17 January 05
How To Be A Birdwatcher
From the Guardian Unlimited’s The digested read (“The must-read books in just 400 words”) comes a summary of How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, by Simon Barnes.
Sample paragraph:
Birdwatching is not at all like trainspotting. That’s an activity for dull geeks. Birdwatching is for very exciting geeks who like clamping a pair of binoculars to their forehead for hours on end on the off chance a dodo will come back from the dead. Birds are alive. Now I know dogs are alive, too, but dogwatching isn’t much fun.
16 January 05
Snow on Salt Water
I just got in from a trip to Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia to meet up with some birding friends from Massachusetts and also from here. We did go looking for the rare birds reported and saw them all—the redwing, the Baikal teal, the falcated duck, and the McKay’s bunting. We also took an overnight trip from Vancouver to Victoria to look at the resident skylarks. I’ve seen both the skylark and the redwing in Europe but never in North America; it was a fabulous experience to go on Canadian ferries and to navigate the various islands with conifers looming right down to the water.
Halfway across yesterday it started to snow. It became horizontal quickly. An inch or two is quite severe weather for Vancouver Island and we hunkered down in the inn we found called the Waddling Dog. Everyone-from the guy in the customs booth to people on the jetty we walked out for the McKay’s bunting to the helpful receptionist at the Waddling Dog-sounds like me. It was an extraordinary experience, like echoes of a former life; the inn reminded me of a restaurant in Uttoxeter where my father used to take me when he was visiting me in boarding school. I smelled the roast beef and yorkshire pudding right away…
Chris Corrigan lives across the sound on Bowen Island. I’m not able to see from the map whether the ferry takes him to the mainland or just over to Vancouver Island. I have enjoyed his descriptions of ferries and ferry trips and see now that it’s very much part of life in these parts.
As we left Sidney on the ferry this morning six marine foraging river otters cavorted around the boat. We saw Pacific loons and a rhinoceros auklet, pigeon guillemots and common murres, pelagic cormorants and mew gulls in among the glaucous-winged. It was this morning. I can still feel the cold air on my cheeks as we stood in the bow trying to turn driftwood into alcids. I’m many hundreds of miles away now, many degrees warmer.
15 January 05
Long Way Off
Yesterday the Huygens space probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. The image it took of the surface is one of the most tantalizing things I’ve seen. The probe was not intended to survive long on the surface and I don’t think any more images from the surface are forthcoming. So this narrow view of a field of flat rocks is the farthest close-up surface look of a celestial body we will have for some time.
14 January 05
Adventures In Laundry
In lieu of Pica’s regular blog for today—she has headed to the Pacific Northwest for a quick birding jaunt—we bring you some catblogging. Here Diego and Charlie continue their training in laundry work. (That’s Charlie’s leg at rear right).
13 January 05
Phylogenetic Rambles
At my meeting in Baltimore I learned about a wonderful online encyclopedia, aimed largely at college students, about animal diversity. This is the Animal Diversity Web, which was developed by the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan. The species accounts, of which there are several thousand at the site, are written by students, and the descriptions of higher-level taxa are written by professional biologists.
Here is the species account of one of our favorite critters, the turkey vulture.
12 January 05
Not in Kansas Anymore Dept.
So yesterday I was just minding my business on my way to the bathroom at work which is in another building the one that’s connected to the lab and I’m thinking how nice it is that the sun’s finally shining after all this rain and it’s a little chilly but not bad really and I open the lab door and take the first left into the women’s room and what’s in there but two women with samples all over the floor I mean not just a few but ALL OVER looking frantically for a pair of Island Fox lung specimens so I tiptoe over their cooler and all the plastic sample bags after asking permission and go into the single stall and think how mundane the women’s room used to be in Mrak Hall where people would gather and talk about what TV shows they saw last night or what they were cooking for dinner and I’ll tell you what it wasn’t fox lungs.
11 January 05
Sheets of Clouds
Yesterday I flew to Baltimore for a meeting. There wasn’t much to look at out the window though; it seemed like there was a solid sheet of clouds stretching from the Four Corners states all the way to Maryland. The neatest bit cloudwise however flying at 41,000 feet above the thick layer of altostratus, with blue sky all around us, but then a thin layer of cirrus clouds just above us. So we were above the clouds, but not quite completely.
10 January 05
Cats & Dogs
While I was having dinner this evening with a friend at Thai Nakorn it started pouring. California has been getting lots of rain—dangerous amounts in Southern California.
Numenius has gone to Baltimore for a meeting about the semantic web, so I’m watching cats and rain.
9 January 05
Abraham’s Tribes
A year ago September, we went to the first community Celebration of Abraham, an interfaith gathering among the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities here. Today there was the second such gathering, this time held in St. James Catholic Church in Davis (oddly, both St. James’ auditorium and the one in the Catholic Church in Woodland where we met for the first event do double duty as basketball gyms).
Again the event was packed. This time the organizers took up the theme of the Messiah among the three traditions, perhaps a little more divisive than last year’s focus on Abraham himself. It’s interesting that even in an event as innocuous as a good loaf of whole wheat bread as this one was cultural differences still come through. When Rabbi Wolfe spoke he told several stories that seemed prototypically Jewish, and I felt most at home there.
At the end we wrote down an action we’d do to help bring forth the messianic era. Mine was to look up and meditate upon the skies and heavens above at least twice a day. We’ve been having interesting skies lately, and there was a fine sunset after we got out of the event.
8 January 05
Flight of Cranes
There was a break in the rain this morning and we took the cats outside for a sniff around. It’s a comical sight, each of us with a cat on a tether. Once there they have very different ideas about what constitutes outside activities, but at length Diego knew he was done.
I was taking him inside when I heard the cranes.
Sandhill cranes winter in the Central Valley but we rarely see or hear them just here; there are thousands about twenty miles south of us, throughout the delta where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet. Having them fly over your house feels like a visitation, a blessing beyond blessings. There were over twenty-five, flying in a loose V.
To approximate the sound made by these birds, round your mouth as though you’re saying “ooooh,” and while your mouth is thus rounded roll an r, Spanish-style. It’s an eerie sound, and the standard term “bugling” doesn’t really capture it for me. It sounds like something muffled in the fog, which of course the birds often are, as are all creatures that spend any time here in the winter.
If this sound had a color it would be a rich magenta edging to gray…