11 March 2010, Thursday
Before PBS did a special and before the many storm chaser cable shows became so over produced that they look and sound like an episode of Survivor, there was Twister (1996) — directed by Jan de Bont and written by Michael Crichton — where weather watching appears to come with barbeque, as well it should. The movie also comes with future Oscar winners Helen Hunt and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Of course weather has its own soundtrack, but though this film, here's your motivation to either find science more exciting or add your own soundtrack to hawkwatching. Who would play you in the movie about your hawkwatch? For the soundtrack, does Van Halen still work? Before Twister, I found the movie adaptation of Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf(1983) to be very cool and true enough in its portrait of a scientist. Like Twister, this one has a good guy and a bad guy, Charles Martin Smith and Brian Dennehy, respectively. In Twister, the bad guys are the storm chasers with "corporate money" and instead of black hats, they have a fleet of glistening black trucks, vans, and SUVs. And, according to Bill Paxton's good guy character, the bad guy has all the toys but none of the instincts inherent in the gifted scientist/naturalist/hawkwatcher. No passion; no soundtrack. Science needs a soundtrack, even if it's only in your head. Going out in the field with your own music makes the day and if not in the field per se, then work out your tunes for the drive to and from. For hawkwatchers, by and large, the birds are chased to the hawkwatch by the storms. For the storm chasers, they are in high speed pursuit and I suppose that makes a movie. Here's some more Twister action and music, with maps (Oooo). 10 March 2010, Wednesday
Possibly rising to comedic levels at times, this Daily Show will feature images from the Spring '10 flight, mostly from Derby Hill at the Southeast corner of Lake Ontario NY. These are three images of the same juvenile Red-tailed
Hawk, a little distant, somewhat backlit, against a high thin cloud
cover filling in the sky as the morning wrapped up last Sunday, March
7th. The size change from left to right shows the bird getting closer,
although just
an
awful angle from my position at the kiosk. But the bird was so
black and white, devoid of any reddish tint to my eye, that I thought I'd
take a few picts and see what the bird looked like later in Photoshop. Young Redtails that give the impression of being just black and white (coloration, not an ID metaphor), are the least common juvenile plumage type from my observations in the Northeast. I'm always excited to see one. Pigment-wise, this is a bird without much reds in its browns... think mixing paint or ink, if you're over fifty; kids, think color wheel on your computer or sliding RGB tabs in Photoshop. Dial down the red. Now this bird does look deep brown, not black, with some light added using Photoshop CS4 and the exposure adjustment — this control works amazingly like adding a exposure stop right in the field with no other distortion, deterioration, or color aberration occurring from this tool... how do they do that(!). But, boy this bird is still dark, especially dorsally. To nail this bird as a juvenile-plumaged Redtail, you might be looking for the upper-wing pale panels out in the primaries. Well, it's there... technically, but it is very hard to see this on a fair number of first-year northern population birds. Once you judge the bird to be heavily pigmented, then you need to fine-tune your glimpse to pick up the two tones. On some well-marked juvenile birds — all other tells present — you can let this field mark go as undetectable, given the distant and/or condition... knowing that it is there, but not as obviously obvious as it would be on a light brown bird. On the underside, this bird has a heavy bellyband, full patagials/epaulets, nice wrist marks, and therefore a faux adult buteo line along the trailing edge, to match. BTW, an adult, or young adult RT displaying this much bellyband would in all cases have a trailing edge to the flight feathers several times wider than this bird! Plus the grayish and thinner barring in from there would be sharp-black on an older Redtail. If you saw or showed just the two back shots to someone, would they (or you for that matter) say this was a light morph buteo?! Everett Ruess, teenager, said: I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself? 9 March 2010, Tuesday
Decades later, western writers like John Nichols and Edward Abbey were fascinated by the many stories of young Ruess who vanished into the harsh light of the Utah wilderness, around Escalante, leaving behind only three years of journals, some letters and postcards, his haunting woodcuts, and the legend of a seeker. Did Master Everett lose himself in the beauty? Did he run out of time instead of place? Did he have a minor accident, but being many miles from aid, succumb to his injuries? Or was he murdered? At twenty. Everett Ruess: traveler, adventurer, or artist? Sure. He was a seeker, and that's a little different. He called himself "a vagabond for beauty" and disappeared. Winter's over and so is the book club, but I need to bring up Ruess (and a couple of books) in order to talk relevantly about the opposite of something else. I'm finding it harder and harder to explain the "sacrificial birder" concept. It's a story that's worn out its welcome with me. It's like the "four o'clock eagle." It's the stuff of old-fart hawkwatching and time to move on, but the story goes that one birder needs to leave so a good bird can be seen... "Guess what we had last Sunday after you left?" Goes the story. Out with the old; in with the new. Nowadays the seekers of beauty stay, until they want to go. They'll be back to seek some more and really-see the fleeting beauty of the hawk flight. One bird at a time and all the way through. Nothing missed here. After all, the reasons to leave your place of beauty are present and pressing all the time, but to stay, singular — the beauty. Everett Ruess is not the first wanderer for wonder and he'll not be the last. But his short life was wondrous and unfortunately (for him) an unfinished tale told in two parts by WL Rusho: a biography and ER's journals, both lavished with the strength of Ruess's woodcuts and his strong heart. Later Gibb Smith Press combined the two volumes (you can check out the woodcuts via GoogleBooks). Hints of the ramblings and fate of Ruess can be found in the books of Edward Abbey, who roamed the same territories for his life's blood. The ghost of Everett Ruess was it, until the one rumor became a story passed along by an old man. And then there were the bones, and a new story in National Geographic's Adventure Magazine. So let's chuck the many sacrificial birders and what they missed for the legend of the seeker and the quest of Everett Ruess. Maybe through his young eyes — that never grew old — we'll see, everything.
8 March 2010, Monday
While it's been in the ground and watered, the seed of legislation trying the same tactics on global warming education that worked, short-term, on evolution in the classroom — teach the controversy — are now germinating in the same states. The NYTimes put together a fair and balanced piece late last week about the bills and then comments from some of the scientists who battled the same sort of lawmaking during the days of evilution. Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist who directs the Origins
Initiative at Arizona State University and has spoken against efforts
to water down the teaching of evolution to school boards in Texas and
Ohio, described the move toward climate-change skepticism as a predictable
offshoot of creationism. Of course what defines science is that it introduces new ideas, works to prove them, and stands for challenges. What isn't science doesn't enlighten and doesn't offer new information... and that pretty much defines, by example, creationism, creationist science, and/or intelligent design... and whatever it's called next month. Need to verify that? Federal Judge John Jones, appointed by George W. Bush, just about found the one scientist who testified on behalf of intelligent design in Dover PA in contempt of science... if there were such a thing. BTW, just the one creation scientist showed up for the Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education trial. For climate scientists, a bit of regrouping is underway. Nitpicking and misdirection are not science, but they do work in politics and matters of public opinion. You know better.
