Less Blogging More Painting

Paintings can be viewed here http://cargocollective.com/MercenaryOrnithology/

Lincoln's Sparrow

Not feeling verbose - but here is the next in the sparrow series.

Golden-crowned Sparrow

The Golden-crowned Sparrow is the symbol of the west coast for me.  It's good to be home.

Grasshopper Sparrow

The grasshopper sparrow was the last bird I saw upon leaving Veracruz, and this painting is based off of sketches I did at the time.  They are another secretive grassland species, but nothing in comparison to the Botteri’s Sparrow.  They are more associated with species of bunchgrass, so can be seen a little more easily as they skitter around. 

 

On the whole, the Grasshopper Sparrow is pretty common, although like most grassland specialists declining.  There does exists an endangered resident subspecies of Grasshopper Sparrow that lives in Florida.  It is interesting to note that this Florida population has a large degree of genetic variability (according to Bulgin et al’s paper Ancestral polymorphisms in genetic markers obscure detection of evolutionarily distinct populations in the endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow,) and the group’s genetic distinctness is muddy at best.  This means that their status as a subspecies is based on (admittedly well-defined) morphological and behavioral characteristics.  This is a departure from the current standard of a purely genetic standpoint of what makes a distinct population, and it pleases me to see this.  In my mind, there is more that makes a species that genetic markers.

Botteri's Sparrow

The Botteri’s Sparrow seems to be another largely overlooked bird.  The literature doesn’t even make it clear if this species should be placed in the genus Aimphilia alongside species like the Rufous-crowned Sparrow or Peucaea along with things like Cassin’s Sparrow.  The current standing is Peucaea, but it seem tenious.  A rather old, but somewhat lovely taxonomic paper on the species by J. Dan Webster A Revision of the Botteri Sparrow, explains why this might be: “The birds are such late migrants, especially the Mexican races, that many collectors have left the field before the birds begin breeding…. [and] the species has eluded fall and early winter collection almost entirely.”

Although this was written in 1959, it seems to remain the case.  This species continues to fly under the radar of many Mexican birders (that is to say, birders in Mexico.)  Although their distribution extends from the southern US to Central America, and their chosen tall-grass habitat is (relatively speaking) ample, few of my friends have ever heard of this species.  Looking at eBird data shows the same - sightings are few and scattered.  There is no reason to believe that this bird is particularly threatened, as they are able to thrive in non-native grasslands according to Jones and Bock’s paper The Botteri’s Sparrow and Exotic Arizona Grasslands: An Ecological Trap or Habitat Regained?  They are simply hard to find.  It is solitary and shy species that rarely emerges from low in the grass except to sing.  As such, it’s a species that draws my personal attention.

Song Sparrow

If you take a quick look at the song sparrow range map (the one that shows all of North America, not just the supposed North America that only includes the US and Canada,) you will notice something interesting.  There is a contiguous population across the bird-guide version of North America and then a little island of sparrows alone down in Mexico.   Geographic isolation usually means genetic isolation, and so it happens to be.  Sometimes it’s nice to have different parts of my life connecting, and it was nice to find that the sparrows I was pondering down in Veracruz happen to be the same birds my professor, Bob Zink, from the U of M published about many years before. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2410178

Worthen's Sparrow

In a birding guide to Veracruz, I came across the casual mention of a bird called the Worthen’s Sparrow.  The guide said that Worthen’s Sparrows were known to have been seen in the far eastern edge of Veracruz in an area called Perote.  This part of Veracruz features a succession of increasingly arid habitats as it nears the state of Puebla – prairie, scrub, mala pais, and eventually desert.

I had never heard of this bird before, but I attributed it to the fact that I’m a terrible birder who doesn’t even own a field guide.  I wanted to see a Worthen’s Sparrow, since I have never seen one, but I didn’t think too hard about it.  That is, until we discovered this is actually one of the rarest species on earth.  They are an almost completely unstudied group that once ranged from New Mexico to Veracruz, but is now restricted three tiny groups in north-eastern Mexico.  The total population of this species is estimated to be no more than 500 individuals, and is likely closer to about 200.

Why has nobody heard of this bird, then?  I suppose because it’s ugly, and it’s in Mexico.  Although, rare, ugly, and in Mexico is about all it takes for me to become very excited.  I have spent some time trying to find the probably extirpated Worthen’s Sparrows of Veracruz, but have turned up nothing.  I want another chance to look.  Something seems romantic to me to be the champion of an ugly bird in an ugly habitat, and another reservoir of genetic diversity would be invaluable to a minute population of slowly dwindling birds.  

The almost endemic bird of Veracruz

The Veracruz Rufous-naped Wren is an endemic subspecies to the coastal dry forests of central Veracruz.  This population happens to be it's own disjunct population and may well be considered it's own species in the future.  Thusly, when considering a bird to paint that would be representative of where I have been living, this was the (sub)species we came up with.

The RAREST bird

Lately I’ve been playing the role of the hawk-watcher in place of bander.  This has been a pretty good chance to learn, and my bird-watching in general has improved more in the past two months than it has in years.  Seeing hundreds of thousands of migratory birds is equally exciting as handling a few.  Still, there is something awesome about having a little bit of “hawk in hand.”  Here is the cool hawk I have to brag about.  (Yeah, I'm not *that* ego-less.)

 

Veracruzano Highlands

Veracruz has existed in my mind as the humid costal plains around Chichicaxtle, Cardel and San Isidro for as long as I’ve known it years that I have had to know it.  Around here, a person gets so accustomed to the wilting heat that any temperature below about 24 degrees C is cause for putting on a jacket.  On clear days, however, it is still possible to see snow on top of the Pico de Orizaba about sixty miles to the west.  There are altitudes in Veracruz that rival and then surpass those of the western US.  This year I’ve had the pleasure of discovering this side of Veracruz, which is probably the most beautiful part of this state.

