Top Birds & Everyfing

Thanks to the Carbon Tax Emperor Penguins Are Not Going to Alice Springs

The Carbon Tax has ruined the old mate’s plans. Now that global warning has been stopped in its tracks and a rising sea level is no longer a possibility the old mate is going to miss out on his long held ambition of seeing penguins not to mention going surfing before breakfast. 

This winter has been as cold or colder than a well diggers arse on the Klondike. Gale force winds blowing straight off the Antarctic have been blowing the feathers off the old mate’s roosters.  This apparently is a result of global warming… but no longer… global warming has been vanquished, defeated and eradicated thanks to an universal and all embracing Carbon Tax.

Anyway, anyway, anyway, the old mate had been taking global warming so seriously that he had been preparing for the inevitable rise in the sea level. Secretly he’d actually been quite looking forward to it. After all it’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The sea only had to rise a couple of hundred feet and each morning instead of having to stroll down the hill the few hundred yards to the beach to go for a swim, he’d be able to have a dip from his back yard. His shed could become a boatshed. He intended to attach a diving board to the back of the shed so with a few gazelle like bounces he’d be able to spring into the air and belly flop into the briny…. three nines and a ten!

And another thing, prior to the defeat of global warming he’d planned on days spent relaxing on his back veranda, that he’s half started already but not got around to finishing, so that he could have had an uninterrupted view on the West Antarctic Ice Shelf as it drifted north on it’s way to Alice Springs. The old mate has been so excited as he has never seen an iceberg or a penguin. So his expectation of seeing hordes of Emperor Penguins taking a ride on a vast iceberg as it melts it’s way northwards would have been the icing on the cake… and one more tick on his bird list.

Not exactly an Emperor Penguin... this rather tatty photo of a Yellow-eyed Penguin was taken with my old camera back in 1968 north of Dunedin on NZ's South Island.

You can’t blame those male Emperor Penguins from wanting the globe to warm anyway. No penguin in his right mind is going to want to stand around shivering uncontrollably all winter, battered by one blizzard after another, while at the same time trying to balance an egg on his feet. While this form of male parenting is going on their wives, partners, girl friends, or whatever penguins call their spouses, are away having coffee, or whatever penguins drink, and gallivanting about the place for months on end leaving the old man colder than a well digger’s arse on the Klondike... or have I said that already. Sadly, for Emperor Penguins, the anticipation that those blokes would be able to sprawl about eating prawns while basking in the warmth of an Australian summer is now gone forever!

And another thing… the people of Kangaroo Island will be rejoicing that their island is now no longer threatened with sinking forever into the Southern Ocean even if the old mate is secretly a little disappointed. Turning Kangaroo Island into a mere blip on the depth finder would have allowed the Southern Ocean swells to surge up the Gulf St Vincent and turn his beach into a fantastic surfing mecca…

 

Two-headed Amoeba Discovered in Tasmania

Obsession on inventing and discovering things is a male thing; Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Albert Einstein, Louis Pasteur, Georges Lemaitre and Francis Crick to mention a few. If Gertrude Darwin had published Charlie’s theory of evolution it would be Wallace’s Theory of Evolution or even worse… we’d still believe in God…

Anyway… a yet un-named female researcher in Tasmania recently made an important scientific discovery, as she was about to dine on fresh corn. It was a discovery that could turn the tables on when evolution began. Predictably the results of her discovery have been either ignored or ridiculed. She is a sister-at-arms of Barbara McClintock who was in 1983 awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine forty years after her own discovery, also on corn, which is an a-maiz-ing co-incidence. She too was ignored until after many years when the high priests of science finally, and no doubt reluctantly, recognised that she wasn’t talking baloney. These girls should have been blokes.

 

The whole drama began a few years ago when the old mate, who lives in a no-horse town in Tasmania that Henry Lawson would describe as a days ride west of nowhere, sold his last remaining one horsepower hay burner. Even calling it a town would be a charitable description… it is more or less, well less actually… to this day it is just a few houses either side of a creek and about ten inhabitants some of which are reputed to be sane. The old mate has spent his whole life there and apart from an occasional trip to a nearby coastal town he’s never left the place. It’s a few days ride to the coastal town on a rough track and he usually spends the best part of a week fishing off the rocks,

The little hamlet was once a two-horse town because the old mate in question once had an old horse and a young horse that added together made two horses and as no one else in the town had a horse… a two-horse-town was the deal. The town is otherwise unremarkable other than, and unknown to its inhabitants; the green pastures that surround the place contains a rare trace element that causes the grass to grow with a special nutritional significance that causes horses that eat it to be able to gallop really really fast. The reason they are unaware of it’s amazing properties is that no-one in the village, other than the old mate, had a horse and he never did anything faster than a slow amble, as you do in a town up in the hills of Tasmania.

 

The old mate's one horse power hay burner...

Anyway, back then, the old mate lived by himself, apart form his wife and a dog, in a corrugated iron shed on a couple of acres on the edge of the two-horse-town and he had a few more acres across the other side of a hill where he scratched a meagre living. He had an old cart that the old horse used to pull back and forth over the hill until one sad day the old horse dropped stone dead.

Not only did the town then become a one-horse-town which is about as inconsequential as a town can possibly become, but the old mate had no way of getting things backwards and forwards from his scrub ridden block of weeds and fallen timber that he called his run-out over the other side of the hill because while the young horse didn’t mind being ridden around the paddock it was beneath his dignity as well as being far too flighty and bad-tempered to get hitched up to a cart let alone pull it in a controlled and useful fashion.

Some time later the old mate rode his young horse to the coast for his annual fishing trip. He just happened to meet this young, flash, dodgy looking bloke who offered the old mate… who incidentally back then was also a young bloke… an unimaginable amount of money to buy his horse and then entered it in the Melbourne Cup and it won at odds of a hundred-to-one making the dodgy bloke rich and famous which is about as good as it gets… moving on, and so it became a no-horse-town and a one-car-town. The old mate promptly bought a brand new EH Holden sedan and drove it over the hill and parked it in his now vacant stable. 

