Another Brown Bird

Here's somebody I'm missing from my yard - a Carolina Wren. Last winter, I had two regular visitors to my feeding stations. They loved the suet dough, served either on this hanging platform feeder or in bluebird feeder, enclosed with Plexiglas on the two long sides and with round entry holes on the ends. There, I kept suet dough and mealworms for the bluebirds, and the Carolina Wrens quickly caught on to the special treats to be found inside. I could always count on them to arrive the minute I stepped back inside after putting out the good stuff.

They were doing great, until a late cold snap came along, and I never saw them again. Both Eastern Bluebirds and Carolina Wrens seem to experience rises and falls in their numbers here in SW Ohio. After several mild winters, the populations rise, then we have a bad winter and they suffer a massive die off. I'm afraid last year's birds succumbed, and so far, a new pair has yet to move in. I really miss them, too. They sing most of the year, and they always liven up a winter walk in the woods.

"Calling all Carolina Wrens: KatDoc is serving up the 'dough again. If you come by, she'll even toss in some nice protein snacks, to go with the fatty ones." [I hope they hear me.]

. . .

Word of the Day - Dingle

A dingle is a deep, narrow, wooded valley, also known as a dell. Origin unknown. Not to be confused with "dingleberry," a term we used in vet school for the stuff clinging to the back end of a sheep or goat.

Can Dogs See Photos?

Julie Zickefoose’s post on Thursday, January 18, “Alpha Bird,” told the tale of an amusing incident between her dog, Chet Baker, and her macaw, Charlie. In the comments, she noted that Chet “won't look at the pictures on the computer screen, but he turns his head when I try to show them to him. Charlie, on the other hand, loves to look at pictures of himself and people he knows. It's a difference in brain organization between birds and dogs, I would guess.”

That stimulated a question from Sara: “I've wondered if dogs can see an image clearly on the computer screen; my dog won't look either. Any idea? KatDoc are you out there ?”

I punted a quick answer in Julie’s comment section, but since then, have fleshed out a more detailed response.

Over the years, my own dogs and cats have noticed rapid motion on the TV, and my cat Dixie comes running to investigate the sounds when I play DVDs with a lot of bird calls and songs, but in general, my experiences with my pets echo conventional wisdom. They won’t look at pictures, watch TV, or pay attention to their reflection in a mirror.

I was always taught that dogs couldn’t see photographs or images on TV or computer monitors, that they couldn’t grasp a two dimensional image and convert it into a recognizable object. That ability was thought to be limited to primates and birds. (Aside: My own thought is that for dogs, sense of smell is much more important than vision when it comes to object recognition. Since photos and TV pictures don’t include smell-o-vision, dogs don’t experience those images like they do the real live thing.)

A study released in November of 2007 busts that myth wide open. A research group led by Friederike Range, Dept. of Neurobiology and Cognition Research, University of Vienna, Austria, studied the ability of dogs to recognize computer images.

Here’s what they did: First, they taught four dogs to discriminate between photographs of dogs or photos of landscapes on a computer monitor, using 40 different pictures of each type. They rewarded the dogs with a food treat each time they selected a dog picture instead of a landscape. Then, they conducted a two-part experiment.

In part one, they asked the test dogs to choose between pictures of landscapes or dogs, but this time they used new photos, not the ones the dogs had been trained on. The dogs were able to correctly select the dog pictures, demonstrating that they recognized the category differences.

Next, the researchers tried to trick their subjects by showing them new dog photos superimposed over familiar landscape pictures. When asked to choose between “new dog/old landscape” versus “no dog/new landscape,” the dogs chose the pictures that contained dogs.

So, according to this study, not only can dogs see a two-dimensional image, they can learn to sort those images into categories.

Cool, huh?

. . .

Word of the Day:

argillaceous Clay-like; of, relating to, or containing clay or clay minerals. From the Latin argilla. Argil means clay, especially potter's clay.

"You might say my jeans are dirty after pottery class, but I prefer to call them argillaceous."

True Toxicology Tales

Thought you might like to know, the things I write about in my toxicology posts really do happen. Yesterday, I had a panicked phone call from an owner whose dog had just eaten a whole pack of gum. Yes, it was Orbit sugar-free gum containing xylitol as the artificial sweetener.

Loyal readers of this blog will remember the Toxicology Tuesday report on xylitol, a sugar alcohol rapidly increasing in popularity as a low-cal alternative to sugar in gums, mints, and available in bulk for home baking. Luckily, my client was aware of the dangers, and called me the minute she discovered what her dog had done.

