her food. After hatching, the nestlings start flying after about 3 or 4 weeks, and leave the nest after 2 months.

PG-13 Side Note: Male magpies, like most male birds, don’t have penises. Most birds- male and female- have a single anal-genital opening called the cloaca, used for passing waste, ejaculating semen, and laying eggs. Magpies mate by presses cloacas together, which in order to accomplish the male must get his tail under the female’s.

Tangent: Like most people, I was a bit grossed out when I first learned the details of avian anal-genital anatomy. Over time though, I’ve come to admire the engineering simplicity of their “architecture”. If you think about it, we mammals sport a rather complex anatomical array to achieve the same basic functions, a thought that’s almost certainly occurred at some point or other to every long-distance male cyclist.

You’ll sometimes hear BTW, that no birds have penises, but this isn’t true. Ducks and ostriches are 2 examples of birds that have them.

You may well have seen other impressive nests, of eagles, hawks and owls, but it’s worth noting that many of these nests were former Magpie nests, Many, many birds and even some mammals use abandoned Magpie nests for shelter.

Ravens (pic right- snapped this shot back in May in Arches NP and have been dying to use it) have been observed disassembling Magpie nests- twig by twig- to prey upon nestlings. While Magpies aren’t big enough to stand up to Ravens directly, they’ll recruit other, nearby Magpies to help mob attacking Ravens and drive them off. Magpies employ mobbing behavior not only for defense, but also “offensively.” A common tactic is to mob a larger predator such as an eagle or hawk who’s made a recent kill, in an attempt to distract it and snatch away the kill.

Side Note: In fact back in May I stumbled upon, and blogged about, just such a scene along Wasatch Blvd. My stop spooked the Magpies and allowed the Golden Eagle to escape with its kill- a snake.

Teaser For Next Post

Social cooperation, positioning, alliance-building and even deception are critical parts of the Magpie’s lifestyle and success, but we’ll get more into these aspects in Part 2, when we talk about their brains.

Different Magpies And Where They Come From

There are 2 species of Magpies in the US. Here in Utah, throughout the Intermountain West, and even up into Canada and Alaska, our species is the Black-billed Magpie, Pica Hudsonia. But if you live in or visit Central California, you’ll notice that Magpies there usually have yellow bills, and often whit-ish markings near the eyes. These are Yellow-billed Magpies, Pica nutalli. (pic right, not mine) The 2 species- like all Magpies- have a common form, with the distinctive gently-curved corvid beak and bristled-nostrils*, long tails (the longest of any corvid) and long (for a corvid, though not for birds in general) legs. The longer legs reflect the amount of time they spend foraging on the ground or hopping among branches; Magpies are capable but unexceptional flyers, and their long tails can be a liability in high winds.

*The nostrils of Piñon Jays and Clark’s Nutcracker are exceptions; they’re bristle-free, to avoid clogging with pine-pitch.

All corvid feet BTW, adhere to a common structure: independent, sturdy “tarsals” (i.e. not joined in a common body, like our feet) and strong, grasping toes. The feet are scaled on top, smooth on the bottom.

Black-billed Magpies look almost identical Eurasian Magpies, Pica pica, and for about 40 years the generally-accepted story of Magpie evolution was this: They evolved in Eastern Asia, probably somewhere around Korea, and then subsequently spread across Eurasia. A few million years ago, Magpies migrated to the Western US, via Beringia. Subsequent glacial advances narrowed and limited the range of these Magpies to the California coast and Central Valley, and they gave rise to Yellow-billed Magpies. Much more recently, Eurasian Magpies reinvaded Western North America, establishing the Black-billed Magpies we see today.

It’s a cool story, with multiple migration-waves reminiscent of the stories we’ve heard for bears and bison. Unfortunately it turned out to be totally wrong.

Probably the single most interesting thing about corvids that you never knew is this: they are apparently Australia’s most successful export. DNA evidence suggests that the original proto-crow evolved in and emigrated from Australia something like 25-30 million years ago*. Today corvids are wildly successful worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica.

*Around the same time primates appeared. Remember this: we’re coming back to it in Part 2.

Magpies, genus Pica, do indeed seem to have evolved from corvid ancestors in or around Korea, but the parallels with the “old” story end there. Korean Magpies, Pica pica sericea*, are the most distantly-related to all other Magpies and seem to have diverged earliest. Magpies from Western Europe across Siberia to Kamchatka are closely-related and a single species.

