Raven 1, Laura 0

One of the problems with spending so much of my life trying to educate the world about birds is that it sort of sets me up to be a know-it-all. And it's ever so easy for birds to prove how little I really know.

I have a lot of friends on Salon Magazine's Table Talk forum, and when anyone there has a bird question, it makes its way to me. Right after answering a spate of bird ID questions, I got two questions of more practical importance, and in both cases my advice sort of backfired. One woman was seeing a beautiful budgie at her feeder. The bird wasn't associating with the feral population of New York budgies, and was pure white, so it was almost definitely an escaped pet. I suggested that she get a cage and leave it open in the yard to see if the budgie, like Ogden Nash's Custard the Dragon, was just seeking a nice safe cage. So she went out and bought a cage, and voila! The budgie disappeared altogether. I hope that if it needs a home, it comes back.

Then, another friend was having problems with a raven picking at the stuff between her roof rack and the roof of her minivan. I suggested hanging some helium balloons up there. In my experience rehabbing, crows and jays were terrified of helium balloons, and I figured it was because nothing in nature acts the way helium-filled objects do, "falling up." So she got some nice shiny balloons and put them on her car. And here's what happened:

I found some helium balloons Sunday, in several colors. This morning, as soon as I got to work, I tied them to the roof rack of my minivan, one at each corner.

No raven for about an hour. Then he landed on the ground next to the van and walked around it a couple of times, all the while eyeing the balloons.

And then he flitted up to the rack, and walked around on top, cocking his head at the balloons. He inspected them for quite a while, pulling at the strings, tentatively pecking at the balloons.

He's already deflated the blue one - scared him when it popped and he flew off, but I think he figured out pretty quick why it popped, cuz he came right back and popped the yellow one.

The red one and the purple one survive. He appears to like purple, cuz that's the one he's admiring himself in now.

I guess he hasn't heard the story about balloons falling up confusing ravens, cuz it hasn't bothered this wiseguy a bit.

I wish she could have gotten video!! But I guess it's time to take my sign in, huh?

And about that looking glass....

Windows cause such a horrifying number of bird deaths a year that it boggles my mind. I got to spend some time with Dr. Daniel Klem three years ago. He's the Muhlenberg College Professor who has spent much of his career systematically studying bird mortality at windows, and I was trying to make 101 Ways to Help Birds as solid as possible as I amassed information about preventing window kills.

I'm working on a project right now that touches on window mortality, and so I'm getting some of my pages regarding the book back up on my website, starting with #6: Make your windows safer for birds. My original hope was that the book would be fully illustrated with color photos, and this section in particular would have been more valuable with photos illustrating some window treatments.

Window at the EPA lab in Duluth. This window used to kill bazillions of birds during migration along the North Shore, but now the kill has been reduced to just about zero. This netting was purchased by employees, and is held in place by bricks on the roof.

Windows at Quarry Hill Nature Center were designed to angle downward. Reflecting ground instead of sky and trees, they've reduced bird strikes significantly.

Window at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has exterior netting to protect birds, and dramatically reduced kills.

Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska. These exterior screens were designed by what is now the Bird Screen Company.

Above and below--a zoo's windows now covered with CollidEscape. This exterior film (the kind used to put advertising on bus windows) is expensive but extremely effective. Sales benefit the Fatal Light Awareness Program.

These photos and more are on my website, on the 101 Ways to Help Birds #6: Make your windows safer for birds. I'd been trying to keep birderblog filled with useful links and photos, and in the coming weeks will be getting more of that information back up on my own website.

Through the Looking Glasses

Maple branch tips scrape the window glass
Branches alive with warblers
Vivid angel birds
Resurrected canaries who gave their lives in mines
Saving us from our own poisons.

Right eye against my spotting scope, left tearing in the wind
Bufflehead drake’s head up, down, jerking back,
Scooting forward, red feet pattering.
Singin’ and dancin’ in the rain. Please! Please! Please!
Trapped in the moment.
Female watches an approaching eagle.
Gazes far beyond me to eggs, ducklings.
Trapped in tomorrows.

Aspen cavity
Black emptiness suddenly fills with a little face.
Hot yellow eyes meet the cold hard stare of binoculars
And retreat.


Scarlet Tanager—click! Gotcha!
An image on a glass screen, anyway.


Great blue heron
So close I can hear it breathe.
Concentrating on movement below the surface,
It doesn’t see me.
Too close to focus with binoculars
Unless I step back.
Yet too far to fathom.

Bad news from coast to coast

You know that myth about ostriches, that they hide their heads in the sand so they don't need to face reality? On days like this, I wish I were a mythical ostrich rather than a conscious person. First I read about algae killing seabirds, sea lions and dolphins on the California Coast. Then I find out that this year Wood Storks had ZERO nesting in Corkscrew Swamp.

We need to do something before it's too late.

Nice day for a Warbler Walk

It was cold this morning, but there was no wind on Park Point, providing some lovely birding conditions. And, thanks to my poor promotional skills, few people know about the warbler walks so we had a nice, small group of just 6. We didn't have any warblers, but had some really lovely sightings.

Canada Goose
American Wigeon
Mallard
Blue-winged Teal
Northern Shoveler
Canvasback
Redhead
Ring-necked Duck
Greater Scaup
Lesser Scaup
Bufflehead
Common Goldeneye
Red-breasted Merganser
Common Loon
Pied-billed Grebe
Horned Grebe
Double-crested Cormorant
Bald Eagle
American Kestrel
American Coot
Killdeer
Ring-billed Gull
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Northern Flicker
American Crow
Common Raven
Black-capped Chickadee
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Brown Creeper
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
European Starling
Song Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
Brown-headed Cowbird
House Sparrow

Lovely break in Port Wing

I drove out to Port Wing yesterday for my annual Woodcock Walk with Photon. We stopped at the Roy Johnson Wetland en route. Spring is here!

No, the loon is not holding hands with the swallow.

By the time we got to Port Wing, my eyes were really tired, and then I fell asleep watching TV with my mother-in-law. When I woke up, Photon and I headed down the driveway, but for the first time ever on a nice, fairly calm April evening, we had zero woodcock. There were Spring Peepers, Chorus Frogs, and Wood Frogs calling, which is always lovely, but it seemed weird to not pick out a single woodcock where usually I have at least three or four. I can hear four Ruffed Grouse within a half mile or so of her house--that's good news, at least.

This morning, I headed out for a bit of birding at the Port Wing sewage ponds before I headed back. A pair of Bald Eagles is apparently nesting somewhere near--they flew over my mother-in-law and me, and then (I think it was the same pair) were perched in a big dead tree at the end of Kinney Valley Road, but they took off before I could snap a photo. It was cold--there was ice on the stream that crosses Kinney Valley Road--but the sun felt lovely and something about Tree Swallows chittering fills me with joy and restores my soul.

First warbler walk!

Our intrepid group!


This handsome Northern Flicker let me photograph him through my spotting scope.

Our Spring Warbler Walks got off to a rousing start today. My very first spring of birding, in 1975, I was out every day searching on my own, and amassed a season list of 40 species--we beat that in just over 3 hours today! I was having trouble with my eyes--that will probably give me problems till this stupid Bell's palsy goes away, bAnd we started a new tradition--on Tuesday mornings we're going to stop at the Willard Munger Inn for a little continental breakfast after our jaunt. Of course some people have to leave early, but this gave us a nice chance to sit down to some coffee, Belgium waffles, and conversation.

Distant Common Mergansers. The male (left) is scratching his face with his big red foot.
This is at least the third year that this goose has nested on this beaver den.
This Pied-billed Grebe stayed too far for great pictures, but it was a cute little guy.
Two Killdeer were hanging out with us.
Okalee!
Afterward we had brunch at the Willard Munger Inn

Here's our list of 42 species for the morning:

Canada Goose
American Wigeon
Mallard
Blue-winged Teal
Northern Shoveler
Green-winged Teal
Ring-necked Duck
Lesser Scaup
Bufflehead
Common Goldeneye
Hooded Merganser
Common Merganser
Common Loon
Pied-billed Grebe
Killdeer
Greater Yellowlegs
Ring-billed Gull
Herring Gull
Rock Pigeon
Belted Kingfisher
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
American Crow
Common Raven
Black-capped Chickadee
White-breasted Nuthatch
Brown Creeper
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
European Starling
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Northern Cardinal
Red-winged Blackbird
Common Grackle
Brown-headed Cowbird
House Finch
American Goldfinch

Duluth Warbler Walks start tomorrow!

American Redstart -- Western Waterfront Trail 2006 Warbler Walk

Tomorrow's the day! Our twice-weekly warbler walks are starting! Every Tuesday from now through May 29 we'll be covering the Western Waterfront Trail in west Duluth, meeting in the parking lot past the Tappakeg Bar (across from the zoo on Grand Avenue), at 6:30 am. Some people arrive later than others, and some people have to leave early--the whole thing is very informal and fun. I heard a Yellow-rump down my block today, so things look good for spotting something good tomorrow!

Every Thursday from now through May 31 we'll be covering Park Point, meeting at 6:30 at the huge parking lot by the recreation building and soccer fields.