One of the sites I have come to know best is La Joya, a favorite birding spots among the VRR crew.  The town itself is charming on it’s own.  It is composed of a lot of wooden building and is bifurcated by the highway to Mexico city where vests and hats are always being sold.  It features a lot of restaurants that serve rabbit, a freakishly high concentration of cheese shops, and a lot of homes heated by wood stoves.  It’s the kind of aesthetic that I appreciate.

 The main attraction however, is a gravel pit surrounded by second-growth pine forest just outside of the town of La Joya.  Sentiments about private property are somewhat different in Mexico, so a person can freely walk into the gravel pit and around the trucks and start birding, but we usually ask for permission at the office anyhow.  Usually the response is a mixture of warm welcome and total confusion as to why gringos with binoculars chose here as a tourist destination. 

For a Californian birder, the mixture of species in La Joya is a strange amalgamation of familiar birds, seemingly familiar birds, and stuff you have never seen before.  There are Stellar’s Jays and Acorn Woodpeckers occupying the soundscape just like in the Sierra Nevadas, and many things such as the Mountain Chickadees and the Dark-eyed Juncos have just been replaced by their equivalents the Mexican Chickadees and Yellow-eyed Juncos.  Then there are things like Gray-silky flycatchers, trogons, and the fabled Red Warbler that have no parallel in California.  It is a pleasantly surreal feeling to be amongst the familiar and the strange, to be in Mexico wearing a coat and battling the wind and rain rather than the heat and humidity.  It is a beautiful place with a little bit of both of the places I love.

Sorry I don’t have a camera to share photos.  Soon!

Pesticide

Back in 2009, while living in San Isidro, Teresa and myself woke up from an afternoon nap to a man in a spacesuit wandering around in our house.  My Spanish was much worse back then, so confusion set in.  Eventually we realized, after being chased out of our house, that they were fumigating the place for pests.  The store below us had apparently arranged this without our knowing.  As we stood outside of our now toxic house, we watched as swarms of swallows started to gather to eat the moribund insects collecting around the property.  Mostly they were feasting on non-target bugs that had been affected such as butterflies and dragonflies.  We were certain that the birds must have been suffering as a result as well, but we didn’t find out one way or the other.

Well, people are spraying nearby now, and I can now say for sure what the results are.  I have pictures for this blog post, but I’ve decided they are just gratuitous.  They are of dead and dying birds found around town in the past couple of days.  The dead are lying out in the open, and the dying are struggling to breathe.  In total there have been about eight of these birds found, mostly blackbirds and inca doves, and there are certainly more.

I guess there is a moral to all of this, but I don’t feel like pushing it one way or the other.  There is just a long way to go towards environmental awareness.

A couple of entries for my eventual video field guide to birds of prey

Since raptor ID is mostly based on in-flight gestalt, it is very hard to identify anything based on field marks.  Regular bird guides are of little help, because you actually have to see the bird to get a feel for it's behavior and flight style.  I thought it would be useful to have a video field guide to birds of prey somewhere online, so I'm going to slowly start one.  I don't have much for equipment in order to make this, but I'm doing what I can for now.  I am getting video faster than I am capable of uploading it, but bit by bit I will have it up.

Mississippi Kite

Cooper's Hawk

A Blast From the Past

I've posted this doodle before, but since I took everything down from my blog awhile back, I think I should re-post it. It explains (kind of) the name of this blog.

Also, I've just been missing the other members of the raptor squad.

Recent Painting

In honor of the Aplomado Falcons living on the dunes of Cansaburro who taunt the banders endlessly.

Rescue Mission

The other day we received a call from Suffield Base range control. They called to provide us with the UTM coordinates of a injured hawk that was found on the base. From their very vague description it sounded like a Swainson’s Hawk, and it sounded bad. I immediately went to go look for him.

Scheduled to pass through Veracruz October 29

When I got there, this is who I found below the flare stack of a gas plant. I was so relieved to see that the sum total of the Swainson’s injuries were just a set of badly burned flight feathers. After hanging out in my garage for several days sharing Cecil’s food, the little guy was delivered to the Edmonton Wildlife Rehab Center six hours away for a new set of feathers.

Replacing flight feathers is surprisingly easy, and falconers have been doing it for well over a thousand years. Rather than waiting a full year for new feathers to grown in or risking a total alteration in the bird’s molt cycle by pulling the damaged feathers out, a person can do what is called imping. You simply cut the damaged feather low along the shaft, leaving a little bit at the bottom, and then find a corresponding flight feather from a dead bird or a previous molt and cut it at the same point as the old feather. Using a small piece of bamboo placed in the hollow tube of the feather shafts, you can connect the old and ‘new’ feathers with a dab of five minute epoxy. This new imped feather will work just as the old one did, and it will molt just as the old one would have, because technically it is still there.

That means that this Swainson’s can be released before the migration season starts, and he can make through Veracruz and down to Argentina with all the others.

Relatively Speaking

As a prompt to get some people to visit, here is a video that demonstrates a poor view of what is considered a "small" kettle of raptors moving over - and it is still awe-inspiring to the perspective of a midwesterner such as myself.

These guys are Mississippi Kites, and they are only the first wave of migratory raptors that comes through Veracruz. They nest relatively far south in areas such as Texas and along the gulf coast so they are done with breeding and ready to go south long before most other raptors. Soon broadwings, and then later Swainson's Hawks will be joining in, and they will be coming in much greater numbers. Get your clickers ready.

Swallow Tailed Kite

Swallow-tailed Kites are an early season migrant that can be seen in small numbers, often migrating alongside the far more common Mississippi Kite. Usually one or two will be seen accompanying a flock of thousands of Mississippis. They will sometimes be seen flying lower near the coast, where I took this short bit of video.

