Friday Bird Blogging: Best. Heron. Picture. Ever

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I got nothin' to add here, except that clicking on the picture gets you the full-sized version.

New Version of Star of the County Down

I just uploaded a new version of "Star of the County Down" recorded last night at Common Ground w/Kindred Folk-- Michael Hertz was gracious enough to learn the song on the spot and do chords. MP3 link here or you can download lots more here

Friday Bird Blogging: The Green Heron

Green herons blend into the background so well that I have, on several occasions, found myself looking right at one and not even known it until they take flight. This is why I take such delight in seeing them out in the open. This particular picture was taken while the heron stood and looked around, exploring the water and provided me with a real treat, getting to see the heron from many angles and in many positions.

These birds are about half the size of the great blue heron, and tend to fly much faster and lower. They spook easily so any sighting is great, but a sighting where I get pictures like this is what I consider to be a very good sighting indeed.

Julie Waters e-notes: Tue, June 19, 2007

I'm sending this mid-month e-mail because I've got a new last-minute gig scheduled with Kindred Folk-- it's me with T. Breeze Verdant and Michael Hertz. It's this Friday (June 22nd) @7pm at Common Ground in Brattleboro.

This show is connected with Kindred Folk, which is a great new organization in Southeastern Vermont, designed to network musicians together for common good. I'd thought about trying to organize something like this a few years ago, but I never found the time to do so-- I'm glad someone else is taking on this sort of project. I'm looking forward to this gig in all sorts of ways and I hope a few of you can make it as well.

Also, for anyone interested, I've been making real strides with my bird photography, including some really nice pictures from a boat trip last week, and of a green heron a couple days ago. Links, etc., at http://juliesmagiclightshow.com/

Not much else to report right now-- still contemplating a new CD, but not having made much progress. Still working on learning Objective C to create a new piece of music software, but that's got a (long) ways to go yet as well-- programming is never easy and this is particularly complicated-- it involves an interaction of music theory, A/V interfaces and end user interfaces, all of which just make my head spin, but if I can get it to work, it will be worth it, in the sense that it will be nothing like anything I've ever heard before.

Hope everyone's well.

Other Ways The Simple Things Matter

It wasn't too long ago that the Osprey was in serious trouble. Pervasive use of DDT threatened the very lives of many birds of prey.

Somewhere, in a moment of sanity, we found the will to change course with respect to DDT and various birds once endangered (such as the Osprey and the Peregrine Falcon) have experienced significant rebounds in population. The Osprey is still endangered in some areas, but it's experienced a major comeback.

What we put into the water makes a difference in the world around us. What we change in our environment may put us back to square one with the Osprey. What will a bird which feeds almost exclusively on fish do if we finally manage to fish out our oceans?

In the last post I wrote, I mentioned the small things, and I was talking in a social context-- being good to one another and showing people the respect they deserve.

This time, I'm talking about the ecological context: using detergents which are biodegradable; composting your food waste rather than putting it in a landfill. Choosing to eat food which comes from renewable sources and avoiding the stuff which is being hunted or fished to extinction.

The simple things matter.

The simple things matter.

Sometimes the Small Things Matter

Per the, NYT: Bid to Ban Gay Marriage Fails in Massachusetts:

Some choice quotes:

"In Massachusetts today, the freedom to marry is secure," Gov. Deval Patrick said after the legislature voted 151 to 45 against the amendment, which needed 50 favorable votes in order to come before voters in a referendum in November 2008.
[...]
Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, did not indicate whether opponents would start a new petition drive, but said, "We're not going away."

He added, "We want to find out why votes switched and see what avenues are available to challenge those votes, perhaps in court."

Those silly conservatives.  Always running to the courts when they don't like their legislature's activities.

More from the article:

Senator Gale Candaras also voted against the amendment today, although she had supported it as a state representative in January. She said her vote reflected constituent views in her larger, more progressive state Senate district; her fear of a vicious referendum campaign; and the 6,800 anti-amendment e-mails, phone calls and faxes she received, one call every three minutes.

Most moving, she said, were older constituents who first supported the amendment, but changed after meeting with gay men and lesbians.

One woman had "asked me to put it on the ballot for a vote, but since then a lovely couple moved in," Ms. Candaras said. "She said, 'They help me with my lawn, and if there can't be marriage in Massachusetts, they?ll leave and they can't help me with my lawn.' "

This is why small things matter.  Honestly, this is part of the reason I tip well.  What we do, as citizens, matters.  The repercussions of small acts of kindness and courtesy are significant and can resonate much wider than our own immediate space.

