by Roland D. Hallee

One night last week, my wife showed a photo to me she received from a friend, showing a pigeon-like bird with fuzzy feathers on its feet. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but it did look like a pigeon.

Research led me to identify it as a fancy feather-footed pigeon. So, more digging was done, and this is what I found. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much about them online.

A fancy feather-footed pigeon, such as the English Trumpeter or Bokhara Trumpeter, is a domesticated pigeon bred for ornamental beauty, distinguished by “muffs” of feathers on its feet, which are a form of genetic variation from its rock pigeon ancestors. This distinctive feature, which gives the appearance of “feather pants,” is caused by genetic mutations that reprogram the leg to develop feathers instead of scales, and can vary in length from a few stray feathers to large, fluffy plumes.

Foot feathering is an uncommon trait among bird species, as most birds have scaly feet. Some raptors and boreal birds have feathered feet, and among chickens and pigeons, birds can have feathery or scaly feet, depending on their breeds.

Fancy pigeon refers to any breed of domestic pigeon, which is a domesticated form of the wild rock dove. They are bred by pigeon fanciers for various traits relating to size, shape, color, and behavior, and often exhibited at pigeon shows, fairs and other livestock exhibits.

OK, with all that beauty, are there any brains?

Pigeons are considered to be quite intelligent birds. They can recognize themselves in mirrors, learn complex tasks, and remember long-range routes. How smart are pigeons? Pigeons can learn and remember tasks, solve problems, and recognize individual people and places.

Fancy pigeons with feathered feet are a sight that you can find often at bird shows and displays. But why do some pigeons have feathered feet while others don’t? What evolutionary processes lead to feathers on some pigeons’ feet?

Pigeons with this characteristic have become the subject of much discussion. You can see some of these birds in bird shows and exhibits.

Pigeons get feathery feet because of one or more genetic variations. Though you might think this is just some sort of overgrowth of feathers like humans that have hair in the wrong places, foot feathers are actually not the skin growing extra feathers.

Other bird species with feathers on their feet include Snowy owls, golden eagles, certain bantam breeds, and ptarmigans.

Aside from them, certain chickens and domestic pigeons have been bred with and without feathers in the same species. The evolution of feathered feet throws new light on how evolutionary processes work.

So, where did this particular fancy feather-foot pigeon come from? Well, although they are common among breeders for show purposes, this kind of genetic mutation does not occur in the wild. So this bird is probably one that has escaped from a breeder or an owner. It’s likely to have a home somewhere nearby.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Name the famous football player who is the brother-in-law of former Boston Red Sox star Kevin Youkilis?

by Roland D. Hallee

Well, we’re coming up on the middle of October, and time to take a look at what Mother Nature has provided to us in regards to a preview of the upcoming winter.

Brrrr! Dread the thought!

During the summer and fall, our little critters, and even our vegetation, provides us with a glimpse of what we may be in store come the winter months.

Now, let’s make it clear. All of the following are according to farmers’ folklore. I looked up the word “lore” in the dictionary, and this is what I came up with: “All the knowledge of a particular group or having to do with a particular subject, especially that of a traditional nature.” Apparently, these are the result of many years of farmers keeping track of conditions involving their fields and crops.

First, it’s the old wives tale about the beloved onion. The lore goes that if an onion is difficult to peel, it is a sign of an impending harsh winter. If the onion peels easily, we can expect a milder winter. Notice I said, “milder.”

So far this summer, I have noticed that onions have been relatively easy to peel. My wife and I eat lots of onions, so this is more than just a small sample size.

Next comes those dreaded hornets and wasps. Farmers’ folklore has it that ground hives signify a low snowfall. Well, we went through this a couple of weeks ago when I told of the problem we had at camp this fall with yellow jacket hives in the ground. We had at least four that we knew about this summer, when action had to be taken to alleviate the problem.

However, during our close-down weekend at camp, we were again pestered with a multitude of yellow jackets, indicating there was another hive nearby. We never found it.

Contributing to that theory is the hornets nest I saw last week. A nest, the size of a honeydew melon, hung on a branch, low on a tree, probably about six feet or so off the ground. Not very high for a hornets’ nest.

With so many nests in the ground and the one hanging low on a tree branch, that, supposedly, indicates low snowfall. Wouldn’t mind that, even if I do have the snowblower tuned up and ready to go.

Another sign that the impending winter will be on the mild side has a little bit of controversy.

The wooly bear caterpillar. That darling, little fuzzy insect that usually comes out in mid-September. I have seen only a few, but they all have been on the highway, where I can’t get a really good look at them.

I did see one last weekend at camp, and the results were favorable.

