Love your mother

Snowy Plover, by Jim Urbach for Audubon. [Click for big, and get the screensaver here.] In its report Gulf Oil Spill Pictures: Ten Animals at Risk, National Geographic writes that the Snowy Plover "has been identified by the National Audubon Society as one of the species most vulnerable to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Snowy plovers risk not only direct contact with the oil but might also be poisoned by eating small invertebrates and oysters tainted with oil."

Updates on the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico:
Workers on Oil Rig Recall a Terrible Night of Blasts

BP suffers setback in attempts to stem Gulf of Mexico oil flow. “I wouldn’t say it has failed yet,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said at a news conference in Robert, La. “What we attempted to do last night hasn’t worked.”

Learning to Love the Sea, Then Torn From It. The Gulf oil spill "has stalled, and possibly ruined, the livelihoods of thousands."

Regulator Deferred to Oil Industry on Rig Safety

Gulf Coast Fishermen Fear That They Will Be Left With 'Crippled Industry'

Sabotage! Conspiracy! And Other Ways to Spin the Oil Spill. I laugh to keep from crying.


Happy Mother's Day!

"The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico is seen from a helicopter." Photo by Rick Loomis for the Los Angeles Times.

International Migratory Bird Day

Above: Cerulean Warbler, Rufous Hummingbird, American Redstart. Below left: Wood Duck, American Oystercatcher, Puffin, Whooping Crane. All by Robert Petty for EFTA's Bird Day 2010.

Truth be told: every day is bird day here in Southern California. OK, every day is [or should be] bird day everywhere, but especially here. From the mountains to the sea [as a SoCal news icon used to say each evening] there are beautiful local birds and cool migratory birds everywhere you look.

International Migratory Bird Day "highlights and celebrates the migration of nearly 350 species of migratory birds between nesting habitats in North America and non-breeding grounds in Latin America, Mexico, and the Caribbean," and to quote from the essay Coming together to protect birds, "IMBD is not only a day to foster appreciation for wild birds and to celebrate and support migratory bird conservation; it is also is a call to action." We celebrate Bird Day [every day] by working toward:

• Protecting and managing green space.

• Landscaping with native plants in backyards and parks.

• Adopting architecture and lighting systems that reduce collisions.

• Making our communities hospitable to breeding, wintering and migrating birds that seek safe places to spend time and find food.

"Birds can save the world," writes Dr. John Fitzpatrick, Director of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology and professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell:

[B]irds represent our most accessible and sensitive indicator of environmental health and ecological change. Today, thanks especially to the Internet, individual citizens have unprecedented opportunities to provide real data that answer important questions about bird populations at continental scales. Humans literally are beginning to serve as worldwide biosphere sensors. The question is, do we also have the will to self-correct? Birds present us with numerous motivations to do so, and an excellent barometer for measuring our successes and failures.

The real data Dr. Fitzpatrick is talking about can be viewed and explored at eBird, which is quite possibly the coolest data-gathering program of all time [and I'm not just saying that because I'm one of this year's top 100 eBirders in my county. Though I am]. To see just one example of eBird's citizen scientists at work, check out the eBird Gulf Coast Oil Spill Bird Tracker. The gadget displays recent sightings of ten focal species — data provided by a dedicated army of eBirders, citizen scientists providing "a real-time snapshot of the region’s birdlife, helping conservationists and researchers understand where, when, and how many of each species are currently occurring on local beaches and wetlands."

Wild birds embody the wonder and beauty of nature, its mystery and its miracles. The challenges wild birds face are challenges that sooner or later will confront us all. We owe it to ourselves, if not to the life of the skies, to celebrate Bird Day as if our future depended on it — because odds are, it does.

