Another blogger has used (after getting my permission of course) my recent picture of Burrowing Owls that I put up recently.
Says one of the commenters on the post,
Many thanks for the burrowing-owl photo. It brightened my Monday considerably.
It’s nice to see the shot getting wider exposure.
My wife and ventured to southern Colorado for spring break. I’ve finally gotten around to throwing up the pictures from the trip. They’re heavy on Sandhill Cranes in flight. Why? Because literally tens of thousands of these birds migrate through the San Luis Valley and use it as a staging area on their way back north, and the birds are just about impossible to sneak up on when they’re in the fields feeding. So it’s much easier to take pictures as they fly by.
It was really a magical experience. Most cranes in the world are endangered. These ancient birds haven’t coped well to the changes people have brought. And while it wouldn’t take much too see Sandhill Cranes get in trouble, their populations are currently large and stable. Like all cranes, they’re quite vocal and frequently display towards one another by jumping in the air and flapping their wings. In short, they’re sexy.
Other highlights of the trip included a couple of Burrowing Owls sitting in the rain on the drive up to Colorado, my first Snowshoe Hare (I now understand why they’re in the same genus as our jackrabbits), and an amazing place named the Great Sand Dunes National Park.
I’ll leave you with a selected few pictures. (Click on them to see slightly larger versions in the gallery).
It’s been too long, hasn’t it? I’ve got friends asking me to write again, friends that are hilariously cajoling me into writing again, and absolute nutjobs that leave the craziest comments on old posts.
This latter comment is especially hilarious for it’s illiterate ramblings against evolution, repetition of the belief that no one is required to pay income taxes, and then a sudden divergence into the necessity of vitamins and seed eating to prevent cancer. The list of seeds we should eat are apple, peach, and apricot seeds, which as any good biologist can tell you are filled with cyanide. If you’re skipping the fruit and going straight for the seeds, it doesn’t take but a handful at once to provide a lethal dose. But hey, you don’t get cancer! I especially liked the National Cancer Institute’s description of a drug name Laetrile based on these seed products. “Laetrile has shown little anticancer effect in laboratory studies, animal studies, or human studies. The side effects of laetrile are like the symptoms of cyanide poisoning.”
Yes, it’s been too long since I’ve blogged.
The short and sweet answer is that I suddenly got tired of it. It felt more like a chore than it did fun. As the amount of time I poured into school skyrocketed (and so did the amount of writing for school), it was hard to enjoy blogging.
I’m also completely done with these eternal debates about evolution and creationism. At least online anyway. Like the above comments shows, the number of people who froth at the mouth and show up to leave comments far outweighs those interested in learning how science works. We live in the age of Google. In 30 seconds you can get more information about a subject than you can read in 30 days. An understanding of evolution and how it works is not lacking because of a lack of information. Therefore, I’m much more interested in having real conversions with people, face to face, who actually want to learn how things work, not just argue. The time I’ve spent at church talking with people about it on a number of occasions is just so much more fulfilling than blogging about it.
I also face the problem of being a fairly good but extremely slow writer. One story in particular illustrates this better than anything. Not long after we got married, my wife was working on this very lengthy paper for a class. She called me in to ask for help with wording a single sentence. I spent 30 minutes and finally came up with wording that we both liked. So out of 10 pages, I wrote one sentence. When she got the paper back (with a good grade of course), the professor had underline that single sentence and written in the margins, “Nicely worded!” (I’ll smile about that for the rest of my life). But the problem you see is that I can’t spend that long writing a post to Ocellated. There’s not enough hours in the day.
I didn’t want to post again until I really knew what I wanted to say. I think where I am right now is that I would love to post about science. There’s just too many cool little things that I learn to not share them with anyone. And I have fun whenever I can taking pictures, so there’s no better medium than the web for sharing the fruits of that labor.
I promise nothing. I certainly won’t be posting every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe once a month. We’ll just have to see how it goes. But I’d definitely like to get back to talking about science, birds in particular, and I’ve got a few papers that are worth sharing due to their general “cool factor.”
So for all three of you still checking the blog, I’ll leave you with a few pictures. I have been busy working at photography when I have the time, and I’ve posted many of these quite some time ago, but never wrote a post announcing them. Here’s a list of the recent galleries. Some of the pictures are of course better than others.
The trip to Marfa, TX (which is in deep southwest TX north of Big Bend National Park, was probably one of the most enjoyable though. I managed to get a couple of incredible pictures of a juvenile Red-tailed Hawk.
