When people want a different perspective on the world, they may go to the mountains, or the ocean, or admire the endlessness of the night sky. Landscapes so vast as to approach incomprehensibility let you feel small, temporarily lifting the weight of consequence from your shoulders.
You can get a similar effect rather closer to home by seeking out the opposite: worlds so small that you become incomprehensibly vast, and therefore as irrelevant as a distant snow-crested peak.
Recently I flew from a particularly dire version of Minnesota winter—periodic rain making no dent in the graying heaps of snow, while rendering the smooth ice-covered sidewalks puddle-pocked and slick, so that it was not unusual to find oneself sliding inexorably down an icy slope into four inches of slushy water—into the blush of spring.
This new season was in California, where I was visiting my fiancé for the weekend. (Long-distance relationships are a staple of academia; my Minnesota labmates have significant others in Seattle and India.) Three hours on a plane headed west and I seemed to have jumped forward two months. Puffed-up robins in the snow…
…were replaced with marsh wrens singing furious declarations of their virility.
The early stages of a scientific career are designed to be unstable, slingshotting you from place to place as you acquire new skills. I bucked this paradigm somewhat in the first years after finishing my PhD, teaching and working on local projects in order to stay in the Bay Area; but the lure of learning from a cool new lab (and having health insurance) proved irresistible. At the end of August this year I moved out to Minneapolis to start a postdoc.
**This post brought to you by a recent attempt to change someone’s mind using solid scientific findings.**
You, a well-trained and diligent scientist, have finally finished rigorously analyzing your data, writing up your results, and then re-analyzing your data according to the suggestions of peer reviewers, and have at last published your findings.
Tellin, an interested person/kitten, is going to try to debunk your findings.
You don’t have a chance.
My first thought was that the stag was badly injured. He trotted across the rural Wyoming highway wrong, dipping with every third step. Clipped by a car, maybe, I thought, mentally cringing at the internal damage that would have done. I pulled over on the shoulder, but by the time I got out of the car he had vanished.
The land was only moderately hilly, so I could see for a good distance, and the grass was waist-high on me: not nearly tall enough to hide an adult deer. I had taken my eyes off the stag for just a moment and now he was gone. All I could see was a flock of small birds swirling in agitation over the ditch at the side of the road.
…Hmm.
A barn owl chick: fierce AND fluffy.
The injured raptors at the wildlife rehabilitation hospital are kept in roomy metal cages lined with towels. There are pillow cases hung over the doors so that the raptors aren’t distressed by the sight of humans. The individual medical records hang on the outside of each door: Barn Owl, admitted 7/4/18, Fx L clavicle. It’s meant to be a calming environment, dim and quiet, with nothing for the raptors to do but eat their food and heal. Usually the raptors sit quietly in their cages, but occasionally there is one who throws himself at the door. You can’t see him, only hear him in his frustration: crash – crash – crash!
Most of the raptors need medications at least once per day. Liquid antibiotics and painkillers, topical eye ointments, pills. This requires one person to fetch them from their cage and restrain them from harming anyone while a second person medicates them.
We head for the Smoky Mountains full of confidence: the Kentucky Warblers may have proved to be elusive, but every source suggests that our new quarry will be more forthcoming. The Canada Warbler is known to be a particularly aggressive bird, likely to respond quickly to our calls; the American Redstart is a common and easy-to-find species. We will catch them easily while enduring less moisture and fewer mosquitos than before.
It’s a bright, cold morning just after the first real snow of the season. The chill gives your hunger an edge, but you have a plan: sit on the trash can and wait for the squirrels to come to you.
This perch is perhaps not entirely suited to your dignity, but it is hardly your fault that your fuzzy-tailed food likes to hang out in the garbage. They have chewed a hole in the side of the trash bin for easier access to their scraps. You, although temporarily perched on a trash bin, are death on wings—sharp talons screaming down from the sky…
Northern Mockingbird
When we catch a bird at the banding station, we look it over—and the bird eyeballs us right back.
The pale eyes mean this Bushtit is female.
The sun rising behind the mist nets at the banding station.
‘Tis the season for year-end “Best of” lists, so I thought I’d do something of the sort for my 2017 banding station birds. Except it turns out that we had too many cool birds this year to fit in one blog post, so I’ll be doing a series of banding station highlights posts. First up: the small and fuzzy.
Female Golden-crowned Kinglet
Tough Little Birds 