Related:
George Divoky's Planet. "This is a story about global warming and a scientist named George Divoky, who studies a colony of Arctic seabirds on a remote barrier island off the northern coast of Alaska. I mention all this at the start because a reader might like to come to the point, and what could be more urgent than the very health and durability of this planet we call Earth? However, before George can pursue his inquiry into worldwide climate change; before he can puzzle out the connections between a bunch of penguinesque birds on a flat, snow-covered, icebound island and the escalating threat of droughts, floods and rising global temperatures, he must first mount a defense -- his only defense in this frozen, godforsaken place -- against the possibility of being consumed, down to the last toenail, by a polar bear while he sleeps. He must first build a fence." A hands-down, must-read classic, even more important now than when it was first published back in 2002.

Media helicopters force Gulf birds to abandon nests. Holy crap, news people.

The know-how and materials already exist. We need to do the right thing

Efforts under way to douse nighttime lights on downtown Cleveland skyscrapers, saving millions of migrating songbirds


H/T to Mike McDowell for the JSOnline link.

Coyotes: "We will dance on your graves, puny humans"

Great photo of an amazing predator: Northern Alberta coyote, by ru 24 real on Flickr. [Click to embiggen.]

It's coyotes in the news week here in Bloglandia. A round-up of the good, the bad and the ugly:

The bad would have to be news of 18,000 coyotes killed by hunters in five months, brought to you by the Saskatchewan, Canada bounty program. Just cut off the paws and collect $20 per animal, and if it's easier to kill a few dozen coyotes in neighboring Alberta and chop their feet off and dump their bodies in front of someone's farm, well, keep in mind that there's a fine for littering. Littering is bad! [Photo of the carcasses by Rick Price, who wasn't anticipating a truckload of dead coyotes when he set off to photograph local wildlife last week.] Trevor Herriot has more about the consequences, intended and unintended, of coyote control here, on his excellent Grass Notes blog.

The ugly: that would be the let's-all-shudder-at-a-hick-and-his-dogs article by Juliet Macur of the NY Times. Quote: "Dogfighting became a felony in all 50 states in 2008, in no small part because of Michael Vick, the N.F.L. star who went to prison a year earlier for his involvement in a dogfighting ring." Seriously, that's an actual quote from the article. It's inaccurate, and of course dogfighting is actually nothing like hunting coyotes with greyhounds, but whatever. I really, really, really hate Macur's lazy mash-up of ignorance and condescension. I don't think it's journalism — it's just crappy writing.

By way of contrast, consider how Ms. Macur might have gotten along with the folks at the Master of Fox Hounds Association’s seminar, which brings us to the good:

In the months leading up to the Master of Fox Hounds Association’s biennial hunt staff seminar, we’d already heard a lot about Dr. Stanley Gehrt and his urban coyote presentation. He’d done this presentation at an MFHA meeting in January that had everyone talking, so we were especially curious to hear it ourselves. And, boy, was it worth the price of admission.

Gehrt is an assistant professor and extension wildlife specialist at Ohio State University. His urban coyote study in Chicago started in 2000 and is the longest-running coyote research project in North America. Using radio tracking collars, the study has followed 440 coyotes in 10 packs and revealed fascinating details about their lives, including how they form packs, which ones don’t pack up, how they develop their territories, what they hunt, and how they adapt to living in an urban environment. The results, as presented in his lecture “Uncovering Truths and Debunking Myths about City Coyotes,” were eye-opening.

Read the whole thing — a fine and fascinating read — over at Full Cry: A Hound Blog. Definitely beats suffering through a 1200-word mock-the-Okie piece in the NY Times.


Related:
MFHA hunt staff seminar, part 3: The Old Guns
Texas ass hat Gov. Perry shoots coyote [Makes me wonder how I ever manage to get a bunch of dogs in and out of the cabin, after dark, with coyotes dodging around in the shadows night after night, and me without a .380 Ruger. I don't pack a pistol when I hike in snake country, either. Daredevil is my middle name -- right, peeps?]

Pacific Flyway

These Ross's Geese winter in California, raise young in the Arctic. Thanks to groups like Ducks Unlimited, the species is thriving and extending its range. Photo by NDomer73 on Flickr: click for big.

