People find the darndest things – first confirmed barn owl for Manitoba this Century

[Note: This blog contains descriptions and images that may not be suitable for sensitive individuals.] 

So imagine my surprise in mid-December when a report of an expired (and frozen) barn owl from a farm near Elie, Manitoba arrived in my e-mail inbox from Manitobabirds (a birding listserve)! The importance of the find was not lost on its discoverer, Mr. Dick Steppler, so he collected the bird and brought it to Jim Duncan of Manitoba Conservation. Jim has been banding and studying various owl species, particularly great gray and hawk owls for, well, probably longer than he’d care to admit, and has published several books and lectured extensively on these species. So Jim was the logical choice to notify about the barn owl, and, fortunately for the Museum, he has always been a great supporter of our collections, recognizing their value as both a repository and as a research tool. Our bird collection would soon contain Manitoba’s first record of barn owl for this century and the first in over 18 years!

But before it came to the Museum, it was off to Dr. Terry Galloway of the Entomology Department of the University of Manitoba. Among his many areas of expertise, Terry is an authority on external bird parasites, and because finding barn owls is so unusual, it was important to try to get as much information as possible from the specimen. Despite his careful inspection, this owl seemed free of external parasites.

I went to pick up the bird from his office and brought it back to the Museum. Under my and (mostly) Janis Klapecki’s guidance (our Collections Specialist), the bird would be prepared as a study skin by Laurel McDonald. Laurel is a wonderfully skilled volunteer who has been processing bird specimens for us over the last few years. Preparing a study skin is different from taxidermy, although it uses some of the same techniques; it is the finished product that is different. With the number of bird specimens we hold (over 6300), it would be far too time consuming and take too much storage space to create taxidermy mounts for each one.

The barn owl was found frozen, but had been thawed a couple of times, once by Mr. Steppler to clean and reposition the bird, and another time by Terry in order to wash it for external parasites. Because there was no certainty as to when the owl had expired, we had no idea of what condition it would be in or whether it could even be made into specimen. If it had been outside a long time, it could either have decomposed substantially or it might have “freeze-dried.” In either case, there would be little we could do but make a skeleton.

To our surprise, the owl was in quite good condition (for a dead bird!), meaning it probably had not been long on the ground before it was found, but just long enough to freeze. To make the study skin, the bird is thawed, an incision is made along the belly, and the skin is peeled back from the body and over the head to be turned inside out. The body, including skeleton is removed with only the lower leg bones, some wing bones and the skull remaining with the skin. The skin is then turned right-side-out, stuffed with cotton and stiffened with a wooden rod to be arranged to lie flat on its back. The vital organs are examined for internal parasites (we found none), checked for general condition, stomach contents examined (although this specimen had none), and the sex organs are checked to determine gender and measured to assess condition. We saved some tissue for future DNA work, in case that is required, and the bones not left with the skin will be cleaned by dissection and in the “bug tank”, a special sealed treatment area that houses beetle larvae that will eat the flesh off the bones to make a clean skeleton.

Barn owls, like many birds, are difficult to sex externally with any confidence. Because this bird was quite buffy with relatively large spots on its breast, we were pretty sure it was a female, but couldn’t be positive. In most birds of prey the females are larger than males. In barn owls, females are bigger on average, but there is considerable overlap in measurements between the sexes. Dissection conclusively determined that this owl was a female. Plumage also suggested that it was a hatch year bird, meaning that it was under one year of age when it died. Although the bird was very emaciated (it had no fat at all), it seemed otherwise in pretty good shape and likely died of starvation. There was some indication of trauma and bruising on the lower right leg, but the bone didn’t appear to be broken, so it didn’t seem enough to explain its death.  There were two holes in the skin of the right wing that we initially thought might be due to decomposition after death, but because the rest of the bird seemed in good shape, these might have been indicative of injury – although there was no evidence of bleeding so these are likely to be postmortem. The exact cause of death will remain unknown.

Stay on the lookout for the unusual any time you are outside. You never know what exciting contributions you might make to our province’s natural history. A special thanks to the sharp-eyed Elie resident, Dick Steppler, who recognized the value of his discovery. Generations of researchers can now benefit from his thoughtful addition to the Museum collections.

