SOME LOOSE THOUGHTS ABOUT WHY I AM ECSTATIC ABOUT BIRDS In the picture you can see a rough stink bug (genus brochymena) on my patio fence. But I want to draw your attention to the sounds. It was this astonishing morning chorus that compelled me to make the recording and share these thoughts. When I stepped outside my apartment, in the space of a just a few minutes, I was overwhelmed by the calls and songs of house finches, Alberts towhees, a Gila woodpecker, a solitary mockingbird, grackles, Inca doves, and one or more kinds of hummingbirds. Add to that the ubiquitous ground doves and mourning doves. (Unfortunately, not all of these birds are audible in this recording). Fall has come to suburban Phoenix. The tree-lined yards and man-made ponds within three miles of my apartment are rapidly filling up with American coots and wigeons; an occasional Western grebe or common merganser; and mallards. There is a rare Muscovy ducks that lives about a mile away. On the banks of the ponds and along the mudflats you can see great and snowy egrets; great blue, green, and black-crowned night herons; cormorants; Canada geese; black-necked stilts, yellowlegs, and killdeer. There are pairs of American kestrels on the field next to my favorite pond, along with a large flock of red-winged blackbirds. Osprey and belted kingfishers (at dusk) circle overhead or make spectacular dives after the fish. Rarely a week passes without my seeing turkey vultures riding thermals above South Mountain or the parking lots nearby. Until recently, when the landlord removed the tree, great-horned owls appeared infrequently at dusk on the branches of a eucalyptus a few meters from my door. And every so often I hear or see noisy but nonetheless elusive Gambels quails and the odd pair of American crows. A still more diverse group of shorebirds can be found at the stunning riparian preserve in Gilbert, about 12 miles away. Some of these birds, like the American wigeons, may have come from as far away as Canadas Arctic Circle. This is a list of the birds that I see on a daily or weekly basis during the Fall months, to say nothing of the mammals and reptiles and invertebrates I encounter regularly along the canals. The names may not be particularly meaningful to everyone. But the sheer size of the list alone impresses me deeply, although it is remarkably small compared to the list of 1,800 or more bird species that inhabit Columbias frighteningly vulnerable rain forests. The roughly thirty species of birds I see on a regular basis in the Phoenix suburbs represent at least 11 (of at least 23) orders of birds (based on the morphological system of classification). Their names are imposing and somewhat strange to me: Podicipediformes, Pelecaniformes, Ciconiiformes, Charadriiformes....To this can be added the exotic Psittaciformes - whose evolutionary history took place in Australia - as represented by the cockatiel I keep prisoner in a sad little cage in my bedroom. One would have to look at least 100 million years into the past to find an ancestor common to all of the birds in my list (all Neognathae). For a point of reference: the non-avian dinosaurs, like tyrranosaurs and their relatives, went extinct about 65 million years ago. Now consider: the last ancestor common to a kingfisher, for example, and any of the other birds in the list lived at least 50 million years ago. (Incidentally, ostriches, a species also present in Phoenix, went their separate way more than 50 million years ago). By about 30 million years ago, most of these orders were already on their distinct evolutionary paths. Modern bird species as we know them have been around more or less in their present forms for about 11,000 years. By contrast, humans and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, had a common ancestor who lived 4 to 8 million years ago - perhaps 20 million years after the last major splits of the modern bird orders. Anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. Despite their - to my mind - sometimes frustrating outward similarities, modern birds represent a staggering range of evolutionary diversity. I hope you will consider these facts and their possible significance the next time you look at one of the many birds that grace our city. PRIMARY SOURCE: Manual of Ornithology (1993) by Noble S. Proctor and Patrick J. Lynch
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 20:58:31 +0000
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