Migration is so awesome. Arrivals, departures... I'm missing these handsome little souls, who wintered in the backyard brush pile, and these busy gents, who wintered here too and have also headed north. [As a wise woman said: "Remember that someone else is waiting for them, and will be happy to see them arrive."] Great photos by The Digiscoper, Mike McDowell. And look who just showed up! A heart bird:

Western Tanager, by Phae on Flickr. Click for bigger.

This coming weekend I'm planning to bird Big Morongo, which is Pacific Flyway Central at the moment. Migrants everywhere you look.

*************

An extraordinarily moving report on an 18,000 mile migration:

“I just did a talk yesterday for some colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey,” Gill told me not long after E7 had been tracked to New Zealand. “And I showed these graphics of E7’s flight and said, ‘Okay, the flight is nonstop, no food, no water, no sleep as we know it, flying for eight days,’ and there was just this silence in the room, and I could see their minds trying to wrap around this—as does mine. I try to be objective as a scientist, but this just . . .” Gill’s sentence trailed off as he seemed unable to summon up the right word to describe his reaction.

More about this amazing flight here, from the USGS Alaska Science Center Shorebirds Research website.

The last leg of E7's journey is the most extraordinary, entailing a non-stop flight of more than eight days and a distance of 7,200 miles [...]

Since they are land birds, godwits like E7 can't stop to eat or drink while flying over open-ocean. The constant flight speeds at which E7 was tracked by satellite indicate that she did not stop on land.

Godwits do not become adults until their 3rd or 4th year and many live beyond 20 years of age. If 18,000 miles is an average annual flight distance, then an adult godwit would fly some 288,000 miles in a lifetime. [Source.]

E7's tribe: Bar-Tailed Godwits, by nkenji on Flickr. Click for big.

Tweets from the past

Hasn't changed much since White's day: the village of Selborne, by Mockney Rebel on Flickr.

Ebert rouses his followers on Twitter:

Has ANYBODY noticed I've been starting each day with Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selborne?"

White's journal entries, as it happens, often make perfect tweets — and now I have another book to buy. From Ebert's link, The Natural History of Selborne:

Gilbert White (1720-1793) was the curate of the village of Selborne in Hampshire, England. He was a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, a farmer in a very small way, and a passionate gardener. From an early age he was fascinated by nature and recorded his observations, and in later life began to correspond with several prominent ‘natural philosophers’. These letters were eventually edited and compiled in a book, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). It has never been out of print since its publication and established the genre of nature-writing in English. Gilbert White’s commitment to close observation of the mundane and everyday in nature– what we would now call ‘field study’– was pioneering and inspired Darwin; his influence felt in pastoral English writing from The Mill on the Floss to The Wind in the Willows.

Trivia: one of White's correspondents was the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant, first to describe the fisher [Martes pennanti] for science in 1771. I love fishers.

Here's the Penguin Classics edition of Gilbert White's book at Amazon. Honestly, Roger Ebert's Twitter feed is the reason God created the computer.

The Summer-Maker. [Check out these beautiful shots on Flickr.]

Related: Pacific fisher [Martes pennanti], at Sierra Forest Legacy.

Tonight: new wildlife series from the BBC, Discovery Channel

"African straw-coloured fruit bats in flight, Kasanka National Park, Zambia." Photo by Kieran Dodds for Discovery Channel / BBC.

This Sunday, from 8-10pm ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, catch the premiere episode of Life.

From the NY Times review:

Fans of programs like “Nature” on PBS are already aware of just how exquisite the best wildlife filmmaking is these days, thanks to ultraportable gear and high-definition video, but the wealth and variety of material in “Life” may surprise even those viewers. (“Life” was made in partnership with the BBC, as was an earlier series, “Planet Earth.”)

The scale is among the most striking things. We’ve long been used to seeing big cats run down antelopes, and there are plenty of large animals here. But there are also insects, hummingbirds, fingernail-size amphibians. Who shot the rollicking images of an inchlong pebble toad rolling like a small stone down a mountainside in Venezuela? Someone with a heck of a lot of patience, that’s who.

Honestly, what kind of person is following inch-long pebble toads as they go rollicking down mountainsides in Venezuela? Funny you should ask. Here's a NY Times profile of The Calm Men Who Bring You Exotic Animals.

