Author: turndoozie

Finished up the ESRI conference in San Diego. Great time. Whole bunch of GIS geeks like me.  Scary thought. Molly went to the conference with me. She liked hanging out at the Hilton pool while I attended sessions on spatial statistics. Who won there? We scored much booty in the trade show. I was afraid my bag was going to be overweight.

Over 15,000 people attended the conference. Initially I thought over 200 countries were represented but in fact it was only 131 countries. Heard more than one language I didn’t recognize. Pretty amusing to overhear someone yammering away in an unrecognizable language and then  hear “ArcGIS online” in the middle of the conversation. There was a Nigerian gentleman beside me at a trade show booth. The way he was dressed I assumed he’s that deposed king that’s been sending emails to help get his money out of the country. I’m glad he didn’t recognize my name and ask why I never responded to his email.

Fellow geogeeks.

Plenary session for 15,000.

San Diego is a lot different than when I was there during my Navy days, lo those many years ago. I didn’t serve under Noah but it wasn’t too long after that. Wood ships and iron men or something like that.

Ed in the navy.

The real “Old Navy”.

Port of call – San Diego. Sailors and dogs keep off the grass.

San Diego was a navy town back then but I wouldn’t have called it a friendly navy town. This was the time of signs saying “No Dogs Or Sailors Allowed On The Grass.” Maybe I was just in the wrong parts of town but the place has cleaned up considerably and is really pretty nice now. You didn’t see sushi or Indian restaurants back then. There’s lots of homeless people though. I guess the weather probably makes San Diego a better place to be homeless than Chicago.

San Diego has over 90 golf courses and more retired admirals than any other city in the world. I doubt any of them are among the homeless. The number of admirals may be why the city even has a couple Navy monuments now. One is dedicated to Taffy 3, where an outnumbered and completely outgunned navy group took on a much larger and far better armed Japanese fleet. This was a classic last stand battle, an Alamo with survivors. E.E. Evans, who I believe was Cherokee, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions commanding the USS Johnston. Once the Johnston was completely shot up and sinking Evans ordered the crew to abandon ship. He went back to make a final check for survivors but was never seen again. He and his crew fought so fiercely that the skipper of a passing Japanese ship saluted them. Iron ships and iron men. I couldn’t get any good pictures of the monument because there were always people there.

Didn’t get much birding in. Just what I could get on the waterfront by the convention center. I did get three new species for the year, Heermann’s gull, western gull, and brown pelican. The two gulls were life birds for me too. Also had a really out of place ash-throated flycatcher, right on the waterfront. The only other passerine we saw there was pigeons. The flycatcher didn’t add to the count because we got them in Arizona but it was interesting to see it on the waterfront. Right by the USS Midway museum.

A very lost ash-throated flycatcher

The birds were a pleasant little addition to the conference. The count now stands at 284 for me, 271 for Lise, and a combined count of 287. Onward and upward.

Molly and I are in San Diego for the annual ESRI user conference. This is my third time at the conference. There’s usually about 15,000 fellow GIS geeks from over 200 countries attending. Big doings in the GIS world. Took a quick look in the ESRI book store and they had Roger McCoy’s Field Manual for Remote Sensing. Molly thought it pretty cool that she could say, “Hey, I’m related to him.” Lise is home holding down the fort for us. Rumor has it the bathroom is going to get painted.

View of the San Diego conference center from our hotel room.

At the conference center.

I don’t like flying anymore. The first five or so years I worked for Grumman flying was a way of life. I loved it. Always heading someplace new. Now it’s more a hassle than anything else. Sitting in the SouthWest waiting room we were force fed CNN. The Colorado movie massacre. Penn State taking down Joe Paterno’s statue. Kidnaped cousins in Iowa. Stuff I would rather not hear about right now. I’m not looking to ignore these things, I just want to hear them on my own terms, not force fed to me. Twenty-four seven news coverage is probably one of the worst things that has happened to us.

