This week in birds - #119

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Hummingbird traffic is picking up as the fall migration of the little birds gets into full swing.  I'm seeing multiple birds around my yard every day now, including several males like this Ruby-throat enjoying a visit at my Hamelia shrub.  There may be Rufous hummers among the visitors as well, but I can't absolutely confirm that.

*~*~*~*

The makers of the rodenticide d-Con have agreed to pull their super-toxic products from retail shelves by early next year. This is a victory for conservation groups that have been campaigning for years to get this accomplished. The problem is that the product kills rodents very effectively, but often as those rodents are dying or dead, they are picked up and devoured by raptors or other predators and the poisons then kill them as well.

*~*~*~*

And we know that poisons can persist in the environment for a very long time. DDT was banned in the United States more than forty years ago and yet it is still killing birds in Michigan. Presence of the poison is attributed to a chemical-plant-turned-Superfund site in the area.

*~*~*~*

It was hoped that rains generated by El Nino this year might help to break the long and severe drought being suffered by California, but those hopes have pretty much been dashed. If the rains were coming, they should have arrived by now, but there is no rain in sight and the drought continues unabated.

*~*~*~*

Artificial lighting in cities can create "light pollution" which can have a detrimental effect on the love life of songbirds. It upsets their circadian rhythms which tell them when it is time to mate.

*~*~*~*

The Philippines have an incredible diversity of species, but that diversity is being severely imperiled by rampant illegal logging. The government has established a tree-planting program to try to stem the damage being caused.

*~*~*~*

The estuaries of Northern Ireland have long been a haven for over-wintering shorebirds, but recently, populations of nearly all these species are declining precipitously.

*~*~*~*

Migrant women and their children in Baltimore have a fellow-feeling for the migratory birds that pass through the area. They are volunteering their time to plant shrubs and flowers that feed and shelter the birds in Baltimore's Patterson Park as a part of the Audubon Center's Bird Ambassadors program.

*~*~*~*

A bee hobbyist in North Texas writes in "The Bee Pasture" about providing habitat for butterflies - specifically for the Hackberry Emperor.

*~*~*~*

There are many myths in various cultures throughout the world about gigantic, and usually angry, birds, some of them so big they could carry away elephants. No proof of the existence of any such bird has ever been found. They seem to be entirely inventions of our vivid imaginations.

*~*~*~*

On the other side of that myth equation is the story about the extinction of dinosaurs. Of course they are not extinct! They are all around us. We are hardly ever out of sight of one when we are outdoors. They are called "birds" and they are descendants of the theropod dinosaurs which included such predators as Tyrannosaurs and Velociraptors. The theropods' strategy for survival was to get smaller and smaller and it was a very successful strategy. Yes, that Ruby-throated Hummingbird at the top of the page is just a tiny theropod descendant!

*~*~*~*

The elusive Black-capped Petrel spends most of its life over the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Now, scientists are learning more about the bird's travels through the first-ever project to track them. This is a joint project of the U.S. Geological Survey, the South Carolina Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Clemson University, Grupo Jaragua in the Dominican Republic, and the American Bird Conservancy.

*~*~*~*

The water levels in the Colorado River Basin have dropped by alarming amounts in recent years. Most of the loss has been attributed to the severe drought gripping the West, but a new study indicates that at least part of the reason for the drop is a loss of groundwater.

                                                                          

The Thirteen Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian: A review

The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The thirteen-gun salute refers to the number of volleys given in honor of an ambassador, an envoy, and that title here presages a tale of a diplomatic mission that Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin are assigned on behalf of England.

But first, we find Aubrey still sailing the Surprise as in the last book, The Letter of Marque. That changes rather quickly, although never quick enough for Jack, when he is reinstated to the Royal Navy because of his exploits on behalf of the nation as a privateer. He is once again "Captain" Jack Aubrey and all is right in his world.

Well, almost all. Being a part of the Royal Navy once again means he must leave his beloved Surprise behind. He is given command of the Diane, formerly a French vessel, which he captured in the last book, and he is sent to accompany his friend Maturin on a diplomatic mission that will take them to the South China Sea. There, Maturin is to aid and support the king's envoy in securing a treaty with the Malay court at Pulo Prabang, a treaty that will prevent links between Bonaparte and the Malay princes that would put English merchant shipping at risk.