I have a personal fascination with the Swallow-tailed kite, because it is the very first diorama you seen when you enter the Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis. I went to that museum as a child and later on worked there for many years. I have spent many hours admiring that diorama thinking I would never see this birds in life. In the early days of the Bell Museum, swallow tails were often seen along the Mississippi river, but they have long since been extirpated from their historical nesting sights along the river valleys of Minnesota. I'm glad I can still see them somewhere, and maybe one day they will return to their historical range.

Sex Panther?

I spent some time last winter in the mangrove swamps of Chiapas. I was mostly there to help with bird monitoring, but I also did crocodile and mammal surveys. When setting out camera traps for jaguars, we sprayed each one with... something... to bait the trap. When I asked what the trap was baited with, I was told in a thick Mexican accent ¨Calvin Klien´s Obsession.¨ After having this repeated to me several times, I verified that, yes, Calvin Klien cologne was part of our field supplies. Apparently, and probably not by accident, Obsession closely mimics jaguar pheremone.

Let this be a warning to those of you who want to wear cologne in the jungle.

Kangaroo Rats

I will do one quick entry.

In the words of my FEHA data sheets "Capture Method: Ground Hand-grab"

While in Canada I did a few kangaroo rat surveys. The Ord's Kangaroo Rat lives in southern Alberta in approximately three dune systems. This means the Ord's is VERY rare. On these three dunes, however, they can be seen hopping around pretty readily.

Since they are so rare, a major goal of the surveys is population monitoring. The general procedure when you go out "k-ratting" is to catch them, check for a PIT tag and put in a PIT tag if the rat is lacking one, (then check for parasites, take some measurements, take some pictures and have fun.) The PIT tag is a little chip under the skin that can be scanned in order to identify the rat. It functions more or less like a bird band, but with slightly flashier technology. From the rate of recaptures and a bit of a Bio101 background knowledge (which I will try to remember to write about later) it is possible to get a pretty good estimation of the total population of rats.

When I asked how you catch a kangaroo rat, I had a vision of a live trap or something in my head. The response was no, you just grab them. I didn't believe the k-ratters, but it's true. They just bounce around the dunes looking stunned to see you when you approach. From this observation I started to formulate theories as to why this is not the most successful species in Canada, but it appears that they only stand around stupidly for humans. When an owl approaches, the evasive maneuvers come out, and the kangaroo rats out perform nearly every time.

My new favorite mammal.

The limited internet effect.

Hi family. Hi mom, mostly.

When my life is truly great and wonderful and exciting, I rarely have much time. I rarely have internet easily available, either. For this reason, my blog is missing most of the best parts of my adventures. So. Just to tell you, I am having a great, wonderful, exciting time. I'm more than content.

I'll try to get a few things up soon.

Clever Girl

My favorite juvenile hawk this season is a hawk I dubbed Ninja Bird. Ferruginous hawks are on average more ninja than other buteos (if you ignore their previously noted proclivity towards drooling.) They have a fearsome sidekick-talon combo that they can back up with some pretty intense face-biting.

Ninja Bird was the greatest of the bad-ass baby ferruginous hawks. Ninja bird attacked us before we even tried to pick her up, footing both of us in the legs. (The Destoryer has eight puncture wounds to prove this.) Ninja bird fought back through the whole transmitter attachment, and upon release, she chased after us with extreme ferocity.

Ninja Bird was not just fearsome, she was also as clever as a Jurassic Park velociraptor. On our day-after check, we heard Ninja Bird’s radio signal coming from near a large mound of dirt at the dugout not far from the nest. It was a hot day, but through the haze we spotted a young female hawk perched on the mound. The Destoryer ran to catch her, and he kept running. The bird flew away far better than Ninja should have been able to– and the signal didn’t move. That wasn’t our bird. It was a decoy.

As we get up to the dugout, the signal started making less and less sense. It would be nearly silent but for brief moments it would suddenly become super strong. I walked back and forth for over half an hour somehow going PAST the signal over and over without seeing a bird or a fallen transmitter.

It finally dawned on me. The bird was IN the drain culvert to the dugout. To quote Aliens “They're coming outta the walls. They're coming outta the goddamn walls.” She was hiding her signal, she was creating distractions, and she almost out smarted us.

Needless to say, getting Ninja out of the drain culvert was difficult.

Hawk Drool

It is well known to any GGROer that a drooling hawk is a bad sign. In most birds, it is a sign of severe stress, but in Ferruginous Hawks it appears to be their natural response to almost everything. Within seconds of hooding a FEHA, the hood will become soaked with hawk spit. The problem is so pronounced that my trapping jeans actually have a ferruginous hawk drool stain. Buteo regilus is just not very regal at times.

A young hawk oozing saliva

More About Cecil

The beloved owl. I know. I'm obsessed.

Cecil the great horned owl, my ferruginous hawk-trapping lure, went back to the Edmonton Wildlife Rehabilitation Center a few days ago. I miss him greatly. He is only a working owl for part of the year, and he had to go home sometime. He spends most of his year rather commodious aviary at the rehab center glaring at the other owls suspiciously and totally terrorizing the volunteers. In fact, Cecil has quite the reputation of being a king-hell bastard. He has already even sent a girl to the hospital to get stitches after he raked her across the shoulder with his talons as she tried to clean his enclosure.

I find this shocking, because I spent the past several months showing Cecil off to anyone who was interested in meeting him. He was comfortable being held by almost anyone. I had a totally positive relationship with Cecil. He was often grouchy, but never aggressive. He would get a little touchy when somebody came between him and his road-kill meals. The worst he would do was refuse to cooperate by hanging upside-down on your glove when you tried to handle him. By the end of the season he even gave up this habit.

