If you can't see the photos...

...I'm working on resolving that, but I don't have a fix yet. There's a problem with the name server for all my web sites and I think it's an easy fix, but I can't fix it myself. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.

Friday Bird Blogging: Rare Rufous Hummingbird Sighting

It's fairly uncommon to see a rufous hummingbird on the east coast, though they are known to stop over at feeders on occasion. This one, apparently, had been stopping at a woman's feeders for two weeks. She agreed to let someone post directions to her house on the New Hampshire bird group. We took a visit out on the first day we had available and it was only a few minutes before it showed itself. We sat on this very nice woman's deck for half an hour or so, taking pictures and watching the bird as it came by multiple times. Not bad for a first ever sighting.


A couple interesting facts about the rufous hummingbird, per Cornell:

1. the Rufous Hummingbird makes one of the longest migratory journeys of any bird in the world, as measured by body size. Its 3,900 mi (6,276 km) movement from Alaska to Mexico is equivalent to 784,500 body lengths. In comparison, the 11,185 mi (18,000 km) flight of the Arctic Tern is only 514,286 body lengths.
   
   
2. The Rufous Hummingbird has an excellent memory for location, no doubt assisting it to find flowers from day to day, or even from year to year. Some birds have been seen returning from migration and investigating where a feeder was the previous year, even though the feeder was currently absent.

All five of my rufous photos can be seen here

Employment Non-Discrimination Act In Danger

I originally posted this to Vermont's Green Mountain Daily.  I thought it might be relevant to post it here, with some additional comments in light of the recent discussions on ENDA.  I'll be adding the additional comments at the end:

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It's funny; in Southeastern Vermont, I can't think of a single time I had a problem connected with my sexual orientation.  It's difficult to tell, however.  It's not like I'll know if I got turned down from a job for being queer vs. some other factor.  And I'm sure that I've had students who have a problem with it.  But, still... it's never really been a problem for me in any way I can perceive.  And yet, clearly, it's still a fairly big problem in Vermont, in ways that honestly surprise me.  Maybe it's more common in different areas, or maybe it's just something that I see as so completely ridiculous to hassle someone about that it just goes right over my head these days.

It's not like I don't know what the dehumanization is like.  I remember college, and being harassed almost daily, with people coming by at all hours of the night to leave nasty notes on my door and sometimes just to bang on my door so I couldn't get any sleep, and I remember the administration completely ignoring it at the time, hoping it, and probably I, would just go away.  I remember one time being harassed by a guy on the street and being scared for my life because I wasn't sure where I could go to get away from him fast enough.  I remember having been threatened by another student once and absolutely nothing happening to stop it, even though the administration said they'd back me up if I filed a complaint.  But these things happened a long time ago, in another place and another time.

I guess I just don't feel that way living here.  In Vermont, I feel comfortable that I won't get harassed or hassled.  While I'm sure homophobia exists here, it's not my experience that it's a problem.  The Burlington Free Press, however, reports on some fairly nasty stuff.

Rachel Rosenberg knows what it's like to feel dehumanized.

The transgender-identified University of Vermont student, who prefers male pronouns but still uses his birth name, says he has been barked at while walking with his partner on campus and has endured so many instances of sexually explicit harassment, it's hard for him to keep track of it anymore.

Rosenberg, 20, came to Vermont from New York because of UVM's reputation of being an inclusive place for sexual minorities. But after just a couple of months on campus, Rosenberg realized that the student body and the Burlington community do not necessarily subscribe to the same ideas of tolerance and inclusion that UVM as an institution does.

What Rosenberg learned about the university community was what many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Vermonters have known about the state for a long time. While Vermont as an institution seeks to promote tolerance and acceptance through policies such as civil unions and same-sex adoption, the community as a whole has a long way to go toward fostering an environment that is safe and welcoming for LGBT Vermonters.

On the books, Vermont does look really good.  But having something on the books is not the same as enforcing it, and having a school which has good principles is not the same as having good communication about those principles.

Allowing kids to get away with harassing lgbt kids isn't really acceptable and I think UVM needs to step up to the plate here and see what they can do to support these kids who are getting harassed and to curtail the harassment that does exist. 