At the Sultan's court, Maturin encounters two French agents who have been his nemesis in the past and who are now well-entrenched in the Sultan's good graces, and with whom he must find a way of dealing so that the mission can succeed. At the same time, the English envoy proves to be a fatuous, self-important man, sensitive to any perceived slight - perhaps not the best personality for an ambassador, but Stephen Maturin is nothing if not resourceful and he manages his behind-the-scenes role with his usual aplomb, ensuring that the necessary treaty can be achieved.

This is a departure from the usual arc of these stories in that there is no great sea battle recounted, no prizes to be won. Instead, the action is mostly of a quieter kind until near the end when a killer typhoon hits after the Diane has become intractably stuck on an uncharted reef. Aubrey and his men must abandon the ship and go ashore to wait out the storm.

But before that final excitement, we get to accompany Stephen Maturin on a quieter - but no less exciting to him and to like-minded readers - adventure when he climbs the Thousand Steps to a sacred crater where a community of Buddhists watches over a habitat that includes orangutans and many other fascinating species. It is the high point of his time in the Malay world.

During this voyage also, Maturin is anticipating the birth of a child. His wife, Diana, is expecting their first child, which he is completely convinced will be a girl and he longs for news from home which will confirm that for him.

But he never gets that confirmation and we have to leave him there on a desolate rock in the South China Sea along with Aubrey and all the other men of the Diane who managed to survive the storm as they plan to build a schooner to escape their predicament. We'll have to wait for number 14 in the series to see whether they succeed. (I strongly suspect that they will!)


View all my reviews

Thank God it's August!

The world of humans has had a rather hellacious month of July. With the people of the Middle East doing their best to kill each other off and wipe the planet clean of anyone who sees things differently from them; with Russia and its minions in the eastern part of Ukraine shooting down civilian airliners and then keeping away investigators and those who simply want to recover the human remains for two long weeks while those remains are exposed to the elements; with the haters in our own country converging on our southern border with assault rifles in hand in order to repel unarmed children who want nothing more than to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol and seek protection... All in all, it was a month, we would be happy to forget.

So, let's do that for a couple of minutes.

It's August, a new month with a clean slate. Let's start it off with a visit to the world of Simon's Cat. We haven't checked on that ever-hungry feline lately. I wonder what he's up to these days.



In a world full of changes, often for the worse, it's a comfort to know that Simon's Cat never changes. Indeed, that could be said of all cats. It's one thing in an uncertain world that we can depend upon.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: A review

(Note: My review of this book was first published on Goodreads on October 12, 2009, but had never been posted here.)

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"...tell 'em dat love ain't somethin' lak uh grindstone dat's de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch.  Love is lak de sea.  It's uh movin' thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it's different with every shore."

This quote from near the end of the book, when Janie is telling her story to her friend Pheoby, is a summation of the tale for me.  Janie's life was like the sea, taking its shape from what it met, the things that contained it.  Perhaps that is true of all our lives.

This is, in many ways, quite a remarkable book, and I confess it is my introduction to Zora Neale Hurston.  I knew her name, of course, but had never read any of her works.  I knew of her as an anthropology student of Franz Boas.  I remember hearing of her during my own anthropology student days.

She had a wonderful ear for language and her telling of Janie's story in the vernacular of Southern Black speech seems a stroke of genius to me.  It brings Janie's story very close to the bone for me, because the cadences of the speech are so intimate and familiar to me from my own childhood.

Janie lived in a time and place when women of independence were looked at suspiciously.  (Well, that could be said of today as well, couldn't it?)  She tried living as her grandma who raised her wanted her to live.  She married the man of means that Grandma had chosen for her.  And she was miserable. When she met another man, who treated her differently and seemed to respect her desire to be her own person, she did not hesitate to run away with him.

She subsequently married Joe Starks and settled down to a life of substance and influence in the community where they lived.  But once again, she found that her husband was trying to control her, trying to mold her into his idea of the perfect wife, leaving no room for expansion to other shores.

