Wing

Cats and birds

This blog post by Maximilian Auffhammer about how much people (de)value the view of a wind turbine from their house mentions another oft-heard critique of these big windmills, namely that they kill birds. Which they do: roughly 250,000 birds per year, according to an estimate from about ten years ago. More turbines today, so probably more dead birds. Sad! The same source puts the number of birds killed annually by cats in the United States at... hmm... 2.5 billion, or 10,000 times the number killed by windmills.

How is that possible... 2.5 billion?! Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. There are an estimated 60 million pet cats, and perhaps 50 million feral cats in the United States. Many of the pet cats are outdoor cats, eagerly prowling the neighborhood picking off songbirds just for the fun of it. But let's stick to the feral cats. My lazy, inert indoor cats consume about 5 ounces of cat food per day each– pure meat and calories. A typical junco, the abundant, smallish sparrow that is the most common bird in my suburban neighborhood, weighs about 0.67 ounces, and some of that is feather and bone. But anyway, let's round up to a somewhat more substantial bird, 1 ounce of meat apiece. Assuming an active feral cat needs as much meat as my inert cats, that's 5 birds per day. For the U.S. feral cat population, that comes to 5 x 365 x 50 million = 91 billion songbirds per year. Of course, they will eat some mice and rats and garbage instead of birds, and some will be fed by well-intentioned human enemies of songbirds. But 2.5 billion seems utterly plausible. Out of a total bird population of... 10 billion? Busy, hungry, cruel, destructive kitties!

Busy acorn woodpeckers

 Grant Park, east of San Jose.

California state animals and plants: proposed updates

California is a great state, and the California poppy is one of the best things about it. Keep the poppy.

I nominate the dark-eyed junco for new state bird. It is found everywhere you go– city, suburbs, farmland, chaparral, forests– and is even more ubiquitous than the admittedly appealing California quail, the current office holder. If it weren't so damn common, we'd find the junco more lovely and charming. Now it is true that our subspecies of dark-eyed junco used to be called the Oregon junco, which may be off-putting to some chauvinistic Californians. But Oregon's state bird is the western meadowlark; I see no big problem here. We'd also be the first state to have a variety of sparrow as state bird.

The current state reptile is the desert tortoise. I've never seen one outside a zoo, and frankly, there's a better option here: the western fence lizard. Not only are they everywhere, brightening your day as they scurry off the trail or fencepost right in front of you, but they offer all of us protection against Lyme disease by killing the bacteria when ticks feed on their blood. Well, it's a nice story anyway, even if it ain't necessarily so. The Pacific rattlesnake would be an excellent alternative.

The incumbent state tree is the coast redwood. I like the redwood just fine, but overall it is not a particularly beautiful tree, selected presumably for its age and stature. Its cousin, the giant sequoia, is a much more charismatic tree, but its range is very restricted and it may not survive climate change.

My nomination is the valley oak, a glorious tree: the largest North American oak, it is endemic to California and widespread in the central valley. Leave it to Wikipedia to offer us a poetic description: "The branches have an irregular, spreading and arching appearance that produce a profound leafless silhouette in the clear winter sky. During Autumn leaves turn a yellow to light orange color but become brown during mid to late fall. In advancing age the branches assume a drooping characteristic. Its pewter-colored rippled bark adds to the attractive aesthetic of this species." Exactly so.

The state mammal, the grizzly bear, is extinct in California, which makes it a sad joke, and, Cal Bears notwithstanding, it ought to be replaced. The black bear would be a good choice, or of course the mule deer, tule elk, coyote, or mountain lion. These are all excellent, charismatic critters, but a little unoriginal. I would go with the dusky-footed woodrat, an industrious if retiring animal, and super-cute.

S/he cardinal

Who knew it was possible? A cardinal under any circumstances is already some kind of little miracle.

Plovers

At Pajaro Dunes.

Reading roundup

From best to worst...

