This week in birds - #294

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

Chipping Sparrows are always welcome winter visitors in my garden.

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There were record high temperatures this week along the East Coast, including an 80 degree day on February 21 in Newark, New Jersey, that made that the highest temperature ever recorded there in the month of February. 

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In July of last year, part of the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctica peninsula split away revealing an ecosystem below it that had been hidden for 120,000 years. Now scientists are racing to explore the marine life revealed by the calving of the ice shelf. 

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Image from the Academy of Natural Sciences. 

This week was the 100th anniversary of the extinction of the Carolina Parakeet, a bird once so numerous that flocks in flight blotted out the sun. If such a population can be utterly extinguished, perhaps the lesson for us is that anything can be. Even us.

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It sometimes seems that the aim of the current administration in Washington is to destroy everything that has been protected by previous administrations. In this endeavor, no one has been more effective than the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt. He is systematically dismantling the agency and making it impossible to continue its purpose of protecting the environment. 

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There is hope, however, in the fact that the administration has often been "sloppy and careless," in the words of one critic, in its assault on environmental rules. A cascade of court standoffs are beginning to slow and even reverse the EPA rollbacks, thanks to what has been characterized as the administration's "disregard for the law." 

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Did American Flamingoes once roam wild in Florida? They have been showing up there over the past 70 years, but many have argued that these are escapees from zoos or wildlife parks. Others make the case that they could be a returning population from Mexico, Cuba, or the Caribbean and that they are simply reclaiming a lost part of their natural territory. 

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The U.S. Climate Alliance is a group of states that has banded together to  commit to continuing to honor the Paris Climate Accord, in spite of the fact that the federal government has chosen to trash it. This week New Jersey joined the alliance.

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And, in other news of resistance to the climate change deniers, more than one million trees have been pledged for "Trump Forest," an effort by environmentalists to offset the president's curtailing of Obama-era clean energy initiatives by planting ten billion trees around the globe.

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A project called Safe Wings Ottawa will be exhibiting a thousand dead birds at Ottawa City Hall on Monday, February 26. They are the bodies of birds that died in collision with the glass windows of buildings in the city in 2017. All were collected by volunteers. The aim of the exhibit is to bring attention to the problem of glass for birds; they can't see it and crash into it. The hope is that it will encourage innovation in finding solutions to the problem.

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Coffee plantations are good habitats for a diversity of bird species, as long as the coffee is grown in shade under larger trees. 

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Image from the Shelby County Reporter.

It's a male Northern Cardinal but it isn't red. It is a bird with a rare pigment mutation that causes its feathers to be yellow. It has been making appearances in Shelby County, Alabama recently where it has been photographed by several birders.

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The tropical island nation of Seychelles will create two huge new marine parks in return for a large amount of its national debt being written off, in the first scheme of its kind in the world. Swapping debt for dolphins and other sea life is an innovative plan that offers a win-win for the country and for the environment.

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The Moas of New Zealand are long extinct, but a study of their fossilized droppings has given clues as to the extent to which they shaped the native landscape of the island by assisting in the spreading of fungi, which was one of their favorite foods.

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A tick that is native to Asia has been found on sheep in New Jersey. It is not clear how the insects came to be there, but they represent a potential threat of becoming another invasive species.

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With the rise of sea levels on one side and the encroaching industrial and housing development on the other, California could be in danger of losing its salt marshes, an important habitat for many endangered species.

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley: A review

The writing of Walter Mosley harkens back to masters like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James Cain. The best of noir.

This book was Mosley's introduction of his character, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins. We meet Easy in 1948, three years after the end of World War II. He is a black man who had been raised in Houston and he had joined the army to fight Nazis during the war. He spent much of it sitting behind a typewriter, but when he had the chance, he volunteered to go with Gen. George Patton's Third Army into the heart of Europe. He fought his way through the rest of the war, including at the Battle of the Bulge, and returned home to Houston, but like many African-Americans in the South during that period, he found the atmosphere stifling and chose to move on. In Easy's case, he moved to Los Angeles, along with many others from Houston's Fifth Ward. As we meet Easy, we find that many in his circle of acquaintances in LA are former Houstonians.