Now, I am sure everyone has heard the myth that the length of the rust-colored band on a wooly bear tells of how severe or mild the winter. If the rust-colored band dominates the body, it will be a mild winter.

The wooly bear I saw measured 1-5/8 inches long. An inch of that length was black, while the rust-colored band measured only 5/8-inch. That’s telling me the winter will be a little on the bad side. However, other people have told me – and showed photos to me – the wooly bears they have seen were predominantly rust-colored. I hope mine was the flunky of the wooly bears.

Finally, the cicadae. That is the green insect that buzzes during the hot, steamy, humid days of July. Farmers’ folklore has it the first killing frost of the season will occur 90 days following the first sound of the cicadae, after the full moon. The first time we heard the cicadae this summer was on July 26. Count out 90 days, that brings us to October 26. With the next full moon happening on October 6, you have to go beyond. The next full moon after that is November 5. We could be looking at an Indian Summer, with the first killing frost following that date.

Now, just for giggles, let’s throw in the Farmers’ Almanac. The Farmers’ Almanac, which has provided long-range weather forecasts for more than 200 years, is predicting a cold and snow-filled winter for Maine. Do we dare look any further?

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Which Red Sox batter has the best career On Base Percentage in team and major league history?

by Roland D. Hallee

OK, we’ve been going through quite a dry spell since July, with hardly any rain. Plants and flowers are starving for the liquid and so are the bees.

I’m sure everyone has noticed the presence of many, many more bees than normal. Just last week, on a particularly beautiful Saturday, I decided to go read my daily newspaper on the deck with a glass of wine.

Nope! Not happening. I was immediately swarmed with dozens of bees all fixated on that glass of wine. So, inside I went.

Last week, my granddaughter and two great-granddaughters came out for lunch. The little girls wanted to eat in the gazebo. So they went out with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and an apple, with some apple juice. Well, guess what happened. Inside they went because of the swarming bees, with the apple and apple juice seeming to be their targets.

Actually, I use the term “swarm” loosely. Do you know how many bees it takes before it is considered a swarm? Give up?

A bee swarm typically contains thousands to tens of thousands of bees, with average swarms around 10,000 to 30,000 bees. The number can vary significantly, though, from a few hundred to over 30,000 depending on the original colony’s size and whether it’s a primary or secondary swarm. Swarms are a natural form of honey bee reproduction, where a queen and a large group of worker bees leave their original hive to establish a new colony.

So, why all the bees?

During a dry spell, the increased bee activity is driven by the colony’s heightened need for water to cool the hive and a scarcity of natural food sources. You are more likely to see bees congregating in places where water is available, such as puddles, pet bowls, and swimming pools.

Bees require a lot of water to maintain their hives, particularly during a dry spell.

The hive needs to be cooled. Bees use a process called evaporative cooling to regulate the temperature inside the hive. Water-foraging bees collect water, spread it in thin layers, and fan their wings to create airflow and lower the hive’s temperature. This is crucial for keeping developing larvae and the wax comb from overheating.

Water is also necessary for feeding young bees and for diluting honey. With natural water sources drying up, bees will congregate around any available source they can find. Interestingly, they often prefer “dirty” water, like from puddles or damp soil, because of the minerals and scent, which they can detect more easily than clean water.

Droughts lead to a “nectar dearth,” a period where nectar-producing flowers are scarce or no longer in bloom. This lack of food changes bee behavior and makes them more visible to humans.

As food sources dwindle, foragers must travel farther and search more aggressively for nectar and pollen. Bees will seek out alternative sources of sugar and carbohydrates, which brings them into contact with human areas like picnic tables, garbage cans, and sugary drinks.

The combination of hunger and the need to protect their limited resources can make a colony more defensive. They may become irritable or aggressive, especially if they are a strong colony attempting to rob a weaker hive. The heightened activity during a dry spell is also influenced by the seasonal growth of bee colonies.

By the end of summer and beginning of fall, colonies typically reach their maximum population size. This means there are simply more individual bees out foraging and more individuals to notice around your home and garden.

My wife, who can’t stand bees, sets off on a mission to capture the bees by luring them to sweet liquids and then disposing of them. I tell her bees are necessary to pollinate the gardens. I explained to her the famous quote: “If the honey bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live.” It is a misattribution to Albert Einstein. While the statement is not found in any of his writings, it originated with a Canadian beekeeper in the 1940s and was popularized by a French journalist in 1965, later circulating on pamphlets and in media to highlight the importance of bees as pollinators. We’ll see how that goes.