5 March 2010, Friday
I was over on Thursday, March 4th, hoping for a bit of an influx of Roughlegs over and above the eleven birds I had on January 22nd. Not to be on this trip, although last year early April worked better, so I'll make another trip then. It was a sunny day, only slight filtering from the high and thin cirrus deck associated with another passing coastal system. The winds were up — N14, gusting to around 20mph — but it didn't feel that cold. Just a beautiful day... Even without a lot of birds or any particularly close
birds. One group of three Roughlegs were hunting and interacting
out of camera range but still nice to stop and watch. Five Rough-legged
Hawks, all told, plus 10 Redtails, 3 American Kestrels, 1 young Northern
Harrier, and an adult Northern Shrike today. Like several places in
the North Country, the silence can still be deafening at times on the
two Ontario
islands, so encountering five Common Ravens, having them break that,
is a wild time. Hawk food was scarce but I had three pairs of roadside Horned Larks and a single bird that was a very pale gray in flight (away). In transit: another two Redtails, 1 Roughleg, and a Bald Eagle.
4 February 2010, Thursday
Just a couple of weeks ago, I had forty (40) Red-tailed Hawks within a few acres. This happens every Winter... it's the Annual Ithaca Redtail Fest. In the Fall, there's a Beer Fest. Downtown, at this time of the year, there's a Chili fest. But on the outer reaches of the Cornell University campus [1000 acres plus], is a DEC Game Farm for raising Ring-necked Pheasants. Each and every Winter, as long as the Game Farm cheats its budget death, there will likely be a Redtail Fest. Today I don't know how many are still active around the state, but from this facility anyway, the game birds are raised, shipped out, released into NYS wildlife areas in the region, where they are promptly shot, or die shortly thereafter from stupidity. In MA, at the Barre Falls hawkwatch, pheasant hunters actually come up and ask if we'd seen where the trucks with the birds went or even exactly where they had stopped to release the birds (so the rednecks can find the ring-necks, I guess). Short of shooting fish in a barrel... well, wait, that's what this is. But I digress. At the DEC facility they talk about the 'thousands' of birds they lose annually to the hawks and owls, but the Redtails are there because the pheasants are fed grain and the grain in turn supports a very dense rodent population, which draws the Redtails. In fact, last week, I saw a young Redtail mantling prey on the ground in front of another young Redtail, one foot away from the hawks were a dozen pheasant onlookers. Nobody ran away; nobody attacked anybody. The hawk had a mouse, not a bird. Now I'm sure some predation occurs, pheasant-wise (oxymoron intended) and a nearly dead pheasant gets finished off by a hawk, but the hawks are there for the small mammals. The Game Farm is at the intersection of two country roads, Game Farm Road and Stevenson Road... the latter is also the location of the Cornell compost heap and is a gull magnet... famous for all manner of gulls including a Slaty-back in the past. Crows abound here too, having rebounded from their bout with West Nile Virus. Interesting — it's all Redtails all the time at the Game Farm, but some years a Roughleg might hunt the adjoining unfenced Cornell fields. Also for about five years there was an adult dark morph RT there! Beyond the various agricultural research areas, private working farms continue into the surrounding countryside and raptors hunt those fields, their edges, and the abandoned farmlands, as they would anywhere else.
3 March 2010, Wednesday
It's been a quiet Winter in terms of wintering raptors, but officially Spring migration is underway with the opening of many hawkwatch sites on or about March 1st. So today, I'm looking back... tomorrow, sunny Amherst Island Ontario for some Roughlegs and Snowy Owls. Web statistics show there are fair number of daily visitors and while any reader can work down page and then back in time to catch up, I've archived most posts into topics. These flow from oldest to newest: meaning, if there were a sequence of thought (who knows), it would reveal itself on that topical page. A few entries appear under more than one topic, for this reason. Some, none. Hawk•art•science orienteering and Counter Culture posts present an introduction to why I started this and give a sense of the new wave of young professional hawkwatcher-birder-banders that followed on the heels of Pete Dunne — starting with Frank Nicoletti, Jerry Liguori, Brian Sullivan. Ten Laws and 6 Axioms of Bird ID are my very own formula for originally teaching young birders about how human nature enters into the equation of applied identification (you can see why that would need a hook). Later on, I found these methods work well with adults, who are young at heart. Blending ID with theories of migration, pairings, and wintering, Redtails R Us (7 entries), Fun with Accipiters (7) and About Eagles (4) get specific. Redtails are everywhere and they are of a never ending interest to me... and I hope it's contagious (Kestrels are my thing too). For the accipiter complex, I'm not sure what I can add, but this is about their identification and our data set based on this ongoing problem. With eagles, it's all about the timing... what isn't! There are around a hundred of my own raptor images (thumbnails not included, as they duplicate), plus a few weather maps, assorted screenshots, and then there are the YouTube videos — a few of which I've made myself. This leads us into the science... I bring scientific thinking into the field of hawk identification and migration two ways: through entries in the scientific literature — Science, straight up (14); and then by way of some humor — Seinfeld Science, & other effrontery (7). In the former, it's notes from the scientific literature, but also the occasional trip to Cornell for a live presentation and report... the Raptors & Cuba (3) collection fits here too. Beginning with "The Opposite," Seinfeld Science along with Woolly Bear, Road House, and on through to OJ Simpson Science use popular media to get across some actual science, in my own way. Weather & Climate (14) is, or should be, a subject of great interest to hawkwatchers and other field biologists, but I think the information is in need of a major update... and I'm doing just that. Can't get away from the hawks, the art, or science when checking out the entries on film and books! The dozen posts found here — At the Movies (6) & in TLC's Book Club (6) — introduce books and movies I simply like, but also bear on the hawks and science. As a teacher, I've always used pop culture (including the classics) to get my point across. And last, if you haven't noticed them, I have four quotes over in the right column — from Joni Mitchell, Einstein, Thoreau, and Rachel Carson — that I like a lot and I feel are words to think by. Tomorrow: The Annual Ithaca Redtail Fest is still underway. Where else can you see forty Red-tailed Hawks perched, nearly shoulder-to-shoulder at times, on just a few acres... but why? You might think Cornell is cultivating the beasts for science, but these are free-ranging RTs. Stay tuned.