So yeah, the MFI is not going away, which is fine.  They've got the right to try their petition again, but given that they couldn't even get one quarter of the legislature to support them, I can't imagine they'll do any better, given that there has been none of that predicted damage to marriage.  Divorce, in fact, is at a lower rate in Massachusetts than any other state in the union.

Hmm.  Maybe same sex marriage is good for marriage.

Friday Bird Blogging: Great Shearwater

The ocean-dwelling Great Shearwater is a lot of fun to watch when out on the water-- they skim across the water looking for food and will, like gulls, sometimes follow large boats looking for food dropped by passengers. This particular picture was taken after a chum line was spilled. Chum lines are a mixture of fish oil and various disgusting smelly things that will attract water birds. The bird had landed near the boat to feed and suddenly looked up when I snapped the picture. As usual, the smaller image links to a larger one.

Whales, Seabirds, etc.

There's something I love about being on the ocean, though some trips are easier than others. In this particular case, the boat was incredibly rocky, to the point where I'm amazed I got any shots at all which were useful.

But... I did. During the ten hours we spent on the water, I took over 2300 pictures and got rid of the crappy ones, leaving me with 200 remaining pictures.

I also got sunburned, which almost never happens, but oh well.

I posted nineteen of the pictures, which you can see via this link. The picture on the right is a tail breach from a humpback whale. The one on the left is a Greater Shearwater, a fun bird to photograph, even under rough riding conditions.

Shearwaters are pelagic birds, meaning that they're ocean dwelling and only come to land to breed. They have tubes on their beaks which actually help them process salt water.

Whale watches are fun, but my preference is for sea bird cruises -- this was a mix, but I prefer it when it's mostly birders. Birders are, as a whole, more polite than those who go on whale watches and are eager to make sure that everyone gets to see.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with these photos and the weekend was fun, despite the sunburn and the big rocky boat.

Friday Bird blogging: The Baltimore Oriole

Orioles do not winter in the north but tend to arrive around the same time as the rose-breasted grosbeaks and it takes me some time to relearn the differences between their songs each Spring, but the visuals are completely distinct. Orioles in sunlight are among the most beautiful birds of their size: brilliant, bright orange intermixed with black glowing in the sunlight as they fly across the lawn. Beautiful sight.

Once the trees start to leaf out, they're not nearly as easily spotted, but now that I've relearned the song, I'm hearing them pretty much everywhere I go whether I see them or not. There's at least one breeding pair in our yard, if not two. When the fledglings show up, it's real fun-- swarms of yellowish orioles splashing in puddles, which is so much fun to watch.

This Takes Chutzpah

From Yahoo News:

A new think tank specializing in gay issues wants a say in the U.S. debate over same-sex marriage and other matters, seeking to counter the influence of religious conservatives by beating them at their own game.

The Rockway Institute is the brainchild of executive director Robert-Jay Green, a California psychology professor who says the media, courts and politicians often make wrong assumptions about what the latest scientific research shows.

Green is building a team of 100 experts who hope to serve as expert witnesses in court cases or testify before state legislatures as they weigh laws affecting gay rights.

That's not the part that takes Chutzpah. This is the part that takes Chutzpah:

A spokeswoman for Focus on the Family, a Christian ministry that opposes same-sex marriage, contends the research promoted by the Rockway Institute is not credible, and considers the upstart a mere advocacy group for same-sex marriage and parenting.

"We've looked at what homosexual activists have put forward and found it lacking. It doesn't meet basic social science standards," Carrie Gordon Earll said. "It speaks to the desperation among homosexual activists to give credibility to their political goals."

"Children do best in homes with married mothers and fathers. That's where the research is," she said.

Yes. Focus on The Family. They're the ones with the facts on their side? I don't think so.

Upcoming Energy Bills

There's a great diary over at MyDD which outlines some serious problems with an energy bill which is cosponsored by Barak Obama.  The first is a bill to support liquid coal.  From the diary:

We don't know how to sequester mass quantities of carbon dioxide created during coal liquefaction yet. Even once we figure that process out--a solution that will no doubt reduce the net energy output of the coal to fuel process itself--we've still got a dirty fuel that increases greenhouse emissions compared to petroleum.

There's also a draft bill up for discussion that includes a provision which will screw us, as Vermonters, over, along with a lot of other states.  Per The Rutland Herald:

A dozen states, including Vermont and Massachusetts, would be blocked from imposing new requirements on automakers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under a draft energy bill being prepared for a vote later this month.

The "discussion draft" would prohibit the head of the Environmental Protection Agency from issuing a waiver needed for a state to impose auto pollution standards if the new requirements are "designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

This is bad.  The first bill has quite a few Democratic sponsors and presents a serious danger.  The second is only in draft form, so it's got a much better chance of being modified before it makes it into being an actual bill, but they're both representative of how much work we have to do to deal with the existing archaic mentality when it comes to proper energy usage.

