Tvivelaktigt

Göran Hägglund, vår föredetta fundamentalismminister, anser att Sverige genom att erkänna Palestina “placerar sig i ett mycket, mycket tvivelaktigt sällskap av länder“.

New publications (soon…)

Two new publications on their way! We finally got the crappiest manuscript I’ve ever submitted edited to perfection (?) and it’s been accepted for publication (it’s not crappy any longer, that is), and another manuscript I am a coauthor on together with my colleagues in Czech Republic should be published soon as well, though I have no specifics on that apart from a letter of acceptance, so I don’t know yet… Still, that makes four papers for 2014, which isn’t that bad… It’s probably too late to squeeze in a fifth one that Sarah and I are still working on together with a colleague in Japan, but it’ll get there eventually…

Fossil of the day #3

The fossil of today comes to use from the National Museum of Science and Nature, located in Ueno Park in central Tokyo:

Catching and banding in a garden

We were catching birds in Gittan’s garden, as well as that of a neighbour, today. Four birds were caught, two Fieldfares Turdus pilaris, one Tree Sparrow Passer montanus, and one Nuthatch Sitta europaea. As Gittan was at work, I got to band all of them, meaning that I’ve now banded birds in Sweden for the first time since… I think I banded some in Umeå when I was there a few years ago, but I’m not sure. Otherwise, it would be the first time since Padjelanta in 2008. I’ve banded more birds in Japan than in Sweden, probably, and did do some banding in Canada, but before Padjelanta, I think I have to go back to the 90s before I get to any banding I remember having done (at Landsjön, when I was going to be a banding assistant, before gymnasium…).

Interestingly, both the thrushes had lice. We caught a male and a female, possibly a breeding couple. They had different species of lice, though, which makes me wonder.

We got five or so Brueelia sp. from the body feathers of the male. There are two species of Brueelia s. lat. on this bird, and I can’t tell for sure which one it is before I’ve looked at them in the lab. Judging from where we caught them, and the short glimpses I got of them (Heidi did the collecting), they are likely Brueelia marginata (Burmeister, 1838), which will eventually be placed in the genus Guimaraesiella Eichler, 1949, after our revision.

The female, on the other hand, gave us about 20 Philopterus bischoffi Eichler, 1951 from the head.

If the birds were a mated pair, it seems reasonable to assume that the lice would spread laterally between them, during mating. This has previously been shown to be the case for lice on Pheasants Phasianus colchicus, by Hillgarth (1996). At the very least, the body lice should have had the opportunity to transfer, but these were only found on the male. The question (which I cannot answer) is: are these not a breeding pair, or did the lice fail to transfer? Or something else?

In any case, two new louse species collected for this trip, and this is the first time we get 50% of the birds we catch during a day having lice! That doesn’t sound as impressive when you consider that there were only four birds.. when I was in Canada catching shorebirds, we generally got to 90-100% infested birds!

36 dagar kvar!

36 dagar kvar!

Igår var jag och lyssnade på en gratisförelösning med Niel DeGrasse Tyson, som började lite stapplande, men till slut fick tåg i sin röda tråd och sedan genomförde en fantastisk föreläsning om hur framtidens USA kommer se ut, och relationen mellan populärkultur och vetenskap. En skrämmande serie med bilder visade först en världskarta, sedan samma karta fast med ländernas storlek i proportion till hur mycket vetenskap de producerar. Inte överraskande var USA, Japan, och Europa gigantiska, medan Afrika och arabvärlden knappt syntes. Han ersatte sedan den med en karta som visade hur samma karta skule se ut om tio år om nuvarande trenderna fortsatte, och medan Europa och Japan hade ökat, och Kina, Brasilien, och Sydkorea också började svälla upp, så hade USA minskat med hälften.

