dreaming of ibis

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I don't know if this is on par with the Pam Ewing dream that Bobby was dead only to wake up and find him in her shower thus negating everything that happened in Season 8, but here it goes.

Last night I dreamed I was leading a bird walk down the Will Skelton Greenway at the nature center. We hadn't really found anything out of the ordinary until POP! (That's how things happen in dreams, things just pop up.) A white ibis materialized on a grassy hillside.

It appeared to be weak or sick, missing a lot of feathers, so I walked over, picked it up and carried it to UT Veterinary Hospital which was only a few yards away. (That's another thing that happens in dreams: space and time gets compressed to move along the narrative.)

There I learned that the ibis was 30-years-old, in failing health and that I would have to return it to sunny Florida myself. 

What this all means, I'll leave to the dreamologists but perhaps I need to go on a trip with an elderly bird.

I also can add white ibis to my list of birds that appear in my dreams, that's a lifer. 

Happy 2013. 

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oh that rosy rump

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After the merriment of Christmas: the nog, the peppermint bark, the Scut Farkus Affair, the Grinch, the Peanuts gang singing Hark! the Herald Angels, the audacious sweaters, the smell of evergreen in the house, the flicker of candles, the eight maids a milking, the Dasher, the Dancer, the Donner and Blitzen (or is it Dunder and Blixem?), the dizzying blur that is the first three weeks of December, you then look for the little things to get you through to the New Year and into the cold, gray of January. 

For me? Mine came to my feeder yesterday: a purple finch. 

I do not get one every winter; I get those ubiquitous house finches, the interlopers, the usurpers, the boorish Hollywood horde knocking at my chamber door. But this one was indeed different. The color softer, more raspberry, the streaks down its flanks were pinkish and the rump—Oh that rosy rump. It really doesn't take that much to ignite a smile, warm the cockles.

Yes, that's enough to chase away the post-Christmas letdown. Although, I do believe I have nog left in the frig. Must savor it though, it's darn hard to find in June.

And, once again, I did not get a leg lamp. What's a fellow have to do?

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the rafter that got away

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When I was a kid, telephones were heavy, came in one color (black) and were owned by Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, i.e. Ma Bell. And when they rang, the entire house shook like there was a three alarm fire. The clanging beast was mounted on the wall in the kitchen, so having a private conversation was close to impossible, besides Mom was always cooking collards or some such so it was no place to be. 

Our original phone number in Gatlinburg was 127. Easy to remember. Three digits. Area codes and zip codes and dress codes were still years in the future.

Flash forward. Today, cellular phones are small enough to fit in your pocket, you can buy them practically anywhere and some—believe it or not—actually double as cameras. (I'm not making this up, it's true.) I got one for Christmas and today managed to take my first photograph and e-mail it to myself.

It was a photo of a rafter (flock) of wild turkeys walking down a gravel road, very bucolic, very take-me-home-country-roads-ish, right out of Field & Stream, although you might note that by the time I figured out how to use my oh-so-smart camera, the gobbler hens had strolled away with a chuckle.

And yet, for this Luddite, methinks a modicum of modernization has occurred?

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is reality really real?

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Is this downy woodpecker really real? 
Or the figment, as am I, of someone else's imagination?

OK. We survived that Mayan end-of-world thingy—unless their math was wrong and they were actually two days off—only to have our anxieties wake up to this new shocker. 

"What if everything — all of us, the world, the universe — was not real? What if everything we are, know and do was really just someone's computer simulation?" writes science writer Joel N. Shurkin. His recent article in "Inside Science News" reports on a new thread of research by professors at two universities searching for traces of the simulation in cosmic rays. (And/or mismatched birth marks on identical twins.)

If this is even remotely possible, even remotely, why wouldn't a futuristic simulator do a better job of imagining me? Was he/she/it having an off day?

For more of Shurkin's article go to: Is Reality Real?

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pale blue dot

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Astronomer, professor, science author
 Carl Edward Sagan died on this date, 
20 December 1996.

When I was a kid,
seeing Sagan on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 
turned me on to the wonders of the cosmos:
all that is, ever was, and ever will be.

In 2007, I visited Sagan's grave on a hillside in Ithaca.

Six years before he died, 
 the Voyager 1 spacecraft
was on a journey that would take it 
out of our solar system.
At Sagan's suggestion, 
it looked back and took a photograph 
of lonely little Earth 
from 6 billion kilometers away. 
In the photograph, our home planet is so small (0.12 pixels) 
it appears as a barely detectable "pale blue dot."

