Showing posts with label Biology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Biology. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

The Birds of 2014

A little while ago, I mentioned that I had been listing all the birds I'd seen in one year for the first time ever.  Since I kept my list in the (reasonably good) Peterson Field Guide iPhone application, it's easy to post the final list as a series of screenshots.

And so here they are, every bird I saw in 2014, from the Song Sparrow to the Brant:



Wednesday, September 24, 2014

My Moderately-Sized Year

It was New Year's Day when it occurred to me, looking at my friend's bird feeder and the birds visiting it, that I'd never maintained a list of all the birds I've seen in one year.

And that, simply enough, is how I started what I came to half-jokingly refer to as my Moderately-Sized (as opposed to Big) Year.  I happened to have an App on my phone that allowed me to make a checklist of birds and I just started right there, over breakfast.  First bird of the year was a Song Sparrow.  I just recently hit bird number 151, an Eastern Wood-Peewee, so I feel like I ought to write something about all this.

First, here are my rules:

1) The bird must be listed in the Peterson Birds Pocket Edition iPhone App.

2) The bird must be alive. 

Corollary to Rule 2: This means captive birds are fair game. Somebody call the ABA police.

If I check off the name of a stuffed specimen, it best be an extinct/nearly extinct species (some of which are listed in the PBPE because why not?  If you're wondering, this hasn't come up yet.)

3) I must either see the bird or hear it. 

Corollary to Rule 3:  The "Red-Eyed Vireo Corollary".  I am allowed to check an unseen-but-heard bird off my list as long as I or a companion can I.D. the call with reasonable accuracy.

I picked a heck of a year to start doing this.  I've been traveling quite a lot, mostly for family events.  This has, as you may have noticed, kept me off the Internet but has kept me in nature.  The world is more alive when you pay especial attention to the birds.

Now, a few thoughts on the Peterson Birds Pocket Edition App: It's... okay.  At this point I'm using it as a checklist mostly.  It's convenient more than anything else, and is not at all a replacement for a good dead tree edition field guide, especially if you're a beginner.  Being able to listen to recordings of the birds is kind of nice, but the Audubon Nature Guide apps are far better in that respect, as they have a wider variety of sounds.

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Sketch of the Unspecific Length of Time! I'm going to go ahead and say that this Bald Eagle was a highlight.

6.17.14 - Eagle!!!

6.17.14 - Eagle!!!

Thursday, May 5, 2011

Let's Play Pokedex or Medieval Bestiary!

Yeah, It's going to take me a very long time to sort through all the Comicon stuff. Especially since the Evil Norway Maple in front of my house has been making up for time lost during the terrible winter we've had by spewing it's pollen everywhere. It feels like my entire respiratory system is coated with yellow and I've been coughing up a storm. Just took some famous name-brand medicine advertised with one of the most irritating ad campaigns ever devised and now I feel like I could never cough again ever. Or make typey fingers make sense of words in brain-thingy

So today, to save me some stress, we're going to play a game based off something I'd been wanting to write about for a while: the striking similarities between some of the crazier Pokedex entries and the descriptions of real animals in Medieval Bestiaries.

Consider: According to the in-game story, the Pokedex is the first collection of information about the Pokemon species in a new area. Bestiaries were apparently the first attempts at natural history field guides. And they both have some... *interesting* theories about the local animals' behavior and abilities.

So everybody get a sheet of paper and number it 1-10. Write down whether you think the following interesting facts about creatures (I will be replacing the terms "this animal" and "this Pokemon" with "this creature" to avoid dead giveaways) are from a Pokedex or a Bestiary. Then check the answers in Spoilertext (highlight to see it) and lie back with a strong drink and reflect on just how far the study of biology has come.

1) These creatures come from trees that grow over water. The young hang from their beaks from the trees. When they are mature, they fall from the trees and transform into birds.

2) This creature sleeps while cleverly balancing itself on one foot. As soon as it spots others of its kind, it congregates with them and then begins crying noisily in unison.

3) The mother nourishes her young with her own blood. After three days of mourning over her dead young, the mother pierces her side and lets her blood fall on their dead bodies to revive them.

4) This creature pines for the mother it will never see again. Seeing a likeness of its mother in the full moon, it cries. The stains on its face are from it's tears.

5) This creature arose from the spirits of people interred in graves in past ages. Each retains memories of its former life as a human.

6) To rejuvenate itself, it flies up to the sun, which burns off its old feathers and eyes. It tears off its old beak and claws with a stone. It then plunges three times into water, and its body is entirely restored.