But Black-billed Magpies, despite outward appearances, are much more closely-related to Yellow-billed than to any old world Magpies, and it now appears that the 2 North American species are both descended from a common founder population of Eurasian Magpies that migrated to North America 3 or 4 million years ago via Beringia.

*In light of the recent DNA evidence, this guy will probably be reclassified from subspecies to species, P. sericea.

Side Note: This summary omits the “Magpies” of other genera, such as Cissa, Urocissa and Cyanopica, which include the various Magpie species of Southeast Asia and a few other Old World locales. These birds are more distantly-related to Pica, and appear to have evolved their “Magpie-ness”- long tail, etc.- independently, although they do appear to be more closely-related to Pica than are crows or ravens. (Pic right = Formosan Blue Magpie, Urocissa caerulea, not mine, because, uh… I’ve never been to Taiwan.)

Tangent: I hate googling for pics, because at least 1/2 the time my image search turns up really weird stuff that either a) I’d be embarrassed if Awesome Wife walked in and saw me looking at or b) an image is so weird I just know it’s going to give me freaky dreams, or c) both, as was the case here. This is the first image hit I had for “Formosan Blue Magpie.” Really? This came up first? Tell me again how Google works?

While we’re on the topic, all Jays in the New World- Piñon, Scrub, Stellers, Blue, etc.- appear to be a monophyletic family, more closely-related to each other than they are to crows, ravens or magpies.

Magpies And People

Another interesting thing about Magpies is that they seem to have adapted various ancestral behaviors to humans and human habitat. One example is what are called protective nesting associations. Magpies have long been known to nest close to- and even in the same tree as- hawks and ospreys. It’s thought that the presence of such raptors might help keep nesting areas clear of prospective nestling/egg predators, and raptors, strangely, are often tolerant of smaller birds nesting close by. (Though what they “get” in return for their tolerance I’m not clear.) Over the last century+, Magpies seemed to have transferred this behavior to human habitats, favoring nesting sites in tall trees in and around ranches and suburban neighborhoods. Humans generally keep their habitats (at least somewhat) clear of snakes, rats, raccoons and other threats, and so the association may make our neighborhoods somewhat safer nesting sites for them.

Another example is hunting/scavenging. If you know much about ravens, you may well have heard that they often follow hunters (and maybe even gunfire) in the Fall, hoping to scavenge recent kills/entrails. It’s thought that this represents a transference of an ancient behavior of following, tracking and showing up at recent wolf-kills, and in fact there’s evidence that Ravens will call wolves to dead carcasses, so that the wolves will open the carcass, something the raven cannot achieve with its bill.

It turns out that Magpies have long had such an association with coyotes, following them and relying on them to open carcasses. And like ravens, Magpies may have transferred this association to humans- not so much in the form of hunting, but in the form of road-kill. If you’ve driven anywhere in the Western US you’ve probably seen Magpies feeding on dead deer and elk along roadsides. Without the crushing/tearing impacts of motor vehicles, Mapgies would be unable to access most of the flesh in such thick-hided dead animals.

Oh, I almost forgot about the pecking-at-sores thing. Yes, Magpies really do this, though not often. More commonly they perch on the backs of both livestock and wild ungulates, feeding on ticks. In times of food-duress however, they’ve been known to peck at, enlarges and feed upon the sores caused by such ticks. (In this, I’d again cut them some slack, as it seems to be a stress-induced behavior, maybe analogous to starving humans eating dogs and horses*.)

*I tried horse once, in France, and you know what? It was pretty good. Like steak, but leaner and somehow almost slightly sweet, kind of like buffalo. And no, I’ve never eaten dog! What do you think I am- Hannibal Lecter??

Human habitat associations appear to be expanding the range of Magpies. Ranching has made them more common in the Eastern Great Basin than they are thought to have been historically, and human farms, ranches and suburbs seem to be helping them spread Eastward across the plains.

So Magpies have a lot going on, and are certainly worth checking out. But the coolest thing about Magpies isn’t nest-building or family life or human associations or any of the things we’ve talked about in this post- it’s their brains.

Next Up: Flying monkeys and the parallel evolution of intelligence

Note: Special thanks to reader and fellow Awesome Nature Blogger KB for her kind assistance tracking down Magpie phylogenetic research.