Solstice Songbirds

Long before we discovered fire or thought up writing, we humans discovered that a single day each year marked the turning toward light we now call the Winter Solstice. In the Northern Hemisphere, we celebrated with bonfires, orgies, bacchanalia; whatever we could think of to mark the end of the slide into the cold darkness.

So, it is not amiss to take a moment a week before this year’s solstice to think again of Spring and songbirds.

E.B. White Writing on his Farm

We did that last night by visiting with E.B. White, one of our favorite writers. Specifically, we read his April, 1942, essay entitled, “Songbirds” from his book One Man’s Meat. By that time of his life Mr. White lived on an Atlantic seaboard farm in Maine. And, as farmers do everywhere, he carefully and joyfully noted the coming of spring. The storm windows were down, replaced by screens; the peas, radishes, carrots, and spinach were in; the ice was off the pond and the frogs were singing; the rhubarb was showing; and the songbirds were back.

But, only four months before, the United States had officially entered World War II, so that spring of sixty-eight years ago was the first spring of that war for Mr. White. Blackout curtains and sugar rationing and air raid alarms and three patrol planes that flew over each afternoon, scaring the chickens who thought the planes were hawks, all were part of his 1942 spring landscape. And here is Mr. White describing one particularly warm evening that spring:

The warmth of the afternoon held over through suppertime, and now the air has grown still. . . .The unseasonable warmth invests the night with a quality of mystery and magnitude.  And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rises the bomber’s moon.

Not the planter’s moon or the spring moon; the “bomber’s” moon.

Noting that spring is a “rush season” on any farm, Mr. White complains that, at his farm, it had become an almost impossible season due to the arrival there of Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds — Including All Species Found in Eastern North America. “Now,” he says, “we can’t settle down to any piece of work without being interrupted by a warbler trying to look like another warbler and succeeding admirably.”

Yellow Palm Warbler - Photo by Wolfgang Wander

That morning his wife had seemed tired and depressed. “My real trouble is,” his wife said, “that I learn the birds pretty well one year, but then the next year comes and I have to learn them all again.” And no wonder, all those, “. . .indistinguishable little birds crying for our attention, flaunting an olive-green spot that looks yellow, a yellow stripe that looks gray, a gray breast that looks cinnamon, a cinnamon tail that looks brown.” According to Mr. White, his wife sometimes got so frustrated that she got irritated with the songbirds.  “There goes one of those damned little Yellow Palm Warblers, — I guess.”

Warblers are the worst, of course.  We’ve noted in this space before that we understand why Audubon shot them; it was the only way to get them to hold still long enough for an identification.  Mr. White complains, “There are dozens of warblers, many of them barely visible to the naked eye. To distinguish them one from the another is like trying to distinguish between two bits of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight.”

What’s more, their naked eyes were all the Whites had to identify all those scurrying, hurrying little warblers.  They had donated their binoculars the year before and sent them to England to help the British defend themselves from the Nazi onslaught.  Imagine giving away your binoculars for a good cause and having none the next time you spot a little bird far away.  Anyway, without his binoculars, all the rushing birds looked dim and indistinct to Mr. White, the way, “. . . .all birds look to me when they are in a hurry (which they almost always are) or when I am.  A hurried man trying to identify a hurried bird is palpably a ridiculous situation.”

So, get out your field guides and start studying.  Spring is coming, not long after next week’s bonfire.

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Be a Great Citizen

The world’s economy remains in trouble and all good people everywhere are asking, “How can I help?”

We’ve got the answer!

Spend money at The Fat Finch! Or, if you live close, come into the physical store, address below.

You’ll help the world’s economy, you’ll help keep us open for business in these hard times, and you’ll feel a sense of purity and serenity, knowing that you’ve done your bit to help the world.

Really.

No birds were harmed in the making of this blog post.

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.

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.

Intestines of the Soil

Aristotle called them, “the intestines of the soil.”  For Darwin, they were the most ancient, most important plough in the history of the world.

For Robins, they are breakfast.

The lowly earthworm, 80% water, 14% protein, 6% miscellaneous nutrients, chugs along just beneath the surface of the earth; eating plant matter, protozoans, plankton, nematodes, bacteria, fungi, and the decomposing remains of other animals — including, one supposes, Polonius and others of his species — creating the good soil from which all the plants that sustain other life grow.  Without them, all life on the planet would be gone.

Motoring around just beneath the surface, they are easy prey for robins.  Cocking their heads first one way, then the other, following with a bill-pounce into the earth and coming out with a worm, robins give people the impression that they actually hear the worms.  That is unlikely.  Robins’ eyes are fixed in their skulls, unlike ours, so they must turn their heads in order to see and locate prey, not to hear it. Most likely, the robin sees motion, locates the worm visually by head-tilting, and then snatches the worm.

A dubious statistic holds that a young robin will eat 14 feet of worms a day.  Frequently cited, that statistic comes from a marvelous website dedicated to earthworms and on which there is much good information. But that particular statistic comes without a reference.

But scientists have plowed through plenty of robins’ stomachs. They find that worms constitute about 15% to 20% of the summer diet for robins. The rest consists of fruit and insects. One study of 1,236 robin stomachs contained 42% animal matter and 58% vegetable matter.

Their diet of earthworms is seasonal.  Many more are eaten in the spring and summer, which makes sense, because the soil is warmer then, the worms more active and easier for the robins to find. In the fall the robins are busy eating seeds and fruit, including that of the juniper, a plant species almost entirely dependent on robins and other birds for dispersal.  Robins adore honeysuckle too.  Some actually get intoxicated from eating too much of it.

