69 posts tagged with "nature"

This is a strange sort of spring we're having. And a small part of me died a little death watching the new Lorax trailer this morning.

This year's drought (new link; SF 2025) has brought the stark reality of water availability front-and-center in Texas. The state has faced droughts before — but by all accounts, this is one of the most severe, and the population continues to expand rapidly. Water is not entirely taken for granted in this state, especially in central and west Texas, but this year's experience seems to have struck home for people in a profound way. Even as we have begun to get some sporadic rain, the talk of stage 4 water rationing continues. And yet there are also stories of people flouting the rules, watering away in their yards. I wish I could accompany those folks on a visit out to John Bunker Sands Wetlands Center.

The organic-bandwagon (and "green" in general) can often seem like a holier-than-thou verbal assault to the average consumer who does not take production processes into account when making purchasing decisions. Moralizing and preaching from the crunchy-granola crowd is not appreciated. And yet there is a point to it all, and we granola eaters need to be armed not merely with facts but also empathy and moderation. That said, often times we are armed merely with anecdote and conjecture, not even fact. Two recent pieces of research present compelling additional facts behind American society's — and by extension, increasingly the world's — over-reliance on technology without consideration of the long term effects:

A friend recently told me about this passage from the collection of Bahá'u'lláh's writings called Prayers and Meditations. In Facebook conversation I've been talking about my limited and impersonal understanding of "God". This passage might seem a bit paradoxical to that viewpoint, at first glance. The paradox is because of my inability to precisely describe the nuance of a belief that lies somewhere between the poles of atheism and personal theism, without recourse to philosophical language (the best "school of thought" to describe my own core belief has always been panentheism).

Ms. Dudzinski’s 9th Grade English class. Grade: 94. Current observations: I was very into politics (this was shortly before the ’92 election), and somewhere I had learned some demagoguery that would later serve me well in debate class. The overall point I was trying to make was and is sound, but on rediscovering this recently, I couldn’t help laughing at my (ignorant) scare-tactic of running out of oxygen. And where did I get this "con-environmentalist" term? The assignment was clearly intended as an exercise in persuasive, opinion-based writing. The lack of citations is irksome to me.

I'm not a spontaneous guy, so for me to do two spontaneous things, out of schedule, in the same week, feels quite liberating! And it is a good reminder that letting myself become too regimented is a sure sign that I'm being pulled too far into the rat race, into the humdrum existence that I've always dreaded. Building a trail and listening to Texas folk-rock are good cures for that.

The Times has a special feature about On the Origin of Species, including annotations from various Scientists commenting on favorite passages. The first annotation is by the famous primatologist Frans de Waal, who comments one of the passages that struck my interest when I read the book earlier this year:

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny

Darwin, in the course of his opus, did not merely lay out the voluminous evidence for natural selection, he also frequently dropped hints of further research to come: for instance, the topic of cooperation. As de Waal notes, we're generally taught to think of Darwinism as survival of the strongest individual competitors. Look at so-called "social Darwinism," and you'll see something that Darwin would likely have hated. Because he clearly believed that cooperation and education (an extension of "leaving progeny") were key components of the general competition between traits (evolution) in a population — that evolution is more than just my biceps are bigger than yours, my brain case has more volume than yours, etc.

I've just uploaded some statistics for the Mississippi River Twin Cities Landbird Monitoring Project. Go into an individual species and you can see a color-coded table of results, histogram showing species presence over time, and a Google maps display with the count of birds at each exact point count location within the various sites monitored. Interestingly, Gold Finchs are the most common bird across these parks. Its definitely fun to pour through this data. Later in the summer, data from previous years will be loaded into the site as well. Check out the Great-Crested Flycatcher — at 8 of 9 sites, they showed up all at the same time (week of 5/9). I can't wait to compare that to previous years' migration results.

This morning at Battle Creek West, where we saw an adult Barred Owl drying itself after a bath two weeks ago, we found two fledged babies. They were adorable. If human babies looked like this, we might have a few already. Someone else's great photo (dead link removed; SF 2025).

Also seen, in another part of the park: small milkweed plant with a monarch egg and 2nd molt monarch caterpillar, and flying nearby was an adult monarch. Seeing three stages of monarch within a minute was quite gratifying. Next time we're out there (two weeks) we'll have to check in on their progress. (T. is now associated with the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project.)

Had an exciting morning in Texas: fifteen new-to-me bird species seen this morning on the lagoon/intracoastal waterway side of Padre Island across the bridge from Corpus Christi:

• Long-billed Curlew
• Marbled Godwit
• Vermilion Flycatcher
• Brown Pelican
• Willet
• Tern (Royal or Caspian, unsure)
• Laughing Gull
• Reddish Egret, white-morph
• White Ibis
• Snowy Egret
• Osprey
• American White Pelican
• Little Blue Heron
• Roseate Spoonbill
• American Oystercatcher

Also seen: Great blue heron, great egret, ring-billed gull, double-crested cormorant, northern mockingbird, great-tailed grackle, song sparrow.