International Vulture Awareness Day

Yard vultures
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

When I was a little girl, my family drove around a fair bit in northeastern California. The area wasn't nearly as populated then as it is now, with the growth of Redding and development of its suburbs, but the roads were lightly traveled. One day, while we were picnicking at Hat Creek along highway 89 north of Lassen Peak, my mother saw Turkey Vultures kettling overhead. Being my mom, she told one of my sisters to lie down in the middle of the road and see if the vulture would think my sister was roadkill, and land for a snack. Being one of my mom's kids, my sister protested but did it anyway.

Of course, the vulture never landed. What we didn't know then, but know now, is that the Turkey Vulture is one of the few birds with a keen sense of smell. They choose their carrion from the scents that waft up to them on warm air. It needs to be a few hours old, but can't really be rotting.

Researchers have put roadkill deer deep into bushes, not far from carefully cleaned and taxidermied deer that look dead, in a clearing, and the vultures have gone after the nice meaty stinky deer. There are stories of Black Vultures following Turkey Vultures to find better dinners.

North America's vultures – the common Turkey Vulture and Black Vulture, and the critically endangered California Condor – are very different animals from old world vultures, but share the same niche. They are more closely related to storks than they are to the old world vultures, and are not raptors, as they don't catch live prey with their feet. But all vultures and condors have mostly bald heads, and eat carrion. A bit more than a decade ago, the nascent Animal Planet had a show called “All Bird TV," and on it, host/ornithologist Ken Dial, a bald guy, illustrated the need for bald carrion eaters by putting a wig on and plunging his head into a huge pot of saucy spaghetti. It stuck all over the wig. Then he removed the wig and stuck his bald head in the pot. What spaghetti managed to stick at all was easily shaken and wiped off.

The California Condor is still at risk from myriad human causes. They bump their huge wings on high voltage lines, they consume lead bullets in carrion, they're occasionally shot at. They don't seem to mix well with modern human society, and there are only about 200 California Condors left.

Old world vultures are also threatened by loss of habitat and environmental toxins. King Vultures in India are dying from exposure to diclofenac, a common anti-inflammatory in cows there. When the cows die, and the vultures eat their meat, the vultures are poisoned. It's even affected the Indian Zoroastrians' tradition of sky burial, with too few vultures to do the job. (And careful with that link – there are some slightly gooshy photos behind it. But the King Vultures are fine with gooshiness.)

I feel lucky to have Turkey Vultures as yard birds. Those in the photo illustrating this post were in my yard at the time, and they often fly overhead. But few vulture species are as common, and few have as secure a future as the roadkill-loving Turkey Vulture. The rest really need our help, which starts with awareness. After that comes working to promote (or require) bismuth bullets for hunting in condor ranges, research into (and banning of?) chemicals that poison vultures, designing human infrastructure and planning development in ways that allow the birds their space as well. But it starts with awareness of their beauty, the jobs they do, and why we need to help them.

Vultures are awesome.

Here are more links and stories about Vulture Awareness Day:

International Vulture Awareness Day home page
Picus blog
Ecoworldly
Vulture Awareness Day at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center
In Haaretz
Vultures I Would Like To See
Reflection from Pinguinus
At Coyote Crossing
Carnival of vulture blogs

Hi there!

The goblins of Goblin Valley are friendly. No really. You can say hi.

It's play time....

It's play time....
Originally uploaded by 713 Avenue.

This makes me wish I liked Monopoly more!

Monopoly City Streets is having a worldwide, everyone's-in Monopoly game using Google Maps as the game board.

There's not much news about it now, just the blog. Will it be worlds of fun, or will the boringness (okay, so I really get bored playing Monopoly) scale up with the size of the game board?

The Station Fire from around the web

Self Portrait
Originally uploaded by anosmicovni.

Mashable offers a great huge pile of embedded images and video from around the web to illustrate the ferocity of the Station Fire.

You know what's a scary thought? This fire grew and spread fast without the offshore Santa Ana winds that can pop up and push fires around at this time of year. I don't want to imagine what this fire might be like with the Santa Anas working their magic.

The Station Fire - this time with armageddon

For the next couple of winters, any storms with a lot of rain are going to make the San Gabriel range flow into debris basins and Pasadena.



After the Oakland Hills fire, officials sprayed the steepest hillsides with goo to glue the dirt together, mixed with wildflowers seeds - and the next few springs were stupendous. I'm not sure there's enough glue in the world for the San Gabriels, one of the fastest-rising and most fragile mountain ranges in the world -- but I hope they try something like that.

Thanks to Ian O'Neill for the pointer.

Who ya gonna call?

Originally uploaded by Claydo NYC.

Sometimes I wish California had the lightning storms they do back east.

We definitely get lightning, and parts of the state get intense lightning.