He was a great companion, and I’m glad he came with my trapping partner and I on our many-hundred mile journey across the Canadian prairies. He was definitely the hardest working member of our crew, and the whole time he was a model citizen. He stood up to angry ferruginous hawks for us, he stayed in motels with us, he napped in parks with us, and he even came into restaurants with us. Cecil even once hopped into a dho-gaza net by accident, and with only a bit of resentment allowed us to take him out.

Thanks, Cecil.

Tracking FEHAs

Lately, I have been tracking the dispersal of fledgling Ferruginous Hawks. In theory, what we attempted to do was to take young birds out of the nest, fit them with a backpack bearing a radio transmitter, and put them back into the nest. This is a good idea in theory. The reality of the situation is that there is only a very tiny window of time in which a hawk is in the nest and about to fly but not yet actually flying. Even if they are still in the nest, they are probably just waiting for an excuse to try out their new wings, and your approach is a perfect reason. We can’t put the backpacks on birds that are too young, so we did the nest best thing. We ran down flighted birds.

The technique we ended up employing was to spot recently fledged hawks as they loafed around near their nests and then bolt after them. Their flying skill at this stage usually only permits them between about 500 meters and a kilometer before they begin losing altitude. If one is alert, it is possible to gather them up as they make their landing. Sometimes the babies flew away majestically laughing at our feeble attempts to run after them, but often we were successful.

A recently transmittered hawk.

Our success is due in large part to my field partner. He is a man with a truly accipiter-like disposition. By this, I mean he possesses both the speed and single-minded desire to chase after anything that flaps fitting of a forest hawk. I had one or two good runs on my part, but I can do nothing in comparison to this man, known by some as the Destroyer. I was able to make an important contribution, however. My role was to determine where the bird actually WENT, and to determine if the bird was, in fact, a ferruginous hawk. The destroyer is known to chase down red-tails and even ravens on accident, and could probably be trapped using a pinecone with feathers attached. I am serious when I say my partner was a human accipiter.

Once the birds are tagged, it comes down to tracking them. The VHF style transmitter in their backpacks is the classic style radio telemetry tag. All it does is send out a pulse at a given frequency. This is my kind of technology. Simple. After spending so much time messing around with satellite transmitters, remote data downloading stations, and total technological meltdowns, the radio telemetry was a relief. There is really only one available control on a radio receiver, and that is the gain. This just adjusts the sensitivity of the receiver. Using this a person can determine everything they really need to know: the relative distance on the bird, and direction of the signal.

Of course, because the University here can never leave anything simple, airplanes and horses and a whole morass of fancy antennae and equipment have come into the picture. The technology is still simple, but now there is an AIRPLANE and a lot more geometry. Since, you won’t see the bird from the airplane, you instead take a bearing on the bird from multiple points. Where the hypothetical lines pointing towards the bird would cross should be the location of your bird. So as glamorous as doing science from a Cessna might seem, keep mind that both math and vomiting are also happening concurrently.

What I have learned from all of this is that life is difficult when you are a young hawk. It takes more than a sharp bill and talons to get by in the world.

Banff

Well. I finally made it out a bit to explore the Canadian Rockies.

I picked the first trail head I could find and hiked as far as I could go. It was lovely.

Nothing like telemetry tracking to make you feel like a spy. Even more exciting when done from horseback or from an airplane.

Just remember yagis and lightning don't mix.

I believe freedom of movement is basic human right. People should be able to make it to work and school easily and cheaply, and people should also be able to go to different parts of the world without facing suspicion and scrutiny.

Thieving Swainson's Hawks

When on a cross country road trip with an owl, a person needs to provide for their traveling companion. Usually I will just pick up some of the fresher road kills that I find for him. However, when Cecil gets exceptionally hungry, I am not above allowing the more suicidal ground squirrels to get hit by my own truck. Today it was of particular importance that Cecil got a bit of a snack, and for some reason there was absolutely no roadkill along the highways of Saskatchewan. It was several hours of driving before something finally came along. A ground squirrel ran under my tires of it's own volition on a gravel range road. Relieved, I had something to give my irritable owl, I backed up my truck. Before I could get out and pick up my prey, a Swainson's Hawk, chased by several blackbirds, swooped in and napped the recently killed ground squirrel. I guess this explains the mostly spotless Saskatchewan roads.

Why the hawks are wary

It's not just the hawks that need to be wary

I found this newspaper in a nearby small town -

I guess I better start taking Cecil a little more seriously.

16 hour work days. 18 hour work days. 20 hour work days. Last day off 23 days ago. Sure I have pictures and stories, but I would rather 8 hours of sleep.

My Roommate

A Change of Opinion

Our bosses came to visit this past week, the PhD student who will make Ferruginous Hawks into her degree and her advisor. With them around we have gotten a chance to hear more about the research and start to get the chance to appreciate the job and the birds a little more. Are FEHAs a truly endangered animal? Maybe not, but the study and observation of patterns in wild populations of any creature has value.

Soon we are going to be starting on the satellite tracking portion of the study. I am looking forward to it. We already have a new owlish roommate named Cecil living in our basement. He shall function as our hawk attractant for when the time comes to catch hawks.

Strange Occurrences

The other day while walking towards one of the Ferruginous Hawk nests we have been monitoring, I saw a small yellow thing pop out and scurry away along the ground. It took a moment to register what I was looking at. This yellow object escaping into the grass was a fuzzy, peeping gosling. It didn't make much sense. Had this little goose just escaped shocking narrow miss from being a hawk breakfast?

I went ahead and peered into the hawk's nest only to find that there too was another downy gosling and three goose eggs. The mother hawk circled above me, maternally protecting what she viewed to be her nest. After I got back into my truck, the hawk promptly re-settled herself upon her nest and returned to her very confused home-life. I can only imagine her attempts at feeding her supposed young.

