Phoebe Watch

One of our favorite birds is the Eastern Phoebe—a very sweet little critter with an ominous family name: Tyrant Flycatcher. I don’t know about the tyrant part, but I sure do appreciate the flycatcher part. These birds help keep the local bug population in check. The phoebe is a small, gray bird—rather dull looking. Its call is also unexciting—a repetitive, raspy rendition of its name.

Phoebes nest around manmade structures. I built a house with a large roof overhang, and the phoebes have nested under the eaves for many years—often rehabbing last year’s nest. They are acrobatic bug catchers, nabbing bugs on the wing (the flycatcher part). They perch on an open branch, bobbing their tail perkily up and down; then suddenly fly off and nab a morsel out of mid air.

When the babies (usually about four of them) are in their rapid growth stage, we watch the furious feeding activities of mom and dad. In the late morning and afternoons the parents fly many sorties, every minute or so, carrying food to their offspring.

This year I was able to get photos of the babies in the nest—watching them grow ever larger and marveling at how the four of them managed to crowd into that tiny cavity. We got to know them and came to feel like they were family members.

One morning the nest was empty. They had fledged. We could see activity in the surrounding trees, as the parents continued to feed the unskilled flyers for a few days. That was in June. Would the parents start a second brood? Sure enough, in a week or so there were four new eggs in the nest. Now I could get my first photos of hatchlings!

I watched as mom sat on her eggs. Phoebes are a little tame, seeing as how they choose to nest so close to buildings. Mom was often absent (the weather was warm enough that the eggs didn’t require her constant presence) so I could sneak in for a photo a couple of times a day. One morning the eggs had hatched and four featherless fetuses greeted me. So tiny and vulnerable!

I eagerly kept watch and took photos over the next couple days. One morning another empty nest greeted me. This was not the result of fledglings leaving the nest. Some critter had made a meal of them. My best guess is a snake dined on our birds. I have seen (and chased away) a black snake climbing the wall of the house, aiming for a phoebe nest.

This was a shocking and sad event, but that’s nature. The food chain occurs only at the cost of many lives. Who am I to question Mother Nature? Is the death of a sweet phoebe any sadder than all the bugs that it eats? Well, maybe to me, but to the surviving bugs it’s quite another thing. I could almost hear the celebratory shouts of the local insects... after all, fewer tyrants would be chasing them.

Chickadee Egg (Very quiet wings)

The Sound of Wing Beats

While disparate people may march to the beat of different drummers, disparate birds’ wings beat to different sounds. Over the years I have observed that the wing noise made by birds are distinctly different. So I have recently classified the various sounds into five levels: choppers, whistlers, flappers, flutterers, and whisperers.

The choppers—like noisy little helicopters—are the loudest wing beaters. Geese are real choppers. Their big wings steadily beat the air so loudly that I can hear them when they fly overhead, unless they are flying high. Most of the time, however, the incessant honking of Canada geese does a good job of masking wing sounds.

The whistlers are mourning doves. They’re not as loud as the choppers but they certainly grab your attention. For several years I thought doves were calling out as they flew, but then I came to realize that the sound is the tips of their wings shedding little musical vortices.

The flappers are medium-size birds like cardinals and woodpeckers. They are not the most graceful fliers. They furiously beat the air with their wings, creating a flailing sound that resembles a jazz drummer rapidly tapping with a rubber twig on partially-inflated balloons.

The flutterers are small birds like titmice, chickadees, and phoebes. They gracefully, quickly, and quietly zoom about the yard. I can hear their wings only when they are within a dozen feet of me, and only then if no insects are whining or breezes wafting. Their flight is acrobatic and sure. I marvel as I watch them land on a tree branch or the edge of the feeder, with pinpoint accuracy. In contrast, the whistling dove can be heard a hundred feet off. I cross my fingers as it comes clumsily in for a landing on the feeder, hoping that it won’t miss and tumble towards the ground.

The stealth fliers I call the whisperers. Owl flight is virtually silent, so I read; but they’re so shy that I’ve never gotten close enough to verify that. But I can testify to the whispering flight of whip-poor-wills. I once sat in the outdoor tub on a black, hushed night, watching a whip-poor-will fly sorties from a stump hardly 20 feet away from me. The bird repeatedly flew up, grabbed a bug, and circled back to the stump. My eyes could barely make out the bird’s inky form. My ears heard absolutely nothing.