I felt an immediate empathy for Easy Rawlins because of the Houston connection. His descriptions of neighborhoods and streets were places I hear about frequently. No doubt they've changed in the last seventy years, but they are still there. Moreover, there was the Patton's Army connection. My father, too, was in the Third Army and I grew up listening to stories about the Battle of the Bulge and the other lesser known battles that he fought in. As a result, Rawlins seemed very familiar to me.

Easy has just been fired from his job at an aircraft factory when we meet him. His white boss thought the uppity black man was not showing him sufficient deference. Without a source of income, Easy stands to lose the small house he is so proud of since he won't be able to pay the mortgage. 

I loved Mosley's description of that little house and lot, because it revealed so much of Easy's character. He takes pride in the order that he keeps in the house and the care that he gives the plantings around the house - the fruit trees, the perennials with their bright blooms, even the pot of African violets on the porch. This is a man after my own heart.

So, Easy has to come up with a way to earn some money fast. He goes for a drink in a friend's bar and in walks fate in the portly form of a white man dressed all in white. It seems that Easy's friend has paved the way for this man to offer him a job. The two talk and the man offers him a substantial amount of money to find a woman. She is a blonde named Daphne Monet and she has a real penchant for black jazz clubs and, incidentally, for black men.

And just like that Easy Rawlins begins his career as a private investigator.

He soon finds himself knee deep in a web of lies and murder, harassed by the police and threatened by sociopathic villains. Easy is not a violent man and he feels himself a bit out of his depth and needing someone to watch his back. He phones home, to Houston, and gets in touch with the girlfriend of one of his former running buddies, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander. He's not sure if Mouse will get the message, but just in time, he does turn up.

Whereas Easy is a pacifist, Mouse does not shy from violence and he likes Easy well enough to be just the back-watcher he needs.

Just like those earlier noir novels, this one's plot winds and wriggles around like a snake in hot ashes. So many complications, so many interconnections, and so many lies. It soon becomes clear that virtually none of these characters, besides the protagonist himself, is to be trusted.

Mosley's writing is really excellent and truly did remind me of the best of the noir masters that I have read. It makes me really happy to know that he has produced thirteen (and counting) more of these Easy Rawlins tales. And they are all just sitting there waiting for me to enjoy!

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


  

My Great Backyard Bird Count

The annual late winter count of birds is over. I spent a part of every day of the four-day weekend counting the birds in my own backyard. 

I did my count while working in the yard, so I can't say that I was entirely focused on birds. Still, the count was pretty successful, with a total of twenty-eight species turning out to be counted. Unfortunately, as always, there were some species that show up regularly in the yard but didn't make an appearance during the weekend and so don't appear on my census.

The first birds to appear on my count were, not surprisingly, the ever-present White-winged Doves.

And the last one, recorded late yesterday, was a particularly colorful Pine Warbler. Looks like he's about ready for spring.

In between, here's a list of everything that I saw in, around, or flying over my yard.

Black Vulture
Turkey Vulture 
Sharp-shinned Hawk
Red-shouldered Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
White-winged Dove
Mourning Dove
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Carolina Wren
Carolina Chickadee
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
American Robin
Northern Mockingbird
Cedar Waxwing
Pine Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Orange-crowned Warbler
Chipping Sparrow
Northern Cardinal
House Finch
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
House Sparrow

This is the eighteenth year that I've done this count and this species count is about average for most years, but the actual total of individual birds was fewer this year. I'm not sure what, if anything in particular, that means; it may just be the randomness of birds wandering or my lack of attention in doing the count. Time will tell. But it is always a revelation to me to see the number and variety of species that pass through my yard at any given period of time. It's a reminder, as if I needed one, that Nature is very much present as an actor in my garden and in my daily life.