7) The fierce nature of this creature makes it so hot that its blood can dissolve diamonds.

8) This creature senses coming disasters and appears before people only to warn them of impending danger. Mistaken as a bringer of doom, it fled high into the mountains. Its life span is over a hundred years.

9) This creature is always hermaphroditic, and must therefore never be eaten. They live near tombs and eat the dead bodies they find there. These creatures will circle a house at night, calling out words with the voice of a human. Anyone who goes out to investigate is eaten.

10) Its beautiful mane is made up of hair in every color and at the tip of its tail is a tuft of magical fur. If captured, the creature bites off the tuft so that nobody can get it. It cannot turn its neck, so if it wants to look behind itself it must spin its whole body around. It is said that if this creature looks at you before you see it, you won't be able to speak.

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An Swears!

Before I give the answers, I'd like to thank the Medieval Bestiary website and the Psypokes Pokedex. They were both invaluable in jogging my pollen-addled memory.

1) Bestiary entry for the Barnacle Goose. I'm honestly surprised there isn't a Grass/Flying type based off this legend yet. This was so widely taken for granted that it was considered perfectly okay to eat goose during Lent. After all, its really a plant, right?

2) Pokedex entry for Baltoy. Funny how one of the weirdest Pokemon has a fairly mundane entry.

3) Bestiary entry for the African Pelican. This is surprisingly prevalent in folklore of the time and helps explain why you may see stained glass windows of pelicans feeding their own blood to their young in churches. And how did the pelican's babies die? Well, sometimes they are killed be a hunter or another animal, and sometimes the mother pelican herself accidentally kills them. Thankfully, they always come back to life at the end of the story, but even so, I think the mother pelican needs to go have a string drink with Cubone. Speaking of...

4) Pokedex entry for Cubone! And this was absolutely the saddest Pokedex entry ever until...

5) The Pokedex entry for Yamask! Because it would have been too much of a giveaway, I left out the part where Yamask carries around a mask to remind itself of what it looked like as a human. "Sometimes," says the Pokedex, "they look at the mask and cry." Ye gods. The sheer existential horror of Yamask's situation is ridiculous. It changes
everything about Ghost-types. These past two entries are the main reasons why I am hoping for goodness sake that the Pokedex is based entirely on folklore.

6) Bestiary entry for the Golden Eagle. Now you know where that ridiculous Powerpoint thing your aunt sent you came from. (The entry for the "Eagle Rebirth" over at Snopes is priceless.)

7) Bestiary entry for the "He-Goat". Honestly, if an animal with a body temperature that is hot enough to melt diamonds isn't right out of the Pokedex, I don't know what is.

8) Pokedex entry for Absol. The disdain for an animal based upon serious misconceptions about it reminded me a great deal of the next bestiary entry.

9) Bestiary entry for the Hyena. For my money, this is the craziest entry in the whole book.

10) Bestiary entry for the Ethiopian Wolf. To which one can only say, "what?"

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On a lighter note, a post over at SomethingAwful brought this very very very weird and undeniably awesome piece of animation to my attention. I can't even imagine how long it must have taken to do all this. I'm linking it because the animation style is freaky enough to scare the young 'uns. Also, it is in Russian, so you may want to activate subtitles... though you really won't need them.

As one comment says, "I feel like I was shown everything. Ever. All at once."
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Art of the Day!

Not much to see here. Just a Swampert.

4.23.11 - I Heard You Like...

Friday, May 22, 2009

AnimeBoston is this weekend!

More information at their website.

Alternatively, if you're the kind of reader who misses the Feederwatch Friday posts, and you can get WAAAAAAY up to Lubec, Maine, you may enjoy the big Downeast Birding Festival. It also runs throughout Memorial Day weekend.

Of course, if you enjoy birds and animation (if you're me, in other words), you'll want to try and attend both events. Unfortunately, I will not be able to go, but there is an excellent reason for this...

5.19.09 - "Arnolds At Sea" Fish Guy

Monday, February 16, 2009

Great Backyard Bird Count 2009 Live Blog!

Why not? This post will update periodically (ie, whenever I remember) throughout Sunday and Monday, the rest of the GBBC weekend. It's not too late to start participating. Head to their website, print out a data sheet, and keep your eyes open throughout the day for our flight-capable theropod overlords friends.

