Crabeater Seal - Lobodon carcinophagus

Yesterday when I went in to the Field Museum for my regular bird division prep lab shift, Bill Stanley (collections manager of zoology at the Field) was giving a tour. I love listening in when any one of the scientists is giving a tour, but especially Bill. He always speaks with great enthusiasm and clarity about his area of study, the collections and how they are used, and in addition brings out some impressive specimens to share.

For the tour yesterday, Bill brought out a skull of a really fantastic mammal: the Crabeater Seal, Lobodon carcinophagus. I've been recently posting a bit about my love and fascination with the Antarctic, and crabeaters are one of its most numerous inhabitants. Despite their name, Crabeaters don't eat crabs. Their diet almost entirely consists of krill and whatever invertebrates are happily floating about in those cold seas. And despite that they are one of the most numerous mammals on earth, relatively little is known about their habits. One of the unique features and adaptations of the Crabeater can be seen by looking closely at the photo of the skull above. Notice their unusual, multilobed teeth? Each tooth has small, tubelike, bony protuberances that look pretty threatening, but in reality their function is more benign than noshing on the hands of unsuspecting Homo sapiens. Crabeaters use their teeth like a strainer by forcing water out through the small spaces in between the dental lobes, and thus sieving krill and other invertebrates out.

When Bill isn't working with the collections at the Field, he's in the mountains of Tanzania gathering data on small mammals. If you can't make it over to the Field Museum, you can find a great little interactive video tour by Bill HERE.

Lists

For the last couple of months I have been trying to keep a list of every bird that I prepare at the Field Museum. I've been writing down the common and scientific names of each, along with their Field Museum collections number. Even though I have been going in rather inconsistently, in looking over my current list the variety of species are mind boggling. I work on a tiny sliver of what the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors bring in on a weekly basis to be catalogued, but even that tiny sliver can give you an indication of the diversity of avian life that comes through, and the impact of urban areas upon it. Fall migration season is winding down, and so for the winter the Collision Monitors will not need to wander downtown buildings again until spring. In the meantime, unfortunately, there are freezers full of birds that need to be catalogued and endless amounts of data to be assessed in their wake.

Kinglets

For a very brief period in spring and fall, the tops of the hackberry trees in the backyard are a flutter with the busy antics of these 2 small birds. They were here about a week ago, but now the leaves are mostly gone, and so are they. Kinglets are very small passerines that are sometimes classified as Old World Warblers, and are part of the family Regulidae. Regulidae comes from the Latin word regulus, which signifies "king" or "prince", and refers to the brightly colored crowns of the adults.

2 Ravens

Another recent watercolor, and ink painting. I'm not sure when this will be up an running, but looking forward to it as a resource Corvids.org. Happy Monday - caw caw!

Antarctic Waters Watercolor

The previous post had a photo of this painting in progress, and here is the finished (for the most part) deal! I'll post when it is available.

Work In Progress

I've been working on a batch of watercolors that will be available on a new website. I just started working on this one today. I'm fascinated by polar habitats, especially the Antarctic. I also love Antarctic exploration history and figures such as Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. A couple of Christmas's ago, I was given a really fantastic guide on Antarctic wildlife. I dream that someday maybe, just maaaaybe I will have the opportunity to use it in the field, but until then it is making a great reference tool for this painting and others to follow. Most of the bottom half is complete. The top will be fleshed out more with a sleeping explorer in his tent, and his sled dogs curled up outside.

Bachman's Warbler - Vermivora bachmanii

Last week I was giving a tour of the bird collections to a group of friends from out of town. Amongst the many rows of cabinets that house the collections, is a case that has been put together as sort of a show and tell. The main drawer in this case contains many different bird specimens, each chosen for a particular quality that highlights important information that can be gleaned from the collections. The drawer has a higher proportion of domestic species to foreign, and there are several specimens of extinct species such as the Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, and the possibly extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Sitting towards the front of the drawer is a tiny yellow bird, which in giving past tours I had managed to overlook. It was pointed out this time by a little girl who really wanted to know what that tiny yellow bird was. I picked it up an looked at the very old label, and saw "Vermivora bachmanii", otherwise known as Bachman's Warbler.

I had heard of Bachman's, but knew very little about it. I know enough to know that it, like the Ivory-billed Woopecker, is sort of a Holy Grail for many birders. Named after a friend of Audubon's, its first recorded sighting was in 1832, and the last confirmed sightings were near Charleston, South Carolina from 1958 to 1961. Very little is know about it, and it would seem that it was never a very numerous species. It's breeding range covered a portion of the southeastern United States, and it wintered in Cuba and possibly parts of southern Florida. Like the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, it has a history of being written off as extinct time and time again, only to resurface with some bread crumb of evidence that it is still with us. When a possible sighting of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker in 2005 turned up in some video footage, I was in Germany when the news broke. At the time, it felt like a token of forgiveness from nature, but as years pass without another confirmed sighting, it now seems more like a haunting. The last whispers of evidence for Bachman's Warbler were a handful of possible sightings in Cuba in the 80s. One can only hope that little Bachman's is still holding out in some deep corner of a southern bottomlands forest, hidden from human eyes. Last night I listened to the only recordings of a Bachman's song. It was made in 1954, and it sounded more like a buzzing trill of a cicada than that of a bird. I hoped I wasn't hearing a ghost, but really, who can say?

*watercolor available in Etsy Shop.