Binocular Bird, Olympic Fish, Debuting Dog

June 13, 2012

Here's a look at some of what's been happening at The Naturalist's Notebookover the last few days, and other news and notes from the intersection of nature, science, art and curiosity:

Birds have sharp vision, but this hermit warbler seemed eager to try out the binoculars while hitching a ride recently on a boat off the Southern California coast with Notebook correspondent Kathy Weathers.

A clearer shot of the hermit warbler, a species that tends to live in the tops of the West Coast’s tallest trees.

Kathy spotted this gull devouring a sea star near Bar Island off Bar Harbor here in Maine.

Lava flow? No, a tree that has grown around a fence outside the Redwood Library and Athenaeum in Newport, Rhode Island, where Kathy saw and photographed it.

Kathy also photographed another fence-swallowing display by a different tree.

Meanwhile, At The Notebook...

Puppy in the house! Virginia brought in Bashi, the Australian shepherd pup that she and Eli adopted over the weekend. You’ll be seeing lots of Bashi (and Virginia and Eli) at the Notebook this year.

The spectral stoop at the Notebook is ready. Here Julie is adding a coat of polyurethane to complete Eli’s brilliant idea. It has been fascinating to watch the reaction of passers-by to this work of art—drivers have even turned their cars around jus… — The spectral stoop at the Notebook is ready. Here Julie is adding a coat of polyurethane to complete Eli’s brilliant idea. It has been fascinating to watch the reaction of passers-by to this work of art—drivers have even turned their cars around just to make sure they saw what they think they saw. Just wait until they see what’s inside the Notebook.

Eli took a celebratory first leap onto the finished stoop, with the puppy ready to follow him.

Haley is designing our flower boxes, which also will highlight colors in the order of the spectrum as part of a much broader project Pamelia has created.

The flowers include a gazania with a two-toned blossom. I’d never heard of a gazania, but it’s a member of the aster family and is native to South Africa. It’s sometimes called the African daisy.

View From Europe Luka Negoita, the young naturalist and Notebook contributor, just returned from his Kickstarter-funded project in Romania, his family's homeland. Luka emailed us one of his beautiful charcoal drawings of the Romanian countryside:

Luka and Philip Walter traveled the Romanian countryside collecting and documenting old knowledge—about plants and many other things—that is in danger of being lost because of modernization.

Commencement Talk: Robert Krulwich Pamelia and I watched Julie and Virginia graduate at College of the Atlantic, a memorable event under any circumstances, but especially so because of the wonderful commencement address delivered by National Public Radio correspondent and Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich. I wish I had it on video, because Krulwich delivered it with such geniality and humor. Into his own story of meanderings, missteps and a career-altering bathroom urinal conversation with playwright Arthur Miller, he wove insights into How Life Works (you might accidentally back into your greatest opportunities; avoid the Yes, But people and instead try to find Why Not? and Give It a Shot people; knowing how to learn and that you can learn, at any age, can be your most valuable assets).

Here's a link to the full text of the speech if you're interested: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/05/31/154105531/the-chumbawamba-principle-a-commencement-address

Strange, Funny, Out of This World It's no secret that we're big fans of astrophysicist, writer and TV science host Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York. Ralph Fahringer, another Notebook contributor, passed along the video below, in which—through the marvels of modern sound-bending science—deGrasse Tyson and renowned physicists Richard Feynman and Lawrence Krauss actually sing about the universe and how all the elements that make up our planet and ourselves were created in the heat of exploding stars long ago.

New Olympic Aquatics Center Since I'm so deep into my London Olympic preparations (I'll be heading to my Sports Illustrated office in New York soon to finish editing the magazine's preview issue, and will then fly to London), I probably should begin giving you a glimpse of what you'll see when the Games open on July 27. So here's a start: a look at the Olympic Aquatics Centre. It sits in Olympic Park, a new complex of venues built in a formerly blighted section of East London.

The $421 million aquatics center was designed by Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid (a woman) and sits near the Olympic stadium and the velodrome. This is what the place looked like last fall when I and other international journalists toured it and oth… — The $421 million aquatics center was designed by Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid (a woman) and sits near the Olympic stadium and the velodrome. This is what the place looked like last fall when I and other international journalists toured it and other London Olympic venues. One woman reporter in our group dipped her finger in the diving pool (the pool in back) before being scolded. In case you’re wondering what Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte and other swimming stars will feel when they dive in, the water temperature of the pool will be kept at 78.8 degrees Fahrenheit (26 degrees Celsius) for competition.

Maine. Compass Harbor, to be exact, as it looked when Pamelia and I took a short walk there on our way home the other night. Just another reason why Maine’s promotes itself with the slogan The Way Life Should Be.