Proud parents of a small egg

California Condor country: Sunset at the Pinnacles National Monument, by StefanB on Flickr.

This story is great, and the headline rocks: Calif condor couple lays first egg at Pinnacles National Monument in more than a century. Congratulations to the happy couple!

A female released in 2004 in the Central California park and a male released the same year 30 miles west at Big Sur had been observed engaged in courtship behavior earlier this year, park spokesman Carl Brenner said.

"They are now the proud parents of a small egg," Brenner said.

Biologists confirmed the presence of the egg after hiking to the site on Friday.

In 1982, the last 22 California condors were placed in a captive breeding program. Today, there are 348 in the world, with about 180 flying free at three locations in California and at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Another dozen are in Baja California.

The goal is to have 450 birds in three distinct populations, with 15 breeding pairs in each group.

Read it all here.

Above left: Condor buddies, by Doug Greenberg on Flickr.

Great Backyard Bird Count

The guaranteed-to-make-you-gasp-out-loud-when-the-sun-hits-him-just-right Costa's Hummingbird. Photo by bcsing on Flickr, taken 1-08-10 on the Lower Colorado River.

Feeders filled — check. Binocs — check. Regional checklist — check. Perfect 74F weather — big giant check. [Sorry, snowpocalypse people.] This weekend it's all about The Great Backyard Bird Count, "an annual four-day event that engages bird watchers of all ages in counting birds to create a real-time snapshot of where the birds are across the continent."

Why participate? Aside from the fact that it's hella fun, the GBBC helps birds. And birds, as the great Canadian writer Margaret Atwood explains in this wonderful essay, are not merely beautiful and fascinating. Birds are the canaries of Coal Mine Earth.

[T]imes change, and we're heading back towards an older way of reading the birds. It's Fates of Nations time again, and ill omens seen through birds in flight – or the absence of them - and deadly prices to be paid for getting what you want. The birds have something to tell us again, and the truths are not comfortable ones.

Recording your counts this weekend during the GBBC is one way to help birds. Another way to help is by making birdhouses for them. The most excellent Birdchick shows us what a well-designed birdhouse should look like:

Our feathered friends

Hail to thee, blithe spirit: Fossil feathers reveal dinosaurs' true colours. Above, an artist's impression of Sinosauropteryx, from Wikipedia.

I know what you're thinking. Looks just like a Spotted Towhee, right? Or close enough. One of my favorite visitors:

Spotted Towhee by Rick Leche on Flickr.

A young Cooper's Hawk showed up in the yard last week. The first time I saw him he was staggering around on top of the brushpile like a drunk in a dark room, with a dozen sparrows and finches frozen beneath his talons. He fumbled around for a bit and flew off, but returned the next day and nabbed a warbler. Collateral damage: an American Goldfinch that I suspect was injured trying to escape. The goldfinch lay on the ground panting and flailing, and I got a shoebox with a towel ready and called one of our local wildlife rehabilitators.

Although some might be inclined to put a poor goldfinch out of his misery in a case like this, keep in mind that 1) killing him yourself is a violation of federal law, and 2) he might have an excellent chance of recovery with the help of a skilled rehabber*. Sad to report, this little guy didn't make it. Plan B: pop tiny body in freezer for delivery at later date to local raptor rehab.

*Related:
Hummingbird Hospital
Hummingbird Hospital Part 2
Hummingbird Hospital Part 3
Release Day

Link liberation: scary wolf stories

Ernest Thompson Seton: Wolf Study. Pen and ink with water color (1896).

I first read Seton's Lobo, the King of Currumpaw when I was eight or nine [thanks, Uncle Rudy, for the gift of Wild Animals I Have Known], and I can still recite parts of that story from memory.

A lion shorn of his strength, an eagle robbed of his freedom, or a dove bereft of his mate, all die, it is said, of a broken heart; and who will aver that this grim bandit could bear the three-fold brunt, heart-whole? This only I know, that when the morning dawned, he was lying there still in his position of calm repose, but his spirit was gone—the old king-wolf was dead.

