Back yard critters

Chevy1 said:
Backyard critters inside the house ?
Caught this stink bug flying around the living room last night. I guess he woke up with yesterday’s warm weather and wanted to get outside. First one I’ve seen since we moved in. Hopefully not to many others got inside. They overwinter indoors, and do not feed, eat or reproduce when inside. But the Mrs. Isn’t happy ?View attachment 45182
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I started have those & several others mking an appearence s well.
 
I read if you place one bright light in the room you found it in on overnight, by morning if any others around you will find them on or near the light.
 

The Dinosaur Age May Have Ended in Springtime​

A new study examining fossils of fish suggests animals were wiped out by a massive meteor at a time when they were just emerging from hibernation and having offspring.

The dinosaur-killing meteor hit in spring.

That is the conclusion of scientists who examined the bones of fish that died on that day when a six-mile-wide asteroid collided with Earth.

“These fishes died in spring,” said Melanie During, a graduate student at Uppsala University in Sweden and lead author of a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. “The reign of dinosaurs ended in spring.”

Scientists have known when the meteor hit — just over 66 million years ago, give or take 11,000 years — and where it hit, off the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. That ended the Cretaceous period of Earth’s geological history, but even though three-quarters or more of the species of plants and animals disappeared in the mass extinction that followed, it has been hard to pinpoint fossils of anything directly killed by the meteor.

But in 2019, paleontologists published the discovery in southwestern North Dakota of what appeared to be a mass graveyard of creatures that died hours or days after the impact. Although North Dakota was about 2,000 miles from where the meteor hit, the seismic waves of what was the equivalent of an earthquake with a magnitude of 10 or 11 sloshed water out of the lakes and rivers and killed the fish. Tektites — small glass beads propelled into the air by the impact — rained from the skies.

The researchers spent years exploring the site, known as Tanis, which is in the fossil-rich Hell Creek formation that stretches across four states. An article in The New Yorker described Tanis as a wonderland of fossil finds; the initial scientific paper describing the site was more sparse on details, focusing on the geological setting.

With the new science results, the fossils now provide insight into the cataclysm that was previously impossible to discern.

“It’s amazing that we can take an event, a single moment that happened 66 million years ago — literally a rock falling down and in an instant striking the Earth — and we can pinpoint that event to a particular time of the year,” said Stephen L. Brusatte, a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the research. “I think it’s a detective story of the highest caliber.”

Animals in the Northern Hemisphere — some emerging from hibernation or giving birth to young — might have been more vulnerable to extinction. “If it was spring, then it was not very likely for many organisms to be in hibernation,” Ms. During said during a telephone news conference arranged by Nature.

Animals in the Southern Hemisphere, hunkering down in autumn, might have been more sheltered from the sudden, drastic change in climate. “If you could hibernate that would increase your chances,” Ms. During said. “If you could seal yourself off in a burrow or if you could shelter underwater, that could help you.”

Dr. Brusatte agreed. “I think there is some potential here for helping understand the patterns and the processes of the extinction,” he said.

Ms. During first heard about Tanis during a talk in 2017 by Jan Smit, an expert on the dinosaur extinction at Vrije University in Amsterdam, where she was working on a master’s degree.

She was intrigued by his description of the North Dakota fossil finds. “I actually started typing him an email from my phone from the back of the room, saying, ‘Hey, if you have these fishes, can we please do isotopic analysis on their bones?’” Ms. During said.

She got in touch with Robert DePalma, the paleontologist orchestrating the study of Tanis. In August 2017, Ms. During flew to North Dakota and spent 10 days at Tanis excavating fossils of six fish: three sturgeon and three paddlefish.

In the laboratory, the scientists sliced thin pieces of bone from the lower jaws of the paddlefish and from the pectoral fin spines of the sturgeon. They saw repeating light and dark lines reflecting seasonal changes in the rate of growth, similar to tree rings. The outermost part of the bones indicated that the fish were becoming more active and growing faster after the end of winter.

“My guess is on April,” Ms. During said. “It was definitely not summer.”

Swings in the levels of different types, or isotopes, of carbon in the bones indicated how much plankton was in the water for the fish to eat. The levels were lower than what they would be during summer’s peak abundance. That added to the “various lines of evidence that we have that these fish perished in spring,” said Jeroen van der Lubbe, a paleo-climatologist at Vrije University and one of the authors of the Nature paper.

