Greater Yellowlegs

This August, I didn't find nearly the number of species of birds that I did in 2015. This month is also a lot slower. Unlike some birders, for whom the list length is everything (insert obvious crude comparison here), I'm fine with that. Species counts are just another tool I use to try to understand what is going on, on my patch. Counts happen to be a powerful tool, if used well, but it's about understanding, not competition.

Here are a couple of Greater Yellowlegs (a sort of large sandpiper) that I don't see enough of. Work can be a pressure cooker environment, the recent news reports are usually depressing, etc. Being able to walk out the back gate, go down to the river and see a couple of neat birds and fall color, reflected in late-summer low river levels, is a welcome break.

Well. That either matters to you, or it doesn't. If not, I hope you have some other means of coping.

Greater Yellowlegs, Willamette River, Linn C, OR, 2016-09.04



Does work really expand to fill all available hours?

That might be a perception issue. In a second effort (this week) to free up more time, I just invested half an hour to run an optimization experiment. Amazingly successful and I'll probably save 4-5 hours per week, for a month or more. Huge win, to be sure. Counting both efforts, I get 6-7 hours back.

The thing is, I didn't start really looking for optimizations until I passed a pain threshold. I expect that is pretty typical behavior for us all, and that really sucks for me, on a couple of levels.

First off is professional. Always optimizing stuff is part of the gig.

Second is just personal embarrassment, because missing a forehead-slappingly easy test for bias, is, well, personally embarrassing.

That bit of folk wisdom, that work expands to fill all available hours? Like much folk wisdom, not buying it. This was just the most recent iteration of the problem. I think it's much more about pain thresholds, and when we finally realize we can't fit that next Desired Thing into the schedule. Only then do we scurry off and find fixes for the problem.

Perhaps this a LifeHacking thing. Hard to tell: trying to follow whatever fashion is currently playing out on the Internet is usually an expertise in futility.

But I plainly need to lower my pain threshold, and optimize sooner.

Taking a Break with a Bald Eagle

After an 0-dark-thirty start to Monday, I was was ready for a break by mid-morning. Grab a fresh cup of Productivity Fluid, and out onto the deck. That deck is on the second story, and faces a large Black Walnut, the slope down to the river bank, etc. It's a bit of a habit to grab binoculars and a camera on the way out. This morning, the idea was to do a quick bird count, for submission to eBird. Because it's the height of Spring migration, and weird things happen.

And indeed they did. About 40 feet away, in that Black Walnut, were Wood Ducks. Which actually have clawed feet, perch in trees, etc. Hence the name. Photos didn't work out too well. These birds are usually shy, with good reason: there are lot of hunters on the river during the season. Typically, I seem them from a couple of hundred feet away, as the are headed elsewhere. Bummer about the photos, though. Drakes are almost cartoonishly colorful. But the drake had a branch between us, and it was obvious that if I moved much, they were going to spook.

And ... they did.

A few minutes later, an immature Bald Eagle flew into the same tree, and pretty obviously was not worried about me at all. There was a lot of ray-catching and preening involved. Here's the bird pausing from a bit of luxurious back-preening to make sure the silly human isn't doing anything, well, silly.

And of course, I had to take the obligatory head photo. 

That bird hung out for at least two hours. Seemingly just enjoying the morning. I, unfortunately, had to get back to the salt mines. An early start already looks like it will extend into a late night.

How's your day going?

Green-hued Purple Finch

April is drawing to a close. It's a been a great (for small values of great) month on the birding front. I added half a dozen or so species to the April all-years list at my local patch. Which is currently wedged at 99, and seems likely to finish that way. So close, and yet so meh. I'm chalking that up to a somewhat early migration for much of the year so far. Which seems to be ending.

This blog is very much not the place for accounts of the truly rare. Odd, I can occasionally do. My patch is a bit different, in that many local birders see White-crowned Sparrow, while I see White-throated, etc.  Another difference lies in Purple Finch. Which, for whatever reason, seem more common here than what is typically seen along the Benton/Linn Co. (Oregon) border. Common enough that I get to see PUFI (4-letter banding code for Purple Finch),  see the cannonical USGS reference for the whole thing, in unusual plumage.