I'm going to be spending a couple of weeks out of town starting after our May 5 trip, so for two weeks, the trips will be led by Larry Kraemer.

These trips, the main little service I provide for Duluth Audubon Society, are free and open to everyone. I usually go out whether it's raining lightly or threatening, but not if it's pouring. But please don't call me to find out if a trip is taking place. My husband and son don't appreciate the phone ringing at that hour of the morning!

Yellow-rumped Warbler -- Park Point, 2006 Warbler Walk

Sam Cook's column yesterday

Yesterday, Sam Cook's column in the Duluth News-Tribune was about how "two people who pay close attention to matters of the Earth" viewed progress on the environment. The two people he selected were geologist John Green and me. Read the article here.

Max the Maggot back online

I just added The Curious Adventures of Max the Maggot to my Story Index. As you may or may not recall, Max is a spunky but polite little maggot who saves the life of Vanessa Redtail after she has an unfortunate encounter with a weasel, and learns about life from peeking out behind the neck feathers of a Red-tailed Hawk. The story follows his life from egg to adult. Many children find this scene particularly appealing:

Now where to? Max sniffed the air. Something smelled wonderful! He headed off toward the captivating smell. A moose! A big, dead, luscious, putrescent moose! With a bazillion flies just like him all gathered, feasting and buzzing and having a jolly time.

If the flower fits the bill...

Today's LiveScience has a cool story about flowers evolving to fit bird and bat "snouts." Check it out!

I've been lucky enough to see some pretty cool hummingbird bills:

Sword-billed Hummingbird (Ecuador, 2006)
Green-breasted Mango (Costa Rica, 2002)

Broad-billed Hummingbird (Arkansas, 2006)
Green Thorntail (Costa Rica, 2007)

Volcano Hummingbird (Costa Rica 2007)
Gray-tailed Mountain Gem (Costa Rica, 2007)
Cinnamon Hummingbird (Guatemala, 2007)

Earth Day 2007

Today's For the Birds script:

This year’s Earth Day marks something of a sea change from recent years—so many people are suddenly fired up about the issue of climate change, many ignited by the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, that we seem to be having the kind of widespread and serious discussions about the quality of the earth’s environment that we had back in 1970, the year of the original Earth Day.

I was a freshman in college then, and played a minute role in the planning of the University of Illinois’s first Earth Day celebration. Working with the idealists who got the ball rolling awakened my own environmental awareness and sparked my own idealism.

Portrait of the artist as a young idealist (1969) (Well, it's my prom photo from high school. But I don't have a single photo of myself from my entire freshman or sophomore years in college, so it will have to do.)

And that was an excellent time for idealists—there were both plenty of clear and obvious dangers associated with the environment AND plenty of honest, well-informed, articulate and passionate people willing to speak out about them. Rivers such as the Cuyahoga in Ohio were literally catching fire. Soapsuds floated up from the little creek in my neighborhood in a Chicago suburb from the heavy phosphate load from detergents. Within hours after any snowfall, a black sooty crust coated snow piles in cities and suburbs both. Peregrine Falcons had been obliterated from the entire continent east of the Rocky Mountains. Bald Eagles and Osprey were no longer successfully breeding and so rapidly disappearing. Even without 24-7 news and the Internet, there was plenty of time on the nightly news and plenty of space in newspapers and magazines for these disturbing stories to be covered. And back then, balanced reporting meant that reporters tried to find out the actual truth rather than give both sides of every argument equal time and space and credibility. In the case of pesticides, there were enormous pressures by the chemical industry to force such corporate magazines as Time and Readers Digest to ridicule and dismiss Rachel Carson and her work, but the vast numbers of objective scientists whose research backed up Carson’s words were still able to speak out and be heard above the financial interests of the time.

By 1970, much of the debate was pretty much over, and all that was left was to get legislation hammered out that would actually solve some of the problems. We were in the middle of a conservative Republican administration, yet the national consensus was so huge that environmental issues were truly non-partisan. After all, everyone, regardless of party affiliation or political beliefs, needs clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. So even with the Vietnam War raging and other pressing national and international issues in the Watergate era, Congress passed and the Nixon Administration signed into law the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, established the Environmental Protection Agency, banned DDT in the United States, lowered the speed limit, established fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, and required automakers to start manufacturing cars that drove on unleaded gasoline.

These laws were extremely effective, making huge changes within years and even, in some cases, months. And so naturally there was a collective sigh of relief. We’d had our national house-cleaning and were ready to kick up our feet and take a break.

But even the tidiest house gets messy if you don’t keep up with it. We started producing new pesticides. Congress provided a loophole so that SUVs and minivans could be defined as light trucks and thus didn’t need to comply with the same emission or gas consumption guidelines as passenger vehicles. And by the 1980s, we were simply no longer enforcing the environmental laws with nearly the same vigor as we’d done in the 70s, even in some cases watering down regulations. We’re still better off than before 1970 in many ways, but we’re again losing ground every day.

But on this Earth Day, 2007, I’m hopeful for a repeat of 1970. It will take hard work and sacrifice to change things. But the combination of the increasingly obvious deterioration of the environment right now along with honest, well-informed, passionate, articulate spokespeople speaking out for our planet may very well precipitate a new national focus on protecting this planet that every one of its inhabitants, human and animal, depends upon, from our first to our last breath.

Listen to the program here.

Birding with Bell's Palsy

Even though I like to think I'm no longer vain about my appearance, I'm not emotionally prepared to post photos of myself with Bell's palsy. It's interesting karma that I'd develop a Dick Cheney sneer when I'm trying to smile--I've said enough nasty things about him over the years that it's funny that my mouth suddenly looks like his. Funny, but singularly non-photogenic.

I still can't whistle, which has been very frustrating--I didn't realize how very much I use whistling to call Photon and communicate with my neighborhood birds. My left eye can't blink easily, and doesn't close quite all the way so needs to be taped down when I'm sleeping, and my vision is starting to be rather blurry--not a pleasant development during spring migration, but when WOULD blurry vision be a pleasant development?

We humans use our faces for a lot of communication. Once when I was a licensed rehabber I cared for an Evening Grosbeak who had head injuries from hitting a window. Apparently she suffered some nerve damage to the skin muscles on half her head. Songbirds don't use facial expression for communication, but they do raise and lower their facial feathers in part for the same purpose. This poor bird's feathers were loose and raised on one side, and she couldn't control them. Blue Jays and some other crested birds raise and lower their crests to show how territorial or non-aggressive they are. Watch a flock of jays at a feeder or bird bath--their crests will all be plastered down unless a stranger or potential predator shows up. Once I was speaking in Wisconsin with my education Blue Jay Sneakers when another speaker showed up with an education Great Horned Owl. Sneakers took one look at it and up her crest went! But I went on speaking, and when she looked at me, down it went again. She glanced at the owl again, and up the crest went! Back to me, and down went the crest. Up-down-up-down-up-down! It was one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

So avian or human, we're supposed to have body language to show others what's going on inside our heads. But with this silly Bell's palsy, I'm not doing that so well right now. My case is milder than many--my face isn't drooping for one thing--so I haven't freaked out anyone so far, despite the disconcerting Dick Cheney smile. Whatever else my expression may say to you, just remember I promise not to shoot you in the face.

From the archives: Bird Tapeworms

I'm trying to locate some old "birderblog" posts about my cat, "Cat," which a couple of people have asked me to repost. So far no luck finding them, but I did come across this old post which I thought was worth reposting:

Back when I was rehabbing and studying nighthawks, several of my birds had tapeworms. I could pick out the perfectly rectangular, pearly cestode fragments in the droppings, and naturally I made a pair of earrings out of them, though since I was no longer teaching junior high science, I didn't have too many opportunities to wear them. I sent one tapeworm in a little vial of formalin solution to humor columnist Dave Barry, who put it in his Holiday Gift Guide for 1994. I hope I won't get in trouble for violating copyright, but this isn't on the net elsewhere that I can see, so I'll quote it here:

Bird Tapeworm

This is the perfect gift for the person--such as your immediate supervisor--to whom you would really like to give an intestinal parasite.

This is an actual tapeworm. It came from a bird, and it was sent in for reasons that we still do not totally comprehend by Laura Erickson, who wrote a book entitled For the Birds: An Uncommon Guide (published by Pfeifer-Hamilton). This book contains a lot of amazing information about birds, including the fact that they get tapeworms. In fact, according to Erickson's book, a single duck can contain as many as 1,600 tapeworms, which explains why ducks always seem so cranky.

Erickson told us that the tapeworm she sent us came from a nighthawk named Bullwinkle. She didn't tell us the tapeworm's name, so we've been calling it Roger. Roger is only about the size of a grain of rice, but he has a lot of personality considering that he's dead and floating around in some kind of chemical solution. We talk to him a lot about things that are on our mind.

"Roger," we say, "can you believe some guy wants $100 million a year just to play basketball?"

Roger doesn't say much--he's not a big sports fan--but he's a good listener, which is more than you can say for a lot of people. Plus you can put Roger in your pocket and carry him anywhere, which means that not only do you always have company, but you also have protection against assault by violent criminals. ("Get back! I have a tapeworm!")