Tektites were found trapped in the gills of the fish but not in the digestive tract. “They couldn’t swim on,” Ms. During said. “They immediately died.”

Another team of scientists led by Mr. DePalma independently performed similar analysis on fish fossils and reported almost the same conclusions last December in the journal Scientific Reports.
 
there's gotta be like a 1000 black birds that just landed in my backyard - thet actually dimmed the sunlight as they landed - that's how I noticed them - I was working on the puter & it started going dark & I looked out the window thinking a storm just came out of nowhere

and just as quick as they landed - they left
 
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wader said:
there's gotta be like a 1000 black birds that just landed in my backyard - thet actually dimmed the sunlight as they landed - that's how I noticed them - I was working on the puter & it started going dark & I looked out the window thinking a storm just came out of nowhere

and just as quick as they landed - they left
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I was floating in the pool last year end of season and had that happen with them flying over head, I loved how it seamed like a steady cloud flying 30’ over head.

Luv that out in the ocean too when the birds fill the sky but its creepy out there.
 
wader said:
there's gotta be like a 1000 black birds that just landed in my backyard - thet actually dimmed the sunlight as they landed - that's how I noticed them - I was working on the puter & it started going dark & I looked out the window thinking a storm just came out of nowhere

and just as quick as they landed - they left
Click to expand...
Are you sure they where Blackbirds? Sounds more like Starlings
 

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Ornithologists should know better, Magpies are smart birds!!

Australia’s Clever Birds Did Not Consent to This Science Experiment​

The magpies showed their smarts by helping one another remove tracking harnesses that scientists carefully placed on them.

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.Credit...David Gray for The New York Times

By Anthony Ham

The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces.

But Australians know magpies best for their penchant for mischief. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is dodging the birds every spring as they swoop down to attack those they view as a threat.

Magpies’ latest mischief has been to outwit the scientists who would study them. Scientists showed in a study published last month in the journal Australian Field Ornithology just how clever magpies really are and, in the process, revealed a highly unusual example in nature of birds helping one another without any apparent tangible benefit to themselves.

In 2019 Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, set out to study magpie social behavior. She and her team spent around six months perfecting a harness that would carry miniature tracking devices in a way that was unintrusive for magpies. They believed it would be nearly impossible for magpies to remove the harnesses from their own bodies.

Dr. Potvin and her team attached the tracking devices and the birds flew off, showing no signs of obvious distress. Then everything began to unravel.

“The first tracker was off half an hour after we put it on,” she said. “We were literally packing up our gear and watching it happen.”

In a remarkable act of cooperation, the magpie wearing the tracker remained still while the other magpie worked at the harness with its beak. Within 20 minutes, the helping magpie had found the only weak point — a single clasp, barely a millimeter long — and snipped it with its beak. Dr. Potvin and her team later saw different magpies removing harnesses from two other birds outfitted with them.

The scientists took six months to reach this point. Within three days, the magpies had removed all five devices.

“At first it was heartbreaking,” Dr. Potvin said, “but we didn’t realize how special it was. We went back to the literature and asked ourselves, ‘What did we miss?’ But there was nothing because this was actually new behavior.”

The only similar example of what Dr. Potvin described as “altruistic rescue behavior” — where birds help other birds without receiving tangible benefits in return — was when Seychelles warblers helped other members of their social group escape from sticky seed clusters in which they had become entangled.

The magpies’ behavior was, Dr. Potvin said, “a special combination of helping but also problem solving, of being really social and having this cognitive ability to solve puzzles.”

“It’s probably partly why they’re so successful in our changing environment on farms and in urban areas,” she said. “They’ve managed to figure things out in a new way.”

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird, or passerine, that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.

Remarkably, magpies can recognize the faces of as many as 30 people, which is the average number who live within a magpie’s territory. “Very rarely do magpies attack more than one or two people,” said Darryl Jones, a magpie expert at Griffith University. “It’s the same individual people that they attack each time.”
And magpies have long memories: One of Dr. Jones’s research assistants was attacked upon his return after 15 years away from one bird’s territory.

As Sean Dooley, the public affairs manager of Birdlife Australia, put it, “If you think it’s personal, you’re right.”

If more than 30 people pass through a bird’s territory, “they actually start stereotyping people,” Mr. Dooley said.