This group is a bit prone to weirdness. I have photos of House and Purple Finch in hues that might be best described as golden, rather than red/rose/purple, and I've seen references to that being a function of diet. But green is a bit off-the-wall, in my experience. Here is the only green-hued Purple Finch I've ever seen, and that was on 2016-04-01. April Fools Day. No way was I going to post that the day I saw her.

But perhaps not so outlandish as all that. A Web search found one reference, the Purple Finch entry in John J. Audubon’s Birds of America, which seems to indicate that this hue can be common, at least toward the eastern US. OTOH, that was a long time ago, far from my patch in Oregon's Willamette Valley, and Audubon was, well, a bit dubious in some respects.

What do modern field guides have to say? In alphanumeric order, looking for any reference to 'green' I found the following.

• National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America: no mention.
• Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, 2nd edition: no mention.
• Peterson Field Guide to Western Birds, 3rd edition: no mention.
• Sibley Guide to the Birds, 1st edition: "Pacific females are washed greenish above..."
• Sibley Guide to the Birds, 2nd edition: "Pacific females are washed greenish above..."
• Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America: no mention.

Does this, in any way, constitute a recommendation for a field guide? Well, no. Aberrant golden hues are, in my limited experience as a patch birder, far more common amongst House and Purple Finch. I've seen dozens of golden-hued birds of each species, and exactly one greenish finch. Yet golden birds get no mention at all.

Does that mean that I regard popular field guides as equally wrong? Well, no. Tremendous effort was expended by very talented people in creating these guides. A lot of financial risk was assumed by all parties -- including publishers. Personally, I doubt that the vagaries of plumage variations can ever be adequately described in a field guide. Not least because human languages cannot adequately describe color. Ask a fly fisher what 'dunn' refers to.

I confess that Sibley is my favorite, but this is not an example of why.

Killdeer are Laying

Springs rolls on. While down along the river this morning, I heard my first House Wren of the year (a nesting bird), and found the Killdeer were already at it. As you can see, Killdeer don't go in for nest building --  just a simple scrape. But the eggs aren't actually that noticeable; one could step on them quite easily, and watching where you are walking is advisable. Luckily when Killdeer are in the area, you will likely know it due to their strident alarm calls, and hair-trigger sensitivity, occasionally feigning a broken wing to lure predators away from the nest, etc.

Their appearance is also distinctive. People that have essentially no knowledge of birds often recognize them when shown a photo: they just didn't know what they were called. So here's a photo. The Killdeer is the bird on the left. The bird on the right is a Greater Yellowlegs. This photo was taken April 3, but is likely one of the same birds involved with this nest. I'm using this image because it contains that Yellowlegs. That is a matter for another post, but this way I get to use the same image, and I'm lazy.

In addition to not stomping up a beach like a Marine going into combat, likely crushing eggs, there are a couple of other guidelines related to nests that you might want to be aware of. Simple things like how to minimize the disturbance you cause. All About Birds has already posted one, so I don't have to.

I specifically wanted to limit my time at this nest, on this day. I had already seen three species of corvid (Steller's Jay, Western Scrub Jay, and American Crow). Corvids are infamous nest-robbers. The tape measure is always with me in the field -- it's not like I had to go get it and return, causing two disturbances. My total time at the nest was 1:38 from first to last image according to Exif data, and laying down a tape obviously took only seconds. One other thing I did was place a couple of rocks to point to the site. My total time was still under 2 minutes.

With the rocks, I can find it again from a distance, and have no need to closely approach it. The normal clutch size is 4-6 errors, so these birds just started. Incubation period is 22-28 days. In a month or so, I should see tiny little fuzz-balls on the beach. They can walk away from the nest as soon as their feathers are dry, and they're fun to watch.