It reminded me of this truly beautiful short film I had seen: The Owl that Married a Goose

Raramuri

According to my Chihuahuain coworker the Tarahumara, (the tribe native to that part of northern Mexico,) have a few interesting quirks about their language.

One notable oddity of the language is the fact that, apparently, there is no word for romantic love. There are words for sex and words for platonic and agape love, but romantic love remains unnamed. What this implies about the perception of love within the culture I can only speculate about, but certainly it must somehow affect how people relate to the concept.

Lonesome for California

It's just that Canada is jealous...

Aside from working with birds nesting on private ranches, we are also doing surveys on the nearby military base. Before we could enter the premises, we needed to attend a briefing and go through some basic procedures training. The main gist of these meetings was to inform us that if we see something and we don’t know what it is – don’t touch it, it might explode, and to tell us that we are always to always check in whenever we drive anywhere so we don’t accidently blunder through a training exercise or a weapons test. It’s pretty basic stuff.

Upon arriving at the base initially, the man at the gate looked in and told us “Oh, I hear you have some foreigners on your crew. We cannot really permit them on the block. I’m sorry.” I looked at Cesar, my Chihuahuian counterpart and prepared to wait out the meetings with him outside the premises.

“You’re fine,” I was informed.

“Oh, no. I’m American. I’m a foreigner, too.”

“Yeah. That’s no problem.”

It seems it is only Cesar who was not allowed on the base, because there are just so dang many Mexican spies.

Later that day, he was informed he was also not allowed to drive the University of Alberta truck, due to insurance issues. This is strange to me, since he is in possession of a Canadian driver’s license and a perfectly clean driving record. After all of this scrutiny about his driver’s license, nobody even bothered to notice that my out of country license was expired. I don’t even understand how this works.

Now it comes out that the university has neglected to pay him correctly and has delayed his entry into the graduate program he is already accepted into for years due to a constantly lengthening list of completely spurious reasons. If this is how a university is behaving towards it’s immigrant population, one knows that other organizations are worse.

I guess I have come to expect this of the US, as much as I hate it, but I had been given the illusion that Canada was a more civilized country. I’m not even seeing a fraction of the bullshit, but I’m still feeling morally indignant. Frankly, the Mexicans are the best thing I’ve encountered about Canada.

Nothing

I tried to take a picture of nothing, because it's the most beautiful thing this place has.

Porcu-spine.

So tell me. What are porcupines doing on the prairies? In fact, how is it there are great horned owls, beaver, cooper's hawks, moose, pine siskin, and so many other tree loving species living around me?

I guess it is just as logical that I should be on the prairies myself.

Saving the planet one square mile at a time

The short-grass prairies of Canada are flat and easily fenced. It is easy to own the land. The roads follow perfect grids, and sections of exactly one-mile square are parceled out. The owners of each of those squares are listed in the map books you can buy at the local general store. It is nearly impossible to find something or somewhere that is further than that mile from a gravel road or a track of some kind, and each of these tracks leads to another gas or oil well. The windswept expanses may look entirely empty, but there is actually an abundance of both natural beauty and human development. They are hidden in plain sight on the prairie, and it is hard to know where they intersect.

Because each scrap of land is barricaded by barbed wire and ownership is common knowledge, I can’t simply walk up to the lone tree where the mother bird is brooding her clutch. Trespassing is out of the question, as all actions are transparent on the flat open range. So, for every hawk nest and owl burrow I find, there is a conversation attached. I have to ask, and I have to explain.

Knocking at the doors of a ranch home, I don’t strike a very respectable figure. My jeans are dirty and worn, and battery acid has started to burn frayed holes in the denim. My eyes are obviously those of an exhausted individual, as researching both hawks and owls are at odds with each other. The bent aviator’s glasses on my head are what I would have been using to hide that fact if it weren’t impolite to introduce yourself behind mirrored lenses. I always expect to be greeted with irritation for having come to their door as an unannounced stranger, but consistently I am welcomed.

My purposed however, does not always draw the same kind of hospitality. “I am studying birds…” is all it takes for them to know that the bird is the often controversial burrowing owl. Barriers come up immediately. Ranchers know exactly what kind of animals are living on their land, and they definitely know if they have burrowing owls on their property. It is plain elitism to think they are ignorant of the ecosystems they are working with. When the owl isn’t at issue, everyone is delighted to take the naive university kid out to drink a couple beers and see the lekking grouse on their land, but when it comes to the endangered species, suspicion is the usual.

It’s not that they don’t like the birds. People usually brag about the animals living on their land and will brag about how well they've kept watch over the hawks and the owls. It's not that ranchers have any big profit making and development plans in their heads that an endangered species would stand in the way of. These are not exactly monitarily motivated people, since any one of them could sell their property and suddenly be a millionair. I guess what people fear is that the government is going to step in and tell them how to take care of their home. They think of loggers losing their jobs over spotted owls and unimpressive fish stopping the building of dams. Here in Canada, however, there is nothing to be afraid of even in a hypothetical manner. The fact is, the endangered species act in Canada is meaningless. The protection it offers does not extend to private land, and all of this land is private.

In fact, here in Canada, I am starting to suspect the act is actually being used to the benefit of developers and oil companies. Although it is true that burrowing owls are rare and declining, my other species of study, the recently listed ferruginous hawk, is not. Although considered a federally threatened species, they are shockingly common. Every tree that might hold a hawk has one, and we keep finding more. They don't even care if their home is a tree or not. They will happily nest on the ground, on manmade structures, and even on oil and gas structures. They eat ground squirrels, agricultural pests, and prefer hunting on very short, well-grazed land. They are perhaps the animals best suited to thrive on the human altered prairie.