He added, “People who resemble 10-year-old boys are much more likely to be swooped, because those are the kids who are more likely to be throwing sticks and stones, shouting and chasing and running at magpies.”

Dr. Jones calls the magpies’ “gorgeous, glorious caroling song” another example of their intelligence.

With more than 300 separate elements, he said, “it’s unbelievably complex. In order to remember and repeat a song of that complexity every single morning without error, you have to have a big brain.”

Dr. Potvin and her team have shelved their original study. But they can’t help but ponder a bigger question: “What else are magpies capable of?”
 
Roccus7 said:
Ornithologists should know better, Magpies are smart birds!!

Australia’s Clever Birds Did Not Consent to This Science Experiment​

The magpies showed their smarts by helping one another remove tracking harnesses that scientists carefully placed on them.

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.Credit...David Gray for The New York Times

By Anthony Ham

The Australian magpie is one of the cleverest birds on earth. It has a beautiful song of extraordinary complexity. It can recognize and remember up to 30 different human faces.

But Australians know magpies best for their penchant for mischief. An enduring rite of passage of an Australian childhood is dodging the birds every spring as they swoop down to attack those they view as a threat.

Magpies’ latest mischief has been to outwit the scientists who would study them. Scientists showed in a study published last month in the journal Australian Field Ornithology just how clever magpies really are and, in the process, revealed a highly unusual example in nature of birds helping one another without any apparent tangible benefit to themselves.

In 2019 Dominique Potvin, an animal ecologist at University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, set out to study magpie social behavior. She and her team spent around six months perfecting a harness that would carry miniature tracking devices in a way that was unintrusive for magpies. They believed it would be nearly impossible for magpies to remove the harnesses from their own bodies.

Dr. Potvin and her team attached the tracking devices and the birds flew off, showing no signs of obvious distress. Then everything began to unravel.

“The first tracker was off half an hour after we put it on,” she said. “We were literally packing up our gear and watching it happen.”

In a remarkable act of cooperation, the magpie wearing the tracker remained still while the other magpie worked at the harness with its beak. Within 20 minutes, the helping magpie had found the only weak point — a single clasp, barely a millimeter long — and snipped it with its beak. Dr. Potvin and her team later saw different magpies removing harnesses from two other birds outfitted with them.

The scientists took six months to reach this point. Within three days, the magpies had removed all five devices.

“At first it was heartbreaking,” Dr. Potvin said, “but we didn’t realize how special it was. We went back to the literature and asked ourselves, ‘What did we miss?’ But there was nothing because this was actually new behavior.”

The only similar example of what Dr. Potvin described as “altruistic rescue behavior” — where birds help other birds without receiving tangible benefits in return — was when Seychelles warblers helped other members of their social group escape from sticky seed clusters in which they had become entangled.

The magpies’ behavior was, Dr. Potvin said, “a special combination of helping but also problem solving, of being really social and having this cognitive ability to solve puzzles.”

“It’s probably partly why they’re so successful in our changing environment on farms and in urban areas,” she said. “They’ve managed to figure things out in a new way.”

The Australian magpie is a large black-and-white perching songbird, or passerine, that inhabits nearly 90 percent of mainland Australia. It is a common presence in parks and backyards across the country.

Remarkably, magpies can recognize the faces of as many as 30 people, which is the average number who live within a magpie’s territory. “Very rarely do magpies attack more than one or two people,” said Darryl Jones, a magpie expert at Griffith University. “It’s the same individual people that they attack each time.”
And magpies have long memories: One of Dr. Jones’s research assistants was attacked upon his return after 15 years away from one bird’s territory.

As Sean Dooley, the public affairs manager of Birdlife Australia, put it, “If you think it’s personal, you’re right.”

If more than 30 people pass through a bird’s territory, “they actually start stereotyping people,” Mr. Dooley said.

He added, “People who resemble 10-year-old boys are much more likely to be swooped, because those are the kids who are more likely to be throwing sticks and stones, shouting and chasing and running at magpies.”

Dr. Jones calls the magpies’ “gorgeous, glorious caroling song” another example of their intelligence.

With more than 300 separate elements, he said, “it’s unbelievably complex. In order to remember and repeat a song of that complexity every single morning without error, you have to have a big brain.”

Dr. Potvin and her team have shelved their original study. But they can’t help but ponder a bigger question: “What else are magpies capable of?”
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