snow geese | The Casual Blog

January 31, 2023

Ducks at Delmarva, bird rescues, and flu research

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I headed up to the Delmarva peninsula for a photography workshop featuring wintering ducks. We put on waders and got in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay near Cambridge, Maryland. There were hundreds of beautiful ducks and other water birds, flying in and swimming close.

From a distance, ducks on the water can look peaceful. But up close, it’s clear they swim fast and are constantly on the lookout. Their lives are not easy.

We also went to the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge to look for various other creatures, including short-eared owls. We saw various eagles, harriers, and great blue herons, a fox, and, after a lot of looking, a SE owl – my first, which was kind of a thrill. The sun was setting, but I managed to get one shot.

As much as I enjoyed seeing the uncommon birds, I also got joy from the more common ones. We see a lot of mallards in the course of a normal year, and it’s easy to forget about their amazing colors. I liked this flying shot, and also one of two mallard drakes having a squabble.

We saw a vast accumulation of snow geese grazing in a farm field. Something (maybe a fox) startled them, and they all took wing in an instant, with some of them headed directly at us. They made an amazing racket. It was so exciting I forgot to worry about the possibility of being hit by one of these good-size, fast fliers. We noticed after the big launch that a few birds were still on the ground, apparently wounded by collisions during the take off. Clearly, it’s not easy flying in a crowd.

The workshop was organized by Shoot the Light, Chas Glatzer’s outfit, and led by Joe Subolefsky. I had thought Chas would be the leader, and was disappointed at first to learn otherwise, but I was very happy working with Joe. He knew a lot about the wildlife and about making interesting images with mirrorless cameras (the kind I’m using now).

Speaking of birds, Sally and I had a special opportunity to visit the American Wildlife Refuge, a bird rescue center in Clayton, N.C. There were quite a few big birds there who’d been hit by cars or otherwise injured, including barred owls, a great horned owl, red-tailed hawks, broad-winged hawks, Cooper’s hawks, vultures, and a bald eagle. Most of these were on the road to recovery and were expected to resume their life in the wild. The barred owls were especially curious to see us, and sat together on a branch watching us intently.

We talked with the head of the organization, Steve Stone, who is a fully licensed and very experienced wildlife rehabilitator. He is effectively a full time volunteer who has devoted much of his life to helping injured birds. We were happy to be able to donate to support this work, and hope others will do so. The web site is http://awrefuge.org/

Until last week, I’d never volunteered for a medical research project, but I decided to sign up as a subject for a study of a new flu vaccine being developed by Pfizer. I met the age and vaccine criteria (over 65 and not vaccinated for flu). After a telephone interview, I went in for another interview, along with a physical exam.

It was more involved than I expected. But I got a shot of either the current flu vaccine or the experimental mRNA one. Other than the needle prick, nothing bad happened. And I got a non-de-minimis payment: $150!

January 7, 2023

Big white birds, intelligent bees, Ultra, and the tree lady

Last week I drove to eastern North Carolina to check on the visiting wild birds. Some hundreds of tundra swans were there. These big white birds nest on the Arctic tundra and migrate long distances to winter at places like Pungo Lake. They really are majestic, swimming calmly or climbing the air. I watched them for quite a while, flying, landing, feeding, preening, and having minor disputes.

Shortly after sunrise I also saw thousands of snow geese in a riotous murmuration, circling around a farm field, landing, then taking off again. It was thrilling. What were they up to? They vocalize as they fly, and perhaps they’re debating how to group themselves and where to go for the day. Or perhaps that’s just their ritual, their way to greet the sunrise.

We have a lot to learn about the minds of other animals. A new book I’m reading, The Mind of a Bee, by Lars Chittka, shows that most of what I was taught about bees back in the day was ridiculously wrong. Chittka, a professor, discusses the special qualities of bee perception, communication, and behavior. He makes a convincing case that individual bees have memories and solve complex problems of navigation, flower biology, and structural engineering. It’s hard not to conclude that they have a kind of intelligence.

On the drive out east, I listened to Rachel Maddow’s new podcast, Ultra. The subject is American Nazis in WWII, including a couple of dozen members of Congress who collaborated with Hitler’s government. One group, inspired by the rabidly antisemitic Father Coughlin (the most popular radio personality of his time), stockpiled arms and planned to overthrow the U.S. government.