Perhaps their threatened status is just a case of overzealously listing all of the top tier predators, and in part it probably is. However, looking at the funding of my study, I have reasons to be suspicious that there is more to it than that. Much of the money for this work comes from places like Cenovus and Husky, the oil and gas companies themselves.

By giving us a comparatively insignificant amount of money for trucks and needlessly hi-tec field gear, they get to say they are working to protect endangered species and the environment without having to sacrifice anything. They can say that it is scientifically proven that endangered species are not disturbed by their activities at all, and it will be true. They know that with an endangered species act that wields absolutely no power, they can have these status symbol birds on their land, but still do as they wish without any consequences. The ranchers, who really do have the hawks and owls at heart, should know they won’t be punished for having the birds on their land, either.

That is why I wish, standing in their yards dirty and tired, I was asking different questions. I wish I wasn’t asking them to bother their hawks and their owls on behalf of questionable motives, but that I was asking them about their own observations and knowledge of their birds. I wish the conservations were about management techniques, not about simply separating them from the birds on their property turning the hawks into a University's test animals. Any good rancher is familiar with his land and his home and nearly all of them are interested in the well being of what's on it, and with land rights and the endangered species act as it is here, they are the only ones with the power to do anything productive anyhow.

Save the planet one mile square at a time.

How strangely familiar it is to be going to sleep to the sound of the dawn chorous.

Thoughts during the winter in San Francisco

I feel underwater when I'm watching sealions
I feel like them - an airbreather
Unable to stay on land
Where I wouldn't have to wait
For each gasp of breath
Or worry if I'd make it back
To the surface in time.

Vampire Pumpkins

While I was in Europe, I learned that according to gypsy folklore nearly anything can become a vampire. Even inanimate objects are known to become vampiric under the proper conditions. The most common objects to turn into vampires are watermelons and pumpkins. The transformation takes place if the fruit is left out during a full moon after being exposed to some kind particularily negative energy. When the transformation has occured, the pumpkin will start to groan and roll around of it's own accord. Sometimes blood will also appear on the pumpkin's skin. As vampires, they attempt to do as much harm as they can, although there is very little they can do, since they are only gourds.

As a scientist, I naturally wanted to test this out. So, I bought a pumpkin, yelled at it, and then left it on the balcony during the first available full moon. I added candles and a wreath just for good measure.




Needless to say, I did not wake up to an ambulatory pumpkin. I later made the pumpkin into pie, and nothing particularily vampiric happened then, either. However, perhaps I will make another attempt on this coming full moon.

My neighbor, Crazy Betty

These are my neighbors; I can see their nest from my living room window. I have been keeping an eye on the nest since I moved in, and most of the time mom has been clamped tightly on top of the nest. This evening, however, I saw her out hunting with her mate, and I went to go see who she'd been sitting on. The nest is pretty high, so it's hard for me to see who's home, but there are at least two owletts in there. They seem pretty young to me, especially since in Minnesota and San Francisco the nests I had visited had branchers or even fully flighted chicks. I thought maybe crazy Betty had an exceptionally late clutch, since she must have have laid her eggs around early April, and in Minnesota Great Horned Owls often lay in early Febuary. Since moving in, I have found many owl nests, including the one in the Aspens I in the third picture here, and they are all at the same stage. I guess I am just a lot further north than I thought.

Since I only have a point and shoot, there aren't a lot of great photographic possibilities for me, but hopefully as the owletts grow up I will get a couple of good pictures as they start learning to fly.

Chaneques

My favorite Mexican monster is the chaneque. Chaneques are creatures of the forest that spend most of their existence as nothing more than a lonely voice. They are able to take on any form they choose, but on their own they have no memories. With no memories, they cannot think of what shape to take and are stuck without form until a human stumbles upon them accidently. When they do encounter somebody in the woods, they are able to look into that person’s mind and take the shape of something within that person’s head. Usually a chaneque will appear to a person as a friend or relative, and the encounter will initially seem like a chance meeting in the woods. However, chaneques do not like to be alone and shapeless. When they finally find somebody, they want to keep that person in the woods as long as possible. Although chaneques will not physically hurt people, they will attempt to lead travelers deeper into the forest until they are lost, and they are said to be exceedingly adept at this.

It is not uncommon for me to run into my Mexican neighbors in the middle of the woods carrying nothing, just sitting and smoking cigarettes and drinking from a two liter bottle of coke. Every time this happens, they seem to want to go swimming in the river or looking for armadillos or something. I have always had to turn down these offers down, because I am usually heading up to the blind. Perhaps these were not encounters of particularly eccentric neighbors, but of chaneques. Maybe it’s a good thing I am always busy, or else I might still be stuck in the mountainous forests of Veracruz.

This is chaneque country

The happy times

This photo was taken by a certain Bonnie Swift. This is the Marin Headlands. When I go to this place, I can't help but cry. I love it so much. It's been nearly three years. I hope I finally know my priorities.

Pajaro Reloj

Atiq

I am told that in traditional Inuit culture, a name and a soul are the same thing. This combined identity and spirit is called the atiq. When a person dies, their atiq will continue and they will be reincarnated into another body. Before a child is born, the child's paternal grandmother will have a dream of what atiq that child will have and who they will be. That child will be treated as the person they were and treated with the same respect. Nobody is raised with condescension, disrespect, or even reproaches. People learn to obey social mores not for fear of punishment, but by being taught that if they disrespect tradition they will put their atiq at risk. If they disobey the laws of the community, they may not be reincarnated into another life. Other discipline is not necessary.