I did hear a new announcement at the airport. Family alert; have you lost a child? Who’s going to jump up and say, “Hey I’m an idiot and left my kid wandering around the Detroit airport.” There’s always a chance it was deliberate. Buy them a ticket somewhere and dump them at the airport.

Not too much birding wise this past week. Everything has settled in locally and we haven’t had time to do serious chasing. There was a black billed magpie up on South Manitou Island but there is no way we could have chased that one. I wanted to chase least bitterns yesterday but I smacked up my foot in a bike accident Friday morning.  We just played low key and got ready for the trip instead. Did get a little odonate work in yesterday. No dragonflies, just a couple damsel flies. Haven’t had time to key them out yet. Plus some insect sex if you’re into that kind of thing.

Unknown damsel.

Unknown damsel eating a bug.

Insect porn.

       
                       

Guess where we went this weekend.

Instead of birding we spent the weekend in the Windy City. Took Amtrak to Chicago and spent a couple days visiting with Zack and Nikki, doing a little architectural photography, and just checking out the big city.                            

Molly and Zack.

We rode business class going in but had to ride in steerage going back. Business class was quite comfortable but steerage was OK too. Much more relaxing than driving. I could work on the laptop or read. Things that are usually frowned on while driving. Still had some issues though. Going in we had over an hour of delays that really set off this drunken loudmouth in our compartment. Coming back we had some teeny boppers that just had to make sure they were heard.            

Riding the train gave us a look at a slice of the countryside one doesn’t usually get to see. Even going through Lansing it was hard to figure out where we were because we were seeing things from a different view. The usual landmarks weren’t there. Sometimes there were nice views and sometimes there was nothing but a blur of vegetation or other trains. Kind of like a green wall.

The green wall

Passing train.

Everything in this area is dry. Like Lise said, we saw brown fields and we saw brownfields. Some pretty interesting things and some really scary things. And, with an air of smugness ,we got to be moving while the cars at the railroad crossings waited for us. Usually it’s the other way around and I’m stuck cursing and waiting for a train to pass.

Brown fields from a fast moving train.

Brownfields from a fast moving train.
                               
Just don’t expect to get into Chicago on time and bring some rations for the delays. The rail lines are owned by freight lines so Amtrak passenger trains get zero priority.

Heat aside, Chicago was great.  Or as Dan Quayle, America’s own village idiot said, “It is wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago…”. I’m glad he was elected vice president and not something important like student council president. As vice president he couldn’t do any more damage to the country than highlight the inadequacies of our educational system.        

We were stayed downtown, right in the middle of things. A couple blocks from Navy Pier, right by the Tribune Plaza, 15 minute walk to Millennium Park and right at the start of the Magnificent Mile. Expensive as hell but an exciting place to be. “You’d never think of taking a cab if you had to walk a mile down Chicago’s Michigan Avenue.” – Helmut Jahn

Architecturally and photographically Chicago was a lot more interesting than DC is. DC has the mall with the monuments but other than that is but it is mostly a bunch of ho-hum limestone and brick government office buildings. I think Chicago is better than New York too. There was enough open space along the river and in the plazas that you got great views of buildings reflecting in each other. Intricate  stonework mixed in with steel and glass. All kinds of crazy lines running in all directions. Doesn’t look like anything was laid out with any rhyme or reason to but it works.

“New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.” – Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968

“Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world” –
Frank Lloyd Wright.

Our hotel interior.

Our hotel interior in black and white.

“There are almost no beautiful cities in America, though there are many beautiful parts of cities, and some sections that are glorious without being beautiful, like downtown Chicago."  – Noel Perrin

”In the twilight, it was a vision of power.“ – Upton Sinclair

Millennium Park has the Bean.  Not exactly high art. It’s kind of like a reflective kidney bean. On the outside you get these warped reflections of yourself or the skyline. On the inside you get reflections of reflections. Almost every picture you take you find yourself in the picture.

The Bean.

Warped skyline.

Warped skyline with Ed.

