Category: Uncategorized

Near Lake Langano, early in the morning, the Abyssinian Black-and-White Colobus monkeys were feeding in the trees. Their proper name is Mantled Guereza, Colobus Guereza, and they are the popinjays of the monkey world:

Their total length goes up to 170cm, or which 100cm is tail! The mantle is the long white fringed fur across their shoulders, like the fringes on John Wayne’s leather jacket.

They are not endangered, perhaps because oddly they prefer secondary forest to primary forest. The new growth may provide more leaves and twigs than the old growth trees. They have a digestive system more usually found in ruminants, so they can digest very fibrous material. This one is eating a twig:

*My title is a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. And Abyssinia is the old name for Ethiopia.

 

My first of several posts from my Ethiopian trip has to be the Ethiopian Wolf, Canis simensis, the most endangered carnivore in Africa, with only four or five hundred left in the wild.  More than half live in the Bale Mountains, southwest of Addis Ababa, our destination, up at 4300 meters (14,000 feet).

Our wonderful guide Abiy found us seven, none very close, but I managed a few photos. Here is the star:

He or she was hunting the small mammals that live in the Afroalpine vegetation :

Getting close,:

But not catching anything, so he headed off up the hill, out of sight:

Males are up to 40″ long and 24″ high, weighing up to 43 lbs, about coyote size. They have a notably long thin skull.

This one was solitary, but we also saw a group of three, and a typical pack is a family group of around six.

These wolves may be rarest canids in the world. Under Ethiopian law killing a wolf incurs a two-year jail term. The main threats to their survival are interbreeding with the local dog population, and rabies. Vaccination is being used to reduce this threat. There is an excellent Wikipedia entry here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_wolf

 

[I’m off to Ethiopia tomorrow, so expect no posts for a couple of weeks, and then a change of subject matter on my return!]

A surprising number of animals find a use for tree bark.

In my last post two grey squirrels were getting together in the treetops, but my sharp-eyed husband noticed that they had already prepared for the consequences of their dalliance: higher in the same tree was their drey:

The base is made of leaves, but look at the top: a mound of shredded bark.

And indeed if you now take a second look at their marital embrace, you can see that earlier one of them had been hard at work harvesting bark:

Foresters hate grey squirrels as much for the damage they do to trees as for any effects on our native red squirrel population.

Beavers of course operate on an altogether larger scale.

This quite sizable tree was felled behind my house in Maine a few years back, and within a few days they had systematically stripped off huge areas of delicious bark.  What they like is the living cambium underneath the bark itself. It is the innermost phloem layer that carries nutrients from the photosynthesizing leaves to the rest of the tree, so it contains delicious sugars and minerals.

Sometimes it may also help them get a grip when they are maneuvering a log into position for a dam or lodge:

and often they just gnaw the bark off a standing tree, sometimes killing it.

Porcupines love tree bark.

My friend Leigh posted impressive evidence of porcupine work in her blog recently:  scroll down about half way for the porcupine aftermath photos:

Poking About Among the Trees

Many other animals, including deer, rabbits, voles and mice eat bark too. Apparently so can humans:

https://www.offthegridnews.com/extreme-survival/edible-tree-bark-the-ultimate-survival-food/

Bark also has its own mysterious beauty:

Bark World, by Olivia Bayard (from The New Statesman, July 2016)

Rough, tough to touch,
grooved ridged scaled –
textures and fissures
teeming with the fuss and
stress of being –
dark crevices
crammed with mini-beasts
– woodlice, beetles, borers –
and wispy spiders, that scurry
across burled highways –
algae
lichen moss growing warmth, cover
over tiny birds tight in dark holes,
feather to feather, beak to beak
– a claw here, an eye there –
flutter shuffle, first squawks
and squeaks –
and the deep inside,
where sap rises rich and quick,
grains, circles, lines,
the yearly marks of tell-time –
old time,
now time, pest, blight, disease time,
warming time, losing time,
a stopped clock at felled time.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

I live near Brompton Cemetery, a grand Victorian green oasis near Chelsea FC.

