Off the Subject

We’re off the subject of birds today in order to bring you this photograph:

The Gamma Ray Sky NASA Photo

That is a visible light rendering of the gamma-ray sky, stitching together an entire year’s worth of observations from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.  One measurement made with that telescope proved, yet again, that Einstein was right that the speed of light is constant, no matter its color, its energy, its direction, or how you yourself move in relation to it.  After traveling 7.3 billion years, gamma rays of differing energies and wavelengths made it to earth within nine-tenths of a second of each other, precisely as predicted by Einstein’s theory.

Being a physicist after Einstein must be like being a poet after Shakespeare, a landscape photographer after Ansel Adams, or a painter of birds after Audubon.

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The photo and information is from today’s New York Times Science section.

Songbird Creation

Modern science tells us that birds evolved from dinosaurs.  Other stories are told too, such as this one from the Navajo creation story which tells about the creation of the smaller birds.

It is said that Monster Slayer went to his mother Changing Woman to ask where he would find the Bird Monsters. (Tsé Ninájálééh) At first, his mother refused to tell him, fearing that her son would be killed by the awful bird-like monster that lived in those days on Tsé Bit’a’í, the Rock with Wings, now called Shiprock in northwest New Mexico on the Bilagáana maps.  But Monster Slayer was insistent and eventually she told him and he set off, intending to kill those monsters.

The bird monsters had two chicks and, like all bird chicks everywhere, they were ravenous and kept their parents busy all day, every day just feeding them.  But their parents brought only people for them to eat.  The two adult bird monsters flew over the land, grabbed living people, flew back to Rock with Wings and then dropped the victims from a great height onto the huge rock where their chicks could feast on the bodies.

Which is why Monster Slayer set out to find and kill them.

Finding them turned out to be easy. The male monster bird saw Monster Slayer coming from miles and away and, after making three passes at him, grabbed him in his huge talons, flew high above Rock with Wings and dropped him on the rocks far below.

But Monster Slayer came prepared.  He had an eagle feather his father had given him and he used it to float gently down to the rocks.  Once there he cut open a bladder of blood from a different monster he had slain so blood flowed over the rocks as if Monster Slayer had really died.

Satisfied that his chicks could now eat their latest meal, the male bird monster flew off in search of more food for them. But the chicks were in for a surprise.

As they approached Monster Slayer, he leapt up and demanded that the baby bird monsters tell him exactly when both of their parents would return and where they would land on the Rock with Wings.  Terrified, the chicks told him.  Their father would return with the next male rain and their mother with the next female rain.  They also pointed out exactly which rocks their parents would land on.

Soon a male rain came with its lightning, thunder, wind, and hard rain.  The male monster bird returned as foretold by his chicks and Monster Slayer killed him by hurling a lightning bolt right through him.

Later, a female rain, with its soft, gentle, quiet rain arrived; the mother monster bird arrived, and Monster Slayer killed her too.

The baby chicks started an awful howling, fearing that they were next.  But Monster Slayer saw that they were still little and could be turned into useful birds and so he made one into an eagle and the other into an owl.

But now it was late afternoon, the sun was declining in the west, and Monster Slayer was stuck high up on the Rock with Wings with no way to get down.

Just then he spotted Bat Woman walking on the ground by the great rock and he called to her, asking for her to help him down.  But Bat Woman did not want to help because she thought of herself as being very ugly and she did not like for others to look at her.

Eventually though she agreed to help Monster Slayer down based on his promise to her that she could have all the feathers from the male Monster Bird with which she could adorn herself and become beautiful.  So Bat Woman helped him down, though not without trouble because Monster Slayer kept ignoring her commands to keep his eyes shut.

After he was down, he gave her all the feathers which she put in her basket.  But she did not want Monster Slayer or anyone else watching her put the feathers on and become beautiful so she started walking off toward a field of sunflowers.

Monster Slayer warned her not to go that way but she ignored him, just he had ignored her when she told him to keep his eyes shut.  As she walked, something fluttered in her basket but she kept going, right into the field of sunflowers.  Suddenly birds of all kinds started flying out of the basket containing the feathers of the monster bird.  When she realized that all those birds were coming out of her basket, she tried to stop them but couldn’t.

Finally she gave up trying to keep them in the basket, set the basket down and just watched as all those birds flew away.  “They flew away as wrens.  They flew away as warblers.  They flew away as sparrows. They flew away as titmice.”  All of them flew away until her basket was empty.

And there she sat, in the middle of the sunflowers, “. . .as ugly as she ever was and as ugly as she would always be.”  Which is why, it is said, that bats are still ugly and fly only at night so no one can see them.

And that is where songbirds came from.

We leave it to you to speculate on this question: How did this creation myth, which was told long before modern science discovered that birds evolved from dinosaurs, know about the Monster Birds from which, according to modern science, all songbirds derived?