Apparently native Chicagoans think this thing is ugly and hate it. Everyone else loves it though. I had to be there at 6:30 in the morning to have the place almost to myself. Just me and a couple of other photography geeks. The rest of the time, even in crazy hot heat, it was crowded. While talking pictures of the Bean I had one guy walk past me and say, “nice tripod.” I’m really hoping he was just a tripod aficionado and it wasn’t a pick up line. 

Ed at 6:30 AM.

Ed in the Bean at 6:30 AM.

Molly, Lindsay, & Ed inside the Bean.

The real beauty of the Bean was watching how people interacted with it. That alone was worth a couple hours. Almost always the first reaction was to walk up and touch it. Then it was getting a picture of your reflection. People seemed to lose their inhibitions around it. I can’t think of any other place where someone in a crowd would lay down on the ground to see their warped reflection.

Molly doing a hand stand.

Zack doing a hand stand.

Chicago had some down sides. Lot’s of desperate looking homeless people. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be homeless there in the winter. ”I think that’s how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, ‘Gee, I’m enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn’t cold enough. Let’s go west.“ – Richard Jeni

“Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation.” – Eugene V. Debs

Seeing the homeless was bad enough but then there was this. The Chicago Theater had “An Evening With Barry Manilow.” The only thing worse I can think of would be two evenings with Barry Manilow.

”Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It’s the most theatrically corrupt.“ – Studs Terkel, 1978

Through history people have had some less than positive things to say about the Windy City:
”Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.“
Ashley Montagu

”Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.“ – Carl Sandburg, in Harry Golden, 1961

”In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it’s a sport. In Chicago not only your vote counts, but all kinds of other votes–kids, dead folks, and so on.“ Dick Gregory, Dick Gregory’s Political Primer, 1972

”I have struck a city – a real city – and they call it Chicago… . I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.“ Rudyard Kipling, 1891

“That’s great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you’d want to spend more than three hours in.” Jerry Della Femina

They may all be right in their own way but I think Mark Twain sums up Chicago nicely. “We struck the home trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago–a city where they are always rubbing a lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago–she outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.” – Mark Twain “Life on the Mississippi,” 1883

We didn’t get any new species but the trip wasn’t devoid of bird life. Between the train ride and a few birds lost in downtown Chicago we saw red-tailed hawks, sandhill cranes, goldfinch, house sparrow, crows, turkey vulture, rock doves, starling, barn swallow, Canada geese, great egret, great blue heron, mourning doves, ring-billed gull, and red-winged blackbird, and robin. We didn’t get the peregrine that nested on the building beside Zack and Nikki. Also, there were a bunch of dragonflies zipping around the gardens of Millenium Park, right in the middle of millions of tons of steel and glass and a couple million people. That’s resilience. No wonder they have been around since the dinosaurs.

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.

Hot, hot, hot!!!!!!!! The temperature, not the birding. We spent the past hot week cooking in Delaware on a family vacation. Lindsay braved a vacation with us and managed to survived too.

Delaware birding was good for Lise. She made a big jump in her count, getting 26 new species. The only new one I got was Northern bobwhite quail. Our counts now stand at 278 for me, 266 for Lise and a combined count of 281. We got most of Lise’s target species. We missed a couple like boat-tailed grackle and fish crow. Missing the fish crow surprised me since they are generally common around the coast. Maybe the heat kept them down. It was beastly hot.

This was a family vacation so we did lots of beachy vacation kinds of things. Got in some kayaking and the Rehobeth fireworks. Molly and Lindsay did the Rehobeth boardwalk a number of times, hit the Cape Henlopen beach a couple times, and did a marathon Putt-Putt golf session with Anita. They went to Ocean City and played six games of carbohydrate fueled Putt-Putt. In the high heat. Lindsay turns out to be a Putt-Putt ringer. Scored five hole-in-ones in a single game.

Molly finding out that cell phones don’t like the ocean.

Lindsay and Molly on the boardwalk Funland Paratrooper.

The Funland Paratrooper demonstrating what it does to your mind and your guts.