I took the chain from his neck, a cowboy helped me to carry him to the shed where lay the remains of Blanca, and as we laid him beside her, the cattle-man exclaimed: "There, you would come to her, now you are together again."

That account of a great wolf's life and death just killed me. A couple years ago PBS ran a show about Lobo and Seton, called The Wolf that Changed America. [You can watch video selections here.] The website has a collection of related images, and when I saw the photo Seton took of Lobo at the end, the real Lobo, with each leg in a horrible trap, I actually broke down and cried.

Yes, I'm a child of the suburbs. [The very first subdivision to spring up in the midst of Pleasantville's fields and orange groves, but still.]

Like grizzlies, wolves fascinate and frighten me all at once.

These two stories are both hair-raising, and true, and they don't have happy endings.

Gros Ventre wolves kill 3 dogs [this article broke my heart]

Wolf kills hunting hound


Related:
Watch out, wolves of Idaho – the Becker dogs are ready to rumble [Edited to add: check out the follow-up post's beautiful photos.]
Dr. L. David Mech's International Wolf Center.
Cat Urbigkit's Wolf Watch.
Off Endangered List, but What Animal Is It Now?

Bird sounds

"Out of the mockingbird's throat, the musical shuttle" [Photo by larry wfu on Flickr.]

Remember Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs? One of the finest things the Onion has ever produced, if you ask me. Turns out Aves may be another group to keep an eye on.

If you watched the terrific video on parrot intelligence [H/T Heckled by Parrots, via Pet Connection], you probably caught a glimpse of a scientist in a lab. He was on screen for just a few seconds, at 5:44 in the vid. That's Erich Jarvis. Here's his Duke U. faculty page. From the NOVA site:

Erich Jarvis is a neurobiologist at Duke University Medical Center. He heads a team of researchers in the field of vocal communication. The Jarvis Lab's research of songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds sheds light on how the brain is able to learn the behavior of sound. Jarvis's work on bird brains may have applications to the treatment speech problems in humans, such as stuttering. In October 2005, Dr. Jarvis won the National Institutes of Health's Director's Pioneer Award, which provides $500,000 per year for five years to researchers pursuing innovative approaches to biomedical research.

This summer Jarvis gave the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union:

Vocal learners mimic sounds they hear, and then modify them to create new sounds. This may not be as much mindless parroting as we used to think—and here Jarvis singled out Irene Pepperberg in the audience, whose experiments with Alex the African Grey Parrot showed that he understood the semantics of a question like “How many total?” well enough to count and reciprocally communicate to Irene that two beads and four beads made “six.”

As for how vocal learning happens, Jarvis and colleagues reported in a staggering series of publications that while all birds use parts of the brain stem to produce songs, those with learned songs also use parts of the forebrain. Birds that learn their songs may even have more than one pathway controlling their learning. One pathway may promote variability in songs while another pathway produces more consistency, or stereotyping. The proper balance between the two pathways allows for vocal learning.
[...]
Jarvis basically threw out the window the received wisdom that humans’ large brain size and extensive brain folding are the explanation for our complex language. When he and colleagues described in 2005 how bird song and human speech actually make use of the same three forebrain regions, it made a splash. People reportedly called Webster’s and asked them to remove the term “bird brain” from the dictionary. [Source: Round Robin — The Cornell Blog of Ornithology.]

You can read more about the evolution of avian brain structure for vocal learning here, at the Jarvis Lab website.

*************

Also on the topic of bird communication: in a thoughtful [as in, both gracious and brainy] exchange of blog posts, David Sibley and Nathan Pieplow engage in a "very interesting and, I think, important discussion about a sea change that may be occurring in how birders listen to bird sounds." [That quote is from Pieplow's blog.] Sibley writes:

I learned bird songs decades ago through countless hours of field experience, supplemented by listening to a few recordings, reading detailed descriptions, and talking to other birders. It was a subjective, holistic approach to bird songs that led to a sort of gestalt style of identification – after you hear a sound often enough the identification just becomes second-nature.

