"Predation of eggs and hatchlings is common, which is why a pair may have (math math) up to 18 young in a season if food is abundant."
This is very close to the reverse causation of Lamarck or of Intelligent Design, which we find so often in documentaries and even in the discourse of naturaliste who advocate Darwinian evolution, although it contradicts their principles.
The caracteristic of being able to have so many youngs in one season is not to compensate for predation, it is the gradual natural selection of females able to reproduce greatly, which allowed some of their offsprings to survive (the fewer offsprings of the less fertile females getting mostly eaten), which allowed this high fertility to become a trait of this species.
There is some indirect causation, but it is not as immediate (and certainly not as conscious) as the formulation leads to believe.
We seem to have a least one pair of these guys, plus two other varieties of woodpeckers. We are constantly filling holes pecked in our house. We do maintain two bird feeders plus suet hangers.
The feed from Costco with fruit is preferred and the suet goes rapidly once discovered.
Enjoyed TSAF today, Cynthia. We've got more than a few of those red-bellies hanging around here, as do we bluebirds.
Which leads me to say I hope you're prepared for any number of the latter to show up at your place demanding equal air time under the equal-time rule, the Fairness Doctrine having been declared dead by the FCC some time ago because some powerful folks thought that it was for the birds, so to speak.
Yeah, we usually have a couple of families near at hand through the summer and one hanging around over the winter. They love the birdbath my wife keeps out in front of the porch, and "bath time" can be pretty entertaining when a whole family shows up for it at once, which happens pretty regularly in the heat of late summer.
Katie was able to convince me to get new windows for the home due to woodpeckers. Our home was built in 1969 and probably had the original windows they were drafty, yes, but paid for.
Two thanksgivings ago a woodpecker began drumming on our front picture window. He had packed a good size hole in the wood, I assume he couldn’t get into the house, but Katie was scared so we called the window company. That year and the following year I had all the windows in the house replaced. I can’t remember if he was pilated or pixelated, but he was big. He sometimes would pack at his reflection in the window. Carly Simon was right about him.
So now the house isn’t drafty. And once we took away his drum window, he left and hasn’t come back.
In our first 1860s home we bought in 77 Massachusetts, I taped plastic film over the windows. Huge improvement. Later, 3M came out with a window sealing tape that after its up, a hair dryer shrinks it tight. More expensive than my home made, but 3M is transparent!
We have quite a few of those red bellied woodpeckers in Southern Wisconsin, and they’re one of my favorites. I’m also excited when I see a red headed woodpecker! I even go tot see a pileated woodpecker one time when I was trail riding.
One thing I came across recently, and thought you might like to cover sometime, Cynthia, is this: The recent release of eighteen Takahē birds in the Lake Whakatipu Waimāori Valley on New Zealand’s South Island holds immense significance. These large, flightless prehistoric bird species were once thought to be extinct and had not been seen roaming these alpine slopes for nearly a century. I came across it in FlipBoard, one of those news aggregators.
I have a busy morning, so don’t have much time to spend here. Going to visit a friend who is recovering from a shoulder replacement. Another artist, and this has really been impacting her painting. And, the farrier is coming later this morning. I’m praying he can help my horse. We’re still struggling with him, and I’ve been worrying a lot.
I hope everyone has a great day, and hopefully, I’ll have more time tomorrow.
Adorable. We see the red-bellied version often while country road biking. The red-headed version doesn’t seem as abundant. My favorite is the pileated version but one has to trek north to see them. You know there’s one nearby when you hear them pecking!
Apparently I didn’t get the right boxes checked when setting this to post last night. I found an option on the interface to “send to everyone” after publishing now—near as I can tell. So hopefully everyone has received the email version by now.
Thanks to Optimum for pointing out the problem to me via email.
Good morning. Cloudy in the low 40s, may get to the 50s. Yesterday the city picked up 20 bags of leaves over the past 2 weeks.