Yucking it up on July 4, waiting for the fireworks.

The day they did Putt-Putt, Lise and I did most of our birding. The morning started in the high eighties and climbed into the high nineties. Compare that to when we did the Sault Ste. Marie trip and the starting temperature was below zero. That gives us  over a hundred degree Fahrenheit temperature swing for birding. Not sure which is better. The cold makes you physically hurt and it’s difficult doing anything wearing bulky clothing and gloves. The heat doesn’t make you hurt but you can feel real sticky and uncomfortable. Then add in the biting insects that come with the heat. Bombay Hook had these nasty green-headed flies that drew blood when they bit you. These bastards treated DEET like a nice Cabernet. “Look Louie, a couple of pasty white Northerners nicely basted in DEET. Dinner is served.” Might be time to take up a new hobby like darts or indoor glow-in-the-dark black light Putt-Putt.
                               
I got a little time in to do chase dragonflies. I had a pair of slatey skimmers fly right in front of my face to nab a bug just off my nose. The male nabbed the bug and landed then the female landed on his back. He didn’t share. Getting amber wing pictures was tough. These guys are common but very skittish. If you are three feet away and move your hand they fly off.  

Slatey skimmer pair.

Slatey skimmer male.

Eastern amberwing.

Eastern amberwing trying to cool off.

Thursday my sister Anita took off a day and we did a trip to Washington DC. Hit the National Zoo and the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Got to see the live panda at the National Zoo and the stuffed one at the Natural History Museum. The live one was a lot more interesting. I wanted to do the Air and Space Museum but Lindsay vetoed it because that was “only something that guys are interested in.” I’m sure Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride would have something to say about that but I acquiesced. It ain’t easy being outnumbered four to one. Not enough Y chromosomes in the family.

Lindsay and Molly do the Zoo.

Deviant behavior at the zoo.

DC is one of those places I could spend a lot more time than a single day. To think that we have great places like the Zoo, the Smithsonian, and the National Mall with no admittance fee. All accessible by public transportation too. We picked up the Metro at the New Carrollton station way east of DC proper.  Worked great for us. The next day the Metro had slow downs and a derailment related to the heat but it worked great for us.

Molly and Lindsay on the Metro.

The heat knocked out walking around the mall. We each went through quarts of water. This was like desert hiking with the opportunity to be mugged. Which reminds me of my favorite boardwalk T-shirt saying for the trip. “Bring a compass. It gets awkward when you have to start eating your friends.”

Did I mention it was hot at the zoo?

We did some great eating. Local blue crabs were in season. This is eating as performance art. Getting up close and personal with your food. Dissection with a wooden mallet. The best place for crabs is a little place called The Surfing Crab. All the ambiance of a prison dining hall. Cement floors, painted cinder block walls, long picnic tables covered with brown paper and you don’t know who you will be sharing a table with. But crabs so sweet you go looking for every small shard of meat.                    

Crabs before dissection by mallet.

Crabs after dissection by mallet.

Lots of other great stick to your ribs food too. Which really means stick to your arteries food. This is the first time I have ever seen a scrapple croissant sandwich. Kind of a sacred and profane thing. Not something you’ll get with a croissant in Paris I bet. To top things off we brought back 150 clams from Delaware and then hit Weaver’s in the Lebanon Farmers Market for a block of scrapple, two pounds of Lebanon bologna, and 40 pounds of  smoked bacon. Don’t get much better than that.

Fresh roasted coffee and a scrapple croissant at the Lewes Bake Shoppe.

We used to hit Weaver’s once or twice a year at a farm market in Lancaster County. They have since moved to the Lebanon Farmers Market, much more convenient for us. On our way to Delaware we swung by the market o pick up some food for the trip. I asked if they would have 40 pounds of bacon available the next week. The manager scribbled down my name to make sure they would have it. Sure enough, the next Saturday they had 40 pounds of bacon packed into two boxes with the note that had my name scribbled on it. A couple hundred dollars in meat and they didn’t ask for a deposit or a credit card number. Essentially business on a handshake. It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with someone that didn’t require a credit card number or a DNA sample before committing to something.                            

