Monthly Archives: February 2015

Hey! What’s The Holdup?

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We just received an urgent message from one of our summer residents regarding the weather up here on The Institute’s grounds. Normally our summer people, in this case the Bluebirds, begin arriving at the end of February, first of March and find themselves up to their tail feathers in snow and cold. This winter however has been different with milder temperatures and almost no snow.

Apparently what is making the bluebirds itchy is the fact that now that satellite TV is so prevalent, even down in central Mexico where these guys winter over, they can watch the Weather Channel and figure out when they should start back. The Eastern bluebirds don’t have a problem. They watch the east coast getting dumped on and they go “No way, Jose. I’m good right here for another month.” They have no problem hanging out down here catching rays and eating Maguey worms until things break up North.

Our Mountain Bluebirds are of hardier stock and they’re tired of the good life down there in mañana land and they know how tough it is to get reservations in the better places. Their wives are reminding them everyday that egg time is getting nearer and if they want that good nesting box down by the pond where all the bugs are they better get their feathery little butts in gear and get this show on the road. Hence the cryptic message “Hey! What’s the Holdup? You guys ready, or what?”.

Well our response was “Hey yourself! We’re not in charge of Spring, buddy, if I was you I’d be gone already.” There is no holdup weather-wise as far as the Institute is concerned so we sent word down, the gates are open, and if you want that nesting box by the pond you better have your deposit here by the end of the week or we turn it over to our timeshare people and they’ll put it out there for bids. This is a cutthroat business. There are a flock of a lot of bluebirds out there and only so many nesting boxes so this is one of our critical times to maintain our cash flow. The Institute as you know is a non-profit endeavor but we do have expenses and if we don’t make our bottom line, people go home, you know what I mean? We love our little feathered friends but if they don’t pony up you’ll find them walking down the road dragging their little egg sack behind them.

Now that the word has spread that the weather’s ok, and we’re open for business, the deposits are pouring in and we expect to see out little blue buddies in a week or so. The only problem we have is the squatters that have hung around all winter, I don’t know where, someplace warm and out of the wind I guess. They sneak in the first warm day regardless of the date and set up housekeeping in our dryer vent way up high on The Institute’s wall where you can’t get at them. Last year we hired a team of Barn Swallows to evict them and that solved the problem. We lost about a week and a half’s rent but it could have been worse. The Barn Swallows made up for it, they pack about 30 of them in that space and as we charge by the head we came out ok.

Below is a shot of the offender that now hangs on our undesirable board. He has been put on the very bottom of the list for the next 11 years and since bluebirds tend to only live around 9 years he’ll be setting up housekeeping down by the landfill for the foreseeable future. The words’ out pretty good now “No Line Jumping!”

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Now onto the next big problem, where to put all those Barn Swallows.

A Murmuration

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Lately there has been an explosion of news on the major networks, NBC and CNN to name just two, about murmurations. Well two rather small announcements actually, one very visible and the other I sort of had to hunt around for. But when was the last time you heard anything about murmurations at all. Been a donkey’s age hasn’t it. One murmuration was in Israel and the other was in England, where they go absolutely nuts about anything birds do.

So what is a murmuration you might ask, well according to Wiktionary it is as follows,

murmuration (plural murmurations)

  1. An act or instance of murmuring. (I know, that really helps doesn’t it.)
  2. A flock of Starlings.

What it appears to be in real life, is a huge flock of birds, usually starlings but can be other kinds too. This flock photographed at Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge, is made up of mostly red-winged blackbirds. They gather together in extra-humongous numbers that apparently makes them kind of nuts or something, as they will all take off and fly around aimlessly but enthusiastically, until one of them decides to land, then they all land at once and make noise. This is repeated endlessly.

There are supposedly many scientific studies that explains why they do this. Money has been spent and mans hours accrued by these scientists watching these birds to figure this stuff out. They say that they have figured out why there is this nutso behavior and have published their findings in some awfully prestigious publications. I looked at one and all I can say is it made my brain hurt, your mileage may vary. If you really have to know what they said, Google murmuration – expensive scientific studies, and it’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know.

Of course our scientific community here at *The Institute has already figured this all out and we didn’t bill the government doodley-squat in American dollars. We sent a team out to look at them, those red-winged blackbirds, take some pictures, kind a talk amongst themselves for a while, go to lunch, take a short nap after lunch, come back out, check them out one more time and come home. Total cost about 12 bucks for hamburgers at McDonald’s, which we fronted out of our own pockets thank you very much.