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The entire story of the Navajo creation story about small birds can be found in Zolbrod, Dine Behane: The Navajo Creation Story, UNM Press 1984, pp 230-241.

The photo of Shiprock is from the NPS, the bat from the USGS, and the feathered bird monsters from the Dinosaur Museum.

Night Crane

A cold front passed through three days ago, leaving us with three crystal-clear autumnal moonlit nights which, if you were warmly dressed, were well-suited to sitting out in the back yard, listening to the trumpets of evolution. The Sandhill Cranes are migrating and this year many have chosen the night flight, probably because the winds aloft, swirling around a departing low pressure blow in the right direction.

And the sunrise this morning brought hundreds more, flying right over the house. One group was accompanied by a hawk, soaring just below them, perhaps catching a ride on their wing-waves.  Being cranes, they appeared utterly unconcerned about the hawk and the hawk seemed only to be interested in tagging along for a bit.

The crane migration, along with hummingbirds, thunderstorms, and Border Collies aging, mark the passage of time for us.  When the autumn cranes arrive, we know that another summer died peacefully in her sleep. Surrounded by birds, we know that the cranes will come tell us when spring heads north again next year.

Happy Autumn to all our readers.

Navajo Condor

 

The Vermillion Cliffs

Long time readers of this blog are used to its author whining about not seeing a California Condor after several attempts at the Grand Canyon.  Another attempt, this time at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, failed last week.

But there will be no more whining about not seeing a condor.

After a trip through parts of the Navajo Nation and a side trip up two of the three Hopi Mesas (Old Oraibi and Walpi) and a night at the Cameron Trading Post, a backpacking buddy and I headed for the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for two nights and three days of hiking.  To get to the North Rim from the South Rim, if you don’t have the time to hike 26 miles or can’t fly, is a 200 mile drive.  The only bridge across the Colorado River leading to the North Rim sits at the head of Marble Canyon at Lee’s Ferry. (The Navajo Bridge) After crossing the bridge, the road skirts the Vermillion Cliffs before climbing up to the Kaibab Plateau, about 1,000 feet higher than the South Rim and about 5000 feet higher than the bridge.

View Looking North from Navajo Bridge

On the morning we made the drive, road work caused us to stop.  Only one lane of the two-lane road was open and traffic had to take turns using the one open lane.  I got out of the car to visit with the flag man who, in the course of conversation, told me that people had been seeing some condors on the Navajo Bridge.  He did not know a Navajo word for “condor” but that was no surprise: The California Condors are not native to Arizona or Navajo country.  But some condors are nesting at a site in the Vermillion Cliffs. He did know how to be polite to the woman who got out of her car further back in the line and demanded, “What are we supposed to do?  Drive around all these stopped cars?”

 

He was very polite to her but, after she stomped back to her car, did laugh when I asked him if he got a lot of stupid questions.  I thanked him for the condor information and it was our turn to drive through the road work.

 

The Shadow without a Telephoto Lens

Naturally, we stopped at the bridge.  Actually there are two bridges, a modern one that traffic now uses and an older one that is now reserved for pedestrians who want to walk out and look down on the Colorado River.

We got out and scanned the bridges and the cliffs and saw nothing.

Fortunately the woman who runs the visitor center at Navajo Bridge was on the foot bridge visiting with a man from the Peregrine Fund who is involved in the condor project.  They pointed to a shadow on the cliff face which resolved itself into the all-black shape of a juvenile California Condor.

Here, thanks to my friend with the better telephoto lens, is what we saw.

 

 

California Condor - Photo by Ron Koopman

Condors’ heads don’t start turning their distinctive red until the bird is about three years old.  Until then, their heads are black as you see in the photo.  This one may only be a year old because he still is not fully grown.

We stopped at the bridge again on the way home and my friend got a fleeting glimpse of one flying away, but the bridge blocked our view and I didn’t see it.

So now, all that is left for me to whine about is that I still have never seen an adult condor or one in flight.  Which means I’ll just have to keep going back to the Vermillion Cliffs and the Grand Canyon.  I hate it when that happens.

 

Early Morning

There were four of them and they came at dawn.  The sun had just crested the rim far to the east and our coffee was gone. The male was domineering; discontented with his women who were dithering along behind him, vaguely flirting with two males of an alien species.  The night had been clear and cold, punctuated by Orion and his loyal hunting dog Sirius, silently stalking across the night sky. A small ravine behind us plunged off a cliff into a 4000-foot abyss and before us a small group of baby Aspen trees stood before an old, majestic Ponderosa Pine like kindergarten kids in front of a beloved teacher.  We were all there together in a house made of dawn.

