19 December 07
But When Should Be The Holiday?
UC Davis researchers have calculated that the solar system is 4.568 billion years old, give or take about a million years or so. They established this figure in a study of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, comparing ratios of chromium-53 to manganese. They do not report the day of the week it all began.
17 December 07
Christmas Bird Count
Too too tired to post this last night… Yesterday Numenius and I hiked Thompson Canyon, northeast of Lake Berryessa, to the ridge and back, spending most of the day in oak woodland and about an hour and a half in chaparral, where we failed to find our target bird, sage sparrow (though it was blowing cold and hard up at the ridge by the time we got there).
My feet are not good hikers and I decided to sit out the side trip up to the spring, armed with a handy-talkie and my tangerines and a sketchbook. I had a close encounter with a pair of wrentits that kept emerging from a brush pile, swishing their long tails this way and that. I’ll post sketches later on Bird by Bird.
It was a beautiful place to hike. Too bad we had the company of some dirt bikers and guys with chain saws cutting up wood (makes hearing bushtits somewhat challenging) but were rewarded at the end by a beautiful varied thrush, one of only two seen the entire day.
We were both weary but had thought to bring along some of the Xocolatl that Linda sent; definitely the best way to revive flagging energies!
9 December 07
Hoping For A Goshawk
This afternoon we went a little hike up the ridge east of Cold Canyon. In part this was to allow us to look up Thompson Canyon on the opposite side of Putah Creek, where we will be doing our Christmas Bird Count a week from tomorrow. It is evident it will be quite a hike next week. Our target birds include sage sparrow and pileated woodpecker. On the way back we stopped at the co-op, ran into Laura D. who said that one year a while back when she did Thompson Canyon they saw a goshawk. Maybe we’ll have similar luck.
8 November 07
Bane of Rhythms
By now most Americans have realized that daylight saving time here ended last Sunday morning, a week later than what has traditionally been the date for the turnover. Not soon enough for me — I view daylight saving time as, to quote Terry Pratchett, an abomination unto Nuggan. Thankfully there is now scientific evidence to support such a view: a recent study indicates that the twice-annual time shift disrupts human circadian rhythms for many weeks after each event.
25 October 07
Comet 17P/Holmes
A normally inconspicuous short-period comet (it completes one orbit around the sun every 6.9 years) brightened amazingly over a few hours a couple days ago, going from magnitude 18 (visible only in very large amateur telescopes) to magnitude 2.8 (naked-eye visibility). After getting home this evening from a Yolo Audubon fundraising letter stuffing party (not to mention watching the ballgame), I had a look from out in the driveway. It was easy to spot in binoculars once I figured out I had to look up higher than I was, it appearing as a little round fuzzball against the star field in Perseus.
With the 7” telescope I could see a bright central spot in the middle of the circular fuzzball.
In mid-northern latitudes the comet is now visible in the northeast portion of the sky in the evening, around 35° high at 9 PM local time. There is a finder page linked from this page about the comet.
12 October 07
Alert To Campus Pigeons
One of my colleagues this afternoon came in the office and said he had just seen a female peregrine falcon flying overhead south of Wickson Hall where I work. He had never seen a peregrine before on campus. He later checked with Marcel upstairs who confirmed that the perry has been around campus for several weeks, and frequently roosts on top of one of the water towers on the south side of campus.
30 September 07
Butterfly Deity
Yesterday we went on a butterfly walk in the Arboretum led by the illustrious Art Shapiro. Professor Shapiro is a cult figure here; he is probably the best naturalist on campus, and traipses around his 11 butterfly study sites in central California every two weeks his only means of transport being graduate students who have been recruited as chauffeurs.
It was a gentle walk through the Arb and the family student housing garden plots to the southeast. He sees a tiny thing flitting at eight paces. “Acmon blue”. No binoculars, no net or anything. We also were introduced to the butterfly-lord technique of catching butterflies — hand goes slowly out, middle fingers scissored, and snag! — butterfly gets pinned between two fingers. My favorite butterfly learned on the walk — the pygmy blue, which is indeed tiny. And who knew that perennial pepperweed (Lepidium latifolium), which is a noxious invasive weed in California, is an excellent butterfly host and is in fact edible, in an arrugula sort of way.
20 September 07
White-crowns Return
Odd weather yesterday and today, the first rains of the season, with a thunderstorm late yesterday afternoon and a shower early in the morning here. The kitties were looking at something through the screen door to the back, and I heard a ‘slihp’ call note — it was the first white-crowned sparrow to return for the fall and winter here.
16 September 07
Turning Ecoblogging Into Data
Today was a good day for fall migrants. In the walnut tree north of the house we saw a couple of Wilson’s warblers and two Pacific-slope flycatchers.
This is the sort of natural history observation that is common for us ecobloggers to post about. My Spire project colleagues have just released a Firefox plugin called Spotter to help turn the observation into formally-described data. The plugin lets one quickly open up an observation form in Firefox. If you fill the form out, the data gets submitted to the Spire server and in return you get a link to the marked-up data together with a fun little spotted owl icon which you can put into your blog post (see below).
For more information about Spotter see this announcement, and the plugin may be downloaded from here.
Spotter is still a research prototype, and we would love to get feedback about how usable the tool is and how it may be improved. So if you are so inclined, give it a whirl!
14 September 07
Announcing The Semantic Naturalist
Pica is not the only one to start a new blog here. I have just launched a technical blog together with my colleagues at work on the Spire project entitled The Semantic Naturalist. It is subtitled “Musings on natural history, geography, and the semantic web”, and the idea is to explore developments in computer science that may lead to a more integrated Web for natural history information. (The introductory post is here.) Though the content is technical, I hope some of it will be of interest to Feathers of Hope readers as well.