YouTube right now is in a zone of greatness. Tons of videos, all for free.
The only time I've visited a site in the zone before was freshman-year-college Napster. It was the same deal: completely free content that had everyone walking around high-fiving and wondering how lucky they were.
Well, like Napster, I doubt that YouTube's period of greatness will last much longer. Just today I read an article about how YouTube has taken the rights to sell anything hosted on its site...but it's hard to be surprised. All good things must come to an end, and all valuable good things will be ended with a fury.
Anyway, I wanted to do an obligitory "blogger links to a bunch of YouTube videos" post. And since this is a birding blog, I thought I'd link to a bunch of sweet bird/birding videos, which there is surprisingly no short supply of.
Let's surf this info-media-tainment superhighway before the toll booths are installed!
A brief birding survey of YouTube reveals the different attitudes people have toward birds. The above clip is titled "Dude. Birds." and was posted by a couple non-birders (it seems) who stumbled upon and were quite impressed by a huge flock of snow geese in a field in DE. However in the below clip, titled "Snowballin' Geese," a couple kids, you guessed it, chuck snowballs at geese sitting on a frozen pond. Hey, to each his own.
A lot of videos on YouTube feel the need to add a soundtrack when one isn't necessary. I love the lame inspirational music over this really boring video of a Reed Warbler from Japan:
The music is better in this beautiful, mesmerizing video of Northern Gannets:
YouTube is great for finding video of birds that I've yet to see, or even hear of. In this sense it could be used as a field guide that shows you what birds look like (and sound like) when you actually encounter them. Here are some close-ups of a rufous hummingbird, something I've never seen:
Or a honeymoon video of an Albatross (Yellow-Nosed?) taking off in the Galapagos:
And this is a rare species that I woundn't mind NOT seeing in the wild:
OK well that's all for now. YouTube is excellent, and there are a lot lot more bird videos to see. Check it before planning a vacation or before heading out for the fall migration...cuz it might not last long.
¶ 2:07 PM0 comments
YouTube Extravaganza
YouTube right now is in a zone of greatness. Tons of videos, all for free.
The only time I've visited a site in the zone before was freshman-year-college Napster. It was the same deal: completely free content that had everyone walking around high-fiving and wondering how lucky they were.
Well, like Napster, I doubt that YouTube's period of greatness will last much longer. Just today I read an article about how YouTube has taken the rights to sell anything hosted on its site...but it's hard to be surprised. All good things must come to an end, and all valuable good things will be ended with a fury.
Anyway, I wanted to do an obligitory "blogger links to a bunch of YouTube videos" post. And since this is a birding blog, I thought I'd link to a bunch of sweet bird/birding videos, which there is surprisingly no short supply of.
Let's surf this info-media-tainment superhighway before the toll booths are installed!
A brief birding survey of YouTube reveals the different attitudes people have toward birds. The above clip is titled "Dude. Birds." and was posted by a couple non-birders (it seems) who stumbled upon and were quite impressed by a huge flock of snow geese in a field in DE. However in the below clip, titled "Snowballin' Geese," a couple kids, you guessed it, chuck snowballs at geese sitting on a frozen pond. Hey, to each his own.
A lot of videos on YouTube feel the need to add a soundtrack when one isn't necessary. I love the lame inspirational music over this really boring video of a Reed Warbler from Japan:
The music is better in this beautiful, mesmerizing video of Northern Gannets:
YouTube is great for finding video of birds that I've yet to see, or even hear of. In this sense it could be used as a field guide that shows you what birds look like (and sound like) when you actually encounter them. Here are some close-ups of a rufous hummingbird, something I've never seen:
Or a honeymoon video of an Albatross (Yellow-Nosed?) taking off in the Galapagos:
And this is a rare species that I woundn't mind NOT seeing in the wild:
OK well that's all for now. YouTube is excellent, and there are a lot lot more bird videos to see. Check it before planning a vacation or before heading out for the fall migration...cuz it might not last long.
¶ 2:07 PM0 comments
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Prepping for the Fall Migration
It's July and it's hot and gross, and the thrills of springtime birding have faded. Birds aren't singing much in July, and it's too hot and the foliage is too thick for anyone to want to look for them.
The good news, though, is that fall, with its crisp air and...pumpkins, is right around the corner. And fall brings the fall migration.
To prep for the coming aviary influx, check out this great website: Migration of Birds from the Northern Prarie Wildlife Research Center. It's fantastic. There are in-depth articles explaining every detail of bird migration from our early ideas about it to "flight speed and migration rates" to a very interesting "patterns of migration" section.