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler: A review

Parable of the Sower was published in 1993, but Octavia Butler was eerily - scarily - prescient in the mid 2020s world that she imagined. Who could have dreamed twenty-five years ago that this broken and divided country would elect a president who promised to "Make America Great Again" by eliminating the space program and getting rid of all environmental, health, and labor protection laws and opening up the nation to be carved up by large corporations and the greedy wealthy? Well, Octavia Butler did. If she were alive today, I wonder what she would think, seeing her vision come true.

This book was planned as the first in a trilogy (the "Earthseed" trilogy), but after completing the first two books in the series, Butler reportedly suffered from severe writer's block in relation to the third book and was never able to complete it. Nevertheless, we have the first two, and, judging by this initial entry, that was a remarkable achievement.

Once I started reading this book, every time I had to put it down because duty called me elsewhere I couldn't wait to get back to it. When I wasn't reading, I was thinking about what I had read. I even laid awake at night thinking about it. Perhaps that tells you everything you need to know about what an impact the book made on me.

If the book were first published today, it would be categorized as YA lit, because the protagonist is a teenage girl, but at the time that it was published, the term YA had not yet been thought up by some media-savvy publicist. So, it was just considered as dystopian literature.

It is the mid-2020s and 18-year-old Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a walled middle-class community in a Los Angeles suburb. It is a California that is barely recognizable. Society is disintegrating under the pressure of global warming, wealth disparity, and economic stagnation. All communities have fortified walls to keep the predatory gangs out. Police and firefighters will only come when called if the caller will pay them, and when they come, they are just as likely to arrest the person seeking help or to pillage the home as they are to actually take action to assist.

Many people are leaving, trying to make their way north to Oregon, Washington, or Canada in search of a better and more secure life, but the borders between states and between the countries are guarded and patrolled to ensure that the unwanted immigrants do not make it through.

In the midst of this anarchy, Lauren's community is attacked and overrun, most of the people, including what remains of her family, killed, and the houses burned. Lauren had prepared for such an eventuality by putting together an emergency pack to get her on her way. (She had planned to leave anyway and go north with the other emigrants.) Now she is forced to start her trek before she had planned and she heads north with a couple of companions.

Lauren is a special person. First of all, she has a disability called hyper-empathy which means that she feels the pain that she witnesses inflicted upon others. In the violent world in which she lives, this is a serious disability indeed. If she is put in the position of having to fight for her life, how will she manage if any pain that she inflicts on her opponent is felt equally by herself?

Also, Lauren is a visionary. She has an idea for a new religion/philosophy of life and she hopes to found a community based on her ideas. She calls her vision Earthseed and she writes verses expounding upon it. It is a philosophy of self-sufficiency in which god is understood as change, but a change that can be molded and shaped by the individual.

We follow the teenage Lauren as she continues north, more people join her group, and she starts teaching them her Earthseed verses and attempting to mold them into a community.

This was a powerful and affecting read, one that I am sure I will still be considering for a long time to come.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars         

Poetry Sunday: To Be In Love by Gwendolyn Brooks

It's a bit late since Valentine's Day was last Wednesday, but here is a poem by American poet Gwendolyn Brooks that tries to express what it means to be in love. 

The person in love no longer experiences things only through his/her own senses; the world is experienced through the senses of the loved one as well. Love expands our awareness of the world and makes us more open to empathize with both the joys and sorrows of others. Love, in short, makes us better, more complete human beings.

To Be In Love

by Gwendolyn Brooks

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.

In yourself you stretch, you are well. 

You look at things

Through his eyes.

A cardinal is red.

A sky is blue. 

Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there_
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprize
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

This week in birds - #293

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

Franklin's Gull (note white dots on black wingtips) photographed on a pier at Rockport, Texas.

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Are you counting the birds in your neighborhood this weekend? Yes, it's the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count. The count is now a worldwide event. It used to be limited to North America but was expanded in recent years and reports are now received from far-flung places on every continent, except possibly Antarctica.