2 March 2010, Tuesday
Barry Lopez is known for a couple of big books — Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams. These are great (big) reads. Amazing, and I say required for anyone wanting to make the most of hawkwatching or any other endeavor requiring attentiveness. Before these, he penned a series of short books — each, a series of short stories. So not only are the books small, he breaks that down into smaller reads. It rains; I read. Squall line; read. Sea breeze kicks in; finished. River Notes, Desert Notes, and Winter Count are his small books. I read them and listened to them on tape. Lopez read them to me. At $2.50 a pop, I bought extras of each and gave them away. A decade later he penned Field Notes. Who wouldn't want to read a book by that title? Desert Notes has some truly devastating pieces. In my very yellow paperback edition (imaged above), I just read the titles and flash back: "Winter Herons" (snow falls at 5th Avenue & 94th), "Buffalo" (why some are white), "The Lover of Words" (he was a gardener), "The Location of the River" (it was always right here), "The Orrery" begins... North of Tucson and east, beyond Steadman, is a place hardly accessible by car call ed The Fields. I do not know how it came by this name. I was told by someone, a lifelong resident, that the name grew up after an attempt to irrigate and sell some of the land had failed, that the reference was cynical. The person who tried to sell the land was from Chicago, he said. I think I was told this because I seemed to be traveling through. Penguin Books Great Ideas hopes you might travel with Orwell (Why I Write) or Ruskin (On Art and Life). Might I suggest you take Darwin (On Natural Selection) or Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature) with you, day or night. While Barry Lopez has written whole books, Penguin provides snippets, essays, chapters, but that's okay... they work well from my sampling. I ask you: has Mary Wollstonecraft or Proust been to your hawkwatch, lately? One might extend an invitation and see.
1 March 2010, Monday "If the winter glove won’t
fit, you must acquit." Bill McKibben —recently mentioned here as the editor-compiler of American Earth (16 Feb & new book club archive)— coined this phrase and made this parallel between the trial of the (second-half of the) century and climate change denial recently. The headline is mine, but the idea for this kind of science perversion is all McKibben. In addition to his funny, if it weren't about our ongoing devastation, OJ take, he has some finer points for this science and politics discussion: Why data isn’t enough On the other hand, is the glove with one finger raised, always: US Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). If you have a Moron of the Month Club subscription then you know this guy. His one-man "It's a Hoax Tour" landed with a splat in Copenhagen. Inhofe explains it all to Grist.org and it wouldn't Inhofe Information, if it didn't contain a couple of outright factual errors. For the last word, we heard Sunday in the NYTimes from Al Gore. His lengthy op-ed covers the snow-gate issue and much more. As usual, his is a fairly calm and reasoned voice in the political wilderness. This excerpt is right near the beginning — he's just getting warmed up (pun intended). The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder
for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet
scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have
been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly
more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls
of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern
United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest
for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
26 February 2010, Friday
I once used my iPhone to tell the weather when it wasn't actually on. When off, the black surface is mirror-like and the tiniest droplets of rain has just begun falling. I saw the rain before I actually felt it. But today, let's turn the iPhone on for some weather apps useful out in the field. This is the third in a series of posts on hand and body weather, sort of... but I just really like that Dylan quote. I have just enough weather apps to get me the info I want in the field, and as I'm about to get out there... there are hundreds to choose from — as in "there's an app for that." I will use these apps on my iPhone readily, even if I'm sitting right next to my desktop computer (with the 24 inch, 2ms refresh, Samsung screen). Most of the smartphone apps are pretty things and in order to do this on the screen allotted content and details suffer. AccuWeather is an example of this. I have both their pretty app and the mobile web page on my weather screen/page. The pretty app is nice and quick and good for today and tomorrow. Sure there's a long range screen fifteen days out, but the wind in missing. AccuWeather's original mobile web page — a page with a tiny screen in mind — still works (for other smartphone users) and it has the text version of the 15-day forecast with the wind direction and speed. The apps (and mobile web pages designed for smartphone screens) all allow you to save various locations... to check the weather there, maybe for business travel or second-home owners. With this, you can track the weather forecast from many apps for several sites, easily, in a minute. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "Mmm, I like fast weather." As I mentioned, there are a lot weather and weather-related apps available. Many are free. I've paid for a couple: either $.99 or $1.99. You can find a high priced app or two for weather: like $4.99 or even $9.99... I only own one $4.99 app, and it's not for weather. I'm very happy with a combo of apps and pages that I've marked with a button (you really can't easily tell those two classes of bookmarks apart on an iPhone home screen), and they work the same for the end user — you and me.     The weather wisdom, above, is from Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965. 25 February 2010, Thursday
There's an old movie cliche where the earnest observer would lick the pad on his index finger, hold it up in the air and then know something. Cowboys did it in the face of a storm front. Occasionally, the finger gets shifted back and forth, for effect. Knowingly. I haven't seen this done on film in a very long time, but I've seen older hawkwatchers try it. It works and it doesn't work. The movie metaphor is two-fold: the character that owns the finger is also the thinker in the group, it's worked for him before and lives were saved; second, it is used to announce visually that events are about to change based on the information being gathered by the finger. Only works like that in the movies. But the cooling effect of water evaporating off your finger will tell you the wind direction at a time and place when it is too light to detect any other way! No, really. Here you are out at the hawkwatch on a day with
a wind is so light or light and variable that no one seems to be able
to size up its direction. What's the day going to be like? Is the forecast
panning out? Who knows if there will be hawks? Use your finger. I'm going to start with the assumption that you or someone else in your party knows the compass directions where you are. Now, take a second to note that your index finger is not round, but a rounded-corner rectangle. In a minute, you'll use that info to orient your finger along an axis (N-S, E-W), depending. Here we go: stick your index finger in your mouth and wet the top joint, completely (all the way around). Take it out, hold it up, orient it along a compass line, hold it still, and you have a very finely tuned wind sensor — you will feel a slight cooling effect where the wind is evaporating the moisture the fastest. And that's the direction the wind is coming from; where it is hitting the finger surface most directly. Unlike the movie finger, I usually hold my finger up in the natural and relaxed position, again: along a compass axis. I don't turn the fingerprint away from me, or aim it at the wind. Changing the compass line from the narrow to wide side of your finger will change the surface area exposure to the wind and give you differing reading due to the change in edge and long surface. Try it different ways, but always hold steady the change and feel the wind direction by way of the cooling. So, we can use sand or rocks with wave action to detect a change in the wind. We can use trees and traffic. Your finger works too. The weather wisdom, above, is from Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965.