Anyway, anyway, anyway, the old mate kept that car immaculate… for almost a week anyway. And because he couldn’t hitch the horse cart to the car he started carrying things back and forth from the acres out-the-back to the home paddock in his new car. To start with he only used the boot (trunk) that soon became full so he began carrying things on the back seat.

Now sheep don’t like being carried in the boot of a car so the old mate used to put them on the back seat. Now sheep don’t like being carried in the back seat of a car either because they tend to run amok and wet themselves and drop little black pellets everywhere which not only makes the car very messy but it’s difficult to drive when there’s a sheep tearing around the car like a banshee. So he used to tie them up before he put them in the back seat and at least that confined the black pellets to the back of the car.

Now the little black pellets and dust and mud off his gumboots including the undiscovered trace elements and fertiliser and pasture and vegetable seed and corn seed that overflowed from various bags accumulated on the floor in the back of the EH Holden sedan until after twenty years there was a rich layer of compost about a foot deep just waiting for a spark of life to get it going.

That spark of life came on a hot sultry day one November when a massive thunderstorm gathered over the mountains of Tasmania. It silently crept down towards the no horse town oblivious to everyone below and gathering strength all the way until it was smack-bang over the centre of the town. The old mate was having a siesta under a gum tree when the first bolt of lightning struck followed by the loudest clap of thunder ever recorded in a no-horse-town anywhere. The bolt of lightning hit the old mate’s car fair in the centre. It shattered all the windows, melted the tyres and blew the radio out of the dashboard, through the now vacant windows; clear across several paddocks where it landed in old Grandma Smith’s garden and sliced through a row of Brussel Sprouts. Grandma Smith who was asleep at the time, who was as deaf as a post anyway, never heard the thunder and slept on insensible to the whole fandango. Days later when she eventually found the radio lying beneath her mangled Brussel Sprouts, which had become a singed box of valves and tangled wires, she promptly blamed it on the UFO’s that she had been seeing regularly in the village over the past few years. It was that sort of village...

 

The life creating power of a huge cumulo-nimbus storm cloud capable of obliterating a EH Holden.

Moving on… a split nano-second after the lightning came a drenching downpour that filled the creek to overflowing and tore away the only bridge in the town making it not only a no horse town but also a no-bridge-town. It drenched the old mate’s car through the holes that were once windows. The seats were so soggy he couldn’t sit on them for a week.

Anyway, anyway, anyway… while the lightning was tearing around the car blowing out windows and vaporising the radio it also sent several million volts through the pile of compost that lay a foot deep on the back floor… that layer of compost was the closest thing to a primeval swamp since the beginning of time. And so it transpired, unknown to everyone, that the combination of primeval swamp, secret trace elements, rain and a few billion volts started a new form of life… it was a kind of amoeba looking thing with two heads.

 

Fire cloud over the Tasmanian World Heritage area in the 1980's.

Anyway life pretty much returned to normal in the no-horse and no-bridge town except that unbeknown to all ten residents that steadily reproducing in the back of the old mate’s EH Holden sedan was this new form of life. What they did notice however was that the seeds that had lain dormant in the compost waiting for the first flush of moisture began to germinate. Soon there was young corn, cabbages as well as a couple of spuds sprouting in the back of the car. The corn grew so healthily that it was soon growing out of the glass-less windows and grew so tall that when the old mate drove his car it looked like a mobile biodynamic green grocery. The old mate could now get his lunch out on his farm over the hill by simply picking a few corncobs and boiling them in his billy.

It was a matter of the purist coincidence that when the corn was at the peak of its productive capacity he took his annual trip to the coast to do some fishing. He had barely got to the little seaside town that he got pulled over by the cops for driving an unregistered vegetable garden.

Moving on… also by shear coincidence the old bloke just happened to have a beachside shack beside the lady scientist in question and in a spirit of generosity he offered her some of he vegetables that were growing out he windows of his EH Holden sedan including some of the heads of corn.

When the lady scientist was about to throw the corncobs into boiling water she noticed this unusual growth around part of the corncob. Being a good scientist she stopped what she was doing and examined the growth. To cut a long storey short she discovered that this growth was infact a large colony of these two-headed amoeba-like-things that bore no resemblance to any other form of life on earth.

Everything about them was completely different down to the smallest detail of their physiology. She had discovered a new form of life! This was without doubt a ticket straight to a Nobel Prize.

 

The tree of life... or should it be a hedge?

It is hardly surprising that the results of her discovery have been poo-poohed. It is even more certain that she’ll get the lead-balloon award as she has suggested that it’s a ridiculous notion that life on earth began on just one momentous occasion and all life sprang from that one happening. If conditions were right in one place, they’d be fine everywhere else and new forms of life would be, as Snow Patrol sang, …bursting into life… all over the show. And so, there can’t be a tree of life, more likely it’s a hedge and there are new hedges growing all the time.

All we just need to do is wait around for a couple of million years for evolution to provide a whole suite of new bird-like creatures so we can add a whole raft of new “ticks” to our bird lists…. must make some space in my note book…

 

The old mate's bull... not the only bull...

The old mate when told of this momentous discovery said it sounded like a lot of damn nonsense, bordering on claptrap, hogwash, bunk, and the result of guzzling too much moonshine…

The Featureless Ocean - Bird Navigation Explained

One of the most recurring assumptions relating to over water bird migration is that the vast expanse of the seas and oceans are devoid of the visual landmarks we humans regard as necessary to find our way. Therefore birds also would be unable to navigate visually and so they would therefore have some super ability to navigate using the earth’s magnetic field and the stars.

A Bar-tailed Godwit in flight. Like many birds their feathers provide a beautiful pattern. The pattern however may provide the means by which they navigate.  

It’s not surprising really that we assume the seas are featureless. Just about any map that we pick up depicts the oceans as empty blue spaces between landmasses. Our history of navigation that was predominated by ships reinforces this assumption. From the deck of a ship the sea all looks pretty much the same.