Answer to the Last Puzzler The bird in the photo is a magnolia warbler

Today's Puzzler Clouds are made of water. How long does any given water molecule stay in a cloud before it falls to earth? a) 12 hours b) 9 days c) 6 weeks

Here's the beautiful barred owl that Sarah photographed.

The Barred Owl and the Tree Lobster

March 14, 2012

The other day on Mount Desert Island here in Maine, Dave Marks and others working at Morris Yachts saw a barred owl. Here is Dave's account:

"It was about 11 a.m. on a nice sunny day at a boat storage building in Tremont. The owl flew off the ground as we walked by and went to a tree branch 15 feet away and three feet off the ground. It turned and look at us for quite a while. It then flew back to the ground about six feet away from us, pecked once and scratched the ground twice with its back to us then flew back to the same spot. It wasn’t concerned with us at all. In fact I talked to it quite a bit and it seemed only bothered by the chance we may have caused it to lose a possible lunch. I went to work in the building and came out an hour later and it was in a different tree overlooking a grassy area in the woods. I yelled and it turned its head around then went back to its business. I’m kind of a bird nut and I’ve never heard one in the area let alone seen one and I’m at those buildings quite a bit. The pictures were actually taken by Sarah Brandon; she paints names and hails on boats for us."

If you haven't heard one, the barred owl's call often sounds like the words "Who cooks for you?" The owl, however, appears to prefer its mice and squirrels raw.

Other Avian News

The Naturalist's Notebook has become a sponsor of the 14th annual Acadia Birding Festival. The event, which includes lectures, walks and a pelagic seabird boat trip, will be held on Mount Desert Island from May 31 to June 3. During past festivals, participants have seen more than 180 bird species, from ospreys to swamp sparrows to scarlet tanagers to all sorts of warblers. (Roger Tory Peterson once called Mount Desert Island "the warbler capital of the world.")

Put the festival on your calendar if you'll be in Maine then. As event organizer Michael Good of Down East Nature Tours says, "I had my first yellow-rumped warbler on the 8th of March so the birds and spring are coming!"

Adventures With The Tree Lobster

Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio recently reported on a rare creature that was found living on Ball's Pyramid, an 1,844-foot jag of rock poking out of the Tasman Sea, off Australia.

It was discovered (or, as we will learn, re-discovered) by a pair of rock-climbing scientists. They saw fresh, large insect droppings under a lone melaleuca (myrtle family) bush that was sticking improbably from a sheer cliff 225 feet above the shark-infested waters. But the climbers saw no insects. Only when one of the scientists and a local ranger scaled the cliff again, at night, by flashlight—yes, field biology can be a daredevil sport—did they find that same bush and the ground below it covered with hard-shelled critters almost five inches long.

The creatures were Lord Howe stick insects, the heaviest flightless stick insects in the world. They are known as tree lobsters for their size and lobster-ish exoskeletons. Once prolific on nearby Lord Howe Island, they were thought to have gone extinct after a ship ran aground on Lord Howe in 1918 and brought in black rats, which ate every Lord Howe stick insect they could find. From 1920 until 2001, when the Australian scientists rock-climbed on Ball's Pyramid (following up on 40-year-old rumors that other climbers had found insect carcasses there), no one saw a single Lord Howe stick insect.

As far as researchers can tell, the insects now live in the wild only on and under that one bush on that one spire of rock in the middle of the ocean. But the Melbourne Zoo has started breeding them in hopes of reintroducing them to Lord Howe Island. As Krulwich notes, this will require a major rat-eradication effort as well as a public-relations campaign to make the human inhabitants of Lord Howe Island more comfortable with an influx of fist-sized, hard-shell creepy-crawlies. The video above of a Lord Howe stick insect struggling to hatch (you may find yourself saying, "Come on! You can make it!") is part of the campaign to reposition the insects as courageous and lovable.

Ball's Pyramid, where the climbers found the stick insects.

One of the lessons of the Lord Howe stick insect is that some animals survive only in the most specialized of habitats. Another is that scientists often display an inspiring level of dedication in pursuit of knowledge. A third is that invasive species, especially on islands, can quickly wipe out other animals. But the lesson that, if you will, sticks with me is how strange we humans are in our relationship with other animals. We kill 'em off, bring 'em back, try to make them 'em sound so cuddly that Disney would turn them into cartoon characters. We're probably fortunate that our survival doesn't depend on whether another species thinks we're cute enough to keep alive.

Jumpin' Jupiter and Venus!

Have you looked up lately? Right now you have the chance to see at least two sights that you won't see this clearly for years to come.