Hummingbird Favorite

Altocumulus Sketch Pad

This time of year—when summer’s long days rule—I repose in my evening outdoor tub and watch clouds float by, rather than gaze at winter’s black sky full of stars. The sun sets and dusk begins to creep over the land. I have a small window on the sky directly overhead, between two sycamore trees.

On many of these evenings puffy white altocumulus clouds float by, still lit up by the sun at their altitude of some four miles. These are not the big puffy cumulus clouds, but cloudlets that come in many shapes and forms, and are more scattered across the sky. These are the same clouds that make for a spectacular sunset, when you look off to the west and become awed by the color display.

When I lie back in the tub, empty my mind, and gaze into these altocumulus cotton puffs, shapes will suddenly leap out at me. I’ll see the face of an ogre here, a sweet kitten there, a bent old man over there. I find I can’t force these shapes. I can’t go looking for them. They come to me only when my mind is free. Children know this.

The Romans and Greeks enjoyed the pastime of watching cloud sketches. Renaissance painters sometimes hid whimsical figures in their creations. Shakespeare’s Hamlet plays a mind game with Polonius on the shapes of a cloud—calling it first a camel, then arbitrarily switching it to a weasel, and finally a whale. Sometimes my image of an ogre will slowly transform into a beautiful woman. My mind’s eye has so much fun.

Altocumulus clouds are formed when moist, warm air rises during the day. They almost never bring precipitation. They are just fair-weather, fanciful images in the sky. Because I’m watching them at sundown, long after the heat of the daytime sun formed them, they are often in the process of slowly evaporating. Very gradually, the fainter wisps fade away. That fading alters the sketches, as they float lazily by.

Sometimes it seems that Hamlet is quietly whispering in my ear—teasing me about what I’m seeing, causing me to change my mind about that image. It’s easy to be swayed while under the intoxicating influence of those ephemeral altocumulus clouds.

Phantastic Phlox

Urban Noise, Rural Quiet

I’ve recently read two books that described the riches of rural “auralscapes”—all the wonderful sounds that one can hear when immersed in quiet surroundings. My former life was in acoustics (noise control) so I have a predilection for hushed environments. Having lived in the quiet woods for 25 years now, I’ve come to treasure the serenity it offers.

There are two terms that are often used to describe auralscapes: loud and noise. Each represents very different things to different people. One person’s loud is another’s quiet. One person’s noise is another’s music. The contrasts become quite stark for those who live in urban or in rural environments.

In cities manmade noise is both constant and dominant. I call it manmade “noise”; an urban dweller often hardly notices it. The continual din of traffic, airplanes, and countless machines numbs one’s hearing. The blare of loudspeakers and similar loud sounds can even damage one’s ears and threaten health by creating stress. City dwellers can lose contact with subtle sounds, just as they have little concept of what might be seen in a dark sky.

A rural auralscape can be far quieter. Surrounded by the stillness, one begins to hear many faint sounds that are otherwise elusive. Depending on the local activity level of background sound like insects and the wind, one can hear animal calls from a long distance away in the woods. The scurrying of little critters in the underbrush may be discerned. The wing beats of a bird can be heard. The trickle of the creek is delightful to listen to. It is not silence; it is the wonder of quietness.

Of course, there is a cost to living in a quiet rural auralscape and being treated to all the wonderful sounds: one becomes much more sensitive to intrusive noise. The snarl of a small plane—not even heard in the city—can be very intrusive out here. One loud motorcycle invades your world for several minutes, since you can hear it several miles away. Numerous studies of human physiological response to noise have shown that we can tune out a constant drone far easier than an intermittent intruder. (In a similar way, loud and flashy TV commercials cleverly penetrate our sensory defenses.)

In my quiet haven in the woods I thrill to all the wonderful sounds of nature, and flinch from the noise of humans. The flinching can be very irritating, but the quiet rewards outweigh the noisy intrusions.

Antidote for Poison Ivy

The Tree is Not a “Tree”—Part 2

Let’s look yet a little deeper into the “tree.” It is, of course, made up of trillions of atoms and molecules. But an atom is mostly nothingness: a tiny, dense nucleus surrounded by a swarm of electrons at some vast distance away. Consider a carbon atom, for example: If its nucleus was, say, the size of a golf ball, the electron cloud swirling around it would be out there, some 2-3 miles away. A golf ball sitting inside a sphere that's several miles big! The atom is not anything substantial at all; it’s some 99.9999% or so of emptiness. Thus there’s this big nothingness the “tree,” reflecting photons (which are really nothing, no mass, wholly insubstantial, only energy) into our eye. It’s not what we think it is at all. It’s pretty much nothing!