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To tie this into current events on a national level: I think it's important to keep in mind how tenuous feeling safe can be.  Vermont's got some great laws on the books, but those laws only get you so far.  If we make it clear to the powers that be that we can easily be divided up while scrambling for the morsels that come with national non-discrimination laws, we're completely screwed.  Non-discrimination laws are great but they need enforcement and they need community support in order to have any real meaning.  Being willing to throw some of us under the bus for the sake of a victory here just isn't worth it.

Eric Staller and Early Inspiration

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I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first saw photos from Eric Staller, but I remember that they got my mind racing. It took me at least a decade to realize how much I'd learned from that brief experience with his work, but it stuck with me.

Staller's work makes use of how film handles light, letting it propagate over long periods of time while he moves through the view using light to imprint on the film. The above image, Poseidon, is one of my favorites. This image is from 1979 and is a pure image: Staller captured exactly what appeared in film here. The one below, I love as well:

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I've done a lot of work with long-exposure and night photography, but to this day none of it is what Staller tried to do. I take pictures of events as they occur, capturing the light that is involved in the scene. Staller would do this, but then add his own light through a variety of methods. This was truly transformational. Not only did he do what many of us know how to do: capture light over a period of time, but he used that technique to build his own light shows, going beyond the naturally occurring events and moving into something else entirely.

When I rediscovered his work a few months ago (it's amazing what you can find on the internet), I learned that his work encompassed arenas considerably beyond that of photography. His designs include gigantic interactive sculptures and what he calls "Urban UFOs." Those UFO's are light sculptures, such as Roly-Poly, a globe with constantly moving lights which surround the rider of a personal vehicle of some sort or Bubbleheads, which you sort of have to see to understand.

There's something heady about rediscovering an artist you'd seen decades before, not even having remembered his name but knowing that, to some small degree, he's one of your original creative inspirations.

What I especially appreciate is refinding this artist years later and discovering that he's not only still doing work, but he's doing work that's politically progressive and anti-establishment as ever and hasn't turned out to be some sort of enormous let down. His work continues to make social commentary and is very strongly anti-war and pro-human. It's something I'm glad to see.

Check out either of his websites. EricStaller.com is an online gallery. Out of My Mind is his web storefront, where there are all sorts of weird and wonderful things, including his book, which gives a lot of detail on his techniques and history as an artist.

Opposing Same Sex Marriage, for the Kids!

Pam Spaulding just posted about a piece from Christian News Wire with five "reasons" that same-sex marriage is bad for kids. Just to keep things honest, I wrote up a rebuttal to the wingnut idiocy that is Trayce Hansen

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One at a time:

...mother-love and father-love--though equally important--are qualitatively different and produce distinct parent-child attachments. Specifically, it's the combination of the unconditional-leaning love of a mother and the conditional-leaning love of a father that's essential to a child's development. Either of these forms of love without the other can be problematic. What a child needs is the complementary balance the two types of parental love and attachment provide.

"mother love" and "father love" are fabricated concepts. They're this woman's assumptions about how mothers and fathers form attachments, yet she presents no evidence to support these assumptions. Even if she's right about a child needing that combination of the two types of love, there's no evidence that women are incapable of conditional-leaning love or that men are incapable of unconditional-leaning love.

...children progress through predictable developmental stages. Some stages require more from a mother, while others require more from a father. For example, during infancy, babies of both sexes tend to do better in the care of their mother. Mothers are more attuned to the subtle needs of their infants and thus are more appropriately responsive. Fathers are generally needed later when they play a restraining role in the lives of their children. They restrain sons from acting out antisocially and daughters from acting out sexually. When there's no father to perform this function, a boy is more likely to become delinquent and incarcerated and a girl is more likely to become promiscuous and pregnant.

This is, again founded on that same assumption about parental behavior, making assumptions about gender roles which do not necessarily play out in reality.

Third, boys and girls need an opposite-sexed parent to help them moderate their own gender-linked inclinations. As example, boys generally embrace reason over emotion, rules over relationships, risk-taking over caution, and standards over compassion, while girls generally embrace the reverse. An opposite-sexed parent helps a child keep his or her own natural proclivities in check by teaching--verbally and nonverbally--the worth of the opposing tendencies.

Once again, she's working with assumptions here and, more importantly, presenting no evidence that there's anything worth with girls adapting behavior she associates with boys or vice versa. That's because children are individuals and that even if (and I'm not saying it's true) most girls tend to be interested in emotion over reason and caution over risk-taking, that doesn't mean that girls who don't exhibit those behaviors have problems. What she's trying to do here is to pathologize human behavior and she's doing a piss-poor job of it.

