Meet: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence

How could I have not know this lady's name?  Well, I kinda do know her, at least from her work.  It would probably also be true that anyone with an interest in North American birds knows of the revelations she gave to us.  For a half century before the term 'citizen science' was even thought of she had been doing studies and sharing her results in reviews and national magazines.  It is no wonder that many of her discoveries are well known.  I wrote in "Birds of Alberta" of the Red-eyed Vireo “one patient ornithologist estimated that one vigorous vireo sings its phrases up to 21,000 times a day.”  It doesn't say much for me that it took another 12 years to find the real statement in that finding.

On May 27, 1953 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence set out to count the number of times "Male A" - a Red-eyed Vireo, would repeat his song in a single day.  She writes in detail about the experience in "Enchanted Singer of the Tree Tops."  Louise began the day at 3:00 am and the bird started singing at 4:23 am. By the end of the exhausting exercise she writes...

"Between 6:00 and 6:13 p.m. my vireo sang 44 songs. Two

minutes later, with wings closed, he dropped from the crown

of the aspen into a thick stand of young evergreens. From

there, like an echo of his day's performance, he gave six more

songs. Then he fell silent and was heard no more. Officially,

the sun set one hour and 39 minutes later.

Fourteen hours, less six minutes, my red-eyed vireo had

been awake. Of this time he spent nearly 10 hours singing a

total of 22,197 songs. This was his record."

So I was wrong, the song of the vireo was not repeated 21,000 times but 22,197.  But more important than the magnitude of the number, was the inner commitment and drive that was revealed through the study.  "This bird sang simply because self-expression in song was as much a part of his being as his red eye."  Here Louise recognized a visceral inner drive within the bird, but she could have just as well been writing about her own drive.  What else but passion could explain the exceptional effort put forth that day by both Male A and Louise de Kiriline Lawrence?

Cougar travels from the Black Hills to Connecticut

Every now and then we hear reports about cougars where they are not supposed to be.  I have great confidence in the work of wildlife managers in their ability to figure out where critters breed even though the science is imperfect.  What is exciting to many of us, is that individuals disperse into marginal areas which may or may not eventually hold a reproducing population.  Over the last few months there have been cougar reports and trail camera photos across the northern states.  Unfortunately this lone dispersing individual was recently killed by a car in Connecticut.  DNA indicats that the cougar was originally fom the Black Hills in South Dakota, more than 1800 miles away from where it ended up.
From this sad story, hopefully we can draw out a little hope that the natural tendency of wildlife populations once they get healthy is to go forth and prosper.    Check out this link to get the full story.
http://easterncougar.org/CougarNews/?p=4021

Photo Flashback- Wolverine

Wildlife Filmmaker Steve Kroschel has a menagerie unlike any other.  Only near Haines, Alaska could you expect to meet someone like Steve along with his wolverines, brown bears and wolves.  While he uses these animals in his wildlife films, his passionate advocacy of conservation and the wild world is as intriguing as the animals he puts on display.

In this wolverine photo, Steve has placed the animal on a stump and is actually distracting the animal by waving a hat that is out of frame.  Even with that kind of set-up, it is tough to get a great wolverine photo.

The Origin of Good Ideas

“Feathers!  Birds have feathers so that they can fly!”  This is a response that I have heard numerous times in response to me asking students what allows bird to fly.  One of the unforeseen by-products of writing a best-selling book on bird identification is being invited to talk to sixth graders during their unit on Flight.  No matter that I share with them that a bird’s fused skeleton, egg laying, hollow bones and concentrated mass all help them fly- for the kids it all comes down to the feathers.

With Europe still abuzz the year after Darwin published “Origin of the Species” Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer unearthed a fossilized feather in a limestone quarry near Solnhofen, Germany.  Within the next few years, German limestone yielded other specimens of this particular animal that lived around 150 million years ago.  Over time, these fossils became known as Archeopteryx and they clearly possessed traits that belonged to both reptiles and birds.  Most notably they included a bird’s calling card: feathers.