Taffy is a 20 lb mixed breed dog who apparently has craving for minty-fresh breath. The owner had come home, dropped her purse on the floor, and gone upstairs for "just a minute." When she came back down, she found Taffy had stuck her nose into the bottom of her purse to find the gum hidden inside. There was not a trace of debris on the floor, and only one stick left in the pack. The owner knew that two pieces had previously been removed, so simple math meant that our culprit had ingested 11 sticks of the 14 stick pack. (Two to four sticks would be toxic in a dog Taffy's size.) She had her dog in our hospital within 45 minutes of finding the evidence.

Our first step was to induce vomiting, something I generally do with oral hydrogen peroxide. It usually works pretty quickly, but it took three doses before Taffy would give me the gum back. I counted 10 wrappers, so I felt certain we had gotten most of the gum out of her stomach. We checked her blood sugar, drew baseline lab work for her liver enzymes, and started her on IV fluids with dextrose, to keep her blood sugar up.

This morning, Taffy was doing well, her blood sugar holding at 100 (normal). Because I closed at noon, she went on to a 24 hour facility for continued care this weekend, but things are looking good so far. Aside from severe hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) Taffy's other risk is for hepatic necrosis, or death of her liver tissue, which can take up to 72 hours to see, so she's not out of the woods yet.

If you have to have a poisoning case, this is the kind you want to have: An alert owner, who recognized that her dog ate something potentially bad and brought her in right away, the recovery of the majority of the toxin, and a dog who is (so far) responding to supportive care.

So please, dog lovers out there, cross your fingers, say a prayer, or wish on a lucky star that Taffy does well. She is a sweet dog, in the process of being adopted from a dog rescue group by a lovely lady, with a cute little boy and another dog-sister who is already in love with her new friend. And, do me a favor - put the xylitol gum in an upper cabinet right now.

My Spark Bird

For those of you who might not be familiar with all the birding ins and outs, a "spark bird" is the bird that got you into birding, that sparked your interest and got you hooked into this crazy hobby/sport/avocation.

For most people, it is something big and dramatic, like a Pileated Woodpecker or a Great Blue Heron. Or, it is something rare, mysterious, or unusual. For me, it was sparrows, often disparagingly called LBBs (Little Brown Birds) or LBJs (Little Brown Jobs.)

I mark my transition from "passive" birder (keeping the bird feeders filled and watching them from my window) to active birder to the year 1994. That winter, I decided to start sorting out all the LBBs into their respective species, instead of calling them all "some kind of sparrow."

Most people curse sparrows, as they are small, brown, and tend to hide in the tall grass when you want to see them, so identifying them can be tough. With a little bit of work, I began to sort out the LBBs in my yard. As it turned out, some of those sparrows were (House) Finches and (Carolina) Wrens, and were not sparrows at all.

The bird that grabbed me and made me want more was the White-crowned Sparrow. Look at this guy:

How could you not love a bird like this? Sharp black and white striped head, crisp clean shirt-front, pink bill, doesn't he look ready to go to a formal party? You can't tell it from this photo, but Zonotrichia leucophrys is larger than your average, everyday sparrow, too: 7" long as compared to 6.25" for the common Song Sparrow or 5.5" for the teeny Chipping Sparrow. That doesn't sound like a lot of difference, but you can really see it in a group of ground feeding LBBs.

Something else I love about the White-crowneds is the way they stop feeding and stand up "on their tippy-toes," making themselves very tall and thin. I think they must be searching for predators. It is a behavior I don't see in the other birds feeding around them.

For a while, I was very confused by birds like this:


Then, I started comparing them to the LBBs I knew. Clear breast, not streaky, pink bill, striped crown (ignore the colors for now) and the clincher - the same behavior of standing erect and looking all around. I finally figured this was some sort of color variation on White-crowned Sparrows, like the tan-striped versus white-striped varieties of White-throated Sparrows.

With a little research, I learned that first winter (immature) White-crowneds have a brown and tan striped pattern. Now, I see several at my feeders every winter, and have lovingly dubbed them "Brown-crowned Sparrows."

I only get White (and Brown)-crowned sparrows in the winter, so I almost never get to hear them sing. They are one of the first birds to return in late fall and one of the last to leave in spring. Like most sparrows, they love the suet dough.

"Brown-crowned Sparrow" diggin' the suet dough

Eyes bigger than the stomach.
A field mark for many birds, not just WCSP

In the spring of 1994, I took my first "warbler walk" and the sight and sound of those tiny jewels cemented my interest in birding, but that is a story for another post.

. . .