The mothership is covering the status of ranked choice voting (spoiler alert: places are having second thoughts. The Front Page headlines, “Meet Our New MAGA OVerlords”
Our city purchased these ridiculous looking vacuum leaf picker uppers. It looks like there’s a hanging tire suspended from the machine that swings back and forth while sucking up leaves. The problem is we now have to rake the leaves on the terrace awaiting for them to arrive and the piled up leaves are killing the grass. The Swiss are not happy about that! We used to rake them in the gutter.
An Only in America moment if ever there was one. Other than this personal one for me...
When I turned 65 I, like all good citizens, had to sign up for Medicare, even though I was still working full time and not yet drawing Social Security. Which meant I had to send in a payment for those Medicare premiums rather than have them deducted from a Social Security payment. Which I did for nearly a couple of more years, running a ways past my "full retirement age" (66) for SS benefits.
When I decided to start drawing SS (but still not actually retire), it looked like there would be an overlap on premium payments between what I'd be sending for the quarter in which that would occur and what I'd have deducted from my first SS deposit to my bank account for the month in which that would happen.
I discussed this with a SS rep, bringing up the fact that if there were any snafu in the Medicare / Social Security system and my sent payment wasn't enough to cover any lapse until it got straightened out that I could (and probably would be, per stated policy regarding premium payments) dropped like a hot potato from Medicare, thus ensuring in the process a giant pain in the tookus to get re-upped, likely resulting in an unacceptable period of being without medical coverage and the risk that entails. So, I suggested my sending an extra month's worth of premium, just in case. Which the rep agreed was a good idea if it weren't a financial burden for me, which it wasn't. And they assured me I'd get a refund from them for any overpayment. Which eventually I did. An therein lies the Only in America moment...
I knew to the penny how much the refund should be if no snafu occurred and everything went off on time, which turned out to be the case. A few weeks later a check arrived in the mail for my refund. It was more than just a little "short" of the amount I knew I was due.
A call to my local SS office and a brief investigation by the nice lady on the other end of the phone turned up what I had deduced as the reason for the shortfall after looking at the shortfall as a percentage of the gross amount I was due.
Although I'd paid that premium with "after tax disposable income", the powers that be had literally *taxed* my refund at the rate at which I'd signed up for federal tax withholding on my SS payments.
And those were my exact words to the nice lady on the other end of the phone when she confirmed my suspicions: Only in America!
Edit: No taxation without representation. But once represented, no problem taxing your bucks twice for good measure.
Seems he broke his nose and suffered scrapes and contusions. According to his lawsuit, he's racked up $47K in medical expenses and anticipates another $50K. For a broken nose?
I saw that item elsewhere. To be fair, it was a healthcare corporation of some sort, not the low-level employees who hit him, that billed the victim for the ambulance ride.
In some places, ambulances run by third parties charged for ambulance runs. As insurance companies added coverage, public emergency services started billing, rather than leave money on the table. The expectation is that insurance will cover it, but that means the patient is billed and is ultimately responsible. It's predatory. IMO.
We’ve got the pileated woodpecker and the red-bellied woodpecker, and I believe the downy woodpecker, too. But I have to look them up all the time, because the descriptive names are confusing. Although the red-headed woodpecker appears to have the name just about right.
Once upon a time, there were ivory-billed woodpeckers. A bro-in-law as who works for the state of Louisiana claimed to have seen one once. But he is a known prankster, and the bird is believed extinct.
I don't think there has been a confirmed sighting since 1944. The government declared them extinct and removed them from the endangered species list a few years ago.
I didn’t appreciate the relative size of ravens. They are very, very rare here in the higher elevations. When they show up, crows mob them. I’ve heard one or the other, noticeable for their croaking squawks.
Good morning, everyone. It's Envirothon day, so I need to get the youth scrambled in order to arrive early so that Brenda doesn't have a total conniption.