Birds that fly over the oceans, funnily enough, have a birds-eye-view and it’s a completely different perspective.

So lets pretend once again that we are flying our little aeroplane from Alaska to New Zealand and somewhere out of sight but not far away, E7 the magnificent Bar-tailed Godwit is doing the same.

High up above us an airliner is winging its way across the Pacific using a state-of-the-art Flight Management System which gets its navigation information from a combination of inertial navigation systems and multiple GPS. For these pilots navigation is precise and reliable. Not surprisingly nowadays, the pilots of these aircraft are largely oblivious to the visual cues beneath them.

But up to the introduction of inertial navigation equipment and GPS flight across the ocean was not so plane sailing, particularly in light aircraft. By today’s standards pilots relied on navigation equipment that was alarmingly crude.

Like E7, many of these flights crossed the Pacific Ocean between North America and New Zealand. There were a small bunch of intrepid aviators delivering small single and twin-engined light aircraft from their manufacturers in the US whose efforts are largely unknown. They flew the long non-stop flight between California and Hawaii and then island hopped the rest of the way. Other small agricultural aircraft that were manufactured in New Zealand went in the reverse direction.

Many light agricultural aircraft such as this DHC Beaver were flown both directions between the USA and New Zealand. They relied on basic navigation, luck and a sharp eye to avoid disappearing in the Pacific Ocean. Not all of them made it!

These small aircraft were almost always flown by a single pilot crammed into his or her seat with every other bit of available space taken up with extra fuel tanks. They had the most basic of navigation equipment. The most they had was a chart with the great circle route plotted, a compass and a blind faith that they would come within receiving range of a radio beacon that could guide them in to their often small remote destinations. Radio beacons that were often switched off, unserviceable or of such low power that they had to be almost within sight of their destination before it would be of any use. By necessity, those pilots learned techniques based on visual observation of the sea and the clouds to help them find small atolls in the middle of wide blue ocean where they needed to refuel and break their journeys.

If there is one thing that birds are very good at it is their vision and observational abilities. The anatomy of birds’ eyes and the light spectrum they can perceive is different to ours and that gives them abilities we humans are unaware. Their whole lives are dependent on acute eyesight and mental visual pictures of their world… for foraging, reproduction, defence, avoiding crashing into things while flying… after all when you travel at the speeds birds do their whole observation, processing and manoeuvring systems need to be super fast and precise to avoid being eaten, to dodge between trees, branches, buildings, fast moving cars, wind generators and even to land on branch or telephone wire without crashing… and last but not least, their vision is used for navigation. Not only are they seeing things that we can’t see, but also they are recognising and using visual information that we ignore or think is insignificant.

Australian Pelicans rest on a brackish coastal lake west of Dili in Timor Leste. Birds migration maybe seasonal or just in response to local conditions. When these birds were photographed in February 2008 Australia was in one of its worst droughts in recent history.

Surfboard riders flock to the islands of Indonesia. Along the south west coasts of Bali and the island chains off Sumatra waves break on the reefs and headlands with a consistent regularity that makes this beautiful part of the world a surfer’s Mecca. Warm tropical seas, consistent surf and cheap living… I’m packing now… and lots of interesting bird life.

The waves that surfers travel from all over the world to surf on are not generated in Indonesia. They are born deep in the southern oceans by the consistent gales in the roaring forties and fifties and travel thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean before colliding with the coasts of Indonesia. Similarly swells generated in the high latitudes travel across the Pacific from both north and south.

Flying south from the bottom of New Zealand into the southern ocean to oil rigs I have witnessed these giants of the sea. The swells are long and large, deceptively ponderous and are never absent even on the rare calm days. These immensely stable swells contain millions of tons of inertia and travel in consistent lines of constant direction that change little as they travel. They are stable patterns that remain the same from year to year. Although local winds and storms may produce a confusion of conflicting sea patterns above, the underlying swells continue on unchanged beneath the turmoil. From the air they are unfailingly discernible.

A Royal New Zealand Air Force Iroquois helicopter flying over the reef on the southern side of the Fijian island of Vitu Levu. An endless progression of swells that originate in the southern oceans breaks on the reef. Fiji, as well as a good birding destination is a consistently good surfing spot.

Having spent many hours flying above the oceans from the tropics to the sub arctic, I observe these swell patterns regularly. Even a glassy smooth tropical sea has long slightly darker lines that giving away their presence. And because they are so consistent they provide a directional matrix on the surface of the sea. Birds only need to measure their angle against these lines and they have a consistent steering guide. And most beneficially these swell patterns follow direct paths across the ocean.  None of the problems, as discussed in my earlier posts on navigation, regarding the vagaries of magnetic variation and the complexity of calculating the compass directions required to maintain great circle tracks exist. The swells are geographically orientated and have no magnetic influences.

Birds use these visual grid lines to provide them with the steering information as well as compensating for the effects of the wind. Many birds, and the bar-tailed Godwit in particular have beautiful patterns on their wings, tails and bodies, often consisting of bars and angled lines – hence Bar-tailed Godwit. Observing these feather patterns on fellow birds at close proximity with each other within the flock in relation to the swell lines may well provide them the method of assessing the angle they need to maintain a steady track as well as working out whether the wind is blowing them off track.

If we look back to our early aviation pioneers we can see how some airborne navigators used the texture on the surface of the sea (and the land) to help find how much they were drifting off track caused by the wind. They had a simple yet effective doohickie called a drift sight. It was basically a tube the navigator could look through vertically at the surface of the sea. It had a series of parallel lines on a lens that could be rotated. The navigator rotated the tube until the lines followed the texture of the surface of the sea. The difference in angle between the lines and fore and aft axis of the aircraft was the drift angle.

So birds, by using the barring patterns of their neighbours wings and tails as reference lines, can judge not only the angle of the swells to which they need to fly but also how much the winds is blowing them off track. Using this information they know which heading to fly and to compensate for the wind.

