We’re in the high summer now. A hot dry summer at that. The lawn is looking pretty ugly. It crunches under foot. We’re starting to look like Arizona.
This is the warmest first six months of a year ever recorded. And the hurricane season started earlier than ever. Of course climate change is just a theory. But hey, so is gravity. Never mind that the last ice age couldn’t go away without climate change. And Australians aren’t falling off the bottom of the planet.
Science says you can’t prove a theory, only disprove it. The next experiment could always prove a theory wrong. Gravity hasn’t been disproved yet, but you can’t prove it. The very next experiment may show that Newton was wrong and Australians are falling off the bottom of the planet.
There is, however, the Flat Earth Society (http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/). Members of this esteemed body believe a literal translation of the bible means the earth is not a spheroid. Never mind the evidence that seems to point against it. The Flat Earth Society is accepting new members and I’m sure being a Republican tea party activist will elevate your standing in the organization. I’m really surprised FOX news hasn’t been championing them as an alternative to those ivory tower academics that believe in data, scientific process, and peer review.
So anyway, every shred of evidence since we conquered fire seems to point to Newton being correct. Just like all the evidence seems to point to human acceleration of global climate change. Wouldn’t it be nice if every jackass, especially elected ones that don’t believe in theories like climate change, would jump off a cliff to prove Newton’s theory wrong. I would even wait at the bottom of the cliff with a net to theoretically catch them. Just in case Newton was right. Maybe the survivors could meet at a Flat Earth Society convention and talk about cold fusion with Pons and Fleischmann. They probably didn’t even lose tenure over that debacle. What a gig.
Anyway, back to birding. With summer here we aren’t going to get much bird movement around here. Territories are established and the birds are down to the business of passing on their genes. For the next couple months we aren’t going to get many more species without traveling. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Part of our little adventure this year is finding new places.
Phoebe nestlings.
This week we checked out the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, about an hour from here. The Refuge is a pretty neat place. There were hundreds of American egrets and great blue herons there, as well as a slew of other wetland species. We got several new species for the year. We both got common gallinule, Caspian tern, and lesser yellowlegs. Lise also got shortbilled dowitcher and least sandpiper. Lise is at 271 and I am at 281. That gives us about five months to get 70 – 80 new species.
Birding may be slow but odonates are really coming in. These things are a lot more challenging than birds. With birds you have calls and songs to fall back on. For a good number of odonates you have to have them in hand to ID. Photographing birds is hard. Photographing odonates is way harder.
Rambur’s forktail in Delaware. A new one for me.
Female Eastern pondhawk. Common but still pretty neat.
Ed's and Lise's Biggish Years 