So OK, one might respond. So the symbol of the “tree” I create in my head is just a bunch of electrical signals. So maybe what I think I’m seeing is not really there. You tell me it’s just a bunch of nothingness. But when I go over and touch the tree, I can feel that it’s something solid. The bark is hard and ridged; the leaves are flexible and smooth. I can feel it. So it’s something physically substantial, right? Wrong. That feeling you got from your sense of touch does not indicate something solid at all.

The “tree” is, remember, mostly nothingness. So is your hand. The touch you feel is just two different kind of nothingness atoms (or molecules) electrically repelling each other. The electrons in the empty atoms of your “hand” meet the electrons in the empty atoms of the “tree” and their opposing electrical fields stop each other cold. The stronger the electrical field, the greater the repulsion—it feels more solid to you. So your “hand” meeting the “tree” is nothing more than two nothings—two vacuous electric fields—refusing to allow the other to pass. Again, nothing!

To some of us, the description of this reality of the “tree” may sound sterile and even rather sinister. We’d rather live with the symbols we’ve created in our heads and get along just fine, without trying to maintain that they are the reality of the world. We all do this most of the time anyway. These images get so entrenched in our psyche that they are real to us. Like the spider, we’re happy in our ignorance. But like the spider, the truth is that our perception of the world is a mere fraction—even a misrepresentation—of reality. It’s all so much grander and whole than we can imagine.

I think it’s important to pause now and then and acknowledge that our viewpoint is fragmentary, at best. My dog’s olfactory world is far richer than mine. An eagle’s visual world dwarfs mine. A bee’s sensitivity to ultraviolet light reflected from a flower tells it things I’m ignorant of. The mysteries and wonders of the world are things that my senses can only begin to comprehend. It helps me keep my hubris in check, to remind myself that my conception of this sacred universe needs a lot of expanding to even begin to be considered authentic.

Butterfly Weed

The Tree is Not a “Tree”—Part 1

We create an understanding of the world around us—based on messages that our various senses gather. We become convinced that the real world matches the images we’ve made; particularly as our repeated experiences solidify them, and as we confirm them with other people. We rarely pause and acknowledge that these images exist only inside our heads, and that the world “out there” is nothing like what we’ve perceived.

One way to consider this situation is to ponder how our human perceptions differ from those of another critter—say, a spider. When I approach a spider’s web I may see this little creature poised at the center, waiting for lunch. Its eyesight is poor. It may not even see me. Why should it? It makes no sense to overload its senses with useless information about my appearance. Its relevant world consists of only its web, its immediate environment, and the food that might come. It’s exquisitely sensitive to the slightest vibration of its web—able to discern whether it’s the wind, lunch, or my finger. Yet it knows nothing of the wider world—and is even unable to sense most of it. Why should it?

And are we any different from the spider—whose limited senses register only a narrow, incomplete image of the world? Our senses are also limited; they provide us with only the information we need to survive. If we could take in more data our brain would become hopelessly overloaded, so we’ve evolved to ignore most of our world.

Let’s look a little deeper, and consider how we create an image in our head of something like a tree—an image that is neither real nor complete. Our sense of sight is based solely on the reception of photons that impinge upon our pupils. The photons that come from the tree originate in the sun; they’re reflected by the tree. They enter the eye, strike the retina, and then the optic nerve transmits an electrical stimulus that goes to the brain. It results in a symbol created in the brain—a symbol based solely on that electrical impulse. It’s not the tree; it’s an abstraction in our heads.

But what about color, one might ask? Aren’t the leaves green? Isn’t that something integral to the tree? No, color is perceived solely as the types of photons that got reflected. The sun’s energy is radiated by photons of many wavelengths (many colors). The trees “leaves” absorb some of those photons and reflect others. Our sense of color is no more than our eye receiving a particular flavor of photon; which carries a particular energy level that creates a particular electrical impulse on its way to the brain. Just another abstract symbol.