Discoveries of feathered dinosaurs continued to trickle into paleontology labs for the next century and a half.  But when a pair of Canadian eyes set their sights on a fossil in a Chinese museum in 1996 a flood of fossils was to begin. “When I saw this slab of silt stone mixed with volcanic ash in which the creature is embedded, I was bowled over" said Phil Currie one of the world’s most prominent dinosaur scientists. Sinosauropteryx was another feathered dinosaur but it wasn’t the only kind that was to be discovered in China’s Liaoning sedimentary rock.  In less than a decade, this region would yield dozens more specimens comprising more than 25 different kinds of feathers dinosaurs.

While many of these specimens do not have the asymmetrical feathers of modern birds or even archaeopteryx, these Chinese fossils showed a clear continuum from filaments arising from the skin to the spitting image of modern flight feathers.  What was also clear was that our contemporary viewpoint on a feather’s raison d’etre needed to be assessed.  These earliest of feathers weren’t for flight at all.

No matter the opinion of sixth graders, even today feathers serve purposes other than flight.  Most notably, feathers serve an important role in keeping birds warm. Like mammals, birds generate their own body heat so it is in their best interests to do their best to conserve it. Even wispy filaments can provide modest thermoregulatory advantages to an otherwise naked animal

Feathers are also used for coloration.  Both the audacious beauty and the deceitful crypsis of certain species is a reflection of the patterns and colours in feathers.  The microscopic structure of the fossilized feathers show cells associated with certain pigments.  Twenty first century textbooks now illustrate these early birds in Technicolor.  While these recent discoveries will no doubt take scientific inquiry down many paths, we are pretty certain that no matter how they are used to this day, feathers were not originally acquired for flight.  That came about as a by-product of feathers designed for colour and warmth.

One of evolutionary biology’s rock stars, Stephen J Gould took note of how finished products in some animals sometimes differ from their original concept.  He gave it a name.  Gould writes,  “we suggest that characters evolved for other usages (or for no function at all) and later ‘coopted’ for their current role be called exaptations.”  The evolution of flight feathers from other purposes is cited as a vivid example of an exaptation.  In that same paper he would give several more examples of this exaptation phenomena from lactation and bone function to the sexual mimicry in hyenas.  He could have just as well used examples of success from our contemporary world as well.

John Pemberton was a first and foremost a tinkerer.  The fact that he was a trained pharmacist meant that he tinkered with plant extracts in order to come up with some health benefits.  Through the 1880s he came up with various hair dyes, pills and medicines.  These did more to promise relief than bring about any healing.  He then looked to copy others success and to follow a trend. He brewed up a tonic.

Hippocrates was one of the first healers to prescribe to patients “those [waters] which have their fountains in rocks.” Mineral spring water contains a high amount of minerals and this natural carbonization leads to a sharper taste.  It was also thought that spring waters were tonics to various health ailments. By the nineteenth century, artificial carbonization was able to produce beverages that had a natural spa taste and their corresponding health benefits.  As these tonics and ‘pops’ became popular, soda fountains were placed in drug stores to carbonate the various syrups that were marketed to relieve just about every symptom of the Victorian age.

With the aim to relieve headaches and nervousness, John Pemberton went down to his basement and combined extracts of kola nut and coca leaf into wine.  Later brews would cut the wine out altogether because of Atlanta’s newly enacted temperance law of 1885. Eventually, Pemberton brought his sweet syrup to the soda fountain in Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886.  It was his Frank Robinson, the bookkeeper who came up with the product’s name and Coca-Cola’s distinctive flowing script.

The sales for that first year were miserable.  Competition was intense.  America’s soda fountain market was competitive with other medicinal tonics by Hires, Schweppes and featuring names like Dr. Pepper.  Despite Pemberton’s insistence that Coca-Cola could cure diseases such as morphine addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headache, and impotence, he couldn’t find a winning marketing strategy. 

Less than two years after Pemberton's syrup was first carbonated in the Jacob’s Pharmacy soda fountain, the inventor of what would become one of the world’s foremost brands, sold the company to Asa Griggs Candler for $2,300.  It was Chandler’s aggressive marketing that would be responsible for the popularization of the drink.  The medicinal roots of Coca-Cola would decreasingly be used in marketing until they were completely abandoned in 1901.  By then, it seemed the one time medicinal tonic had simply become “Coca-Cola: delicious and refreshing.”