24 February 2010, Wednesday
You may recall (ha!) a post on some of the terms for scientific principles I use with non-science, but educated, bystanders: back-ordered, outsourcing, down-sizing, and some other realms of science, like Tobacco Science — where there's never enough evidence to think and do the obvious (like for modern deniers of evolution and climate change). Now professional hawk has entered the birding mainstream. Last year, Wild Bird magazine used my little phrase to catch readers' attention by enlarging it as a call-out to an article. I'm adding a new one to my lexicon, and I'm stealing it from the Faking News site. “From time to time God reviews his creations (products), and he may decide to recall some of them after the review, which causes that particular creation (species) to go extinct. It’s tough, but it’s God’s will.” declared leading creationist Rich Hawkins, hoping that the theory will put an end to all kinds of speculations going on over dinosaur extinction. Intelligent recall is catchy. Couldn't design a better metaphor myself. One online commenter said, "Their saddles were defective, obviously." This is a reference to a creationist museum in Kentucky where visitors can view a life-sized diorama of children playing near grazing dinosaurs; where you can have your picture taken riding a saddled, bucking dino... your admission fee includes use of a cowboy hat, obviously. Full disclosure: My Nissan lineage runs unbroken from a 1976 Datsun B210 through my current '10 Nissan Versa SL. If I hadn't had a fabulous Nissan mechanic with his own garage two miles down the hill from my house in MA, I might own a Toyota today, as he's the overriding reason I didn't make the switch to a Tercel when Nissan models all kept getting bigger and less fuel efficient.
23 February 2010, Tuesday
With three new and different adult Redtails along familiar fields, the movement and/or migration is underway. Even without a sunny day, fair weather clouds, and a southerly flow for surfing, Redtails are subtly in more places around and about than just ten days ago. From a few weeks ago (27 January '10)... Slide is a lacrosse term I use to describe an opportunistic movement North, in the direction of home turf... the urge to get there is too strong to resist, and of course it's evolutionarily advantageous. Sliding, when detected, is often noted as only a few birds that weren't around yesterday, seen today, and gone tomorrow. Two of the three movers along lower Hayes Road here were adult females, the bird above being one of them. And that's also the first bird in that Tuliptree all Winter! Last year at this time, it looked like something was on sale there. This slide behavior consists of adult, or nearly so, birds; no juveniles inching up (that's what I've detected in this and other years). If you have a wintering bird or two under observation and you are familiar with their routines and perches, watch for something else: the orientation thing. I think I've seen this in Snowy Owls on Plum Island MA, a Redtail pair at Thoreau's Nine Acre Corner near Concord MA, and maybe the Boston Gyrfalcon from a few years ago. In all three situations, and my NAC pair across several years, just ahead of their departure, the birds change their habits in the last few days on their wintering grounds. Hunting around, I find birds have shifted — less than a mile — but to some bearing to the North. Whether they also take up a different roosting site, I don't know, but for part of their last days, they set up shop with this new orientation and the northerly idea in mind.
22 February 2010, Monday "You don't need a weather man Duluth hawkwatcher Bob Dylan said it (Subterranean Homesick Blues, 1965). And, hey man, it's like Dylan, man... In addition to the weather man, weather maps, online long-range forecasts, and NEXRAD the rest of the weather is what happens when you're out there, in it. Even with a hawkwatch on top of an obstruction-free bald mountain top, there is more to the wind than meets the hawkwatcher... right in the face. Even this seemingly unobstructed point of land is subject to diversions and misdirection, misleading us in our quest for migrating hawks, hawk food, and the true vector of the hawk wind. And it is a neverending source of amazement and amusement that the vast majority of hawkwatchers are utterly unaware of it at a spot on the ground they inhabit. Supposedly. The sprites that carry their tiny messages of change to those who are paying attention come in several forms. The trees speak to us; so do the waves (through their sands and pebbles). Nonsense?! Where's the science in this? Easy there, easy rider. After all, I am that material guy: the one who arrives for the hawkwatch and always has a thermometer, anemometer, clickers, pencil-paper, hats, gloves, extra binoculars etc. at the ready... and for sharing. For example. Along the Atlantic Ocean, a sea breeze is the terminal event. The reason the birds were piling up and streaming by is the edge of the land, at least until the sea breeze overtakes the land winds. Weaken the land breeze, and the sea breeze (always at the ready) will kick in. Ahead of this raptor finale and a ten degree plus drop in the temperature, there are subtle signs of this weather rapture. At Plum Island, coastal Massachusetts, even though you've been essentially at sea level within a couple hundred feet of the ocean's edge, you don't hear the ocean. The crashing of the waves does not carry to your ears because of the westerly wind blow. The wind is not drowning out the sound, it just isn't carrying it to you. But as the favorable wind wears out, here comes the sea and its sounds — the crashing waves... hear that? This happens on the Great Lakes too. At Derby Hill, for example, the rocks on the shoreclatter as each wave recedes. I'm sure you can hear it all the time right down at the base of the hill, at the inlet to the creek. But you can't hear it up the hill at the hawkwatch... until the lake breeze is coming. Away from big water, these sounds tune in an angular change in the weather. You are now seeing fronts, little ones, that aren't visible to the naked eye. On detailed weather analysis this is change at another atmospheric level and some of this shifting wind (and sound) is designated by stationary fronts, secondary line/fronts, and also know as dry lines, mostly out in Hurricane Alley. You can feel 'em, but you can't actually can't see 'em. A particular tree line that's had nothing to say all day long, maybe for many days, begins to speak up. The sound brushing by says something about a change in the wind's flightline. Now I'm not saying you know what it means even when you are aware of it. Maybe it's the end. Maybe it is the clarion call of the coming flight. A pocket of birds riding in behind and on this wind wave. Listen and watch. Take note. Fortunately, or un-, traffic is as useful an indicator of wind change as sand, rocks, and trees. As unnatural as it is — got to go with the flow. Often a distant highway or busy secondary road, one with a fairly steady stream of trucks and cars, even many miles away, will drone in and signal the true direction of the prevailing winds. Often you can't really detect the wind direction, compass-wise, because of the various obstructions that are around your site. Even a treeline nearly a mile away can twist and turn your perception of the wind's direction. No, really. With traffic, you might not hear the highway hum until the wind is strong and true from that bearing. Until a moment ago, nothing, but now, listen, there it is, and it's out of the SE, strong... just what we're waiting for (at Derby Hill for a favorable bend in the Golden Eagles on their way). With traffic, from roadways with a consistent flow, the same guys who've never heard the trees (right over there), let alone road noise, will insist you are hearing one really big truck... certainly not a weather phenomenon useful in understanding the hawk flight. This is part one of a three-part "weather in the field" series.