Here's a remembrance.

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FLC book talk tonight

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In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker

December 18, 6:30 p.m.
Location: Blount Memorial Wellness Center 
220 Associates Blvd. - Alcoa, TN

Stephen Lyn Bales, an Ijams senior naturalist and author, will speak about his latest book Ghost Birds: Jim Tanner and the Quest for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, 1935-1941. 

It is the compelling story of Jim Tanner, the only ornithologist to conduct an in-depth study of the largest woodpecker to live in the United States, the legendary ghost bird of the South. Tanner’s fieldwork in the 1930s while a grad student at Cornell University provide a detailed look into the natural history of this species that may or may not be extinct.
 
Several copies of Ghost Birds have been donated by UT Press to Foothills Land Conservancy and they will be available for sale during the presentation with 100 percent of the proceeds going to FLC. They will make great holiday gifts!
 
Bales has a second book, called Natural Histories, and has also written for Smithsonian magazine and is a regular contributor to The Tennessee Conservationist magazine. Bales is also a regular speaker at Wilderness Wildlife Week and other venues.
 
For more info, please call Elise at (865) 681-8326.

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a pine out of season

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Pine Warbler (Setophaga pinus)

Pine warblers, as a rule—and such rules are often amended, bent or pushed over a cliff—spend their winters south of my location: Georgia and the Gulf Coast states. But that may be changing.

My friend, Rikki Hall, recently commented, "I hear pine warblers out of season with growing frequency. They spend a lot more time high in the canopy, so they are harder to notice, but with climate change I think yellow-rumps are losing their claim to being the only wood warbler that overwinters in our area."

So, I've been watching for pine warblers out of season.

I told birding protégé Eliot to pay attention to the pines that tower over their apartment and listen for something that sounds like a chipping sparrow—a rather robust trill with a hint of being forlorn.

Last week, she spotted and then heard one, her first. A lifer.

Canadian author, radio host and musician Alan Watt is credited with coining a popular phrase more than a decade ago to describe the social, economic and political changes in society. But it applies here as well. 

Is this part of the "New Normal?" 


- Photo by Ken Thomas 

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sapsucker rescued

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Yellow-bellied sapsucker rescued at Ijams.

More more details, go to: sapsucker.

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eye-popping, but why?

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I guess it could be said that winter weather has finally arrived in the valley. Damp and rainy, followed by cold—at the moment it's 32º—but as of yet, we've had no snow. 

At this time of the year, I think what I most enjoy are the bright red, puffed up male Northern cardinals. Against a background of brown and gray, it's virtually impossible for them go unnoticed. But why be so daring? Most other colorful male birds molt into much duller winter plumage.

Why be so bold, when only the moon, or is the sun, should shine so bright Petruchio?

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I'm nobody. Certainly not!

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Happy Birthday, Emily, born on this date, 182 years ago.

 You certainly weren't nobody!

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the (future) king's speech

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A third anniversary of note.

"For the grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.

As the President of Gabon said at a meeting I hosted last month: 'The door to our future is closing...'

This, I fear, is not an overstatement. For climate change is a risk-multiplier. It has the potential to take all the other critical issues we face as a global community and transform their severity into a cataclysm.

Reducing poverty, increasing food production, combating terrorism and sustaining economic development are all vital priorities, but it is increasingly clear how rapid climate change will make them even more difficult to address...

One final thought ... As our planet's life-support system begins to fail and our very survival as a species is brought into question, remember that our children and grandchildren will ask not what our generation said, but what it did. Let us give an answer, then, of which we can be proud."

Excerpt from a speech delivered by the English king in waiting, Charles, Prince of Wales, the heir apparent of Queen Elizabeth II, at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference at Copenhagen three years ago this week.

Considering the fascination (and loyalty) we Americans still have for the English monarchy, isn't Charles still our king in awaiting? 

Long live the king!

- For the entire speech go to: Prince Charles. 

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a golden morning

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Golden-crowned kinglet (Regulus satrapa)

One of the great joys of working at Ijams is my office window. (Windows are good for the soul no matter where they are, but ones at a nature center are especially soulful."By my Window have I for Scenery," wrote Emily Dickinson.) You never know what might appear in the trees and shrubs planted just outside.