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It is feared that a reorganization of the Interior Department, planned by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, will muddle the responsibilities of various sections of the agency and will reduce the role of science in agency planning.

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The number of oil and gas rigs in the United States increased by 38% last year. This is expected to have a significant climate impact since the oil and gas industry is a huge source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

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A new study of wildfire management that appeared in the Journal of Applied Ecology this week makes the point that the wrong kind of management can actually devastate wild bird populations. The study was based on findings from California's destructive and expensive year of firefighting.

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Researchers have found that bees seem to prefer fields with borders. Interestingly, croplands with more divisions actually benefit pollinators more than increasing crop diversity.

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A new study demonstrates that the nesting success of the Louisiana Waterthrush -- a habitat specialist that nests along forested streams, where the potential for habitat degradation is high -- is declining at sites impacted by shale gas development in northwestern West Virginia. This is believed to be evidence that "fracking" to extract shale gas is impacting the breeding success of songbirds, possibly because of the pollution of water which it creates.

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Polluters in the United States are facing fewer consequences these days. Scott Pruitt's EPA has fined those that flout regulations 49% less than the past three administrations.

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Meanwhile, the Interior Department appears to be in a state of all-out attack on the public lands which it is supposed to protect. One prong of that attack has been the promotion of "multiple use" of public lands. This essentially means opening up those lands to mining, oil and gas drilling, and the grazing of cattle.  

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Plastic of all kinds and sizes is turning up in great quantity in the previously pristine areas of the European Arctic. This detritus of human occupation is causing great harm to the wildlife, especially seabirds, that live there. 

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Using genetic and fossil data, lepidopterists have produced a new and improved evolutionary tree which, they claim, more accurately reflects the evolution of butterflies and how the various species are related to each other.

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Science is slow. It rests on painstaking research with accumulating evidence. This makes for an inherently uneasy relationship with the modern media age in which people often take their "news" from such sources as Facebook and Twitter. This is especially true of issues that are politicized as climate change has been. A prime example is the recent winter that has been colder than usual in many parts of the northern hemisphere. Climate change deniers have taken that to mean that global warming is not happening, and, in fact, that we may be entering a new ice age. They tend to ignore the fact that there is a southern hemisphere of the planet that has experienced record HIGHS in temperatures during these same months. It's called cherrypicking your facts to make them fit your conclusion.

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An Oregon State-led research analysis of bird diversity in the mountains of southern Costa Rica has concluded that old, complex tropical forests support a wider diversity of birds than second-growth forests and, thus, such old-growth forests have an irreplaceable value for conservation.

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A massive oil spill in the East China Sea that resulted from a collision that sank an Iranian tanker last month is threatening some of the most important fishing grounds in Asia, from China to Japan and beyond. The oil condensate that is leaking is especially insidious because it is almost invisible. 

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A study by University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers has found that the survival of the Sharp-tailed Grouse will likely be negatively affected by the predicted increased temperatures across the Great Plains which will reduce appropriate nesting sites.

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Global warming has caused the world’s oceans to rise over the past 150 years. Warming seas expand, and water from melting glaciers and ice sheets have had nowhere to go but into the oceans. The rising seas have slowly and steadily eaten away at coastlines. But a new study finds that in recent decades, the pace of sea-level rise has picked up and coastal real estate could be under water faster and faster in the coming decades. Sea-level rise could double its rate within the next century, with disastrous consequences for coastline communities.

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - February 2018

Shhh! My garden is still sleeping.

The shrubs have been pruned back.

Winter clean-up is underway.

There's a bit of green to go with the brown in spots.

Undaunted by our colder than usual winter, the little leucojum blooms right on schedule.

These sweet little blossoms do give the gardener hope.

When they are the only thing blooming in the garden, they are precious indeed.

But everything else is sleeping still.

Waiting.

Waiting...

Hold on! Spring is just around the corner.

It's nice to be able to visit Carol of May Dreams Gardens and find that some gardeners do have actual blooms this February. Happy Bloom Day to you all, whether or not you have any blooms.