Though she was unhappy and unfulfilled, she stayed with Starks until his death.  Soon after, she was to meet "Tea Cake," the free-spirited man of her dreams and the rest of her story is bound by those shores which she and Tea Cake explored together.

I'm very glad to have finally met Zora Neale Hurston.  She's an interesting character in her own right and the foreword and afterword, as well as discussions of Janie's feminism that were included in the book added much to my enjoyment of it.  It was a very canny decision by Harper Perennial Modern Classics to have included all that, especially for readers like me, who really knew little about Hurston other than her name.  In addition to everything else she was, she was a very good writer.    


View all my reviews

Backyard Nature Wednesday: Praying mantis

While I was watering a pot of gerbera daisies yesterday, I became aware that the daisies had a visitor aboard.

See him? He's well-camouflaged, wearing the same color as the leaves, and sitting just to the right of the flower. That's right - he's a praying mantis, one of the most interesting of predatory insects.

Here he is from a slightly different angle.

From behind, you can get an idea of those relatively large front legs which he uses to capture his prey - things like moths, crickets, grasshoppers, flies, and just about any other insect that comes within reach. Those legs are equipped with spikes that help him snare his prey and hold it in place while he devours it at his leisure. Not only do the mantises eat other kinds of insects, they are also known to eat their own kind. The most notorious cannibalistic behavior is that of the female mantis who sometimes eats her mate just after, or even during, the act of mating. This however does not seem to deter the horny males. Perhaps the hint of danger gives the act an extra fillip!

Those front legs that are formidable weapons also give this insect its common name. In its resting pose, the legs are bent and held together at an angle that suggest the position of praying hands - thus, "praying" mantis.

Whatever we call them, these insects are powerful and efficient predators. They have the ability to turn their triangular heads 180 degrees on their long neck in order to scan their surroundings with their two large compound eyes and the three other simple eyes that are located between them. While doing this, they remain virtually invisible because of their cryptic coloring of green or brown that blends in with their surroundings.

Praying mantids are welcome partners in the garden because they eat so many harmful insects. Indeed, gardeners often purchase egg cases of the insect to allow them to hatch in their gardens. I haven't found it necessary to do that since I seem to have plenty of naturally-occurring ones. And so can you if you eschew insecticides. The females regularly produce an egg case which holds hundreds of eggs. When the nymphs hatch, they look much like miniature versions of the adults. I frequently see large numbers of them around the garden in summer.

Here is a link to ten little-known facts about these fascinating insects.

The unguided Cruz missile

Ever since the voters of Texas in their infinite wisdom foisted Ted Cruz onto the national politics stage of America, we have read and listened to innumerable stories about the man that tell us that, whatever else he may be, he is very, very smart. And ever since he arrived on the scene and I've been reading those stories, I've been saying "Show me the evidence!"

Just ask my husband. We've had this discussion several times, because he tends to think that Cruz is very intelligent and that he just "plays stupid" for his tea party supporters. I maintain that he isn't playing.

But you won't convince any Beltway pundits of that. The "Cruz is brilliant" meme, which I suspect was started by Cruz himself, is now accepted wisdom with the Beltway crowd, and every time anyone mentions the name Ted Cruz, it is mandatory that they mention how smart he is.

So, mine has been a lonely voice indeed, which is why I was elated to see this headline on Salon.com yesterday: "The 'Ted Cruz is smart' trap: Why this garbage is false - and dangerous." 

"Yes!" I cried. Vindication at last! Someone agrees with me.

Nathan Robinson, the author of the piece, writes, "It can't really be that we think Cruz has a sophisticated mind, given that the only thoughts he produces are angry pants-on-fire platitudinous drivel. Even those who lavish praise on his oratory seem to agree that his heat-to-light ratio nears the infinite, and that 'thoughtfulness' and Ted Cruz cannot exist in the same room."

Well said, Nathan. To those who take the opposite view, I challenge them to name one original thought expressed by the man since he has been a senator or one positive and forward-thinking act taken in that period. He is a smarmy, egotistical, bomb-throwing, arrogant, destructive force, who cheerfully lies in support of his agenda in the certain belief that no one will call him on it because everyone is so intimidated by his vast intelligence. 

