Helen FieldsScience Writer

A new study finds that bird lice have evolved cryptic coloration. (What you or I might call camouflage.) Read my tiny story about it here.

Sulfur-crested cockatoos are awesome. This is my favorite fact about a trip I took to Australia in 1996: instead of pigeons, the parks have flocks of sulfur-crested cockatoos. At least, the parks I remember. Ok, I actually have a lot of favorite facts about Australia, like the fact that the kangaroos in Carnarvon National Park were total pests and kept trying to steal food from the picnic tables. Also, we were on Heron Island during the time when the female sea turtles were coming on shore to lay their eggs and the babies from earlier nests were hatching out and swimming out to sea (where probably most of them became shark snacks).

Man. Australia was cool.

Today I went on an outing of the D.C. Science Writers Association to Patuxent River Park – a local park along the Patuxent River, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. We got a little archaeology tour and a boat trip. And a baby bird. Oh yes – a baby bird. That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you reading to the end.

My half of the group started with an archaeology tour of a place called Mount Calvert. “Mount” is, of course, a completely silly term in that part of the world. Yes, it is higher than the water. It’s even higher than some of the nearby land. But not by much.

It has a long and cool history. American Indians lived there thousands of years ago. In 1684, it became an English colonial town; in 1699, it was made the county seat of Prince George’s County, a position it held for just a few decades, but enough to litter the ground with colonial trash. Hardly anybody lived there; it was basically the place where you went because the court was in session. (The bars were also in session.) After the county seat was moved, Mount Calvert reverted to agriculture and was a tobacco plantation, worked by slave labor.

The plantation house from 1789 is still standing, with a little display inside on some of the items archaeologists have found there. It’s a lovely brick Federalist house. Being on a little rise does give them a bit of a view down the Patuxent toward the Bay.

Archaeologists were at work outside. The whole area is divided into a grid (with giant nails marking the corners). As they dig down, they dump shovelfuls of soil into a sieve to see what’s in them – the occasional bit of pipestem or a nail, but mostly rocks. In this pit, they’ve gotten through the loose soil and are now poking around trying to find the postholes from some old buildings.

Someone asked what they do when they’re done with one of the holes. They fill it in, but first, they often go to the bank, get a roll of 2010 pennies, and scatter them around so future generations of archaeologists will know they’ve been there. How cute is that?

Here’s some of the stuff they’ve dug up – presumably thrown away by residents, not buried by jokester archaeologists:

That’s a couple of pipestem fragments, a hand-forged nail, and a chunk of prehistoric pottery.

For the next stage of the trip, we left archaeology and turned to nature, with a boat tour of a little creek that feeds into the Patuxent. It’s a lovely place – all that water and all that sky, with a strip of green in between.

We saw a beaver lodge, lots of herons, and quite a crop of ospreys.

The guy who lead the boat tour, naturalist Greg Kearns, has been working at this park for decades. His job is park stuff – renting out kayaks and driving the boat and whatnot – but he’s also spent a lot of time making the area welcoming to ospreys. Ospreys are eagles that fish. They’re big. They have a wing span on the order of five feet. They’re supposed to nest in trees, but these days, they mostly nest on handy little nest platforms that humans build for them. So this creek is full of this guy’s platforms. At this time of year, the moms are sitting on the eggs. Both parents take care of the babies. This nest had two adults sitting on it:

Can you see their two heads sticking up? Actually, you can see a lot of the body of the one on the right; the other head is just to the left of that. (The thing poking up on the left is part of the nest.) Kearns is involved in bigger osprey-saving programs, too; he’s sent osprey chicks off to other states to help get populations back. Ospreys, like all birds of prey, were in a lot of trouble for a while there because of DDT. But now they’re back. I saw one fishing in the Tidal Basin when I went to look at the cherry blossoms.

So we’re going along, seeing all these ospreys sitting on their nests. With binoculars, I could see their big yellow eyes up close. But then we came up to this one nest, and he said, oh, that one’s got eggs – he checks them all regularly. Since it was high tide, he could take the pontoon boat right up to the nest. He stopped the boat, climbed up on a bench, reached his arm in, and pulled out…this:

It’s a baby osprey! Hatching!! Saying “peep”! It’s been living off the yolk its whole life. It just has to do that for a little longer – tomorrow it should finish hatching and be ready for fish. You can see its little white egg tooth, the spot on the beak that birds use to break out of its shell. The mother flew around being annoyed while we were checking out her baby, but Kearns said they aren’t particularly bothered about people. Indeed, she landed on the nest again right after we left.

UPDATE: I added the naturalist’s name.

You’d think rainforest birds would be ok with rain – and you’d be right, to a point. But when the rain really comes down hard, the birds stop flying around. Today I wrote a story for ScienceNOW about a study that shows birds get stressed out in the rain, at least this one super cute bird called the white-ruffed manakin – in heavy rain, levels of a stress hormone go up, and they seem to maybe not be able to get as much food as they need.

Here’s how this works. Every week I get a bunch of press releases from science journals, like Nature and Biology Letters. My editor at ScienceNOW gets them, too, and so do tons of other science writers. This is how we know what’s coming out in the journals the next week; there’s a list of articles, with a summary and contact information for each one. When my editor assigns me a story, the first thing I do is e-mail one of the authors. I do that before I read the article or anything. I know I’m going to have to talk to them, I have limited time, and I want to get moving on scheduling that interview.

