25 August 07
Introducing Bird by Bird
Approaching 700 birds seen in the ABA area (North America including Canada and Alaska, excluding Hawaii) has me at a crossroads. It’s expensive and environmentally irresponsible to gad about the country adding birds to my list. (I have neither unlimited time nor unlimited funds for this kind of activity, and at this point the price per bird goes way up.)
Some birders at this point in their list settle into county listing, or state listing (easier if you live in a small state). Others start photographing birds, building their list back up with a photo of each species they had previously seen. (Some keep on going, chasing 750 and even 775; I will never be one of them.)
Me, I’m going to start sketching. A bird a day. Bird by bird, like Annie Lamott says.
Sketching birds makes you look at the bird hard. If you look hard enough, it makes the bird part of your psyche. This takes your head to a different place, one that is unfettered by obligations. I’m not particularly good, but I hope to get better. You do it enough, it gets easier. You see more.
Today’s bird is a white-faced ibis, sketched at the Yolo Bypass. It was getting hot. There were birders around because a glossy ibis — an eastern vagrant — had been reported that morning. I found myself smiling that I was content to study the white-faced ibises rather than worry that I couldn’t see the glossy. This is my introduction to a new quest: not a new bird, each time, but a sketch. The bird in front of me, not the one that got away…
I hope to produce one of these for my new blog, Bird by Bird every day, though they won’t always be new birds. We are seeing a lot of the turkeys from our kitchen window, for example. But my efforts are now shifting away from chasing to recording…
25 August 07
Need A Blank Map?
If you’ve ever felt the need to color in what states you’ve visited, or draw in the route of your upcoming South Pacific cruise, National Geographic offers a series of blank maps for printing and copying as part of their Xpeditions educational resource site.
23 August 07
Mystery Solved
so in June when we went to the wedding on Putah Creek on the tandem and had the best damn meal of our lives pretty much and coveted the Tshirts of the catering staff I mean a magpie plus a great design how much better does it get and mentioned it on the blog and then several weeks later one showed up in the mail here at home I asked Andrea the lovely bride and she said sorry wish I’d had more presence of mind but no it wasn’t me and Barbara said nope and Numenius said no I was well and truly stumped and then yesterday after a gruelling couple of hours in the dentist’s chair dear Chris and Karen came over and it was like a balm having their wonderful presence around me and Chris wondered whether possibly had I ever gotten a package in the mail?
Be careful what you say on your blog. Somebody’s paying attention.
(Thanks Chris, what a great birthday present!)
21 August 07
See Worlds No One Has Seen Before
Humans are far, far better at pattern recognition tasks than any computer. This is the basis of quite a novel effort in citizen science, GalaxyZoo. Astronomy has entered the era of vast datasets being produced by large-scale surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which in its first phase catalogued about 200 million celestial objects. Now astronomers now want to do studies that are equally vast in scope with these data. For instance, what would a sample of a million galaxies from SDSS tell us about galaxy formation and the nature of the early universe?
There is one slight problem with such studies — how many astronomers have time to look through a million images of galaxies? So they turned to the astronomy-loving public to help them with classifying galaxies. In mid-July, the GalaxyZoo site was opened. Participants are asked to tell whether an image shows a spiral galaxy, an elliptical galaxy, a pair of merging galaxies, or in fact the image is a star or some artifact. If the galaxy is a spiral, they are asked to tell if the direction is clockwise or anticlockwise.
The project has turned out to be phenomenally successful. By the first week in August, more than 80,000 participants had classified galaxies, the traffic being 20 times more than what the organizers were hoping for. And the astronomers are now assured of getting many replicate classifications for each image, always a good thing statistically.
20 August 07
Glacial Ramble
Our time in Colorado in April put us in closer contact with a landscape shaped by glaciers than usual. This weekend I renewed my acquaintance with tarns, deep scars left on rocks by the grinding of ice and boulders, and with the high-elevation plants and animals that now call this landscape home.