For many Manitobans, the only connection we might have with Arizona involves a certain hockey team that left Winnipeg in 1996 for warmer climes. There are, though, other connections that involve organisms from the natural world other than coyotes as mascots!

I recently returned from a family vacation to southern Arizona where we were hoping to catch up with some of the local bird and lizard specialties, as well as enjoy the truly incredible environment that Sonoran desert has to offer.

Although we were a little early because of the mid-March timing forced by the school break, we had several species of hummingbirds, and I finally managed to see roadrunner – a “jinx” bird that I had missed on previous trips.

So the Arizona/Manitoba connection runs deep on many fronts. Much as humans find a way to chase a puck in the frozen north and the Phoenix desert, our sparrows manage to raise a family in the north every summer and eke out a living in the desert in winter. But unlike the puck chasers, the sparrows haven’t decided to move down to Arizona permanently.

A recent web-based discussion about the identification of an odd-coloured bluebird reminded me of a similar odd bluebird in the Museum collections. There are three bluebird species in North America: Eastern, Western, and Mountain. Contrary to what one might expect from their names, Manitoba is home to the Eastern and Mountain Bluebird, the Western being found in Canada only on the other side of the Rockies from us.

What does this have to do with Museum collections? Because of that amazing variation, the specimens held in a museum are very useful for comparison and the museum collections themselves are a good place to deposit unusual specimens that might need a harder look later. Bluebirds are a good case in point. In the late 1960’s, an ardent bluebird worker in Manitoba, John Lane, found a very strange-looking male bird at one of his nest boxes. Its coloration suggested a hybrid between an Eastern and a Mountain Bluebird. Hybrids among bluebirds were not known at this time, and this was rare enough that he got in contact with the Museum and the unusual step was taken to collect the apparent hybrid, its Mountain Bluebird mate, and raise the young in captivity (for more details, see an article by John Lane in The Blue Jay, 1969, pages 18-21).

The hybrid male bird is certainly strangely-coloured. It has the quality of blue of an Eastern Bluebird, but rather than the typical rusty-orange throat and breast of this species, these areas are mostly blue, similar to the pattern of a male Mountain Bluebird. There are, however, some dashes of reddish mixed in. A look at the back shows the difference in blue colour of the Mountain Bluebird and the possible hybrid and Eastern birds.

The bluebird species also vary in size, although with overlap. Once the potential hybrid was at the Museum, measurements could be made to see where it might fit. As an example, wing length (measured officially as ‘wing chord’) for male Easterns ranges from 95-105 mm and for male Mountains ranges from 108-121 mm. The hybrid’s wing length, at 104.5 mm is at the high end of Eastern, but nowhere near the Mountain Bluebird size range. This same pattern holds for other measurements.

One possibility not considered by Lane is that the odd-coloured bluebird might be a hybrid of Western and Mountain. Western Bluebirds have a blue throat with an orange breast, and are slightly larger than Eastern Bluebirds, making the measurements fit that species. The blue breast of the hybrid would be the possible Mountain parent contribution. One issue with this is that Western Bluebirds usually have a rusty-orange patch on their shoulder or back, absent on the possible hybrid.

There is one more way that the hybridization question might be resolved with the Museum specimen. Dried skins, like these birds, can provide samples of DNA, the molecules that are the instructions for building and operating living things. Just as human DNA samples can identify a particular person or determine to whom they are related, animal DNA can be used to identify parentage. Perhaps a biologist interested in bluebirds will one day run a sample of DNA and help to solve which species might have hybridized to make our strange specimen.

But without the specimen in a museum collection, we would never have the chance to check.