Awesome!

This is -so- cool:

Friday Bird Blogging: Chestnut-Sided Warbler

This is a bird which is about four and a half-inches long. I'd been trying to get a good photograph of one for awhile when one flew in a tree about ten feet above. As I started to take pictures of it, it flew off, disappointing me, only to be replaced by another a few seconds later. It's of the second warbler that I got this wonderful shot.

As usual, clicking on the picture points to a larger version.

Incompetents Masquerading as Eagles

The Bush administration (that may be an oxymoron) would have you believe that we're in Iraq to damp down terrorism, that they are the soaring eagles with their watchful eye. When you get down to the details, however, it doesn't quite work like that. Years ago, my students asked me what I thought of the invasion of Iraq, shortly after it begun. I told them that from my point of view, it was a "strategic blunder" and that it would lead to a major groundswell in support in the Mideast for terrorist causes and it would, in the long run, do us much more harm than good.

Sometimes, I really hate being right. Per The New York Times:

Militants Widen Reach as Terror Seeps Out of Iraq
[...]
The Iraq war, which for years has drawn militants from around the world, is beginning to export fighters and the tactics they have honed in the insurgency to neighboring countries and beyond, according to American, European and Middle Eastern government officials and interviews with militant leaders in Lebanon, Jordan and London.
[...]
Last week, the Lebanese Army found itself in a furious battle against a militant group, Fatah al Islam, whose ranks included as many as 50 veterans of the war in Iraq, according to General Rifi. More than 30 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting the group at a refugee camp near Tripoli.
[...]
Militant leaders warn that the situation in Lebanon is indicative of the spread of fighters. “You have 50 fighters from Iraq in Lebanon now, but with good caution I can say there are a hundred times that many, 5,000 or higher, who are just waiting for the right moment to act,” Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident in Britain who runs the jihadist Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, said in an interview on Friday. “The flow of fighters is already going back and forth, and the fight will be everywhere until the United States is willing to cease and desist.”
[...]
In an April 17 report written for the United States government, Dennis Pluchinsky, a former senior intelligence analyst at the State Department, said battle-hardened militants from Iraq posed a greater threat to the West than extremists who trained in Afghanistan because Iraq had become a laboratory for urban guerrilla tactics.

“There are some operational parallels between the urban terrorist activity in Iraq and the urban environments in Europe and the United States,” Mr. Pluchinsky wrote. “More relevant terrorist skills are transferable from Iraq to Europe than from Afghanistan to Europe,” he went on, citing the use of safe houses, surveillance, bomb making and mortars.

A top American military official who tracks terrorism in Iraq and the surrounding region, and who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said: “Do I think in the future the jihad will be fueled from the battlefield of Iraq? Yes. More so than the battlefield of Afghanistan.”
[...]

Way to go! We've got ourselves a training ground.

So this was unexpected

I just got the following e-mail from amazon.com:

As someone who has purchased a John Wayne movie or a Western from Amazon.com, you might be interested in our new John Wayne Store, commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth on May 26, 1907. Don't miss it, pardner.

So I'm thinking to myself... Western? I purchased a western?

I really didn't remember purchasing a western... then I started running through the few movies I'd purchased from amazon.com: Wordplay, Thank You for Smoking, Little Miss Sunshine, Good Night and Good Luck and... well, the closest we have to Westerns in that list is Thank You For Smoking, since it involves a guy who used to play a cowboy and no, really, that can't be it, and then the only other thing I bought was...

Oh my.

Okay, I didn't think of that.

You may or may not have guessed this by now... but the movie that flagged me as being into westerns was, believe it or not...

Brokeback Mountain.

Somewhere, John Wayne is spinning in his grave.

I wonder if he and Jerry Falwell share a plot?

Friday Bird Blogging: Glossy Ibis

We spent most of the week in coastal Maine, looking for obscure and unusual birds and got quite lucky. I was able to photograph at least eight new birds that I'd never captured before, and I also managed to get much better photos of certain birds than I'd ever achieved before.

The glossy ibis is one such example. The last glossy ibis photos I got were last year and this was the best I could do. This week's walk on Scarborough marsh allowed me to get very close to an Ibis, as well as get quite a few views of other ibises (along with some beautiful egret photos.

As usual, the ibis photo links to a much larger version.