Gosh, I loved the driving rats article. As a child, my older sister came home from graduate school with a white rat (psychology, Case Western Reserve) and, with the originality of a child, I named it Ratty. Ratty was very sociable, liked to run on the piano keys and watched TV with us. He lived for years and even the dog tolerated him. A good rat.
The fact that "rat" is generally insulting in spite of the many instances of rats becoming pets drove me to look up the etymology. It appears that it is so old no one knows its origin, as is also the case for "cat."
The insult stems from the image of rats leaving a sinking ship according etymonlin.com.
Perhaps, kind of like people, they are often easier to get along with one on one than they are when surround by their tribe.
The driving rats article was fun! (Haven’t read the other link yet.)
Straub’s tail sounds like the response in cats when they greet friends. They come with their tails straight up, flexing near the tip, sort of like a human greeting smile. If we had tails and fur-covered faces, we’d probably do something similar.
"Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism."
The concept of "a test designed to measure rodent optimism" is delightful.
Dear CynthiaW,
"Predation of eggs and hatchlings is common, which is why a pair may have (math math) up to 18 young in a season if food is abundant."
This is very close to the reverse causation of Lamarck or of Intelligent Design, which we find so often in documentaries and even in the discourse of naturaliste who advocate Darwinian evolution, although it contradicts their principles.
The caracteristic of being able to have so many youngs in one season is not to compensate for predation, it is the gradual natural selection of females able to reproduce greatly, which allowed some of their offsprings to survive (the fewer offsprings of the less fertile females getting mostly eaten), which allowed this high fertility to become a trait of this species.
There is some indirect causation, but it is not as immediate (and certainly not as conscious) as the formulation leads to believe.
We seem to have a least one pair of these guys, plus two other varieties of woodpeckers. We are constantly filling holes pecked in our house. We do maintain two bird feeders plus suet hangers.
The feed from Costco with fruit is preferred and the suet goes rapidly once discovered.
Enjoyed TSAF today, Cynthia. We've got more than a few of those red-bellies hanging around here, as do we bluebirds.
Which leads me to say I hope you're prepared for any number of the latter to show up at your place demanding equal air time under the equal-time rule, the Fairness Doctrine having been declared dead by the FCC some time ago because some powerful folks thought that it was for the birds, so to speak.
We often have bluebirds. I saw some today near the Baptist church right up the road.
Yeah, we usually have a couple of families near at hand through the summer and one hanging around over the winter. They love the birdbath my wife keeps out in front of the porch, and "bath time" can be pretty entertaining when a whole family shows up for it at once, which happens pretty regularly in the heat of late summer.
Katie was able to convince me to get new windows for the home due to woodpeckers. Our home was built in 1969 and probably had the original windows they were drafty, yes, but paid for.
Two thanksgivings ago a woodpecker began drumming on our front picture window. He had packed a good size hole in the wood, I assume he couldn’t get into the house, but Katie was scared so we called the window company. That year and the following year I had all the windows in the house replaced. I can’t remember if he was pilated or pixelated, but he was big. He sometimes would pack at his reflection in the window. Carly Simon was right about him.
So now the house isn’t drafty. And once we took away his drum window, he left and hasn’t come back.
In our first 1860s home we bought in 77 Massachusetts, I taped plastic film over the windows. Huge improvement. Later, 3M came out with a window sealing tape that after its up, a hair dryer shrinks it tight. More expensive than my home made, but 3M is transparent!
We have quite a few of those red bellied woodpeckers in Southern Wisconsin, and they’re one of my favorites. I’m also excited when I see a red headed woodpecker! I even go tot see a pileated woodpecker one time when I was trail riding.
One thing I came across recently, and thought you might like to cover sometime, Cynthia, is this: The recent release of eighteen Takahē birds in the Lake Whakatipu Waimāori Valley on New Zealand’s South Island holds immense significance. These large, flightless prehistoric bird species were once thought to be extinct and had not been seen roaming these alpine slopes for nearly a century. I came across it in FlipBoard, one of those news aggregators.