Unfortunately, nighthawk tapeworms are not available in stores. If you want one for yourself or that special someone on your holiday gift list, you'll have to use the technique that Erickson used to obtain Roger: "You sit around and wait for the nighthawk to go to the bathroom."

You will do this if you really care.

Please don't copy/paste this and send it to people you think want to read about intestinal parasites because I already feel bad ripping it off from Dave Barry, who after all wrote it and deserves full credit. (Well, just send them the URL for this post--that way I'm the one who accepts full blame for ripping off his writing.) I hope he won't get mad that I've quoted it here, but his accepting the tapeworm in the first place, naming it Roger, and then writing about it is one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me.

The only thing that could possibly happen that would be cooler would be if some parasitologist one day were to name a cestode that infects nighthawks after me. Gary Duke, my advisor on my doomed Ph.D. project, and I tried to identify the tapeworms infecting my nighthawks, and I sent him some that he was going to get analyzed, but unbeknownst to either of us, he was already starting to suffer from early-onset Alzheimer's and I don't know what happened to the samples. The only tapeworms infecting Common Nighthawks that I could find in the literature were Hydropsalis climacocereus and Metadilepis caprimulgorum, though I found records of others in other nightjars. Wouldn't it be lovely to one day read in the literature about Hyropsalis ericksonius or, even better, Metadilepis laurai?

This is the postcard that started the whole thing. It was his endorsement of my first book.

This is the postcard he sent when the tapeworm arrived.
This is the endorsement he sent for Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids.

These postcards represent 30% of my Dave Barry Postcard Collection,but 100% of The Tapeworm Collection.

Air or water quality--how to choose?

Here's a story from today's New York Times, about the hydroelectric dams in Oregon. They've damaged rivers badly, but now are being defended as "green" energy.

Climate Change Adds Twist to Debate Over Dams

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Published: April 23, 2007

KLAMATH FALLS, Ore., April 19 — The power company that owns four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River says the dams provide a crucial source of so-called clean energy at a time when carbon emissions have become one of the world’s foremost environmental concerns.

But the American Indians, fishermen and environmentalists who want the dams removed point to what has happened since the first one was built nearly 90 years ago: endangered salmon have been blocked from migrating, Indian livelihoods have been threatened, and, more recently, the commercial fishing industry off the Oregon and California coasts has been devastated. They say the dams are anything but clean. They say the river is a mess.

“Should we have to sacrifice water quality for air quality?” said Craig Tucker, who is coordinating efforts by the Karuk tribe of Northern California to take down the dams. “Should Indians and family fisherman be the ones who have to sacrifice to address this problem?”

Whether the power company, PacifiCorp, wants to keep the dams because they improve air quality or simply because they are inexpensive to operate is not clear. But emphasizing an environmental argument that touches on climate change has added a new wrinkle to the longstanding debate over dam removal in the Pacific Northwest. In a region where plenty of residents measured their “carbon footprints” long before green became the new black, PacifiCorp is suggesting that righting one environmental wrong could lead to another, one that could affect people more than fish.

Read the whole article.

In 101 Ways to Help Birds, I tried to make some sense of our energy dilemma by discussing the impact on birds of every way we produce energy and how we distribute energy. The ONE way we produce electricity that doesn't harm birds at all as far as I can tell is solar--which is of course the one way that individuals could become fully or at least much more independent of energy companies, so is the one technology that I'm seeing the least discussion of. No matter where or how our energy is produced, it's CRITICAL--for climate, for birds, and for ourselves and our children's futures--that we conserve energy.

Speaking of which, on the drive home from Wisconsin Friday, I took my time and had nice tailwinds, and between Rhinelander and Ashland got some pretty nice gas mileage in my Prius.

Yep--that's 61.3 mpg going 126 miles! Of course, that wasn't just the tail winds and my speed (I was going 52 mph except when cars were approaching--then I'd speed up to 55 till they passed). There was also a nice gentle downhill stretch as I approached the lake. But the mileage for the entire 236-mile journey was 58.8, which was still pretty darned good. When we drive at the slowest speed that is safe, courteous, and convenient, we save energy, money, and even wildlife, which is much easier to avoid at slower speeds. If a great many people got into the habit of driving at the slowest speed that was safe, courteous, and convenient, we'd save vast resources of energy which would be an important step in limiting climate change and lowering our dependence on foreign oil without adding to the habitat loss and pesticide and fertilizer contamination associated with massive corn production for ethanol. And we'd also lower our subsidies for crows and other scavengers by reducing the free calories on roadsides. Which, by the way, would also be good for our own health, since those dead deer rotting away on roadsides don't just disappear, and many of the bacteria involved in putrescence are dangerous for us. Avian and mammalian scavengers carry loads of bacteria from carcasses to parts unknown. And houseflies and other insects carry them right into our kitchens, too.

Reducing our driving speed really and truly has a huge array of advantages for us and for the natural world. Many people don't want "Big Brother" to regulate us. That's fine with me, but then it's high time we started regulating ourselves.

Photon has an adventure

Photon and I headed out to Rhinelander on Thursday, to help pitch for WXPR. We always have a great time at the station--it's an absolutely wonderful community station, completely worth a 9-hour round trip drive to help support. This time I actually bought a membership, too--at the $75 level I got the coolest imaginable premium--Beethoven's Nine Symphonies, by Josef Krips and the London Symphony Orchestra!!!! This is the exact same version Russ got back in 1969 or so, as one of those introductory offers to join a big record club. So it's the one I memorized, learning every movement's every note. I must have listened to each record dozens of times, and to the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies each at least a hundred times. And now I can hear them again! First thing I did when I got home was install them on my iPod, and I've already listened to my Big Three twice each.

But when I was in the studio Thursday afternoon, since it was pretty warm in Rhinelander, someone propped the outside door open without realizing Photon was there, and she decided to take a little walk. I came out and she was nowhere to be found! So Mick Fiocchi and I headed out to look for her. I turned toward a little patch of woods near the station--that's the kind of place she loves to check out. I tried to whistle, but this damnable Bell's palsy makes that impossible. She wasn't in the woods across the street, so then I walked behind the building where I saw something that looked like her and started calling. That's when a sweet couple called me over. Photon had apparently seen their little dog through their apartment's patio door, and knocked on the door! They found it funny that a cute, friendly little dog was paying a visit, and when they saw her dog tags called the phone number. Russ answered, of course not having a clue what was happening, and so when they told him they'd found his dog, Russ said, "But she's in Wisconsin." To which they of course responded that they were in Wisconsin, and told him where they were. So he called the station to tell them Photon had been found, but meanwhile I'd found her myself. So then I had to call him to tell him the prodigal puppy had returned.

Photon is always fun at the station--she greets people, does her tricks ("Road kill!" "Not happy road kill, tragic road kill!" "Oh, no! Mommy's got a gun--BANG!" "Wave bye-bye!" "Dance!"), and when she's not off having adventures, lays down quietly in the studio with me. But for Photon, Dog of the Northwoods, it's not exciting being stuck indoors, even at a lovely station like WXPR. So I promised her we'd have "such larks, Pip!" as soon as we were done.

She got to play with Mick and Karen Fiocci's excellent Golden Retriever Gus that night, and next morning we headed back to the station for a little reception. And after that, it was time for REAL fun. We stopped at the Powell Marsh where she got to go for a little swim:


I saw the most peculiar thing there--what looks like a "mixed marriage" between a Trumpeter Swan and a Canada Goose. They were pretty far out, so I didn't get any good photos, but they were sleeping and then preening right next to one another.
Of course, Photon paid them no mind. We saw Sandhill Cranes, Ring-necked Ducks, Green-winged Teal, Northern Shovelers, and a few other birds, heard a few Spring Peepers and Wood Frogs, and lots of Chorus Frogs. It was a lovely little respite from real life. The cranes seemed totally spooked by me--I guess my Dick Cheney smile put fear in them that I'd shoot them in the face. Oh, well.

Ruby-throated Hummingbird gallery finally up

Boy, between so many speaking gigs, developing this stupid Bell's Palsy (why couldn't it have been a case of Bell's Vireo?!) and trying to keep up with some other assignments, I've been working way too slow on getting my photo galleries back up. But I've made it (alphabetically by family common names) up to Hummingbird today. I've got a few pretty nice Ruby-throat photos--this spring and summer I'm going to work really hard on getting some better flight shots.
And looking at today's hummingbird map, I guess it's time to get my feeders out! They won't be here right away, probably, but just in case, it's better to have something out there for them!

For the Birds programs for last week -- the Dr. Ruth of Ornithology

Last week's For the Birds programs were my new "Dr. Ruth" series:

• Bird equipment
• Birds getting in the mood
• Birds do it
• The scoop on bird poop
• Do birds fart?

They're all podcast and also available on iTunes--it was a kick to go to the iTunes store, look for Laura Erickson, and find out that my podcast is highly rated! And it's free. If you open these files in iTunes, you can read the scripts on the "lyrics" tab.