Black-tailed Godwits in Timor Leste. Like their cousins the Bar-tailed, these migrants also have distinctive wing and tail patterns. 

Unlike the sun and stars, observing swell patterns are not blocked out by cloud. And using their excellent night and UV vision, birds can see the swell patterns just as well at night and possibly by using phosphorescent footprints on the surface of the sea.

But, as discussed in previous posts; using steering information such as swell patterns is dead reckoning and only part of the navigation process. Birds still need position fixes to confirm they are going in the right direction and to be able to correct for any errors that have crept in. So what other features are observable on the so-called featureless oceans. Well mostly there are clues on the clouds and sea surface itself.

Over the sea clouds tend to build up over land. Even a sand bank such as this one in the Timor Sea can provide sufficient day time heat to trigger a cumulonimbus storm cloud. At full development they can attain a height of 60,000 ft.

Now you may be forgiven for thinking that clouds are just clouds and are just randomly scattered about the sky. Clouds are the result of variations in the air itself; of humidity, temperatures and air currents, but also highly influenced by the sea or land beneath them. They have form and location that are dependent on such things as the topography and temperature of the landmass or the temperature of the sea. They consequently have some predictable and recognisable features. There is a line of clouds off the south coast of Timor Leste that is in the same spot almost every day. A giant cumulonimbus storm cloud that sits above Bathurst Island north of Darwin is so consistent that it has a name… Hector! Clouds such as Hector congregate above islands generated by the daytime heat from the land … huge towering clouds that reach fifty to sixty thousand feet into the upper atmosphere. They are visible from huge distances.

Not only are they visible during the day but also they glow internally at night. Ferry pilots use clouds as beacons during the day and night. Strange as it may sound the colour of the clouds also give reliable clues as to whether or not there is land beneath them. And while clouds are often associated with islands, it’s not always the case. We in our little aeroplane and E7 looking at a line of clouds over the distance horizon may be confused as to which ones are over land and which are over the sea. Clouds reflect the surface beneath them. The reflection of the blue lagoon on the clouds above it are unmistakeable, as do clouds above a forested island reflect the green of the trees.

And there is the visual texture of the sea surface itself that gives those that are observant clues to fixed locations. Oceans currents rise from hidden sub sea topography giving constant evidence of the presence of undersea landmarks almost as if they were visible above the surface of the sea. Between Fiji and New Zealand there is an almost continuous deep trench and ocean mountain range. Such sub sea topography may provide more orientation for birds to follow.

Looking at the flight paths that E7 took there is an evident plan that minimizes the risks of getting lost. Pilots flying to small islands used similar techniques… playing the odds. The pilot estimates the time at which he or she is expecting to get there. If the island doesn’t appear as expected rather than keeping going and run out of fuel and perish it is best to turn at right angles to the track and see if the island can be found. But which way does he or she turn? Go the wrong way… perish again! So pilots would deliberately steer off track to one side and if the island didn’t appear they would know which way to turn to look.

By tracking south from Alaska, E7 would come across the wide stretch of islands and reefs of the Hawaiian Archipelago that stretched across her track from Midway Island to Hawaii itself. Picking up the visual cues of the archipelago from a hundred miles or so away, she then turned southeast towards Fiji. Between the Hawaiian Archipelago and Fiji identifiable landmarks in the Central Pacific Basin, the Gilbert and Phoenix Islands become more common. From Fiji south to New Zealand the Tongan and Kermadec Ridges would guide her until sensing the northern tip of New Zealand she would turn towards her final destination. All the time using the ocean swells as her steering guide.

No creature is born with a map hardwired into his or her brain, birds included. Humans have the most advanced brains of any animal and we certainly are totally ignorant of our whereabouts at birth. Nor can we get anything but the most basic navigation information by staring at the sky. But birds with their great visual sense learn to use the visual cues they receive throughout their lives, guided by their own exploration and following others. It is through this learning process that birds gain the knowledge to navigate. Not only for navigation but they learn to use the visual features of their environment to help them maintain a database of food availability, nesting sites and materials and where to find mates. Very much the same as we do.

Additional information on aircraft navigation systems:

Inertial Navigation Systems

Inertial navigation systems were developed before GPS for oceanic navigation. They consist of sets of very sensitive gyroscopes rotating at high rpm. By measuring the precession of the gyros movement can be detected. The pilots enter the exact location of the parking bay at the departure airport and the motion of the aircraft as it flies across the world detected by the gyros is converted into navigation information. This is a dead reckoning procedure so the pilots use radio navigation information to update their positions from time to time and for the approach and landing at the destination. These days’ fibre optic gyros are used instead of traditional gyros as they are lighter, use less power and are more precise.

Global Positioning Systems

Global Positioning System or GPS as it is more widely known, is in concept not much different to the celestial navigation used by Captain Cook. It just uses round position lines instead of angular position lines to fix the position. GPS uses a constellation of satellites and is dependent on very accurate UTC and the ability to measure time in incredibly small increments.

Like everything, both of these navigation systems have their pros and cons. Inertial navigation is a self-contained system. GPS doesn’t have the accuracy and guaranteed availability to be used solely for navigation. GPS, as well as relying on a satellite constellation that can fail, be interfered with or even switched off.

Radio Navigation Systems

Radio navigation uses a number of different types of radio equipment both on the ground and in the air and is still the most common approach and landing navigation aid. Automatic landing systems used at major airports still rely on radio navigation equipment. However, enhanced GPS corrected by a accurate land based survey site will, in the not to distant future, be so accurate that all the jets arriving at an airport runway will be able to do a blind touch down on the runway on the same tyre prints as the other aircraft before it. And with a software program you could set up a automatic blind landing approach in any where in the world.

Stars Get in My Eyes - Bird Navigation Part 2

Navis is Latin for ship and agere for drive but birds have been navigating long before human language was written. 

A gorgeous little Double-banded Plover. Unlike most bird migration journeys that go north south this diminutive little wader migrates east west between Australia and New Zealand.

