Burke Museum - 3 - Death

Lat:47.66063861939029, Lon:-122.31028240171611
Day, 2012
4/26/12
1:30-3:30

In the death section, we looked at a lot of graphs with Susan and interpreted them. We also looked at marbled murrelet and warblers.

Marbled murrelets are small diving birds. They are brown on the top and white on the bottom. These are traits necessary for survival. Murrelets are brown on top because when a predator looks down, the murrelets will blend in with the water; they are white on bottom because if a predator is looking up from underwater, the murrelets will blend in with the sky. This was an interesting thing to think about because now when I look at birds and ducks I notice that a lot of them are lighter on bottom and darker on top.

On the subject of warblers, we learned about the differences in survival and location of the adult and juvenile birds. A way to tell the difference is that the adult warblers’ third tail feather is mostly white, while the juveniles’ is mostly brown. Because the juvenile warblers are less developed, they are slower during migration. Consequently, they get stuck with the worse territories after the adults migrate to the best ones. However, the following year, some of the adult warblers will die and be replaced by juveniles that have become adults. Therefore, the grown juveniles will get the better territories. This is a simple concept but I had never really thought about it before. It makes sense though those adults in a species are more mature and knowledgeable than juveniles and would of course know of and get the best territories. But it is also interesting to think of how that knowledge gets passed down from adults to juveniles who will eventually pass it along to younger juveniles when they get older. I guess there’s no way to know for sure (maybe the young just observe the old and there’s no communication or passage of knowledge at all) but it would be interesting to know if there even is communication and to study it among these birds.

Species List:
Marbled murrelet
Warblers

Posted on May 31, 2012 07:51 PM by lisad22