Coke is not the only product that achieved its success away from its original design. Gutenberg modified a wine press to print his first Bible; sildenafil was initially studied as a drug for hypertension and angina before it became known as Viagra.  The GPS in your iphone was initially developed to accurately launch nuclear warheads from submarines. And just as Stephen Gould suggested, the feathers that a sixth grader associated with a bird in flight, were first grown to keep a reptile warm.

The successes of the natural world are achieved through modification and not by spontaneous generation. “Every advance carries along the baggage of its ancestry, so we see echoes of our past in every feature” writes the evolutionary biologist PZ Myers. And so too is it with are our ideas. They are transformed into their final form by experience in response to environmental conditions.  Good ideas don’t fall out of the sky and flight feathers don’t just appear on a bird’s wing.  Why a good idea reaches it’s eventual glory, is more important than how it starts off.

Photo Flashback- The Curious King

Feb 21, 2009

I managed to squeeze my way into the back of a Range Rover as a escort for what I knew would be a fabulous tour to the king penguins at volunteer point in the Falkland Islands. After more than two hours of off-roading over peaty hummocks, we had arrived. As is my habit, I quickly tried to distance myself from the other tourists in order to spend a little alone time with the kings.

It wasn't long before I realized the trick would be to let them come to me, so a sat myself down about where I thought our paths would cross. It wasn't long before two kings walked right up to me. As I had anticipated the experience, I prepared for the moment- framing the photo in the best light and angle. When one of the two kings leaned in to peck at my right hand, I clicked off a frame. That briefest of moments will forever live, thanks to this image.

Video: Royal Albatross Drake Passage

Rewind to January 12, 2011.

Today, the winds were perfect and created a wall of air that was sweeping up the side of our ship. The Wandering, Royal, Black-browed Albatross of the Drake Passage were coming particularly close, as they were lifting their way through the stirred air. This Royal Albatross kept sweeping by our port side, only a wing length away.

An Albatross named Jerry

The Drake Passage makes me long to be an albatross. This 600-mile gap is the most raw and adventuresome bit of ocean that anyone is likely to find and albatross rule over it with perfect grace. The frigid circumpolar current pinches between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula and whips waves to infamy. Maritime history of shipwrecks is reinforced by annual stories of ships going down to 40, 50, 60 and 90 footers. This is a place where a rogue is a reality. It is a legendary place, though perhaps the greatest legend is not of the seas but that of a bird.

A calm day is as common as a rough one during January and February, the peak season of Antarctic expeditions. On such days, the air remains cool and forceful in the Drake Passage. The cool winds are just strong enough to lift life to this otherwise uniform viewscape of sky and sea. Life inevitably shows itself but for the uninitiated to the seas, it seems odd that the most commonly seen form is neither fish or whale. It is a bird.

Most people would never consider the ocean to be acceptable to birds. I suppose this is the result of our shared history. We grow up with robins in our yards, pigeons on our streets and geese on our ponds. They seem to be as fixed to dry land as we are. Though the perception is understandable, it is wrong and albatross prove it. Albatross are very comfortable floating around like a duck, extracting fresh water from the brine and subsisting on a diet of squid. Put an albatross on land and it fumbles around without dignity- but an albatross at sea is perfection.

As a ship sails across the Drake, the rhythm of the waves and the incalculable freshness of the wind invites you outside. The ship’s fantail is the place to be. Birdwatchers travel the world to specific trails, parks and gardens to see exactly what they are after. Down here in the Drake this is albatross water and they are out there. Off the back of a ship you can just feel them in all that nothingness.

As you stare to the aft you first spot them married to the horizon. Their pencil thin form may be indistinct two miles away, but it is definitely something against the nothing. As the bird closes the distance the wingspan stretches gradually into clearer view. The wings, fixed and immobile are fine-tuned to do all the work- and to do it exceedingly well. These birds don’t simply fly, they whip back and forth through the ship’s wind wake with only undetectable twitches of their wingtips. There is no need to flap, the wind moves so their wings don’t have to. They make what other birds do in the air seem boring. And albatross seem to do it with calm indifference.