Robin Wine

Getting drunk on honeysuckle doesn’t hurt robins.  DDT does though.  In a futile effort to eradicate Dutch Elm disease, Americans sprayed ailing elm trees with DDT to kill the elm bark beetles which transmit the fungus that kills the trees.  Because the molecules of DDT are persistent and non-dissolvable, they continue to kill insects for as long as the leaves are on the trees.  But when autumn comes, the leaves fall, the earthworms eat the leaves, the robins eat the earthworms, and the robins die.  Before DDT was banned from the United States, it wasn’t just the high-end predators like Peregrine Falcons and eagles that were killed by DDT. Songbirds too died by the millions. On the campus of Michigan State almost every robin on the campus died  after DDT was sprayed on the campus elms, as did migrant robins who were merely passing through.  The elms died anyway.

The robins died because the earthworms, doing their job, were eating the fallen leaves and depositing the DDT into their bodies which in turn killed the robins that ate the worms. A movie could be made about that: “The Revenge of the Earthworms.”

Now that DDT is banned from the United States, the American Robins who live here go unmolested about their business of hunting earthworms; for it is true, as the mystery writer P.D. James has written, “God gives every bird his worm, but he does not throw it in the nest.” Robins do most of their earthworm hunting early in the day.  We said earlier that they think of earthworms as breakfast.  The old saw that the early bird gets the worm appears to be scientifically accurate.  Robins spend more of their time looking for worms early in the day, shifting to seeds later.

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The science in this post comes from Sallabanks, Rex and Frances C. James. 1999. American Robin (Turdus migratorius), The Birds of North America Online (A. Poole, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America Online: http://bna.birds.cornell.edu/bna/species/462 (subscription required), last visited August 22, 2009 and Worm Digest,  http://www.wormdigest.org/, last visited August 21, 2009.

The earthworm photo was made by Michael Linnenbach.

Long Ago, in a Place Far Away

Or Maybe that Bird is a Cordilleran Flycatcher?

Or maybe that bird we thought might be a Hammond’s Flycatcher is actually a Cordilleran Flycatcher?  A reader named Keith thinks it might be a Cordilleran and he may be right.  (His comment is attached to the last post.) We are posting two more photographs of the bird today, so he and you can have another look.

All of which brings up another point about identifying birds:  It is difficult to do it with nothing in front of you but a photograph.  (Obviously that does not apply to all birds but it does to the ubiquitous “Little Brown Jobs” (LBJ’s) which inhabit our world.  Some are almost impossible to distinguish when you are looking at them in the flesh, let alone looking at a marginal photograph.  In fact, our preference for field guides is that they not have photographs.  We want the art of Sibley or Peterson or Kaufman or the National Geographic in our field  guides rather than photographs.  Artists can be more careful about color and can put more detail into a bird than a photograph.  While that may be a departure from reality, it is a better learning tool.

The age of digital photography further complicates identification by photograph.  Modern digital cameras can take marvelous photographs but you can never be absolutely certain about the colors.  Some cameras may saturate the colors more than nature does. The process of rendering the digital image onto the computer screen, changes the colors more.  And every computer monitor shows them slightly different than any other monitor.  Every browser mangles the color as well.  Most important,  All cameras see the world differently than the human eye and brain.

Here are examples.  Every digital camera has a control called the “white balance” which is simply the color temperature of the ambient light the camera perceives.  But you can change it for every photograph you take.  And here is why it makes a difference.  Look at the three photos below.  It is the same photo but with three different white balance adjustments.  Because the identity of this bird depends, in part, on how much yellow it has, you can see that the white balance alone makes a huge difference.

Photo as it came out of the camera

Because of all the green in the background it is difficult to tell if that is yellow on the lower breast of the bird or merely reflection of the predominant green in the background.

Photo Adjusted to "Auto" in Adobe's Lightroom

And, here is the last example”

Photo adjusted to "Daylight" in Lightroom

Then, and finally, we  run into the fallibility of human memory.  In my memory this bird was not showing much yellow, but my memory may be wrong.

That is why no substitute exists for the experienced birder.  If you are a casual birder and want to be better at identifying birds, you simply must go out with someone who knows what he or she is doing.  As an example, take this bird:  Keith would have nailed the identity in a flash, told us, and we would have remembered. As it is, we may never be certain.

And, as we always remind you:  The bird doesn’t care what you call it.  All you really have to do is see it and you’ll be more than a casual birder.

Real Fireworks

Here, for your 4th of July entertainment, are some real fireworks, photographed from space.  (The segment is silent and lasts only a few seconds.)

A Weighty Question

As you know, this blog is the son of the Fat Finch stores, the one on-line and the bricks and mortar one.  The bricks and mortar store — actually there are neither bricks nor mortar —  sits in a small and new shopping area.  Until recently, a small restaurant was also in the little center but it has closed.  (A new restaurant is on the way though.)  To properly understand this post, you should know also that, until the new restaurant opens, we are the only business in the shopping area.

A large cardboard recycling bin sits at the side where we dutifully recycle all the cardboard boxes that bring us our merchandise.  We were out there last week when a man in a car drove up, looking for boxes.  The conversation went like this.

Man – “Do you work at the restaurant?”
Us    – “No, the restaurant has gone out of business.”
Man – “Oh.  So do you work at the weight store?”

On reflection, we must admit the word “fat” does appear in our name.

Raining Ducks

We don’t often post items here that are otherwise widely available on the internet but this is too cute not to.  It is from a network (ABC) news program which means it is short.  The most interesting — and unanswered question — is, “What was that mother duck thinking?”  Do you suppose she thinks she is really a Peregrine Falcon trapped in a duck’s body?

The original ABC broadcast aired Monday evening.  They did a follow-up story including a bit about the famous children’s book Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey.  (If you want the original story sans commercials, here it is at buzzfeed.)