The story behind this extraordinary gravestone is one of the more remarkable ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Warneford

But this week, the sun was shining, and everyone decided it was spring. The trees:

The birds:

You can hear this European Robin, Erithacus rubecula, song here:

And the squirrels, doing their Cirque du Soleil trapeze act imitations:

After playing hard to get in a “mating chase”:

She selected one from a trio of suitors, and there they enjoyed a precarious tryst high, high in the treetops. The tail says it all:

She will have a litter of 3-4, after a gestation of 44 days. Females can breed at 10-12 months, and often have two litters per year. They may live to the age of 5, so at up to 8 young per year for four years, that is 32 young per female. There are about 2.5 million grey squirrels in the UK, and you can see why their introduction from the US has overwhelmed the more sedate British reds.

Their Chinese name is sōngshû, or ‘pine tree mouse’, 松鼠. The second character looks very mouselike!

PS My computer refuses to put the right accent on the ‘u’ in sōngshû. Sorry to those of you who know it should be a ‘v’ shape, not a little hat. 

 

 

Most mammals (including the great apes) and many species of birds have dark brown eyes.

We forget that humans are unusual in having a wide variety of eye colors: brown, blue, grey or hazel/green.

And in fact elsewhere in the animal kingdom, we find the same eye colors recurring. This Ugandan Grey-necked Crowned Crane, Balearica regulorum, has pale grayish-blue eyes.

This Common Cormorant in Central London has eyes greener than those of any human outside Scifi movies:

And this dragonfly goes one step further:

But we also find eye colors that in humans would need contact lenses:

Look at this White-eyed Buzzard in India:

Or the lemon yellow eyes of the Indian Jungle Owlet:

or the tawny eyes of the lion:

and the tangerine eyes: of the Namibian Southern White-faced Scops Owl, Ptilopsis granti

Maddest of all, the cherry-red eyes of the loon (aka Great Northern Diver):

The dragonfly aside, the mechanism for all these eye colors lies in the outer layer of the iris, called the stroma. Dark brown eyes result from the presence of melanin in the stroma.  Blue eyes happen when the stroma contains no pigment and is translucent. This layer scatters the white light, and it scatters the shorter blue wavelengths the most, giving rise to the perception of blue eyes. If the layer has a little more collagen, the blueness is dampened and the eyes look grayish. Green eyes result from the presence of a little melanin only, mixing with the reflected blue to create green.

There are actually two types of melanin, and the full range of colors found in my photos above depends mainly on which type of melanin is found. Here is a great chart, if you’d like to know more.

Melanin Content and Eye Color

Eye color	Melanin Presence on Front Layer of Iris	Melanin Presence on Back Layer of Iris	Dominant Pigment Type
Brown	Heavy	Normal	Eumelanin
Blue	Light	Normal	Eumelanin
Gray	Even less than blue	Normal	Eumelanin
Green	More than blue eyes, less than brown	Normal	Pheomelanin
Hazel	More than green, less than brown	Normal	Pheomelanin and Eumelanin
Amber	Heavy	Normal	Pheomelanin
Red or Violet (in humans)	None or extremely little	None or extremely little	n/a

 

PS Humans are also unusual in having the colored iris surrounded by a large white area, the sclera. This makes it easy to notice the direction of other people’s gaze, a useful trait when cooperating with others.

Many animals and birds have striking markings around their eyes, made of fur, feathers or just plain skin. Why?

Pale circles round the eye may help gather extra light for animals that feed in reduced light. Dark circles around the eyes may reduce glare for animals that feed in bright light. Often, though, these markings have no precise function. They either disguise the eye, or break up and confuse the head contours, or aid in species recognition. Here are some examples.