The two bright objects fairly high in the western sky, quite close to each other, in the four hours after sunset are Jupiter and Venus. Venus is the higher and brighter one. On the night of March 15 the two planets will be just 3 degrees apart. This moment of visual proximity is called the Venus-Jupiter Conjunction.

Mind you, Venus and Jupiter aren't actually close to each other—they're just temporarily lined up from our perspective—and they're certainly a long way from us. At different points in our orbits Venus gets as close to the Earth as 26 million miles and as far away as 160 million miles; Jupiter's distance from us ranges from 391 million to 599 million miles. (Flying the latter distance at the speed of a commercial jet would take you a mere 137 years.)

When you go outside to look at Venus and Jupiter in the west, take time to look east as well. The red light you see will be Mars. It won't be this bright in our sky again until April 2014. You can see it from dusk to dawn.

The Turkeys Are Getting Frisky

I posted this quick video on youtube yesterday after watching male wild turkeys strutting and displaying their tails in our driveway:

Daylight Savings Idea

Einstein discovered that as we near the speed of light, time slows down. Anyone who has ever toiled in an office knows that the same thing happens during work hours on Mondays. So here's my idea. Instead of moving our clocks an hour ahead in the middle of a Saturday night to start Daylight Savings Time—a cruel mandate that costs us not just one hour of precious sleep, but one hour of precious sleep during the weekend—let's move the clocks ahead at 4 p.m. on a Monday, thus chopping an unwanted hour off the most hated work day, raising national morale, and giving us all a reason to think of Albert Einstein. We can brand the event as Relativity Monday.

Answers to the Last Puzzlers

1) One of the distinguishing traits of mammals is that they—and no other animals—have a middle ear containing three bones. That configuration has helped scientists trace mammals' evolution. For a fascinating account of how bones, fossils, DNA and other evidence have revealed the course of change and adaptation in animals (including us), read Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. That mind-opening book, which among other honors won the Best Book award from the National Academy of Sciences and the Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, should be required frontier-of-knowledge reading for anyone who wants to understand how biologists, geneticists, paleontologists, anatomists and other experts have pieced together, with physical evidence, the connections between humans and all other life forms on Earth. The book also offers a fun look at how both detailed planning and extraordinarily good luck are sometimes required to find tiny, hundred-million-year-old bones buried in the surface of our vast planet.

2) The branches in the photo are turning red because spring sunlight is causing the plant to produce anthocyanin, an antioxidant that also gives grapes and berries their color.

Today's Puzzlers

1)Geologists use several criteria to distinguish minerals from rocks. Which of these is NOT true?

a) Minerals are made of substances that were never alive.
b) Minerals are never found above ground.
c) Minerals have the same chemical makeup wherever they are found.
d) The atoms of minerals are arranged in a regular pattern and form crystals.

2) Why is a barred owl called a barred owl?

a) Because it was barred from churchyards in medieval times as a symbol of death
b) Because of the bars of light and dark across its feathers
c) Because it often roosted outside a famous prison in Shropshire, England
d) Because its wise look suggested a lawyer, or barrister; it was originally a "barristered" owl

(Thanks to Notebook friends and correspondents Kathy Weathers, Regina Ryan and Leanne Nickon for their blog contributions.) —Craig Neff, The Naturalist's Notebook

Vegetable Orchestras and Birds Who Imitate Saws and Power Drills

April 27, 2011

How would Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis have fared if they had performed on trumpets fashioned from cucumbers and yellow bell peppers? Would James Galway have become a great flautist using a hollowed-out carrot? If Kenny G had gone to cooking school, would he today be blowing smooth jazz through broccoli florets?

The transformation of plants into instruments is a kitchen industry. Carvers who understand the science of sound make play-things out of edibles from A (asparagus) to Z (zucchini). The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra performs concerts in a city that was once home to the likes of Mozart and Beethoven—or perhaps I should say beet-hoven.

At least one crudité band I've seen (on video) ends its concert by turning its instruments into vegetable soup for the audience. That's a more savory finale than the rock tradition of smashing an electric guitar, though I suppose there's a veggie-strumming Pete Townshend out there who might thrill the stadium crowd by dramatically dicing his cuke-ulele.

We're already looking ahead to the 2012 season at The Naturalist's Notebook and our plan to make music one ingredient in our strange nature-science-art-curiosity soup. It's not too early to start carving your carrot.

What Did the Blind Carpenter Bird Do? He Picked Up a Hammer and Saw
Sounds of all sorts are in the air, one day after the 226th birthday of artist and bird-documenting giant John James Audubon. Robert Krulwich of National Public Radio did a piece this morning about the lyrebird, the world's greatest avian mimic. Krulwich describes lyrebirds as accidental historians who record decades of past sounds.

Pamelia and I have been fascinated by lyrebirds since first encountering them on one of our trips to Australia back in the 1990s. Here is an Australian news video about Chook, a 30-year-old lyrebird at the Adelaide Zoo. You have to see—or hear—his sound imitations to believe them:

While we're on the subject of birds, I should note that red-breasted mergansers have arrived back at our bay in Maine. They're lovely ducks with long, thin bills and distinctively spiky head plumage that would have served them well in the punk music era. They've been diving underwater in front of our house to catch fish or other sea creatures—was that an urchin in the mouth of one surfacing merganser yesterday?

Film Note
The movie Waste Land is not be confused with The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot's masterpiece poem from 1922 that begins with the famous line, "April is the cruelest month..." Waste Land is a superb piece of art in itself—an Academy Award-nominated 2010 documentary about artist Vik Muniz spending parts of three years in the community of impoverished men, women and children who make their living by picking recyclable trash out of the world's largest landfill, in Rio de Janiero. Pamelia and I finally saw the movie last night and (like most of the reviewers) found it powerful and, strange as this may sound, uplifting.

This portrait—a floor-sized blowup of a photo by Vik Muniz of one of the Rio women—was turned into art by the trash-pickers themselves, using landfill junk to outline and, in a sense, paint the image.

The trash-pickers (who are paid by companies that recycle what the pickers collect) are experts on every type of recyclable and have a detective's skill for interpreting clues; they know almost instantly from a trash bag's contents what a person's life is like. One line that sticks with me from the film came from an older worker at the landfill. He described well-off people holding up a single bottle at home and asking what difference it really made if they threw the bottle away instead of recycling it. The man, who has stooped to pick up tens of thousands of discarded bottles, answered with this simple comment: "Ninety-nine is not one hundred."

Hard at Work:
Our Naturalist's Notebook preparations for this year are still top secret, but here's a shot of some of us at the shop last week. Artist Kathy Coe (far right in photo below), who'll be back teaching our children's art classes this summer, was up visiting. Along with a wonderful group—her two daughters, their two friends and three great College of the Atlantic students who are part of our team—she helped us create, shall we say, a new window on the universe.

Some of our creative team, not including Yours Truly, who tried to imitate some SI photographers I've seen by taking this shot from above, on a step ladder.

Answer to the Last Puzzler:
Q: Why did the fungus go to the party?
A: Because he was a fun guy.

Today's Puzzlers:
Two to test you today:

Can you identify these plants with the Justin Bieber haircuts? They popped up in our woods this week.

This second brain-teaser comes from the late puzzle guru Jim Fixx:
An electric train heads north at 80 miles per hour. The wind is blowing from the east at 20 mph. In what direction will the smoke from the engine point?

Birthdays:
As mentioned above, John James Audubon, the Haitian-born artist and birder, would have turned 226 on Tuesday. "Haitian-born" is a bit misleading; Audubon was the son of a French sea-captain and plantation owner and was raised in France before being sent to America at age 18 and living the rest of his life there. I'm looking forward to reading an upcoming essay on Audubon by my friend Bob Sullivan, the editor of Life books; I'll give you more on that when it's released.

Charles Richter, the Ohio-born physicist and seismologist who invented the best-known measurement scale for earthquakes, would have turned 111 on Tuesday. It may register as a 7.0 on your personal Richter scale to learn that, besides being a pioneer in science, Charles was a "naturist"—that is, a nudist, who spent time at many clothing-free retreats.

William Shakespeare, the English playwright, would have been 447 on Tuesday. Perhaps you've heard of him.

Anne McLaren, the British biologist, geneticist and zoologist who helped develop in vitro fertilization, would have turned 84 today. McLaren (who died in a car crash in 2007) also worked for the welfare of children and was such a soccer fan that, according to the British newspaper The Guardian, "when any international match was on television it was a waste of time trying to talk to her."

Wallace Carothers, the Iowa-born inventor of nylon, would have turned 115 on Thursday. He was working for DuPont, doing research to create new materials that might or might not have any practical value, when he found a super-polymer from which he felt strands of fabrics could be made. Plagued by depression all his life, and convinced that he had accomplished little in his career, he eventually committed suicide.

Walter Lantz, the New York-born auto mechanic-turned-animator who created Woody Woodpecker, would have been 111 on Thursday. Lantz's inspiration for his most famous cartoon character was a woodpecker who rat-a-tat-tatted on the roof of the building in which Lantz and his wife, Grace, were spending their honeymoon. Grace is the one who suggested turning the bird into a cartoon figure; her husband was skeptical that anyone would like it.

News, Notes and Photos from the Field (Craig and Pamelia's Blog)

Craig & Pamelia's Past Posts

Darwin's Past Posts