Not Just Birds

We saw lots of birds in Texas. I sketched a good number of them; some of those sketches will be appearing on Bird by Bird.

There were other critters out and about, though, including javelinas, deer, coyotes, and bats. Millions and millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats that emerged from the mouth of a cave mere feet below us, at a rate of about 500 per second, for ages and ages. They swirled up into the air to be picked off at random by awaiting red-tailed and Swainson’s hawks (and be summarily eaten mid-air) yet drifted off toward Austin unfazed, eventually looking like smoke.

There are some sights that defy description, verbal or pictorial. This is one of them. I offer my meager attempts knowing that nothing at all can compare with being there. Certainly nothing at all can convey the ammonia stink of twenty million bats emerging from their sleeping quarters…

West Texas Tidbits

This morning we were having side-by-side views of Brewer’s and clay-colored sparrow in the scrublands northwest of Uvalde, Texas. We arrived back this afternoon from our trip to the Texas hill country, Big Bend, and the Davis Mountains and quickly saw our familiar crows and yellow-billed magpies again — quite a change of avifauna!

Best bird of the trip: the Colima warbler. In the United States this birds is only to be found in the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park, and it takes a long hike to get to the zone where it was found. We had a long 12-and-a-half hour hike that day, but after much effort and careful listening, we caught up with the bird. This was Pica’s 700th species of bird seen in the ABA region.

Most obliging life bird ever: on the Colima hike, a Mexican jay caught up with us hoping to procure some trail mix. He followed us up a few hundred meters, and often got within several feet of us. This was my first Mexican jay ever — I wish all life birds were so accomodating!

Most amazing astronomical sight: since the Big Bend area and the Davis Mountains have the darkest skies of anywhere in the continental United States, I figured on doing some good stargazing. I saw the zodiacal light for the first time ever, but what was incredibly cool was seeing the intersection of the band formed by the zodiacal light with the Milky Way. The former follows the ecliptic, that is to say the plane of our solar system. The latter marks the plane of our galaxy. Incredible to see this intersection in the real sky rather than just on a star chart.

700?

We’re off to Texas tomorrow. We’ll be looking at birds. (We won’t be on our bikes.) If we see the golden-cheeked warbler, black-capped vireo, and Colima warbler, that will put me at 700 bird species seen in North America.

My first big birding trip was also to Texas, in February 1990, also with Bill Drummond. I was recovering from a divorce and found the focused energy a wonderful outlet. I was mesmerized by pauraques and cranes, grackles and kiskadees.

I do not intend to stop birding, but I think this may be my last big trip that involves getting on a plane to see birds…

Lots of sketches ahead; I’ll post some when we get back.

Citizen Science Is My Life

We’re off on a birding trip to Texas in a couple of days, and we’ve been frantically trying to pull things together before then. One of which is getting the Yolo County Breeding Bird Atlas project underway. This will be a five-year project to inventory the birds breeding in Yolo County to a five-kilometer grid cell resolution. Somehow I’ve ended up being the volunteer data manager for the project, the biggest chore of late being producing a set of maps for the grid cells we’re surveying this year (the maps are available at the link above).

On clear evenings I’m still hard at work making variable star observations. I am not very quick at the process yet and seem to manage only two stars or so per session, but I presume I will get more efficient over time. It is fun the morning after to enter the data, since they get posted immediately on the AAVSO website. It’s great to be able to look at a graph of the change of a star’s brightness and see your own observations pooled together with everybody else’s. Here is an example of the light curve graph for the star R Canis Minoris. My own observations are the three points at right on the graph highlighted in a purple box.

Lights Out Earth Hour

On March 29th at 8 PM local time the World Wildlife Fund is inviting everyone to turn off their lights for an hour, an Earth Hour to make a statement about energy use and climate change. What to do then? March 29th also marks the start of the 6th annual National Dark-Sky Week Celebration organized by the International Dark-Sky Association. It’s a great chance to get out and do some stargazing!