The American red squirrel has elegant white semi-circles above and below its eye, probably helpful in noticing predators when feeding in dappled light:

Raccoons famously sport dark highwayman’s masks, but it seems unlikely that reducing glare is their main function, since raccoons are largely nocturnal:

Wood frogs too have dark masks, and they live mainly in thick woodland, where the light is not bright. (Though the dark lines in front of the eye may help in accurately targeting prey.)

But the Southern Masked Weaver’s dark mask may indeed be an adaptation to reducing the glare of the Namibian desert:

And the Egyptian Goose, although this one now lives in Hyde Park in London, originates from Africa and so its dark eye circles may not just be the result of a late night out, but may have given it an edge in that bright light:

My last few examples are almost certainly not aids to vision of any kind. Just like our eye makeup, they may serve to attract a mate. Whatever works for you…

In Maine, the wood doves have pale blue eye-liner: a look I am considering for next summer.

In Ecuador, both the male Masked Trogon  (first photo) and the female (second photo) wear red-rimmed spectacles:

As does the Zambian Three-banded Plover:

Here in the UK, the common blackbird has sharp yellow circles:

But these are outdone by the Ecuadorian the Cock-of-the-Rock’s astonishing yellow goggles:

Finally, by popular demand, the Plate-Billed Toucan: not exactly an eye ‘ring’, but the most flamboyant choice of eye shadow shades that I know:

Humans need more help:

[James Charles is sponsored by Covergirl. He is the beauty blogger phenomenon who stopped traffic in Birmingham last week. ].

If you’d like to know more about natural eye makeup, read this:

Ficken, Robert W., Paul E. Matthiae, and Robert Horwich. “Eye marks in vertebrates: aids to vision.” Science 173.4000 (1971): 936-939.

PS There is a separate story about the color of the eyes themselves. Maybe I’ll look at that next.

 

 

[I think this is my last topic from our Nepal and India trip. So my posts will become more erratic for a while, until after my next trip, to the Bale mountains of Ethiopia, in late February.]

The Common Kingfisher, Albedo atthis, is an accomplished fish catcher, but that is just the start. Preparing the daily catch for eating requires an additional set of skills:*

In Assam, this female caught a very wriggly fish:

So she then bashed it on the branch to incapacitate it:

It was now stunned (moribund? dead? Who knows?) , so she rotated it to get the scales the right way round:

And down it went, in one gulp:

Common kingfishers range through Eurasia (including the UK) and North Africa, and are not threatened.  This is a female, because her lower bill is reddish, just visible if I zoom in to the max on the final shot.

Kingfishers were valued (ie trapped) by the Victorians for their iridescent blue feathers. The Chinese took the use of kingfisher feathers in jewelry to an extraordinary level. This art form was called Tian-tsui (also spelled Diancui), and the demand for the feathers from Cambodian kingfishers was so huge that they became a major source of income for Cambodia, and contributed to the funding for Angkor Wat. They also came close to extinction.

Look at these astonishing pictures of a late 18th century hairpiece :

You can read about it here, and its restoration:

https://blog.nms.ac.uk/2018/08/02/phoenixes-in-flight-conservation-of-a-chinese-kingfisher-hair-piece/

I don’t know which species of kingfisher these came from, but the Common Kingfisher is found in Cambodia.

*This fish-eating technique is basically the same as that of the Black-necked Stork, as you can see from this previous post.

https://eyesonthewild.blog/2018/12/02/

But the kingfisher has added the step of dashing it against a branch to stun it, something that bee-eaters also do with their prey,

[Back to my Nepal and India trip..]

On the road between Nepal and the Indian border the driver suddenly pulled over on the verge, and pointed up.

High in the trees there were hundreds of Indian Flying Foxes, Pteropus giganteus, one of the largest bats in the world. Like most bats they are nocturnal, but they seem to be quite alert even in the daytime. The odd one was flying around: their wing span can reach 1.5m, or nearly 5 feet.

They huddle together in small groups for warmth (the mornings are cold in November):

They wrap up inside their wings to keep the wind out, like the one on the lower left here:

They have five claws on their remarkable feet, and claws on the ‘thumbs’ of their wings too:

At the end of this post you can see a drawing of the wing anatomy.

