Jim Cane, Author at Wild About Utah

February 6, 2014July 18, 2020

Those Howling East Winds

Wind is inevitable on a spinning planet with an atmosphere and a sun. At our latitude, westerlies prevail, but east winds do occur now and then. Locally, canyons daily exhale denser, cooler mountain air that drains into valleys. In Logan, trees blown by these canyon winds tilt westward. Occasionally, though, the whole Wasatch front is whipped by howling gales from the east, leaving behind shredded shingles, snapped tree limbs and rolled tractor-trailers. These forceful east wind events have a regional weather origin that is intensified by local topography.

It begins with a strong high-pressure cell parked over southwestern Wyoming. It’s descending dry air circulates clockwise. Somewhere to the south or southwest, a low-pressure cell is needed. The strong air pressure gradient between high and low generates a wind that races westward from Wyoming. The surging wind pours over the entire Wasatch front like water over a flat boulder in rapids. These winds then plunge down slope, blowing quickest where the descent is long, steep, and unobstructed. The down rushing air slams onto the flat benches and valley floors. In November 2011, such winds ripped Centerville with 100 MPH gusts.

Where these so-called mountain wave events blow regularly they often have names. The mistral and foehn winds howl down from the Alps, chinooks race down the Rocky Mountain Front Range, and the Santa Anas blast Southern California. The steep altitudinal descent of these parched winds compressively heats the air. A spark or flame soon transforms to a raging wildfire when fanned by a drying foehn or Santa Ana wind. Europe’s foehns are also known to spark short tempers and stress.

Perhaps the sporadic easterly gales that lash the Wasatch Front and Cache Valley deserve an evocative name too. For now, you at least know the answer to what’s blowin’ in the east wind.

Thanks to Martin Schroeder at the Utah Climate Center for insights and the stream boulder analogy

This is Linda Kervin for Bridgerland Audubon Society.

Credits:
Diurnal Utah Winds Image: Courtesy Utah Division of Air Quality
Surface Air Pressure 1 Dec 2011 Image: Courtesy Utah Climate Center, USU
Text: Jim Cane

Additional Reading:

Martin Price, Alton Byers, Donald Friend, Thomas Kohler, Larry W. Price. 2013. Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions. Univ of California Press. pages 7174. https://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Geography-Physical-Human-Dimensions/dp/0520254317

Mesmerizing live wind map of US at: https://hint.fm/wind/

Forecast of damaging east winds along the Wasatch Front, end of November 2011, https://www.ksl.com/?sid=18282965

How Chinooks Occur, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_wind#How_Chinooks_occur

December 5, 2013March 4, 2018

Defining the Great Basin

Willow Creek North of Wells, NV. Sagebrush at mid-distance. Route of the California Trail used by pioneers. — Willow Creek north of Wells, NV.
Sagebrush at mid-distance.
Route of the California Trail
used by pioneers.

Courtesy & Copyright
Jim Cane, Photographer

Lupines amid sagebrush
north of Wells, NV.
Ruby Mountains in background
Courtesy & Copyright
Jim Cane, Photographer

Map delineating the Great basin
Courtesy Wikimedia, KMusser, Artist
Ref: wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin

Lupines amid sagebrush north of Wells, NV. Ruby Mountains in background — Willow Creek north of Wells, NV.
Sagebrush at mid-distance.
Route of the California Trail
used by pioneers.

Courtesy & Copyright
Jim Cane, Photographer

Lupines amid sagebrush
north of Wells, NV.
Ruby Mountains in background
Courtesy & Copyright
Jim Cane, Photographer

Map delineating the Great basin
Courtesy Wikimedia, KMusser, Artist
Ref: wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Basin

The Great Basin is aptly named. Twice the size of Kansas, it stretches from the watersheds of the Columbia and Snake rivers south to that of the Colorado, and from the crests of the Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades eastward to the Wasatch front. The Western explorer John Fremont coined its name in 1845. The rivers and streams of the region that Fremont had seen all ended in sinks, marshes or lakes. None flowed to the Pacific Ocean. He confirmed this on meeting Joseph Walker at Mountain Meadows in Utah. Walker had traveled more of the basin’s western margins, dispelling rumors of a river traversing the Sierra Nevada. Precipitation that falls in the Great Basin stays in the Great Basin; water leaves only as vapor. This is the hydrographic Great Basin.

How else to view the vast region between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada? Geologists speak of the “Basin and Range Province”, so named for its valleys and the towering ranks of north-south mountain ranges that march across the landscapes of Nevada and edges of adjacent states. Unlike the upthrust Rockies and Sierra Nevada, Earth’s crust in the Great Basin appears to be spreading, to be pulling apart. The tilted escarpments of the Wasatch front are the easternmost evidence of this crustal deformation that has built the Basin and Range Province.

Botanists delimit the Great Basin by the hardy flora that clothes this rugged landscape. Great Basin plants tolerate freezing winters and parched summers, and in the valleys, soils of varying salinity. The so-called Sagebrush Ocean fills many of the basins, as do other shrubs, such as shadscale and greasewood. Upslope, these give way to juniper woodlands, often mixed with piñon pine. This floristic Great Basin reaches eastward to central Utah and the Wasatch front, beyond which trees and other plants of the Rockies make their appearance.

The boundaries of all three concepts for the Great Basin — hydrographic, geologic and floristic — largely coincide. Each recognizes the distinctive attributes of the Great Basin that set it apart from neighboring regions. The Great Basin is readily recognizable to the trained eye, whether looking at satellite images, river courses, or the native plant communities encountered on a simple walk.

