Wildlife

[Soleil]

It was quite odd; why would it be afraid of mockingbirds? There were only two of them.

Some of the birds, mocking birds among them, and particularly corvids (I can't remember if mockingbirds belong to that particular group or not) are capable of doing a hawk great harm if they mob them. The hawks seem to know this, whether through instinct or through some form of species communication I don't know. In any case, I have observed several times only three or four crows harrying a hawk or other raptor. The hawk is generally on the losing end of things.

There was a hawk in our backyard one time just... lurking around a nest. We sat there and watched it for a while as it just... lurked watching the nest. Anyway, I don't know what kind of birds they are but we have some small-ish birds (ones in the nest actually) and they just started group dive-bombing the hawk and chasing it all over the yard until it left.

Wish I knew what kind of birds they were, but I'm horrible at wildlife identification!

We also have some really pretty birds that are kind of a dark ugly brown but have a beautiful red patch on their "throat" area, but they aren't cardinals..

[TNHawke]

It was a red-shouldered hawk! Several mockingbirds were perched around it, squawking angrily. After a while, the hawk leaped off of the tree, flying right past my head with two mockingbirds in hot pursuit. It was quite odd; why would it be afraid of mockingbirds? There were only two of them.

Most likely, the hawk wasn't 'afraid' of them, but decided to move on. With the mocking birds pointing out where he was, he wouldn't be able to hunt for anything else, because all the prey animals know he's there. As they demonstrated by following him as he did fly off, had he tried to stoop (dive) on some kind of prey, they would have gotten in the way and made him miss. Better for him to move on and hope to not be seen for a successful hunt.
When they do the dive bombs and such, they can pull feathers, or give a hard peck or claw to the head and back. A lucky shot could even take out an eye. There are some birds who will intentionally poop on predators, and for birds, they have to find water to bathe in to get it off quickly, because it actually damages their feathers.

I'm trying to remember... I don't think mocking birds are in the corvid group, but they might be closely related to mynas and I think mynas are closely related to the jays and corvids... I should probably look it up.


Anyways... I came in to write about this newspaper article that pissed me off to the nines. I realize that the yellow bellied marmot is not endangered. And I realize that in many areas they are considered a varmint, and it's pretty much open season on them at any time. What I don't understand is WHY. Could someone who farms or ranches, or knows people who do tell me WHY they are considered this way?
I hear the story about "they dig holes and horses and cows can step into those holes and hurt themselves", but I've also read that statistically, cattle and horses coming to harm in rodent holes is almost zilch. Yet everyone seems to know someone who's horse broke its leg in a gopher hole- never a reliable 1st hand account that I have yet to hear.
Anyways... In the Newspaper the other day, was the "4th annual Rock Chuck Derby", 'rock chuck' being another name for the marmots. The article was all about how many people came out, and how they brought in money for charity, and their goal was $75K. All noble causes. And then about how it's all done in honor of a girl who died of cancer and how "she would have loved this. She was spunky, vivacious and the most positive and inspirational person ever."
So... she would have partied with the rest of you over the wanton killing of innocent rodents? Not a word in this article about how killing the animals was a good thing environmentally, only about how much fun the hunters have shooting them, the prizes for the largest one, the party afterward and the money gathered.
Sure, noble end... but does it justify the means?

[Ravenari]

I'm trying to remember... I don't think mocking birds are in the corvid group, but they might be closely related to mynas and I think mynas are closely related to the jays and corvids... I should probably look it up.

Mockingbirds are closely related to mynas, but neither are closely related to corvids. I mean, they are passerines, but they're not even in the same superorder (corvids don't belong in Muscicapoidea like mockingbirds and mynas). That said, mynas and mockingbirds are quite closely related (they belong in the same superorder). Mockingbirds and mynas belong in the parvorder Passerida. And corvids belong in the parvorder Corvida. That said, they're all songbirds, so they're all fairly related.

*

I love bushwalking and keeping an eye out on native, local wildlife. I walk generally once every day, and usually keep an eye out for corvids like the Australian raven and cractacids like the grey butcherbird and Australian magpie (as our Australian magpie despite being black and white having almost all the habits of a corvid magpie, is not actually a magpie at all; which makes me love convergent evolution).