19 February 2010, Friday
Last Friday, February 12th, was a birthday for Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Both were born on the same date in 1809, so both were two hundred and one years old. Celebrate. Lincoln fought to bring an end to slavery and thereby hoped for an equality for all citizens, while Darwin, in his second major tome (toward the end of his life) made a biological imperative case for the equality of the sexes. This was the climatic message issued by Yale ornithologist Richard O. Prum at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology seminar last Monday night! Prum works a lot with feathers: evo-devo; color, created both chemically and physically; and Darwinian courtship display. At the electron microscope level, his work with structure of melanocytes — black and brown pigment packaging — comparing the extant and the extinct (birds and dinosaurs), lead to the recent image in the mainstream media of small dino-bird with a brown crown and striking black and white wings. Old school coloration. This amazing scientific work, not guess work, was genius at work and likely caught the eye of the MacArthur Foundation leading to Dr. Prum receiving one of their famously unrestricted grants last year. All this is a matter of teamwork for Prum and his brilliance shows up in all kinds of work on birds but also in some other fields. He works openly and generously with chemists, physicists, paleontologists, geologists... as you can see from Prum-online. Now the birder turns aesthete, a "vagabond for beauty," but way more scientific than poetic. Still the sights and sounds of this stuff came Monday night as music to the ears of this hawk, art, & science guy (me: the dull end of the knife). Building his case through the evening and in the spirit of Darwin, with great energy and intellect, Richard Prum took up the mantle of Darwin's theory of sexual selection. Both Darwin and Prum theorize that the female sexual agency — female mate choice — drives evolution, and, pilots the course of change and speciation equally with natural selection. Not frivolously and not as a less than equal partner.
18 February 2010, Thursday
Changes in body size for vertebrates are happening, but more rapidly farther North. Changes are happening primarily in higher latitudes,
where Prof. Yom-Tov has identified a pattern of birds getting smaller
and mammals getting bigger, according to most of the species he's examined.
The change, he hypothesizes, is likely a strategy for survival. Prof.
Yom-Tov, who has spent decades measuring and monitoring the body sizes
of mammals and small birds, says that these changes have been happening
more rapidly. Next, in a fairly simple study using some high tech, biologists have shown that stopover times are effected by another factor, besides the weather. While the study is pretty basic and reinforced something you might have guessed at over a couple of beers, their conclusion and therefore the reinforcing hard science is important. There are also some interesting "related stories" in a sidebar. Small migratory birds, like the garden warbler, must make stopovers on their journeys to their breeding grounds. When they have crossed extensive ecological barriers, such as deserts or oceans, they must land to replenish their fat reserves. A researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen and a team of Italian colleagues measured the duration of the stopovers made by garden warblers on an island off the Italian coast. There they observed that fat birds usually move on the night of their arrival, while thin birds interrupt their journey for an average of almost two days. Unrelated to today's sizings, but a prelude to tomorrow — Sean B. Carroll had a very nice birthday card to Darwin in Tuesday's Science section of the NYTimes. Darwin and Lincoln both were born on February 12, 1809, did you know? Dr. Carroll's piece is about a slightly younger man, Henry Walter Bates, who upon reading Darwin's Origin of the Species realized his own explorations and collections supported Darwin's theory in a new way. Bates wrote to Darwin: "I think I have got a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species." He was referring to mimicry. When Bates published his idea, significant enough to be known to this day as Batesian mimicry, Darwin wrote back to say it was, “one of the most remarkable and admirable papers I ever read in my life.” Stay tuned.
17 February 2010, Wednesday
In Roddy Herrington's 1989 modern western, Road House, there's a reoccurring joke about the hero of his tale — the best bouncer in the club business, bar none... that he seems kind of small for his line of work. The late great Patrick Swayze stars in a film full of characters from the Wild West, we've got: Dalton, Red, Doc, Wade Garrett, Cody, Emmett, and Brad Wesley. This preconception about Dalton proves fatal to the bad guys. In observational science, a misconception about a species occurrence, in a place where it ain't, causes more sightings and can become ingrained in the culture or tribe. The solution is not just to correct an ID, but to explain why this is a myth in the locale, state, region, season. With hawkwatching, top-down feedback (and corrections) are not part of the culture. In fact it is actively discouraged, except for those who pass on the myths. Recently two separate Broadwing reports were online from the Maritimes. Now in the past, there have been juvenile BWs lingering up there... more so than other locations along that parallel: the geography for this makes sense. It's a catch for birds that have dispersed earlier, late Summer into Fall. To paraphrase another and better-known Swayze move, "Nobody puts Broadwing in a corner,' might actually be true in the Maritimes. But not for long, as these birds either move on or die. We don't know if they make it through to the Christmas Bird Count period or are other species incorrectly thought to be some BW lingering? Current events: images of the bird in Nova Scotia were not of a Broadwing, and, the discussions that followed were not just about buteo ID. There was a cancer cluster of dark Broadwings in New England, until the source moved away; Goshawks were regularly reported in Spring on the outer Cape, until some feedback in terms of numbers from surrounding coastal sites were offered; Golden Eagles (adults!) were an annual September migrant at a New Hampshire hawkwatch until an onsite (respectful) discussion occurred. Legends, ghosts and myths crop up in an area and boy can they linger and be practiced as Road House Science. We're initially (of course) working in some Laws of Birding to make the first, or second wrong ID. But after that it is word of mouth that perpetuates and ingrains this stuff — setting in place the preconception. Think of it like an unwritten protocol, the opposite of Discount Hawkwatching (see Redtails R Us archive, 5 January '10). There's a longer Road House clip online expanding the scene above to include another famous quote, "Pain don't hurt." We also find out that Dalton has a degree in philosophy from NYU... just a great, bad time at the movies. 16 February 2010, Tuesday
