Fall is here and birds are passing through. On Saturday errands took me downtown. I didn’t want to find birds, didn’t want to see them broken on the ground. But it’s that time. Time for this little thrush to fly the last time, to fall, to close its eyes and tousle its feathers softly on the way down. Like sleeping.
Curling toes, weightless bones beneath speckles, soft as anything. Like sleeping.
They make happy fluttery noises. Their feathers shimmer like oil-slick rainbows. They’re often the only wild creature I see for days on end. Is there anything non-awesome about pigeons?
No. The answer is no. Because a South African IT company has now shown that pigeons can transmit data faster than the nation’s internet service. Learn about Winston the pigeon’s feat of data derring-do here, and learn more about the brief, irreverent history of IPoAC (IP over Avian Carriers) from Mashable.
Another bird, another flower. In my mind, it’s always going to be spring in San Francisco.
I could look up what kind of bird this is, perched in the lovely datura branches. But unfortunately I’m apartment hunting, and I can’t spare the time away from compuslively refreshing craigslist. When that spacious, air-conditioned 2-bedroom treehouse comes on the market, I need to be the first to know. So meanwhile, nice bird, nice flowers, and so on. Enjoy.
(Click for larger image, showing very cool eye)
We resume our photo parade through San Francisco with the gull, as promised.
In addition to not assaulting me, this nice gull is also giving us a perfect view of the brilliant red spot on its lower bill. We know that this spot is used by hungry chicklets, who tap it with their own beaks to beg for food. But behind the habit lie interesting details about the nature, or nurture, of animal instinct.
The laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) was the star of Niko Tinbergen’s studies of sign stimulus and food regurgitation response, later expanded by Jack Hailman in his intriguingly titled Scientific American article “How an instinct is learned”. Returning to the nest, an adult laughing gull swings its head from side to side. Peck the red spot and the chick receives food. Tinbergen’s experiments using model birds revealed that, if the red spot were anywhere else on the head, the young gulls would fail to peck. Ignore it completely. They’d tap to elicit food only when the spot was in the right, er, spot.
But the swinging action of the bill, too, has its role to play. In their first feedings, baby gulls would often miss the moving target. With practice, their accuracy increased until they reliably pecked the red spot in motion.
It’s a complex interaction: the stimulus of a precisely placed spot instinctively evokes pecking, and the swinging motion promotes learning of visual and muscular skills. Through observations like these, ethologists came to understand “instinct” not as inborn, unminded and ancient response, but as a behavior pattern pre-programmed to develop.
(And if you think this is fascinating, wait until we uncover Tinbergen’s juicy revelations about the life of the three-spined stickleback. Ooh, as they say, la la.)
Pleasant touristy picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. Except that I didn’t realize at first there was a bridge in it. I = worst tourist anywhere ever.
These were my last hours in San Francisco and I felt so restless for more of it. Walked the way I hadn’t been yet, which was Chinatown, and North Beach, past Fisherman’s Wharf, ending up at Fort Mason and this skinny spiral walkway deep into the bay. Out there I got obsessed, dazed with all the astounding, shadowy tones of blue surrounding: in the sky, between the hills, under the crook of each little wave. And the gulls there, biggest gulls I have ever seen, and how the blank and solid massy white of them was so different from the vague shifting sea-light blues, those unreal blues—so opposite and so evolved to cut through them, transcend them.
Anyway, when I tried to photograph all these self-indulgent daydreams, this particular transcendent bastard flew directly at my face with muscular determination. I may or may not have squealed. Then he flew away and a bridge was behind him. The end.
(Coming up next: a real gull, standing still and managing not to scare the crap out of me. Some bird-rescue-volunteer-slash-intrepid-world-traveler I turn out to be.)
This morning before sunrise, in a small field by the railroad tracks, two rabbits scampered, and three grackles morse-coded through the grass, round bodies, brushstroke tails, dot-and-dashing urgently.
Yesterday I found a perfect, fragile little white-throated sparrow. These round buffy birds have a dandelion tousle of yellow feathers running over each eye to their beak, defining the anatomical feature called the lore.
They look like this.
And rather remarkably like this.
Solange has much to teach us about the fabulous beasts of the world, real and imagined.
This morning a squirrel lay on my doorstep. The tight, secret curve of its ear was the first thing I knew about today. No wounds I could see, just a whole and perfect body that wasn’t living anymore.
Walking the few blocks from my train to my office, a woodcock in the street. Damaged on its way down, thin, wrong-shaped by the time I found it.
I don’t want this to be what today is. The breeze-fine fur of a tail, the lean and stiffening legs, the gnarls and angles in their bodies. So I went looking for them alive, so we can celebrate them alive. Courtesy of the internet: squirrels resourceful and shiver-quick in their movement, moving, alive. Woodcocks dancing, round-chested, prowling, instinct and alive. Thousands, millions, forests full of them living, though I can’t see them.
(Silly music, for all their grave and silly charm.)