Now, it still takes countless hours, but birders have a wealth of technological aids, allowing them to study and compare bird sounds with an ease and immediacy that was never possible before. In the modern world of ipods, sonagrams, and websites like xeno-canto, birders can examine the bird sounds directly, objectively, and in great detail. This may lead (as Nathan Pieplow admits) to a slightly greater emphasis on differences in pattern rather than the more subjective and hard-to-describe differences in tone.

Given how suggestible we are, and how tiny things can influence our perception, the detail-oriented objective approach to bird sound identification is probably better and more accurate.

And Pieplow replies:

[Sibley] learned sounds in the field; I learned them on the floor of my bedroom in South Dakota when I was in high school, playing the Peterson Birding By Ear tapes over and over again. Those tapes (which remain the best resource I’ve ever seen for people who want to learn bird sounds on their own) didn’t take a holistic, all-at-once approach; instead they took an analytic approach, grouping similar sounds together and then pointing out key field marks or “handles” — here a distinctive tone quality, there a distinctive rhythm — to distinguish sounds within the groups.

I’ve used this same basic approach to sound identification ever since: recognize a pattern, then focus on a piece of it. The pattern gets you to the right group; the pieces narrow the identification to species. Tone quality is part of this analysis, but not the most important part.

In fact, in some ways I think I place a pretty low priority on tone quality. For several years now, I have been convinced that tone quality is the slipperiest attribute of sound: the hardest to analyze perceptually, the hardest to describe. And I think tone quality is responsible for most of the disconnect between most descriptions of sounds and the sounds themselves. I de-emphasize it precisely because it is so difficult to categorize. Other attributes of sound are much easier to describe and compare, so those are the ones I focus on.

For the most part, I’m just doing what works for me, but I hope it works for other people as well. I really do believe in the objective, analytic approach.

*************

So who makes those field recordings of bird songs? Remarkable people like William Belton:

An internationally recognized ornithologist, Mr. Belton was almost single-handedly responsible for the current body of knowledge of the bird life of Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost Brazilian state. His field recordings and specimens from the region are today in the collections of major research institutions. His two-volume study of the birds of the area is widely considered seminal.
[...]
Each [of Belton's recordings] was often the product of hours of standing stock-still in the wild at dawn, with swarms of biting insects for company. But the rewards were considerable: over the years, Mr. Belton captured many bird songs that had never before been documented.
[...]
The bird names alone read like found poetry. Mr. Belton recorded, among others, the variable screech-owl and the southern screamer; the freckle-breasted thornbird, the sooty-fronted spinetail and the rufous-browed peppershrike; the cattle tyrant, the masked yellowthroat and the piratic flycatcher; the squirrel cuckoo, the laughing falcon, the pectoral sandpiper and the gilded sapphire.

William Belton died in October at the age of 95. As a woman of a certain age, I love that Mr. Belton's ornithological career [of more than 30 years!] began following his retirement.

*************

A high school student asks Erich Jarvis, "African grey parrots can learn to speak, and they can be taught to tell color, and even to express themselves. And from what I observed on NOVA scienceNOW, some birds are capable of creating simple tools. But what about the other kinds of birds that are incapable of doing things like this? For example, a crow can make tools to obtain food but a pigeon can't. Why? Why is the parrot smarter than the finch? Is it brain size, the way they use their brains, or does the parrot have something the finch doesn't?"

An excerpt from Jarvis's answer:

[A]n argument can be made that having a brain means that you have intelligent behavior, regardless of whether you are a bird, mammal, reptile, or otherwise. But this is not the way many people think. There is something inherent in our human psyche that wants to make nonhumans "lower" in intelligence, and for us to form a scale of intelligence such that some species would be considered not intelligent.
[...]
In fact, it is very difficult or almost impossible to make such a scale. Yes, a crow can make tools, and as far as I know, this has not been observed in pigeons. But pigeons have incredible visual memories and abilities, including the ability to learn how to distinguish different styles of impressionistic paintings. Chickadees, which are a type of songbird, can store over 3,000 seeds in the forest, and during the winter they remember where they put them and retrieve most of them. A parrot so far as I know has not been observed to do this, yet a number of parrot species can imitate some human speech.