Hal Borland, along with Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch and many other like-named old boys of natural history wrote about walking along a country road or seeing a million Snow Geese at sunset back in the fifties. Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey came along just a little later. While Mary Austin, Thoreau, Emerson and John Burroughs were more turn of the century (comma twentieth). Borland samples them and many others with his reader in mind, maybe sitting across a heavy wooden table at a Connecticut country store and post office. An anthology like Our Natural World is a big book containing a lot of smaller books, actually excerpts, therefore a sampler. Think chocolates... the really really good ones. How else will you know that you want to invest in a quarter pound of the ones with the toffee nougat center, and another measure of the just solid milk chocolate ones (square with the sharp sides... until they start to melt, in your mouth), or Mornings in Mexico by DH Lawrence. A couple of decades later I bought the small but hardy Sierra Club paperback, Words for the the Wild, containing some portable writings from John Muir (of course), but also Joseph LeConte, Isabella Bird, Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner, plus most of the authors listed above. Bill McKibben's American Earth came out last year and it is a dangerous book. Do not drop it on anyone's foot: you are warned. Post warning: this book contains a very nice sampling of earthy writings, and may lead to a lot of trips to the library, or Amazon.com for whole books. Or maybe a small book emporium known only to a few, and invisible to many. In addition to all or most of the above, McKibben adds a bit of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons — a seminal pre-Earth Day essay on personal responsibility, a commencement address by Stephanie Mills to post-Earth Day bright-eyed bushy-tailed seniors, and the absolutely amazing nature-journalism account of a mass whale stranding by Barry Lopez with the chilling headline: A Presentation of Whales. Having an anthology of some sort on your shelf is as necessary a draw for any birder or biologist as strong southerly winds or a chorus of spring peepers. 15 February 2010, Monday
Predicting the very best conditions for a hawk flight is exactly the same as for optimal big wave surfing. When the lifeguards raise the black flags, it is a warning... and a welcome. For the elite surfers coming to Hawaii from all corners (shores) of the world for the Eddie Aikai big wave contest the combo of speed, fetch, and duration is as tantalizing as a Huntington Beach fish taco... been there, done that. A strong front, with no other weather in its way, traveling across the Northeast landmass picks up a lot of hawks along the way. The key to great macroweather conditions is understanding wave theory. Watching the weather, like you watch hawks — pick up the object of your interest as far away as humanly possible and follow it in. Identifying the rarest thing at the greatest distance gives you the longest time to study, learn, and enjoy. According to my wave theory, you are looking for the same kind of big wave conditions the surfers look for, but for hawkwatchers we want (Spring example): a strong cold front with good winds and long North-South length; we want this front moving unobstructed and with a clear path, hundreds of miles in advance of it; and this in turn sets up a full day and often two of pre-frontal conditions with a ton of birds that read just what we did. In the Fall, hawkwatchers in the Northeast want the front to clear quickly and cleanly: analogous to Spring where you want a clear path ahead, in the Fall you don't want trailing/secondary fronts sending mixed signals to the raptors as they choose a wave to ride South. Mitigating factors — other weather — are the kiss of death to a great hawkfight. In the Spring, multiple dry lines, or warm fronts, preceding your big weather maker is not good as it weakens the pressure gradient which sustains the wind fetch. Without this the waves are for the tourists... for hawkwatchers, these are the folks who want to know where the hawks are today. Over the last twenty years, at Derby Hill, we're seeing more warm fronts, split lows, and the low center themselves taking a more southerly track. This effects the wind strength out ahead of a Spring front, setting up weaker conditions that can quickly and more consistently allow a lake breeze (Great Lakes) or a sea breeze (Atlantic Ocean) to kick in and ruin a good flight at the hawkwatch. As always though, hawks don't need the wind... hawkwatchers do. In the Fall, weather, winds, and the pressure gradient are mitigated (weakened) by a more frequent and early tropical storm season. Again, lots of little weather systems in between the fronts waters down the weather. And all this is not the result of better weather mapping, although you see more now on a forecast map. Those of us who have watched weather, both on maps and out in it, have observed this. Bob Dylan said it, "Things have changed." PBS Nature had an episode in 2006, Condition Black, about the 1998 "storm of the century" style weather pattern for big wave riders — that's where the excerpt above comes from. I also put a longer version on YouTube that repeats this clip and continues the discussion by adding in bottom conditions that make certain beaches the very best for big wave surfing, when the best weather comes. Hawkwatchers will see another common thread.
12 February 2010, Friday
In Californication, Hank Moody advises, "Check yourself, before you wreck yourself." (Showtime, David Duchovny). There's some irony there. I can't remember the last time — but it's been a very long time — since I entered the Owl Woods on Amherst Island, off Kingston Ontario. I just don't go in there, even if I'm the only one around that end of the island. Can't do it. An email to Ontario birders and others who check for info, might also be titled, "Horse gone somewhere, please close barn door now." This message is so old that it used to be the announcement on the KFN rare bird line, when birders got their information that way. Nobody got the message, apparently. Subject: Amherst Island's-Owl Woods new rules And rules to live by, anywhere.
11 February 2010, Thursday
Nice looking adult Redtails, but not many of them (7). Not especially close either. I was hoping for more sun than I got and was not expecting lake effect. For some unknown reason there was the occasional southerly flow kicking a light snowfall where I was... still Winter. And while it's "still Winter" there are a few things yet to be seen.
When you search for the name of the February full moon, Hunger Moon is no longer a name you can find easily; certainly not the name with the best marketing department.
10 February 2010, Wednesday Of course it is, and well it should be. Whether it's a concert pianist, professional athlete or professional hawk, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A hawk is not the summation of talons, powerful eyes, wings on soar... it is more, whole, and because it is not less than us, equal partner. In wars ancient, and modern religions, it is important to make others less than us so we can either conquer or utilize them. More and more studies are showing us that this just doesn't have any basis in fact/science. Got to love a bat study with "zen" in the title. That's what I'm talkin' about. And the photo with the article's release statement is worth the click. The art and science of bats, and probably all other hunters is examined through a simple study with high tech tools. These bats emit paired clicking sounds and the researchers found that the sonar beam created by each click alternated to the left and right of a target. This alternating pattern effectively directed the inside edge, or maximum slope, of each sonar beam onto the target. As a result, any change in the relative position of the target to the bat reflected that large sonar edge back at the bat, delivering the largest possible change in echo intensity. Seen any great tits lately? GoogleSafeSearch had reset itself this morning (to ExtraCensorshipMode... my term) and it took a couple of minutes of banging around to get search results for this species because of the its name. An impressive genetics study of Parus major looks into personalities and therefore behavior and adaptation, within but beyond this little chickadee. This stuff of behavior is more than just learned and lost (with an individual or within a family etc. that would be the case, where it not encoded... in advance). Gene variation is the reason that some great tit populations are more curious than others. In humans and animals alike, individuals differ in sets of traits that we usually refer to as personality. An important part of the individual difference in personality is due to variation in the underlying genes. One gene, the dopamine receptor D4 gene, however, is known to influence novelty seeking and exploration behavior in a range of species, including humans and birds. In both of these studies, and many more lately, we see our affinities to all life expressed through our DNA across space and time.