So, it’s a conundrum. We need the bees, but they can be pests, especially during dry conditions. I was stung a couple of weeks ago, and it wasn’t a picnic. I worry about my great-granddaughters.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Whose 240 hits in 1985 are the most in a single season in the Boston Red Sox team history?

by Roland D. Hallee

Last week, while doing some yard work, my wife noticed some insects on our outdoor fire pit. When summoned, I went over and identified the “bug” as the cicada exoskeleton, the part the cicada leaves behind its external skeleton, a hard, protective outer shell. We counted 11 of them. As a cicada grows, it outgrows its exoskeleton and must molt, shedding the old, hard shell and emerging as a larger, soft-bodied form.

The cicadas are a superfamily of insects, with more than 3,000 species described from around the world. Cicadas have prominent eyes set wide apart, short antennae, and membranous front wings. They have an exceptionally loud song, produced in most species by the rapid buckling and unbuckling of drum-like tymbals. They typically live in trees, feeding on watery sap from xylem tissue, and laying their eggs in a slit in the bark. Most cicadas are cryptic. The vast majority of species are active during the day as adults, with some calling at dawn or dusk. Only a rare few species are known to be nocturnal.

One exclusively North American genus, (the periodical cicadas), which spend most of their lives as underground nymphs, emerge in predictable intervals of 13 or 17 years, depending on the species and the location. The unusual duration and synchronization of their emergence may reduce the number of cicadas lost to predation, both by making them a less reliably available prey (so any predator that evolved to depend on cicadas for sustenance might starve waiting for their emergence), and by emerging in such huge numbers they will satiate any remaining predators before losing enough of their number to threaten their survival as a species.

The annual cicadas are species that emerge every year. Though these cicadas’ life cycles can vary from one to nine or more years as underground nymphs, their emergence above ground as adults is not synchronized, so some members of each species appear every year.

The “singing” of male cicadas is produced principally and in the majority of species using a special structure called a tymbal, a pair of which lies below each side of the anterior abdominal region. The structure is buckled by muscular action and, being made of resilin, unbuckles rapidly on muscle relaxation, producing their characteristic sounds. Some cicadas, however, have mechanisms for stridulation, sometimes in addition to the tymbals. Here, the wings are rubbed over a series of midthoracic ridges. Although only males produce the cicadas’ distinctive sounds, both sexes have membranous structures called tympana (singular – tympanum) by which they detect sounds, the equivalent of having ears.

For the human ear, telling precisely where a cicada song originates is often difficult. The pitch is nearly constant, the sound is continuous to the human ear, and cicadas sing in scattered groups. In addition to the mating song, many species have a distinct distress call, usually a broken and erratic sound emitted by the insect when seized or panicked. Some species also have courtship songs, generally quieter, and produced after a female has been drawn to the calling song. Males also produce encounter calls, whether in courtship or to maintain personal space within choruses.

Most cicadas go through a life cycle that lasts two – five years. Some species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, which has a number of distinct “broods” that go through either a 17-year or in some parts of the region, a 13-year life cycle. For example, a 17-year cicada with a predator with a five-year life cycle will only be threatened by a peak predator population every 85 (5 × 17) years, while a non-prime cycle such as 15 would be endangered at every year of emergence. Cicadas are commonly eaten by birds and mammals, as well as bats, wasps, mantises, spiders, and robber flies. In times of mass emergence of cicadas, various amphibians, fish, reptiles, mammals, and birds change their foraging habits so as to benefit from the glut. Newly-hatched nymphs may be eaten by ants, and nymphs living underground are preyed on by burrowing mammals such as moles.but observations of predator responses refute the claim.

In mythology and folklore Cicadas have been used as money, in folk medicine, to forecast the weather, to provide song (in China), and in folklore and myths around the world.

Cicadas feed on sap; they do not bite or sting in a true sense, but may occasionally mistake a person’s arm for a plant limb and attempt to feed. Male cicadas produce very loud calls that can damage human hearing.

Cicadas are not major agricultural pests, but in some outbreak years, trees may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of females laying their eggs in the shoots. Small trees may wilt and larger trees may lose small branches. Although in general, the feeding activities of the nymphs do little damage, during the year before an outbreak of periodic cicadas, the large nymphs feed heavily and plant growth may suffer.[111] Some species have turned from wild grasses to sugarcane, which affects the crop adversely, and in a few isolated cases, females have oviposited on cash crops such as date palms, grape vines, citrus trees, asparagus, and cotton. Cicadas sometimes cause damage to ornamental shrubs and trees, mainly in the form of scarring left on tree branches where the females have laid their eggs. Branches of young trees may die as a result.

Now we know a little more about the insect that makes that loud, buzzing noise in mid-summer.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

What former New England Patriots player was nicknamed “the law firm”?

by Roland D. Hallee

My wife has a strong liking for hummingbirds. At camp, she has five feeders spread around the lot. We watch them constantly.