Plus, there are lots of cool illustrations like this:
In other birding news, July has been a slow month for me. Since getting 4 life birds in Maine at the beginning of the month I haven't had any time to get out around DC to see anything. This weekend will take me to Indiana, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll see some migrating waders or something.
¶ 9:55 AM0 comments
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Carnival of Community Campaigns
The 1st ever edition of the Carnival of Community Campaigns is up at Humantide, and I'm excited to say that my Americans for American Energy post is included. It's a great looking carnival, with many more editions sure to come.
In further A4AE news, a spokesman for Pac/West Communications admitted in a radio interview for Living on Earth that Americans for American Energy is "essentially, one worker paid by Pac West." The interviewer takes Pac/West to task for calling themselves grassroots, to which the spokesman responds that A4AE is grassroots if there is a grassroots response. Too bad there hasn't been...
¶ 9:17 AM0 comments
Monday, July 24, 2006
Birds in the News
Here's the text of a nice little article that appeared in the NY Times today about why birds sing:
What's That Singing All About?
Monday, July 24, 2006; Page C14
The best time to hear birds singing is early on a spring or summer morning. Here are some reasons why wild birds sing:
It's Mine: A male songbird sings to tell other males that he "owns" a particular area, so they should stay away. Who's That?: Songbirds all sound different, even if they're the same kind of bird. Birds recognize their friendly neighbor's songs and chase away strangers. Be My Mate: To a female songbird, a complicated song by a male sounds attractive and shows that he is strong and healthy. Start Those Eggs: When a female bird hears her mate singing, her body begins making eggs. Often she will start building a nest, too. And when the male sees that, he sings all the more.
Although bird songs will become less and less common as the summer goes on, it's never too early to think about next spring...
¶ 12:33 PM0 comments
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Americans for American Energy: The Oil Industry in Action
In April of this year a $3 million no-bid contract given by the state of Alaska to an Oregonian PR company called Pac/West Communications. The contract was given by the Alaskan delegation (including Senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski) to lobby members of Congress to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (breeding ground for millions of birds) to oil exploration and drilling.
In Alaska a controversy began about the choice of Pac/West as soon as the contract was announced. Many Alaskans were already familiar with Pac/West as the company that ran an aggressive campaign in 2004 to defeat an initiative to ban bear baiting, the action of feeding or otherwise attracting bears to be shot by hunters.
During that campaign Pac/West was accused of shady practices, including attempting to hijack the names of opposition groups and doctoring images of protestors using computers (they wanted to make it seem like Greenpeace activists were involved). Pac/West also created a false image for itself by creating of a fake 'grassroots' organization called Alaskans for Professional Wildlife Management. This tactic of creating the image of a grassroots movement and using them as a front for the campaign ads is one commonly used by Pac/West (read on).
OK. So, Pac/West now has $3 million dollars of Alaskan taxpayer money and wants to "educate voters and their elected leaders as to the wisdom of congressional approval from drilling in ANWR" (Anchorage Daily News 4/20/05). What do they do?
SIDE NOTE: If you look through all the stuff from drilling proponents, you'll never EVER seem them call it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's always ANWR. ANWR sounds like a middle eastern country, not a pristine wildlife refuge. Check for yourself.
Well, first they decide that they probably want to distance themselves from the Pac/West name. Why? There are a number of reasons.
OR it could be about the separate, simultaneous controversy about how Pac/West set up another fake grassroots organization (this one funded by a Canadian cruise ship company) and falsely listed companies as being against a proposed tax that would punish cruise ships for discharging waste into Alaskan harbors.
OR it could be that their CEO, Paul Phillips, was fined $17,000 in 1990 for an ethics violation while serving as a state legislator in Oregon (he offered to use his position to fight tax bills for Nike if they offered him a full-time job) and has hosted fundraisers for Congressman Richard Pombo.
OR it could be because Pac/West VP Tim Wigley is also the head of another dubious 'grassroots' organization, the Save Our Species Alliance, a group looking to 'revise' the Endangered Species Act to favor landowners (it would be terrible for many endangered bird species). Check out Wigley's quote in this leaked email about selling the public on an idea and then changing it in legislation: "...don't mistake the language we use to sell the public on the need for change -- with language which will appear in the bill." Classy.
So Pac/West figures out that it wants to hire someone else to put some distance between them and the Arctic National Wildlife Drilling campaign. They turn to Jim Sims and his company, Policy Communications, Inc., who had previously been involved with the SOSA website.