9 February 2010, Tuesday
Our play (and practice) for macroweather involves getting to know the pattern of the weather's flight across the continent. Any weather map of North America will do, but I recommend you start by follow weather on as many maps as you can find... and you'll notice similarities but differences too: for any given day, over a few days as a system migrates our way, and you'll also see one low pressure system become two... or more and then maybe none. Front lines — cold, warm, stationary — appear, disappear and morph. They are as different as they are the same. Play at seeing that. If weather can't be predicted a couple of days out, while look it from every angle for a week or more? Because we are not interested in doorstep weather. We are looking at the big picture and looking to see what kinds of systems and patterns of systems are on the move, and maybe the hawks along with. At this point, the disclaimer: this blog entry should be confused or equated with a book or course in meteorology... which may or may not be of any help figuring out the movements of hawks, migration or dispersal. There are however several companion pieces on my view of weather watching, a gathering storm or not. Weather mapping has added a ton of technology over the forty years of modern hawkwatching, but the weather model in the hawkwatchers' mind hasn't changed much. These days, I use my iPhone for long-range weather watching, but I subscribed to Accuweather Premium for several years ($79/year). There's a free thirty day trial. Of course you can find five, seven, ten and fifteen day forecasts desktop weather for free. But I want my forecast with wind direction on top. Click on the old-school NOAA continental view above and you can see a week plus page from Weather Underground... a bit clunky, confusing but with wind, several days out. Things will likely change, but you'll know that, adjust, anticipate, react smartly... this could be a martial arts class, as I say the same things there. What are we trying to get an internal (core) feeling about here? After the hawks have been counted, your sense of the weather and the birds will be one. Don't take my word for this, or anything else as I've said many times before here and in the field: use your favorite maps and long-range forecasts to watch the weather like you'd watch a hawk. BTW, I have used macroweather through long-range weather forecasting as a pretty good predictor of weather & specific species/flights including Mississippi Kite flights on outer Cape Cod!
8 February 2010, Monday
The Academy Awards nominations are out and The Cove is already odds-on to win in Best Documentary. A preview and an entry about that little film is online here with some other film notes. Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival is a wrap and is sort of the opposite of the Oscars, as it gives cinephiles (like me) movies to watch for during the coming year! Grist.org attended to scout out the latest environmental films in show. In addition to brief write-ups, they've gathered up the previews to give us a hint of the content. Now, be advised, from someone who sees his share of the inspiration and the confusion in the arena of documentaries: they are all over the map, both in locale and in quality. Hopefully though, chosen for Sundance means we at least have one filter applied. Films like Frozen River (2008), a fictional slice of life from the Mohawk Nation that straddles the St. Lawrence River in NY and Quebec, while not a documentary, has its earthtones and came out of Sundance a year ago with all the proper Buzz, played around and is now on DVD. If you like that one, try and find Powwow Highway (1989). Twenty+ years old and it still works as a contemporary Earth legend, told by a three hundred pound Sioux. Enjoy.
5 February 2010, Friday
I had coffee yesterday morning with two visiting MD's from China (mainland) who are on staff at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse for four months. This is their last week in the US. Over the course of an hour our topics included the lack of Chinese food in CNY (compared to SF and Boston, well), state quarters (commemorative 25 cent pieces), North American obesity (a surprise for them), food as medicine, acupuncture, and the liver pulse... because mostly, we had gotten together to talk about the state of Tai Chi and Eastern medicine in the US. An odd connection? I'd taught Tai Chi for a year for members of the Greater Boston Chinese Cultural Association, and another dozen at the Cambridge Center in Harvard Square, and then... six degrees of separation. At medical schools in China, there is coursework in the subject of Eastern medicine, but only a cursory introduction. An orthopedic specialist, one doctor associates with new students from a school for this at his hospital... a cursory introduction to Western medicine for those practitioners! Kind of like here with bedside manner and preventative care. The more we talked, the more he began to realize his own disconnect. Each time he referred to reading about chi or how it was a philosophy one could understand by thinking, I worked in a thread about practicing it... with your body (less mind). At one point the other doctor, a woman, dove in (I'd actually forgotten she was there, and failed to compensate in the conversation for the cultural bias... read, her silence in between two men). You see, her family's sir name is Yang — a famous family in the history of Tai Chi Chuan. She had no Tai Chi experience herself, but had a bit more knowledge bases on her heritage. She recognized my line of discussion, just burst into the conversation with both hands and arms moving, and made a reference to Tai Chi "play"... as the more direct translation of "practice." I introduce this word myself later on in classes with Western students, but avoid it early on because it just doesn't work well. After a little success in a Tai Chi course — meaning mind and body feeling happy on the way home — I find "play" comes across better, later. So here we in Starbucks and its getting physical... let's play. To break out of mind and into body, I only did things I would do in a class to minimize the talk... and maybe the language barrier too. Weather play. The practice of weather is different, from watching the weather, for: pilots, storm chasers, surfers and hawkwatchers (toss in the esoterica that is seawatching, etc.). You would hope: hawkwatchers. But I find I can only talk serious weathertalk with a handful of hawkwatchers, either in the field or online about weather — past, present, future. They seem to know the words but not the language. And language —the nuance of culture — is borne out of everyday practice/play... meaning, finding joy. Otherwise it's work, isn't it? Weather play involves long-range weather watching: and that's macroweather. Everything else? That's what I label doorstep weather and that's all work and no play, plus, leaves you feeling unsatisfied, tired, and listless (ha!). I use my iPhone so much now for weather, both short- and long-range, that I'm having to really to dig around, both the web and in my mind, for some current desktop links for macroweather practice. Stay tuned. [Got seriously distracted for a couple of days during the week in pursuit of a new hawkmobile (previous vehicle at 200K miles and that's enough). I was doing fine, until Friday, when I constructed this post, looked it over for its content, self-approved it, and then failed to actually upload it! A key step in the internet viewing process.]