Our Australian ravens are quite unusual / different in that they have a white iris (hence the scientific name Corvus coronoides), this was one more habituated to humans (as most are notoriously shy, and will take flight after about 5-10 seconds of direct eye contact - according to Simpson & Day, I find it varies, personally)



This is another Australian raven on the tree behind our house:



I very much enjoy their throat hackles. Proportionately, for their size, they have the largest throat hackles of any corvid in the world. When they puff them out and strut around during breeding season, it's quite something to see!

[TNHawke]

The Australian Raven is beautiful. I wonder if it would be possible to get a hybrid of that and a common raven with the white eyes... My current pet raven is part white-necked, a raven out of Africa, but he looks all common. He didn't pick up any of the white feathers (although this could change as he moults into his adult plumage), and to my eyes anyways, his beak doesn't seem to have the arch that the white-necks have. He does seem a bit smaller than the wild common ravens around, so he might have picked up his size from his white-necked parent.

Ravenari, since you did the research on where mockingbirds and mynas fit in... where are jays and magpies compared to them and corvids?

[Ravenari]

The Australian Raven is beautiful. I wonder if it would be possible to get a hybrid of that and a common raven with the white eyes...

Maybe, but probably not in Australia. They tend to really frown on the keeping of exotics here, it's very different to the USA. For example, in some states in the USA, it's possible to keep sugar gliders (native to Australia) as pets. In Australia, it is illegal to keep sugar gliders as pets. Ravens are not permitted to be kept as pets, even with a licence.

The only people who can generally keep them are rehabilitators with rehabilitation licences, and even then, it's often deeply discouraged. That said, it is pretty awesome that you have a pet corvid. It's not just our ravens though who have white eyes, there's also a species of crow (the Little Crow) that has white eyes as well. I'm pretty sure the Torresian Crow and probably a few others around Australasia do as well.

Ravenari, since you did the research on where mockingbirds and mynas fit in... where are jays and magpies compared to them and corvids?

Jays and magpies are corvids (with the exception of the Australian magpie, which is neither a technical magpie or a corvid), and are in the Corvidae family, and are all very closely related to each other. And they're all under the parvorder of Corvida - which generally holds that all song-birds under the Corvida sub-heading are evolved from a common corvid ancestor. I know that contemporary research (through the Museum of Victoria in Australia, and CSIRO) has suggested that all passerines/song-birds in Australia, for example, evolved from one common corvid ancestor.

So mynas and mockingbirds are closely related to each other (being in the same superorder Muscicapoidea, under the parvorder umbrella of Passerida). Jays, magpies and ravens (and crows and rooks and choughs and treepies) are closely related to each other being in the same Corvidae superorder. But Muscicapoidea and Corvidae are under two different umbrellas (or parvorders) and so in that sense; not so closely related. The parvorders Passerida and Corvida are considered sister branches under the song-bird tree, but in terms of birds, they're related to each other in the sense that they're birds and song-birds, but not really in terms of superorders or species or anything. But it can change too; taxonomy changes all the time.

[Soleil]

*snip*

Anyways... I came in to write about this newspaper article that pissed me off to the nines. I realize that the yellow bellied marmot is not endangered. And I realize that in many areas they are considered a varmint, and it's pretty much open season on them at any time. What I don't understand is WHY. Could someone who farms or ranches, or knows people who do tell me WHY they are considered this way?
I hear the story about "they dig holes and horses and cows can step into those holes and hurt themselves", but I've also read that statistically, cattle and horses coming to harm in rodent holes is almost zilch. Yet everyone seems to know someone who's horse broke its leg in a gopher hole- never a reliable 1st hand account that I have yet to hear.
Anyways... In the Newspaper the other day, was the "4th annual Rock Chuck Derby", 'rock chuck' being another name for the marmots. The article was all about how many people came out, and how they brought in money for charity, and their goal was $75K. All noble causes. And then about how it's all done in honor of a girl who died of cancer and how "she would have loved this. She was spunky, vivacious and the most positive and inspirational person ever."
So... she would have partied with the rest of you over the wanton killing of innocent rodents? Not a word in this article about how killing the animals was a good thing environmentally, only about how much fun the hunters have shooting them, the prizes for the largest one, the party afterward and the money gathered.
Sure, noble end... but does it justify the means?