I enjoy learning about American history, and like to think my knowledge is above average. But the Ultra story was a chapter I’d never heard anything about. I’d had the impression that in WWII, there was hardly any disagreement among Americans on the proposition that Nazism was wrong and needed to be opposed with all our strength. But thanks to Rachel and her team, I now get that it wasn’t that simple.

The January 6 insurrection, election denialism, QAnon conspiracy thinking, and the MAGA penchant for violence and repression now make more sense. As disturbing as these ideas are, it’s clear that they aren’t random or isolated.

Fascist fears and longings have been part of our story for a long time. For some, there’s real appeal in the idea of finding unity behind an inspired dictator to beat down a supposedly grave threat. It’s easy to condemn this kind of extremism. But it’s better to understand it as part of a long-standing culture that adherents did not consciously choose. It might make us less judgmental and angry, and able to help the extremists calm down and perhaps find a measure of sanity and peace.

On a happier note, I was glad to see the Washington Post featured a good piece by Sarah Kaplan on Suzanne Simard. Simard is a pioneering plant biologist who made key discoveries relating to how trees in forests behave. (She was the model for a character in Richard Powers’ excellent 2018 eco-novel, The Overstory.) She discovered that mycorrhizal fungi connected to tree roots facilitate living forest communities.

Kaplan wrote, “Through decades of study, Simard and other ecologists have revealed how fungi and trees are linked in vast, subterranean networks through which organisms send messages and swap resources. The findings have helped revolutionize the way the world sees forests, turning static stands of trees into complex societies of interdependent species, where scenes of both fierce competition and startling cooperation play out on a grand scale.”

Simard’s current big experiment is called the Mother Tree Project. She’s designed different environments to see how trees and their associated fungi networks fare. It seems pretty clear that the logging methods generally used today are not sustainable, and she’s looking for a better way.

January 20, 2020

Farewell to Sunflower’s, the dastardly Wall project, and The Great Derangement

Snow geese at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico

I was in Raleigh this week, and didn’t take any new photographs of note, but I had quite a few to work through of the more than 5,000 I took in Bosque del Apache, NM. It sounds like a lot, but they add up fast when you shoot at 9 frames per second. The high frame rate helps in capturing different aspects of the birds in flight, but it also means there are a lot of images to analyze, which takes time and energy. Anyhow, here are a few more Bosque shots that I liked.

Sandhill cranes

On Friday I went over to Sunflower’s Cafe, which has for a long time been my favorite neighborhood lunch spot, and noticed that the parking lot, which was normally pretty full, was empty. I peered inside, and saw that the furniture was gone. The place had closed.

Sunflower’s invented several marvelous vegetarian sandwiches that they served in a bright, friendly space. I felt happy and healthy having lunch there. I’ll never forget when I ordered the Portobello Ellen, and the friendly young woman taking my order said, “I’m Ellen.” Her mom, the proprietor, had invented the sandwich when she was a baby. But Ellen said that she wasn’t a fan of portobello mushrooms.

I later learned from the News & Observer that there are plans for a hotel to go where Sunflower’s used to be. No hotel will give me as much pleasure as Sunflower’s did.

Speaking of construction, I heard further news of The Wall this week. The Wall has until now been a right-wing fantasy project, with much tough talk and little actual building. Its alleged purpose is to address a non-existent problem — hordes of invading criminal Latin Americans. Just as the premise is a lie, the solution is bogus — defensive walls have been obsolete since the Middle Ages, and this one won’t stop anyone not in a wheelchair.

Yet the idea of The Wall does serve a purpose: whipping up fear of impoverished and desperate Latin Americans. Sad to say, the idea seems effective in inflaming the folks who go to Trump’s rallies.

Trump is raiding the military budget to get more money for this sad and absurd boondoggle. And NPR reported that the project could cost $11 billion — the most expensive wall in the history of the world.

We could use that money to build more unnecessary weapons of war, or we could just hand out bags of public money to corrupt building contractors. In fact, almost anything would be better than actually building The Wall. A lot of the debate about the project omits that it will be an environmental disaster. It will affect an estimated 1,500 species of animals and plants, including some that are endangered. Species that need to move about in that area to survive will be trapped.