In addition to Policy Communications, Inc. and Americans for American Energy, Jim Sims also heads the Partnership for the West Coalition, is on the Board of Directors of the Center for the New American Century and is the Executive Director of the Western Business Roundtable. He previously served as the Director of Communications in Vice President Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group.
So Sims, taking a page out of the tried-and-true Pac/West guidebook, creates Americans for American Energy, a "non-profit, grassroots-based organization dedicated to promoting public policies that encourage greater energy independence for America" (americansforamericanenergy.org). A4AE claims to be a grassroots organization with members and supporters across the country, but it lists no membership information and only lists Sims as staff.
A list of members could probably be produced if necessary, though. Sims himself boasts an army of citizenlobbyists for-hire to any organization who wants it (click on "Partnership for the West Announces Grassroots Power Network").
Americans For American Energy's media campaign has begun. It started in late May and June when Sims himself began writing Op-Eds and getting them published in small newspapers across the country. The effort has stepped up, though, and now print, radio and television ads are being aired in targeted states, those with potentially vulnerable Senators: ND, Arkansas, Nebraska and more to come. The tactic here, I think, is to establish a base history of A4AE letters in small newspapers so it looks like they have a legit grassroots following when they decide to take it to a wider audience. All of the published work, though, are directly from Jim Sims.
Why does this matter? Because those who want to permanently scar the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and smart and well-funded. They will do anything, and pretend to be anyone, to get people to think that drilling more oil out of the ground in a National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska will be the answer for this country's energy problems. They won't call it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They won't mention global warming. They won't mention breeding birds or polar bears. They won't mention hybrid cars or increased fuel efficiency (the real solutions to our energy problems).
They won't because they aren't Americans for anything but money from Big Oil. Don't listen to them.
¶ 3:59 PM0 comments
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Fledgling Warbler ID Help
Connie and Wilton Stale of Wildlife Response, Inc in Chesapeake, VA wrote the Va-Bird listserv today requesting ID help for a fledgling warbler they has just taken in. Here are the photos they posted: Can I help? Whelp, I just got back from the sweatiest, most uncomfortable trip to Eastern Market of all time, and now I want nothing more than to just sit here motionless. So lets give it a try.
Ok so let's take a look. Is it a baby? Yeah looks like it. Is it a warbler? Hmm I'm not sure. Is it yellow? Definitely. My field guides don't show fledgling birds, so let's use the magical internet to find pictures of baby birds until, hopefully, we find a match.
OK well it makes sense to look for some warblers (after all, it could be a warbler) that breed in the area and see what we've got.
Hmm well these warblers don't seem to be working out so well. And hey, it looks like our mystery fledgling is already about the size of a full-grown warbler...so maybe this is a baby bird of a larger species. Let's try taking a look at some other baby birds to see if we find a match.
Wait! How about a Baltimore Oriole? Here's another angle. Hmm about right size and shape, lots of yellow, same beak shape, wing-bars...Ladies and Gentlemen I think we've got it. Thanks for playing.
¶ 1:56 PM0 comments
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Vandalism is a Homo + Likes Butt
This is not directly bird-related, but it sort of is in that many bird species are dependent on federally-protected lands for their habitats. A few months ago a couple people entered the McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area in Colorado and proceeded to spray-paint graffiti all over a bunch of prehistoric Native American rock paintings.
Vandalism on federal lands, the land that belongs to each and every American, ranges from graffiti to littering to shooting to illegal off-road vehicle use to the outright digging up and theft of prehistoric artifacts. At it's worse it can help spread exotic species (as in illegal turf dumps at Idaho's Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area), permamently ruin prehistoric sites (as in many graffiti incidents and the January 2006 looting of a huge Ancestral Puebloan settlement in Colorado's Canyons of the Ancients National Monument) and ruin fragile geological features f(illegal ORV use along fragile desert streambeds and the destruction of the Eye of the Needle arch in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument in Montana).
Vandalism happens all the time, but the recent McInnis Canyons graffiti really pissed me off. Here's a shot of some of the work, courtesy of the BLM: Can you see that? Can you read it?
Thousands of years ago a member of the Pueblo tribe, out in the baking sun, etched representations of his daily life into the side of a rock. These etchings, among the earliest lasting examples of creative artwork, lasted unchanged on the rock face for centuries, until one day when some brain-dead teenager drunkenly strolls up and writes AMBER IS A HOMO + LIKES BUTT all over it? Are you kidding me? AMBER IS A HOMO + LIKES BUTT?!
This is absolutely horrible. It's ironic that at the same time we are trying to preserve these works in their natural state (i.e. out in the wilderness without barriers or roads or interpretive signs), our efforts also make the art more vulnerable to vandalism. The same considerations should be made, though. Would we dismiss graffiti painted on the Mona Lisa this easily?
