Monthly Archives: December 2017

Young red-tailed hawk vs. the ice

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It’s a bright, cold morning just after the first real snow of the season. The chill gives your hunger an edge, but you have a plan: sit on the trash can and wait for the squirrels to come to you.

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This perch is perhaps not entirely suited to your dignity, but it is hardly your fault that your fuzzy-tailed food likes to hang out in the garbage. They have chewed a hole in the side of the trash bin for easier access to their scraps. You, although temporarily perched on a trash bin, are death on wings—sharp talons screaming down from the sky…

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Banding station highlights are small and fuzzy

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The sun rising behind the mist nets at the banding station.

‘Tis the season for year-end “Best of” lists, so I thought I’d do something of the sort for my 2017 banding station birds. Except it turns out that we had too many cool birds this year to fit in one blog post, so I’ll be doing a series of banding station highlights posts. First up: the small and fuzzy.

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Female Golden-crowned Kinglet

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The massive/tiny scale of ancient DNA

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Wild tuco-tuco. Photo by Anand Varma, former member of my lab; http://www.varmaphoto.com/

Take a tooth. Leave it in a cave for 5000 years. Retrieve it and examine the tooth: after all that time, those seasons passing and bacteria working away, what is left of the original animal? Not a lot; but not nothing.

There remains still some DNA from the original owner of the tooth, but degraded, fragmented into little pieces, and overwhelmingly outnumbered by the DNA of all the bacteria that have grown and reproduced and died in the tooth. Finding the DNA of the original animal would be like finding a needle in a haystack—if the haystack was really big and the needle was also a piece of hay, just slightly different from all the other hay.

And yet: we can do it.

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