Great New York Times article about starlings

I love it when I read a general news article about birds that is both well-written and accurate. And the Sunday New York Times has an extraordinary article about starlings written by Jonathan Rosen that perfectly fits the bill. He weaves natural history, human history, and the arts in a lovely article inspired by an art exhibit of Richard Barnes’s photographs of starlings, which Rosen writes:

capture the double nature of the birds — or at least the double nature of our relationship to them — recording the pointillist delicacy of the flock and something darker, almost sinister in the gathering mass. Many of Barnes’s photographs, which will be shown at Hosfelt Gallery in New York this fall, were taken over two years in EUR, a suburb of Rome that Mussolini planned as a showcase for fascist architecture. The man-made backdrop only enhances the sense of the vast flock as something malign, a sort of avian Nuremberg rally.

The entire article is really and truly worth a read.

Stephen Colbert's Meta-Free-Phor-All!

I almost died laughing when I watched this today--Russ had recorded the program because I was in Rhinelander pitching for WXPR last night.

King Penguins may help monitor climate change

From today's Live Science:

King penguins could help scientists monitor the effects of climate change. Scientists at the University of Birmingham are investigating whether the penguins can be used as bio-indicators.

“If penguins are traveling further or diving deeper for food, that tells us something about the availability of particular fish in regions of the Antarctic,” said one of the researchers Lewis Halsey who presented study results at the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology in Glasgow.

“We may be able to assess the pressure exerted by king penguins on this ecosystem, and look at the effects of both climate change and over-fishing in this region of the world,” Halsey added.

King penguins are good candidates as bio-indicators for several reasons. For instance, while foraging they cover hundreds of kilometers and dive to depths of several hundred meters, so they explore large swaths of the Southern Oceans. Plus, since they come ashore to molt, the penguins are accessible to researchers. Since their diets are well known, scientists can keep track of certain fish populations by monitoring the penguins’ health and food consumption.

It's not like this research is going to really help the penguins--just give us clues about climate by how it affects them. But penguins are a charismatic, popular species, so if they are being hurt, Americans are maybe a little more likely to do something about the problem than if they were, say, Sage Grouse, which we're doing very little about despite their dangerously low numbers. Anyway, read the whole article here.

The greatest living American

Not only is he eneagled, not only is he a flagophile, not only did he create the very word "truthiness," Stephen Colbert is the Greatest Living American. Now if only he wanted the Dr. Ruth of Ornithology to explain the birds and the bees to Stephen Junior! This week my radio programs are all done in my Dr. Ruth capacity. Monday was about the equipment birds have. Tuesday is how that equipment is readied for breeding. Wednesday is how birds do it. Tomorrow will be the scoop on bird poop. And Friday will provide the answer to the eternal question, do birds fart?

Now come on, Stephen. I need to get people to notice my book, 101 Ways to Help Birds, which I put my heart and soul into researching and writing for three years. You need your son to know the facts of life before he has to learn them on the streets. Wouldn't this be a win-win situation?

Rats--I can't whistle

I was reading Graeme Garden's account of his experience with Bell's palsy and a red flag went up. He discovered he had it when he suddenly found he couldn't whistle. So I puckered my lips and blew, and nothing came out! Oh, dear--whistling has always been my way of signaling my chickadees that I've got mealworms. And my neighborhood cardinal has been singing--I love whistling back to him. Again, this seemed cruel upon the first shocked discovery. But really, I can still see and hear them, and when my whistling comes back, I'll maybe have that same joyful thrill of accomplishment I had the first time I got a whistle to come out sounding like a cardinal some five decades ago.

How I spent Stress Day

I woke up today feeling vaguely weird--my whole face felt sleepy or something, and I felt like I had something in my left eye. But I had to drive to the Twin Cities with Tom and so off we went at 7 am.

Half way there, in Hinckley, I bought a cup of coffee. I took a sip and it dribbled out of the left side of my mouth. It was hot coffee, but it didn't feel hot on my lip or chin. Or rather, it didn't feel hot on the left side of my lip or chin. It was like I'd had a shot of novocaine on that side.

The sky was clear, and we watched a couple of crows chasing a Bald Eagle and lots of Red-wings and stuff, so I wasn't too focused on my mouth. But then as the road curved to the east, the sun poured in, and I tried to close my left eye for a second, but it wouldn't close. I simply could not wink on that side.

I was still focused on the lovely day and getting Tom down to the U of M (where Sandhill Cranes flew over the parking lot!) Then we headed north again, and stopped at a Hinckley Subway for a late lunch. And that's when things got REALLY weird. I couldn't open my mouth right to bite into the sandwich, and when I did get a bite, I found myself chewing on my lip! It was bleeding, but I couldn't even feel it. So then I went to the bathroom and took a look at myself in the mirror. I found myself with a smile as crooked as Dick Cheney's and an eye that wouldn't close.

This was pretty scary, to say the least. I didn't have my palm pilot and didn't know my doctor's phone number, so I called Russ and asked him to call and find out what I should do. Tom drove the rest of the way (we passed a loon in one of those lakes along I-35), and then Tom brought me straight to the emergency room where Russ met us.

They made sure it wasn't a stroke--that was a relief! It turns out I have Bell's palsy. No one knows what causes it for sure, but it's a frequent complication of Lyme disease, so they are doing a blood test for that.

Fortunately, this isn't a bad disease, just a weird one. I'm afraid I'm going to look pretty asymmetric for a while. And until I master drinking without it leaking out the left side, I may retreat to a corner to eat. I have to tape my left eye closed when I go to sleep because it doesn't close properly--the cornea can be easily damaged. But the facial paralysis is usually gone within several weeks, and even if it lasts several months I can hardly complain after the relief I felt that it wasn't a stroke or brain tumor.

So that was how I spent "Stress Day." But imagining what a horrible day some people are having, mine was a piece of cake.

Greater Prairie-Chicken photos finally back up

I've gotten pretty much all my photos uploaded, but am still getting the galleries back up. Now that prairie chickens are booming on their leks, I figure people may want to see their cool displays, which are at Laura's Prairie-Chicken Photo Gallery

Another theory about why bees are declining-- Cell phones

Birdchick, maybe you better not talk on your phone near your hives. This just in from The Independent Online:

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

By Geoffrey Lean and Harriet Shawcross

Published: 15 April 2007

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Read the whole article.

Look up, Hannah!

I love Turner Classic Movies. Today's "Essential" was The Great Dictator. I find the speech at the end cosmically beautiful and satisfying, and distressingly timely:

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an Emperor - that's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible -- Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another; human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone.

The way of life can be free and beautiful.

But we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.

To those who can hear me I say, "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass and dictators die; and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers: Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel; who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate; only the unloved hate, the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers: Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke it is written, "the kingdom of God is within man" -- not one man, nor a group of men, but in all men, in you, you the people have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness. You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite!! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people!! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise!! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.

Soldiers: In the name of democracy, let us all unite!!!

Hannah, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up, Hannah. The clouds are lifting. The sun is breaking through. We are coming out of the darkness into the light. We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality.

Look up, Hannah. The soul of man has been given wings, and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow -- into the light of hope, into the future, the glorious future that belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hannah. Look up."

(Thanks, Wikipedia)

Look up, Hannah. Look up!

Anniversary of Silent Spring

Forty-five years ago today, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was published. At the time, Rachel Carson was my age--55. I wrote 101 Ways to Help Birds as my small contribution to what she'd started--my original working title was Resounding Spring. I grew up with the DDT truck going down my block one or two times a week on summer evenings--when they heard it coming, the boys in the neighborhood would jump on their bikes and chase it, each vying to be first to grab onto one of the bars jutting out the back of the truck. My brother would come home drenched and smelly. Now his body is covered with weird subcutaneous fatty lumps--when he wears short sleeved shirts, you can see them bulging out everywhere. I'm incensed when I read that banning DDT is responsible for the deaths of people by malaria--I addressed that in my book and on a recent listserv when someone suggested that Rachel Carson wasn't such a hero:

There is no place on earth where malaria has ever been successfully controlled or reduced by using DDT on the outdoor environment. Really--no place in the world. The only way DDT has ever been effective to combat mosquito-borne diseases has been when it was applied indoors, on upper walls and ceilings of houses and on the netting covering beds. Applied in the environment, it's encouraged the evolution of resistant mosquitoes, which have a short life span and rapid reproduction, while enormously reducing the populations of many mosquito predators, such as dragonflies, which have long life span and slow reproduction; had a devastating effect on birds and other wildlife; and its metabolite worked its way into our own food chain. And DDT is still being applied environmentally today--India, for example, uses huge amounts and yet still has serious typhoid and malaria problems. And even today DDT works its way around the world such that a researcher from Illinois told me last October that it's still being detected in wolves in northern Minnesota! By the 1960s, Breeding Peregrine Falcons had been completely wiped out east of the Rockies. Eagles and Osprey were disappearing. Thousands of dead robins were picked up on the Michigan State University campus, documented and linked to DDT by George Wallace, the university ornithologist. DDE (the metabolite of DDT) was being detected in human mother's milk. Yes--I do think that was cause for justifiable outrage.

I strongly believe that public outrage is one of the most effective means, for better and for worse, in making any bureaucratic entity change the status quo. And I strongly believe in protecting human health, especially for those people who are the least powerful and able to protect themselves, and most of the people dying from malaria today are the least powerful of all--impoverished babies and children. Most issues are not cut-and-dried--there are nuances that a fair and open dialog can reveal. A fair and open reading of Silent Spring, for example, shows that Rachel Carson believed DDT and other pesticides could have a positive value in combating diseases, but that it was wiser to limit use to the smallest effective use possible rather than the widest, heaviest use. ..