When I was little, in Shasta County, the grid wasn't as robust as it is now. We'd get days where the temperature would be 100, then 105, then 110, and sticky humid, unlike what we're used to in parts of California that aren't the northwestern corner. Then kaboom, the angels would start bowling, as Mom described it, and we'd have a huge storm, and the rain would pour. The power would go out, and we'd eat hot dogs cooked on unbent metal hangars in the fireplace, and pop popcorn in my mom's old campfire popping basket, and toast marshmallows, and sing. We were a girlscouty sort of family like that. Then we'd go to bed, and at some point the next morning, the power would come back on, usually just in time to power our tiny air conditioning unit in the living room so that as the temperatures rose back up into the 90s, we could lie in front of it and read. If the gutters were still running, we'd go block off the storm drain with detritus and walk around in our boots or pretend to fish.

There are other parts of the state that get lightning storms. But for the most part, we don't get big thunderboomers in California, the storms slide on overhead and aren't terribly dramatic.

We worry a bit when they come over, sometimes, as our summers tend to be dry, and a dry lightning storm can be troublesome. But lightning doesn't terrify me the way it can people in, say, Florida, where death by lightning is generally understood as one of the ways to go.

Rambles through our country

Rambles through our country, an instructive geographical game for the young, 1890
Originally uploaded by trialsanderrors.

Oh, I want to play! The chances of my finding a copy of this game are slim, I know .... but still. What a find.The Library of Congress has the image. I want the *game*.

(The caption says:
From the Popular Graphic Arts Collection at the U.S. Library of Congress....This picture is in the public domain.)


edited to add at 10:26 pm:
Linda says that you can find the maps on ebay, and that the rules are on google books! Yay!

Station Fire - August 29/30

From Eric Spiegelman, a time-lapse video of today's smoke from the Station Fire currently burning far out of control in the San Gabriel mountains of Southern California:

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

It's late and I'm sleepy, having paid too much attention to it today because a dear friend lives a couple of blocks outside of a mandatory evacuation zone. Things seem to be going reasonably well for her, in terms of how well the firefighters are protecting her little corner, but it's nerve-wracking.

The Briggs Terrace neighborhood is in worse shape -- okay for now, but transitions between night and day do weird things to weather and air circulation, and thus fire behavior.

Of course there are other fires burning in California. It's summer, after all.

That's the one capturing my attention right now.

We want you as a geography recruit!

Manchester Geography professors do the YMCA:



YouTube, though, has disabled the audio for copyright reasons, so you might want to pull out your Village People cassette and put it on in the background while you watch.

You might be a geonerd if ....

.... your first reaction to this video is that it's unrealistic for a hurricane to travel that far over land.


Hurricane Bound For Texas Slowed By Large Land Mass To The South

Yosemite is still one of my favorite places (and a foreign exchange student question)

Plenty of photographers have wallowed in the joy of Yosemite Valley. Nothing in this time-lapse video is, frame-by-frame, better than the best Yosemite photography, but the timelapsey goodness of the video is lovely:

Time Lapse Round One from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Thanks to Backyard Zen for the heads-up.

Starting next week, I'll be taking an environmental writing course. I hope to edit some of my work there for this blog.

Also: Have any of you been foreign exchange students, and would be willing to talk to me about it for a post on this blog? Please let me know, if so, and pass this post and request on to anyone you know who might be interested.

Thanks. :D

ah, for the wide open skies

I grew up under stars like this, but now I live in the city, and I live in a city that gets marine layer fog many nights all summer. An onshore breeze brings the low clouds in around 4 or 5 pm, and they go out again the next morning, but we can't ever count on seeing the sky.

Next spring, I think, I want to go up to Northern California -- the northeastern corner, Modoc County, and camp for a few days, and watch the Milky Way move like this:

sense of place - bay laurel

Bay laurel - Chabot Regional Park
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

When I was young, I used to seek out nooks like this in the woods near our house, and make forts, and spend hours. Those woods now hold a housing development.

Later, when my mother was engaged to a man with a huge ranch in Tehama County, we'd go out with him and help flake the hay for the cows (picture two kids, 11 and 7, riding on the top of a big pile of hay on a pickup truck, cutting the bale wire and flicking flakes of alfalfa off the back of the truck onto the hills in a meandering line, as the truck was slowly driven, cows lining up behind the truck, the kids working their way down, down through the stack of hay, until the truck was empty, it was a big job but it was just a basic kid chore) then he'd drop us into a little gully to play as he ran around and fixed fences and did rancher things. We'd get up under the oak trees and build fairy lands in the undertree litter, or play hide and seek, or make forts, or even read. We learned young how to avoid rattlers and poison oak and even mountain lions (uncommon, but not at all unknown), and we stopped thinking about them, they left our daily consciousness. I think Mom thought of them as one risk of a natural childhood. If one of us had gotten badly injured, we'd have been well away from help until the truck came back a couple of hours later, we were at least three miles from the nearest house. But we didn't think about that, and we were happy, and well exercised, and strong.