But the male was not a poet and didn’t care about the beauty of the time. Skulking in the grass, he began making mild threats.  When that didn’t work, he flared his tail.  But even that wasn’t enough, so he marched out, right out into the open, demanding that they come.  And so, without a backward glance, they left us.

Grouchy Blue Grouse Male

God Introduces New Bird

The New Bird, according to The Onion

The Onion, in case you haven’t stumbled across it, is a fake, humorous newspaper where you can read all sorts of imaginative stuff.  With that warning, we refer you to a recent faux article announcing that God has created a new bird.  The bird doesn’t have a name yet because,  “In keeping with tradition, the bird has not been given a name by God, who has left it to mankind to name all the animals.”  Of course, in this modern age, even God has critics.  One such person is alleged by the Onion to have said, “It’s no bald eagle, that’s for sure.”

Just a Thought

Bottlenose dolphin from treehugger.com

Here is a thought from Douglas Adams, the writer and dramatist who died in 2001.  I was thinking of this watching the Grand Canyon Ravens last week.  By exchanging “fly around” for “swim in the water” and “eat anything” for ” eat fish”, you get exactly the same thought about animal intelligence.

Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons.

Sleeps with Elk

Some of the Grand Canyon’s California Condors often congregate for the night on the cliffs below the South Rim’s Bright Angel Lodge, but not on the one day we could be there to witness.  That’s the trouble with Nature: She doesn’t reliably bend her schedule to fit the desires of her human species, so we missed the condors once again.

California Condor on South Rim overlooking trail from Indian Gardens to Plateau Point

One man, from North Carolina, getting out of his pickup with an Audubon field guide in his hand, testified that he had been about a mile and a half down the South Kaibab Trail that day, eating lunch when one of the Condors soared overhead and the park rangers all report that the condors are doing well, so we’ll see them and get you a photograph one of these days.  You can read the latest condor update at this link.

We’re not complaining too much though.  We were privileged to watch earth, moon, and sky in their glory.  The backpacking tent stayed in the car, never once out of its stuff sack, which is exactly how tents should behave.  On the first night, a small juniper fire cooked the bison steaks perfectly and fresh juniper berries were a fine condiment.  The Milky Way is high overhead right now and the Andromeda Galaxy is barely visible to the naked eye.  Later in the night the waning moon rose and marked the night’s passage as it moved through the branches of the juniper and pinon trees overhead.  Coyotes serenaded the night while the humans slept in sleeping bags stuffed with down feathers borrowed from geese. Dawn brought a Pinon Jay which announced its presence long before favoring us with a sighting.  Shortly after, the Ravens flew in from their nightly roost, wheeling, soaring, doing barrel-rolls, and other acrobatics, talking to one another; you’ll never convince me that only food and fear motivate Ravens: Those birds were joyous.  At least one of them was thinking, “I’m a lucky bird, living here on the edge of the Grand Canyon and I must be a lot smarter than that human down there with the camera who doesn’t.”

USFW Photo of Bugling Wapiti

But the highlight of that night on the edge of the Grand Canyon was the elk.  It is rutting season for elk and the bulls bugle to attract females.  Scientists think the cows more strongly attracted to males who bugle the loudest and most frequently.  Early in the evening we heard bugling from a long distance away.  (If you’ve never heard it before, it is an eerie sound to the ears of a human. Here is a recording.)  The bulls, about 25% larger than the cows, stand five feet tall at the shoulder, are eight feet long, and weigh upwards of 700 pounds. (320 kg.)  Loaded with testosterone this time of year, they know what they want and they bugle to get it.

The Footprint

Elk — also known as Wapiti from the Shawnee word meaning “white rump” — got to North America the same way humans did: They walked.  They were here long before the Ancestral Puebloans  drew petroglyphs of them on cliffs and in caves all over what is now the southwestern United States. Revered by the Lakota, young males were given an elk’s tooth — the last part of an elk to rot away after death — as an aid for long life.  Elk, for the Lakota, were teachers, embodiments of strength and courage.

I was dreaming of elk that night but soon realized it wasn’t a dream. Two bulls were bugling within a stone’s throw of our camp.  One off to the left and another that was so close it sounded like it was lying next to me.  We found a footprint the next morning, maybe thirty feet from our sleeping bags.

Elk's-eye view of human camp with the print in left foreground.

I saw one of the bulls at sunrise the next morning but, in another example of Nature’s refusal to comply with humans’ desires, he was gone before I could grab the camera.  But he will live on in memory’s eye.

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For more on elk, try the National Geographic. That site also has a video of Elk with the sounds of several bugling.  Sadly, however, the video is marred by way too much talking and some silly background music.  For elk and their love of Aspen, see The Ecology of Death. And don’t miss this from Wild Resiliency, which, in addition to explaining what it is that Aspen know,  has a great photo of an Aspen which an elk loved.