 Our conclusions were a little different from the scientific types and as we chose to use American, as spoken by everybody on TV as our language, this makes our report a little simpler to understand. Here it is in a nutshell.

These birds are not your average run of the mill dummies. Yeah some of them may look goofy but they’re not. They learn by watching and when they see one of their neighbors grab a seed out of the dirt or find a worm or something they pay attention. They are also greedy by nature and want that worm or seed for themselves so they go right over there and try to take it away from that guy. All of these birds in one place at once, squabbling over a bug causes a commotion, and some of the other birds and it only takes one, freak, jump up into the air and that tears it. Now they all jump into the air and being paranoid figure that the other guy knows where the better food is and they are not going to let him out of their sight for a second.

Hence the flying around in perfect unison. They pack so tightly together that nobody in the middle can even see anything so the guy on the bottom of that murmuration gets a chance to see something, like a juicy bug down there in the weeds, and goes for it. When that happens the result is everybody dives for the ground and you get ‘murmuration’. One of our observers came up with the thought that they fly so close together because they totally believe the guy next to him knows where he’s going, when the truth is not one of all those birds, and we’re talking like, thousands, have a clue. Yes, it creates pretty patterns in the sky but it is not a display of higher intelligence.

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Murmuration is said to be derived from an old English word or medieval Latin, ‘murmuratio’, the meaning of which supposedly sounds like the murmuring of a crowd from the sound the huge flocks of starlings make as they form at dusk, back then when it was medieval. Well it does if the crowd is making a screechy, raspy, squawky noise similar to fingernails on a blackboard and you have a hangover. But since this word ‘murmuratio’ comes from old English who even back then really liked all things birds, they probably thought it sounded beautiful. To each his own. Just remember these English guys medieval or not, like warm beer and eggs fried to the point of incineration. Just sayin’.

Murmuration is a world-wide event that the media is trying to play up as a special thing that only happens in exotic places like Europe and the Middle east but nothing could be further from the truth. We’re having murmurations all over the place right here in the USA. This one was in New Mexico, we saw one up in Wyoming of Franklin gulls visiting for  a day that put on a great show, and that was just a bird squawk above the state line from Colorado.

I hope we’ve taken some of the mystery out of Murmurations and helped you to understand one of Nature’s little quirks before you get led astray by expensive and some say unreliable studies even if they get on TV. As always if you have any questions about this subject or anything else for that matter, call us, drop us a line, we’re from The Institute and we’re here to help.

*Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Never mind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Je Suis le Leap

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Well the rut is over for this year for the Mule deer with the month the Lakota call Waníyetu Wi — Moon of the Rutting Deer, ending and the Wanícokan Wi — Moon When the Deer Sheds Their Antlers, just around the corner. With their duties over the mule deer bucks begin to gather together again, hanging out, forming small groups we call the Bachelor boys.

Deadly enemies a few weeks ago, now they’re best buds again, but because they still have their antlers they remain a little twitchy. There is still a lingering energy left over and although they no longer want to fight they feel the need to do something. That something is fence jumping. And jump they do, effortlessly, endlessly, leaping back and forth to dissipate that energy that permeates their muscles, until they wear down a little and can go back to grazing.

Coming home last night after shooting a pair of Golden Eagles until it was nearly too dark to see, I came across this mulie working off some of that excess energy in a pasture outside of town. It was actually too dark to shoot, I had the headlights on in my jeep, but through the magic of digital photography even images shot in near darkness can be made presentable enough to view. The graininess and softness is a by-product of this process. Think of it as a beauty mark. They’re certainly not Pulitzer material, but they do show the beauty and form of these magnificent creatures. Enjoy.

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Vermillion Cliffs Another Color Lesson

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We talked about how color out here in the west works in the past, but  in reviewing this image of the Vermillion cliffs I noticed something new. If you look closely you will notice that there is just about every color available in the southwest in this shot. Click on it, the picture I mean, and look at all the different shades. I don’t even think there are names for some of these colors. The only other place I’ve seen that comes close to displaying these many shades is the Grand Canyon, but the canyon spreads its color over such a wide, deep space it is difficult to find a photographic area that you can shoot to include all these colors in one shot. Even wide-angle lens in the canyon don’t give you these effects.