We recently received a request for a few feathers off of a single specimen of Ivory Gull (Pagophila eburnea) collected north of The Pas in 1926, the only specimen we have of this species. The Ivory Gull is a High Arctic breeder that has made an appearance in Manitoba only about a dozen times in the last 100 years. The species is listed as Endangered in Canada and its populations are declining. A research group is examining levels of mercury and stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in feathers to investigate the possible role of heavy metal contamination and changes in foraging behaviour in Ivory Gull decline. The Manitoba Museum specimen is one of only about 150 specimens from Canada in all the museums of North America, and its age makes it particularly valuable for reconstructing historic levels of contamination and isotopes. Who could have predicted the value of this Museum specimen for conservation of the species when it was collected those many years ago?

By sharing information on Museum rarities with researchers who can pool data from the few specimens available in collections from around the world, we learn more about the biology of the organism, making the specimen more ‘valuable’ in terms of information and helping conservation efforts. The Museum ends up with another story to tell about its collection and about the animals themselves. Science, the Museum, and, most importantly, the animal will all win from this exchange.

Nature generally can be understood through patterns. Unique observations, like a rare gull found north of The Pas in 1926, are curiosities, but can’t contribute very much to the bigger picture as an isolated event. Even the proverbial apple clunking onto Newton’s head, though important as a unique event, only becomes truly valuable when its act of falling towards Earth can be generalized to explain why other things also fall.

This helps to explain why the Museum has, when possible, more than one example of a species, and continues to grow collections through active collecting. Just as a single letter is more as a part of a word, or a word is more meaningful when put into a sentence, a specimen becomes more in the context of a collection. A particular specimen does have value in and of itself as a record of occurrence in a single place at a single moment (called a voucher), or sometimes even has monetary value. But several specimens from different places collected at different times provide a more complete story of species variability, distribution, biology, and, as in the case of Ivory Gull mercury levels, how these might have changed over time and space. Each individual provides a data point, and an important one, but the real value comes from the collection as a whole. And a new specimen added to the collection today, while not necessarily individually significant right now, might be so 100 years from now, just as the Ivory Gull specimen collected in 1926 is valuable today.

Richard Fortey (a paleontologist at The Natural History Museum, London) suggested that natural history museums are the archives of the Earth, an apt metaphor. Through their collections, museums document individual “events” as specimens, which together tell the story of how our natural world changes over time. The Manitoba Museum plays this critical role as natural history archive for the province. Specimens old and new are together a feather in our collective cap.

Just outside my office on the 4th floor of the Museum is a big, hairy outlaw that can stare anybody down. It’s the mounted head of one of the original ‘outlaw buffalo’ of the Pablo/Allard herd of Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), the most significant of the private herds purchased by the Canadian government that helped to bring these magnificent animals back from the brink of extinction.

Michel Pablo rounded up his bison in Montana, loaded them onto boxcars and sent over 700 to Canada between 1907 and 1914. However, there were a few individuals that were too wild and managed to escape. In early 1911, in what was billed by the The New York Times in January that year as “the last big buffalo hunt in the history of the world,” Pablo hunted down and shot these ‘outlaw’ bison. The metal plaque on the Museum hallway head clearly identifies it as a member of Pablo’s ‘outlaw’ herd.

I mentioned the Museum bison head mount to a volunteer in Geology and Paleontology, Dr. Jim Burns, who has a fascination with Winnipeg history. He brought to my attention a photograph he had researched that showed 11 bison heads lined up on Main Street in 1911, apparently from that famous last hunt by Pablo (see Burns, J.A. 2010. Edward Darbey, taxidermy, and the last buffaloes. Manitoba History, 63:40-41). It seems that a number of these animals had made their way to a well-respected Winnipeg taxidermist, Edward Darbey. Born in St. Thomas, Ontario in 1872, Darbey came to Winnipeg at the age of 15. In 1898 he purchased the taxidermy shop on Main Street that is the backdrop to the bison skulls in the photo. By 1902, Darbey had been appointed as the “Official Taxidermist of the Manitoba Government,” an odd title by today’s standards, but one that made sense at the time when animal mounts were frequently used to decorate public buildings.

The Pablo bison were hunted in early 1911, the bison head and taxidermy shop photo was dated by Dr. Burns to around mid-1911, and there is record of a Winnipeg auction of bison head mounts and capes in late November, 1911. According to the plaque on our Museum mount, it became property of the City of Winnipeg in 1912, a reasonable date to link it with the somewhat gruesome Main Street display.

