Spring 2020

Decided to record some of the lovely spring that is taking place in the northeastern US (mostly in Prospect Park and Park Slope).  

April 2020

Perspective in Science

Threespine stickleback, the protagonists of the research article that we wrote a perspective piece for,
are a model for understanding how repeatable evolution is. This is because populations of these little fish have independently evolved to live in freshwater lakes and streams all over the Northern Hemisphere.

Repeated adaptations to life in freshwater range from anatomical features like losing armoured anti-predator defences, to growing and reproducing faster, to digestive enzymes that compensate for the dearth of fatty acids in freshwater diets.

Life in freshwater does not just involve new predators and new food sources, but also new parasites. Below is an illustration (not to scale) of the life cycle of some of the key tapeworm parasites than infect freshwater stickleback. Eggs and larvae are eaten by little crustaceans such as copepods, as depicted on the bottom of the figure. Stickleback, such as this male guarding his nest, become infected when they eat copepods full of tapeworms. Birds, such as loons and mergansers, distribute tapeworm eggs across different watersheds when they eat infected stickleback and poo out tapeworm eggs. As a result, while the stickleback in each watershed are on isolated evolutionary trajectories, they are constantly coevolving against parasites like tapeworms, with a much more global distribution. This system provides a perfect natural experiment for understanding how host immune systems evolve different ways to combat a single parasite.

Birding Bali Barat National Park

 Bali Barat, or West Bali National Park, is in the northwestern corner of Bali, 4 hours drive through mountains and rice terraces from the madding crowd of tourists that cluster around the beaches in the south. This park was set aside as the last habitat for the Bali starling or mynah, which is found only on Bali. These beautiful birds became critically endangered due to persistent poaching for the caged bird trade, and there are now over 1,000 individuals in captive breeding programs around the world.

Fewer than 100 Bali mynahs remain in the wild, all of which gather to breed here in the park. We were lucky to see a flock of 12 birds flying from tree to tree as we stood on a hillside looking out over the forest canopy on our first morning. The next day, we found four pairs, garrulous and stunning in their startlingly white suits and brilliant blue spectacles.

Christmas birding in and around Hangzhou, China

Birds of Okinawa

Like many islands, Okinawa is full of endemics (species found nowhere else). We were lucky enough to have superb views to both male and female Okinawa woodpeckers as well as a family of Ryukyu robins complete with demanding fledgelings. The Ryukyu scops owl calls almost incessantly in the evenings when we were looking for elusive rhino beetles (Trypoxylus dichotomus). And of course the flightless Okinawa rail, with it's lipstick red bill and legs was a real highlight. Well worth sleeping in the car for a few hours in between nocturnal beetling and dawn, to see the rails when they were most active and busy feeding along route 2, which runs through the Yanbaru forest in the north of Okinawa. There are very sweet signs in Japanese and other languages all along the road, possibly marking the spots of previous rail roadkills. We were also most impressed by the conservation efforts to save the rails, which include a rather successful anti-mongoose fence across the island of Okinawa.

Provence

View from Les Baux de Provence

Gordes

Rousillon

Panama & Costa Rica with Lindblad and the Harvard Natural History Museum

 

Birding SE Arizona

 

Zambian birds

The miombo rock thrush is a particularly engaging little bird, with its tastefully muted plumage. It is named for the increasingly threatened miombo woodland that covers much of south-central Africa, from Angola to Tanzania. Like many other species in the region, this rock thrush is a miombo specialist, so deforestation is a significant conservation threat. In Zambia, where I spent much of February and March, miombo is cut down for firewood, and to make way for tobacco, a highly lucrative crop that has to be dried, a process requiring fuel in the form of more decapitated miombo trees.

Assorted sketches of some of the avian highlights, including the Chaplain's Barbet (Lybius chaplini ), found only in Zambia.

Animal Acknowledgements

To all who helped, directly and indirectly in producing Dr. Tong, THANK YOU!

A subset of people are depicted below, sans surnames: