Blue Birds and Blue Devils

March 23, 2011

Rube Goldberg meets Rocket J. Squirrel in today's amusing welcome-to-the-blog video, passed along by Notebook correspondent Andy Anderson of North Carolina.

Turkeys in Love We're staring at each other, a few feet apart. Snow is falling. My cheeks are pink. His face is blue. I'm on my way up our dirt road to the mailbox. He's blocking the way. I'm trying to be inconspicuous. He's puffed up, his tail feathers fanned out like a gigantic rummy hand.

Tom and his fellow males have been flush with passion.

He's looking for love. I'm looking for a Netflix DVD about Thomas Jefferson. He has a harem. I have cold feet. He recognizes me. I recognize him. We've met often this winter. He knew me before I had this limp from slipping on driveway ice. I knew him before his face turned blue. We go way back.

I lower my head and try to look non-threatening. I walk wide of him, off the road, a bit too far, and start sinking. Mistake. I feel the slushy water pouring in over the top of my extremely manly gardening galoshes. Now my feet are cold and wet. But I pass Tom Turkey without further disturbing him. He returns his attention to his harem.

Around our birdfeeder, several Toms have been displaying as they strut past about a dozen females.

Wild turkey mating season has begun. It's a showy spectacle. To woo the hens, each male not only flashes his iridescent topcoat and magnificent tail but also puffs up to reveal what seem to be multiple layers of underlying haberdashery. Who knew gobblers had such style? The technicolor transformation of the male's head is equally startling. The face goes sky blue, the forehead blanches white and the wattle deepens in tone from light radish to ripe tomato.

All of which set me to wondering as I snuck back down the driveway with my Jefferson DVD. How did that other colonial genius, Ben Franklin, overlook the striking color combination when making his pitch to have the turkey (rather than the bald eagle) declared America's national bird? Every year male turkeys turn red, white and blue! Talk about brand identity!

Had Franklin succeeded, I'm sure that by now the marketing engineers at TurkeyCo would have figured out a way to genetically delay the start of mating season until the Fourth of July.

Movie Update
Given that 116 years ago this week the first motion picture was projected onto a screen, by French film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumiere, let me note that a release date finally has been announced for the much-anticipated movie version of Mark Obmascik's comical birding best-seller, The Big Year. The movie, starring Owen Wilson and Jack Black, will reach theaters on October 14th.

I'm not sure what flick the Lumieres showed on that historic day in 1895 (it was a private screening), but their first public screening, in December 1895, was of 10 films, none longer than 49 seconds. The lineup included a 46-second movie of workers leaving a factory and a 42-second work called Fishing for Goldfish.

Naturalist's Guide to The Sweet 16
Those of you who have visited The Naturalist's Notebook know that our annual Sweet 16 Honey-Tasting Tournament is a summer highlight. We set it up like the NCAA college basketball tournament, complete with seedings, brackets and a carefully selected field of competitors. Each day for several weeks pairs of honeys face off, with Notebook visitors tasting and then choosing (by paper ballot) which one advances to the next round. The 2009 champion was Washington State Fireweed, which edged New York Basswood in a memorable final. Last summer Maine Wild Raspberry ended the Cinderella run of modest Pennsylvania Alfalfa with a title-game trouncing.

I mention this because the real Sweet 16 is here. After two rounds, the NCAA tournament has narrowed its field to 16—the Sweet 16. Here's how a natural historian, analyzing only team nicknames, might handicap the next round:

Ohio State Buckeyes vs. Kentucky Wildcats: Any cat might climb and scratch a buckeye tree, but the Felis silvestris, the true wildcat, is small—usually no more than 13 pounds. He's said to be the ancestor of all of the world's house cats. We know what that means: After a long game, only the trees will be left standing. The cats will be curled up, napping. (Revised assessment after Kentucky's victory: Many of Ohio's buckeye trees have been felled over the years. What's one more?)

Marquette Golden Eagles vs. North Carolina Tar Heels: Tar Heels are homo sapiens who were nicknamed in the Civil War for refusing to turn and run. Golden eagles have been symbols of the Roman legion and the Holy Roman Empire. Good matchup. The natural historian, however, says that the sticky distillation of Carolina pine trees will leave the eagles both feathered and tarred. (Post-game update: The Tar Heels won.)

Duke Blue Devils vs. Arizona Wildcats: Blue Devils was the nickname of the blue-clad French mountain infantrymen who fought in World War I; they were dashing enough that Duke borrowed the moniker for its sports teams. Though wildcats might sneak up on a single soldier and devour his pet mouse, they can't take out a whole platoon of armed primates wearing berets. (Revised assesssment in the aftermath of Arizona's victory: World War I soldiers are pretty old and feeble by now.)

Connecticut Huskies vs San Diego State Aztecs: Archaeologists have confirmed that the homo sapiens known as Aztecs sacrificed humans by cutting their hearts out, decapitating them, shooting them full of arrows, slicing them, stoning them, crushing them, skinning them, burying them alive and/or throwing them off temples. Though Huskies evolved from wolves, nowadays they're mostly good sled-pullers and family pets. (Revised assessment in the aftermath of Connecticut win: Forgot to mention that Aztec civilization went extinct.)

Kansas Jayhawks vs. Richmond Spiders: Jayhawks aren't real birds. They're an imaginary cross-breed of jays and hawks. Doesn't matter. Birds eat spiders. (Post-game update: That's exactly what happened.)

Virginia Commonwealth Rams vs. Florida State Seminoles: Rams win points for being more politically correct, but all that butting will constantly send their human opponents to the foul line.

Butler Bulldogs vs. Wisconsin Badgers: Germans once bred a superdog to hunt badgers: the mighty dachshund (literally, badger hound). That said, bulldogs aren't good at going down into holes to catch fierce, short-legged weasels. (Trivia note: Wisconsin is known as the Badger State because of its impoverished 19th century lead miners, who spent winters "living like badgers" by burrowing tunnels into hillsides). Revised assessment in aftermath of Butler triumph: Why would I ever pick a weasel?

Brigham Young Cougars vs. Florida Gators: Crocodiles and alligators can snatch and eat fairly large mammals. Cougars tend to stay far away from them, hunting equally large mammals in the mountains. This unnatural matchup has the naturalist scratching his primate head. But he's going to go with the cat, based on this astonishing video evidence of feline dominance: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sAF8gMN9c0] Revised assessment in aftermath of Florida win: I still like the kitty video.

Answer to the Last Puzzler: To recap: An explorer is captured by natives, who tell him this: “Make a statement. If what you say is true you will be hanged. If it is false you will be shot.” What can the explorer say to save his life?

The answer: He says, "I will be shot." If the statement is true, he has to be hanged, which would automatically make the statement false. If he is shot, then his statement is obviously true, so he should be hanged.

Another of our North Carolina correspondents offered an astute alternative answer. She suggested that the explorer say, "I am a liar." If the natives interpreted that to mean, "I always lie," they would be caught in a similar loop of contradictions.

Today's Puzzler:
How about a few more word jumbles. All of these unscramble into common words from the natural world:
1) persid
2) natrige
3) dicalarn
4) showisrfd
5) mucas
6) intamigor

Birthdays:
John Bartram, the largely self-taught Pennsylvanian who has been called the Father of American botany, would have turned 312 years old today. He explored from Lake Ontario to Florida, collecting samples, identifying (and sending to Europe) a vast number of specimens, including rhododendrons and magnolias. He was the first person to cultivate that mini-Little Shop of Horrors plant, the Venus flytrap (which is native only to a 60-mile radius around Wilmington, N.C.), and the first American to perform hybridizing experiments. I'm not sure where Bartram stood on the turkey-versus-eagle question, but he and Ben Franklin were friends and co-founders of the American Philosophical Society.

William Smith, the English geologist who discovered links between the age of rock layers and of fossils found in those strata, would have been 242 today. Known as Strata Smith, he published the first full geological map of Britain—a document so detailed and revelatory that it was called The Map that Changed the World. Unfortunately for Smith, his work was plagiarized, he went bankrupt and he was sent to debtors' prison before being recognized for his accomplishments.

Simon Winchester's book on William Smith

Wernher von Braun, the German-born Nazi-turned-American who was the foremost rocket engineer of the 20th century, would have been 99 today. A gifted cellist and pianist who grew up wanting to be a symphony conductor, he instead became a rocket scientist who dreamed of space travel. Steered into military work, he designing the deadly V2s in World War II before coming under suspicion by the Nazis for his qualms about the war effort. Von Braun willingly surrendered to U.S. forces in 1945 and went on to draw up the Saturn booster rocket that launched NASA rockets to the moon.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician and astronomer who in his day was compared to Isaac Newton for his brilliance and contributions to math and science, would have been 261 today. Laplace, a pioneer in statistics and probability, built upon Newton's discoveries and formulated a scientific explanation for the stability of the universe. In a famous scene, he presented a copy of one of his major works to the emperor Napoleon, who said, "Monsieur Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." To which Laplace replied, "I had no need of that hypothesis."

Yours truly hiking along the Ocean Path toward Otter Cliff in Acadia.

How a Nuclear Plant Nearly Was Built Next to Acadia National Park (Part I)

March 19, 2011

The evening news report was examining the history of unreported radiation leaks and safety problems at Fukushima Daiichi and other Japanese nuclear plants run by the Tokyo Electric Power Company, also known as TEPCO.

That name...TEPCO...it sounded so familiar. Then it struck me. I'd read about TEPCO several years ago, while doing some historical research into Maine. It was one of the companies that in 1969—unbelievable as this may sound—nearly succeeded in building a nuclear power plant and an aluminum refinery on the doorstep of Acadia National Park.

The plant and refinery were planned for the shore of Union River Bay in Trenton, a small town adjacent to Bar Harbor that bills itself as the Gateway to Acadia National Park. Pamelia and I live in Trenton. We look out at the mountains of Acadia and see, well, much of the wildlife and natural beauty you read about in this blog. Her mother's 1934 cottage sits on Union River Bay. The idea that anyone ever could have considered erecting here two potential environmental nightmares (on top of the radiation dangers of a nuclear plant, aluminum smelting is a serious source of air pollution) seems unfathomable to us.

The heroes of this story are John Cole and Peter Cox. They were the editor and publisher, respectively, of the Maine Times, which Time magazine, in its October 1969 account of the Trenton nuclear saga, described as "a unique statewide paper that tirelessly harasses would-be wreckers of Maine's environment." Cole and Cox, in Time's words, "lambasted the [nuclear] developers and explained precisely how their plans could pollute Trenton's air, land and water."

An aluminum smelting and processing plant in Washington. According to that state's Department of Ecology, the plant contaminated the Columbia River with PCBs and the ground with an assortment of toxic chemicals. Alcoa was ordered to clean up the sit… — An aluminum smelting and processing plant in Washington. According to that state's Department of Ecology, the plant contaminated the Columbia River with PCBs and the ground with an assortment of toxic chemicals. Alcoa was ordered to clean up the site and the river.

Keep in mind that in 1969, the environmental movement was only a few years old. There was no Clean Air Act. There was no Environmental Protection Agency. The country was in a recession and—as today—the pressure to create jobs and boost local economies was considerable. And yet the voters of Trenton, the last obstacle standing in the way, voted 144-77 to reject the nuclear plant and aluminum smelter.

I'm waiting to receive, through inter-library loan, a copy of a hard-to-find book that features the Maine Times's coverage of the whole episode. When I get it, I'll give you more details about the original plans for the plant and the smelter and why Trenton was chosen as the site.

Fortunately, given that we will almost certainly need more nuclear energy in the decades ahead, the technology has improved tremendously since 1969. Lessons from the Japan calamity will help make future plants safer—though no such facility should ever be built a few miles from a national park. If you're wondering, not one nuclear plant has been constructed in the U.S. in the last 30 years. Among several now on the drawing board is at least one on the Texas Gulf Coast that is to be built by a consortium of companies, including TEPCO.
*****************

Tilt! Tilt! Tilt!
As spring arrives at 7:21p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, think big. Envision the Earth. Remember that rather than being perfectly perpendicular to the Sun, our planet is always tilted at about 23.4 degrees. In winter, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, and so—even though the Earth is 3 million miles closer to the Sun in January than it is in July—our weather is colder. In summer, our hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun, which rises farther overhead and (even though it's farther away) brings us beach weather and sunburns.

Shorter Days?
You may have read that the earthquake in Japan literally shifted the mass of the Earth and has caused the planet to spin slightly faster. Each day is now 1.8 microseconds (that's less than two millionths of a second) shorter than it used to be. This may seem startling, but in fact the speed of the Earth's rotation hasn't been constant throughout the planet's almost 4.6-billion-year history. In the early years of the Earth, the planet revolved much faster—once every six hours. Hence that was the length of each day.

It's a fun exercise to imagine what our daily routines would be like now if instead of living in a 24/7 world we lived in a 6/7 one.

What's worse than peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth? Suet stuck to the top of a woodpecker's bill. This male downy studied the problem for quite a while yesterday before flying off.

The Indoor-Outdoor Woodchuck
One of the small pleasures of living in this part of Maine is reading the Nature column written each week by author, musician and long-time naturalist Ruth Grierson. It appears in the Mount Desert Islander, one of the three weekly newspapers that (along with the Bangor Daily News) provide this area with outstanding local coverage. This week Ruth wrote about (among other topics—she always hits several in a column) the emergence of woodchucks from hibernation. "The woodchuck is not everyone's favorite animal, but I like them," she wrote.

This woodchuck was never our pet, but he made himself at home on our lawn and in our gardens early last summer. Fortunately for our dahlias, he then moved on.

I knew that the woodchuck is a rodent; Ruth noted more specifically that it is the largest member of the squirrel family in New England. "Like many humans, they have a perpetual weight problem," she wrote, "spending six months fattening up and then six months losing weight."

Ruth always adds a nice personal touch. She recalled in her column that "many years ago my husband and I had a small woodchuck living in our small house with us. It was very tame and we didn't think it would be a problem until one day I came home from teaching school and found that it had chewed the leg off a chair and had almost severed a lamp cord...That afternoon the woodchuck moved outside."

I can't find an online link to Ruth's columns, but if I do I'll pass it along.

Answers to Last Puzzler:
The jumbled words, when unscrambled, are:
1) papaya (aappay)
2) oriole (leiroo)
3) thrush (hursth)
4) eagle (legae)
5) worms (mosrw)
6) lightning (glinngith)

Today's Puzzler:
This one (borrowed from the late running guru and brainiac Jim Fixx) is in honor of the British explorer Sir Richard Burton, who would have turned 190 years old today:

An explorer is captured by vengeful natives. They tell him this: "Make a statement. If what you say is true you will be hanged. If it is false you will be shot." What can the explorer say to save his life?

Birthdays:
B.F. Skinner, the influential Pennsylvania-born behaviorist who has been described as the most celebrated psychologist since Sigmund Freud, would have turned 107 on Sunday. Skinner believed that behavior is shaped by the positive or negative reinforcement an animal receives for that behavior. His theories have been influential in many fields, including education, where they caused emphasis to be placed more on positive reinforcement than on punishment. Skinner, who thought Freud's study of the unconscious motives for our behavior was a waste of time, was criticized for seemingly eliminating free will from the explanation for how people act. He envisioned creating, through positive reinforcement, a more utopian society and said that one of his goals was to help save humankind from destroying itself. He left that particular task unfinished.

William Morton Wheeler, the Milwaukee-born myrmecologist and entomologist who became the world's leading authority on social insects, would have been 146 years old today. His interest in animals began to flourish when he was a boy and was sent to a school that had a small natural history museum (perhaps a sort of old-fashioned Naturalist's Notebook without the cool stuff for sale?). I know you're wondering, so here's the answer: Myrmecology is the study of ants. And entomology is the study of insects, not to confused (as it frequently is in my own brain) with etymology, the study of word origins.

Ovid, the great Roman poet, would have been 2054 years old on Sunday. He was not what you'd call a naturalist writer. He was more into the theme of love, though in his history-of-the-world epic, the Metamorphoses, he did describe ancient god-driven natural forces and people being turned into creatures such as wolves and spiders. I'm intrigued by a short work that has sometimes been attributed to him, called Nux, or The Walnut Tree. In it, a walnut tree talks to some delinquent boys and asks them to stop throwing rocks at his branches to try to knock his nuts off. I think that sounds like a wonderful parable of mankind's treatment of nature (and a side-splitting joke for schoolboys to tell each other), but the consensus seems to be that, alas, Ovid didn't actually write it; one of his lesser contemporaries did.

Maud Menten, the Canadian scientist who helped shape the field of biochemistry, would have been 132 on Sunday. Menten and colleague Leonor Michaelis came up with the groundbreaking Michaelis-Menten equation, which gave researchers a way to measure and record the reactions of enzymes (the proteins that serve as catalysts for virtually all metabolic events in the body, including the making of DNA). One observer has noted that the development of most drugs in this century would not have been possible without Michaelis and Menten's breakthrough. Menten also did pioneering work in isolating and analyzing proteins, those crucial building blocks of the body. Described as a petite dynamo who drove a Model T for 32 years, she spoke at least six languages, painted superbly and went on mountain-climbing and Arctic expeditions. And, at age 70, she finally earned tenure at the University of Pittsburgh.

Edward Everett Horton, the Brooklyn-born character actor who—as we moose fans know—narrated the "Fractured Fairy Tales" segments on the Bullwinkle and Rocky Show, would have turned 125 yesterday. That cartoon classic's Cold War spoofing and punnery ("Be with us next time for 'Missile While You Work,' or 'Boom With a View...'") was probably more memorable than its insights into either the flying squirrel or the antlered Maine state animal. Why, for example, did Bullwinkle (who was named after a real-life car dealer) wear white gloves? How did he pull lions and bears out of that magician's hat? And did any other moose ever attend Wossamotta U.?

Semi-obscure literary pun in one episode:
Rocky: Bullwinkle, this ship is covered in rubies and look what's written on the side: O-Mar Khay-yam.
Bullwinkle, do you know what this is? Bullwinkle: Well, if you're waiting for me to say it, I won't.
Antique Dealer: Me either.
Rocky: O.K., then this must be...the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam!"

Inside an Ant City

March 16, 2011

When Pamelia sees swarms of people, she often says, "We're just ants." She doesn't mean just in a bad way—at least not in reference to the ants. She's just pointing out another of the many similarities between us and other species. In fact, she finds ants amazing, as do I. The above video, passed along by Notebook correspondent Betsy Loredo, offers an unusual look inside an ant colony. The structure—perhaps resembling something we'll build for ourselves on Mars someday—includes farming chambers (ants cultivate fungus to eat), trash depositories, a ventilation system, efficient roadways and, relatively speaking, more space than your typical condo complex. And don't worry as you watch the opening scenes: The colony was abandoned by the ants before the concrete was poured in.

Riding the Ice

A few of the seals who showed up yesterday—right on schedule.

When we looked out yesterday morning, we saw hundreds of common eiders gathered on the bay and at least 17 seals who were sunning themselves on floating chunks of ice. Those sights have become rites of (almost) spring around here. I checked my nature notes from recent years and found this entry from exactly two years ago yesterday: "Lots of eiders suddenly on the bay on a sunny morning—and at least 10 seals sunning themselves on ice blocks floating fairly close to shore."

Forty or more seals live directly across the bay, so we'll be seeing them from now until the fall. The common eiders—large, beautiful, black-and-white ducks—are temporary visitors. They fly to the Arctic to breed, but gather in front of our house in vast numbers before heading north. Several years ago we had a few thousand of them. In the last few years that number has dwindled to a few hundred, causing us to worry that the shellfish draggers who scrape the bay (and wipe out swaths of life on its floor) have been diminishing the food supply the eiders need. We'll see how many more eiders appear over the next week.

Are any migratory birds showing up yet where you live? Please let me know.

Charles Darwin's Earthquake
There's no shame in being beaten to the punch by John McPhee. Drawing upon Pamelia and my voyage around Cape Horn several years ago, a trip that took us through the Beagle Channel and followed part of Charles Darwin's route toward the Galapagos Islands, I'd planned to write this morning about the massive earthquake Darwin experienced in Chile in 1835. I intended to point out how that two-minute temblor, an 8.1 that struck as he was resting under a tree near the Pacific Ocean shore, helped form his view of the Earth and the forces that shape it.

Then I saw that McPhee, the eminent writer and natural-history observer, had pointed out exactly that in a blog post for The New Yorker done one year ago, in the aftermath of an 8.8 quake in Chile. Here is McPhee's post: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/backissues/2010/03/darwin-and-the-chilean-earthquake.html

Concepcion, Chile, after the 1835 quake.

Given the ever more grim news from Japan, I will instead offer Darwin's own description, in a letter to his sister, Caroline, of the devastation he saw after the 1835 quake:

"I suppose it certainly is the worst ever experienced in Chili (sic). It is no use attempting to describe the ruins—it is the most awful spectacle I ever beheld. The town of Concepcion is now nothing more than piles and lines of bricks, tiles and timbers—it is absolutely true there is not one house left habitable; some little hovels built of sticks and reeds in the outskirts of the town have not been shaken down and these now are hired by the richest people. The force of the shock must have been immense, the ground is traversed by rents, the solid rocks are shivered, solid buttresses 6-10 feet thick are broken into fragments like so much biscuit. How fortunate it happened at the time of day when many are out of their houses and all active: if the town had been over thrown in the night, very few would have escaped to tell the tale."

(Notebook contributor Dr. James Payne sends along this link to Charity Navigator for any of you looking to donate money to help victims in Japan: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1221)

Answer to Last Puzzler:
A 10-inch cake has a perimeter (circumference) of 10 times pi (3.14), or 31.4 inches. If you cut the cake into eight equal pieces, each slice will be 3.92 inches wide at the thick end.

Today's Puzzler:
Unscramble each of these into a common word for something you find in nature:
1) aappay
2) leiroo
3) hursth
4) legae
5) mosrw
6) glinngith

Birthdays:
Caroline Herschel, the first woman astronomer, would have turned 261 years old on Wednesday. Limited in her growth by a childhood case of typhus (as an adult she stood 4'3") and trained by her parents to be a house servant, she was drawn to star-gazing as strongly as her more famous astronomer brother, William Herschel. More adept than William at caring for and handling telescopes and and at keeping track of his observations, she became her brother's invaluable assistant and, in her own sky searches, discovered a number of comets.

Coincidentally, William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus 230 years ago this week. He wanted to name it Georgium or the Georgian Planet after Britain's King George III (yes, the same king the American colonists fought against in the Revolutionary War). The astronomical community overruled him, and so the planet was named after the Greek god of the sky.

Norbert Rillieux, the New Orleans-born inventor who revolutionized sugar refining by creating a more efficient evaporation method, would have turned 205 on Friday. A cousin of the French painter Edgar Degas and the son of a white plantation owner and a free African-American woman, Rillieux was a gifted engineer. After sweetening life for sugar companies with his "multiple-effect evaporator," he tried to help New Orleans fight a yellow-fever outbreak by designing a plan for eliminating breeding grounds for disease-spreading mosquitos.

Martinus Beijerinck, the Dutch microbiologist and botanist who first used the the word virus to describe tiny pathogens, would have been 160 yesterday. He found the pathogens on tobacco plants and called them a virus because that is a Latin word for something poisonous or noxious.

Martin Beirjerinck

Ebenezer Elliott, the British naturalist poet known as the Corn Law Rhymer, would have been 230 on Wednesday. Labeled a dunce as a child, and plagued throughout his life by medical problems that followed a boyhood case of smallpox, Elliott often skipped school to roam the woods and study plant and animal life. He took up botany and plant collecting. At 16 he was sent to work for seven years with no pay in his father's factory, but also began writing poetry. His nickname comes from his opposition to the tariffs (the Corn Laws) set up by Britain to protect its grain industry. A spokesman for ordinary people, Elliott blamed the tariffs for some of his family's financial setbacks. A sampling from The Corn Law Rhymes:

Yes, ye green Hills, that to my soul restore
The verdure which in happier days it wore!
And thou, glad stream, in whose deep waters lav'd
Fathers, whose children were not then enslav'd!

And later...

Dear Sugar, dear Tea, and dear Corn
Conspired with dear Representation,
To laugh worth and honour to scorn,
And beggar the whole British nation.
Let us bribe the dear sharks, said dear Tea;
Bribe, bribe, said dear Representation;
Then buy with their own the dear humbugg'd and be
The bulwarks of Tory dictation.

Earthquake Artists and the Countdown to Pi (π) Day

March 12, 2011

I couldn't stop watching news coverage of Friday's deadly earthquake in Japan. One reason was that I have a friend who lives in Sendai (and whose status I haven't yet been able to determine). But in any such natural catastrophe, the planet's natural forces make compelling television. Seeing those forces in action is the only way to fully grasp their magnitude.

This may seem startling, but the explanation of why and how earthquakes happen wasn't spelled out in a fully, widely accepted scientific theory until the 1960s. Thanks to that theory of plate tectonics, we're now able to understand how the massive rock plates of the Earth's crust move and collide. They travel slowly across the hot, semi-molten mantle beneath them and grind into adjacent plates, uplifting mountain ranges and causing earthquakes and in some cases volcanoes.

Months or years from now, we will see artwork inspired by the Japanese disaster. Not just monuments, but paintings, drawings, songs, novels and poetry to help all of us comprehend the destruction and the enormous loss of life. I came upon an unusual example of earthquake art this morning. In 1968, around the same time plate tectonics were coming into focus, a temblor in Sicily destroyed the mountain town of Gibellina. The town was never rebuilt. Instead, a wildly creative new version of it—designed by modern artists and architects as a statement against political corruption, bureaucracy and the Mafia, and meant to play off the rugged natural environment—rose about 15 miles away. It is, say some who have visited it, a bizarre and eerie place, filled with metal sculptures and a haphazard feel. The new design did not attract many tourists or establish the town as a vibrant creative center. I still find it interesting, however—it sounds almost like the jumbled product of a human creative earthquake. It is a monument of a unique type. And it can be no more strange than the original Gibellina, which was turned into a different sort of artwork by Alberto Burri.

Part of new Gibellina, created by artists after the earthquake.

Burri (who, coincidentally, was born 96 years ago today) buried a large section of the ruins of the original Gibellina in waist-deep concrete in the 1980s to turn it into a piece of "land art." He made pathways where streets once lay. Visitors can thus walk through the city and ponder not just the impact of an earthquake but also deeper questions about the destructive powers of nature and humankind. At The Naturalist's Notebook we're always trying to highlight and merge nature, science and art, and Burri is an example of the creativity that can be spawned by that combination. He was a medical doctor as well as an abstract painter and sculptor. He took up painting while interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Texas during World War II.

The earthquake-destroyed town after Alberto Burri covered it with concrete and turned it into an artwork.

Ready for Pi (π) Day?
This Monday is Pi Day, an unofficial but semi-widely celebrated brainiac holiday honoring the world's most famous mathematical constant. Don't think of the date as 3/14 but as 3.14, the (rounded-off) value produced by dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.

If you have trouble remembering that ratio, this might help: Pi—the Greek letter for P—is an abbreviation for P/D, or "perimeter/diameter." O.K., so that's the P. How do you remember the D? Well, good pie is to die for, no? Think Pie/Die.

Pi Day is celebrated at a number of schools and museums, such as the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which has been holding 3.14 festivities for more than 20 years. The slicing of a celebratory cake (a round one, of course) can be used as a math exercise. For example, if you cut a 10-inch-diameter cake into eight equal slices, how wide will each slice be at the frosting end?

Over the course of history, some mathematicians have devoted years to calculating pi to as many digits as possible. It can be a lifetime pursuit; those digits go on indefinitely. Computers have now calculated the constant's value to more than a trillion decimal places.

Besides being essential to geometry, pi has what music executives would call crossover appeal. That is, even non-geeks find it fascinating. Kate Bush, the English singer-songwriter, sang the digits on her 2005 song Pi:

Before Bush's song came along, some people composed "piems" to try to memorize pi's value. Piems are poems in which the number of letters in each word matches a digit in pi. For example, here is piem by Sir James Jeans, the late British physicist, astronomer and mathematician who is credited with inventing this memorization method: "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics." Count the letters in each word and you get 314159265358979.

Those of you who live in the South may have heard the Georgia Tech sports cheer that makes use of π in playing up the school's science/engineering bent:

"E to the X dy dx,
E to the X dx,
Tangent secant cosine sine,
3.14159,
Square roots, cube roots, Poisson brackets,
Disintegrate 'em Yellow Jackets!"

Given that pi's value is often rounded up to 3.1416, you might want to plan ahead and circle Pi Day on your calendar for 2016, when the celebrations for 3.14.16—a date that comes around only once every thousand years—might rock Times Square. Or, more appropriately, Columbus Circle.

Answer to Last Puzzler:
Maple sap

Today's Puzzler:
Might as well stick with a question I asked above. The perimeter (or circumference) of a circle is pi multiplied by the diameter. If you cut a 10-inch-diameter birthday cake into eight equal pieces, how wide will each slice be at the frosting end?

Birthdays
Albert Einstein would have been 132 years old on Sunday. Perhaps you've heard of him. If you expect me to explain the theory of relativity here in two sentences, well, read the poster below.

Douglas Adams, the English author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and many other books, would have been 59 on Friday. A humorist who contributed to Monty Python's Flying Circus as a writer and (in one episode) an actor, and an environmental activist whose book Last Chance to See, co-written with zoologist Mark Carwardine, focused on endangered species, Adams was a multitalented creative force who worked in every medium he could, from music to radio to video games. His premise for The Hitchhiker's Guide was that Earth was being destroyed by aliens to make way for an intergallactic highway. "There no point in acting all surprised about it," the alien spokesman tells the Earthlings. "All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years...What do you mean, you've never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know."

Charles Bonnet, the Swiss naturalist for whom Charles Bonnet Syndrome is named, would have been 291 today. The syndrome, which Bonnet first identified in 1769 in his grandfather, causes a person with vision loss to have vivid, complex hallucinations that can last all day and cause the sufferer to worry that he is developing mental illness. Bonnet contributed to scientific knowledge in other areas as well. Through research on aphids (plant lice) he discovered that some animals and plants reproduce without fertilization by a male. This concept is called parthenogenesis.

Relatively Humorous
If I'm playing up Pi Day, I might as well close with some Einstein jokes.

Q. How did Albert come up with his famous theory?
A. He thought to himself, "If I vere to put my hand on a hot stove for a minute, it vould seem like an hour. But if I vere to sit with a pretty girl for an hour, it vould seem like a minute. By Jove, I think time is relative!"

Q. What was Einstein's favorite limerick?
A. There was an old lady called Wright who could travel much faster than light. She departed one day in a relative way and returned on the previous night.

Kimber (right) began teaching Herbie to paint in 1999 at the San Antonio Zoo.

The Rhino Who Painted (and the Elephants Who Still Do)

March 9, 2011

Our friend Kimber has been asked this before: Why did you teach a black rhinoceros to paint?

The obvious answer is that the San Antonio Zoo, where she worked as a volunteer, asked her to do so. She then explains why: "When you have animals in captivity, they tend to get bored with the same surroundings and routine every day. Boredom can lead to to a great deal of stress for the animal. In order to keep the animal from getting too stressed out, keepers will introduce different things for the animal to play with, smell or eat in order to break up their monotonous lifestyle. For rhinos, it's sometimes hard to come up with things because they are such large animals. Much of what could be put in their enclosure would probably either be smashed or eaten. So you have to be creative."

In December 1999 Kimber began giving painting lessons to Herbie, a black rhino at the zoo who was then seven years old. I thought about Kimber and Herbie this week when I stumbled upon the YouTube video below of an elephant named Paya from the Maesa Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, painting what appears to be a remarkable self portrait:

The video seems too amazing to be true, but it is not a fake, according to the veteran Internet-fraud debunkers at hoax-slayer.com. In fact, Paya is but one of a number of pachyderms who have been taught to paint as part of the non-profit Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project, which sells elephant-created artworks to raise funds to protect elephants in the wild.

The phrase "taught to paint" raises the hackles of some critics. They argue that elephants such as Paya are not real artists; the animals merely learn to take particular brushstrokes in response to commands from humans. In Paya's case those strokes add up to a painting of an elephant. Many other elephants, however, paint in a more freestyle form, producing modern-looking, non-representational pieces. In any case, the point is to add variety to their days and study how they learn, not to prove that the animals deserve scholarships to the Yale School of Art.

In working with Herbie, whom she describes as very intelligent, Kimber says she built on commands he had already been taught. If she said "target," he would touch a designated spot with his mouth. She would then "bridge" him by blowing a whistle to let him know he'd done the right thing, and reward him with a piece of fruit or lots of attention. "Although rhino skin is rough and thick, the skin is still very sensitive, so Herbie [enjoyed] being rubbed or brushed," she says.

Kimber began her painting instruction by teaching Herbie colors and shapes. "I made a triangle, circle and square out of different colored foam board—red, green, blue and yellow," she says. "I then taught Herbie to 'target' onto the correct color and shape by saying, for example, 'blue circle,' and then bridging and rewarding him if he touched the correct shape and color with his lip. He got to be pretty good—a lot of times over 80 percent correct.

"Some people said I was just training him to do a trick," Kimber continues. " However, it's not any different from when you teach a human child their colors and shapes."

Herbie painted using his unique upper lip and non-toxic paint.

Kimber tried putting a paint brush in Herbie's mouth, but he kept trying to eat it, she says. She decided to try his upper lip instead. It's an unusual lip, one that is linked to a black rhino's diet and even its name.

The terms "white rhino" and "black rhino" have nothing to do with color. The "white" in white rhino is a mistranslation of a Dutch word, wijd, meaning "wide," and refers to the shape of that rhino species' broad upper lip. By contrast, the black rhino (which is called black simply to differentiate it from the white rhino) has evolved a pointed, "prehensile" upper lip that he can use to pull leaves and twigs off bushes and trees for food (white rhinos can't do that and feed on grasses).

DEFINITION TIMEOUT:

(The word prehensile describes a body part—a monkey's tail, a gorilla's feet, a human being's hands, a giraffe's tongue or an elephant's trunk, for example—that is able to grasp or hold something. The word is NOT a combination of pre and hensile, so it does NOT mean "before hensile." It comes from a Latin word, prehendere, meaning "to grasp.")

Kimber taught Herbie to dip his upper lip in child-safe acrylic paint. "He chose his paints out of a muffin tin," she says. "And, yes, HE chose the colors." When creating an image, Kimber says, Herbie "moved his lip around just like he was finger painting." His works were abstract. But beautiful.

Kimber is the first to point out that animals such as Herbie deserve "wide open spaces to roam" rather than a life of confinement and occasional artistic recreation. But life in the wild has become particularly dangerous for black rhinos, who reside only in Africa (rhinos used to roam all the northern continents) and are critically endangered. The population declined by 96 percent between 1970 and 1992, to a few thousand. The causes were habitat loss and mass murder by poachers eager to sell the rhinos' horns for use in making handles for ceremonial Middle Eastern daggers and as expensive sexual boosters in Chinese medicine.

Just for the record, rhino horns are composed primarily of keratin, the same protein that makes up human fingernails and toenails. Keratin has been found to have no medicinal value.

Though black rhinos in captivity often live into their 40s, Herbie died last October at age 18. Kimber hopes that he raised awareness of the plight of black rhinos. He certainly made an indelible impression on her. As she noted in an article she wrote some years ago for Critter magazine, "I've come to appreciate and love this huge animal that has the strength to turn over cars yet at the same time is gentle and intelligent enough to create a beautiful piece of art."
****************

Answer to last Puzzler:
How many of Europe's 50 countries and sovereign states can you name? Here's the full list:

Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City.

The European country with the longest coastline? That would be Norway.

Today's Puzzler:
A nature riddle: I rise only once a year. I run but can't walk. When I get real hot, I concentrate better and people like me more. What am I?

Birthdays:
George Steller, the German-born naturalist for whom the Steller's jay, the Steller's sea lion, the Steller's eider and other species were named, would have turned 302 years old on Thursday.

Steller was a botanist, zoologist, physician and adventurer. He spent most of his adult life in Russia and Alaska, and was a survivor of the doomed expedition on which Danish navigator Vitus Bering and half the crew died following a shipwreck in what is now called the Bering Sea. Three decades after Steller identified what is now known as the Steller's sea cow in 1741, that large, gentle, seaweed-eating animal was hunted to extinction for its skin, blubber and veal-like meat.

John Herschel, the eminent English astronomer, mathematician and chemist whose many accomplishments included helping to shape the theory of evolution, coining the term photographic negative and naming a total of 11 moons of Saturn and Uranus, would have turned 219 years old on Monday. Herschel's ideas on the evolution of language and animals influenced Charles Darwin, who stopped to visit him when the HMS Beagle passed South Africa (where Herschel was living) in 1836 en route home from the Galapagos Islands. Herschel and his artistic wife, Margaret, also made beautiful botanical illustrations; he used a "camera lucida," a device that projects the image that is to be drawn, in order to accurately outline the plants. Margaret then did the illustrations.

James Herriott, the veterinary surgeon and author of All Creatures Great and Small, would have been 95 on Thursday. His real name was Alf Wright and he worked solely as a vet until age 50, when his wife urged him to finally pursue his dream of writing a book. A few years later, using the pseudonym James Herriott (a name he borrowed from a goalkeeper who played for a British soccer team), he began publishing semi-autobiographical novels about the experiences of a country veterinarian. The first two of those were republished as the best-selling All Creatures Great and Small, which became a BBC television series and spawned a number of other animal-themed books, including Let Sleeping Vets Lie and James Herriott's Favourite Dog Stories.

Andre Michaux, the French explorer and botanist who introduced numerous plant species to America, including the crepe myrtle, ginkgo, tea-olive and Christmas Camellia, would have been 265 today. His destiny was changed when his wife, the only love of his life, died less than a year into their marriage. Steered into studying botany to escape his grief, Michaux (who never remarried) ended up traveling the world and spending much of his adult life in America, where he set up botanical gardens in North Charleston, S.C., and Bergen, N.J.

Who wouldn't want to fly like a bumblebee?

From Bumblebees to Michelangelo

March 5, 2011

Need to jump start your day? Click on the YouTube video link below to see and hear, in just over a minute, a performance of the catchiest nature song ever written, Flight of the Bumblebee. Sunday is the 167th birthday of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the Russian who composed Flight as an interlude for one of his operas. The song has since been used in everything from The Green Hornet to Kill Bill to the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Musicians have competed to set world records for playing it fastest on particular instruments. The high-speed YouTube performance is by Croatian pianist Maksim Mrvica, dressed, obviously, in Rimsky-Korsakov-era musical garb.

An Ice Age Old Question
Standing gingerly atop the mile-thick ice that blanketed this area 15,000 years ago, a primitive Mainer might have stared down at the dangerously slick expanse, pondered it for moment, then looked over at his friend and said, Ayuh. Whatcha gonna use, sand or salt?

That dilemma has only grown more complicated for those of us who currently have Ice Age-like sheets covering our Maine driveways. I hate using harsh salts and chemicals (which can harm plants and wildlife and pollute groundwater) and we don't have any sand, but after the postwoman slipped and fell and the UPS woman started donning ice cleats and dragging packages two-tenths of a mile to our doorstep on a plastic sled rather than driving her truck in, I knew I had to do something.