4 February 2010, Thursday
On the surface, this classic Monty Python skit from 1969 is about a man trying to return a parrot to a pet shop. His interaction with the man behind the counter slowly but surely escalates from a mere description of the situation and a request for a refund to a universal scene we've all been involved in at this scale or another (or maybe wished we had been). Was the parrot dead or was it alive when it left the shop and does that shift the sands? The thing works so well because of the shifting arguments and logic employed, or unemployed. It is apparently easy for a clerk (or ____________) to ignore the facts in favor of what best suites them: their personal, intellectual, organizational, governmental, or corporate agenda (in that exact hierarchical order... of who runs the world). That any one person can change the world is certainly true, but the ease of this act, for any individual, is very great. When this story of our own power comes to us at various stages of our lives, it comes with the proviso that if you're right in your quest, then change should come with some ease. Of course that's not true. I lined up way too many excerpts from email exchanges and discussions in the field that I've had in the past and even this week to illustrate this back and forth toward change, through seems like a process I call Dead Parrot Science, but I think Michael Palin and John Cleese have it covered. Sometimes you have to rewind and replay this skit of yours a few times... okay, over and over and over to make any headway, but what else have you got going on?
3 February 2010, Wednesday
A hundred years before Darwin's time, it was the natural world according to Gilbert White. He was the Man (gentle-), and in the 1700's, observations from his country gardenside, nearby paths and other cultivations were our observations... having cultivated our place in our world as: us and them, with us doing all the thinking and speaking, not always in that order. By the midpoints of these two centuries, things changed: White to Charles Darwin. But things change back and forth, even today, depending on who you're talking to about what, in the world we live in. Oh, did I mention this is just about the best little book I've read in many many years? It is, because it puts things in perspective... there's that word again. Klinkenborg is a master writer, and would need to be to pull off the shell game he's set up for himself (and his reader): that of retooling Gilbert White's A Natural History of Selborne into another history, via White's own words (and even receipts), told to us by Timothy, who turns out is actually a she-turtle... due to the state of men and/or their science in seventeen and something or other. All I can say is go over to Amazon.com, start reading, and see if it draws you in as quickly as it did me: standing in the River's End Bookstore in Oswego NY... after a day's hawkwatching.
2 February 2010, Tuesday But how do they taste? I think we'll leave that question for a panel of hawks and owls, meeting in a few months at a five-star forest near you. In a study just released last week and conducted mainly in migration-rich New Jersey, biologists now think that birds experience their flyways by the various scents along the way. They learn this though over the course of the first journey. Birds largely rely on their sense of smell to navigate
on their long migration routes. Indeed, the “third sense” has
been shown to be a more important for them than orientation based on
the sun and the earth’s magnetic field. Exactly how birds navigate
on their migration routes has not yet been fully clarified. How does
a bird develop an “internal map”? How does it find its
way back to last year’s nest? On the ancient side of things, it might be interesting to consider the long history of the migratory story. Both dragonflies and birds seem to follow the same rules. "The dragonflies' routes have showed distinct stopover and migration days, just as the birds' did," said Wikelski, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "Additionally, groups of both birds and dragonflies did not migrate on very windy days and only moved after two successive nights of falling temperatures. We saw other similarities as well, which makes us wonder just how far back in Earth's history the rules for migration were established in its animals." Another ancient biological event, the virgin birth, might now be more believable to the non-believers... if they know that sharks can pull it off (or is it out). On the other hand, here's another case for the evolutionary unnecessity of another appendage, the male of the species. Plants have figured it out too. There's a nifty little clip of foodite Michael Pollan talking real food with Oprah online over at Grist. And hoping this fast food quickie posting is fun, if not nourishing, I have a couple of longer weather-related ones in the works. Plus, I finally think I figured out why my all-time favorite Monty Python skit just gets funnier over the years... Dead Parrot Science — coming soon.
1 February 2010, Monday
But first, the movie. Inglourious Basterds was the best film I saw in 2009! Ranks right up there on most critics' lists and is a certain Oscar best picture nominee (in the expanded field of ten). Combine that with the best film IMO of the decade just concluded: Q's Kill Bill Vols 1&2, and you get the picture. Basterds is a WWII film about these hunters that get the ultimate prey in their sights and make the kill. Okay, he's rewritten a little history, but Tarantino does what moviemakers do all the time. Adjust things. As Roger Ebert says, the last thing you want see up front when a movies starts is, "Based on a true story." Read: "Well, we found out while making this film, the truth can be kind of dull, let us now show you just how uninteresting." So... in this case he turns the large knob, but he's a great fan of cinema too, and I'm always down for whatever he'd got in mind... I remember seeing his Pulp Fiction in '94: as vivid a memory as if it were yesterday's Merlin. Like Pulp Fiction, there is action, but there are also his abnormally long and intricate monologues and dialogues that are primo in this one (Q's both writer and director for his signature projects). Visually he knows movies, and knows how to honor the tried and true. In this one, he creates a situation where a number of the characters — good and bad — have all descended a narrow stairway into a cellar pub with no other way out, he has one of this lot comment, "Who would pick such a place, tactically, for a meeting... there's no way out," then he slows down the fuse time with some talk knowing this is a no-win... chaos and body count, to follow. I saw this in a theater, and while it should reappear, the DVD will work for you. Just standing around at Cape May, with not much going (20 Peregrines, maybe 10 Merlins, and only fifty Cooper's Hawks, etc.), when up the stairs comes a civilian, a big fish from a small pond/hilltop, asking the basterds in the corner where they would go to watch hawks... anywhere he added, then on he goes some more attempting to answer his own question with Texas, Veracruz, exotic door number 3. Silence, with frosting. Then, like a temple bell, "Duluth" from the alpha (Ligouri), and the basterds went all low-tones and nodding while the tourist looked very very puzzled, wondering off. See, the inglourious basterds want the other thing. Not to be different, necessarily, but out of a need for the thing. Let everyone else go for the warm moist zephyrs and a million hawks, we'll veer North, and find a nook, or better a cranny, and wait for it. Goshawk, adult; Golden on an updraft, close, too close to take the shot; maybe something in a dark morph.
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