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.
19 September 07
Tracking Wildlife
Walter “el jefe” wandered into my office this afternoon and alerted me to Tracking of Pacific Predators which is a very sophisticated effort to bring tracking data to the public.
18 September 07
Pastel Pencils
Our trip Sunday to Berkeley featured a visit to the art store, located conveniently three blocks from where we had lunch. My cousin Susan is a colored pencil artist, so there we gathered around that appropriate aisle in the store. Pica spotted these Stabilo CarbOthello pastel pencils, and started playing. With no shortage of encouragement from the rest of us, who all had their own temptations, she ended up walking out with a set of 48 of these.
Basically these are pastel chalks bound inside a wooden pencil. I have not done much of anything in pastels and these are very fun to try out. The concept of adding white to a drawing to raise the value is hitherto new to me.
Above is a drawing of one of the white eggplants that Pica has been growing in the garden out front.
17 September 07
Avian Anatomy
My recent forays into bird sketching have required the study of some elementary avian anatomy. Where to find such a tome? I looked at online sources and pretty quickly realized I had a very respectable book on our shelves already, Proctor and Lynch’s Manual of Ornithology, a book I imagine the entering Avian Sciences class at Davis will be purchasing. (I got my copy back when I worked for an east-coast university press and knew the sales rep for a different east-coast university press.)
It’s been years since I did any anatomy at all, but it’s good to see some familiar names (humerus, ulna, radius) and some less familiar ones (retrices, hallux, crissum). I do already know about supercilia and malar patches.
My protracted encounter with turkey vultures today made me realize how much an anatomical background might help as I try to sort out feather groups, structure, shape…
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!
15 September 07
A Trip to Berkeley
We took a trip to meet a cousin of Numenius visiting from Cleveland. It was a delightful surprise to find she’s an artist. We spent lunchtime talking about pencils, brushes, pastels, and finally decided to drag everyone else off to Dick Blick on University Ave (far enough down that Cal football traffic wasn’t an issue). I bought some pastel pencils I think will work well for bird portraits, though there wasn’t any Ampersand Pastelbord at that shop — I’ll have to order it.
I did a sketch of Numenius’s father. He’s a great gentleman and a great person and I’m always happier and richer to have seen him.
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.
13 September 07
The Use of a Monocular
Not many birders use monoculars, for good reason. The three-dimensionality of binoculars gives a much better look at a bird and a telescope gives much better looks from afar.
But as I mentioned in Bird by Bird, a monocular is a great sketching tool, one I’ve used already quite a bit in my daily bird sketches.
I wondered who, though, mostly buys monoculars. Oh, said the extraordinarily attentive salesperson at that fantasy palace of consumerism, B&H, on Friday. Antiques people and truckers.
?
Antiques people so they can look through the cordons on the cordoned-off Chippendales; truckers, so they can read road signs without taking their eyes off the road.
I’ll be interested to see if I ever notice monocular around birders in the next few years. I may be alone.
12 September 07
Remembering Alex
By now it has been widely reported that Alex, the gifted African Grey parrot from whom we learned so much about avian cognition and communication, died suddenly a week ago at the age of 31. He was the friend and research subject of comparative psychologist Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who started working with him in 1977. Using a novel technique that emphasized social aspects of learning, Pepperberg was able to teach him categorization, shapes, colors, small numbers, the names of 50 different objects and express all this in English speech. One of my deep beliefs is that there is a great deal going on in the thoughts and feelings of our vertebrate friends; Alex was a fine teacher to all of us in that regard.
11 September 07
Blackwolf the Dragonmaster
Since Numenius seems to be on a fantasy binge, I thought I’d include a sketch of Blackwolf Dragonmaster I did this weekend in Central Park in New York. I am well MOMA’d out. Plus I bought a new toy…
It was a delight to see old friends, meet oldish ones in person for the first time, and reacquaint myself with bits and pieces of a city that doesn’t sleep (but whose subway system does in fact slow down after 1:00 am). I’m sleepy, now.