This morning a golden-crowned kinglet fidgeted through the lowest branches of a sweetbay magnolia. (Fidget: to move about restlessly, nervously or impatiently.)

These lively little pixies are only in the valley in the winter. They nest farther north and farther upslope, in the spruce/fir forests at the highest elevations of the Great Smokies not that far from my hometown of Gatlinburg. Thus proving that migration is not always north-to-south, sometimes its high-to-low. AS to whether my bird spent its summer in Quebec or on top of old Smoky, it's hard to say.

Because kinglets are generally higher up the tree, the golden blazes on their noggins are not always easy to see, but this morning's passing was at eye-level.

Wow. What a way to start my day!

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peeping too early

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The trouble with being a male spring peeper is that your amorousness is controlled by the outside ambient temperature. If the temperature feels right, you're in the mood. (The same is true for human males except for the temperature part.) So male peepers can feel frisky any time of the year, it has nothing to do with the calendar, it's the thermometer: not too hot, not too cold, ahhhhh just right.   

We're having a lovely mild early December—perhaps yet another sign of climate change—and some male peepers have awaken from their winter torpor and are crooning for a mate. My guess is that the females are not really interested. It IS December after all and freezing weather is surely on its way. I suspect the females are smart enough to wait. 

I have read that male peepers that stir too early, run the risk of burning precious energy reserves and may starve to death when they return to their slumber before true spring arrives.

There's a lesson here somewhere, but I'll let you sort it out. Perhaps a little Johnny Mathis will help.

strutting his stuff

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Northern pintail (Anas acuta)

And speaking of ducks: pintails are beautiful. If I get to come back as a waterfowl, let's hope it's a pintail and not a Muscovy.

What did James & Bobby Purify sing? Something like, "Come on let me see you shake your tail feathers." Watch the below video. Talk about a group of males showing off for the lady. And how noncommittal and disinterested she appears to be.  I assume she'll finally choose the male with the longest tail feathers thus producing a clutch with even longer pintails. A thousand years from now, a pintail's pintails may be a foot long. 

Funny how it all works. "Here we go loop-de-loop. Shake it up baby. Here we go loop-de-lie."

Click: Pintail courtship

- Above photo by J.M. Garg

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Duck. Duck. Goose!

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Ring-necked duck (Aythya collaris)

Winter is a great time to look for feathered friends floating on local fluids. OK, maybe we carried that alliteration a bit too far, but we're taking, duck, duck, goose. Tomorrow at 2 p.m., join me at Ijams Nature Center for a look at some of the ducks and other waterfowl that can be found in winter on our local waterways. Short program inside, followed by a long walk outside. We'll visit a pond, creek, river and lake; maybe we'll get lucky. This program is free for Ijams members and $5 for non-members. Recommended for ages 12 and up. Please call (865) 577-4717, ext. 110 to register.
 

Tip: The ring-necked duck above gets its common name and Latin name, "collaris," from the ring or collar (often called a "spur") between its neck and breast but this field marking is really only discernible in good light. Instead look for the white ring around the bill.

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thanks, Panther Nation!

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One of my annual traditions is a visit with the AP Environmental Science class taught by Coach Will Roberts at Powell High School, a.k.a. Panther Nation.

The students were asked to read various parts of either of my two books: Natural Histories and Ghost Birds and be prepared to ask me questions about nature, the out-of-doors and/or conservation issues. If our environmental woes are to be fixed it'll be the bright young minds this generation has produced since the bright young minds my generation produced mucked things up even more.

For me, the visit is always a fun experience. For them? Well, it's required reading not quite as hefty as Silas Mariner.

One question broached by a student was a query about the sound of a male American toad crooning for a mate which I wrote about in my first book. Here's a link: Toad. 

Here's what a brown creeper looks like: creeper

And the sound of periodical cicadas singing: 17-year cicadas

Click these links for a look back: 

School year 2011-2012

School year 2010-2011

School year 2009-2010

Plus, we talked about bats, in particular red bats that hang upside-down and sleep out in the open which makes them look like furry cocoons dangling from trees. (They actual hibernate under the leaves on the forest floor. Now how cool is that?) Here's a photo I took at Ijams last year.

Eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis)

Thanks Coach Will and all! Go Panthers!!

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climate change?

