Classification Matters

One thing a lot of visitors are curious about when it comes to animals is which ones are related to which.  If it's my job to help people learn about the animals around them, I should get this stuff straight.

According to Wikipedia, egrets and bitterns are types of herons.  At CuriOdyssey, we have some herons (green, great blue, and black-crowned night) and egrets (but no cranes or storks).  A lot of children that come through think that the herons are flamingos, and I tell them they're on the right track, since flamingos are also birds that like water. 

Ultimately, the understanding I want to impart to kids is that the way animals look and act is related to how they live.  A lot of times I am not sure what exactly someone thinks it means to call some species "cousins," but just saying that seems to satisfy questioners.

Some egrets at Shoreline.

Uneven Spring

It's chilly today.  I know, I know, I'm from Idaho.  I should be able to handle 55 degrees.  More observations of the Shoreline colony have yielded some snowy egrets in with the great egrets.  I don't think there are more than a half-dozen pairs of birds yet, and I haven't seen any babies. (I see them every evening when I pick up my spouse from work.)  I can't be sure, but the number of birds I've seen this year seems far smaller than last year.  It could still be early to see a lot of animals.

Egrets in the trees at Shoreline.

What I did discover was a big pond of tadpoles at CuriOdyssey.  I was out visiting the roadrunners and finally noticed the frog pool was full of tadpoles.  A few weeks ago a little girl asked me if there were any frogs in the pond, and I told her no.  Oops.  The tadpoles are now in various stages of development.  Some are pretty big, but none have any signs of legs yet.  I noticed them coming up to the surface of the water, and thought they might be taking gulps of air, but a keeper at CO said they're just eating the algae on the surface of the water since they're relying on gills at this point.

Tadpoles at CuriOdyssey

Citizen Science!

Sometimes, a molecular biologist has a lot of time on her hands, and she wants to explore a new environment.  I moved to the San Fransciso bay area a year ago, and love an excuse to get outside and see what this biome has to offer.  I volunteer in the aviary at CuriOdyssey on Friday mornings, and I've used their philosophy of experiential learning to gain as much expertise on area birds as I can.  I spend four hours in an enclosure with seven species of birds (and two species of turtles) once a week, and every single time I've done it, I've seen something completely new to me.  My school training focused on the chemical level, so my knowledge about macro-level biology is embarrassingly-TV-based.  

When I drive home from the park, Science Friday is always on my radio, and there have been a lot of citizen-scientist projects highlighted on it lately.  All the changes that seem to be coming with global warming deserve some kind of documentation.  I won't necessarily know what things were like around here before 2014 but I can tell you what I'm seeing now.  

To begin with, I can report that there are great egrets nesting in Mountain View.  When I see something neat, I tweet at magneticksara.  In my other blogging life, I am pretty heavy into politics, so expect my political musings to be mixed in with nature observations.  I'll tag my nature tweets with #baynaturalist so you can sort out my bons mots and get straight to the good stuff.  Until I get some good nesting egret video, here are some cell phone photos of the CuriOdyssey aviary residents:

John, the great blue heron

Unnamed red-eared slider

Greenie, the green heron