Activism and Personal Place

As some of you know, I used to be a very active member of the Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group. I still administer the mailing list that connects members of that group and though the group more or less faded away several years ago, the mailing list is still sometimes active, but generally from activism issues that various individuals who used to be connected to the group would post. I recently posed a question to the group about whether or not to keep the list active and as part of the discussion, I posted a version of the following item:

I should explain my own thing-- I stopped attending Brattleboro Area Peace and Justice Group when two things happened-- I got hired long-term to do contracting work all over the state and I realized that I only had so much time to devote to activism. So I chose doing work to unionize CCV faculty instead of working on Peace and Justice Group issues for a time. Last October the union drive went down in flames for a wide variety of reasons which are, at this point, over and done.

The funny thing is that this defeat happened on what was, in all reality, an extremely good day for me: it was the day I got the photograph shown on the right.

It's a photograph that helped me in ways I don't think I can articulate sufficiently-- it transformed my sense of what I could accomplish as a photographer-- it captured a bird I'd been trying to capture for some time, and it captured it with outstanding clarity and quality and did so under very poor lighting conditions. It taught me to believe more in my strengths as a photographer and to try to push my own skills and abilities in ways I wasn't sure I'd been able to before.

After losing the union drive, I'd been very slow to get back into activism again. I haven't done benefit concerts the way I used to. I did one with a few local musicians in Saxton's River after hurricane Katrina which raised $600, but that was September of 2005 and that's the last one I did. 20 people showed up, which makes raising $600 kind of impressive, but makes me feel like I could have done a lot better in terms of drawing an audience.

Even so, I feel like I want to do that sort of thing again, but since I've been working much more in Northern Vermont than Southern, I don't feel as connected to the Brattleboro community and I don't feel like I have the emotional resources to invest in being the only person doing all the work behind an event. I've done that way too often and I just don't have it in me right now. So I've been doing environmental work on a personal level-- when it was time to buy a vehicle for work, I put the extra investment in getting a Prius rather than spend the money on something just for me.

When it came to how I would spend my time last fall, I invested it in a master composter class so that I'd have a better sense of how to reduce personal waste and do a better job of giving back to the planet.

And what I've really been doing is honing my craft as a photographer, and somehow, right now, that's more important to me. Not necessarily long term but, for now, it's an eco-friendly hobby that connects me with the earth in an important way.

I guess I'm in an odd place right now. I'm very interested in activism, but I feel as though my activism has transformed itself into a less direct action approach and more of a work through my art fashion. My photography web site draws a lot of people to it, and I use it to connect with blogging towards environmental awareness. And yet, I know that's nowhere near enough to sustain any sort of real change. I am learning a lot about birds, about climate about shifting migration patterns, about deforestation and about the impact we all have on the planet around us, but finding myself sometimes really hopeless-- when I read that our best effort is to be reducing greenhouse gases by 2020, I thinking that's just not going to do it. Not even close.

So I do what I can, but I don't know what else to do except to talk to people about it. So I tell people I work with and deal with about auto emissions and about bird populations and about what happens to Vermont's economy when the temperature rises enough that maple syrup doesn't work any longer.

And I talk to my students about politics and about influence and about cognitive dissonance on a political scale, but it's not my place to tell them what political beliefs to hold or to advocate for a viewpoint, so I just do my best to make sure they have the tools they need to figure it out for themselves and only tell them what I really think about a political issue when they ask me point blank about it.

So, I guess that's where my head is right now.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher

This bird is about 4 inches long and one of the smallest birds I've ever photographed, save for the ruby-throated hummingbird and the ruby-crowned kinglet. It's also one of the most difficult shots I've ever gotten. This bird is in near constant motion, bopping back and forth in the trees, easy to hear but very difficult to spot. I'm amazed I got the shot at all. Unlike the kinglet, which I've sometimes seen on the edge of forests, I tend to only see this bird inside forests. Hummingbirds I can photograph through feeders. This one I just get through luck and a lot of persistence.

Speaking Ill of the Dead

As most of you probably know, Jerry Falwell died this week.

Jerry Falwell was a talented leader who did an extremely good job of playing off of the fears and bigotries of many Americans. He was a friend of the openly racist Apartheid government in South Africa, defending the country and opposing divestment. He attacked those who weren't heterosexual and used anti-gay sentiment as a tool of self-promotion.

The scary thing is that he managed to do this with a great deal of humor and personality. He was friendly, charming and used his skills to greatly advance the cause of oppression in this country.

I neither mourn nor praise his death. When we, however, as a people, rise up and fight back against the pseudo-religious anti-human anti-science philosophy that Falwell helped propagate, I will celebrate.

Friday Bird Blogging: The Yellow Warbler

The Yellow Warbler is one of my favorite warblers to watch -- it will flit about from tree to tree, feeding and singing and its color is just so intensely bright that it makes me think of day-glow paints. They've just started migrating back into Vermont again. The first one I spotted was on Sunday and I've either seen or heard one every day since.

As usual, clicking the picture leads to a larger image.