Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

Sciurus Niger, Black Squirrel When you move to a new place, it often comes with new sights and scenes. One of the more unexpected examples has been the color of the local squirrels. Squirrels in the northeast are already named for their predominant colors (with the exception of flying squirrels), but as the picture to the left shows, they also come in black. While they seem like a different species, these "black" squirrels are actually a melanistic morph of the regular Eastern Grey Squirrel ( Sciurus carolinensis ). In the past, this didn't prevent prominent scientists and naturalists from labeling them as such however.  Even though color morphs were certainly known about in the 1800s, there was still the constant taxonomic war known as "lumping and splitting". Even today, there are still battles and hypotheses being waged about certain species either being regarded as unique from one another or as simply being a subspecies. In biology, species and su...

Uh dude....? A little to your left... So as I've mentioned before, I will be year listing this year. I have no set region or state for this so it's more a challenge for me to see how many species I can compile. I must correct people though. It isn't a big year. Unlike the immensely popular film of yesteryear (based on the much better book, as usual), I won't be jet setting around the country to see as many species as humanly possible. I'm not that crazy, nor am I rich. But what's that I hear you say? Kenn Kaufman did his big year for around $1000 and saw just over 660 species! That's true, but he also hitchhiked most of the way and ate cat food at some point. And if eating cat food is a selling point to a birding trip, you're barking up the wrong tree. Besides, I only wanted to announce that I'd recently seen my 100th bird of the year and it isn't even the end of the month either! It was a small group of Common Goldeneye ( Bucephala clangul...

In my struggle to get to 300 species before the end of the year, the start of the fall migration should be a point of joy for me. Instead, I'm feeling anxious that I won't meet my goal, despite having 277 species on my life list with the recent additions of Northern Fulmar ( Fulmarus glacialis ), American Pipit ( Anthus rubescens ), Steller's Jay ( Cyanocitta stelleri ), and Purple Gallinule ( Porphyrio martinica ) and the quickly closing gap that would mean I only need 23 more species in order to reach my goal. (For clarifications sake, I didn't go on a whirlwind tour to see those birds, but instead happened to remember seeing them in the past and put them on my own list. This benefits me more than simply using eBird as I mentioned in On the Wing post #7, due to the flexibility I have with the entries in that I know I saw them within a given time period without having a particular date or time of seeing them.) My reaction to meeting this daunting challenge has been...