I don't know what a rock chuck is, I had to google, looks like a beaver o_o Anyways!

Here we have a MASSIVE problem with gophers. I mean it looks like a damn minefield in our horse pens. We have had our colts trip because they stepped in one that just happened to be fresh (meaning, the gopher didn't cover the hole very well yet) more than once. Luckily, they never broke anything but it makes them cautious to run and when one is raising race horses cautious-runners is a bad thing.

That's why we are trying to kill ours. We've tried live-traps, we've tried everything and can't get rid of them naturally. So.. we had to resort to the more hated method of dealing with them. "Gopher bombs" are widely used around here because they are like.. smoke bombs, but with poison for smoke. I personally don't like it, but I'd rather them be gone than have a $3000 (breeding fee) colt get hurt severely.

---
In terms of that article:
To me, it seems like they are just... wanting to justify what they are doing. They are doing it for the sport of it, and hey if it helps the farming community then so be it, but it seems to be just for sport.

They probably also kill it for sport because (if what I am reading is up to date) the marmot can be the host for the tick that carries Rocky Mountain spotted fever. I know nothing of the disease so I don't know if it's transferable to humans or not, but you know people.. kill the host before there's even that small chance!

[TxCat]

WHY they are considered this way?
I hear the story about "they dig holes and horses and cows can step into those holes and hurt themselves", but I've also read that statistically, cattle and horses coming to harm in rodent holes is almost zilch.

If I understand correctly their habitat, yellow bellied marmots live ABOVE the treeline or at the timberline. If that is indeed the case, then the farmers and ranchers have no cause for hunting them. There shouldn't be any cattle or horses grazing at that altitude because the forage is largely unusable and the animals are at risk for falling and rock slides.

In the lower altitudes, we do hunt burrowing animals for precisely that reason. The holes in the ground are a danger to hoofed animals. I was thrown twice from my horse (and had to put it down) owing to it having stepped in gopher holes. The problem was so endemic that once a week we would go out into the fields and pastures for the sole purpose of filling in the holes. I also put down an average of three to five cattle per year because of non-repairable injuries suffered from gopher holes. At $3k-$5k a head, that's a significant loss of stock for a small farm (we had about 66 acres and 100 head of cattle).

I'm embarrassed to say that for some reason those types of fund raisers are common where I grew up. The sad part is, most of the participants have no idea about the environmental impact of such a hunt and quite a few really shouldn't even have access to guns. The ones I really can't stand are the ones where they use clubs or bats. If you're going to kill something, at least make it clean.

They're also missing the point: an animal isn't on the endangered species list YET. It will be if such mass killings are allowed to happen without reason.

[TNHawke]

These marmots live all over the range, below tree lines, through the desert, in the forest areas. Yellowstone used to have problems with people feeding them, and them getting extremely large and FAT and begging at Old Faithful.
There is a chance that I've forgotten exactly which species they actually are, there's several species of marmot. Double checked... I'm going to have to take photos of our marmots and cross reference, looking at the faces, I think we might have hoary's here in the canyon, but looking at a range map, it looks like the Yellow-bellies are more common, which is what I thought we had here.


The event hunt was on a few square miles of one particular area. But I hear so many stories from people, co-workers, people at parties, what ever who just talk about going out and shooting them, just for fun and target practice.

As to diseases... it looks like they can spread various diseases, just like rats can.
Here's a slightly edited quote I found.

the Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911
In the early 1900s railroads brought people from south China to Manchuria, a region of northeast China, newly opened to marmot hunting. "Local hunters knew how to recognize sick marmots and knew to leave them alone," Summers said. "The new, migrant hunters didn't know local lore and spread disease from sick marmots to themselves. The railroad made the rapid spread of sick people possible."
By the spring of 1911 a major epidemic of pneumonic plague swept through Manchuria killing between 45,000 and 60,000 people.