Fourth, same-sex marriage will increase sexual confusion and sexual experimentation by implying all choices are equally acceptable and desirable. So, even children from traditional homes--influenced by the all-sexual-options-are-equal message--will grow up thinking it doesn?t matter whom one relates to sexually or marries. Holding such a belief will lead some--if not many--impressionable young people to consider sexual and marital arrangements they never would have contemplated previously. And children from homosexual families, who are already more likely to experiment sexually, would do so to a greater extent, because not only was non-traditional sexuality role-modeled by their parents, it was also approved by their society.

This is a common tactic of the right: make assumptions about the cause of sexual orientation and then extract an argument based on it. Of course, this is entirely absurd. No one's demonstrated any evidence that children raised by same-sex couples are more sexually experimental than those raised by non-same sex couples. Furthermore, if a child is gay, it's probably a lot healthier to for that child to have adult role models who can demonstrate that being gay is not the end of the world.

This, of course, is really the point of pieces like this: having gays walk around proud is dangerous because it will suggest to other gay people that there's nothing wrong with them. The horror!

Anyway...

Human sexuality is pliant. Consider ancient Greece or Rome--among other early civilizations--where male homosexuality and bisexuality were nearly ubiquitous. This was not so because most of those men were born with a "gay gene," rather it was because homosexuality was condoned by those societies. That which a society sanctions, it gets more of.

So... what she's saying is that it is natural for people to be gay? That unless we have an iron fist determined to block gay at every turn, that a whole bunch of people who wouldn't otherwise be gay would suddenly start acting all gay? I know a lot of women who would really like to be attracted to women and not men because they think it would make their life easier (I'm not even going to try to explain this) but none of them seem to be able to actually find themselves attracted to women.

And fifth, if society permits same-sex marriage, it also will have to allow other types of marriage.

Right. Because it always goes in that direction. If you allow men to sleep together, then you have to allow goats to sleep with cats. If you allow same-sex couples, you have to allow Rick Santorum to have sex with a dog. If you allow allow women to have sex with one another, you have to allow the lion and the lamb to lie down together and... hmm... never mind that last bit. I think God's given the OK on that one.

Sorry, I can only read so much of this stuff before I get punchy.

Friday Bird Blogging: Red-Breasted Nuthatch

Red-breasted nuthatches are smaller than the white-breasted, with a very clear black band across the eye and, as their name suggests, come with strong red across their chest. The White-breasted variety also have red on their chest, but it's broken red with lots of white mixed in. The red-breasted are much more vivid and clear.

Red-breasted nuthatches are one of those birds we hear about from time to time that uses tools. Per Cornell:

The Red-breasted Nuthatch applies sticky conifer resin globules to the entrance of its nest hole. It may carry the resin in its bill or on pieces of bark that it uses as an applicator. The male puts the resin primarily around the outside of the hole while the female puts it around the inside. The resin may help to keep out predators or competitors. The nuthatch avoids the resin by diving directly through the hole.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of them throughout the winter.

I thoroughly approve

Friday Bird Blogging: The Dunlin

In the summer, this bird is much more dramatic looking, with sharply contrasting red and black across the wings and a large black belly spot. In winter, it's much more subdued, as shown in the picture here. This medium-sized shorebird (6-9" long) can be spotted by its very round appearance, combined with a long, downturned, beak.

Last weekend marked one of my best opportunities to photograph a group of Dunlin. They were sleeping and feeding about 20 feet away, and the picture shown was the result.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Magnolia Warbler

Per Cornell:

The name of the species was coined in 1810 by Alexander Wilson, who collected a specimen from a magnolia tree in Mississippi. He actually used the English name "Black-and-yellow Warbler" and used "magnolia" for the Latin species name, which became the common name over time.

My first encounter with a Magnolia Warbler was at Parker River, when it was one of many warblers that we encountered in a fallout (when large groups of warblers pause together during migration). The next year, I got much better looks at them-- finding one this Spring in Maine and then again a couple weeks ago closed to home at Herrick's Cove in Bellows Falls. These are tiny birds (4-5"), and not at all easy to photograph, but when they do make themselves visible, they can provide for some really nice pictures.