Different species have different behavioral capacities that vary in sophistication, Jarvis continues. However, brain size is not the main driving factor behind these complex behaviors. Instead, neural connectivity appears to be the driving force.

And bird brains, as it turns out, are firing on all cylinders.

Small, smaller, really darn small, so small it's like totally unreal

Click on this link, then move the slider. Dude!
H/T: Andrew.

Best idea ever

Heaven on earth: the Santa Rosa Plateau, much as it looked 200 years ago. Before the Gold Rush, a Spaniard wrote that it was possible to ride from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other and never be out from under the shade of a giant oak. [Click for big.]

In the top ten of best ideas ever, at any rate: bulldoze sprawl, return suburban blight to nature. MacArthur Genius Grant for Maria Streshinsky, please!

How’s about a stimulus-started plan to buy up the nation’s foreclosed and empty McMansions and hire out-of-work construction workers to deconstruct them? It’s an idea that could keep giving and giving. Aside from the obvious benefits of employment as the deconstruction took place, de-developers could offset costs by selling used housing materials (recycle!) or donating us able building materials to low-income- housing renovation projects (help the poor!).

De-developers could then restore the housing lot to the area’s original native-growth environment (employ out- of- work landscapers, help the native critters!), have it designated as a conservation easement, and donate it to, say, the Nature Conservancy. Or perhaps the local community could take the lot over for the construction of playgrounds or the planting of victory gardens.

Sounds absolutely perfect to me.

Related:
US Government May Bulldoze 50 Cities; Create More Green Space
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
Bulldozing America’s Shrinking Cities

State of the Birds 2009

Peregrine falcon soars across Morro Rock in Morro Bay, California. Photo by kevincole on Flickr: click for big.

A beautiful video and an impressive, informative web site - check both out here: State of the Birds - the 2009 Report.

From the Foreword:

Birds are bellwethers of our natural and cultural health as a nation—they are indicators of the integrity of the environments that provide us with clean air and water, fertile soils, abundant wildlife, and the natural resources on which our economic development depends. In the past 40 years, major public, private, and government initiatives have made strides for conservation. Has it been enough? How are birds faring?

In an unprecedented partnership, government wildlife agencies and conservation groups have come together to produce this first comprehensive analysis of the state of our nation’s birds.

Thanks to:

North American Bird Conservation Initiative, U.S. Committee

American Bird Conservancy

Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies

Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Klamath Bird Observatory

National Audubon Society

The Nature Conservancy

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

U.S. Geological Survey

I should add that hunters' groups like the most excellent Ducks Unlimited have done an extraordinary job of preserving, restoring and protecting habitat. Falconer, author and blogger Rebecca K. O'Connor just joined DU's Sacramento team -- you can read her fine blog here.

Middle-of-the-night blogging

Ruchira explains why women can't sleep.






[H/T: 3 Quarks Daily.]

Where God made his nest

Whenever I used to drive to a friend's place in eastern San Diego County I'd pass a freeway off-ramp to a place called Tierra Santa, and I'd start singing:



La Huasteca es tierra santa
La Huasteca es tierra santa
Donde Dios formó su nido
Donde Dios formó su nido...

The Huasteca is sacred ground, where God made his nest — where the thrushes sing their long notes that everyone loves —

For people who like wild birds and animals and books and travel and history and other fascinating essentials, natural history museums are the coolest places. They are especially great if you volunteer or know someone who works behind the scenes, because then you can look at the collections that aren't on exhibit.

Egg and Nest, by Rosamond Purcell, Linnea S. Hall and René Corado sounds like a behind-the-scenes, bird- and museum lover's dream book. Purcell took photographs of birds, nests and eggs at the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology in Camarillo, a natural history collection specializing in the eggs and nests of birds from around the world, and naturalist Bernd Heinrich, Linnea Hall, the director of the foundation, and René Corado, its collections manager, supplied the text.