Credits:
Images: Jim Cane
Map: Courtesy Wikimedia, KMusser, Artist, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
Text: Jim Cane

Additional Reading

Frémont, John Charles. 1845. Report of the exploring expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the year 1842 and to Oregon and North California in the years 1843 – 44. Printed by order of the Senate of the United States , Gales & Seaton, 693 pages. –available as a Google eBook scanned from the original published book Grayson, Donald K. 1999. The desert’s past : a natural prehistory of the Great Basin. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C., 356 pages. –an exceptionally readable, thorough and authoritative overview of the Great Basin, with many maps, photographs and illustrations.https://books.google.com/books?id=W8ICAAAAMAAJ

Intermountain Regional Herbarium Network. searchable plant database representing multiple holdings of herbaria at universities in Utah and Nevada, with maps, images and more https://swbiodiversity.org/seinet/projects/index.php?proj=10

McPhee, John. 1981. Basin and Range. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, New York. 215 pages. –the first of the author’s many engaging books about geology. https://www.amazon.com/Basin-Range-John-McPhee/dp/0374516901

November 7, 2013March 4, 2018

Bird Gizzards and the Old Grind

Chicken Gizzard
Copyright 2013 Jim Cane
Naturally polished dinosaur gastrolith found near Duschene Utah
Copyright Rick Dunne, Photographer

You may think of “the old grind” as your workweek, but from a dietary perspective, the old grind links your holiday turkey with dinosaurs. Before making gravy this Thanksgiving, find the densely muscular organ amid your turkey’s giblets. This is the turkey’s gizzard which preceded the living bird’s intestine. In its tough-walled gizzard, a bird mechanically breaks down hard or tough foodstuffs like we mammals use our molars. Reducing chunks to crumbs gives digestive enzymes the large surface areas needed to efficiently digest food.

Being toothless, birds must swallow most nuts, seeds, bugs and mollusks whole. In the gizzard, these items are churned, crushed and ground up, aided by ingested sand, grit or small stones called “gastroliths”. A turkey’s gizzard squeezes with twice the force of our own jaws. At 400 pounds per square inch, this force shatters acorns and even hickory nuts. The gizzard works like the ball mills used in mining, wherein heavy rotating iron drums loaded with steel balls pulverize rock ore. Like a gem tumbler, though, the gizzard eventually smooths and polishes its gastroliths. Having thus lost their utility, these stony gastroliths are regurgitated.

Gastroliths did not originate with birds, Continue reading “Bird Gizzards and the Old Grind”

October 3, 2013March 21, 2022

William Swainson and His Namesake Hawk and Thrush

Swainsons Hawk, Buteo swainsoni, Photo Copyright 2010 Eric Peterson — Swainson’s Thrush
*Catharus ustulatus*
Copyright © 2004 Jim Bailey

Swainsons Hawk
*Buteo swainsoni*
Copyright © 2010 Eric Peterson

What links this melodious thrush of northern Utah forests
(Kevin Colver: Song Birds of Yellowstone)
with a hawk that soars over farms, range lands and prairies in western North America?

Both Swainson’s Thrush and Swainson’s Hawk are named after the 17th century self-taught British naturalist, William Swainson. He was a contemporary of John James Audubon. Like Audubon, Swainson was a passionate solo collector, taxidermist and skilled illustrator of birds. Unlike Audubon, Swainson’s single intensive field expedition took him far to the south, sailing to eastern Brazil. During his two year stay, he amassed a collection of 20,000 animal specimens, including 760 bird skins. Swainson ultimately named 20 species new to science. Although he never visited North America, he nonetheless co-authored an encyclopedic four volume treatise about North America’s fauna.

Swainson’s Hawk and Swainson’s Thrush share another similarity, this one biological. Both birds migrate long distances to escape winter’s cold and hunger. Swainson’s Thrush winters in balmy tropical forests of South America. Swainson’s Hawk soars farther, all the way to the arid Argentine pampas. There this large slender hawk dines mostly on big flying insects, particularly grasshoppers and even dragonflies. Swainson’s Hawks migrate in groups, often along regular corridors. Every September, Hawkwatch volunteers and hardy birders have reported hundreds of Swainson’s Hawks rocketing past the Wellsville Mountains of northern Utah, flying amid several thousand migrating raptors of all kinds.

Birds migrate to avoid the snow, cold and lean times of northern winters. Migration poses natural risks, of course. Hawkwatch ornithologists also suspect that widespread use of two deadly organophosphate insecticides on Argentine crops kills many insect-eating Swainson’s Hawks. The plow, pavement and subdivisions have also reduced this hawk’s historic northern range, especially in California. In addition, foolish people still shoot this relatively tame hawk, not caring that its diet of rodents and grasshoppers benefits our farmers and ranchers.

Professional disappointments drove the quarrelsome William Swainson south as well, to New Zealand, where he died in anonymity. His namesakes, Swainson’s Hawk and Swainson’s Thrush, live on to cross and recross the equator in pursuit of perpetual summer and the feast it provides.

This is Linda Kervin for Bridgerland Audubon Society.

Credits:
Pictures: Swainson’s Hawk, Courtesy and Copyright © 2010 Eric Peterson, as found on utahbirds.org
Swainson’s Thrush, Courtesy and Copyright © 2004 Jim Bailey, as found on utahbirds.org
Bird Recordings: Kevin Colver https://wildstore.wildsanctuary.com/collections/special-collections
Text: Jim Cane, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Voice: Linda Kervin https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/

Additional Reading:

Swainson’s Hawk, Fieldguide, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, State of Utah, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=buteo%20swainsoni

Swainson’s Hawk, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swainsons_Hawk/overview

Swainson’s Thrush, Fieldguide, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, State of Utah, https://fieldguide.wildlife.utah.gov/?species=catharus%20ustulatus

Swainson’s Thrush, All About Birds, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Swainsons_Thrush/