Moreover, Cruz seems to be thoroughly lacking in people skills and has completely alienated his fellow senators, which is apparently not all that easy to do in the clubby atmosphere of that body. He makes enemies every time he opens his mouth. Which is often. Like some other senators - John McCain comes to mind - he lives for the spotlight and, unfortunately, the mainstream media cooperates with him by shining it on him pretty much 24-7.

Nathan Robinson again:

Any definition of intelligence is destined to be highly contestable. Yet it is hard to imagine a plausible one that does not include large measures of critical thinking and self-scrutiny. As Bertrand Russell put it, it’s always a central problem that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Intelligence necessitates doubt, for doubt is the origin of wisdom. One whose mind is clamped shut cannot be intelligent, and yet Ted Cruz does not in his life ever seem to have taken on board a single challenge to his worldview.

We can be pretty sure that Ted Cruz is never troubled by doubt. Glib and loquacious, ambitious and confident he may be; a deep thinker he is not. The description once applied to Newt Gingrich - “a stupid person’s idea of what a smart person looks like” - seems to fit Ted Cruz perfectly. And since there are apparently plenty of stupid people around, especially among the media, we probably will continue hearing about how smart he is.

The Anodyne Necklace by Martha Grimes: A review

The Anodyne Necklace by Martha Grimes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that I could have easily read in one sitting if I didn't have anything else to do because it was just hard to put down once I got into it. But since I do have other things to do, it actually took me a couple of days. Two very pleasant days of reading.

Once again his boss sends Richard Jury off into the English countryside to solve a murder. This time it is in the tiny village of Littlebourne where a severed finger had recently been found. The finger pointed (pun intended) local constables to a boggy footpath where the corpse it had come from was found by a bird watcher out looking for a rare bird.

The murdered woman was a stranger to the village. It developed that she had probably come there for a job interview, but what was she doing on that footpath and why would anyone in the village want to kill her? Or was the deed done by some nefarious stranger?

Littlebourne, it turns out, is your typically wacky English village with eccentric denizens galore, all of whom we meet in the course of Jury's investigation. But strange things were happening in this village even before the murder. The year before had seen the theft of an extremely valuable emerald from one of the local gentry. Later, the owner of the emerald had died, leaving his widow essentially destitute and needing to sell their mansion to move on to something more manageable. The man suspected of the theft was himself killed in a road accident, but the emerald was never found.

Meanwhile, more recently, a young woman from the village had been attacked while she was in London for her violin lesson. She was left in a coma and is in the hospital, having not yet regained consciousness. Jury soon becomes convinced that all of these incidents are somehow related if he can only find the key. And if he can find that key, he can identify the murderer.

Aiding him in his search is the estimable if hypochondriacal D.S. Wiggins that we met in the first two entries in this series, as well as Jury's friend Melrose Plant who has become an amateur detective of sorts, one who enjoys assisting the police in their inquiries.

Richard Jury forms the opinion that the answer to the puzzle may actually lie in London and, returning there, he searches out a pub called the Anodyne Necklace where a game called "Wizards" is played. The game is played with a specially drawn treasure map and it seems that such a map may be instrumental in solving the murder.

But before the one murder can be solved, another one is committed in the village. It appears that a real crime wave has hit the sleepy little place and there are plenty of nasty people about who look suspicious.

As in the last book, The Old Fox Deceiv'd, Littlebourne has a charming and precocious child who figures in the plot. This time it is a nine-year-old horse-loving girl, Emily Louise Perk, and she seems to have the village pretty much under her thumb. (She actually reminded me somewhat of Alan Bradley's creation, Flavia de Luce, and I had to wonder if Bradley was possibly inspired by Grimes' child character.)

Of course, in the end, Jury, along with his "posse" of Wiggins, Plant, and Emily, manages to find the solution to the mysteries that surround Littlebourne and he wraps it all up in a neat little bow. But I'm sure his boss, who is always looking for an excuse to get him out of London, will soon find another quirky little village that is experiencing a crime wave and we've be off on another reading adventure.



View all my reviews