I get a Google Alert when news stories about DDT are published. And I feel a great deal of outrage at how the issue has been taken up and distorted by certain anti-environment entities, as if Rachel Carson was wrong about the impact DDT was having on humans and birds when it was released into the environment and worked into our food chain, which was the precise use she was criticizing. So yes, outrage on this issue is still appropriate.

More Brilliance from the Eneagled Stephen Colbert

As the "Dr. Ruth of Ornithology" I of course am still yearning to explain to Stephen how to tell young Stephen Jr. the facts of life so the poor eagle won't have to pick it up on the streets. How did I get named the Dr. Ruth of Ornithology? First, once a reference librarian from a small library called me to ask, for one of the people calling her, how birds "do it." So I explained it in some detail, and also referred her to my book, Sharing the Wonder of Birds with Kids. I also explained in on Salon TableTalk once:

OK. Equipment on male birds: two testes, both internal (so avian sperm must be able to survive at very high temperatures, and they don't need to worry about their fertility if they jump on a bicycle now and then) that lead through the vas deferens to a chamber called the cloaca. The cloaca is sort of the vestibule entry into the whole house, with those two hallways to the testes, the ureters leading to the kidneys, and the large intestine. So it's very important for birds to poop before having sex, to clear out the vestibule before company arrives, so to speak, but since birds can poop at the drop of a hat (meaning on your head the moment your hat falls off) this does not represent any hardship.

Equipment on female birds: They have only one functional ovary (if they had two, and managed to ovulate through both, they'd end up with scrambled eggs inside), which is connected to the cloaca via the oviduct. During the nesting season, female birds usually ovulate about once a day. The ovary looks quite a bit like a teenie tiny cluster of grapes, only a couple of grapes are double the size of the rest, and one is HUGE. That is actually the whole yolk of the next egg to be ovulated. So the birds are feeling romantic -- maybe they're cranes and have been singin' and dancin' in the rain, maybe they're red red robins who've been bob-bob-bobbin' along -- and now the moment arrives! He flutters his wings in eager anticipation, and this time she doesn't flitter off saying she has a headache -- she actually flutters her wings back at him! So he hops aboard her back, and she's twisted her tail a bit to get the bottom to face the side, and he twists his tail to get the bottom to face the side, and their two cloacas meet in what ornithologists romantically call the "cloacal kiss." And a packet of sperm from him passes over into her cloaca. Then he flies off, she remains where she's sitting for a bit, and they each pull out a tiny little cigarette.

The sperm swim, as sperm are wont to do, and head up her oviduct. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, she's ovulated one yolk that morning, which is in the high reaches of the oviduct. One lucky sperm wins the race, and the rest go over into the pool hall and shoot a few rounds, hoping they'll have better luck the next day, and they sometimes do, because as I noted, they can survive warm body temperatures. As the fertilized egg works its way down the oviduct, the cells secrete the proteins that make up the albumen, and then secrete the calcium that will form the shell. And eventually, usually by early the next morning, the egg has reached the vestibule, which makes the female bird very uncomfortable and she heads for a nest (if her own isn't built, she'll take any port in the storm) and dumps that egg out. And it eventually hatches into another bird who will one day ask his parents to tell him where he came from, and they'll say, "The stork brought you," or "Toledo," depending on how much of a sense of humor they have.

The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum referred to me as "The Dr. Ruth of Ornithology" in their promotion materials when I had a speaking engagement there in 2004. So, Stephen, how about it?

Weird collection of stories

Today I'm going to be blogging some stories about birds I've rehabbed, but for some reason that eludes me, I'm starting with another story altogether, that has nothing to do with birds but may somehow relate to why birders are good at recognizing different bird sounds. It all started with me thinking about James Earl Jones. I'll never forget seeing, and hearing, him perform as Othello at the Goodman Theater in Chicago when I was in high school. It was the most moving performance I'd ever seen. Years later, Russ and I found ourselves in a movie theater watching Star Wars, and I went nuts trying to remember who that voice belonged to. Suddenly, I blurted out, "It's Othello!!!" I couldn't remember the actor's name who had performed in the play so long ago, but I KNEW it was him. At the end of the movie I watched the credits to see who the actor was, and it said, "David Prowse." So I rushed home, pulled out my Stagebill, and was stopped short. Russ wasn't surprised--he thought there was no way I could remember a voice from so long ago. But I was so SURE. And then, weeks or months later, there was an article in I think Parade about the actor behind Darth Vader's voice. And that was the most gratifying "I told you so" of my entire life.

Oh, no! Kurt Vonnegut has died

This is really sad--Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote a bunch of the books I voraciously devoured when my children were babies, has died. He and I shared a birthday--November 11. When I was a little girl that day was called Armistice Day, which my grandpa told me was the day we celebrated the end of the war to end all wars. It was a horrifying discovery, years later, when I learned that my grandpa had fought in World War I, so named because it had an encore, and then I found out that there had been another war going on when I was a baby. And as a little girl I'd never have guessed that we were already getting involved in a war that my big brother was going to have to fight in. Kurt Vonnegut's experience in World War II were most eloquently used in his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse Five. He ends the book with the captured American soldiers being released from the underground meat locker where they'd been put to work manufacturing vitamin supplements with other prisoners of war. That underground meat locker ironically saved their lives during the firebombing of Dresden. From there they were imprisoned in a stable outside Dresden for a while.

And somewhere in there was springtime. The corpse mines were closed down. The soldiers all left to fight the Russians. In the suburbs, the women and children dug rifle pits. Billy and the rest of his group were locked up in the stable in the suburbs. And then, one morning, they got up to discover that the door was unlocked. World War Two in Europe was over.

Billy and the rest wandered out onto the shady street. The trees were leafing out. There was nothing going on out there, no traffic of any kind. There was only one vehicle, an abandoned wagon drawn by two horses. The wagon was green and coffin-shaped.

Birds were talking.

One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, 'Poo-tee-weet?'

Vonnegut's final book, A Man without a Country, ends with a poem called "Requiem":

When the last living thing

has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating up

perhaps

from the floor

of the Grand Canyon,

“It is done.”

People did not like it here.

Read the New York Times obituary for Kurt Vonnegut.

Roscoe Lee Browne, rest in peace

Rats. I just learned Roscoe Lee Browne has died. He had a magnificent voice, used to wonderful effect in Babe and Babe II: Pig in the City. He also played Saunders on the sublimely silly Soap.

LOVELY photos of Pale Male and Lola

My friend Paula just sent a link to lovely photos of Pale Male and Lola.

If ignorance is bliss...

Joe Soucheray must be a happy man, indeed. Read his current column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, about the brand new Lights Out program in the Twin Cities:

The latest chapter in what can only be described as a massive crackup is the idea that we have to turn off the lights in downtown buildings to save birds. I don't know if you are aware of this - I certainly wasn't - but birds apparently are attracted to the lights during migratory periods in the spring and fall and then, because they are stupid, they crash into the buildings and die.

I guess if we turn off the lights the birds will make it safely to the next day, when they can sit in a park and get eaten by a cat.

Read the whole column. Opinion columns are ever so much easier to write when pesky facts and research can be ignored. Notice that he's not made reference to any other Lights Out programs, including those in vibrant cities such as Chicago, New York, or Toronto, nor has he interviewed a single person who has worked on the local project, nor has he researched anything substantive about the issue at all. It's all about what Joe Soucheray's idea of "vibrancy" is. About everything else, he's completely in the dark.

Are GM crops killing bees?

This is worrisome--Birdchick, make sure you warn your little guys to stay away from corn fields! From Spiegel Online:

Are GM Crops Killing Bees?

By Gunther Latsch

A mysterious decimation of bee populations has German beekeepers worried, while a similar phenomenon in the United States is gradually assuming catastrophic proportions. The consequences for agriculture and the economy could be enormous....

Walter Haefeker, the German beekeeping official, speculates that "besides a number of other factors," the fact that genetically modified, insect-resistant plants are now used in 40 percent of cornfields in the United States could be playing a role. The figure is much lower in Germany -- only 0.06 percent -- and most of that occurs in the eastern states of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Brandenburg. Haefeker recently sent a researcher at the CCD Working Group some data from a bee study that he has long felt shows a possible connection between genetic engineering and diseases in bees.

Read the whole troubling article.

Harry Potter Owls

Rats. I did a google search on "Owls Harry Potter" and the very first link is to my page--the one on Birderblog. But that's a dead end now, and I got tired of searching page after page without finding a link to my "The Owls of Harry Potter" page. How frustrating. Two years ago, the top link for the topic was my home page, and I only put it on Birderblog because they wanted as much of my content there as I could get over there. Now it's like starting from scratch, only even worse, because back when I put my page up it was for quite a while the ONLY page specifically about the owls featured in Harry Potter books and movies. When The Nature Conservancy finally put up a comparable page, they said Ron's owl Pigwidgeon was a Little Owl, though Mary Granpre's lovely drawing of a tiny owl carrying a message showed "ear" tufts. It's going to take forever for people to be able to find the content I've worked so hard and so long on. Oh, well. You can find my Owls of Harry Potter right here.