Lately – I’ve counted at least eight – they have been swarming the feeders, fighting amongs themselves, and it’s a wonder they get to eat at all, what with chasing any other hummer that approaches a feeding station.

Add to that the presents of bees, who during this dry spell, have been in search of liquids themselves.

Those tiny bees, keep chasing off the hummingbirds. Why would a diminutive bee scare away a hummingbird, which even though tiny themselves, are behemoths compared to the bees?

Hummingbirds belong to an avian family and their closest relatives are the equally fascinating swifts. Hummingbirds are small with long, narrow bills and small, saber-like wings.

Males (and occasionally females) often have a colorful gorget – small, stiff, highly reflective, colored feathers on the throat and upper chest. These shiny feathers and others around the head may look sooty black until a hummingbird turns its head to catch the sun and display the intense, metallic spectral color.

It makes sense that the smallest birds come from the smallest eggs, but how small? The one to two eggs in a ruby-throated hummingbird clutch are about as tiny as peas and are placed in a walnut shell-sized cup woven from spider webs and plant material.

Hummingbirds and swifts are able to stroke with power both on the down- and up-beat of a wing flap. Their power and small size allow tremendous agility in flight. In fact, hummingbirds are the only vertebrates capable of sustained hovering (staying in one place during flight), and they can fly backward and upside-down as well.

To their maneuverability, hummingbirds add speed and stamina. They have been clocked at close to 30 mph indirect flight and more than 45 mph during courtship dives. Migratory ruby-throated hummingbirds have no problem flying 18 to 20 straight hours to cross the Gulf of Mexico, powered by their fat stores and given a bit of help from winds.

A ruby-throated hummingbird’s heart beats from 225 times per minute when the bird is at rest to more than 1,200 times per minute when it is flying. Its wings beat about 70 times per second in direct flight and more than 200 times per second while diving.

Hummingbirds are one of the few groups of birds that are known to go into torpor. Torpor is a very deep, sleep-like state in which metabolic functions are slowed to a minimum and a very low body temperature is maintained. If torpor lasted for long periods, we would call it hibernation, but hummingbirds can go into torpor any night of the year when temperature and food conditions demand it.

Their high-energy lifestyle compels hummingbirds to locate reliable food resources. Feeding on flowers puts hummingbirds at the mercy of the flowering seasons of the plants upon which they depend. Hummingbirds solve this by being very mobile, and their movements are often shaped by the changing pattern of flower production over time.

Hummingbirds don’t always depend entirely on flowers. During the breeding season, in particular, hummingbirds hover mid-air and catch small flying insects to eat and feed to their nestlings.

In northern and high-elevation areas, hummingbirds depend upon sap-wells of woodpeckers known as sapsuckers. The woodpeckers are able to keep the sugary sap of trees flowing, and the hummingbirds sneak in to take advantage of the woodpeckers’ work.

Hummingbirds are, for the most part, unsociable. In fact, the adjectives pugnacious and feisty are often appropriate. When more than one hummingbird is around, it is often a scene of repeated high-speed chases. In fact, male and female hummingbirds do not form a pair-bond after mating, and the female is left to care for eggs and chicks alone.

What is all this fighting about? Plants take time to secrete nectar into their flowers. In an ideal world, hummingbirds should time their visits to flowers to take advantage of a full load of nectar. But they wait to feed at a flower at the risk of other hummingbirds beating them to the punch. It is therefore worth the effort for hummingbirds to chase away competitors, so they have access and control of their favorite flowers.

So, let’s get back to the original question.

Those tiny bees are able to scare away a hummingbird because a bee sting to a hummingbird can be fatal. Hummingbirds have very small bodies and a single bee sting, especially in a sensitive area, can be enough to cause death due to the venom. While hummingbirds can sometimes be aggressive towards bees, the bees can also be aggressive towards them, especially around feeders.

With only about a month left before hummingbirds head south, enjoy the time spent watching their antics.

Another note: we’ve had bird feeding stations for years, and attract many different, common songbirds. Recently, hummingbirds have been buzzing around like an airport with no flight controllers. Can they be scaring off other birds? We haven’t seen our songbirds in weeks.

We’re wondering if they could be bullying the other birds away? It seems that since they’ve taken over, our regular visitors have stopped appearing.

The answer: Yes, hummingbirds can sometimes scare away other songbirds from feeders, primarily due to their territorial and aggressive nature, especially around nectar sources. While they are small, hummingbirds can be quite assertive in defending their feeding territories, which can deter larger or more timid birds from approaching.

Roland’s trivia question of the week:

Who was coach of the New England Patriots when they went 1-15 in 1990?