Sentimental

Definition: expressive of or appealing to sentiment, esp. the tender emotions and feelings, as love, pity, or nostalgia

Can sentiment be escaped? I do my best to not get cheery eyed when true love beats the odds and conquers all. I don't know true love, and I do not know if it exists. I know joy, sadness, pain, pleasure, and a few others. I feel joy when I gambol through the woods or watch my niece play. I feel sadness when I don't get a job I want or when a tragedy takes a life sooner than I expect. I feel pain when a Bald Eagle pinches my skin through a glove or I touch a hot pan. I feel pleasure when I drink a well-crafted beer or a friend massages my shoulders. These emotions are easy to describe in simple scenarios.

True love is not so easy to describe. What defines true love. Many epitaphs and stories attempt to answer this question. Theories like: there is only one soul mate for each of us and we will know them when we find them. I am more enthralled by the lust of Pan's flute than this illogical search. I have heard the lyrics of love songs. They have been flooding into my head since my first Hank Williams record. The Beatles wrote, "All you need is love, dadadada." I want love, but I don't need the cookie-cutter kind. Love is all around me. I can love without true love.

So why this concept of true love?

Count #1 Complete

I have completed my first two-day count period. My species counts are as follows:
6 Black-capped Chickadees
6 Purple Finches
2 White-breasted Nuthatch
2 Red-breasted Nuthatch
4 American Goldfinches
1 Red-bellied Woodpecker
1 Blue Jay

10:30AM seemed to be a bustling hour at the feeder. The early morning and late afternoons were filled with squirrel antics. Including a red squirrel chasing a gray squirrel twice its size. I am going to construct buffers for the feeder to create an impasse for squirrels. Additionally, I would like to build a suet feeder. This might attract woodpeckers. I noticed the Purple Finches move about like a synchronized swim team. The banded female White-breasted nuthatch visited this morning. Her elegance caught my eye as she grabbed her seed perched upside-down. In short, I look forward to the rest of the feeder watch season and hope the Dark-eyed Juncos return.

Project FeederWatch

I am excited to participate in Project FeederWatch this season. The official start date is November 14th. I will be collecting my data at the intern house here at Audubon Center of the North Woods. I began preliminary observations this past weekend. I was delighted by the visits of Dark-eyed Juncos, White and Red Breasted Nuthataches, Hairy Woodpeckers, Fox Sparrows, and Black-capped Chickadees. Other visitors included: Blue Jays, Red Squirrels, Eastern Chipmunks, and Gray Squirrels. I will post a picture of the Fox

Sparrows soon. One of the White-breasted Nuthaches bore a small grey bird band. I suspect it was one that was banded here at Audubon, but I did not have the time to read the numbers.

If you are interested in Project FeederWatch,

check them out o

nline at: http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/index.html

The Myth of Sisyphus, part 1

I have just begun reading Albert Camus's essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus.' In discussing the difficulty of understanding a man's thought pattern that leads to suicide Camus writes, "But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently." To me this means that the suicidal person, when they feel that even their closest acquntances place little value on their life, their mind equates this to suicide having little impact on their closest friends lives and also that they have little to live for.

Why I think this part hit me hard today...
Earlier this afternoon poignant greif stirred up inside me when I felt as though a person whom I care for deeply was post-poning responding to me. This has always bothered me. I find myself overcome by anxiety when I get the sense that someone that I assumed to care deeply for me would respond more quickly to a new acquiantance's request than my own.

A direction

My original intent for this blog was expressing factual behavior using poetry, I suffered writer's block and attempted to use it for short book reviews, but my recent chain of intellectual interests have veered off the scientific path. I am seeking to answer the age old question of "how should one live." I find myself being overcome by palpable waves of confusion in regards to what direction I want to go with my time. I enjoy time spent in the out of doors, but I do not so much enjoy exploring nature in a purely scientific manner or in a destructive manner. I feel most alive in matters of ethics. I do not like to watch children picking up toads with little concern for the treatment of it. I do not see myself finding joy in laboratory experiments on animals regardless of what discovery is to be discovered because of it. I am most content observing animal and plant-life in nature and then drawing or writing about what I have observed. I also enjoy exploring other writer's and artist's observations and creations. This is a working construction in hopes of finding answers to what it is I would be happy and ful-filled spending my time working on.

Stellaluna is sweet, but not quite stellar

Janell Cannon's "Stellaluna" was a sweet and simple tale about a bat that grows up with birds. The story is beautifully illustrated, but lacks wit and preaches good behavior while teaching little about bats. The story begins with Stellaluna and her mother being attacked by an owl. Stellaluna gets seperated from her mom and winds up in a birds nest with three baby birds.

Stellaluna is fed insects (even though she is a fruit-eating pteropodid) which she dislikes but have no health consequnces for her. The story misleads kids to believe that a fruit-eating bat would be okay if fed insects. When Stellaluna teaches the baby birds to hang upside down she is scolded. This part did succeed in teaching kids that baby birds do not hang upside down like baby bats can, but it came off as threatening to Stellaluna. It carried the mantra that if a child does something different from what a parent desires they will be thrown out of the house. Finally it ended with Stellaluna saving the baby birds after showing them how well she could see in the dark. In actuality it is unlikely that a baby bat would have the strength to fly around with three baby birds in hand. Bats are light-weight beings which is essential for their flight abilities.

Though this book is beautifully illustrated it does not provide the best messages for impressionable young minds. I would love to see this author illustrate a more meaningful book about bats!

Red-Tails in Love tells the epic tale of birdwatchers in NewYork City

It was a cold January morning in Petersburg, Pennsylvania, abnd I was receivinga crash course in common winter birdfeeder birds. Although it was not until 3 months later that I became enthralled with ornithology and the joys of bird-watching, I will never forget the excitement of watching a white-breasted nuthatch flying back and forth between a feeder and a tree on that bugar-freezing day. At the time, I pondered why the nuthatch ate that way when other birds chose to eat their seeds right at the feeder. Why did the nuthatch use up all that energy going back and forth? Since then I have become a birder, I find the august song of a winter wren or a sneak-in visit by a hermit thrush to be tantamount to or exceed any experience I have had at a zoo or circus. In agreement with me would likely be Marie Winn.

Marie Winn's "Red-Tails in Love" documents multiple years of bird-watching in New York City's Central Park. This story tells the tale of a group of multi-generation birdwatchers whose paths become entangled when two red-tailed hawks begin nesting in the heart of New York City. This book is a fluently written piece that documents bird behavior and diveristy in Central Park. Winn takes us not only through the nesting trials of a pale male red-tailed hawk, she also introduces us to the lives of many other Central Park birds. Winn succeeds where a field guide fails. Red-Tails in Love gives us an opportunity to get to know birds on a more intimate level. Winn doesn't always mention color, family, song, habitat, range, ect.; rather she writes about specific accounts of birds and their behavior.

Other features of this book include detailed maps of Central Park, species lists of birds, butterflies, and dragonflies, and excerpts from the official Central Park bird register. Red-Tails also touches on laws protecting wildlife and the need for citizens to take action if these laws (i.e. the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act) are going to be enforced. As a new birder, I would reccommend this book to anyone with an interest in birds or that is looking for a new hobby. As the summer is coming to a close, I am excited to observe the inflow and outflow of fall migrants through Southern Minnesota. My wishlist bird this winter is a snow bunting, or as I like to call it: thetoasted marshmallow bird.