Quarantine entry #106 - July 5

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but at least I will be getting a haircut today. Yay! What shall we talk about?

According to the initial plan – about the barn owls, but the problem is that they’re owls – and owls may look different from each other, but the basic design is the same, the family traits are there and in the open.

…This is part of the reason as to why classifying owls upon the greater animal tree of life is tricky – yes, they are birds, but what are their closest relatives? Right now, they are part of the Afroavian clade, whatever that means, but to a layperson? One owl is as good as another, and-

-And they are not entirely wrong either, for while a barn owl may be only distant related to the short-horned, (or the long-horned – North America has both of those species), owl, but beyond that, physically, they are similar.

…Yes, physical similarity isn’t a very reliable means of establishing relationships, but it does work, plus we’re talking about the ecological aspect here and now instead: all owls, from the great snowy owl, (a relative of the eagle-owl and the great horned owl that we’ve discussed earlier), to the tiny elf owl, live the same lifestyle: they are birds of prey that can hunt at night. They can hunt during the day, in fact, the burrowing owl is actually a diurnal bird, but they hunt during the night, when the hawks, eagles and falcons – as well as most other birds – are asleep and cannot compete with them, nor escape from them as readily as they can during the day.

The other birds are aware of that, sort of, as they mob the owls during the day and otherwise harass them. Songbirds are one thing, but if we are talking about the bigger corvids – jays, crows, and ravens – then an owl may be in some serious trouble, as those bird species are both big and social, unlike the owls, who are more of loners instead.

Pause. Again, the punchline here is that birds of prey, including owls, aren’t social, but loners; the Harris’ hawk is the only exception, though it can be pointed out that some of them are known to perch in large groups, for example – the previously-mentioned long-horned owls. They are known to perch in groups of almost a dozen – that is a lot for solitary nocturnal hunters. But…

…But perching alone does not make social bonds – the long-horned owls may tolerate each other, they are actually not very confrontational, by owls’ standards especially, but otherwise, they don’t hunt together, as wolves, or even Harris’ hawks do – each bird usually has its’ own hunting spot and it doesn’t tolerate any rivals there. The size of this hunting spot/territory may vary, but it is there, period. Anything else?

…This brings us back to the issue of owls’ physical similarity to each other, period. A long-horned owl may be much closer related to a short-horned owl than to a barn owl, but in many ways the three birds are built along similar lines – they are all owls, after all. If you add other owls, the family similarity will not be any less noticeable. Why?

Because all owls are predators. They are nighttime predators. They are predators, primarily, not of other birds, but of other vertebrates…or in case of smaller species, such as the screech owl or the saw-whet, of large invertebrates instead. Unlike most of the birds, the owl prey is active at night as well – we are talking mice here, voles, rabbits & hares, etc. – and so the owls need to be extra stealthy to catch them. There usually not too much variety either, aside from the size… saving for the fish owls and the fishing owls. No, these are not synonyms: fish owls usually have tufts of hair on their heads, look rather like eagle owls, and belong to one genus, while the fishing owls belong to another, and have no tufts. All of those owl species, (there are about seven of them, I think), hunt fish, just as the osprey does, and since fish can’t hear sounds that come from air, these owls are as noisy as an osprey is.

This brings us back to co-existence: these owls hunt the same prey as the osprey does, just as the rest of the owls hunt prey items that are similar to those of other carnivorous birds, (such as small falcons). Only… not, because while hawks, kites, and especially falcons are bird specialists, owls hunt prey items from mammals, reptiles, amphibians and so on, which allows them to co-exist with their counterparts during the day…mostly. There are exceptions – for example, the eagle owls and black kites, as we have discussed earlier – but these exceptions only underline the main rule…

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #104 - July 3

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. I care for my family, I really do, but sometimes they drive me insane – actually, we all drive each other insane, and on a regular basis. It is not that we want to hurt each other – usually we do not want to, (I am being optimistic here), but more often it happens just despite our best intentions, (again, I am being optimistic here). What next?

Well, last time we talked about one of the most specialized birds of prey – the osprey. This time, we will talk about one of the most generalized of them all instead – the black kite. Why it? Because it is one of the most outspread members of the kite group in the Old World.

What characteristics define a kite, (we are talking birds here, not toys)? They are excellent flyers, but unlike the falcons, their aerial mastery is more like that of the much greater eagles and vultures – they glide and soar on the currents of air instead.

Then how is a kite different from a vulture? Aside from the obvious, of course… actually, let us start with the obvious. Both vultures and kites, (such as the black kite), eat carrion, but the vultures appear to be more adapted to it – i.e. their bald heads and necks, their more powerful physiques and bigger body sizes, and so on. Yes, just as the kites, at least some vultures can catch live prey, but they are bigger, they need a greater daily intake of food, and so they usually don’t waste energy further by killing live prey, they scavenge.

