JOURNAL OF THE HAMILTON NATURALISTS ' CLUB The massive (and threatened) White Oak in Bronte. See Paul O'Hara's article on page165 for more information. Photo courtesy of Paul O'Hara.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
was leading an HNC hike on the north shore of Cootes Paradise when the group noticed something odd. There, caught in the burs of a Great Burdock (Arctium lappa), was a dead American Goldfinch. Presumably, the goldfinch had landed on the burdock to eat its seeds, and became entangled. The phenomenon of North American birds being killed by burdock has been documented since at least 1909 (Needham 1909), but normally involves very small birds. The main victims are kinglets, but also hummingbirds and gnatcatchers (e.g.: Kubisz 1989; Brewer 1994). We were surprised that a bird as large as a goldfinch—which, at around 13 grams, would be twice as heavy as a kinglet or gnatcatcher (Sibley 2000)—could succumb. Sure, burdock is annoying, but outright dangerous? McNicholl (1994), however, lists 12 species known to have been caught in burdock. As expected, small birds were the most frequent victims (three records of dead Ruby-throated Hummingbirds; thirteen of dead kinglets). However, he noted five records of dead gold-finches, and they weren’t even the heaviest species captured. That hon-our belonged to a Solitary Vireo (which would weigh around 16 grams) found dead in Ottawa sometime around 1985. Hamilton birders, for better or worse, can even do one better. Barb Charlton and Rob Dobos report finding a dead Barn Swallow in burdock! A Barn Swallow would top the scales at around 19 grams, over three times as heavy as a kinglet. They are stocky birds, with very strong wing muscles; not the kind of bird one would expect to get stuck on a bur. And then there’s the further question of what a swallow would be doing down on burdock to begin with… The fact that birds as large as swal-lows and goldfinches can be killed by burdock suggests that the risk to really small birds (especially kinglets) may be greater than we realize. Even mam-mals are not safe; Little (1925) found a dead bat in a burdock patch! We would be very interested in hear-ing from other HNC members who find dead birds (or bats) on burdock during their outings (send observations
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.410 | 0.110 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".