And if I rotate one of the photos, you can see where they get their name:

They are fructivores, sucking the juice and discarding the pulp.  Although they damage fruit farms, they also pollinate the trees. They are common in India, and essentially harmless, but they do carry disease, particularly the deadly Nipah virus, which can be transmitted to humans who collect and drink the date palm sap from near their roosts. One of the worst outbreaks was in Siliguri, not far from Darjeeling, where we spent a few days.

PS This drawing of the wing anatomy shows the claws on the feet and the wing joints:

 

*My title comes from Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where the Mad Hatter sings:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea tray in the sky.

 

[A brief news report from England: back to India next time.]

I was wandering round Kensington Gardens in central London last weekend, and found a group of six swans. Two were adults, and four were last year’s young, still in their ugly duckling plumage. Two of them had the most peculiar wing feathers, stuck out at an angle and reduced to toothpicks :

They seemed otherwise fine, behaving normally, feeding alongside the others. I didn’t know if it was a strange moult, or a problem, so on the advice of my birding friend Jane I emailed The Swan Lifeline,  https://www.swanlifeline.org.uk, who confirmed it was a disease known as Angel Wing.

Jasmine and her colleagues sprang into action. By 11am the next day they had got permission from the Queen (via her representative, the park warden!) driven up to London, and met me at the water’s edge . They sprinkled food on the water, and as the foolish birds came over, they grabbed them with one swift expert scoop .

To my surprise the adult parents did not come to the defense of their young, just watched with interest.

Next step: tying the feet together with a piece of soft cloth.

then swaddling them in a custom-made red straitjacket.

And finally into a bright yellow carrier. Interestingly, by this point they are quite calm, just looking around with interest. And the rest of their uncaring family are polishing off the left-over food in the background.

Off they go to be looked after and eventually released somewhere safe from predators, probably a private lake with an island that foxes can’t get to.

There is a short video here: listen to the noise and fuss that the more aggressive male makes:

The cause of Angel’s Wing is not clear. One theory is that it is dietary, caused by too many carbohydrates, especially white bread. In Hyde Park these swans are fed by well-intended passers-by, often with not just bread but biscuits or cake too. But it may have a genetic component, since only two of the four cygnets were affected. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_wing

Whatever the cause, there is no cure, and the wings will never grow proper flight feathers like these:

So these poor swans will never fly, which is why they must be protected from predators. They will be otherwise fine, and are even capable of breeding.

 

 

Many butterflies have “tails” on their hindwings. This small Blue at Koshi Tappu in Nepal is a good example:

When its wings are closed it looks like this:

One hypothesis is that the combination of these long wiggly protuberances and the eye spots at their base mimics the antennae and eyes of a butterfly’s head. A predator is then confused, and instead of attacking the head it goes for the much less important hindwing. Mind you, a butterfly whose wings have chunks missing probably won’t fare so well either.

Here is an entirely different Nepalese butterfly, with similar wiggly tails, though the eye spots, at least on the upper side, are not so obvious.:

And this one in Ecuador has gone overboard:

Since Darwin’s day, eye spots on butterflies have been thought to pay a role in confusing predators (and attracting mates). Butterflies and moths can have eye spots without fake antennae, as this Grand Paon de Nuit (Grand Peacock of the Night) , Saturnia pyri, near Carcassonne, France, so dramatically displays:

They can also have fake antennae without eyespots, as this Swallowtail butterfly in Maine shows:

In 1980, scientists from the Smithsonian showed that the more “false head” features a butterfly had, the more likely it was to be attacked on that part of the wing, so apparently deception works!

* Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and endings, the past and the future, and he was always depicted with two faces. He is also associated with deception, which is why I chose his name for my title. I am not the first person to think of this link. This moth’s scientific name is Automeris janus:

(Thanks to the lepbarcoding.org website for this photo. The URL refused to copy, so I hope the unnamed photographer will forgive my use of this photo.)