Variable Nights

I got clouded out this evening. T Tauri and Z Ursae Majoris will have to wait until another time.

With my Messier survey well under way, I have been getting started at what seems to be my next astronomical adventure. This is being a variable star observer. A variable star is, simply put, a star that varies in brightness over a period of time, whether from minutes to decades. There has been a long tradition of amateur astronomers recording data about the brightnesses of variable star — the largest organization coordinating such activities, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, dates back to 1911.

I did some variable star observing almost 10 years ago, when we were living up the mountain in Santa Barbara, and am now back into it. I enjoy looking at faint fuzzy galaxies under dark skies as much as the next observer, but in the bright skies I live under, the faint fuzzies are either a) invisible or b) dim, washed out, and completely lacking in drama. Variable star observing is quite a different path to take. It’s a lot of fun. First, there are lots of stars to follow, no matter how bright the skies are or how modest your optical equipment is. Second, I love looking at star charts, and estimating things — the standard procedure in making visual observations is to interpolate the brightness of the variable star from precise measurements of the brightness of comparison stars as printed on the star chart. Third, it’s fun to climb the skill ladder as an observer. Finally, there is lots of interesting science to learn about in the process. Even a basic question like “what are the different types of stars” is now of immediate concern.

Tomorrow night is expected to be cloudy again. Dang.

Wolverine Sighted In California

The first confirmed sighting of a wolverine in California in 30 years took place last Thursday. This was recorded by a remote camera array in the Tahoe National Forest; a link to the photo is here.

Encyclopedia of Life Opens Its Pages

Today I went to a presentation about the Encyclopedia of Life, a project to provide a set of web pages for every one of the 1.8 million species on Earth. As it turns out, the first incarnation of the site went live yesterday, and proved to be too popular for the site’s own good, their computers quickly crashing under the load — they got about 19 million hits yesterday!

The site has initially been populated with about 30,000 entries, with 25 of these being selected to serve as exemplars showing what the fully fleshed-out content will look like. They hope to have entries for all the named species within a decade.

On the way down to this presentation in San Francisco, I was able to do some public transport bigbying. From the train I saw a ring-necked pheasant, marbled godwits, willets, and a ruddy turnstone. Best of all was seeing a flock of red-masked parakeets, the birds made famous by the story of the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill.

Duck Days and a Bag of Rice

A postdoc arrived from Spain a fortnight ago. He’s working in Plant Sciences under the direction of a faculty member — Numenius is working on a project concerning climate change and agriculture with her, so he met Fernando.

Fernando’s from Madrid, where I grew up. He’s also a birder; a really, really good birder. But he doesn’t know our birds. There’s something wonderful about having a newcomer enthuse over your robins and white-breasted nuthatches (we all went out on bikes last weekend; today it’s raining hard, time to catch up on laundry).

Apparently in Spain (in Europe? Richard? ) people are now taking bags of rice — large bean bags, in effect — along with them when they’re birding to anchor their spotting scope (and long camera lens) from the car window without having to set up a tripod. Since we got handed bags of sushi rice at the California Duck Days reception on Friday night, I might just cobble this together. Might be useful on the bike, too…

Meeting Around The Moon

I’ve become quite a fan of the Clear Sky Clock. This is a set of weather forecasts for astronomers, telling when the skies will be clear and transparent. Anyway, it correctly predicted we’d have a break from clouds and rain this evening just in time for tonight’s lunar eclipse.

The eclipse had to fit in around Yolo Audubon activities though — tonight was the monthly general meeting, preceded by the dinner for the speaker. I cycled over to the dinner in downtown Davis and while riding eastward saw the moon rising with a bit of shadow nibbled out of it. I got out the binoculars to have a better look, only to discover I had to be standing right in the middle of the road to see the moon. It was a quick look.

The meeting was at 7:30 so I got to see the moon at totality. Not a prolonged look, but at least lunar eclipses are easily seen from the middle of town. After all, we saw the last one while watching quite an historic event.