As an adult, I still seek out the nooks, the undertree forts, the thick, strong trees, the places that feel safe.

Geography as a fascinating and relevant subject

The youtube account holder is "geogfilms," so I expect enthusiasm and lack of objectivity. ;)

shakin' all over

He'll Make It
Originally uploaded by Infidelic.

Japan's been shaking like crazy this week. Among the decisions that have helped make Japan, as tremulous as it can be, among the safer places to be in an earthquake is that people have been trained in quake safety.

A basic step, if you live in an area that could possibly have a big quake, is to keep a stash of supplies -- food, water, safety gear, extra sturdy clothing -- where you'll be able to get to it easily afterwards. I refer to the comprehensive quake-kit list at sfgate.com when I need a reminder of what to include.

My area is decidedly red. We live near a fault that's overdue for a big quake. I lived through the Loma Prieta (from 60 miles away -- it was scary where I was, and damaging, but not devastating) and spent a long time nervous about earthquakes, afraid. I still have some nervous responses, but mostly I'm better, and I'm working on being more prepared.

At our house, we have camping equipment stored in the garage, and we specifically keep it right near the garage door, near the floor, where we can grab it if we have to. Even if that building were to collapse, we could find the camping equipment. And we're pretty sure we can stay in our yard, there aren't any hazards and it's not likely to liquefy. We also have a pen for the dogs, just in case, and extra leashes.
We need to work on storing that in a more organized way.

We keep important papers hidden in a fire-proof safe that we can access easily after a quake. I'm not worried about things like jewelry -- I don't have much, and even for the emotionally important stuff, ultimately it's just stuff. We want to keep ourselves safe and hydrated, and we want to keep the dogs safe, hydrated, and as calm as possible. Everything else is extra.

There are some things I don't do nearly often enough, and I don't have ready. For instance, I don't have a flashlight in my bedroom where I can grab it easily, or sturdy shoes always right near the bed. Both of those are easy enough to fix. I'm pondering getting a cheapo kid's backpack at a thrift store and making a small, basic pack for next to my bed, and one for the car. (It's a station wagon, impossible truly to hide anything of any size in there. I don't want to be a break-in target.)

Is there anything else? I'm sure I'm forgetting things specific to me (e.g. make sure I have three or four days of medication in my quake kits), and there might be something specific to you that's not on any list, that you should remember. Extra glasses if you're used to contacts and can't see at all without help? Disposable diapers and wipes?) What would you want to have in a kit that's not on standard readiness lists?

white-hot meteors

An amateur astronomer set up his basic little digital camera to record some of the Perseid meteors last night:



The fog came in for us, and we saw none. This is the San Francisco Bay Area, where fog on summer nights keeps us cooler in the daytime, but makes star watching a real pain sometimes.

This little video makes me want to go somewhere more remote and clear, next August, and set up the camera with the 16 gb card in it, then drink hot cocoa and watch the skies.

Poor Japan

Here it is all dark and wet as a couple of Asian typhoons swing by, and as some folks are still trembling from a quake a few days ago, and whacko:



But as hard as the shaking looks, it was only 6.4, and there was no major damage (reported as of now, a few hours later, anyhow), and the tsunami was small.

Mind you, within twelve minutes away from this quake, a 7.6 whopper, probably an aftershock of the 2004 quake, shook the Bay of Bengal between the Andaman Islands and Burma. Tsunami-watchers waited nervously, but none materialized. The quake was more than 30 km deep, fortunately.

Sierra Nevada watershed

Three years ago, I took this video at the Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model visitor's center in Sausalito, California.



It illustrates with LEDs the storage of fresh water in snow and ice in the Sierra Nevada, and its flow down the slopes, through the valley, and out to sea through the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

If climate change warms up and dries out California in the summer, as models currently predict, less water will be stored as snow over the winter, leaving less fresh water to flow out to sea and through the Delta in the summer. Not only will this mean less fresh water for immediate human use, but less for agriculture, wildlife, and fresh/salt balance in the Delta.

traditional map skills

With so much emphasis in modern geography training on GIS, aerial interpretation, and other important skills, some basic traditional map skills such as orienteering have gone by the wayside.

Here are some traditional uses for maps that you might have forgotten about.

To the edge of space

James May of Top Gear rode to 70,000 feet above the earth in a U2 plane.



This would have been a life-changing experience for me, too -- the black above, the curve of the earth below, all one planet.

On my first airplane trip, a 24-hour flight to Australia, back when it took that long and required one or two refueling stops, I awoke at one point to sunrise over the Pacific Ocean. The colors broke into a spectrum, a horizontal rainbow on the horizon between some towering clouds in the distance, and I nearly cried.

This was something my great-grandmother could never have had.

I wonder what the children coming after us will see.