I have a busy morning, so don’t have much time to spend here. Going to visit a friend who is recovering from a shoulder replacement. Another artist, and this has really been impacting her painting. And, the farrier is coming later this morning. I’m praying he can help my horse. We’re still struggling with him, and I’ve been worrying a lot.
I hope everyone has a great day, and hopefully, I’ll have more time tomorrow.
Cool, thanks!
You are welcome! Also, things went much better with my horse than I expected, so a big WHEW is in order.
Glad to hear it!
Me too!!
I Love the woodpeckers.
Thats a fabulous slomo video of the woodpecker coming in for his seed/grain!
Here, we have the Gila and Ladderback Woodpeckers. Seen often. Also there little cousin, the cute Cactus Wren.
47 delicious degrees
Adorable. We see the red-bellied version often while country road biking. The red-headed version doesn’t seem as abundant. My favorite is the pileated version but one has to trek north to see them. You know there’s one nearby when you hear them pecking!
Apparently I didn’t get the right boxes checked when setting this to post last night. I found an option on the interface to “send to everyone” after publishing now—near as I can tell. So hopefully everyone has received the email version by now.
Thanks to Optimum for pointing out the problem to me via email.
RE: "They will also use human-provided nest boxes."
Not really your fault if C didn't elaborate beyond this so that you'd have enough info to get the right boxes checked, is it?
Good morning. Cloudy in the low 40s, may get to the 50s. Yesterday the city picked up 20 bags of leaves over the past 2 weeks.
The mothership is covering the status of ranked choice voting (spoiler alert: places are having second thoughts. The Front Page headlines, “Meet Our New MAGA OVerlords”
I mow and mulch weekly. I have one tree left with significant leaves on it so I will probably mow two more times this year.
That would be the tree’s decision, not mine. Because I am not pushy, I try to leaf the tree alone.
Um, you may need to take a little break from commenting, Jay, since it appears you're starting to talk to yourself.
How mulch longer will that take?
😂😂😂
Our city purchased these ridiculous looking vacuum leaf picker uppers. It looks like there’s a hanging tire suspended from the machine that swings back and forth while sucking up leaves. The problem is we now have to rake the leaves on the terrace awaiting for them to arrive and the piled up leaves are killing the grass. The Swiss are not happy about that! We used to rake them in the gutter.
Ya gotta love this headline: "Oregon Cyclist Hit by Ambulance, Taken to Hospital by Same Vehicle, Then Billed for the Trip"
They billed him $1,800.
It reminds me of a George Carlin headline; off-duty policeman shot by on duty criminal.
An Only in America moment if ever there was one. Other than this personal one for me...
When I turned 65 I, like all good citizens, had to sign up for Medicare, even though I was still working full time and not yet drawing Social Security. Which meant I had to send in a payment for those Medicare premiums rather than have them deducted from a Social Security payment. Which I did for nearly a couple of more years, running a ways past my "full retirement age" (66) for SS benefits.
When I decided to start drawing SS (but still not actually retire), it looked like there would be an overlap on premium payments between what I'd be sending for the quarter in which that would occur and what I'd have deducted from my first SS deposit to my bank account for the month in which that would happen.
I discussed this with a SS rep, bringing up the fact that if there were any snafu in the Medicare / Social Security system and my sent payment wasn't enough to cover any lapse until it got straightened out that I could (and probably would be, per stated policy regarding premium payments) dropped like a hot potato from Medicare, thus ensuring in the process a giant pain in the tookus to get re-upped, likely resulting in an unacceptable period of being without medical coverage and the risk that entails. So, I suggested my sending an extra month's worth of premium, just in case. Which the rep agreed was a good idea if it weren't a financial burden for me, which it wasn't. And they assured me I'd get a refund from them for any overpayment. Which eventually I did. An therein lies the Only in America moment...
I knew to the penny how much the refund should be if no snafu occurred and everything went off on time, which turned out to be the case. A few weeks later a check arrived in the mail for my refund. It was more than just a little "short" of the amount I knew I was due.
