Over the past several weeks I’ve been slowly making my way through the Cornell Lab of Orinthology’s Handbook of Bird Biology. This has been my effort to get a better understanding of a hobby I took up recently on a trip to Barcelona and have continued. Birds, apparently, are so closely related to dinosaurs that modern members of the Class Aves could correctly be considered to be a subset of Class Reptilia. The distinction between the two Classes is just a matter of convention. Crocodiles are the nearest living relative to birds outside of Class Aves.
The mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period 65.5 million years ago was approximately coincident with the branching of modern birds. The first family of modern birds to split off were the ratites, containing several flightless birds such as the emu, the tinamou, and the ostrich (as well as several extinct birds like the moa and elephant bird). Birds (extinct and living) from the branch of the tree descended from ratites are called “paleognaths”, whereas all other birds are called “neognaths”. It’s unclear to me whether this split occured before or after the KT boundary. The only known fossil (as of the time of writing of the third edition of this book) from before the KT boundary is of a fossil duck relative of order Anseriform. This is a neognath species and accordingly it is believed that the paleognath/neognath split must have occured before that, but I don’t know that that can be established definitively.
I started birdwatching in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. There are several palm trees in the plaza, and in the spring they’re occupied by dozens of Monk Parakeets. Unfortunately, they’re highly invasive– Spain’s population of Monk Parakeets (a bird native to South America) accounts for nearly 80% of the European population. These birds were not exactly what you might consider “subtle”. In fact, they’re so loud that in the two hours or so I was in the plaza, locals twice set off fireworks nearby to scare them off. It didn’t work though, and within ten minutes they were back in the palm trees above the plaza chattering away.
Back in Baltimore, it’s surprisingly easy to find birds. I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising given that the Baltimore School of Urban Ecology is one of the foundational schools of thought in that field and represents the most comprehensive and longest-running urban ecological field study (I think!). Cylburn Arboretum in Mt. Washington is my favorite place to watch birds. This summer, Jimena and I spent a good amount of time there watching Eastern Kingbirds. Eastern Kingbirds are small, grey, flycatchers that migrate every season from their breeding range across much of the northern United States and southern Canada to their winter range in South and Central America. They’re gregarious and charismatic, and you can recognize them by the white stripes on their wings.
I haven’t found a particularly good place to watch birds in Boston yet (although I have a few ideas). There’s at least one species though for which no special spot is necessary: wild turkeys. Up close, these birds are where you can really see that Class Aves are really just a special case of Class Reptilia. Looking at one, it’s not hard to imagine that if they were a bit larger they could be just like their distant genetic cousins: velociraptors. I would know: when I was 16 my family took a trip to Boston. On that trip, we encountered wild turkeys in Fenway, just two blocks from Comm Ave, and one of them tried to kick my sister.