As a child when we visited the caves in Altamira (now closed to try and preserve the paleolithic paintings from human traffic and exhalations) I found myself imagining what it would have been like to have been an eight-year-old girl living in a cave so many thousands of years ago. The paintings are works of art in the most visceral sense I can think of, and though I had no idea about the shamanic (assumed) power of the paintings, the musculature of the animals (bison, deer, goats) was real and skilfully portrayed, even to an untutored eye. What was it like to draw like that? I found myself pondering those caves again on Saturday, as I watched mountain goat family groups pick their way easily across the scree slopes that would have sent me to the hospital, as I tried inexpertly to draw them.
We were in the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada to see a bird, a bird that doesn’t belong in North America. It’s a hard bird to see (and, I gather, to hunt, for which reason it was introduced here from the Himalayas in the early 1960s). It took two attempts of a two-mile hike at 10,000 feet and a lot of hours before we finally saw it on Sunday morning, just before we were going to have to head downhill and drive all the way back to Davis. But spending a day surrounded by mountain bluebirds and pikas (whose alarm call is very similar to a red-breasted nuthatch’s), golden-mantled ground squirrels and Brewer’s sparrows, in the high glacial meadow with no sound except the wind and the occasional “hey, there’s a badger!” makes me feel the tug of the mountains again.
Reading Butuki’s account of his trek across the Alps has great resonance for me just now. I’m not a strong hiker and I blister easily but it’s worth it… I’m hoping to convince Numenius to come with me to the mountains more. Promising the sight of introduced birds won’t do it, but Numenius is a mountain goat at heart…
[See Richard’s account of this trip here ]
17 August 07
Mr. Ibis
The reference in the title is to a character in Neil Gaiman’s excellent book American Gods, which I finished last night. It’s the season when we are seeing lots of white-faced ibis flying about in long, lazy vee formations. They head out from roosts in the wetlands such as the Yolo Bypass to forage in fields in the agricultural landscape. Two days ago the alfalfa field just south of our house was flooded for irrigation, and in came the ibis.
16 August 07
Daft Caper
So I’m creeping up on 700 North American birds on my list. It stands at 696, to be precise, the last one being the Philadelphia vireo near Rangeley in Maine.
I’m heading off tomorrow with some friends to the Ruby Mountains of Nevada to look for the Himalayan snowcock. No, it doesn’t really belong there. But according to American Birding Association rules, it’s countable. The black rosy-finch that hangs around up there ought to be more satisfying…. Numenius is sensibly staying put. See you when I get back.
16 August 07
Wireless For Frogs And Mice
On Monday I heard a presentation about Quail Ridge Reserve, one of the University of California natural reserves that is administered by UC Davis. Quail Ridge sticks out as a peninsula into Lake Berryessa, about 40 kilometers west of here. Quail Ridge Reserve has gone hi-tech. In a collaboration with the computer science department, the reserve managers have set up towers and repeaters to create a wireless mesh network covering much of the reserve. The technology used is the standard wireless found in many a laptop, but the environment and scale of the network is of a degree to make the project interesting to computer scientists.
Putting a natural reserve on the Internet leads to some neat possibilities. One researcher, who left UC Davis for a position at the University of Michigan, can continue to monitor the calling of frogs he was studying in real time. Webcams have been set up that can be reoriented over the net, looking for foxes, mountain lions, and snakes. And plans are afoot to set up a triangulation network that will enable tracking of critters such as radio-collared mice down to accuracies of less than a meter. The only other such triangulation network is at Barro Colorado Island in Panama, with much less favorable topography.
14 August 07
Shake Your Tail
A study at UC Davis shows that California ground squirrels generate measurable heat when waving their tails around rattlesnakes, which apparently helps deter the snakes from attacking them. (Adults are resistant and even immune to rattlesnake venom; the snakes go after the younger squirrels, which don’t have enough blood to make them safe.)
I have occasion to watch this tail-wagging, though there aren’t really any rattlesnakes on the valley floor, here. The adults chase each other around outside my window at work all day long, tails thrashing, in a kind of come-hither routine that involves lots of running, lots of thrashing, lots of sniffing, and very, very rarely, a copulation. They do seem to use their tails in communication as well….
14 August 07
Leaving Town
The swarm of bees that left the hive in the nectarine tree to camp in the almond tree have moved on. Pica returned home for lunch to find the drive leading out back clouded with thousands of flying bees and the almond tree empty. It all makes me think of colonists in a game of Freeciv moving one square off from the city before heading out into the wilderness in the next turn.