                       

This is being written as we head to the east coast. Lise’s driving, I’m not texting and driving.

It’s been a slow week for birding. Between heat and being busy we just couldn’t seem to get out there. Last night we took the kayaks out to try for a least bittern at Park Lake. Struck out. High heat, high winds, and low water kept us from getting to where we really needed to be.

Molly and I got out for some field work but it wasn’t birding. We went down to Ives Road Fen to help with massasauga rattlesnake surveys. Basically you line up and slowly walk through the area, hoping to spook out a snake. A good part of the area is tall rushes, sedges and grasses. Like waist high tall. Makes it tough to see anything. If you are lucky you disturb them enough that they curl up and start rattling. If they just take off through the high grass you have to be really quick with the snake tongs before they find a crawfish hole or disappear into the thatch layer.

Ives Road fen. Major neat place if you are into natural communities.

Molly the snake hunter.

Once you catch a snake you then process it. Processing a snake entails taking some measurements, then inserting a bar code tag up in them. Best not mentioned where the tag is placed. The bar code tag is used for mark recapture studies. All you need to do is scan the snake with the reader to get details about the it. Finally a couple scales are branded. Kind of like snake cowboys. All we need is Frankie Laine singing, “Head em up, move em out, rawhide.”

We didn’t do too well, probably because of the heat. Tuesday our group caught one massasauga. Thursday it was over 90 degrees F. by 10:30 AM and we didn’t find any. Saw a few garter snakes and some dragonflies. Probably the neatest thing we found was a crawfish carrying eggs that were hatching. So we got to see little baby crawfish, right out of the egg. That was a new one for me and pretty cool. 

Eggs and baby crayfish

Speaking of cool, we finished up with a trip to the Spotted Cow in Adrian. Over 50 flavors of soft serve ice cream and just about as many hand dipped flavors. Just in case the ice cream isn’t sufficient they also had deep fried brownies and deep fried cheesecake. My arteries harden just thinking about it. Adrian had another interesting establishment. A combination Laundromat, tanning salon, and Beaner’s Coffee.  So you can sip a latte while nuking yourself to a fine glow and watching your jockeys go round and round. Beat’s Gilligan’s Island reruns I guess.

  

The Spotted Cow in Adrian. Just watch out for the deep fried cheesecake and brownies.                                

Been a busy work week so we only got one new species. Not going to get to 350 with these kind of stats. Work sure does interfere with what is important. Both of us got a dickcissel. Lise got her’s in West Lafayette at Prophet’s Town State Park and I got mine around here. Mine came thanks to a listserve post that directed me to the spot.

I also tried a little odonate work this weekend but that wasn’t too productive. I hit two spots on the Red Cedar in my waders. First time I’ve been in waders this season. Identified a couple damselfly species and saw a few dragonflies but nothing spectacular. I think the Red Cedar is just too muddy and silty to be good dragonfly habitat.

Molly was moving her life sized theater cutouts of Ron Weasley and Draco Malfoy and watching a Harry Potter movie. I started thinking about what’s next for the boy wizard, now that he conquered all evil and saved the world as we know it. Going back to school doesn’t seem likely. That would be worse then when I went back to grad school. I figure that J.K. Rowling has to spend too much time in her counting house, counting all her money, to think up new adventures for the boy wizard. So I came up with a book idea for her. How about “Harry Potter and The Big Year” for book number eight of the series.

Doing a big year may be the perfect transition from saving the world to the more mundane status of a wizard with nothing to do but procreate. You certainly want to attempt it before kids, jobs, and a mortgage are in the picture. Doing a true big year requires all the skills that a world saving wizard can muster up. There’s both physical and mental challenges. There is the traveling around to strange places at ungodly hours. There’s the questions about your sanity from friends and family. Being able to talk to snakes may come in handy too. At least you don’t need to worry about things like the avada kedabra  curse blind siding you.