Birds and Proper Coffee

A great unsolved mystery of the natural world is how so many species of life on our planet survive without coffee.  Birds and other animals appear to go straight from deep sleep into instant wakefulness without the slightest need for two cups of coffee. While that seems impossible, we must not flinch in the face of evidence.

Nevertheless, humans require it and here, reprinted from the Golden State blog — with permission — is the proper way to make coffee.

August 23, 2009 by goldenstate

It’s not easy being a yuppie in an industrialized, developed country at the beginning of the 21st Century.  You have to have one dedicated faucet in your home from which runs only the finest quality, filtered water and from another must flow only the best white wine, chilled to the proper serving temperature.

And that is the easy part.

The difficult part is the coffee.  In olden, pre-Enlightenment times your parents or grandparents went to a grocery store — imagine buying coffee in a grocery store — and bought Folgers coffee in a big metal coffee can, took it home, opened it with a can opener, dumped some of the already ground coffee into a drip coffee maker; or, even worse, into a percolator — the horror — and actually drank the results. Before that people drank cowboy coffee, which was made by dumping a bunch of ground coffee (and a egg shell) into a coffee pot with some water and boiling the stuff. It is a wonder our species survived.

But now, from the magazine Cook’s Illustrated — which is a really fine magazine, even if you are not a cook — comes the latest, most scientific word about the correct way to brew the best cup of coffee. (One doesn’t “make” coffee, one “brews” it.)

1.  Use only fresh ground coffee that you yourself ground just before making the coffee.  Exposed coffee cells begin to break down within an hour of grinding.  (So much for making the coffee the night before and having the coffee pot come on a few minutes before your alarm.)

And the coffee beans you grind must have been roasted not more than 12 days before, assuming you stored the beans in a bag that allows carbon dioxide to escape and prevents oxygen from entering.  Woe betide you if you have not stored your beans properly.

2.  Use only filtered water.  Ordinary tap water, you see, can mask the coffee’s “complexity.”  Which you already lost, if you failed step one.

3.  The water must then be heated to exactly 200 degrees Fahrenheit.  If you lack the proper thermometer, you can approximate that temperature — if you live at sea level — by bringing the water to a boil and then letting it rest for 10 to 15 seconds.  At 5000 feet above sea level, water boils at 202 degrees, so let it rest for only 5 seconds before pouring it over the freshly ground coffee.  (The precise boiling temperature of the water depends also on the current barometric pressure at your locale. You’ll need a high quality barometer to do this properly.  The lower the air pressure, the lower the temperature of boiling water.)  If you live at 7000 feet above sea level, water boils at 199 degrees so you have to pour it without rest.  I don’t know what you are going to do if you live, or have a second yuppie home, in the mountains. At 10,000 feet water boils at only 192 degrees so you can’t possibly get it hot enough.  Like altitude sickness, the only sure remedy is to descend to a lower altitude.

4.  You must also insure that you use the right grind for the right amount of brewing time.  The longer the brewing time, the coarser the grounds ought to be.  In this way, you protect yourself from over or under “extraction.” (Brewing time should be 4 to 6 minutes, if you have the water temperature correct.)

5.  Use the correct amount of coffee with the correct amount of water.  That is 2 tablespoons of ground coffee for every 6 ounces of water.  Unless you like your coffee stronger.  Slight variations at this step are permitted by the coffee police.

6.  Finally, you must accomplish the brewing by using the proper device. The best choice is a French press.  The recommended one cost $40.00. (Bodum Chambord, 8 cup size) You dump the medium – ground coffee in, pour the water steadily over it, and let it steep. (This is entirely different, of course, than cowboy coffee, but don’t embarrass me by asking how.)

If you choose not to use the French press method, you are allowed to do a “manual” drip, which consists of a stately pour of water over a medium grind (like coarse cornmeal) through a paper filter.  If you use one of those gold metal fillers, you must use a fine grind of coffee.  (Like fine cornmeal)

But the pour must be performed in two stages; one-half cup, followed by the remainder — in batches — beginning 30 seconds later.  Stir between batches.

If, after all this, you still want an automatic drip machine and do not want to be labeled a hopeless cretin, you must buy the Technivorm Moccamaster Coffee Maker.  It is the only one that heats the water to the correct temperature. If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.  ($265.00)

Or you could deny human progress, return to the days of the British Empire, and drink tea.

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Read more about coffee science here.

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The Fat Finch blog will be on a short hiatus until next Monday, October 12th.  We’ll be off looking for California Condors in the Big Ditch — sometimes referred to as the Grand Canyon.  See you on the other side.

The Fat Finch Goes Birding

The staff and management of the Fat Finch are leading bird walks this weekend.  Here they are out scouting.