The Goshawk
T.H. White
Filled with humor, pathos, and damn good writing, White's account of his attempt to train a hunting hawk is justly lauded as a classic. Audaciously and naively, White convinced himself that he could train this most difficult of raptors through book learning and a kind of boy-scout can-do-ism. You will have to read the book to find out whether he was correct. His realism about nature's savagery is unflinching, but it is tempered by a touching sentimentalism. He offers up live pigeons as bait for the hawks he hopes to capture, but grows oddly attached to one of them and is unable to tether it in the trap– nonetheless, a hapless substitute takes its place. He eulogizes a female badger killed by fox hunters. His description of the maggots roiling in a sheep's carcass– easily the stomach-churning equal of Günter Grass's eels in The Tin Drum– displays an admiration for their work that is only partly ironic. His depictions of the English countryside– its vegetation, miserable climate, and folkways– are vivid. He cites specific passages to prove that Shakespeare really knew his falconry. I reckon I should have read The Goshawk before Helen Macdonald's very fine H is for Hawk. Both books leave you wondering whether the connection between austringer* and goshawk is true love or pure delusion. If you have read neither book before, by all means read them both, and start with White's.

A Fairly Good Time
Mavis Gallant
I have nothing against novels in which nothing really happens, but this one left me bemused. Shirley, a young Canadian woman in Paris, is trying to figure out whether her French second husband has really left her. Will you care about the answer? I can't say I did, exactly, but then, I found myself reading it to the end. There's something about this Shirley that makes you want to get to know her better.

Amnesia Moon
Jonathan Lethem
It's California sometime in the not-too-distant future, and something has happened to make everything pretty weird. It may have something to do with aliens, or maybe not– we never meet them. Everything gets more confusing, and you start skimming ahead to see if it all might make sense or have a point. Nope.

Selected Poems
A.R. Ammons
This little hardback from the American Poets Project fits comfortably in your hands and promises a selection of pieces by this most musical and thoughtful of modern poets. What's not to like? Alas, the book's compact format is its undoing. For Ammons, like many moderns, line breaks are unconventional and very important to the sound and meaning of the verse. When the page is so narrow that many lines must be wrapped, it becomes unclear which line breaks are intentional vs. arbitrary. What were they thinking?

* A falconer who uses accipiters (such as the goshawk).

Early summer

Dry, dusty, and largely deserted today at Arastradero Preserve. But a tribe of gobbling and peeping turkeys is always a treat, as is a ring-necked snake, an impossibly small and beautiful thing. I hope by scaring it along I spared it from a cyclist's wheels on the popular de Anza Trail...

Save the akikiki?

As an atheist deep, deep-down in my bones, I harbor no illusion that a Creator intended for the akikiki bird to survive or even exist in the first place. It has no more cosmic claim than any bird, mammal, tree, virus, or stone for that matter. As an economist, I appreciate that constrained optimization is a tough taskmaster: We will have to make some hard hard choices about which endangered organisms we save, and which, ultimately, we let go. But I have tramped through a corner of this drab little critter's turf, the Alikai Swamp on Kauai. Humans, inadvertently for the most part, have reduced her odds of survival nearly to nil. Habitat destruction, rats, malaria. Her existence serves no more useful human or even global ecological purpose than the existence of, say, the Virgin of the Rocks. Which is to say, my godless heart thrills to the fact that a bunch of people are wasting precious time and money trying to protect the precious little akikiki from annihilation. Photo credit.

Postcards from Nicaragua

Research meetings took up most of my time, but I managed a little sightseeing. How about a few pictures...

Front yard of my home stay in Sontule, Miraflor...

Vacas bonitas...

Corn and beans, the staples...

My daily walk through the barrio El Rosario in Estelí took me over the Rio Estelí on "la rampla," a local landmark...

Estelí is famed for its murals. I didn't get around enough to see many of them, but this is a good one...

Some interesting commercial artwork in Managua...

And last but not least, a visit to Volcan Masaya, just south of Managua, where you can just catch a glimpse of the bubbling lava at the bottom of the crater... scary and impressive. Green parakeets nest in burrows in the walls inside the crater and sometimes circle overhead through the smoke...

And why not close with a cliché, sunset in Miraflor...

H is for Hawk

I mostly read fiction books, but "nature" nonfiction attracts my attention now and then. I suppose Helen Macdonald's account of training a goshawk counts as a nature book, but it is much, much more. Macdonald weaves the alien allure of this most extraordinary bird of prey, the craft and lore of falconry, her debilitating grief over the death of her father, the rich human history and uncertain future of the semi-wild English landscape, and a compressed, sad biography of T.H. White into a complete and absolutely compelling work of art. Her powers of description– internal, external, and speculative– are poetic. Funny, insecure, invincible, she invites you into her saga of grief, near-madness, and recovery. Her love for Mabel, her hawk, is all the more remarkable for the fact that, as she eventually concedes, the goshawk is other... inscrutable. Yet there is quite a bit of the goshawk in this woman: her ferocity, her independence, her virtuosity. A masterpiece.