Unfortunately, the federal agencies charged with protecting these lands (BLM, Parks Service, Fish and Wildlife, Forest Service) are continually having their budgets cut by the Bush Administration and can rarely afford rangers and law enforcement officials to do patrol and education. As far as I'm concerned, the lack of understanding that much of America has about the importance of protecting wild lands is, you guessed it, a homo + likes butt.
Disclaimer: FYI I have nothing against homosexuals or liking butt I'm just using it for effect, OK?.
¶ 3:08 PM3 comments
Monday, July 10, 2006
Kennebunk Plains
I lived in Maine for 21 years and apparently I never left my own town. The Kennebunk Plains are about a half-hour drive from Portland, but are unlike anything else in the state.
Apparently glaciers created this large, flat, grassy area (ok I'm no geologist) by leaving sifted sand and gravel on the ground instead of more vegetation-friendly soils. The result is a huge grassland in the middle of otherwise lush northern forest. It reminds me of midwestern grasslands (uh, even though I've never been to one) and, like other grasslands, supports wildlife that cannot live in think forests.
The three of us (Kate and Jared and I were all heading out of Maine to NYC for a few days. They aren't birders, and it was very hot in the sun, but a free ride to the city afforded me some time walking around a field with my binoculars...God bless 'em) pulled into the main parking area and hiked the path back to where the Clay-Coloreds had been seen. The presence of these birds is big news in Maine, since their typical summer range only extends into New York and Quebec, as you can see: Walking through the field I was a little disappointed at the lack of visible birdlife. I could hear grasshopper sparrows all over the place, but the breeze kept most birds down in the brush. I figured my chances at seeing a single individual Clay-Colored were pretty slim, but we kept on strolling.
To my surprise, the Clay-Colored was buzz-singing his little heart out at the top of a small tree, right where the wonderful internet said it would be (honestly, how sweet are RBAs? I drove 50 miles and walked out to the middle of a field and saw a bird the size of my fist with no problem. Awesome). I was overjoyed. I got great looks through the binos, and even gave the two non-birders a look. They didn't care.
Here's the best picture I got. You're just gonna have to trust me on the ID. Super.
Onto another section of the park to look for the Uplands. We drove down to a nearby power substation and birding hotspot to check it out. Long story short, no Uplands. I did see a pair of lifer Vesper Sparrows, though. These birds had previously eluded me at both Kenilworth and Rock Creek, but here they were plentiful, showy and out in the open. No pictures, though.
Kennebunk Plains is an outstanding place. It is beautiful, especially when you get there after driving through miles of dense forests.
It's good to be back in DC. My next trips will probably be to Sky Meadows to look for the Shrikes there. I'll keep you posted.
¶ 10:25 PM1 comments
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
Update from Maine
Well Kate and I have had an awesome bunch of days in Maine. The weather has been alternating between sunny and gorgeous and cloudy and lame, but this afternoon is great.
I've been out and about and seen some nice birds so far. On Sunday I took a quick trip to Evergreen cemetery, an excellent warbler migration spot, but didn't have much luck, it being mid-summer and all. The best bird was a singing American Redstart, the first of the season for me, which gave great looks.
Today I went down to Higgins Beach in Scarborough to lay in the sun do something about my offensively white skin. I brought my binoculars along in case I saw anything, but I didn't want anyone to mistake me for some creeper leering at chicks in bikinis so I kept a low profile.
The birdlife was in high gear, though, and I quickly forgot about what anyone would think of me running around a crowded beach with high-powered binoculars. Out on the northern end of the beach is the mouth of the Spurwink River, which flows though the legendary Maine birding spot, the Scarborough Marsh. Common and (my lifer) Least Terns were diving into the swift current at the mouth and more often than not coming up with fish. Also along the riverside were Eiders, Laughing Gulls, Willet and Spotted Sandpiper.
The best birds, though, were a group of plovers that were noisily flying back and forth across the river and dunes. I figured they were semipalms, but through the binoculars I noticed that they were much lighter colored and had little black on their faces. That leaves, of course, Piping Plovers, a bird that I had tried to find unsuccessfully a few other times in Maine. I had no idea that there was a colony on Higgins Beach (behind a fenced off area, no less), right at my favorite surf spot. Outstanding.
On Friday I'm planning on hitting up Kennebunk Plains where with luck I'll see Upland Sandpipers, Vesper Sparrows and maybe get a look at one of the Clay-Colored Sparrows that's been lingering around. Stay tuned.
¶ 5:21 PM0 comments