Friday Bird Blogging: Confusing Fall Warblers

Warblers aren't all that difficult to ID in the Spring. Their markings tend to be clear and distinct, and though some are a little tricky, most of them are easy with practice. But in the fall, you're dealing with juveniles, fall plumage, and lots of other confusing markers. This bird in particular gave me a real headache figuring out. None of its markings quite seemed to match what I was looking at in the books.

As it turns out, it's a Pine Warbler. It's also the first one I've ever photographed, which is kind of cool. In Spring, these birds are much more clearly defined; sort of like a goldfinch with stronger wingbars and shaped more like a warbler.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Pine Siskin

I'm particularly pleased with this picture because the Pine Siskin was one of my "target" birds. When I saw how similar they look to juvenile house and purple finches, I realized that it would have been easy for one to appear on the feeders without my even noticing it. So I started keeping an eye out and, as luck would have it, I spotted one totally at random. It let me get close enough to get this gorgeous shot of a bird that, weeks earlier, I could easily have confused with another bird entirely.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Common Yellowthroat

These are fairly abundant warblers but their populations are declining. Cornell reports its status as:

Not threatened or endangered, but is decreasing in many areas. Local nonmigratory populations in some areas face potential extinction from habitat loss and disturbance.

Though the bird looks fairly distinctive, it's easy to be fooled by fall warblers. This picture, for example, is a common yellowthroat as well, but the black face is not present on females or juvenile males.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Least Sandpiper

The smallest shorebird in the world (usually under 6 inches long), the Least Sandpiper is a very small bird, most easily recognizable by its greenish-yellow legs. It's the only shorebird in its size class in the US with such markings, making it an easy spot for people new to birding.

In this particular case, the bird let us get very close to it as we walked a path on the Nelson Island part of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Other pictures of the same bird can be found at:

• http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/?&pic=2145
  
• http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/?&pic=2146
  
• http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/?&pic=2142
  

Friday Bird Blogging: The Salisbury Egret Roost

Photo: Glossy Ibis in Flight

In Salisbury, MA, on Route 1 just South of 110 there is an amazing sight going on this month. Each night, a large variety of wading birds has been coming in to roost communally. From about 5-7pm you can start with a small number of birds and watch as they fly in, bringing the numbers up to several hundred. In one night, I was able to find:

• a few Great Blue Herons;
• over a hundred Great Egrets;
• a few Little Blue Herons;
• Several Green Herons;
• a pair of Black-crowned night herons;
• Dozens of Snowy Egrets;
• a group of eight Glossy Ibises (the one pictured here is one in flight, coming into the roost).

On another night, I also spotted a variety of small shorebirds, including least sandpipers and spotted sandpipers. This is a really great show. The roost is positioned so you can watch it at sunset, with the sun setting behind you, providing a really nice light for photography as well as general viewing. Some of the birds are close, but most are further out so it's good to bring binoculars or a scope.

If you're into birding at all, it also provides for great opportunity to learn the differences between immature little blue herons and snowy egrets. They're both about half the size of a great egret and predominantly white birds, but there are some key differences that can be put in clear contrast here, as the snowys tend to hang out at the same spots as the little blues.

This won't be here much longer; these birds will all be migrating soon so get down there when you can. This sort of roosting site is commonly visible in some areas, but in New England it's rare to see a roost site with so many different kinds of birds making themselves so very and obviously visible for an extended period. And be sure not to just look at the roost, but to check the skies as they come in because watching them land is a great part of the show. Most birds come in from the left side, but a few will travel from the South as well.

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Related: Salisbury Egret Roost photo gallery.

Friday Bird Blogging: Ruby-Throated Hummingbird Revisited

There's been some great hummingbird activity at the feeders as of late, and I just want to take a few minutes to highlight some of it:

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All three pictures will bring you to larger versions when you click on them.

Apparently, I can sell my music here now

Friday Bird Blogging: Cedar Waxwings

I've been taking pictures of Cedar Waxwings for quite some time now, but this is the first time I actually captured the reason they've got their name: those red wingtips which look like they're made from wax are where their names come from. They are fairly plentiful in Vermont and feed almost entirely on fruit (though once, for some inexplicable reason, one showed up at our feeder to eat on sunflower seed).

Here's one of Cornell's cool Cedar Waxwing facts:

Cedar Waxwings with orange instead of yellow tail tips began appearing in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada beginning in the 1960s. The orange color is the result of a red pigment picked up from the berries of an introduced species of honeysuckle. If a waxwing eats the berries while it is growing a tail feather, the tip of the feather will be orange.

