Tuesday, August 9

Life is kind of slow in the Schools’ household right now.
Not necessarily a bad thing as summer winds down.

We spent the weekend down in West Lafayette, visiting
family. Always a good thing to do. I spent some time playing out at
Prophetstown

State Park. Things were pretty slow odenate wise, at least where I was.
There’s a stream that flows through a nice fen but late in the season
everything was overgrown. Hard to sneak up on anything when you are in you are
hauling a tripod with camera and flash units through grass and plants over your
head. For birds I got dickcissel and Henslow’s sparrow, bringing me up to 298
for the year. Closing in on Lise’s 300 count.

Male widow skimmer at Prophetstown State Park.

American rubyspot damselfly
Prophetstown State Park.

While we were in West Lafayette we walked around a good bit
for Molly to play Pokemon Go. For the uninitiated, Pokemon Go is a worldwide
video game played on your cell phone. You wander around and Pokemons pop up and
you capture them by flinging a virtual ball at them. If you hit them, or they
don’t dodge or deflect the ball you capture them. You acquire the balls and
other goodies at various landmarks or buildings.

I am not a fan of video games and barely tolerate my smart
phone slightly more. But Pokemon Go is an interesting phenomenon. The developers
have done a remarkable job of incorporating the real world into the game. They
have taken online map products and turned them into a virtual reality. You see
a cartoon map of where you are, but it is accurate as any online map. Pretty
much anything that has a place name, or physical objects like historical
plaques or statues, are part of the game. Morton Community Center, which was
the building where Lise went to grade school, is a Pokemon Center where you
stock up on balls and goodies.

Being that I spent the last part of my career trying to
figure out how to map things, I’m really interested in the technical and
geographic component of the game. But the social side intrigues me even more. This
is a social game. People play this in groups. If you see a group of people
walking around looking at their phones, they are playing Pokemon Go. This is
the first time I have seen what amounts to a video game getting people outside,
walking around looking for places, as a group. I saw a number of families where
Mom, Dad, and all the kids were walking together collecting Pokemons on their
phones. And finding things they never knew existed. Molly made the comment that
now she is starting to understand maps. Except for the two guys that walked off
a cliff and the guy that ran into a police car while driving and playing, I’m
not seeing a down side to this game. The Iranian government declared Pokemon Go
a threat to national security so you know it has to be good. I’m still not
going to play the game, even just to irritate the Iranians, but I will enjoy
walking around with my daughter while she learns to read a map and get to level
22.

This morning I went out to Rose Lake following a lead on
ringed boghunters. Unfortunately the lead was from last May, about the time I
was up in the UP trying to find bats. Conditions were about as bad as at

Prophetstown. So, no ringed boghunters but I did get a few other more common
species.