Postcards from central Florida

Well, I'm back in balmy, rainy Cali again, but I enjoyed my few days visiting the folks in sunny Florida. The lichens in Florida are nonpareil, the birds are plentiful (including the beautiful and curious purple gallinule), and the jello is bright blue, to complement the canned mandarins. As are the waters of Florida's threatened natural treasures, the freshwater springs.

Gadwall

The gadwall is not flashy, but it is a handsome and elegant duck: At Palo Alto Baylands right now, the males in their winter plumage are a rich, warm brown with gray patterning, and distinctive saturated darkness under the tail. The female is lovely in her mottled brown. They are quiet and easily overlooked, but should not be.

By DickDaniels (http://carolinabirds.org/) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Dear State Farm,

After we moved into our new place, the wall... well, it just... bloomed! The kids barely fit anymore. I presume our policy covers biological disasters of this nature...

Nearly fully grown...

... by the time we discovered the nest.

An estimated one in four North American birds was a passenger pigeon...

... on the eve of European settlement. By the end of 1914 they were all gone... every last one. Their flocks could, famously, darken the sky... and apparently also whiten the earth. For some reason the story I remember from childhood was that farmers shot them in large numbers to protect their crops, but they were in fact killed for food, and also suffered from habitat destruction as the continent was deforested. Their catastrophic decline after 1870, interestingly, coincided closely with the near-extermination of the American bison. The railroad plays a key role in the conventional wisdom about both events: trains allowed large numbers of hunters to travel to where the massive herds or flocks were passing, and pick them off with rifles or capture large numbers in nets. When it comes to the buffalo, however, this story is decidedly incomplete, if not wrong, as economist Scott Taylor has shown in his excellent article, "Buffalo Hunt...." The discovery of a new tanning process facilitated an export market for bison hides and thus an elastic (nearly limitless) international demand. With the price maintained by the export market, and absent regulation, mass extermination was the likely and eventually actual outcome. Presumably there was no international trade in pigeon meat or feathers, but the domestic market for meat was sufficiently large to maintain a profitable price. Hunting proceeded all the way to the point where the number of these highly social birds fell below the critical level, and the population imploded.

Four colly birds

At a caroling party tonight, someone asked me, what is a calling bird? The answer always seemed obvious enough-- namely, any old bird singing. Wrong!

Wikipedia tells us that "...the line commonly sung today as 'four calling birds' is believed to have originally been written in the 18th century as 'four colly birds,' an archaism meaning 'black as coal' that was a popular English nickname for the Common Blackbird."

The common blackbird is a European thrush not closely related to our New World blackbirds, but in the same genus as our American robin, which in turn is not related to the bird Europeans call a robin. Got it? The colly bird is the blackbird Paul sings about in the beautiful Beatles song. Thrushes are generally wonderful singers. New World blackbirds... not so much.

Crow at play

Having observed crows keel and swoop through the air for no obvious reason but it must be a gas to be able to do it, it comes as no surprise to me that one would figure out how to snowboard.

Townsend's warbler...

... is, like many warblers, a gem, a gift one can never tire of. Like most warblers, it is coy, and flits overhead in the branches, flashing its exceptional yellow and black facial plumage, often with a friend nearby. If you are patient and still, they may come nearer... curious, or just oblivious?

Townsend's warbler is named for the naturalist John Kirk Townsend, who identified the bird for western science in the 1830s. Townsend came from a rather remarkable Quaker family, it seems, back when the world was smaller and people were bigger...

John Kirk Townsend was the son of Charles Townsend and Priscilla Kirk, he had five brothers and four sisters. His sister Mary wrote a book called, "Life In the Insect World" in 1844. And Mary and another sister, Hannah, wrote "The Anti-Slavery Alphabet" in 1846, which was sold at the Anti-Slavery Fair in Philadelphia. His brother Edward was President of the Philadelphia Institution for Instruction of the Blind and helped organize the Philadelphia Dental College.

Photo credit.

Pintail

The Palo Alto Baylands are teeming with waterfowl right now. On my morning run today I got a nice up-close look at a flock of northern pintail. This is the most beautiful and graceful of our ducks, in my opinion. The male is simply a splendid creature, with his dark chocolate head, elegant coloration and markings, and eponymous tail feathers. But the female should not be overlooked, with her richly tawny head, subtle mottling, and equally graceful long neck.
(Photo source)