So our big, hairy ‘outlaw’ bison mount is 100 years old this winter. This could be considered a depressing anniversary of the killing of some of the last ‘wild’ bison in North America. But for me, the old head commemorates the beginning of an incredible conservation story, the salvation of our provincial emblem and, just perhaps, an altered attitude of society towards the world around us.

Exhibits begin as the germ of an idea and often take on a life of their own. This was no different for the new Colours in Nature exhibit, now open in the TD Canada Trust Discovery Room. This space was set aside to showcase the hidden treasures of our collections that we ordinarily don’t have an opportunity to display; less that 5% of our collections are exhibited at any one time and there are many spectacular specimens that are available for research, but not generally accessible to visitors.

We (the Natural Sciences section – Botany, Geology & Paleontology, Zoology) had been thinking about ways to combine our collections for exhibit under one theme, but were looking for an additional and different angle to go along with a scientific perspective. What most makes an impact on a behind-the-scenes collection visitor? The numbers of specimens impresses, of course (we have over 150,000 natural history specimens), but it is also often the diversity of colour and beauty of what we have on the shelves that strikes a chord.

Trays of blackbirds, orioles and grosbeaks (left) and various tropical butterflies (right), some of the thousands of specimens that were examined as possible exhibition pieces.

So why not have an exhibit on colour? Initially we aimed to create a series of exhibits, each featuring a specific colour, but despite our substantial collections it just wasn’t possible to gather enough specimens of any one colour to make a significant exhibit. We decided on a single exhibit of seven cases, one each for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and one for multi-coloured specimens. Although the main impact (we hope) would be visual appreciation of the collections, panel text would tie the individual cases together under themes of where colour comes from and how different animals perceive colour. These themes are constrained by text length limits – it is surprisingly tricky to write entertaining, concise, yet meaningful text (haiku, good haiku anyhow, is tougher to write than a full-length novel, in my opinion).

Our concept was shared among other exhibit team members that include an exhibit manager (who keeps us on track and within budget), a designer, conservation and collections personnel, technical support, and programming staff. Exhibit case sizes, arrangement and lighting were determined first, all physical limitations that impact choice of specimens.

The curators have the onerous, though perhaps enviable, task of going through the collection and choosing appropriate specimens. Along with space limitations, specimens might be unsuitable for display because they are too delicate or are compromised in some way. Each choice is given a final ‘health-check’ by the collections manager through a condition report that includes a photograph; this makes certain that the specimen can withstand the rigors and risks of display and allows us to keep track of any possible deterioration during the course of the exhibition. Lighting and environmental conditions of exhibition galleries can potentially damage specimens.

Along with the designer, the curators determine the arrangement for a particular case so that the specimens show their ‘best side’ and the case as a whole is visually interesting. Because Colours is, in a sense, showing the jewels of the collections both figuratively and literally, we were seeking a jewelry display case atmosphere where the colours and vibrancy of the specimens would jump from the cases. We also wanted the colours of the various animals, minerals and plants to form an organic whole where the colours and forms would complement one another.

Conservation staff finishes the mounts and determines acceptable light levels that will not damage the specimens – all are susceptible to fading. Then curators and collection manager install the mounts,  specimens and labels, and final lighting adjustments are made by technical staff. Designed and proofed panels are wall-mounted. The end result is many hours of individual effort and teamwork.

Only the visitor can judge how successful our efforts have been, but the opportunity is there to see some splendidly brilliant specimens that provide a glimpse into the diversity of our research collections. The final tally for Colours in Nature approaches 300 specimens, and all continents but Antarctica have representatives. With the rare exception, almost all of these specimens are on exhibit for the first time.

The exhibit, I think, affirms the words of a Cindi Lauper song, “True colours are beautiful, like a rainbow” – or perhaps, as an educational institution, we would be better to quote Oscar Wilde:

“Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.”

Come by this winter and have the jewels of the natural history collections speak to your soul. Although we’d like to think you can leave with a little meaning mixed in there, too.

