Just a quick note for those that care… I’m headed to graduate school! It was expected, but I finally got my offical acceptance letter yesterday in the mail, and I will be attending San Angelo State starting this spring to pursue a masters degree in biology. My thesis will most likely focus on some aspect of community ecology in birds. I’ll have to do some leveling work the first semester. So far I’ll be taking undergrad classes in genetics, biostatistics, and evolution. I’d like to talk my way out of the evolution class. I feel like Abilene Christian did a good job covering the subject, but alas, you’ll never find a class titled such on an ACU transcript. Oh well. I’m sure I can learn much from it.

I’m quite excited (even if a little scared) about this next phase in my life. A couple of weeks ago, I visited the campus with my wife to meet with the professor I’ll be studying under, Terry Maxwell. It was a delightful visit.

One of the funniest moments came as we (Dr. Maxwell, my wife, and I) were crossing campus to visit the admissions office. There was a dead Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura) on the ground, and Dr. Maxwell picked it up to stick in Angelo State’s freezer, to be prepared later for their natural history collection. He left the bird outside when we visited with the admissions folk, but on the way back to his office, we took a detour through the campus center as he wanted to show it to us. Dead dove in hand, we walked past throngs of students, people in business suits and dresses, and workers getting various end of year festivities setup. He would occasionally point to something, dove in hand. I think my wife was a little surprised and trying not to laugh.

Afterwards, at my request, Dr. Maxwell graciously showed us the natural history collection, a modest but very respectable collection of bird and mammal preserved specimens. (Scientists use these collections for research and teaching). My wife bumped her head on the wall-mounted hyena donated by the San Antonio Zoo when we walked in the door, and she was a little startled at first. I think she enjoyed it, though probably not as much as I did.

Yeah, this is where I belong.

I will occasionally share things about family and friends, particularly when the stories or reflections are such that a wider audience could still enjoy the post. This is just such an occasion.

Last Saturday evening, my wife and I gathered with a group of friends to celebrate festivus. What is festivus you ask? Festivus is a holiday that appeared on an episode of Seinfeld, invented by George’s dad as an alternative to the commercialization of Christmas. Officially it’s supposed to be celebrated on December 23, but if people have Christmas parties at random times during December, our friends who organized the event figured, “why not a festivus party?”

We all particpated in several of the festivus traditions, including

• An aluminum pole in a tree stand, complete with a strand of lights.
• The airing of grievances, whereby all of us (about 20 people in total) gathered in a circle to tell things that grieved or disappointed us during the last year (mine was having to endure the high levels of Christmas cheer and euphoria this time of year).
• Feats of strength, which included leg wrestling, thumb wrestling, slaps, and me voluntarily allowing a cat to attack my arm.

The food that night was also a special part of the occasion. Friends of ours that recently moved away had mailed a turducken to another friend. Just what is a turducken? It’s a turkey, stuffed with a duck, stuff with a chicken, along with stuffing to complete the dish. Its roots are believed to be cajun, and it was quite good.

I’ve also put up pictures for those that are interested. (Sorry, I’ve moved the pictures to a family only album).

So to all my readers (mostly family and friends, but perhaps a few strangers by now), I wish you happy holidays and hope that you’ll enjoy your time with family and friends.

While browsing this evening, I came across an article that both I, with my interest in biology, and my wife, interested in teaching and childhood development could both enjoy. Carl Zimmer of The Loom has an interesting article in the New York times titled Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t. (A quick hint… if you get prompted for a username / password and don’t want to register, pull up the article at Google News. Links from there seem to let people get through without signing in. I have no idea why).

Scientists were studying developing chimps (which for the record, are apes, not monkeys) and comparing their development with that of children. The author approved of his preschool daughter participating in the study, and, as Zimmer does, his prose of the results were both interesting and humerous.

Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.

Essentially, young chimps can see past unnecessary steps in accomplishing a task, while young children are completely committed to imitating. The evolutionary ramifications of this are quite interesting.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

Since much of what I’ll do here at Ocellated is discuss science and faith, and hopefully engage others on these topics, I wanted to have something that everyday “non-science” types of people can enjoy, something that people can look forward to, something that’s uplifting.

Animal of the week will be a weekly topic in which I pick one animal and give you, my treasured readers, an intimate look at something you might have no idea existed. Now my criteria for “animal” will be somewhat flexible. It will be either extant (currently living) or extinct. It might be a group of animals, or it might even be a plant (doubtful, but I’m not ruling it out).

Now, I figured that Mondays can often be depressing days being the start of the week and all, so my plan is to try and publish animal of the week articles on that day to bring just a little bit of cheer. I might occasionally miss this deadline. It will certainly have to depend on how much time I can spring for writing. But my desire to do this is to share my knowledge of the world we live in. We all have gifts. Mine would certainly seem to be a passion and better than average knowledge of the natural world. I hope you’ll enjoy.

So without further ado, meet the Kakapo, Strigops habroptilus.

To understand why I chose this animal for my first animal of the week, all I need to do is give you a brief list of it’s qualities. It’s an 8 pound nocturnal flightless parrot. In fact the name comes from the Maori word meaning night parrot. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s right. This one’s worth seeing, not just reading. I’ve come across a blog titled Olduvai George. It’s author is a 60 year old natural history illustrator, with a particular interest in the last 65 million years. Check out his first post for some examples of his work. With his illustrations, he can bring things to life in a very special way. Creatures that haven’t roamed the earth for some time can now stir the imagination.

Exciting news coming from Borneo today. Several places on the web are reporting a newly discovered species from Borneo.

This image was taken from a motion censored camera placed in the forest. (The “spotlights” for eyes is common when nocturnal animals get their pictures taken by a flash.) If comfirmed, this would represent the first new species of carnivore found in Borneo since 1895.

Stephan Wulffraat, a dutch biologist helping look for the species said

We have consulted several Bornean wildlife experts. Some thought it looked like a lemur, but most were convinced it was a new species of carnivore.

Depressingly, before we’ve even had a chance to learn what this animal is, we could lose it. Indonesian officials are considering the large-scaled clearing of the forest for a palm oil planation.

Borneo is also home to some highly unusual animals, particularly gliders. The Colugo (the world’s most advanced glider), flying snakes, flying frogs, flying lizards, and flying geckos.

While talking to a professor at church last night, I heard a story that was absolutely horrifying. He had a student who just became engaged and took her fiance home for Thanksgiving. When it came time to go to bed, she went her way, and he his. Apparently, just to be on the safe side, grandpa locked him in his room, waiting until morning to unlock the door and let him back out. As the story was told to me, this caused “issues” and they probably won’t be going back around grandpa anytime soon.

The moral of the story was simple. Whatever issues you think you have with your spouse’s family, they can’t be that bad…

So can I just skip back a couple of days and have a do over? After talking things over with my wife, I axed the whole Digest thing. True, I want to talk a lot about science and faith. But I also decided I don’t want a second blog. If I’ve got something funny to share, I don’t want to have to put it one place and not the other. I just felt horrible after moving all those old posts and having everything split off like that. So, for those still with me, I’m terribly sorry for jerking you around like this. Everything’s back to normal now. Just pretend it never happened.