Of course, now that I know this, I'll have to go looking for an orange-tailed one just to get the variety.

Friday Bird Blogging: Yellow Bellied Sapsucker

I have to admit: I had no idea what this was when I took the picture. From a distance, I knew it didn't look like our usual (Hairy and Downy) woodpeckers but even though it had a shape like the sapsucker, its markings were all off. It turns out this is a juvenile. We had several in our yard that day and I completely missed them. I'm particularly happy to have gotten this shot because I'd only had one sapsucker picture in the past and it wasn't very good.

I've made a lot of changes to the photo site as of late, mostly in terms of layout. Please, if you have a moment, check it out. Not only is it all reorganized (I moved a lot of the text and info below the fold to focus more on the pictures themselves), I've set up a function where end users can rate the pictures so viewers can see how much other viewers like what's up there. I will eventually set it up so that the pictures can be ordered by rating (highest to lowest) when viewing, so everyone gets to see the highest rated pictures first, so having good data as to who likes what is really helpful for this.

Julie Waters e-notes: Thu, August 9, 2007

For those of you who don't know-- I recently had a theft of a lot of camera equipment. Details on that are at:

http://reasonandbrimstone.blogspot.com/2007/07/well-that-was-interesting-weekend.html

I'm not writing to talk about that, but that does provide some context for what I am talking about. I've finally replaced everything I had that got stolen that I wanted to replace -- I had a couple items that I didn't think were as useful as I thought they'd be when I purchased them, but most of what I had before I replaced. The hardest thing was a particular brand and model of teleconverter which, it turns out, took me some time to track down but I eventually found one and it only cost half what I originally paid for the one that got stolen, so that works out well.

I made some better choices this time; I had a low-end Pentax lens that I had used for wide-angle work that was never that great a lens, so I replaced it with a higher-end Sigma that's REALLY nice. It's how I got this picture:

http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/?pic=2009

It turns out this was all a lot more expensive than I'd thought. The replacements cost me over a grand, and insurance is only covering a portion of that. The replacement window on the car was another $200 over that. So it's been a bit of a mess. And now I'm paranoid about leaving anything in my car, so there's that, too, where I lug my camera equipment around with me wherever I go now. I'll get over that eventually but now I feel sort of stupid doing it even though I know I need to.

So... photography's good again if not a little stressful from time to time. And on to music...

Music's interesting right now. My mind's really spinning with new ideas and I'm getting all sorts of thoughts about how to work them all out. I'm seriously considering a new CD, focused primarily on trio work between baritone, banjo and six-string, working on my usual mixtures of stuff. I'm getting a new pickup for my baritone so I can do more performing with it and I'm trying to find a compatible pickup for the six-string banjo as well.

In the meantime, I don't have a lot of other news. I'm not actively seeking gigs right now, but if I find them, I'll be glad to do them. I'm playing from time to time. My Tuesdays are going to be free again after next week, which is nice, because it means I'll be able to start doing the song circles in Putney and those with Kindred Folk again. I've missed those events and I'm glad to have the time opening up.

In the meantime, we're taking a week off at the end of the month to mellow out, hanging out at a house on Cape Ann, doing bird photography and whale watches, so you'll see a lot more updates on the photography part of my site than on the music. In the meantime, once I get my baritone guitar back, I'll be updating podcasts and other music stuff with solo baritone work as well.

Hope everyone is well.
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More info:

http://juliewaters.com/

Julie's photography:

http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/
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Upcoming events for Julie Waters
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Sunday, August 12th 2nd Sundays Song Circle (tentative) at RAMP Gallery; Bellows Falls, VT

Sunday, September 9th 2nd Sundays Song Circle (tentative) at RAMP Gallery; Bellows Falls, VT

Sunday, October 14th 2nd Sundays Song Circle (tentative) at RAMP Gallery; Bellows Falls, VT

Friday Bird Blogging: The Spotted Sandpiper

The appearance of the spotted sandpiper varies dramatically. The picture shown is in non-breeding plumage, but you can see the strong breeding plumage in this shot.

These are extremely common birds, nesting throughout the Northern United States, and can often be noticed from a distance by their repeated bobbing motion. They walk a few steps, bob up and down, look for food, and then do it again. No one seems to know why they do this, but it certainly helps birders in the field know whether they've got a spottie.