As summer comes to a close, I am finally getting an opportunity to go through some of my fieldwork photos. I ran across this one of a culvert that connected a large marsh with a roadside ditch along Highway 6 just south of Tan Lake  (about 30 kilometres north of St. Martin Junction).

Brook sticklebacks, like many small fishes, are an annual species, meaning that individuals born one summer are the adult breeders in the next. Very few last more than two summers. This is a huge turnover in biomass – think about that school of 8,000 fishes, and a brand new one of those every year in just that one place! This kind of turnover is very important for nutrient cycling within the ecosystem. These small fishes grow fast and eat a lot of insects and aquatic larvae, and are themselves food for larger fishes, birds and mammals.

We hear a good many frogs in spring as they call for mates, but tend not to think about them for the rest of the year as they become less noticeable. But they are there all year, and in large numbers. During my fieldwork, I hear boreal chorus frogs (Pseudacris maculata) all along Highway 6. If we take a 50 metre swath on either side of the highway to cover roadside ditches, and conservatively estimate one singing frog for every 500 square metres, that would mean 200 calling frogs for every kilometre of road. Calling frogs are male, so with equal sex ratios we have 400 chorus frogs each kilometre, or about 300,000 chorus frogs in the ditches along Highway 6 from Winnipeg to Thompson! And there are thousands of kilometres of roadside ditches all across the province.

Even if these rough estimates are off by two orders of magnitude, there are still millions of chorus frogs in Manitoba, just as there are additional millions of individuals of other species of frogs and small fishes (like brook stickleback). These under-appreciated, inconspicuous animals in our fields and forests play a huge role in maintaining a functioning environment. Our tiny fishes and frogs are living examples of when a small thing means a lot.

Seeing cats in Manitoba doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. I have one that lives in my house (and only in my house), and too many that wander around the neighbourhood doing a number on birds and getting hit by cars. And there are always cartoon cats on TV or the web like Sylvester (of Bugs Bunny fame) as he tries to capture and eat Tweety – that yellow bird’s frequent (and distorted) exclamation being the source of this blog’s title. But seeing the province’s native wild cats is quite a bit more challenging than seeing these domestic versions.

We have three wild cat species quietly slinking through our woods and fields. Two are quite rare in Manitoba and all are shy, so a special effort and/or a little luck are needed to see one. The most common is the lynx (Lynx canadensis), a Canadian shield and boreal cat, usually around 10kg with long ear tufts, a stub tail with a black tip, and a luxurious fur that has made it a staple of the trapline for centuries. Despite its relative abundance, it is infrequently seen, even by those that spend a good deal of time outdoors. The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is of similar form, but with shorter ear tufts and a striped stub tail. It is about the same size or a little larger than the lynx, but found only in the southern tenth of the province and is considered uncommon.

The most romanticized member of the cat family in Manitoba is the cougar (Puma concolor). Big males of this magnificent cat can be over 100kg, but most are smaller, and females reach about 60kg. Its status in the province was a bit of a mystery, with only vague historical records until more reliable reports began in the 1940s. But it was not until 1973 that an actual specimen was available, a small male (43kg) shot while near livestock in Stead, about 90km northwest of Winnipeg. Two others, one shot and another accidentally snared, were taken in 2004 around Riding Mountain National Park (near Grandview and Erickson). All three of these specimens are in the Museum collection. There have been several well-documented and publicized sightings since then in Plum Coulee, Duck Mountain, Lac du Bonnet, and Morden (among others).

Front views of the Turtle Mountain cougar skull with mouth closed and mouth open. Intimidating any way you look at it!

Sightings of cougars seem to be on the rise. And there are those two other smaller Manitoba wild cats, the lynx and the bobcat, that are also superb animals. So if we keep our eyes open and have a little luck, maybe more of us will soon be able to quote that cartoon canary, Tweety: “I did! I did! I did taw a puddy tat!” And those are some impressive “puddy tats.”