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900 mile wide Hurricane Sandy as it passed by Florida

Four weeks ago tonight Superstorm Sandy came ashore along the coasts of New Jersey and New York and finally, finally, finally, finally to the square root of 24, the media and political leaders on both sides of the aisle are discussing climate change as though perhaps maybe it's real. (Heck, 30 percent of the population think that scientists are boogie men—and women—and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old when Jeez Louise, I have tennis shoes in the back of my closet older than that. Why, the shirt I wore to Thanksgiving is at least Ordovician in origin but the crinoids alive at the time could not be reached for comment. They're stonewalling it. Besides, doesn't it all end on December 21 because the Mayan calendar said it would? So why the rush to complete your holiday shopping? For me, Black Friday was a soak in a hot tub in the dark.)

Back on topic: Climate change. Former Vice President and fellow Tennessean Al Gore must be thinking, "Where have you guys been? I've been talking about this for 30 years."

But is it all too late? As writer James Atlas says, "Contemplating our ephemerality can be a profound experience."  

Here is his complete op/ed piece from the New York Times: Is this the end?  

It's best to hum the Doors "The End" while you are reading it.Here's a refresher: The End. 

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thanksgiving

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I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

As did I. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Thanksgiving trifecta

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Brown creeper super-sized

Watching a brown creeper work its way up the trunk of an oak is always a treat for me; the bark huggers search every little crease and crevice for a crunchy insect or spider crudité. Creepers are only in my woods in the winter, choosing to raise their families elsewhere. 

They love the biggest trees they can find and don't waste much time on the spindly ones.
 

The other day, while I was sitting on my front porch, I spotted two creepers and a yellow-bellied sapsucker on the same oak.
 

My very own November trifecta, although I never would have bet on it.
 

Here's a "cool fact" from the Cornell Lab website: "Brown Creepers burn an estimated 4–10 calories (technically, kilocalories) per day, a tiny fraction of a human’s daily intake of about 2,000 kilocalories. By eating a single spider, a creeper gains enough energy to climb nearly 200 feet vertically."
 

Happy Thanksgiving! And we all have a lot to be thankful for and often it's the little things.

For more about creeperdom, click: Creeper.

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sweet gum weaponry

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With sweet gums, "the distinctive compound fruit is hard, dry and globose, 1 to 1.5 inches in diameter, composed of numerous (40-60) capsules. Each capsule, containing one to two small seeds, has a pair of terminal spikes (for a total of 80-120 spikes). When the fruit opens and the seeds are released, each capsule is associated with a small hole (40-60 of these) in the compound fruit. Fallen, opened fruits are often abundant beneath the trees; these have been popularly nicknamed "burr balls."

OK. That's the technical definition from wiki. To me, they have always looked like spiked maces or morning stars, the flails used by knights back when hand-to-hand combat was up-close and highly brutal. But why?

I have to assume that the spikes are to protect the tree's precious seeds from birds like the seed-eating finches that have never heard of middle-age weaponry or be intimidated by such. Over the millennia, these birds have evolved their own methods of dealing with the formidable defenses; they're well equipped with pointed bills and the necessary dexterity to remove seeds from difficult places.

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postal thrush

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"In the swamp,

in secluded recesses,

A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.

Solitary, the thrush,
the hermit, withdrawn to himself, 
avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song."


- With a nod to the new Steven Spielberg movie 
about the sixteenth president, a line or two from 
When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d

an elegy written by Walt Whitman
shortly after the assassination of Lincoln in 1865.

A sure sign of the approaching winter in the south. 

Yesterday, when I returned home from work, 

a hermit thrush was waiting for me on my mailbox 

as though it had just arrived by postal carrier. 

He warbled no song and quickly flew away to the yard
beckoning me onward to my own secluded recess,
shy and hidden.

Seeing the dear migrant warmed my heart.

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natural play

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Imaginative young children enjoy natural play at Ijams. 

Go to: Fairy House Festival.

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hawk talk Saturday

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The hawk is the one on the right. 

Join me tomorrow at Ijams: Saturday, November 10, 10 a.m.

For close encounters of the feathered kind. Feathers and talons and beaks, oh my! Birds-of-prey are some of nature’s most fascinating and powerful predators. Come explore the adaptations that make them such efficient hunters. Eagles. Hawks. Owls. Vultures. Falcons. Join me and learn the tricks to identifying them quickly in the field. 

Free for Ijams members and $5 for non-members. Please call (865) 577-4717, ext. 110 to register.

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found woodcock released

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This is a first: A rehabilitated American woodcock (Scolopax minor) was released at Ijams Nature Center.

Click here for more details: Woodcock. 

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