A certain amount of wizardry is needed to be a big year contender. Breaking Sandy Komito’s 745 species big year record will require some major magic. Having Hermione’s time-turner gadget would be handy. The ability to be in two places almost simultaneously would certainly help your species count. Think about combining the time turner with the instantaneous travel via an old boot port key or flue dust. You can spend a couple hours birding on the Gulf Coast, then stroll into the simultaneously occurring Lansing staff meeting only a minute late. I could be a couple hours late to a staff meeting and not really miss anything. The flue dust may be a problem. It would probably make me sneeze and I would end up in the Bronx. Not sure which would be worse, staff meeting or the Bronx.

Mythical birds may be an issue. Can a wizard count birds that are not on the official ABA North American list? Like the phoenix that uses its tears to heal your fatal wounds or brings you a silver sword when you’re in a bind? Right now I’m starting to think that screech owls are mythical birds.

A few other potential Harry Potter titles as our hero gets on with his post Voldemort life;

Harry Potter and The Lost Thumb Drive: It has to be some powerful dark magic that allows so much data to fit onto such a small thing that then disappears into thin air. “Accio thumb drive” doesn’t seem to work.            
Harry Potter and Quantum Physics: Only in the world of wizards or quantum physics could Schrodinger’s cat be both dead and alive.
Harry Potter and The Unsolvable Puzzle: His Mother-in-Law gives him an evil suduko puzzle. Solving it requires something stronger than pumpkin juice.
Harry Potter and The Mystery of Scrapple: Harry and friends solve the mystery of scrapple. No, it’s not Hippogriff meat. Some dark secrets are best kept from the rest of the world.
Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Debt: Just when he gets the student loans paid off, Harry buys a new house. It’s expensive buying into the Hogwarts School District. No more trips to the Quiddich World Finals. 
Harry Potter and the Kidney Stone: Welcome to middle age kiddo. This ain’t the Crucio curse, it’s something a bit more painful.
Harry Potter and The Deathly HMO: Sorry but you went out of the network. You may as well be cursed.
Harry Potter and The Secret of Life: Unless it involved three wise men and a star, it’s not magic Harry. It’s called birth control for a reason.

We did a little trip up to the Graying to get Kirtland’s warbler. Went with our friends Barb and Ellen. Good thing we did. They introduced us to Cops and Doughnuts, a great little doughnut place in Claire. The place is a historic, from scratch bakery, started in 1896. It’s now owned by the nine Claire police officers who stepped in to keep it open. Yes, there was a cop in there when we went in.

Cops and Doughnuts.

Cops and Doughnuts is the home of the “Squealer”, a doughnut with maple icing and bacon on it. If they would tone down the sugar in the icing a bit it would taste like eating a plate of French toast. No word on a scrapple version yet.

The squealer.

The trip was great. We got to see Kirtland’s warbler. They summer in Michigan’s jack pine barrens and winter in the Bahamas. Which isn’t a bad gig when you think about it. The jack pine system was heavily dependent on fire coming through the area periodically. When Europeans started suppressing fires the jack pine stopped reproducing and Kirtland’s habitat deceased.  No surprise, so did the warblers. They almost went extinct a couple years ago. Once the dependency was figured out the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Michigan DNR started implementing management that increased warbler habitat. The warblers responded in kind.

Kirtland’s warbler. Taking food to a nest.

Kirtland’s were also nailed pretty hard by cowbird parasitism. Cowbirds are native to the Great Plains where they followed buffalo herds around. They didn’t bother building nests, choosing to lay their eggs in other species’ nests. Then the host parents would hatch and raise the cowbird chicks. Bird species in the Great Plains evolved with this behavior and adapted strategies to cope. Then after we cut down the great Eastern forests, cowbirds expanded eastward into the now open areas. Unfortunately the bird species in these areas have not evolved with the cowbirds. They end up raising cowbird babies at the expense of their own offspring. To counter this threat to the Kirtland’s, cowbirds are trapped throughout the Kirtlands nesting area. Several thousand cowbirds are trapped each year.