Maybe, but probably not in Australia. They tend to really frown on the keeping of exotics here, it's very different to the USA. For example, in some states in the USA, it's possible to keep sugar gliders (native to Australia) as pets. In Australia, it is illegal to keep sugar gliders as pets. Ravens are not permitted to be kept as pets, even with a licence.

I've found that in any place where an animal is native, it's illegal to keep them as pets. Here in the western US, it's illegal to keep blue-bellied lizards as pets, because they live here in the wild, so there's no way to 'prove' the lizard wasn't captured. But in the eastern US, they are a very popular pet, and legal to keep, because breeders hatch them and sell them. I've had the wonderful opportunity to rehab a couple, and even the wild born ones can make lovely pets.
House Finches are a cute little red (or orange or yellow) headed finch native to the western US. A group were captured (and possibly bred in captivity) and then sent east to be sold as pets called Hollywood Finches. Fish and Game found out and went to round them up out of the pet stores, as they were protected by law. The pet stores released them, rather than be caught with them... and now the House Finch lives in the east and is making its way westward to meet the original population. (these also make wonderful pets... I've enjoyed my house finch rehabs more than the parakeets I kept!)
I would imagine that Australia is extremely concerned about the possibility of released exotic pets, the same way Hawaii and Florida are, because they have such issues with invasive species already.
I have heard that non-native corvids can be kept as pets with out permits, because they have to be acquired through legal breeders. The hybrids are easier to acquire because they are obviously not a native species. Hybridizing in the falconry world is also common, partly to try to establish the 'best of both worlds', such as the speed of a peregrine with the strength of a gyrfalcon, but also because such a pairing would likely never happen in the wild, so it's relatively certain that such a hybrid bird was born in captivity. This is also part of why albino reptiles are popular and color morphs are encouraged- such bright animals are not likely to survive in the wild, so the chances of them having been born and raised in captivity are much, much higher.
I believe this is also becoming more common with pet parrots as well, since it has not been legal to keep wild caught parrots for over 30 years. I see more and more color morphs of common parrot species, such as blue forms, high color forms, pastel forms, hybrids of different species of macaw, etc.

[Ravenari]

I've found that in any place where an animal is native, it's illegal to keep them as pets.

Very true. Though Australia tends to take it to another level in terms of strictness. We have one of the strictest quarantines in the world, for example, and some of the strictest in terms of animal import and export laws. And animals from overseas are very rarely permitted to be pets here either (and dogs and cats arriving from overseas must go through a minimal 3 month quarantine; sometimes longer, and sometimes they are not permitted to come over at all depending on the country of origin).

In part, it's because the people who generally pass the laws often recognise that it's very difficult to give wild animals the stimulation and complex diets that they need, and as you say - because of fears of the destructiveness of wild animals that have gone feral. Bill Bryson in his book Down Under observed that before settlers, the red kangaroo was the largest wild animal on the mainland. And since settlement over 200 years ago, it is now the 13th largest because of feral animals. It's a bit of a worry.

The RSPCA here is very strongly opposed to the keeping of any wild or native animals as pets and states:

"RSPCA Australia is opposed to the keeping of wild, native or introduced animals as pets or companions. Native animals require equally high standards of care as do any domestic pet, however it is much more difficult to adequately provide for them. In many cases they require specialised husbandry and facilities to mimic their natural environment and meet their physiological and ecological requirements. Most people do not have the skills, experience and facilities to do this (something evidenced by the difficulty many people have in providing adequate care for traditional types of companion animals)."

I have heard that non-native corvids can be kept as pets with out permits, because they have to be acquired through legal breeders.

Is that in Hawaii? Or do you mean Australia? I got confused, I'm sorry!

[TNHawke]

I have heard that non-native corvids can be kept as pets with out permits, because they have to be acquired through legal breeders.

Is that in Hawaii? Or do you mean Australia? I got confused, I'm sorry!

Around the US- in general. A friend in Poland introduced me to the idea of pet ravens, when he aquired one from a breeder in Norway. Also I have seen several videos of people with a raven and also having some other kind of corvid like a New Caledonian Crow.