(Note: For those of you who may have viewed this post before the original photo I had here was a Red-capped Plover. I've now replaced it with the correct one as above - thanks Geoff for the note)

It doesn’t matter whether you are a bird, going bird watching or a whale; in essence navigation has two components. The first is being able to know where we are from time to time – in navigation terms – fix our position. If we know where we are all the time then we don’t need the second component… that is directional steering information.

In my last post, E7, the wonder Bar-tailed Godwit and us in our little aeroplane were in the Yukon Delta in Alaska about to depart for New Zealand. We both know the topography of the Yukon Delta so well that when we fly around collecting food and doing other preparations for the long journey ahead we don’t need steering information. We just fly from place to place because of our intimate knowledge of the local geography.

A Bar-tailed Godwit at the Shoalhaven River mouth in southern New South Wales. Can a bird such as this navigate on a long transoceanic flight using the stars?

However, on our trip across the ocean it’s a different story. Finding landmarks, or in our case seamarks, so that we can fix our position is going to be more challenging. The second component of navigation… steering information… is going to be important. We want to be steering more or less in the correct direction for two reasons. First because we might want to find an island or some other small identifiable feature that we can fix our position. If our steering is up the creek we may not see it. Secondly because we want to get to our destination with the least amount of effort and the shortest possible time in case we run out of fuel or get there too late for the party.

Steering information is a “dead reckoning” process. That means that any errors the creep in are not rectified until we can fix our position again. The longer we continue dead reckoning without positive “fixes” the further off course we can be without knowing it.

And as discussed in the last post even with the best compass, and assuming birds have one, the complexities of navigating solely by compass over long distances are pretty much impossible.

So, if we can’t navigate with just a compass what else have we got? Some have suggested that birds migrate using the sun and stars as a guide.

A Wood Sandpiper foraging on the mudflats outside Dili in Timor Leste.

Fortunately the sun and stars, not forgetting the moon and the planets, (lets just call them all stars for ease of description), can provide us with both of the components we need for navigation… methods of fixing our position and steering information.

Again, it is not as simple as we might imagine. Fixing our position is a complex process requiring accurate measurement of the angles of the stars, being able to distinguish what star is what, having an accurate world time and being able to process the information into a position fix. And steering by the stars is also a complicated affair. But whether we are using the stars to steer or fix our position, celestial navigation has one major drawback. It is being able to see the stars. It is particularly so in the higher latitudes where the sky can be obscured for days. When that happens we need something else.

The navigator station on the Super Constellation airliner owned by the Historical Aviation Restoration Society in Albion Park, NSW. To navigate across the oceans the crew required a full time navigator. This aircraft is just one of the handful of flyable Super Constellations in the world.

For instance, navigators have used the North Star for ages. It sits fairly constantly directly above the north geographic pole and can in the northern hemisphere give us our latitude but not our longitude… the angle of the North Star above the horizon is our latitude. But we could be in Asia, North America or Europe. South of the equator the North Star is of no use.

In ocean travel, knowing the north south part of a fix has been the less difficult part of the navigation solution for centuries. It has been working out the east west component or longitude that has been the problem and the cause of so many shipwrecks.

So what can the sun and stars provide us. Well we can do some basic navigation. We know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. That gives us some rudimentary steering information during the day provided we know the time. And that time has to be adjusted for the east west component of our travel and to make that adjustment to local time we need to know where we are or alternatively use a time based on GMT.

The angle of the sun above the horizon (altitude) gives us some indication of how close to the equator (or geographic poles) we are. But because our planet earth rotates at an angle on its path around the sun, the direction the sun rises and sets at a different direction every day and travels higher or lower with the seasons.

Because our solar system is just part of the grand universe, the stars at least are geographically constant. When we cross the equator they travel vertically across the sky and arc left or right when we are north or south.

So these aspects of the visible stars are only sufficient to give us crude steering information. To get accurate information in which to fix our position from the stars we need to be able to measure their angles above the horizon with precise accuracy and then mathematically calculate a solution using an information source such as an almanac based on an artificial time base such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or Co-ordinated Universal Time (UTC) which is it’s modern equivalent.

The Prime Meridian line on the Greenwich Observatory. It is an artificial base line for GMT and UTC. It could equally be located in Timbuktu or Papeete in Tahiti.

The information that celestial position finding provides us is called a position lines. Each sighting provides a single position line and that means we can be located anywhere along that position line. To locate where we are on that line we need a second position line which can be a dead reckoning line or another star sighting. Ideally three is good and we end up with a little triangle plotted on our chart known as a “cocked hat”. We are somewhere within that cocked hat… hopefully!

For our preparation to fly from Alaska to New Zealand we have decided to get a sextant and buy a Citizen Eco-drive watch with a radio corrected UTC readout. We are going to be too busy flying our little aircraft to be able to use the sextant and fly at the same time so we are taking a navigator with us. He or she has a pile of almanacs, charts and rulers and pencils so we need an additional seat, a desk and some space to put all that gear. Even with a sextant, navigation is still going to be a bit dodgy but with luck we’ll be able to combine dead recking with some positive fixes when the atmospheric conditions are conducive to seeing the stars and with a fair wind we should be able to get there.

A periscopic sextant was used by navigators on early transoceanic airliners. Before the periscopic sextant the navigator would have to hand hold a marine type sextant in a plexiglass dome known as an astrodome in the roof of the aircraft.

It’s all very well for us to get all this additional help but can E7. Can a bird both steer and know where she is by using the stars? Well, while she may well be able to get some steering help she probably can’t navigate to the degree necessary to get where she wants to go. But wait! Birds have a few tricks up their sleeves. Pilots that ventured out across the oceans before the use of GPS have learnt some them by trail and error and observation. Otherwise known as the hard way.

Bird Compasses - Get Lost

Birds have been flying across the oceans for millennia… people for not quite so long. Interestingly when people finally managed to defy gravity and leap into the air, one of the first things they attempted to do was to cross the oceans. Flying the English Channel and the Atlantic are still some of the most important milestones of world as well as aviation history.