Male brown-headed cowbird.

Cowbird eggs in a warbler’s nest. Note the larger sized cowbird eggs. They out compete the warbler chicks, starving them.

Cowbird trap.

We got some other good species too including; upland sandpiper, clay colored sparrow, black-billed cuckoo, winter wren, black tern (for Lise), Lincoln’s sparrow – lifer for both of us, and a young Northern goshawk on a nest. The goshawk was a lifer for Barb.

We are well into the nesting season now.  In some cases broods are already fledged and are chasing Momma around for food. In something reminiscent of my childhood we have seen five young ones whining for food chasing after a harried mother.

The range of nesting styles is interesting. Everything from the fortress built up in a tree by the goshawks to the pile of stones in a park entrance driveway the killdeer use. Most birds hide their nests or make them difficult to get at. Not the killdeer. I can’t believe how prolific killdeer are given their tendency for dangerous living.

Young goshawk.

Tufted titmouse nesting in a hole. There were young inside because it kept going in with food.

Kirtland’s warbler nest. Down in that well camouflaged hole was a mother and several young. All we could see was an eye and a beak with binos.

Killdeer eggs. The nest, such as it is, is in the gravel of a park entrance road.

Our counts now stand at 276 for me, 238 for Lise, and a combined count of 280. We had to remove one from our list. We mistook the summer tanager call, thinking we heard it up here in Michigan. Highly unlikely.

I spent all day today in Grand Rapids at a conference for Economic Developers. Could have been worse I guess. At least it wasn’t an insurance salesman conference. They fed really well too. No scrapple though. Obviously they have never done economic development in the Penn. Dutch country.

Our species counts right now stand at 270 for me, 231 for Lise, and a family count of 274. We missed a fair number of Spring migrants and it took us longer to find nesting species than it should have. A lot of the reason is unfamiliarity with the vocalizations, both songs and calls. We do have a  few of them down but nowhere the number we need know to be respectable birders.

Knowing the calls is essential part of birding. There are some species that look so similar the only reliable way to differentiate them is by call. One time I had one of the empidonax flycatchers dead in my hand and still could not tell which of the five possible species it was. There was a crowd of fellow grad students and some pressure for me to name the species. I was thinking of squeezing his little chest to force some air out of him hoping it would make his call.

Knowing the songs and calls really speeds up the process of finding new species. Or in the case of big years, knowing the calls helps limit the time spent tracking down dead ends. A great example is the American redstart. At least five times we have spent time tracking down an elusive bird with an unfamiliar call only to find another yet American redstart. Or as we have renamed them, another damn redstart. Don’t get me wrong, a redstart is always nice to see, but we could have been focusing on other species we haven’t seen.

Birds use a bony structure called a syrinx to make their sounds. They can control both sides of their trachea independently of each other and control the membranes holding the parts of syrinx together to make some fairly complex sounds. Some species can even create two notes simultaneously.

Translating bird sounds into English is kind of amusing. These are quotes from Peterson’s Eastern Field Guide.

• Tufted titmouse: notes similar to those of chickadees but more drawling, nasal, wheezy and complaining. Something like an avian version of George W. Bush.
• Virginia rail: wak-wak-wak, also kidick, kidick, and various kicking sounds. When I think kicking sounds I think Marvel comics kicking sounds. Bam, pow, wap, umph. Maybe a “holy highwater Batman” thrown in there too.
• Eastern kingbird: A rapid sputter of high bickering notes. Think of listening to the Republican primary. Or Congress.
• Western kingbird: Shrill bickering calls. Think Fox News.
• McCown’s longspur: clear sweet warbles. Not just warbles, mind you but clear sweet ones. Not to be mistaken for the “bright pleasant warble” of the painted bunting. Doesn’t clear sweet warbles imply there are also murky sour warbles? Rap music maybe?
• Bobolink: ecstatic and bubbling, starting with reedy notes and rollicking upward. Makes me think of Strasburg, North Dakota’s favorite son, Mr. Wunnerful Wunnerful himself, Lawrence Welk. Let’s go boys, a wan an a twoo…
• Scarlet tanager: Robin-like but hoarse (suggests a robin with a sore throat). So not only do you need to know what a robin sounds like, you need to know what a robin with the flu sounds like.
• Scrub jay: A rough rasping kwesh. Also a low rasping zhreek or zhrink. Do these guys smoke or what? The avian version of Marian McPartland maybe?