The “tree” is really nothingness... next time

Wee Tortoise

Apollo 11 at 40

Forty years ago on July 20 I excitedly jumped out of bed at the sound of the alarm clock—at somewhere in the vicinity of two am. If things were going well, NASA’s lunar lander, the Eagle, would be spiraling down to the moon’s surface in another hour or so. I dragged three sleepy kids from bed, to allow them to witness this incredible achievement. They sat sleepy-eyed and I teary-eyed, as Neil Armstrong coolly piloted the lander to its resting spot, with a few precious seconds of fuel left.

I didn’t feel pride at America’s beating the Russians there, or even see it as the culmination of some long-held national dream. As an engineer, I was simply thrilled by the success of such a bold effort. It was a first for the human species, which compared in my mind to building the Pyramids or the creation of the first alphabet. And I was present to witness it!

The Apollo program had come to fruition in an amazingly short time. From Kennedy’s brash speech in 1961 to the lunar landing: eight brief years. Unfortunately, Apollo then faded even faster. The public’s attention was diverted elsewhere, the last three Apollo missions were cancelled, and NASA stumbled on to other efforts—never again rising to the heights scaled in the 1960s.

Much has been written and debated about the subsequent triumphs and flops of NASA. Many questions have been raised as to the general inconsistency of the American space program, the failures of the Space Shuttle and the dubious scientific value of the Apollo program and the International Space Station. The relative merits of unmanned missions to the planets, as compared to low-Earth orbit manned missions have been passionately argued.

I have no space or inclination here to enter those contested arenas. It simply seems a shame that the American public and Congress have been so fickle in their support of the space program. A consistent, well thought-out direction has been utterly lacking. How much farther in space exploration we could have been by now, with coherent planning and commitment! I’ve always thought it strange that the public readily accepts huge military budgets that have created so much suffering around the world, while begrudging the tiniest fraction of that money being spent on something positive: the acquisition of knowledge about the marvelous universe we inhabit.

Now at Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary we see humans regaining an interest in the moon. But I fear the efforts are just as political and are motivated by petty national competition as they were in 1969. It feels too much like grandstanding. Give me a quiet little Mars Rover any day!

Firefly (Photinus pyralis)

Firefly Antics

This is the season to watch the antics of fireflies. Late June and early July are such fun times—gazing at the flashing, flying, glowing creatures. Fireflies are another of those insects with “fly” in their name, that are not flies at all. Another common moniker they have is lightening bug, but they’re also not a bug.

Fire“flies” are beetles, and they ought to be proud of that, since beetles are the most abundant and diverse critters on Earth. One in every four animals is a beetle! One in five of all species (including plants) is a beetle. Yikes, they’re everywhere! Just in North America we sport 24,000 different species of beetles.

Have you ever watched a beetle fly? They look quite ungainly, compared to their distant cousins, the “true” flies (who have only two wings). Beetles have four wings; but the forward pair are for protection—and are unable to flap and help in the flying game. They are hard plates that are lifted up and held ungainly out to the sides, as the aft pair gets the beetle precariously airborne.

There’s quite a variation between the different species of fireflies. Most females can fly, but some are wingless. Some females deceive another species’ males and eat them. Some species don’t flash at all—the so-called day-active non-luminescent fireflies. (Huh? Isn’t that an oxymoron?)

But I digress. I wanted to write about a recent firefly antic that I was treated to. Ordinarily, I watch the lanterns of these luminescent beetles flash on and off when it’s dark. It’s very rare that I can follow an individual firefly after he blinks off. If I see another flash, I have no idea if it’s him or another nearby suitor. I even have no idea of how many flashers I’m watching. It may be just a couple of them dashing and flashing here and there, or a bunch of them hovering lazily in one location and occasionally flashing.

On this recent occasion it was early dusk, so I could see him, even when his beacon was extinguished. It was mesmerizing. He’d helicopter slowly along, a couple of feet above the ground, then quickly dip downward and flash. Bobbing back up, he’d dawdle along for a bit, then swiftly dip and flash again. He looked to be in hunting mode. After each flash he’d pause, as if waiting for a potential mate to respond, and then move on, when he got no answer.

He kept searching, drawing me into his undertaking. At one point an answering flash came from below, with the same timing. There she was! But he missed the signal! He moved dreamily on, dipping and flashing. I wanted to call out to him, telling him he’d just missed a golden opportunity. I hoped he’d U-turn and come back to find her, but he plodded fruitlessly along. Could he even have heeded my call? Does a firefly have ears for human coaches?

Black Trumpet