Birds of the same species as these over-wintering Bar-tailed Godwits at Shoalhaven Heads in New South Wales have flown the longest non-stop migration flight ever recorded.

The story of E7, a female Bar-tailed Godwit who flew a round trip of 29,000 kilometers when she left New Zealand and flew to Alaska via China and Korea and then back to New Zealand is to us humans nothing short of astonishing.

The flight from Alaska back to New Zealand is over 11,600 kilometres and is the longest recorded non-stop journey of a migrating bird. What makes this flight even more incredible is that she navigated across the seemingly featureless Pacific Ocean for eight days arriving just 14 kms from where she had departed seven months earlier. Her track was not one straight line. She basically flew three straight tracks or “legs”. According to information from the US Geological Survey she left Alaska heading in a southerly direction towards Hawaii. Before she reached the Hawaiian Archipelago she turned south west towards Fiji and then before reaching Fiji turned south towards New Zealand. Just offshore from New Zealand’s North Cape she turned southeast landing in the late evening.

There is no conclusive explanation on how a bird navigates across such a vast ocean devoid of visible landmarks. But is it really so featureless and what other senses do birds utilize that we don’t understand.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau:

"In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksand’s and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds."

First we need to try to understand just how airborne navigation is accomplished.

Lets assume we have a small nuclear powered aeroplane… no conventionally powered aeroplane has the endurance to remain airborne for anything like eight days…  and we planned to fly it from the Yukon Delta in Alaska to the Miranda mudflats on the North Island of New Zealand.

A basic aircraft compass and a compensation table. Compasses are subject to many variables which make flying an accurate track prone to error. With a basic compass like this one pilot's could only expect to fly an accuracy of two to three degrees either side of the intended compass direction. Fortunately the table which takes into account the errors caused by magnetic materials in the aircraft's structure is not required for birds.

Some have suggested that birds can navigate using a built in compass so lets assume that the only piece of navigation equipment we have on board our little aeroplane is a compass.

If we intend to navigate using a compass it would be helpful (actually essential) if we knew what compass direction to fly… known as the heading to steer. The first thing we would need is a chart so we can plot where we are and where we are going. Birds obviously don’t carry charts because they have no where to put them… so they would have to have that information stored within…

Knowing what heading to steer is not as straightforward as we might imagine. If we wanted to fly the shortest distance between Alaska and NZ… other than digging a huge tunnel… we would fly what is known as a “Great Circle” course. This deceptively simple idea of having a straight line across the world belies the fact that calculating the compass directions to keep on that Great Circle course is an extremely complicated process. It’s all to do with the world being round. It’s actually an oblate spheroid, which I realise sounds like an unmentionable male disorder… moving on… so in fact to steer such a direct course requires constant changes to the compass direction and a sophisticated mathematical process to work out what those changes should be.

For example if we were to fly our little aeroplane on the great circle (shortest distance) from the Middle East to Japan we would depart heading northeast and finish up heading south east.

For that matter the same applies for any route flown, short or long…they are all great circle routes… whether direct as in our little aeroplane, an Airbus 380 crossing the Pacific or flying a number of “legs” as E7 did. The only way we can fly a great circle without this complicated process is to fly either exactly true north or south or fly east or west along the equator but that’s hardly practical.

If some of you were thinking... didn't sailors used to (and still occasionally do) steer their vessels across the oceans on constant compass headings... you'd be right, they did and do. They sailed what is known as the Rhumb Line... maybe it was the amount of rum they drank. It is much easier to steer a constant compass heading that be constantly figuring out new compass directions every few miles. However the distance using the rhumb line between the Yukon and NZ is approximately 30% longer than the great circle and would describe a large "S" curving towards the north until crossing the equator when it would swing the other way in a large curve to the south. E7's track was a kind of "S" shape but curved in the opposite direction making it even less a rhumb line.

This Tiger Moth at the Historical Aviation Restoration Society's hangar at Wollongong, New South Wales was navigated with little more than a compass and a chart and looking over the side. Nowadays the pilot probably has a GPS in his pocket. 

So lets be generous and give us a chart so we can plot our course and work out all the compass changes and E7 has somehow done the same. However there is another complication in relying on navigating solely by compass.

The magnetic field to which our compass aligns itself has three major problems. The magnetic poles are not at the geographic poles; the magnetic field is not in a regular pattern and thirdly the magnetic poles are constantly moving. These are basically lumped together and called magnetic variation.

These problems require us to make compensations to our compass direction to maintain our track. The rate of change of magnetic variation is not even across the globe… I mean the oblate spheroid. Leaving Alaska the variation is about +15°, passing Hawaii around +10° and then at NZ about +20°. Each year both E7 and us will have to apply slightly different corrections to account for the moving magnetic poles.

Departing the Yukon Delta in our little aeroplane our initial compass direction, for the first 100 km or so until we need to make changes to maintain the great circle route is 196° “True”. The compass direction we need to steer in order to fly that direction needs to take into account the magnetic variation of +15°. We need to subtract the 15° and steer 196 – 15 = 181° “Magnetic”.

So for the entire flight we are firstly making changes to our compass direction to maintain the great circle and for each compass direction apply a non-linear correction appropriate to place on the globe to account for magnetic variation. Fortunately for us our charts have the magnetic variations plotted on them but we have to know where we are along the track to apply the appropriate correction… how does E7 do it?

Migrating birds would fly over the tropical seas such as these north of Australia 

But those problems, complex as they are, pale into insignificance when we are confronted with the problem of wind.

If we were sailing a yacht rather than flying a plane we could stand on the deck and feel the wind on our faces and see the effects of it blowing across the surface of the sea. With that sort of information we could make a reasonable judgement of its direction and speed. No such capability is possible when flying. Reliable and accurate calculation of the wind has only been possible since the use of inertial and GPS navigation systems in aircraft.

