waterbottle_s's Favorites

A good result for song meter sites sited within the NP (& beyond boundary of Pullen Pullen Reserve) under the auspices of Bush Heritage and Birds Qld as part of a broader Bird Surveying Expedition to the NP with Andrew Ley. 2- note call confirmed by N Leseberg, (Pullen Pullen Reserve) "one bird flew over that area on the night of 27 Sep, at about 10pm. You had a number of recorders there within a few hundred metres of each other, and the bird was detected on four of the recorders. Based on the times (see data below), it seems to have been moving west. Of the 8 calls detected, all are two-note whistle calls (I have attached a clip of the strongest call) and similar in structure, suggesting the same bird. There was one call of the 8 though that was higher and thinner. This may indicate a second bird, or it could just be the one bird doing something unusual.

So, while it’s not a roost site, it’s still valuable information. It is consistent with what we’ve found before, which seems to suggest birds roosting on the western edge of the escarpment country to the east of where this one was detected, then perhaps moving out onto the floodplains to the west to forage.

I’m sure your crew will be excited to hear the news. It’s not a roost site, and there is no risk of folks disturbing a sensitive area, so happy for you to share this data and the call clip around" 1/5/24

As my 1000th observation submitted to iNaturalist, here is something a little different and unusual from my archives.

My colleagues and I took this photograph of an actual original and unique X-Ray (physical "hard copy") film made in the Emergency Room of the University hospital in which I worked night shifts back in 2002. It was the regional center for medical treatment of snake bites in north central Florida.

This snake had bitten someone late at night, roughly in the vicinity of Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville, as I remember, and the snake was killed and brought to the E.R. as proof of the species of poisonous snake that had inflicted the bite, for antivenom administration purposes. There were a couple different types of antivenom then, and they usually took a little time to reconstitute or prepare. All pit vipers in Florida inject similar venom when they bite, but it is different from that of the Coral Snake for instance, which is North America's only native Cobra. Having the actual body of the snake delivered to the E.R. is not absolutely necessary of course, but it does insure correct identification as to species, for whatever that may be worth, at the time, and in later analysis.

While identifying a snake from an X-Ray photograph may be a little unusual, it is not so difficult in this case as some might imagine. After all, here is a very large Pit Viper, totally without tail rattles, in Alachua County Florida.

Just how big was it? Coiled up as you see, it almost doesn't fit on a piece of film that was 11 by 14 inches in size. The snake's head, distorted a bit by the trauma of its demise, alone is nearly 3 inches long, measured directly on the film itself. The snake's coiled body, head to tail, can be measured on the original film by laying a piece of string on the image, tracing the course of the backbone. At 58 inches, or 4 feet 10 inches (147 centimeters) then, this a pretty large snake as Water Moccasins go.

What's more, one of the reasons we X-rayed it at all was that it had clearly recently eaten something. It had a large bulge in it's stomach, down about a third of it's body length, just past its air-filled lungs that are visible on the film as well defined darker shapes. We found the bulge was a big fish with a large blunt bony head, very visible swim bladder, which we took to be a catfish, though we lacked an Ichthyologist amongst the E.R. staff of course. I can follow the fish's spine for quite a ways in the image, but lose it somewhere along the snake's lung in the extreme right of the picture. We did not, in any case dissect the snake in the E.R. Nor did we weigh it, unfortunately. For all I know, the patient, who survived with the help of our treatment, took the dead snake and its last meal home with him when he was discharged.

The Technician that made the actual exposure for us on film, at my request, wrote the details of the exposure for future reference on the film itself, which, though the film suffered damage when it was stolen from my vehicle inside a locked briefcase and dumped out in a back alley and further mistreated both by the thieves and the weather, I can still read most of what he wrote with a "magic marker":
"40(or 46) MA
1 MAS
56 KV"
Are there any X-Ray Tech's out there who can confirm that that is in fact a good exposure for a big dead snake?

On this day at Spoonbill Pond, Craig Wilson wrote online, "Merlin most often identified SBD but had few LBD identifications." I believe my photos show one of the Long-billed Dowitchers from that same day and location (although I didn’t hear it, as it was busy preening and foraging).

For comparison, this individual is shown with 2 Short-billed Dowitchers in photo 1, and also photos 7 thru 13. In those photos with 3 birds, this observation is for the bird in the middle (the SBDOs will have their own separate observation).

This observation has been added to the Species Look-Alikes project.

Comments welcome, as always.

same female in the same location as yesterday: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/194837786

seems to have fishing wire stuck on her body and I don't think she can get it out. I saw her try but it was unsuccessful.

a very strange sight today.
i think this raccoon was dying, but i'm not sure how, or of what....
i found it on a wide open residential lawn. it was hardly moving. it didn't respond to any stimulus. even as my dog and i got real close and made our presence known, it seemed completely frozen, standing in this bizarre position, doubled over and arched, like a dog trying to take a poop.
occasionally it would lift its head, and its head really unnerved me. something seemed off about it, like i was looking at a zombie raccoon. its eyes were very strange. there was something coming out of its eyes. fear, and the need to control my dog, kept me from getting any better pics.
the reason i'm sure this raccoon was dying was that, while i was looking at it, a huge turkey vulture (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/194530590) circled overhead. it flew in low circles around us for 5 minutes or so.