Sunday
8:45 AM - Woke up to the usual 15-or-so House Sparrows in the backyard (I already saw 25-or-so on Friday) and a flock of about seven Crows (the most I've seen so far together is three). A quick glance at the stats for my state suggests that there's only one other person in my city doing this. I wonder how many people I know check their email on Sunday?
Martha's Vineyard!!!🙀

10:27 AM - Still nothing but sparrows and the occasional single gull gliding overhead. I do want to note something cute the sparrows did earlier. Five of them hopped over to the one remaining six-inch-long patch of snow and started pecking at it. I've seen birds "drink" snow before, but it's especially hilarious to me that these sparrows weren't the least bit interested in the snow when it was a foot and a half deep.
Did a little exploring in the GBBC's data. Florida is trippy.

2:08 PM - Just got back from a nice little drive around the city, up and down the shore. I can sum it up in one hastily MS-Painted word:



I saw about 21 Common Eiders rafting off of Nut Island (which is actually a peninsula). There was also a flock of about fifty Starlings, another raft of about fifteen each of Mallards and Black Ducks, flocks of another fifteen each of the three different species of seagull that hang out on Wollaston Beach (Great Blackback, Ringbill, and Herring), seven Pigeons, two Mourning Doves, ten Crows, and a Red-Tailed Hawk.
Uh-oh, why is this song in my head again? I won't become one of them!!!
3:30 PM - Well, it's starting to get dark out. I may fill the feeder and call it a day. The White-Breasted Nuthatch couple visited the suet feeder a few minutes ago. Fine time for my camera to run out of batteries.
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Monday
11:01 AM - Looks like the GBBC is going to end with a wimper for me: nothing so far this morning but the usual 25-50 House Sparrows.
What gets me is that I haven't seen a Chickadee this weekend. At all.
Now, these are older pictures, but on the fairly reasonable assumption that the rest of the season will probably be something like this weekend, weather-wise, I changed the feeder setup from this:
New feeder setup (as of January 7)
To this:
10.28 Snow and Sparrows
(Actual backyard may not currently be as pretty as it is in the above pictures. There's not much I can do about that until spring.)

2:30 PM - Continuing to see nothing but sparrows. Huh.

5:30 PM - Dusk. The female Cardinal visited and a family of Crows flew overhead but I'd already seen them earlier, so all I can do is add individuals. So all in all, the last day of the GBBC for me was a bit of a wash.
Overall, however, the weekend was wonderful. Here's my final tally:

25 Brants
11 Black Ducks
11 Mallards
21 Common Eiders
6 Buffleheads
2 Hooded Mergansers
1 Red-Tailed Hawk
15 Ring-Billed Gulls
29 Herring Gulls
9 Greater Black-Backed Gulls
7 Pigeons
2 Mourning Doves
1 Downy Woodpecker
1 Blue Jay
7 Crows
2 White-Breasted Nuthatches
1 Robin
1 Mockingbird
25 Starlings
2 Song Sparrows
2 Cardinals
50-something House Sparrows

You can see the total stats for Massachusetts birds here.
Thanks to all who participated. I leave you with this gallery of incredibly strange stuff Michael Jackson is auctioning off. I would bother getting my driver's license if somebody bought me item 6/7.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

No more farting around.

It's time to start reading this:



(That's one of those little Audubon stuffed birds that sings, and there is a hilarious story behind him that I may tell later. For now, he's just providing scale.)

I chanced to find Gregory S. Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World at my beloved local library. They have two copies, which is impressive as the book is, tragically, out of print. Tragically because this is probably the one animal anatomy book I use the most often.

My copy (used book stores are wonderful) is dog-eared, highlighted, bookmarked; in short, much loved. The illustrations are Phenominal (a small sampling can be found in this fansite), and there are loads and loads of skeletal diagrams, musculature studies, and other anatomical diagrams. If you find a copy, even if you for whatever reason never want to draw a single theropod in your life (I do not understand you), buy it.

Really, if more animators/illustrators/ect. would put away their "Jurassic Park" DVDs and thumb through this book once in a while, I'd be a much happier person. (Not coincidentally, I hit the "Koal" episode of "Teen Titans" last night. You'll know the Wall-Banger scene when you see it. Ugh.)

Anyway, you'll understand why I was excited when I found out about Dinosaurs of the Air. Naturally, I assumed that this was either an update or a follow-up to Predatory Dinosaurs. The asking price on Amazon should have deterred me, but it didn't, and I snapped it up without having any idea what I was in for...

It's a textbook.😱

Nonetheless, I'm going to read it. Because I'm stupid like that.

Edit: Well, it didn't take long for that plan to get derailed:
Yay for interlibrary loans!