The only thing I'm going to say about the Don Imus flap

I've never listened to Don Imus, and don't know if he's used his power and influence to promote a healthy environment or to make his audience more informed about the natural world and the birds that enrich our lives. And I'm not very informed about the current college basketball scene. But as a mother of a young woman, I am angry as all get-out when any mindless blowhard demeans powerless women young enough to be his granddaughters. Those students were playing their hearts out, and he was supposed to be commenting about the team's chances at winning. If one of them made a stupid play in a game, she'd expect (but be devastated by) public comment and ridicule. But for the whole team to be publicly disparaged with such an ugly comment that manages to ridicule both the women's appearance and their fundamental selves--well, I'd just like to ram his microphone where the sun don't shine.

Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips from North America's Top Birders

It came today!! My copy of Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips from North America's Top Birders. It's wonderful, and even if it's a little creepy and weird to think there's any way anyone can figure out who "America's Top Birders" are, it's pretty darned exciting for me to be included as one of them.

One disclaimer: The description about me is no longer accurate, since I'm no longer working at Binoculars.com nor am I the writer of Birderblog now that it's been sold. Also, in the part where I talk about children's binoculars, I gave some specifications but no specific model. Since then, I've found the perfect pair of binoculars for children and for families--the Leupold 6x30 Yosemites. I am no longer working for an optics company, and even when I was had absolutely nothing to gain from recommending one brand over another--I never got paid on commission or to do sales. But these Yosemites are PERFECT for kids--great range of interocular distance perfect for the tiniest faces with close-set eyes, their parents with wider-set eyes, or anyone in between. They have crisp optics, and are lightweight with really rugged construction. I can't imagine a better-designed pair of glasses for kids. Some people think 6x is just too small for magnification, but guess what--I was using Leupold's 6x Katmais in Florida when I got a perfectly good look at a distant Kirtland's Warbler--I could see its bright yellow underside, streaked sides, the subtle markings on wings and back, and the broken eye ring, and watch it wag its tail. For the same size binoculars, 6x is brighter and has a wider field of view than 7x or 8x, and has a better depth of field, making it easier for beginners to find the bird in the first place while it's at least marginally in focus, and make it easier to hold steady.

If I were rich (and apparently THAT's never going to happen! I can't even hold a job!) I'd buy a pair of 8x32s in a top line. Right now I have a splendid pair of 8x42 Nikon Premiers, which are fantastic, but since I so often carry two cameras around my neck, I like using something smaller for most use, and couldn't afford top of the line. If I couldn't afford really good ones, I didn't want to get 8x, because the one rule about optics I'm pretty sure holds all the time is that the less you can spend, the lower the magnification you should get so you don't lose too much optically.

I never had a chance to check out the new Leupold Golden Ring 8x32s, but they look really wonderful. Unfortunately, like the other top names, they're way out of my price range! My Katmais cost less than a quarter of what the Golden Rings cost, but I'm glad I bought them before I knew I wouldn't be working--otherwise I wouldn't have been able to justify even that. I tend to loan out or give away my extra binoculars, and never have quite enough to share when leading my spring warbler walks, but at this point, I'm pretty happy to have two nice pairs, giving me an emergency auxiliary backup pair. And--what a relief!--I don't have to evaluate optics anymore!! I've always preferred to keep my focus on birds.

The Hardy Boys!

I had to go to Best Buy with my son Tom today, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the entire series, The Hardy Boys! I remember it from when it first appeared on TV, when I was 4, and it was repeated often enough over the years that it was pretty stuck in my brain. I've just barely started watching it, but oh, man--that theme song! I can't find proof anywhere, but I'm sure it was Thurl Ravenscroft singing, "Gold doubloons and pieces of eight, handed down to Applegate, from buccaneers who fought for years for gold doubloons and pieces of eight." Thurl Ravenscroft, who just died in 2005, had one of the coolest voices on the planet--he was one of the Mellomen who did the great dog songs in Lady and the Tramp--his voice was the deep one.

A Barn Owl is featured in one episode. They show a real Barn Owl "calling," but its voice doesn't sound like any Barn Owl or recording I've heard. There's a super fake cardinal "singing" too--it drives me nuts when they pretend whistling people are songbirds.

Is feeding jelly really okay for birds?

Back in spring 2004, we had an extreme cold spell in May, right at the peak of warbler, tanager, and oriole migration. Suddenly people were finding dead insectivores on walks through the woods, and my yard was simply hopping with birds, including a wayward Bobolink, 7+ Baltimore Orioles, 5+ Scarlet Tanagers, and 30+ Cape May Warblers all visible at any one time. I went through a huge number of mealworms, and vast quantities of suet, sunflower seed, white millet, and jelly. I've been feeding grape jelly for many years. When my 23-year-old daughter was a preschooler, she'd come home from Montessori school wanting a "pickanic" lunch. I'd fix a sandwich and set her up at the "pickanic" table. On the same table was the orange bowl pictured above (we've had these orange bowls for decades--they came free in dog food), with a plop of grape jelly. And every day while Katie sat there, in flew a catbird to feed at the table right alongside her. When I went out, the catbird wouldn't come anywhere near, but for some reason it approved of my tiny daughter. That orange bowl of jelly was EXTREMELY popular in 2004, when birds were cold and food-stressed!

Anyway, I've long fed jelly to birds. I plop it out in very small amounts usually, because it gets buggy fast and I'm sure bacteria thrives in it, so I don't like having out more than birds can eat in a day. But that spring with all those birds, one morning I filled that bowl half full with jelly because I was going to be gone for several hours and the temperature was in the teens. When I came home, I found a Red-breasted Nuthatch close to death, mired in the jelly so that the only parts sticking out were his beak and eyes. I fished him out and spent hours washing him in warm water, toweling him dry, and allowing him to preen, over and over, until he was releasable. I felt horrible about that, and ever since have been cautioning people about setting out only small amounts of jelly at a time.

But today I got a thoughtful email from Kay Charter, who writes:

I confess that I had a prejudice against this practice [feeding jelly] the first time I saw it...about twenty years ago in a relative's yard. It just didn't look right. So I did some digging...as much as it is possible to do, which isn't much and it certainly hasn't been quantified, but it all makes sense. One source was a good friend who is an internist...he said that high sugar foods may trigger a bird's satiety gland, much as it does in children, causing it to feel satisfied when it has had little in the way of nutritional value. He also said that sugar may be addictive for birds as it certainly can be in humans, and that a bird might develop a strong liking for jelly and spend less time searching for natural foods.

Then I queried my friend, Kent Mahaffey, who was manager of the San Diego Wild Animal Park's famous free-flight Bird Show for more than two decades. Kent had primary care responsibility for hundreds of birds from many families. He said he would never allow any birds under his care to have jelly. He added the following:

• In general, any food that exceeds the balance of sucrose in a bird's natural diet is suspect. Natural nectars contain 12% to 30% sugars, while jams and jellies are more than half sugar. He also said that higher than normal sugar loads may outstrip a bird's ability to adequately process the sugar (as it does in humans); and products high in sugars are an ideal environment for bacterial growth.

He summarized as follows: "Birds developed the way they did by adapting to the environments in which they lived and the foods that sustained them. We do our best for them when we stick as closely as possible to their natural diets."

I know that people have been doing this for decades with no apparent ill effects. But since there is no way to check the effect on internal organs, or, as Kent suggested, bactarial growth, it just seems wise to me to stick with Kent's suggestion...which is to offer foods that are as close as possible to what they evolved with.

SBTH recommends an alternative: grapes. Birds love them, and they have real nutrients, not just sugar.

The bottom line is that while we don't know how this affects our birds, it may (as Kent and my doc friend suggested) be harmful. Why take the chance?

Thanks,

Kay

So what's the right answer? I think it's CRITICAL to stop feeding jelly if there is any evidence birds are feeding it to nestlings or bringing fledglings to it--growing babies need protein, not such a heavy carb load. And if an individual birds seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time at the jelly, I'd close down shop, too. At this point, I'm going to probably continue to feed it during migration, especially during cold weather.

Does anyone know of any studies about the relative benefits and harms of feeding jelly to birds? Let me know!

Funny story from Iraq

Mike Easley sent me a funny story of puzzling through the identification of a bird while he was serving in Iraq:

While on my last tour in Iraq, I developed an interest, until then subdued by dreams of being a physicist, of working in ecology. On Al Asad, in what turned out to be ample spare time, I started watching the many birds. Most of them seemed fairly familiar, or at least similar to birds of the intermountain west where I've spent most all my life. But one bird, what turned out to be the crested lark, had me baffled. I had not then found your site, so I went about my inquiry as best I could.

We had an interpreter working with our unit, who went by the pseudonym "Tony." Tony and I did not get along very well, mostly because I called him on some inappropriate behavior towards some of my female colleagues. Once a week, however, I was charged with driving Tony out to the checkpoint, so he could catch whatever means he had back to town.

The road we drove went by the wadi, the one strip of green on the whole base, and on one occasion I spotted the bird in question in the reeds near a stop. Hoping to find a way to break the silence, I pointed towards it and asked Tony if he knew the name of the bird. He said something in Arabic, which I took to be the name of the bird, but for the life of me I could not pronounce.