Unless we correct for the wind we will be blown way off course. E7 and our little aeroplane both fly at about 55 kph. If there is a 20 kph wind from the side at an angle of 45° we need to compensate our heading by about 14°. What that means is that in order to fly along our planned track our nose, and E7’s bill, need to be pointing 14° to the side.

Before we took off in our little aeroplane, we, as good pilots would get a weather forecast. That would give us the predicted winds for the whole trip divided up into various sectors. By using a circular slide rule known in the trade as a "whiz wheel" we can work out the corrected heading that take into account the winds that the met service has predicted. Like most weather forecasts they are only partially correct and sometime completely wrong. Inevitably, because the wind is so variable and so difficult to predict to the degree of accuracy that we need, we still get blown off track.

So how do we actually navigate our little aeroplane? Navigation is a series of “fixes” – known positions that we can recognise. We know where we are when we begin our journey. We can use our compass to steer us in the direction that we have planned.

Navigating by compass alone is known as “dead reckoning” and while the origin of the expression “dead” is unknown its implication is clear. Sooner or later, fingers crossed, we can positively “fix” our position by flying over or within sight of a recognisable feature. Like a junkie, without those regular “fixes” we are in serious trouble!

Incidentally, a GPS does not use a compass for navigating. A GPS computes its information for us to use by calculating a rapidly recurring series of “fixes” from which it can tell us the compass direction in which we are moving across the sea as it were. GPS cannot by itself work out the wind. For that to occur in flight the GPS requires an input of the aircraft’s compass direction and airspeed to work out the wind direction and speed.

So by getting positive fixes we can cancel out the errors that have occurred so far and start afresh. With a compass solely for navigation our errors just continue to compound.

In summary in order to fly our journey we would have to be able to fly to our destination by calculating a constantly updating compass heading, account for the vagaries of magnetic variation and apply corrections for the wind and being able to fly the aircraft accurately according to the compass equipment we have onboard.

One of the rules of navigation is the one-in-sixty rule. This neat little formula means that for every 60 units of forward travel, one degree of compass error results in one unit of distance off track. So for an 11,000 km flight across the wild blue ocean a one-degree error would be result in being almost 200 km off track. Approaching NZ from the direction in which E7 arrived, the whole country is about 200 km wide. To be able to fly on a compass with only a one-degree error is a considerable achievement even using a sophisticated compass?

All in all it is unlikely that birds would have the knowledge to navigate on compass directions even in the unlikely event that they have some sort of an onboard compass. That such a compass was capable of displaying the accuracy needed to maintain a track and that a bird could fly that accurately is also unlikely.

So even for us will good charts and an accurate compass, the ability to fly precisely as we can on heading and taking into account all the complexities of compass direction, magnetic variation and wind, a five degree error would be a good result. In that case should we attempt to fly such a long distance solely by compass we would more than likely end up missing NZ by at least 1,000 kilometres.

 

The P8 compass. In the days before gyro-stabilsed compasses this type of compass enabled aircrews to fly much more accurately. The scale was graduated to a much finer degree to make it easier to read precisely. Because it was mounted horizontally it was usually used by the navigator rather than the pilot.

Next post… maybe E7 navigates using the sun and the stars and we install a sextant in our little aeroplane, carry a bunch of almanacs and buy a watch.

In "Moby Dick," Herman Melville wrote:

 "...and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the error-abounding log?"

Roast Sparrow...Anyone?

Charles Darwin’s most enduring and well-known hypothesis (he did a lot of philosophising) is the “Origin of Species”, and it is a concept that has been widely adopted, although not, I might add, by everyone. Some societies won’t allow it to be taught in their education systems.

However, in nature there is probably no such thing as a “species”. It is we human beings that want call things species because of our very human need to put things in boxes. A large container ship can carry about one thousand containers. We would need ten large container ships to have a separate container for each species of bird on earth.

 

But, if we are so intent on putting things in boxes called species; then just what is a species. Sounds an easy enough question to answer. An Elephant is a species and a Sparrow is a species. Even I can relate to that.

However, it may interest you to know that modern science cannot agree on what actually constitutes a “species”. In fact more of an argument would be a better description. So, if science can’t agree on what is a species, then how can they agree what are the origins and evolution of species. It’s all about where one species begins and the other one ends – it’s called species limits and it’s a very murky area.

In the past (and still is today by the majority), people gave animals and plants a recognisable a name to make it easier to communicate with others. So if Og told Bog to go hunting and bring back a elephant (mammoth) for supper (the neighbours from a cave over the way were coming for a big shindig) then it would be helpful if Bog brought back a leg of elephant instead of the hind leg of a sparrow. Og would have to say to Bog – “go get a four legged, large, grey animal with large floppy ears, a long nose trunk-thing, plays a mean trumpet solo with it’s trunk-thing, and has gorgeous brown eyes... it’s far easier to call it something that Og and Bog agree on… elephant!

Therefore, a species was identified as an organism that was distinguishable from all others by its appearance and given a name. Sometimes, size, behaviour and location influenced the decision. People recognised that African elephants were different from Asian elephants and so called them different species… but are they?

Systematics, among other things, is the science of labelling living or once living things. It’s putting organisms into boxes. It wasn’t long before modern science decided that such a simple and common sense method of naming species by their appearance was insufficient. They decided to define a species a little more clearly and with the usual argy-bargy that goes on in the science world a whole bunch of methods evolved all of which have their supporters and detractors. They wanted to label the boxes all over again. Trouble is those confounded boxes just don’t fit in with what’s actually out there.

Probably the most commonly used recent method, is called the Biological Species Concept. This concept limits a particular species to a group of organisms that are capable of breeding together. Sparrows don’t breed with elephants, (If they did I wouldn’t like to be the sparrow); therefore they are both separate species.

 

It sounds sensible enough when you think about widely different looking animals, but in reality, especially with the similar looking animals, using breeding as a limit is totally impracticable. There are so many species of birds, for example, that science labels as separate species that interbreed. Take the Yellow-throated Miner and the Black-eared Miner – both birds of the semi-desert Mallee country of South-eastern Australia – they are considered separate species. 