No, I’m not about to give a recipe for Saskatoon berry jam, but instead introduce some members of an animal group that most would never associate with Manitoba: jellyfish. Jellyfish are, of course, not fishes at all, but part of a very interesting phylum of animals called the Cnidaria [nie-dare-ee-a] that includes corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish. Some of you might remember high school biology and examining the superficially plant-like Hydra, a hydrozoan cnidarian, under a microscope. The term “jellyfish” refers to similar-looking stages of the lifecycles of various members of the Cnidaria that are not necessarily closely related.

But what, you might ask, do cnidarians (and jellyfish) have to do with Manitoba? Actually, cnidarians are incredibly common in the province, but mostly as fossils. Many species of fossil corals are known, and often make up part of the popular Tyndall stone found cladding many buildings (including the provincial legislature and The Museum). Fossil jellyfish have recently been described from rock over 440 million years old by the Museum’s paleontologist, Dr. Graham Young. These and other discoveries form an integral part of the Ancient Seas gallery that opened just last spring. This award-winning gallery, using fossils and scientific animation brings that early Manitoba to life when cnidarians were commonplace here.

We also can’t forget that Manitoba has ocean frontage! Hudson Bay is home to over 60 species of cnidarians, including several species of jellyfish. The first image in this blog, the scyphozoan jellyfish Aurelia, is a genus recorded for James Bay. Not all of these species might wash ashore along our northern coastline, but some certainly do. One of the most spectacular is Cyanea capillata, the lion’s mane jellyfish, perhaps one of the largest invertebrates by some measures. Although most individuals are smaller, some have a bell (body) reaching over 2 metres in diameter and tentacles that are over 30 metres long! Our Arctic/Subarctic Gallery has a meticulously prepared model of this species.

For a more southern taste of jellyfish, you might recall the report late last summer of a “first” record of jellyfish for the province in the Whiteshell area (southeastern Manitoba). There were reports of a bloom of small jellyfish about the size of a quarter or smaller, found in the hundreds in a couple of isolated bays of Star Lake. The species of jellyfish is Craspedacusta sowerbyi, harmless to humans, but a critter with an interesting history. It was originally described in the 1880s from ornamental water lily tanks in London, England, and thought to have come from South America. Further research suggests it is actually a Chinese species. With the popularity of aquatic ornamental plants and through other means, it had made its way to eastern North America by the early 20th century and has gradually spread throughout large portions of the United States and southern Canada. It has been regularly reported from Wisconsin and Minnesota since about 1969, so it would have seemed only a matter of time before it would turn up in Manitoba.

As it happens, this species of freshwater jellyfish was recorded by a reputable source in Star Lake and other Whiteshell area localities as early as 1972! Unfortunately, no voucher specimens were retained at that time, but the Museum was fortunate enough to obtain a small collection of this year’s bloom from Doug Collicutt. These will provide a permanent physical record of the species’ occurrence in the province.

Image: The lifecycle of Craspedacusta sowerbyi. The medusa stage, or jellyfish, is a very small part, and only occurs when water temperatures are high. Reproduced with permission of Dr. T. Peard.

The high temperatures required to produce the jellyfish stage explains why they are found only in late summer, as our lakes take a while to warm up. And it also explains why these blooms of jellyfish are so rarely seen; most of our lakes won’t normally reach the required temperatures. The species goes quietly about its business as a podocyst in winter and a polyp in summer, only very rarely encountering the conditions favourable for producing the jellyfish stage – the conditions during 1972 and 2010. Although it is known that several years can go by between blooms, jellyfish might have been produced between these dates, but the conditions are so fleeting that perhaps few jellyfish would have been produced and perhaps missed by the casual observer.

Finding freshwater jellyfish in such a frequented spot in Manitoba is exciting! Although this species is a foreign invader, research has yet to show if it harms native organisms, but one might expect it would provide at least some competition for the small water animals it eats. Regardless, its unexpected occurrence shows there remains a great deal of undiscovered animal diversity right in our own backyards. And some of these Manitoba “jellies” are preserved for study at The Manitoba Museum.

So keep your eyes open for jellyfish around your cottage this summer. If you find any,  please report them to me, Manitoba Conservation.