MudNCrud Forums
Climbing and ... Climbing => Masters of Mud -- Pinnacles => Topic started by: waldo on February 03, 2012, 09:14:57 AM
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I had business in Salinas last night. I went early and stopped by the West Side to take my rope for a walk. The moon was already high at 3:00 and was perfectly framed by Machete and Squareblock. Two condors patrolled the air above - just making sure the moon stayed safe, I guess.
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Are you sure there weren't scheming on how to eat it?
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Moon's not made of electronic and metal trash so the condors don't want it.
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I had business in Salinas last night. I went early and stopped by the West Side to take my rope for a walk. The moon was already high at 3:00 and was perfectly framed by Machete and Squareblock. Two condors patrolled the air above - just making sure the moon stayed safe, I guess.
nice
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SWEET!
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Moon's not made of electronic and metal trash so the condors don't want it.
It's actually pretty tragic to see condor nestlings in critical condition that need to be evacuated from nest sites because their guts are full of microtrash... The adults mistake the trash for bone chips (which provide calcium supplements to nestlings and aid in bone development).
It's a sad testament about how much junk human beings leave littered all over the landscape.
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So it's bone chips then. I'd been unable to find a good explanation for why they do that. A lot of articles seems to have a "inconclusive reasons" arguement (though I havent looked into it since three or do years ago when I was talking about it in my classroom.)
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Yeah, bone fragments is the current understanding on the subject. A lot of birds will also occasionally eat small pebbles and bits of rock to aid in digestion of food... The pebbles help grind up food material in birds' gizzards, then are expelled along with food waste. When condors (and other birds) mistake pieces of junk for pebble or bone, the micro trash often gets stuck in their GI tracts and accumulates over time, especially for nestlings that are smaller and unable to pass the trash effectively.
The thought is that back in the Pleistocene when condors were really numerous - and when there was a lot of megafauna on the landscape like bison, elk, deer, antelope, bears, wolves, etc. - there were a huge amount of big carcasses on the landscape, and lots of bone chips accessible to the birds. So even now condors have an instinctual urge to consume bone chips for calcium, bone development, and food processing.
When performing nest entries, a lot of the trash I've seen does indeed look similar to natural stuff: pieces of plastic, metal, ceramic, and paper products that look quite like bone fragments, mammal hide, etc.