Part of The Wall project apparently involves ignoring such environmental impacts. It’s a fair example of our leaders’ mind set — willful ignorance of climate and other looming disasters, and indifference to the lives of both humans and other species.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to know how to think about climate change — the scale boggles and scrambles the mind. Amitav Ghosh addressed this problem in his recent book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, which I just finished reading.

Ghosh, an Indian scholar and writer primarily known as a novelist, points out that the modern novel has largely failed to address the central issue of our time. He has a lot of interesting things to say about the strange failure of much modern art to grapple with climate change, and also about the relation of imperialism to reckless greenhouse gas emissions. He points out that the most numerous early victims of rising sea levels will be poor people in China, India and less developed countries. This could, he thinks, partially explain the West’s inaction — some might view the death of millions of Chinese as in the US’s interest.

Could we really be that despicably callous? Maybe so. Can we move from there to a mindset of caring and kindness , and of decency and generosity? That could be the great construction project of our time.

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January 27, 2019

Snow geese and tundra swans, Roman history, and another wall problem

Tundra swans at Pungo Lake

Each winter thousands of migrating tundra swans and snow geese stop in eastern North Carolina for a while to collect themselves and eat what’s left in the farm fields. For a human, all that bird life is a thrilling sight.

In addition to the thrill, I was hoping to capture some images of the birds in flight. In preparation, I did some research on optimal settings and customized some of my camera buttons. This process was involved and confusing, and I thought it possible I would end up with a hard-to-repair mess. I also decided to try wielding my Sigma 150-500mm, a beastly large lens, free hand (no tripod).

Pungo Lake, where I saw most of snow geese and most of the tundra swans, is about 2.5 hours east of Raleigh. For part of the time I traveled with other members of the Carolina Nature Photographers’ Association, including some friendly and very well-traveled shutterbugs. I got to hear some of their stories and picked up some helpful tips.

I saw thousands of big white birds, as well as several species of ducks, waders, and one black bear. We had good weather until Saturday afternoon, when the rain came in and the temperature started to drop. I was happy with some of the shots I got before then.

On an ordinary day, I check the digital news headlines frequently, which rarely puts me in a more relaxed, pleasurable state of mind. So it was good to unplug for the weekend and concentrate on the beauty of the natural world.

I also spent some of the driving time learning about the classical world. I finished listening to a series of lectures titled The Rise of Rome, by Gregory Aldrete, from the Great Courses series. It traces the rise of Rome from a settlement to the Western world’s first superpower.

Aldrete is a good teacher and a good story teller, and mixes broad themes with interesting anecdotes. The Romans were certainly great engineers and organizers, as well as fearsome warriors. In the late Roman Republic, the levels of corruption, extreme inequality, and political dysfunction were even worse than our own, which I found somewhat comforting. Leaving aside the lives and civilizations destroyed by Rome, life went on.

Snow geese coming in for a landing near Pungo Lake

I’ve been trying to avoid spending too much time obsessing over the latest Trump conflagration, since it does little or no good. But I have been keeping a sharp eye on the presidential approval poll numbers, hoping to see a change in the national mood, and possibly our direction. Even though Trump has been generally unpopular almost since day 1, his Republican base has been mostly steadfast.

I know some sane, well-informed, thoughtful, kind and generous Republicans, and have found it hard to understand how people like them could support a President with none of those virtues. Trump, it seemed, might have been right when he said that no matter how crazy or heinous his acts, his base would never abandon him. But in the latest polling, after his reckless government shut down and non-stop nonsense about the Wall, the polls indicate some of his loyalists may be rethinking their position.

Although Trump has a gift for bringing out the worst in people, at times he inadvertently brings out better things. For example, his racist language encourages the no-holds-barred racists, but it also makes others think more and talk more about the hard-to-see realities of our longstanding, everyday privileging of whiteness. His climate change denialism is getting harder for the base to swallow as they face more frequent droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, and other storms.

Even the Wall discussion seems to have crossed a threshold. For many, it seems to have gone from being primarily a fun slogan to yell at a Trump rally to looking like a nutty and wasteful boondoggle. There’s an aspect of the Wall idea that hasn’t gotten much attention, which I was glad to see noted in the news recently: the harmful effects on non-human life. The 650 miles of wall already in existence is very bad for the hundreds of species of animals and plants that live in the vicinity. Many of these need to travel north and south for food, water, and mating. We need to take their needs into account.

Tag: snow geese