Word of the Day:

Coypu: The Coypu, Myocastor coypus, also called the nutria, is a large, semiaquatic rodent native to South America but recently introduced to other continents for fur production


*Thanks to the three ring circus of Bill of the Birds, Rondeau Ric, and Julie "Science Chimp" Zickefoose for the inspiration for day's WOTD.

Sweet Surprise

I had a notice in my mailbox on Monday that I had a parcel waiting for pick-up. Tuesday, I left at 7am and didn't arrive back home until 7pm, which meant no trip to the post office. So, I stopped in Wednesday morning on my way to work.

Looky, looky at what I found waiting there for me:

A surprise gift from a friend, who obviously knows of my obsession with The OSU Buckeyes. Isn't it great? I took off the jacket I was wearing and put this one on immediately. Although I got grief for wearing OSU gear after the debacle Monday night, I wore it all day. (Well, not while inside, but you know what I mean.) Too bad I didn't have it on Monday, maybe it would have been lucky. We need some kind of luck to survive the National Championship jinx.

A great big "Thank you!" to you, my special friend. Your thoughtfulness touched me.

Word of the Day:

Thaumaturgy: the performance of miracles, magic. From the Greek thauma, miracle and ergon, work

"I really believe it will require an act of thaumaturgy for OSU to win national football championship."

Word of the Day: Tabor

Tabor: a small drum From the Latin

The tabor is a small drum, carried suspended from the arm and struck with only one drumstick, so that the musician is free to play a pipe with the other hand. The pipe-and-tabor combination differs from a fife and drum in several ways. The most significant difference is that the fife and drum is used for military and ceremonial purposes, while the pipe-and-tabor is used for social functions, such as weddings and dances. This is what Shakespeare was referring in Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, scene 3) when he wrote, about the change that had come over a man who had fallen in love,

"...I have known when there was no music for him but the drum and the fife; and now he had rather hear the tabor and the pipe."

For more about tabors, click here.

Toxicology Tuesday, January 8

No hints this week, just a question:

Toxic or Not?

Here's a close-up photo to help you:

And, even closer:

Yep, that's right, we're not talking about the seeds here (which are safflower seeds, by the way) but the mold that is growing on them. And the answer is, most likely TOXIC.

This is a lesson from my own backyard. Last winter, I left a lid off the metal garbage can where I store bird seed, and it got wet. I didn't notice, and popped the lid back on. As the contents of the can got lower, I dumped fresh seed on top, never noticing the developing toxic stew at the bottom of the can. Finally, one day, I scooped out a bunch of seeds and noticed they were discolored. Upon further investigation, I discovered the mold. Yuck!

I started to dump the can in a corner of the yard when I realized that my opportunistic dogs would surely discover this bounty and feast on it. Bad idea. I gathered up what seed I had already spilled on the ground and put it all in the garbage. Come spring, I thoroughly scrubbed and bleached the can before using it again.

Molds are crazy things, a real mixed blessing and curse of Nature. Some of them give us wine and cheese and penicillin. And, some of them can kill us. I don't know precisely which mold this was, but I am guessing some species of Aspergillus, a ubiquitous environmental mold, and one commonly found in various grains.

Moldy corn was discovered to be the culprit in an outbreak of fatal liver disease in dogs in 1959, which was termed hepatitis X back then. It was similar to cases in cattle and swine which had eaten moldy feed. Further study revealed aflatoxins from Aspergillus to be the cause. More recently, in December of 2005, there were several outbreaks of liver failure among dogs which was traced back to aflatoxin contamination of one brand of dog food. (This is not the same thing as the big, multi-brand pet food recall from last year.)

More than 100 dogs died of liver failure from the 2005 episode. Clinical signs are vague - anorexia, lethargy, and vomiting - the same as a hundred other diseases. Later, dogs develop jaundice (icterus = yellowing of the skin and mucous membranes) and blood in the stool or vomitus. Many victims suffer an acute death before developing any signs. Treatment is supportive, and fatality is high. There is no antidote.

I have never seen this particular problem, but I did see two dogs from the same family who got into the garbage and ate moldy cream cheese. The owners had been away and returned to find one dog having severe seizures. We began treating it, but the dog had such severe brain damage it didn't survive. The owners went home, then returned with the second dog, who had just started having seizures as well. It was then they found the cream cheese container. With supportive care, we were able to save the second dog. Why did these dogs have seizures instead of liver failure? I'm guessing it was a different kind of mold.

Take home lesson from today's subject: Don't feed any moldy foods to any animals, and if you do have bird seed, cream cheese, or other foods get moldy, be sure to dispose of it where your pets can't find it.