From a NY Times review of Egg and Nest and other bird-related books:

If you are wondering why anyone would spend a life in a pursuit as eccentric as collecting eggs and nests, Ms. Purcell’s work will tell you. She selected a range of specimens, eggs brightly colored and plain, and nests made conventionally of twigs or of materials as bizarre as nails. Then she photographed them in natural light.

Her luminous results explain without words why people have been collecting eggs and nests for centuries.

Small photo: nest of a Bell’s Vireo. Above: nest of a Costa's hummingbird, on a cactus. [Both photos by Rosamond Purcell, from Egg and Nest.]

*************

The most excellent Birdchick and Diane of Ark Animal Answers remind us that there isn't much time left to comment on the evisceration by bulldozer of the Endangered Species Act. You have until October 14 to submit comments by phone, snail mail or hand delivery. The Sierra Club will do the heavy lifting for you if you submit a comment through their site.

You can try leaving comments here as well, by following the links.

Penguin poop. Also: blogging secrets revealed

Adélie penguin in nest decorated with popular "sunburst" pattern.

Lore Sjöberg of Wired presents his Secrets of the 7 Basic Blog Posts, at least five of which are too close for comfort. The 7 Basic Posts [see link for dead-on analysis] are:

1. Be upset!
2. Buy a thing!
3. Animals are cute!
4. People are dumb!
5. Something I like, only different!
6. Weird science!
7. Me, the blogger!

Add an extra category, Posts About Mine Own Blog, and I'd have to slit my wrists.

Pressures produced when penguins pooh first appeared in Polar Biology back in 2003. Therefore not timely, but my attempt at an end-run around the seven categories above. Besides, I like penguins: this is one of my favorite books. Yes, I'm twelve. Hat tip to TED's "eccentric genius multimillionaire" Nathan Myhrvold for discussing penguin poo in front of a paying audience. No wonder he's rich.

From the Polar Biology article:

Penguins spend most of their life in the water. An extended period ashore only occurs during breeding [...] Brooding penguins, in order to relieve themselves, do not leave their stony nest, but move to the edge of it, stand up, turn their back nest-outward, bend forward, lift their tail, and shoot. The expelled material hits the ground maximally 40±12 cm away from the bird and then leaves behind a whitish or pinkish streak that can end a few centimetres from the nest's periphery and may be up to 1 cm wide. The colour of the streak depends on whether the penguin had enjoyed a meal of fish (mostly white) or krill (pinkish).

See the photo at the top of this post? Those streaks radiating from the nest are penguin droppings. Looks petroglyph-y and creative.

As far as anyone knows, the penguins don't seem have any particular pattern in mind:

Whether the bird deliberately chooses the direction into which it decides to expel its faeces or whether this depends on the direction from which the wind blows at the time of evacuation are questions that need to be addressed on another expedition to Antarctica.

More cool bird poop facts:

In a process called urohydrosis, California Condors defecate on their legs to reduce their core body temperature. Storks and New World Vultures also display this behavior. The white uric acid coats the legs and protects vultures from harmful bacteria. The droppings produced by Turkey Vultures and other vultures can harm or kill trees and other vegetation. [See the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for more.]

Finally, a photo of a baby penguin mooning the photographer practicing his mad pooping skillz. He and his sibling are giggling hysterically and their mom is like, "Two more months. Two more months..."




The End.

Chickens. don't. menstruate.

Sheesh.

Repeat after me:

Menstruation has nothing to do with eggs. Ovulation produces eggs. Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining, the endometrium. Menstruation occurs only in some mammals. Chickens are not mammals. I will not sleep through high school biology again. I will not sleep through high school biology again. I will not sleep through high school biology again.

Thanks to Antinous of Boing Boing for the quote, and thanks to Terrierman for the vid [third one in linked post] of the raw food peeps chiding us [er, me — I had (cage-free!) scrambled eggs for breakfast] for exploiting chicken periods.

Also: pendejo means 'pubic hair.'

This concludes today's installment of Our Bodies, Our Selves. Tune in next week and find out: Is honey really just bee spit?