So last week he assigned me this story and I e-mailed one of the authors, who had a charming British last name and works in Wales, asking him if he could talk to me about his tropical bird research, blah blah blah. Half an hour later I was looking at the article, and looking through the references, and thought, wait, who wrote this article? These people are Canadian. And none of them has a charming last name…uh-oh.

Yeah, I’d grabbed the wrong contact information off the press release and sent a message about tropical birds to a computer scientist. The best part is, he studies errors. If I ever write a story about errors, I’ve already got a personal anecdote and a source ready to go. (Fortunately, he was amused.)

photo: Alice Boyle

Yesterday for ScienceNOW I wrote about tobacco plants that open their flowers at a different time of day if they’re getting eaten by caterpillars. (My story.)

It’s kind of ingenious, if these scientists are right about it. Hawkmoths are good for the tobacco plants, because they pollinate them. Plants want pollination. But female hawkmoths also lay their eggs on the tobacco leaves. Eggs hatch into caterpillars that eat everything in sight.

So if there are caterpillars around, this study shows, these plants shift their flowering from night – when moths are out – to morning, when hummingbirds are awake.

Plants have a ton of ways of dealing with predators. They can produce toxins to hurt the predators. They can stop making new leaves, send new sugars to their roots, and wait until the predators go away. My favorite: They can send out “heelllp meee” chemical signals to attract their predators’ predators, like a parasitic wasp that lays its own eggs in the caterpillar.

One of the guys I talked to for this story told me (when I interviewed him for another story) that he used to be able to tell what species of caterpillar was eating a plant in his lab by the smell of the chemicals the plant was giving off. They’re that specific.

Plants are awesome.

photo: Danny Kessler

Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey have a clever new way to find emperor penguins around Antarctica: look for their poop. From space. Read all about it! Note that I did manage to quote the guy calling poop “poo.”

A moment of culture clash: today I interviewed a researcher in England about his work on poop, only he didn’t call it poop, he called it poo. I hope to quote him on that. We also bonded on the topic of how much you miss lettuce when you can’t get it, although my experience is from the last couple of weeks of a 40-day boat trip, and his is three months of the year on a remote subantarctic island. That’s a long time to go without lettuce. I didn’t think to ask him if they have alcohol on his island.

In Friday’s dispatch there’s going to be an outstanding close-up of a McKay’s bunting taken by a photographer who knows what he’s doing. But why would you wait for that when you could have a picture by me?

The McKay’s bunting is exciting – they summer on a couple of islands in the Bering Sea, and unless you’re poking along the Alaska coast in winter, pretty much your only way to see one is to come out here. Chris the photographer and I are both attempting to rub it in with any birders we know that a McKay’s bunting is wandering around the ship today saying howdy.

Mostly it seems to like the flight deck. The flight deck is a good place to stand and watch things happening on the fantail, and Chris thinks people might drop food there. It seems to be finding something to eat, anyway. It’s also drinking from the water that collects in the helicopter tie-down bracket thingies. That water can’t be very clean, but I suppose it’s not salty – waves haven’t splashed that high, so it must be rain or melted snow.

Anyway, it’s cute, and it made the bird people happy.

Guys & Dolls is my favorite musical. It’s just so fun. It’s also the only musical I’ve ever been in. I’m catching up on old New Yorkers while I’m out here in the middle of the Bering Sea, which means I’ve read *two* pieces about Guys & Dolls recently. There’s a new production on Broadway, so someone reviewed that. In another issue, Adam Gopnik wrote about Damon Runyon (whose stories Guys & Dolls is vaguely based on). My favorite quote from the essay:

But then “Guys and Dolls” is so good that it can triumph over amateur players and high-school longueurs and could probably be a hit put on by a company of trained dolphins in checked suits with a chorus of girl penguins.

I read that quote to my roommate Liz, the bird surveyor. She said, “That would be really messy.” I think penguins poop a lot.

There are good strong laws about not getting too close to marine mammals, and hey, the Coast Guard, they’re not seal-killers. So the people on the bridge are always keeping a good watch for seals. For a grownup, they can figure it’s going to jump off the ice and swim away, but they have to steer away from the babies that are too little to swim.

Tonight there was this one grownup seal that kept not swimming away, and when it got close someone realized it was dead, and there was a gull eating it, and also we were going to run right over it. The piece of ice with the dead seal disappeared under the bow and reappeared a little later closer to the back of the ship, without the seal.

That gull was having the best day ever, right? Whole dead seal to itself. And then this giant ship comes by and knocks his dinner into the water. Imagine what that gull told its friends later. “Seriously, guys. It was THIS BIG. No, really!”

Today there was a sediment trap deployment, and it was exciting and there was heavy equipment and everything was cool and all, but much more exciting: a Laysan albatross, the first albatross of the trip, kept flying by. So Chris and I were watching the albatross and agreeing, yeah, you could take a picture, but then you just have to say, “trust me, it’s really big.” And I said, you’d have to get it next to a gull (although they’re actually pretty big, too, so it wouldn’t give you the full effect).

Then, 15 minutes later, the sediment trap is out there with its giant orange buoys. And then we’re like, hey, wait, that’s the albatross sitting next to it. And then a gull lands next to it. Thanks, buddy!

Ok, my picture only has the albatross in it. But take my word for it: that’s a big bird. This actually rises above my usual wildlife pictures, which are of the “see that speck? that’s a [thing]” variety. You can actually tell this is an albatross – see that giant beak? That beak is alllll albatross.