Later, while trying to repeat it to one of my fellow Marines more fluent in Arabic, we determined we would need to see it written down. So the next time I was with Tony and we saw that bird in the reeds, I asked him again what he had said it was. This time I had him write it down for me.

We still could not figure it out, but one morning talking with our chaplain's aide, who is fluent in many languages, to include Swahili and Arabic, the story came up. He asked if I had the paper Tony had written it on, and a wide smile crossed his face as he read it. I asked him what it said...

"God knows."

~Cpl Mike Easley

Starting to get my species galleries back up

I'm finally getting some of my species galleries back up. It's going to take a while, and I haven't even had a moment to change any of the copyright information on the photos, but I wanted to get them back up ASAP because lots of teachers and newsletter editors use them. I hope to have all the bird and non-bird ones up by next week. The bird gallery directory is here. I'm going through the families in common name alphabetical order, but if you need some specific photos, feel free to email me with requests for me to hurry up with certain families. I'm also still trying to find my blog entries about my cat "Cat," as someone requested--I am so overwhelmed with trying to get all this content back up that I'm not going about it in a very systematic way yet.

Oh, wow--some really nice reviews

Now that my book has been out a full year, I've been getting a little resigned to it languishing on shelves, but suddenly it's had a spate of reviews. Birder's World gives it a mention in the current issue, I just got some clippings of a review by Catherine Ferguson that appeared in newspapers in New Jersey, and I just discovered a review on Bird Forum by Grant McCreary, from March 7. There's also Nick Upton's review from East Yorkshire in Great Britain from February 6.

And that wonderful Ric Zarwell posted some really generous words about my book on the National Wildlife Refuge listserv and the bird education listserv today. He wrote:

Bird Education Colleagues:

For far more than 101 important reasons, author Laura Erickson's wonderful book, 101 Ways to Help Birds is a superb book for today's bird educator!! This book provides all of the information needed to directly involve students in at least 101 learning activities that are important steps toward helping the birds we all enjoy and seek to help.

Laura is a multi-talented lady, a radio show host, and a long-time effective advocate for wild birds. She is also a careful researcher, and a very gifted writer with several excellent books to her credit. This latest book is extremely relevant and timely because of the continuing steady decline of Neotropical Migrants and other species of birds. But Laura doesn't lay guilt on her readers. Instead she uses a positive approach that is sure to inspire people of all ages - bird educators, as well as students of birds.

101 Ways to Help Birds is divided into five appropriately chosen sections:

Part I: Helping Birds at Home

Part II: Enhancing the Natural Habitat of Your Backyard

Part III: Supplementing Backyard Habitat

Part IV: Helping Birds Away from Home

Part V: Helping Birds on a Larger Scale

No, I'm not getting a commission for promoting Laura's book!!! But I did have an opportunity to review this thoughtful and comprehensive treatment of bird-human relations when it was published about a year ago. Last year I wrote that this is the book I wish I had written. I feel even stronger that this is so after digging even deeper into Laura's exceptional work.

In a nutshell, 101 Ways to Help Birds is by far the best book I know of for the bird educator or lay person who wishes to learn what can be done for wild birds, and how each of the 101 ways of helping birds can be accomplished.

The 101 opportunities are practical, proactive, lifestyle-type stuff that young and old can readily learn from and implement in their own lives.

Wow. I feel really honored!

My favorite non-bird videos

Oh, dear--first there's this one, which has been out for months but still makes me laugh:

I don't know how to embed the video for this one, but it's hilarious, from Prangstgrup, "Lecture Musical." If my students had done something like that when I was teaching, oh, wow--I don't even know if I could have survived laughing that hard.

Cool pigeon photos from Iraq

William McVicker sent some really cool photos of an odd pigeon he'd been seeing at his base just north of Tikrit. It has weirdly feathered feet, and after doing some research, he figures it must be a Trumpeter Pigeon. These are not strong-flying birds, and not used in races. They're also pretty high-maintenance, so it's very likely this bird escaped or was released from a fairly wealthy pigeon fancier's flock. That makes it somewhat likely that the bird was actually one of Saddam Hussein's birds. Interesting! The photos and video that William sent are all on the new William McVicker pigeon gallery, which is also linked on my Iraq Birds Photo Gallery.

Don't monitor bluebird houses in bad weather!

If you have bluebird houses in Minnesota or Wisconsin, or anywhere where temperatures are cold right now, please don't check your houses until temperatures rise again. Tree Swallows who arrived early this year are having lots of problems, and some are piling into bluebird houses for warmth. When we check on them, they get scared and leave, and when they're already stressed for calories and warmth, that can be disastrous.

Question of the day: Do birds fart?

Ah--an intelligent kid's question has worked its way into BirdChat channels. Since I worked on nighthawk digestion during my ill-fated Ph.D. research (the world already has one-too-many Dr. Laura's anyway, right?) I figured I better tackle this question. So I plunged in, noting that nighthawks have extremely odoriferous droppings because mixed with the fecal matter and urates are also caecal contents, and the caeca are filled with anaerobic bacteria that, as far as I've been able to determine, break down some of the chitin in their insect diet. While studying them, I spent many, many hours in extremely close quarters with nighthawks, paying an inordinate amount of attention to sounds and smells, and never once detected anything resembling a fart.

That said, mammalian intestines are very long, digestion slow, and fecal contents can remain in the intestines for quite a while. Gases erupting from any point in mammalian intestines can build up before they reach the end, and are going to pass through a bunch of malodorous stuff along the way, picking up additional odors. Birds get rid of any gases as quickly as they do the other material in their guts, and so there really isn't time for huge buildups of the kind that 10-year-old children (of both sexes, in my experience both as a former kid and as a former teacher) delight in and squeamish, oh-so-proper adults (again, of both sexes) recoil from.

Then someone wondered what it is in human nature that is attracted to such a question. To which I simply had to jump in again. What is it that attracts us to any question? We humans have five senses, and although our sense of smell isn't as keen as that of a golden retriever, anyone who's spent any time in proximity to a golden retriever in the evening (well, at least near MY dear, departed golden retriever Bunter), cannot help but have noticed the phenomenon we call farting. We upright humans may not produce quite as powerful a smell, but our own farts do at least occasionally make up for in sound production what they lack (only marginally) in odoriferousness. So only a deaf person who also lacked an ability to detect odors could possibly have gone through life never experiencing the phenomenon of farting, and only a human without an operational mind could possibly have gone through life never once wondering what the heck farts are all about.

I suspect my golden retriever didn't think much about the phenomenon, but she also didn't care who Ernie Banks was, or wonder if he rejoiced, in his retirement, at having played for the Cubs long enough (just barely) to have been able to play against a flock of Blue Jays. My golden retriever probably never wondered about the stars in the sky or whether there is a God or why cats bury their feces and dogs don't or why manufacturers don't make a 20x fixed-focus eyepiece for digiscoping. She just knew that anytime anyone acted upset about anything, it was somehow her fault, so when anyone said "EWWWWWWWW!" in the evening, she guiltily slunk over and nestled her head in their lap to make them feel better. Which of course was counterproductive, but she never thought about that, either. We mammals pretty much all fart, and presumably most of the humans among us think, and though few among us will ever produce a fart that approaches the sheer smelliness of a golden retriever's, few of us will ever be as kind as one, either.

It's when we recoil from asking natural questions that we are least human and most like animals.

But the short answer is an almost definite no, birds do not fart. Farts are, by definition, noticeable eruptions of significant volumes of intestinal gas. Avian intestines are short and evacuate wastes frequently. Any gases produced in digestion leak out as fast as they're produced, so there isn't the opportunity for build-up that leads to those explosive releases we cheerfully or disgustedly call farts.

Birds of Iraq Photo Gallery

I finally re-posted my Iraq Birds Photo Gallery. I need to get the pictures at the top into the taxonomic section, but now it's time to start focusing on my taxes.

The Owls of Harry Potter

Little by little I'm starting to get stuff back up. I just finished getting up The Owls of Harry Potter. Now I'm starting on my Birds of Iraq gallery--that should be done later today.

Why I'm not a millionaire

Jeffrey Strain has an interesting take on why most people never become millionaires from The Street: 10 Reasons You're Not Rich. I'll summarize:

1) You care what your neighbors think. This really is one reason I'm not rich, but not for the reason the article suggests. The article says too many people acquire too many possessions and too big a house, competing with the neighbors, rather than amassing personal wealth. To me, the critical issue is wanting to be held in some esteem by my neighbors for being a decent human being. Lately I've been hit over the head with the realization that one path to wealth requires that you don't care what anyone thinks of you--and that includes not just your neighbors but your friends, family, and people who worked their hearts out for you to reach your level of wealth. When you can sell every one of them down the river, you get rich.

2) You aren't patient. The article talks about get-rich-quick schemes that don't work. I'm actually very patient at working to achieve my goals. It took three years of research and hard work to finish 101 Ways to Help Birds. But at this point, that book has barely made me a thousandaire. Was it time wasted? Not according to my lights and my goals. I'd rather be held in the esteem of one ten-year-old than have a million dollars. Really.