A call to my local SS office and a brief investigation by the nice lady on the other end of the phone turned up what I had deduced as the reason for the shortfall after looking at the shortfall as a percentage of the gross amount I was due.
Although I'd paid that premium with "after tax disposable income", the powers that be had literally *taxed* my refund at the rate at which I'd signed up for federal tax withholding on my SS payments.
And those were my exact words to the nice lady on the other end of the phone when she confirmed my suspicions: Only in America!
Edit: No taxation without representation. But once represented, no problem taxing your bucks twice for good measure.
Seems he broke his nose and suffered scrapes and contusions. According to his lawsuit, he's racked up $47K in medical expenses and anticipates another $50K. For a broken nose?
It was a wonderful nose.
For that kind of dough, you should use a more expensive word. Like proboscis.
Excellent insight. Probing even.
Eye'm known for my probing insights.
Because you were a good pupil?
And given the cost in medical services to fix it, the transportation cost actually sounds quite reasonable! 😀
I predict he will get a settlement. But then, I’m nose-tradamus
You think your nose pun is funny? Well, snot.
Pretty slick one there, buddy.
I sense Phil making an appearance
A yuuuuuugnise, the best nose ever!
BC doesn’t like “cyclist hit” stories.
Me neither.
I can imagine. You probably dislike "cyclist-hit-and-charged-for-ride-to-hospital-by-ambulance-that-hit-them" stories even less.
Where are the ambulance chasing lawyers when your really need them?
Someone stole their bikes right out of the rack.
Staying safely out of the way of Oregon ambulance drivers!
I'm more scared of pedestrian chasing ambulances!
I saw that item elsewhere. To be fair, it was a healthcare corporation of some sort, not the low-level employees who hit him, that billed the victim for the ambulance ride.
Its an interesting business model.
In some places, ambulances run by third parties charged for ambulance runs. As insurance companies added coverage, public emergency services started billing, rather than leave money on the table. The expectation is that insurance will cover it, but that means the patient is billed and is ultimately responsible. It's predatory. IMO.
Our local EMS sends out an invitation every year to make a donation. If you donate, you don't get charged for ambulance transport.
It's like the old Fram Oil commercial:
"You can pay me now ... Or pay me later!
Fram oil filters, to be precise.
Volunteer fire and rescue departments are a special case. I'm more sympathetic to donations than to fee-for-service in emergencies.
I wonder if the law that mandates medical emergency departments treat all comers regardless of ability to pay, applies to ambulance service.
Especially if they hit them first. That’s predatory in a very unsettling way.
I have it on good authority that the CEO of that Oregon company begins every employee and shareholder meeting with a bowed head and "Let us prey..."
Somewhere in there lies an allegory about our politics…
Maybe something to do with political "hit pieces"? Just sayin'...
Hadn't thought of that. But, yeah.
We’ve got the pileated woodpecker and the red-bellied woodpecker, and I believe the downy woodpecker, too. But I have to look them up all the time, because the descriptive names are confusing. Although the red-headed woodpecker appears to have the name just about right.
https://abcbirds.org/blog20/woodpecker-species-united-states/
I just call them all peckerheads, they don’t seem to mind.
Would be interesting to know what they call you in bird-ese, no?
We have those too, as I have now looked them up. We also have the 3-toed woodpecker and lewis' woodpecker, whoever Lewis is...
It's named for Meriwether Lewis. There's also a Clark's Nutcracker.
Excellent, Cynthia. We have lots of woodpeckers up here, though I'm not certain which kind.
You may have red-bellied, but you wouldn't have red-cockaded. There are many kinds: pileated, hairy, downy, etc., plus sapsuckers and stuff.
Once upon a time, there were ivory-billed woodpeckers. A bro-in-law as who works for the state of Louisiana claimed to have seen one once. But he is a known prankster, and the bird is believed extinct.