…The kites, on the other hand, are more flexible than the vultures are – usually. In North America, lives a bird called the snail kite, and it too is a kite, but a different one: it is a food specialist. The osprey eats almost only fish. The snail kite – almost only a certain type of snail, so when those snails suffer and their population falls, the same can be said for the snail kite.

To further differentiate itself from the rest of the kites, the snail kite is very much sexually dimorphic, as the males and females of this species have very different plumage colorations. As we have mentioned before, many of the carnivorous birds have bigger females and stronger males – aka the sexual dimorphism – but usually the two sexes are not colored differently as well. There are other birds of prey with this sort of thing, the northern harrier comes to mind, but we have digressed. Let us get back to the kites.

There are several other species of kites in North America, and while they do not look very similarly to the black kite of the Old World, they are master fliers as it is, and as a rule, the kites are some of the more migratory birds of prey. The snail kite is a homebody, which makes it again different from the rest of this group. There are stable populations of black kites in Africa… actually, they might be closely related birds to the typical black kite, but where were we?

Ah yes, the kites. They might be some of the most basic modern birds of prey. They do not have any derived physical that make them unusual, (but there are always exceptions, of course). They do not have any dietary preferences either, (usually) – they can eat both live prey and carrion. They are master fliers and have spread all over the globe, except for the poles and the mountains – they do not do cold so well. They are not particularly powerful or impressive, so they are able to co-exist with other carnivores, avian and otherwise, without too much conflict… though some hawks, and the European eagle-owl do attack the black kite on occasion – this is inter-species conflict, and it’s not unlike what the lions have with the other meat-eating mammals on the African plains. Sadly, here the black kite is the underdog – but that is another story.

For now, though, this is it. See you all soon!

Quarantine entry #103 - July 2

Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks… not that AoS is doing that much better. Clark Gregg’s character has died… again. This is the fourth character of his to be killed-off, (or get rid otherwise), after the actual Phil Coulson, the first LMD, and the Sarge – and this is not even a real Coulson, only another LMD version of him. For all we know, there are still a dozen or more of them stuck in the Time Bus’s stockpile, eh? Ergo, why should we care about the second LMD Coulson?

…We do not. For a while now, AoS played cute by using the same actors to act-out different characters (more or less), killing them off regularly. Consequently, audiences no longer care whether or not the actors remain on the show anymore, and by now this probably goes for the cast and crew too – AoS is in the finish line here, and its’ cast are probably jumping ship: they got recast all too often to form permanent bonds, especially real ones, and not publicity stunts. Remember when Jeff Ward (Deke) admitted that he could not stand Iain, (Fitz)? Well, right now, we got plenty of Deke, but little of Fitz on AoS’ S7 – gee, I wonder why. I also wonder just what is Deke’s role on AoS now, now that agent Sousa seems to be more of Daisy’s love interest than of May’s, but since the final AoS season is about halfway done, no one on AoS cares about this anymore either, I bet.

Getting back to real life, let us talk osprey. More precisely, we are talking about the real life bird here, since it is too a bird of prey, but a very unusual one. For one thing, it is almost completely piscivorous – the sea eagles may also eat fish, but they also attack other animals; some, like the white-tailed eagle actually prefers to hunt waterfowl to fish, but the osprey does not. It feeds almost exclusively on various fish, and is the most aquatically adapted modern bird of prey out of them all.

…There are also the so-called fishing owls, but as owls, they are grouped separately from the birds of prey that we’ve discussed earlier, and so we’ll be talking about the owls in general separately too. Right now, though, it must be pointed out that no one knows where to put the osprey within the bird of prey group either. It is called the fish hawk, even nowadays, sometimes, but the truth is that scientists agree that it is no more related to the hawks, eagles and vultures than it is to the falcons; the fact that it is grouped with the former rather than the latter is just whimsy, really, nothing scientific at all. Sigh.

To further deepen the unnecessary conclusion, the osprey is sometimes lumped in discussions alongside the secretarybird. The two avians have little in common – i.e., both are birds of prey without any obvious living relatives and their fossil history is not very good either. That is it. Otherwise, while the osprey is the most aquatic of the diurnal birds of prey, the secretarybird is the most terrestrial – it even looks like an ostrich wannabe, with its long and powerful legs. The two of them have nothing in common with each other or the other raptors, and so they are often discussed side by side. Sometimes human logic is something else, you know?

In addition, some people believe that there are two species of osprey – the common or the western osprey, (the one usually seen in the various videos, TV specials and what else have you), and the so-called eastern osprey, which lives around Australia and Oceania, (the island complex that is closer to Australia than to any place else). Whether that is justified, or is the local osprey one of the subspecies, (and right now, the osprey lives all over the world, save for the poles), so far has not been decided…

Well, this is it for now. See you all soon!