3) You have bad habits. I don't smoke or gamble, and drink very little, so I'm not wasting potential wealth on these things.

4) You have no goals. Actually, I have plenty of goals, I work hard to achieve them, and I have an excellent track record for success. But my goals involve making the world a better place for human beings and birds, not acquiring personal wealth.

5) You haven't prepared. "Bad things happen to the best of people from time to time, and if you haven't prepared for such a thing to happen to you through insurance, any wealth that you might have built can be gone in an instant." Well, I'm pretty well insured, but hang that. Overall I'm far more focused on bad things that could happen and already are happening to the natural world, and trying to insure that we do something about them before it's too late. Oddly, the reason my efforts have so little effect is directly related to the ways other people become millionaires. Go figure.

6) You try to make a quick buck. That's not me at all.

7) You rely on others to take care of your money. Well, yes, I put what little I have in the bank. I refuse to put another penny in the stock market, ever. Too much of America's real wealth, our human and natural resources, has been squandered for the short-term profits of shareholders and the excessive salaries and bonuses of CEOs.

8) You invest in things you don't understand. Well, no one fully understands all the complexities of the natural world, but I do as well as I can.

9) You're financially afraid. Nope, not me. I'm like a chickadee--I work hard and trust that I have the skills and cleverness and will to be able to eke out an existence somehow as long as I live, and when I no longer can, I'll die. It's only fearful people who spend their lives amassing wealth they cannot enjoy against some dark, ominous future.

10) You ignore your finances. Well, yes. As long as millionaires are ignoring the natural world, which holds far more real wealth and importance than money, I've got way higher priorities than mere finances.

Chickadees and politics

My thoughts have been running to both politics and migration lately, and somehow that odd juxtaposition has led me to wish we operated this country like a chickadee flock. Chickadees are probably the most accepting birds on the continent—so much so that not only do local woodpeckers and nuthatches associate with them but also warblers, vireos, kinglets, and other migrants passing through an area. These strangers in a strange land can negotiate unfamiliar territory much more easily when chickadees show them the way. And chickadees welcome virtually anyone into their cooperative feeding flocks, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity in a manner that is very much in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution of the United States.

But despite their community spirit, chickadees are very much self-reliant. Each individual chisels out its own roosting cavity, and even when it's 60 below zero, each one sleeps in its own cavity.

Chickadees have excellent family values, of course, and raise their children without video games, too much television--indeed, without ANY television, or Internet, either—and although they have a poor track record in getting their children into the best colleges, or any other institutions of higher learning, their success in rearing healthy, happy young that become productive members of chickadee society is far greater than people of any political stripe can boast.

Like many birds with little or no sexual dimorphism, chickadees have fairly egalitarian relationships between male and female, sharing in many of the child-rearing tasks. Their domestic arrangements last until the children reach independence, and many pairs reform the following year. Both male and female chickadees occasionally look beyond the marital bond—females tend to be suckers for a tuneful guy, and the finest singers can’t help but go along with their overtures. But these awkward lapses don’t lead to divorce or legal proceedings, and although a brood of chickadees may exhibit multiple paternity, males never ask for, much less demand, blood tests, nor do they ever withhold love and care from babies that may not be their own. Chickadees never embarrass their spouses with public dalliances, and even when mates go their separate ways after a breeding season, they never slap divorce papers on a mate recovering from cancer surgery.

Yep—thinking about politics is much more pleasant when viewed through a chickadee prism.

Louis Black talks about birding in Iraq!

Jayagra

Oh, dear. Someone actually remembered my commercial for Jayagra from last year and wanted to make sure I put that back up. Naturally s/he wishes to remain anonymous, perhaps especially in view of the more serious programs linked in the previous post.

A couple of requests

One of the first requests I got after I had to start up a new website on a new server was to put back up the scripts and radio programs I did as my tribute to Paul Wellstone and my tribute to Fred Rogers. Honoring those men meant a lot to me, and I'm really happy that my tributes meant something to someone else, too. I also added them to my podcasts.

Unrequited love in the world of swans

Here's a tragic story of looking for love in all the wrong places, from CBS News: Love at First Sight for Swan and Boat: Wild black swan won't separate from paddle boat in German lake. There's a video there, too.

Oh, dear--and they called Al Gore "wooden." But at least she'll never have to worry about him canceling her vote, or winning an argument against her.

Don Kroodsma's book is out in paperback!

Wow--what a lovely gift popped into my mailbox today--the paperback version of The Singing Life of Birds! This extraordinary book, by Don Kroodsma, won the John Burroughs 2006 Medal Award, and is my favorite single bird book ever written. I wrote about it in my Amazon review back when it came out:

I was predisposed to like this book, since I love birdsong and have long been drawn to research about it. But this book far exceeded my high expectations. Don Kroodsma takes us through the entire process of listening to a song, thinking up questions about how the species acquired it, and step by step through the process of learning the answer, setting up the sections like little mysteries. He's recognized by the American Ornithologists' Union as an authority on acquisition of birdsong, and although the book is authoritative and scientific, he somehow manages to infuse every paragraph with his own sense of wonder and joy in his subject. This book may look like a textbook, but it reads like a cross between a mystery novel and lovely poetry. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I had the pleasure and privilege of interviewing Don Kroodsma when the book first came out two years ago, and made the interview into 6 "For the Birds" segments. In honor of the book being released in paperback, and because it was such a thrill to interview Don in the first place, I just podcast those programs. You can find them at my For the Birds page--scroll down a bit to the archives section.


Don Kroodsma--I took this photo (yes--he's smiling at ME!) during the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology's field recording course in 2001, in California. What a thrill to get to spend time in the field with one of my heroes!

Yes! Supreme Court rules on global warming

Just in from today's New York Times:

Supreme Court, 5-4, rules against Administration in Global Warming Case

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: April 2, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.

Connecticut and 11 other states, along with 13 environmental groups, sued the EPA over the issue.

They'll have more specific details about the ruling later.

Mike's Fox Sparrow surprise

Check out Mike McDowell's amazing Fox Sparrow video--he didn't notice till after the fact that he was also videotaping a wonderful surprise bird! (And this is no April Fool!)

John Chickenfat Sled Bird Race

This year's John Beargrease Sled Dog Race had to be canceled due to lack of snow, but the John Chickenfat Sled Bird Race was held exactly as it was back in 1988. You can hear all about it right here.

Oh, man

I have been as sick as I've ever been since Thursday night, when I got home from Hibbing. We weren't sure if it was stomach flu or food poisoning until this morning, when Russ came down with it, too, which really sucks because I'm not very well yet to help get him through it. I'd probably have been hospitalized if he hadn't been around to get lots of fluids into me--I was extremely dehydrated by Friday night. Usually when I'm sick I lay around watching romantic comedies and Zucker Brothers movies, but this time my brain was going in and out of commission and so I didn't do much of anything. Fortunately, I'm feeling a lot better today, though I'm still pretty weak and fuzzy-headed.

Apparently I missed a huge ice storm. Russ said it wasn't too bad in our neighborhood, but I got an email from a woman in Superior who found an iced-up, dead crow in her yard, and watched as an iced-up robin toppled, dead, from a tree.

If you can stomach it, today's big lead article in The Washington Post is worth a read--it's an expose' on the international logging industry. Don't buy ANY wood product from Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe's or any other discount store--or any store period-- unless it bears the Forest Stewardship Council stamp of approval. According to the article,

Home Depot sold some $400 million in products certified by the FSC in 2005, compared with $15 million in 1999. Still, those recent sales represented less than 5 percent of the company's total wood-product sales.

I was horrified, visiting the headquarters of one major discount online retailer last month, when one of their staff boasted to us that they are big enough to be able to pressure their vendors to get as much produced abroad, "especially in China!" so they can get "great margins!" My desk at work was from Ikea, and may well have been cut out of tropical woods that need protection. Our voracious appetite for cheap goods is literally destroying our planet. Here's just one little part of the huge article:

Some of the largest swaths of natural forest left on the planet are being dismantled at an alarming pace to feed a global wood-processing industry centered in coastal China.

Mountains of logs, many of them harvested in excess of legal limits aimed at preserving forests, are streaming toward Chinese factories where workers churn out such products as furniture and floorboards. These wares are shipped from China to major retailers such as Ikea, Home Depot, Lowe's and many others. They land in homes and offices in the United States and Europe, bought by shoppers with little inkling of the wood's origins or the environmental costs of chopping it down.

"Western consumers are leaving a violent ecological footprint in Burma and other countries," said an American environmental activist who frequently travels to Burma and goes by the pen name Zao Noam to preserve access to the authoritarian country. "Predominantly, the Burmese timber winds up as patio furniture for Americans. Without their demand, there wouldn't be a timber trade."

At the current pace of cutting, natural forests in Indonesia and Burma -- which send more than half their exported logs to China -- will be exhausted within a decade, according to research by Forest Trends, a consortium of industry and conservation groups. Forests in Papua New Guinea will be consumed in as little as 13 years, and those in the Russian Far East within two decades.

These forests are a bulwark against global warming, capturing carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to heating the planet. They hold some of the richest flora and fauna anywhere, and they have supplied generations of people with livelihoods that are now threatened.