Han visade samma sak med periodiska systemet, genom att först markera nuar de olika grundämnena upptäcktes, och sedan var. Det framgick tydligt av hans bilder att när brittiska imperiet var starkt upptäcktes de flesta nya grundämnena i Storbrittanien, sedan Tyskland när det enades och blev starkt inom vetenskapen. Efter kriget blev det USA som tog över, men sedan försvann USA igen, efter kalla kriget, och det blev (om jag inte minns fel) framför allt Tyskland som kom tillbaka.

Hans argument är att till skillnad från för femtio år sedan så drömmer folk inte om framtiden längre. Man tänker sig att allt kommer vara som det är, fast med nya modeller av iPhones och liknande, istället för helt nya upptäckter. Hela hans tal kommer väl tids nog upp på youtube, men jag kan inte hitta det nu. Han är väl mitt i sin föreläsningsserie, så det dröjer väl ett tag. Hur som helst så är hans föreläsningar i allmänhet sevärda.

Things to do

Here’s a list of things I have had piling up while I was gone, just so people understand why I’m not updating this very much:

– Sorting through the material Heidi, Emily, and I collected in Sweden;
– Looking at a small sample of lice from Greenland I got from Mihaela Ilieva (through Sabrina who met her at a conference in Lithuania);
– Looking at some plover lice from Madagascar I got from a PhD student in Hungary;
– Looking at about 1700 slides I just got from Slovenia (mainly Brueelia);
– Looking at some samples Andrew collected in the Philippines, which may include some target species for the Brueelia project;
– Edit the illustrations for three papers I want to finish this year (one with new Emersoniella, one with new species of Paraphilopterus from New Guinea, and one with new records and species of pigeon lice from Japan);
– Make more illustrations, and edit the old ones, for the Brueelia project;
– Help with the Brueelia phylogeny article;
– Mount and look at Coot lice I got from Kevin Johnson;
– Collate all the collection data from Sweden and try to get that into a faunal report at least;
– Start thinking about what to use the ecological data we collected in Sweden for;
– Start doing descriptions for a paper on Philopteroides from New Guinea.

So there are lots of louse-related things to do!

Stupendous day

A total of 75 birds searched today, with lice from two Ruffs Philomachus pugnax and a Song Thrush Turdus philomelos! The former seemed to have only Lunaceps holophaeus, while the lice from the latter were menoponids, probably Menacanthus sp. I think 75 is the highest number of birds I’ve ever searched in one day, but there may have been some day in Japan when I searched more birds.

I’ve booked lodgings and tickets to London and Berlin, and my host in Wroclaw has booked their guest room for me during my stay, so all I need to take care of is the train ticket from Berlin to Wroclaw. Tomas will set up things in Czech Republic once he gets back home at the end of the month, and I’ll still need to buy a ticket from Brno to Gothenburg/Jönköping…

Today, Heidi left Sundre, having searched 962 birds (I’m at 931), and by now I think she should be on the ferry, or at least waiting for it. She’ll spend the night in Oskarshamn, and then take a train down to Kalmar tomorrow morning, and arrive here at Ottenby sometime between 3-4 pm tomorrow, depending on which bus she gets on. Once she gets here, we can finally start doing more hippoboscid phoresy trials. I’ve done two when Tomas was here, but usually, I either have live lice or live flies, not both at the same time… And the few times when I have both, I don’t remember that I’m supposed to do these trials until I’ve already killed one of them… Hopefully, we’ll get something done once Heidi comes here, at least…

Preliminary plan for next spring:
Tomas to Umeå again (Umedeltat or Stora Fjäderägg)
Me (and some assistant with a driver’s license) to Sotenäs, Hammarö, Landsjön, Tåkern, and maybe some other place.
Lo somewhere?
Someone on Ottenby?