None of the sightings over the last 20 years has been replicable.
I don't think there has been a confirmed sighting since 1944. The government declared them extinct and removed them from the endangered species list a few years ago.
I never get close enough to see. They are usually pretty high up.
The pileated woodpeckers are big, big birds—on the order of a crow or raven maybe. Their call sounds like a primordial trill.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Pileated_Woodpecker/id
The Cornell Lab says they are crow-sized, up to 19" high. We get some whopper crows around here. Ravens are about 27" high.
I didn’t appreciate the relative size of ravens. They are very, very rare here in the higher elevations. When they show up, crows mob them. I’ve heard one or the other, noticeable for their croaking squawks.
We have a lot of Ravens. And Crows, Hawks. Our house is at 3,000ft and its 4-5k nearby
They're found only at high altitudes here, too. I don't think I've seen one in the wild.
Woodies?
Need to ask Cynthia if there are any guthriespeckers in the world of woodiespeckers. For a friend, of course.
Yes, Incognito, Woodies. Why didn't I think of that?
Is that this woodpecker? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_IDGrKZ0Rs&t=3s
Exactly
Slow on your feet?
Give 'im a break; he was out taking care of some pretty big bills and had those on his mind, or he'd have thought of it a lot sooner.
I haven't reached beak coffee consumption yet.
Misfire.
Damn. Thought I had gotten away with that one.
Good morning, everyone. It's Envirothon day, so I need to get the youth scrambled in order to arrive early so that Brenda doesn't have a total conniption.
Good morning! Beat of luck to the youth at Envirothon!
I came up this during a period of insomnia and thought of you:
https://theconversation.com/im-a-neuroscientist-who-taught-rats-to-drive-their-joy-suggests-how-anticipating-fun-can-enrich-human-life-239029
I first read about this in Matthew Crawford's Why We Drive
https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Drive-Toward-Philosophy/dp/0062741969
(I believe they were married when she first started this work).
Gosh, I loved the driving rats article. As a child, my older sister came home from graduate school with a white rat (psychology, Case Western Reserve) and, with the originality of a child, I named it Ratty. Ratty was very sociable, liked to run on the piano keys and watched TV with us. He lived for years and even the dog tolerated him. A good rat.
Did he make noise running on the piano keys? I can see him watching TV. Thanks for sharing the memory.
The fact that "rat" is generally insulting in spite of the many instances of rats becoming pets drove me to look up the etymology. It appears that it is so old no one knows its origin, as is also the case for "cat."
The insult stems from the image of rats leaving a sinking ship according etymonlin.com.
Perhaps, kind of like people, they are often easier to get along with one on one than they are when surround by their tribe.
Also, they ate crops and destroyed stuff, and people didn't like that, long before we knew they could spread diseases.
Oh. Yeah. There's that. There were reasons they were on the ship...
I was lost in the glow of joy and little cars and happy tails...
They were in the ship to eat the supplies and cargo.
Jonah's rat-expert guest explained that contemporary captive-bred rats are extremely different from wild rats.
Hey, Rev! Nice to see you!
The driving rats article was fun! (Haven’t read the other link yet.)
Straub’s tail sounds like the response in cats when they greet friends. They come with their tails straight up, flexing near the tip, sort of like a human greeting smile. If we had tails and fur-covered faces, we’d probably do something similar.
Thanks! I need something joyful to read.
Me too! You are most welcome.
"Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism."
The concept of "a test designed to measure rodent optimism" is delightful.
But the concept of rodent optimism is pretty strange, I think. Hard to think of them as being more sure of getting the cheese than not.
I was thinking that by "optimism," she meant that they are anticipating having fun in their cars.
Cheese! I guess I just didn't look at it that way, huh? Rats!
One way to see if it works or not, would be to test the likelihood of their joining their local optimist club! 🤠
Indeed.
Morning. Speaking of which, I’ll have something scrambled, too.
Oh, that Brenda!