Animals also have atiq that deserve similar reverence. When the meat of an animal is not shared or when the body of an animal is not treated with proper deference, that animal's atiq is put in danger. A lack of respect of that animal's home and habitat similarly can cause the loss of an animal's atiq. If the atiq of the animals start to disappear, then there will be fewer animals and food will become scarce. It is well known to the Inuit that if something happens to the fauna, something the people are doing is not right.

In present day, I suppose this system no longer really can work. There are too many people with unknown atiqs who don't know who they are. There are too few animal atiq left, and the logic of the system falls apart with so many influences from outside the culture. Still, I feel like before all the things forced themselves in from outside, these stories were totally and literally true in that part of the world.

Curious Mood (the trogon, not me)

For those of you who didn't get the memo, like me - this is a Gartered Trogon not a Violaceous Trogon. The more northerly Mexican population of this species complex had been split from the Violaceous Trogon recently.

When I took this photograph there had been four more male trogons perched sedately nearby. I find that when I come across male trogons, it is usually a small group. Most accounts I read report that this is a monogamous species forming strong pair bonds, but specifics of their mating behavior and their social behavior is pretty poorly known. ...I wonder if there is something going on here, or if it is just a coincidence that I tend to see trogons hanging around one another?

Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?

The first Ferrugineous of many

Eurasian Kestrel

The view from the tower

The view from the dungeon

This is how I feel

A couple quick painting and one more serious one.

Developmental Cues

Here are three pictures I took a long time ago living at my house. I think these might provide some clues as to how I became a wildlife biologist.

How I became concerned about campfire safety

About the time I turned eighteen, I got my very first job that involved neither coffee nor bagels. I had been hired to work for nearly nothing as a field biology intern with The Institute for Bird Populations. By some remarkable blessing of fate, I had been handed my dream job. My partner, Dayna, and I were going to spend the summer in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in search of the rare and elusive Sierra Nevada Great Gray Owl. Specifically, we were hoping to find owls living on the drier, rockier eastern slope of the mountains. That was me, back-country owl scholar.

It should be mentioned right now that Great Gray Owls almost certainly do not live on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas anymore. We knew that we were unlikely to find any owls from the outset of the project. No Great Gray Owls had been seen in that region for over thirty-five years, and wanting something to exist will not make it so. I didn’t mind not finding owls. I was happy to simply be exploring real mountains for the first time in my life, and in those mountains I was truly happy for the first time in my memory. It’s hard not to be when you are high above the rest of the world amid the blue skies in a wildflower covered alpine flat.

Still, it is difficult to explain to people that your job is to go out into the forest and look for owls. It is even more difficult to explain to people that your job is to look for owls, and after three months of searching, you have yet to find a single one. And it was almost impossible to explain this fact to the people I was living with at the Bridgeport Ranger District barracks: the Forest Service fire fighters.

Firefighters are a unique class of human beings. There is a certain type of impulsive, noble, suicidal idiot that chooses a career that involves walking directly the flame. There is a bit of Don Quixote in almost every firefighter I’ve been friends with, although they would like for you to believe it was really a bit of cowboy. As housemates, they bring a certain amount of chaos to any daily routine. During that spring of unprecedented precipitation, they spent the fireless days drunk, bored, and irritable. The often berated me and insisted that us owl girls never really did any work.

Despite their accusations, Dayna and I actually worked quite hard. We typically spent ten days at a time in the field, hiking through the wilderness to owl habitat and spending those nights looking for the hypothetical owls. Great Gray Owl habitat is wet mountain meadows, which means that after a full day of hiking in extreme heat over steep ridges, you spent your nights knee-deep in rapidly chilling water battling mosquitoes only to finally arrive to your tent cold, wet, and exhausted late the night. Making matters worse, you do not simply look for the owls, but you have to call for them. Great gray owls are so large, and their hoot is so deep that a full sized stereo system needs to be hauled into forest in-order to accomplish this. On top of extra weight, this also meant hours of sitting around in the dark listening to deafening recorded owl hoots and hoping that one day a real one will hoot back.

On the other hand, on days when the study areas were close, we didn’t bother to wake up until the sun warmed our tents and forced us out. We would slowly eat breakfast by the fire, maybe swim in the creeks full of docile cutthroat trout and melt water, watch sapsuckers feeding their loud and demanding young, read in the shade awhile, and then maybe after all of that we could pack up at a leisurely pace and move the mile or two to the next meadow.

On the days that we were really lucky, we would stay at Paiute Meadow, where an old cow-camp cabin still stood with the forest and the meadow very slowly sneaking back into it. There's something odd about having been out in the woods for days without seeing a single other person, yet finding yourself surrounded by four walls, but I loved the feeling of standing on the doorstep between nature and civilization drinking a mug of real coffee and looking out at the view. You could see range after range of ridges stacked up with the appropriately named castle peak and tower peaks sitting most prominently in not-too-far distance. I realized in those moments that there was nothing in the world a person needed that was not in that cabin. Even the cabin itself was a luxury.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the cabin was the poetic graffiti left behind from the previous visitors. The graffiti read things like "Long live the Paiute cuttroat," left by biologists and things like "we need women," and "wiskey's almost gone," by the partiers. I guess I can relate to both, but I prefer envisioning people just like me trying to restore the near-extinct Paiute cuttroat trout to it's native habitat in the mid seventies. I was sustained by idealism then, and everything was beautiful for it.

Perhaps this is why the firefighters accused me of never working. Much of my time on the job were spent exactly how I liked to spend my days off. Although, there was one important difference: my days off also included the firefighters. At that point in my life I could match them drink for drink and shot for shot, and that meant my days off were trouble. As the lone eighteen-year-old girl drinking along with bored, irritable firefighters, I found myself receiving a more attention that I was capable of handling.