The Black-eared Miner is endangered and considerable time, effort and money is spent on trying the preserve them. This is one of the reasons why it is important that they are called a separate species – if you want money for the conservation. However the Black-eared Miner and the Yellow-throated Miner freely interbreed in the wild and the hybrids are threatening to eventually predominate so presumably some time in the future there will be no pure Black-eared Miners. Incidentally, even in the hand these birds are almost indistinguishable. (Don’t get me wrong… I fully support the efforts to conserve any “species” regardless how you describe them… you just can’t get away from using the word.)

 So these two “species” quite obviously fail the biological species concept. In reality huge numbers of “different species” can and do interbreed. Many similar looking “species” are geographically isolated from one another and so whether they can interbreed or not is not known; so who knows how many so-called separate species are, under the biological species concept, actually the same. Even if obviously different looking animals are brought together in a controlled environment such as a zoo they often will interbreed; e.g. the Liger – Lion and Tiger.

In order to accommodate these annoying anomalies the system is modified and manipulated to get organisms to fit within the concept. One way the boxes thing can be manipulated is by having half boxes – sub-species, races, clines, morphs etc. – and while we only need ten large container ships to carry all the separate species of birds, we would need 43 container ships if we put each sub-species (whatever you call them) that are recognised today, into separate containers.

The problem is when do you label different groups of organism’s one species or two. If they are similar then you have decide somehow. So if population A is not quite different enough from population B to be separate then you lump them together and call them one species, or maybe two sub-species. However population C is different enough from population A to be a separate species but is not much different from population B; then you have a problem… and population D is way different from A but similar to C… and so it goes on.

In order to accommodate these problems species are lumped together, separated, re-designated and recombined until the whole process looks like Australian taxation law. A stack of law books so high no one can keep up with the changes let alone understand them… don’t start me on taxation!

The Variegated  Fairy-wren. This delightful little wren has a whole lot of "sub-species" as well as a whole raft of similar "species" that display an amazing range of gorgeous colours from almost completely iridescent blue to black and red.

Clearly, it is an unsatisfactory system but never the less is widely used. Next time I discuss an even more bizarre concept called the Phylogenic Species Concept. 

Birds, however, as all living organisms, just go about their daily lives being themselves. Incidentally, we would need 350 container ships to categorize all the known species of beetles! At the end of the day the word species will continue to allow us to describe what we see in nature and that's a pretty good outcome.

I, For One, Didn’t Descend From a Monkey.

The Grey Kangaroo. 

  

When I go to the zoo, despite my resemblance to those delightful little monkeys, it’s not to visit the relations. I take the grandkids to show them the diversity of life on earth and by seeing all the different types of animals I hope to encourage them to develop a life long interest in nature .  

  

If, however, you are wandering around the zoo as a believer in Darwin’s theory of evolution then, sorry, but there in that cage hoo hoo hoo-ing and swinging around in the branches are your distant cousins. Not only them but you are also related to cockroaches, swine ‘flu, screw worm, not to mention the the fleas, mites, bugs and skin irritations that are causing your relations (the afore mentioned monkeys) to scratch themselves; it’s really relations scratching relations. Not me, I’m actually a designer edition fashioned to be a human.

  

 

Blue-faced Honeyeaters. Are they related to the mites that inhabit their feathers; and the branch of the tree they are sitting on?

And, I absolutely, positively, and uncompromisingly refuse to be related to my dog Bella. She is a firm believer in Darwin’s pet theory - what has she got to loose. She actually thinks she is fully entitled to all the privileges of the human race (as a close relation) and has absolute rights to sleep on the best sofa despite having a perfectly good mat outside on the brick paving that I went to enormous effort to lay (the brick paving that is, not the mat). Bella has been told many times not to sleep on the best sofa. What else can you do when you’re expecting the Queen to visit any day and there’s dog hairs on the sofa.

 Bella looking depressed after being told to get off the sofa. 

Anyway, anyway, way up there on the list of unsocial behaviours (or for keeping the kids out of your hair) is getting jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, most of the bits of which have been lost, and mixing them up in one box and hiding them in a dusty corner of the shed. It’s a bit like Darwin’s theory of evolution only most of the bits were never there in the first place. 

When the kids eventually find the box of jigsaws, they can get some of the parts to work and a sort of an image appears, at least with a bit of imagination an image that looks plausible.

 The Red-winged Parrot. Adaptation or Creation!

Let’s face it, it takes ages to go to all the trouble of spreading all the jigsaw bits out on the table in the first place (having cleared the table of all the junk). Then turning over the ones that are upside-down, finding the easy bits and putting them together in groups. However it becomes increasingly difficult for them to fit them all together and to find the bits that they need. All kids know that the best way to solve a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t work is to FORCE the bits to fit. And that’s exactly what science is doing to evolution. They are forcing the bits to fit to keep the theory alive. And the picture is looking increasingly wonky.

Most people who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution do so because they were told it’s right during school - faith is a wonderful thing - but when you think about it, it just doesn’t make sense.

Common sense dictates that the 100 million or so species on earth could not evolve from one ancestral beginning; and the idea that life could have begun by a random association of chemical compounds that mysteriously came together to create life in some primeval swamp is plain ludicrous. 

The leaders of the peleton on the Tour-Down-Under 2009; Aldinga Beach, South Australia. Would monkeys be able to design a competition bike and if so and why haven’t they.

And don’t forget, although our education and scientific community conveniently like to gloss over this;  Darwin’ theory of evolution is a THEORY of evolution. It’s not a fact of evolution. As a theory it relies on a huge number of assumptions none of which have been proven.

 The Australian Bush. The modern four wheel drive includes a huge number of designed technologies. The trees are just as complex. But they, according to Darwin’s theory, are just the result of a random series of error codes in the DNA chain wending its way through time.

Next time:- some of the reasons why the theory is wonky plus additional tips on how to remove dog hairs from the sofa (and free steak knives).