The giants that you see in the Drake are never your first type albatross, Black-browed Albatross have by now, become well know. Yesterday they swirled around the ship in the thousands as you circled the island of Cape Horn. At over two meters, these have the same wingspan as Shaquille O’Neill and serve as a welcoming ambassador to their kind. But that was yesterday. Today you sail through deep and wild waters that are home to an albatross that would make Shaquille look like Spud Webb.

Wandering Albatross are winged giants, spreading their air embrace further than any other bird. They also make a fortunate habit of following ships. Bearing down toward you through binoculars are four meters of wing that make you thrilled that they choose to seek out ships. What you are observing is a natural kind of genius that fills us with awe and appreciation.

Their mastery of the southern oceans, awesome as it is, did not come about by chance. The arch, camber and shear of the wings are fine-tuned by evolutionary design stretching back some 32 million years to the Oligocene. Circumstances and time brought the Wandering Albatross into being, just as the right circumstances have now brought the birds into your view.

At the beginning of the Oligocene, the Earth was just getting over its dinosaur hangover. The great reptiles had been gone for some 30 million years. Their ecological roles, long since vacated, were being filled-up by birds and mammals. Terrestrial habitats were the first to be moved upon, but inevitably opportunities were being exploited in the oceans.

As it were, the oceans were undergoing some transformations of their own in the Oligocene. The Atlantic Ocean was spreading, and the grinding of tectonic plates started raising hundreds of remote islands from the southern hemisphere all the way to Hawaii. New Zealand was breaking away and so too was the Antarctic Continent. Thirty seven million years ago, the Drake Channel was born.

As the Antarctic shifted, it eventually parked over the south magnetic pole and became the icebox of today. The white continent profoundly influenced the climate, by not only generating the sub-antarctic winds but also by setting the stage for periods of glaciation.

Cool, oxygen-rich waters mingled with nutrients that were eroded away by grinding ice sheets. These mineral injections were a jolt for fish and squid populations in the south, still one of the most productive fisheries on the planet. The isolated, subantarctic islands continued to form. These were free of terrestrial predators and provided birds the safe nursery required within the vicinity of their fishing grounds. The wind machine generated off a frozen continent provided the ultimate vehicle for albatross to roam the southern hemisphere.

Malcolm Gladwell discusses the value of circumstances in his book Outliers (2008). While he doesn’t exactly get into how birds achieve success, he does go into great detail about how some of us have achieved success. It turns out that it normally doesn’t come about by chance but rather situations combine with ability and work to make some people more successful than others. To me, that sounds like how the perfection of albatross came about.

In Outliers, Gladwell explains in compelling detail how the majority of professional hockey and soccer players have birthdays in the first third of the year, while few of them have birthdays in the last four months of the year. It turns out that the way amateur hockey and soccer associations break down leagues, depends on the calendar year in which the players were born. Six or seven year olds, that are born on the leading end of their age class (January kids), have a growth and maturity advantage over kids that may be 9 or 10 months younger (December kids). The best players get identified at a young age and graduate to better leagues. These kids receive better coaching, more practice hours and ultimately a few of them make it to the big leagues.  If one looks at the roster of one of the greatest National Hockey League teams in history- the 1985 Edmonton Oilers, their birth dates correspond perfectly with Gladwell's theory.  It is not that some kids born in December and November don’t make it, it is just that circumstances make it less likely that many do.

While there may be circumstances that are involved at all stages leading up to someone acquiring elite level abilities, according to Gladwell the greatest factor involved in success is work. In describing elite level musicians he writes “the things that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And once more the people at the very top don’t just harder than anyone else, they work much, much harder.”

In this world of fingertip statistics, it is no surprise that someone has tried to quantify just how much work equals “much, much harder.” Gladwell rather convincingly argues that the answer is 10,000 hours. Elite level athletes, musicians, academics and entrepreneurs all seem to have put in around 10,000 hours of practice before being recognized for their elite-level skill. That’s about 3 hours a day, 20 hours a week of work for 10 years.

I would like to think that I was contributing to my 10,000 hours on the night of July 5, 1989. The only thing, however that I know for sure is that I missed out on television history. I wasn’t alone, as the television pilot that was broadcast that night received a modest 11% share. Still, network executives concluded that enough people watched to give this show a chance so they cautiously ordered an additional three episodes.