The main goal would be to compare birds during breeding season with birds during migration. I’ve searched 67 species since I came to Ottenby, and for 16 of those I’ve searched more than 20 birds, which means some sort of comparison could be made. Most of the old material from Sweden has also been migrating birds, which brings the number of searched bird species at Ottenby to approximately 135, with maybe 50 species with sample sizes over 20 (the only summary I have is mixed between Japan, Canada, Australia, the USA, Tanzania, and Sweden so I can’t be bothered to work out the exact numbers now…)

However, both when I was catching Willow Warblers Phylloscopus trochilus in Padjelanta and when I was catching Reed and Marsh Warblers Acrocephalus scirpaceus et A. palustris in Torslandaviken, infestation rates were much higher, despite sample sizes being lower. It is sort of known that at least some lice have breeding cycles in synch with those of their hosts (I can’t remember the reference now…), and it would make sense, perhaps, for them to be in synch with migration cycles as well. Comparisons with breeding grounds would be very interesting. I think we could get some data on at least some breeding birds from Landsjön, Tåkern, and Sotenäs, and possibly elsewhere; Ottenby is not as good, as very few passerines breed on the cape, but then again it could be interesting to compare spring and autumn migration.

(I also don’t want to let go of the comparison-with-Mediterranean idea, but we’ll see…)

Stranger in the basement

Not many birds today, either, but two species I haven’t searched before on this trip:
Rock Pipit Anthus petrosus
Marsh Warbler Acrocephalus palustris

Neither of these had lice, and of the 28 birds searched today (plus one Chaffinch Fringilla coelebs searched last night), only a Red-backed Shrike Lanius collurio and a Ruff Philomachus pugnax had any lice. The great weather that was supposed result in a huge downfall of birds during the night didn’t result in any such thing, as far as I can see.

We did get a surprise visitor today, though. Christopher (the bander in charge here) found a European Viper Vipera berus in the basement. I don’t know how it managed to get in there, but it was trying to climb up the stairs. It got up the first step, but then there were people in the way, so it returned down and eventually we got it up on a shovel and carried it out into the wild again. Here are some pictures:

Incidentally, I also passed 700 searched birds today. 1000 is not impossible. The most I’ve ever searched in one collection trip was 1008, in Japan, so this may be the time to break that record.

Vulture cake

This is what the vulture cake looked like (it is now eaten…)

We were first going to make the cake in the shape of a vulture, but it turned out to be too small, so it wouldn’t have been enough for everyone (or everyone would have got a very small piece; conceivably, in this Conservative-Norm world of ours, one or two would have got divided the cake between them and the rest would have been distracted by the news that Japan got the 2020 Olympics!)

The cake was made in several steps, the most salient were the baking of two sponge cakes, one with chocolate and one without. Between these (they were too thin to cut) we put raspberry jam and some very thick custard. Whipped cream on top, and then we traced the likeness of the vulture in sprinkles. It looked too much like a crane or a goose carrying a pair of paddles:

We therefore felt obliged to write “vulture” on the cake so that there would be no embarrassing situations in which passing vulture fanciers believed we were somehow detracting from the International Vulture Awareness Day by instead celebrating an unrelated crane-based event. We could have written this in sprinkles, but Barbara thought it would be better to use some chocolate sauce, so she mixed milk and cocoa in the old Lucky Luke manner:

“If you want to make good coffee, wet half a kilo of ground coffee slightly, put it in the pot, and let it brew for an hour. Then add a horse shoe. If the horse shoe doesn’t float, you add more coffee.”

The sauce was inedible (except to Barbara, but those weird Spanish ladies can eat anything. Or so I’ve heard).

In any case, the cake was nice, and everyone became aware of vultures, and the problems they face. Or, rather, the problems they faced, as most of them are dead.

Tokyo Tower #2

Here are some more pictures from the Tokyo Tower panorama. No new birds, unless this counts:

I did find some more anomalies, though:

As well as this mystery object:

And this very cute train:

I also found two examples of censorship:

A drunk man (?) that has just fallen off his bench.

But what is behind this black box?

It turns out to be a woman hanging her laundry:

Is it censored because she is hanging up panties? No idea…