And then, a few days ago, while walking out of a store with a supply of rock salt, I saw a display for something called Clean Melt. Described on the label as an an "eco-friendly ice melt," it is "blended with magnesium chloride and infused with Ice Ban." It cost twice as much as the rock salt and came in green bags, so of course I bought 150 pounds.

But what the heck had I gotten?

I had gotten into a murky realm, that's what. The Clean Melt crystals are a highly unnatural color, and they stained the ice a weird blue-green when I sprinkled some on the rutted disaster on which we drive.

My attempts to research the relative merits and dangers of ice-melts led me deep into the worlds of chemistry and marketing. There are dog-friendly ice melts and high-speed ice melts and ice melts that work especially well in extreme cold. Magnesium chloride may be a better choice than either sodium chloride (regular salt) or potassium chloride (a versatile compound that is also used in fertilizers, sodium-free salt substitutes and lethal injections). It may not be as potent as Prestone's Driveway Heat (calcium chloride), but I try to keep my plants and animals away from anything made by Prestone. Clean Melt claims that it is less damaging to plants than rock salt is, and its key ingredient, Ice Ban, is a byproduct of the brewing industry that is so safe that it is actually fed to animals.

I hope I'm being green. I will be experimenting (sparingly) with Clean Melt in the days ahead (spreading it with my bare hands, as the label says I can safely do), and will monitor the plant life around the driveway come spring.

In the meantime, don't you think the term "eco-friendly ice melt" would be good for a refreshing summer drink?

How to Grow Car Parts From Mushrooms
The use of corn to make ethanol fuel is turning out to be less than eco-friendly, but wheat and fungi (sometimes mixed together) are proving to be environmentally smart replacements for plastic in car parts made by Ford. Here's a really interesting short clip from a new Nova special on that subject:

Perhaps someday, instead of hearing Ricardo Montalban cooing about the seats of "soft Corinthian leather" available on a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba, we'll hear Mario Batalli cooing about the seats of "soft porcini mushroom" available on a 2016 Ford Vegan.

Lessons from a Crossword Puzzle
I love crossword puzzles, but sometimes I don't know the answer to a clue even when I see the answer. The other day, for example, the nine-letter solution to a clue that included the word "hard" was MOHS SCALE. My ignorance of the Mohs Scale may simply prove that I don't have rocks in my head: That scale, created by German geologist Friedrich Mohs in 1812, measures the relative hardness of minerals by assessing which ones will scratch other ones. Diamond tops the list, with a perfect 10 rating. Talc—the mineral from which we get baby-soft talcum powder and which is the main component of soapstone—ranks at the bottom, with a score of 1. Thank you, Will Shortz.

Now, does anyone know "Where Attila was defeated, 451"? Seven letters.

Are You Interested in Nature Apps?
I got an e-mail the other day from a tech company called Appweavers. It was announcing the release of its iPad and iPhone applications for the Peterson Field Guide to the Birds of North America, and encouraging me to share that news with friends of The Naturalist's Notebook. I have an iPad (we create a version of Sports Illustrated for it every week, so I more or less have to), and I have downloaded the iPad Peterson Guide, but I'm just wondering: How many of you care about nature "apps" for electronic devices? Would you like me to do some comparison testing? I've already started doing some, but I'm just curious.

Having said that, I will add that, while reading a magazine in the doctor's office this week, I rather enjoyed a comment from actor Liam Neeson on why he doesn't own an electronic-reading device: "I like the tactileness of books."

Answer to Last Puzzler:
How many coastal states are there in the U.S.? A total of 23: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii.

Today's Puzzler:
Continuing the geography theme, here's a pair of tougher questions:
1) Europe has 50 countries or independent states. How many can you name? (Helpful hints: Great Britain counts as one country, but so does Vatican City. Remember that a lot of countries have splintered into smaller ones over the last two decades.)
2) What European country has the most miles of coastline? (Helpful hint: It's not Russia, because much of Russia's coastline lies in Asia.)

Birthdays:
Michelangelo, the Italian painter, sculptor and architect and true Renaissance man, would have been 536 years old tomorrow. Take any one of his greatest works—his statue of David, his sculpture of the Pieta, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to name just three candidates—and that alone would be enough to put him in the artistic pantheon. He was self-critical (and did not tolerate fools), but his drive to create was remarkable. We have one of his famous quotations hanging in The Naturalist's Notebook. Quoth the genius: "I am still learning."

Valentina Tereshkova, the Russian who was first woman in space, turns 74 on Sunday. Chosen to be a cosmonaut in part because she was a model member of the proletariat (a factory worker) and an amateur parachutist, she piloted Vostok 6 in 1963 and was in space for three days. For those of you still caught up in the Cold War rivalry, the first American woman in space was Sally Ride, who didn't go up until 1983.

William Oughtred, the English mathematician who invented the slide rule, would have been 437 today. Oughtred's device—two side-by-side, strategically numbered rulers that slid past each other, enabling him to multiply and divide—became a common tool in math, science and engineering, and wasn't his only significant innovation. He also introduced X as a symbol for multiplication.

John van der Heyden, the Dutch painter who invented the fire extinguisher—talk about a Renaissance man!—would have turned 374 today. His Dutch compatriot Aert Schouman, a far superior painter who contributed nothing to the world of firefighting but was one of the earliest natural history artists, would have been 292. Schouman was able to paint from a zoological cabinet and menagerie of animals collected by his patron, the prince Willem V.

An Aert Schouman painting called A Purple Heron on a Sand Bank, done in a combination of watercolor, black chalk and pen and ink. The purple heron is a wading bird found in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe.

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