The following year the first season of this bold new comedy was introduced. While it was still no ratings sensation, at the conclusion of the season, the network ordered another year. By the mid 1990s, the show was still losing the ratings war to ‘Jake and the Fatman’ & ‘Doogie Howser MD’, but the audience was loyal and building. By the time ‘The Finale’ was seen by over 76 million viewer (myself included) on May 14, 1998, ‘Seinfeld’ had become one of the most celebrated television series of all time.

As a result of the success of this series, Jerry Seinfeld is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant comedic minds in the history of entertainment. While he gained fame and fortune from the show, the television series profiled him while he was already at an elite level. Like the majority of successful people, he was no overnight sensation. The TV series introduced him to a much wider audience, but he was already at an elite level before the initial pilot was ever broadcast. Not surprisingly Seinfeld achieved his expertise through a combination of circumstance and effort.

As the young college graduate left the City University of New York in 1976, few would have thought that a career in comedy was on the horizon for Jerry Seinfeld. By all accounts his first 5-minute set at an open mic was as terrible as that of any other first timer. Jerry’s trick was that it was not to be his last. And in this midst of his desire, circumstance came calling.

Nightlife of New York City throughout the 1970s has become the stuff of grandiose legend. The pulse of New York in the 1970s followed a disco beat. But like the demise of the dinosaurs, the death of disco was swift and complete. During June 1979 most of Billboards Top 10 singles were disco songs. By September of that same year Rock and Roll had reclaimed the charts. Discotheques started to take down their mirrored balls and it was comedy that reclaimed the clubs.

The proliferation of comedy clubs in New York and across North America provided an up and comer like Seinfeld the ideal opportunity to nurse his rise to comedy genius. In 1981, he made his first appearance on ‘The Tonite Show’ and was dropping into several comedy clubs a night to work his show. By the time NBC requested a TV pilot in 1989, Seinfeld was doing 300 shows a year and had more than met his 10,000 hours of practice time. "Four days is about my maximum to go without working." He had made it.

We are not so isolated from the natural world as it often appears. The ability to achieve success at an elite level follows the same premise whether hockey player, stand-up comic or an oceanic bird. It requires the investment of considerable time and the ability to use the circumstances that arise for your best interests. It turns out that Jerry Seinfeld is not only a comedic genius- he is also an albatross.

Steven Johnson on Where Good Ideas Come From

I have been reading Steven Johnson quite a bit lately and I dare say he seems to make a lot of sense. My career has been a blend of natural history, television, publishing and travel and while it is unconventional, it may be just the thing to foster creativity. Johnson goes through many 'Eureka' stories in his book, but ultimately concludes that 'Eureka moments' are far less common than history suggests. Most ground breaking discoveries are the result of 'slow hunches'. Good ideas take time to come about and do so as a result of numerous influences coming together and eventually fusing in a coherent pattern. I've not read anything so encouraging in a long while.

Bird BS- #2 Owls Aren’t Wise

JK Rowling hasn’t been a bit of help on this one- and she isn’t alone. Storytellers the world over have an obvious delight with owls. These nocturnal birds are second only to penguins for their appearances in story books and Hollywood fairytales. While most of these night time raptors are supremely adapted for hunting at night (an evolutionary home run in its own right), the general public knows owls best for their wisdom. Ahhh, the wise old owl.

Assigning human attributes to animals is always a bit messy, but the claim that owls are particularly wise is downright grimy. While owls share with several other types of birds a relatively large brain size, they do not seem to use it in a brainy way.

Wisdom implies innovation and while many birds are known to make and use tools, build elaborate nests and learn new behaviours, owls are not generally among them. They make due with their exceptional function and form, but we want more out of them than that. We even want them to be industrious, but the only reason for a ‘Night Owl’ is that they spend the day sleeping. An owl shows no more or less inclination to put in long hours than it does to being wise.

The fact of the matter, the reason that owls have long been viewed as wise is that among all birds, they tend to look the most like us. They have a nice round head and two great big forward facing eyes. Since we think ourselves as wise, so too must be owls. Our erroneous views on owls clearly question whether either of us should be considered to be all that wise.