There’s more in that album too. And speaking of pictures, I’ve got lots more to process from recent trips which I’ll be posting shortly.
I went birding for a short time with my wife yesterday to the north unit of the San Angelo State Park in west Texas. For those of you that are birders, you’ll understand that there are rare days that are just magical. Yesterday was just such a day.
I was hearing a kingfisher chattering in the distance. Not its full machine gun fire call, but just individual chattering notes. After walking through the brush and peering out along the Concho River, I spotted this guy (or rather girl). It’s a Ringed Kingfisher, the largest new world kingfisher that ranges throughout Latin America, barely reaching south Texas. They’ve been straying north, seemingly with greater regularly, with sightings from central Texas. This is perhaps the third sighting and first photographic record for the Concho Valley.
That alone would have made it an incredible day, but the magic wasn’t done. We walked down to a dry spot on the river to try and refind the kingfisher, when my wife pointed out a small passerine bird coming down to the water’s edge. I was somewhat distracted, still looking for the kingfisher. When the bird finally hopped out into view, my jaw hit the ground. A male Black-throated Blue Warbler, one of two regularly occurring U.S. warbler species I’d not seen, hopped in view to get a drink. This is a hard bird to find anywhere in Texas, but when it does show up, it’s usually on the southeast coast. They breed in the northeast and winter in the West Indies, so most migrate down the eastern seaboard and miss Texas all together. As far as I know, this is the first record for the Concho Valley.
I’ve also put up lots more pictures of both birds in the photo gallery.
When it was all said and done, I’d seen a couple of highly unlikely birds within the span of 15 minutes. When you least expect it, birds can really surprise you.
… as the famous line from Monty Python goes.
I’ve put up some pictures of an outing a couple of weeks ago to a local ranch, where my university’s biology department hosts an annual Bioblitz, identifying every species regardless of taxa they possibly can.
I managed to get one picture in particular that I just really like.
Another highlight of the weekend was this Hoary Bat, a species I had previously only seen in pictures. They are arguably the most beautiful of bats found in the U.S.
More from me if I survive today.
Each night as I come or go from my apartment, I’ve noticed a sizable Mediterranean Gecko (Hemidactylus turcicus) hunting in the dim lights on the side of the building. As their name implies, Mediterranean Geckos are an introduced species, naturally occurring in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. Not being a herpetologist, I’m not sure if they’re having any harmful effect on native species. But being nocturnal and highly associated with urban / suburban environments, you might think of them as the House Sparrows of reptiles. My guess is that they’re filling a niche that was previously unfilled (nocturnal insect hunter on the walls of human structures) and that they’re not hurting anything. But that’s just a guess.
I’ve been meaning to grab the camera and try and get some shots. Here’s an excellent one of a beetle walking by. He didn’t make a lunge for it, but seemed attentive to the movement nonetheless.
And another one of him clinging to the walls with those incredible suction pad feet. (For further edification, here’s a BBC article on the fascinating foot structure of geckos.)
And as always, there are larger versions of the pictures in the photo gallery. Clicking a picture will take you through.
So I know this is going to creep some people out, but don’t blame me! At a family reunion a few weeks ago, I looked on the floor to find a single Barbie’s head. All the other toys had been put away, but someone missed this head.
I love the picture. The head without a body, the darkness of the background, and the tussled hair, all in stark contrast to Barbie’s perfect features and smile.
Sunset at the San Angelo State Park
A while back, the sky was looking really cool, so I grabbed the camera and made a mad dash outside of town. In truth, I might have gotten much better pictures had I been out earlier, and been in a good place when the light reached it’s best. This shot, while not especially impressive, shows a very nice cast to the sky. If there’s anything that great about living in west Texas, it’s the open skies and vivid sunsets.
Perhaps a definition of good photography is taking the common and making it look uncommon. I grabbed this shot off the shelves of my wife’s 2nd grade classroom. The repetition and the focus of a single book, really made the photograph. I also love how the tack looks real, as if it were actually stuck into the book.
I went tried to go birding last weekend. The west Texas heat was so oppressive, and the bird activity so abysmal, that I quickly turned my focus to photographing butterflies, dragonflies, and some other cool stuff.
I’m just now getting around to putting the pictures up. There are some really nice ones, like this guy — a Roseate Skimmer (Orthemis ferrugineas).
Roseate Skimmer — Orthemis ferrugineas
In addition to the insects, I also managed to get several nice shots of a really cool reptile, and several of birds. So be to check out the whole album.