We’re probably looking at several miles of cliff face from a distance of several more miles away and it was photographed as a panorama of 19 different images using a telephoto lens, then stitched together into one large image. That was done to bring the cliffs in closer in the image, as using a wide angle lens would have resulted in a tiny squinty little line of purple cliffs across the image that would have had you saying “What the hell, can’t that guy even take a picture?” and I don’t like it when people say that.

The rosy-purple of the cliffs in the center of the shot is produced by the shadows of the incoming storm clouds. Right before the clouds moved in that purple-ish series of cliffs was the same color as the taller line of cliffs behind it. The darker cliffs are some distance in front of the taller ones so the break in the clouds let light in on the back row, but out in the front row the denseness of the clouds put the cliffs in shadow which brought out the deep rich color you see.

None of this would be as noticeable if you were closer. It takes the distance in this case to bring out all the color available and to show the harmonious interplay between them. The lesson being that sometimes you have to step way back to see the overall effect in play. Like a couple of miles. Now I didn’t say this was going to be a great big Ansel Adams type of lesson. It’s just a tiny little lesson, one that doesn’t require a lot of brain power by either of us but sometimes that’s ok. And if all this is turning Greek to you just look at the picture instead of trying to figure it out. That’s what I do.

3 O’Clock

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Time passes differently in the desert. It conforms somewhat to our notion of how time should behave. It gets light in the morning and dark at night, and high noon is roughly what shows on the face of your Rolex when both hands point straight up, but it doesn’t feel the same. And as you know if you’ve ever spent time alone somewhere like this desert at Coral Pink Sands Dunes State Park, time is as much a feeling as it is the passage of seconds and minutes.

You can come here with your time if you want. The dunes don’t care. Have your schedules on your smart phone set to tell you how long you can stay, how long before you have  to go if you want to make it to Zion before the afternoon rush for rooms begins. But be careful when you step out onto the sands here. Watch out for the fact that the hands on your watch may move but the passage of time here on the dunes doesn’t always agree. Finding a place to sit where you can watch the winds sculpt the dunes into new shapes, erasing footprints, sharpening the edges of the dune tops until they look as is they could shear the wind in half, or slice little eddies off the breezes to form new ripples down the face of the sand. That’s when you notice that the 15 minutes you thought you were spending has actually been an hour and a half. The desert is showing you how time works here. It’s not your watch that’s at fault. It’ll work just fine when you get back to people places and that time takes over again.

Forget also about making it the 45 miles from here to Zion in time. You’ve been caught by desert time. Sitting there watching the sand change color from a yellowish-tan to a rich, deep coral as the sun moves across the shifting dunes, listening to the low moan of the winds as they scrub across the dune tops, feeling as much as hearing the low humming that comes from the movement of untold billions of sand crystals rubbing together, as the wind slowly but surely pushes the dunes along, moving these massive collections of sand some fifty feet a year. Sitting there you’ve been moved with them, not very far, a short journey actually, but as a new part of the desert you’ve been added to the structure and affected by it, unaware that your presence has been noted and taken into account. You’re on desert time now.

It’s time to put your smart phone away, pull your sleeves down over that watch and tune into desert time. Make other arrangements in your mind as schedules don’t work well here in the desert. But it’ll work just fine if you let it happen and don’t fight it. It will still get light in the morning and dark again the evening, noon will come and go just like always, it’ll just feel differently is all. Once you understand how that works you’ll find its a pretty good system. If you need to know things like hours and so on, the desert will tell you. As you can see by the image above it’s three o’clock. Now that you know that, does it make a difference?

Island Proverb

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I was Island hopping through the portfolio last night, stopping on the big island, when I came across this image of a Hammerhead shark in a bit of difficulty. It reminded me of an old Hawaiian proverb.

Some days you get to be the shark

Some days you get the hook

However, it’s never good for both to happen on the same day.

Those Hawaiian folks, you’ve got to give them credit. They sit around on the beach all day in sarongs, drink coconut milk, sing songs and dance, play their ukuleles, and  don’t worry too much. Just taking it easy you know, and they have things figured out pretty good for people who don’t punch a clock.

I’m still trying to figure out the moral of the proverb. Maybe there isn’t one. Perhaps they’re just good cautionary words to keep in mind if you decide to go swimming. Anyway that’s our proverb lesson for today. Aloha.