So imagine trying to translate Peterson’s for say, Japanese birders. These are the English versions of birds sounds straight out of Peterson’s; whoooleeeeee, wheeloooooooooo, skyow, skewk, kucks, oong ka’ choonk, ker-loo, garooo-a-a-a, zayrp, ker-lee-oo, tchack, chick’-a-per-weeoo-chick’, quee-ee, ji-jiv, frahnk, dzeeb, swee-ditchety…. and the list goes on. I’m pretty sure you won’t find these in the Official Scrabble Dictionary.

This weekend we will be going a bit north with our friends Barb and Ellen to listen for a song that “..resembles a Northern Waterthrush’s song; at times suggests a House Wren’s. Typical song starts with 3 or 4 low staccato notes, continues with rapid ringing notes on a higher pitch, and ends abruptly.” Yes, we are going for Kirtland’s warblers.

Haven’t had much time for birding or writing since our return from Maine.The trip was great but unfortunately the rest of the world doesn’t stop just because I go on vacation. I was in such a daze the first day back at work it felt like day two of a three day bender. I am definitely ready to be a gentleman of leisure and cut out this work stuff. There is also the vacation aftermath, like about 600 pictures to edit and catalog. A more tolerable task than working for a living but still something that needs to get done. So, this has been a catch up at work and around the house week.

We have gotten some new species this week. Nothing spectacular, just species we can find around here with a little looking. Like an evening walk around campus to hear common nighthawks.

After looking high and low in Delaware I finally got a ruby-throated hummingbird at our feeder here in Okemos. I kept checking every feeder I could find in Delaware but never saw one. There was one trailer that had an elaborate bird feeding setup including several hummingbird feeders. They had everything except a real live ruby-throated hummer visible when I would cruise past. The owner’s probably got a bit creeped out having some guy slowly driving past their trailer, looking at it through binoculars a couple times a day. “Honest officer, I just need a ruby-throated hummingbird for my 2012 big year list. I’m not casing the place to steal their Elvis on velvet wall hanging.”        

The work week was busy but we did get out to play this weekend. Saturday morning we went to Legg Park for a little birding and some odonate photography. Didn’t get any dragonfly pictures but I did get some of a spreadwing damselfly. Haven’t tried to key it out yet but I think it is an elegant spreadwing. Lise got a willow flycatcher there too.

Possible elegant spreadtail

Today we did a little leisurely family kayak float trip down the Grand River. Leisurely for some of us. Molly and her buddy Ian beat us by a tad over an hour. I want to emphasize that Lise and I were taking a leisurely saunter down the river. We were in no hurry and easily could have kept up with the two incredibly buff, physically fit teenagers, one of whom had recently completed a triathalon. We would have smoked them if we hadn’t been going for a Thoreau-like experience cruising down river. We went easy on them so they wouldn’t feel bad. I could easily knock off a triathalon if the events were billiards, gardening, and barbecuing.

On the float Lise got spotted sandpiper and prothonotary warbler and we both got Acadian flycatcher. For dragonflies I managed to identify midland clubtail, Illinois river cruiser, dragon hunter, and a lifer, comet darner. There were several other species about but using a bug net from a kayak isn’t recommended unless you want a bath in the Grand River.        

Speaking of baths, it turns out that Fido, our desert lizard, likes playing around in water. She does something like a swimming motion through the water and likes to drink out of the hose.  Nothing to do with birding but I think it’s kind of cool.

Fido taking a swim.