Luckily, once first fire of season started, my problems were solved. It happened on the third of July during a rather strange Fourth of July Eve soiree. I had just arrived back from the field, dirty and tired as usual. The moment I stepped into the boy’s side of the barracks, I was instantly met with a larger than average shot glass full of Jack Daniels and the phrase “have a little guy.” The fire fighters were going to be in the Bridgeport, California annual Independence Day parade, the biggest annual event in town. Until then the boys were determined to celebrate to the fullest.

My friend Chris decided to put himself at the center of this event, and spent much of the evening enthusiastically pouring drinks with his one good hand. As long as I knew him, his right arm had to be held crossed against his chest in a sling. Before my arrival he was involved in a drunken four-wheeler accident that had left him sitting in pain for over six hours as he waited for somebody to sober up enough to drive him to the nearest hospital over two and a half hours away in Carson City, Nevada.

Although a lesson may have been learned from this, the incident did not seem to have put a damper on the joy he took in drinking. “Have a little guy,” became the chorus for Chris’s evening, who was now going around pushing shot glasses into everyone’s hands. “Have a little guy… hhhev a littel guay. Hv uh little gyy.” Eventually it came to a point where his speech is devoid of vowels as he drinks any shots turned down.

I liked Chris, maybe because he seemed too strange to exist. He had this tendency to make a hell of a lot of eye contact when he spoke to people, and he is always giving people this weird sideways look. It only got worse when he was drinking. I think it had something to do with the fact his eyes were two drastically different colors, and he wanted people to notice. It was disarming. He seemed to enjoy it. It creeped me out, but it certainly caught my attention.

As it got later and later, people became tempted to leave or sleep, but all attempts to escape failed. Chris has given up as the tender of the whisky bar and had taken to patrolling outside of the bunkhouse to prevent people from abandoning the party. Although we all lived in the same building, each of our rooms were accessed from the outside, and unreachable through Chris's barracade. As you exited the building he'd come upon you and demand "where are you going?" He then proceeded to talk at you - and this is a fellow that's very good at talking at you. Actually, what he does is yell. Not in an angry way, he just seems to prefer yelling to normal speaking, even when sober. The further you got from the house, the worse it became. The only reprieve was to give up and go back in to where the party was disjointedly happening.

Eventually I decide I really have no choice, I needed to sleep. Too many drinks and too many miles of hiking had taken place. Chris somehow knew I was going even before I made it to the door, however. He was blocking my exit and making a point I noticed his brown and blue eyes. “Don’t go. You’re always going. I mean. Jesus. Fuck.” Somehow without seeming to have made a single move, he picked up a wooden chair and threw it directly at me. The chair was unwieldy and his aim was poor, so I avoided getting hit, but a few inches from my left shoulder the chair smashed into fragments on the concrete wall. The he just looked at the broken piece of furniture and laughed, and for some reason I just accepted the action.

I suppose my priorities were very wrong, but my worry was that the pieces of broken chair were telling evidence, not that a man I was involved with had just thrown a chair at me. I was more concerned that the powers-that-be at the ranger station would know we were having another drunken event upon seeing broken chair shards, and we had been warned and I was the one underage one.

I eventually hit upon a solution and decide that I could kill a few birds with one stone by escaping out back and having a nice bon-fire to destroy the evidence. Broken furniture is one thing, but nobody would ever notice furniture that isn’t there. So, I go and gather news paper and kindling and start to enjoy myself by a nice crackling flame. The chair burns pretty well, although the upholstery does give off a disconcerting smell.

Eventually, Chris wanders up and joins me. He's still yelling a bit in his friendly sort of way, but his demeanor is changed. Mostly, he's trying to apologize in a way that does not directly admit any actions. He insists he’d never do anything that might hurt me, but clearly he already did. I accept his half appologies, and the fire gradually dies down into coals.

Things seem less manic finally, and I get up with the idea of finally, after hours of trying, going to sleep. Chris gets up too, with the idea of following me, but the alcohol pulls him back down and he falls directly into the fire as suddenly as te firewood was created. Between Jack Daniels and a broken collarbone he cannot pull himself out, and I struggle to help him. He is so much bigger than myself. In the perception of a panicked person, it took forever to finally get him free. Chris is finally standing on his feet again, wobbling, and his apologies start coming out again. “I deserved this. I am such a piece of shit… I…” and he stutters, and steps week-kneed to one side and falls again, right into the fire.

I pull him out quicker this time, but now I can barely think. Help. He needs help. Luckily, in a house full of firefighters, there is more than one trained EMTs. We wake up Taylor, the most responsible and well-trained of the group and start to explain what happened. Chris is already trying to create some alibi, but it doesn’t really matter what we are saying. Neither the truth nor the crazy lie fit into the story Taylor already has in his head. He gives me this look of stunned respect, and I suddenly see what he is thinking.

“You think I pushed Chris in the fire?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But…?”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“No!”

“No? Yes you did. I don’t believe you. But it’s fine.”

“Fine?”

Did I really seem like the sort of person who might have done such a thing? I started to ponder this as I drifted away from the events and finally went to sleep. Sleep could not have been much more than an hour, however, as we were woken up once again to the radio screaming. There was a fire, finally. There was finally something to do, but there wasn’t a long way to go. The fire was directly behind the house. My chair fire had gotten loose, and the fire fighters had to spend the rest of the morning battling it. In turn, I spent the rest of the morning worrying about the boy I burned and the forest fire I had started.

I guess the fire must not have been too bad, nor Chris too horribly hurt because that afternoon in town I saw him standing as planned with the other hung over fire fighters on the forest service float. He smiled and waved his bandaged arm under a professionally printed banner that read “I am concerned about camp-fire safety.”

My time in Bridgeport was a lot calmer after that. Nobody gave me trouble, and nobody ever accused me of not working. Most importantly, I am now concerned about campfire safety.