Bioswales and Constructed Wetlands

Early this AM, I was looking for some information on native willows. There are a lot of them on the river banks behind my place, and they provide forage for Black-tailed Deer, and nesting sites for Yellow Warblers and several other bird species, including cavity nesters such as Black-capped Chickadee, Tree Swallow, and various woodpeckers.

Searching for "Scouler's willow oregon bird usage" I found a link to an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality PDF titled BIOFILTERS (Bioswales, Vegetative Buffers, & Constructed Wetlands) For Storm Water Discharge Pollution Removal . I glanced through it, and while it wasn't what I was looking for, I noticed the following on page 25.

Obtainable reductions of pollutants in bioswales are:Total Suspended Solids – 83 to 92%Turbidity (with 9 minutes of residence) – 65%Lead – 67%Copper – 46%Total Phosphorus – 29 to 80%Aluminum – 63%Total Zinc - 63%Dissolved Zinc – 30%Oil/Grease – 75%Nitrate-N – 39 to 89%
These results can be obtained for a bioswale at least 200 feet in length with a maximum runoff velocity of 1.5 ft./sec., a water depth of from one to four inches, a grass height of at least 6 inches, and a minimum contact (residence) time of 2.5 minutes. 

It turns out that some random roadside ditch might be an engineered bioswale. Their generic usage is pretty much anywhere there is a need to remove pollutants from storm runoff. While I might care more than some because of where I live, anyone who uses rivers or lakes for recreation, or simply likes the notion of a healthy environment, should care to some degree.

The benefits of wetlands have been written about extensively, but nearly all of what I have seen has been about natural wetlands. What might be regarded as unnatural (though native plants are used) wetlands provide a lot of benefits as well. Also, they aren't subject to the same regulatory regime as natural wetlands. It's not as if, once built, they have to be protected for all time. Hopefully that will tend to increase their usage. We are all downstream of someone.

Northern Flicker (intergrade)

The common race of Northern Flicker over most of the western United States is the Red-shafted. In the Willamette Valley, the eastern (Yellow-shafted) bird shows up occasionally, as one did this winter, and causes a minor stir among local bird lovers. It's not that exceptional, as the nesting variant in Alaska is the Yellow-shafted.

Intergrade birds are more common here -- so common that even I spot them once in a while. Here's an image I've uploaded via eBird, so it is reachable via Cornell University's Macauly Library.

EDIT 2016-04-14: Noticed that the image had become unreachable via Macauly. Possibly (though I doubt this very much) this was a privacy protection measure. Reason being is that location plot is still available from the original link; as is the checklist. It's only the image that is not available. As Cornell is attempting to develop photo recognition software, and has a long history of not being particularly citizen-science friendly (despite vast claims that are on the border of unwarranted and ethics violations) I'm changing the link to a Google share, and will no longer mention Cornell/Macauly in anything like a positive sense until they once again deserve it.

Google does not make image organization easy, in terms of grouping -- bird/sparrow, bird/owl, etc. They are a commercial concern, and this does not not seen to be a commercially useful thing for them to do. I'm fine with that -- if I wanted to be rigid about ontologies, I would put up a proper Web site.

         

Race	Wings, tail	Crown	Face	Nape crescent	Malar
Red-shafted	Orange-red	Brown	Gray	None	Red
Yellow-shafted	Yellow	Gray	Brown	Red	Black
Photographed	Yellow	Gray	Brown	Red	Red/black

Note that "Malar" refers to a malar stripe that some bird species have -- it's that mark next to the bill. The bird I photographed shows predominantly red, but also a bit of black. Depending on the species or subspecies (race), it might be limited to only one sex, might be colored differently, etc. In Northern Flicker, only male birds have it.

As you can see, the bird I photographed shows characteristics of both. The exact mix on any one bird can be pretty much anything.

Workstation Wallpaper, Courtesy of ESO

This is from The European Southern Observatory, specifically the VISTA Magellanic Cloud Survey view of the Tarantula Nebula. For the last several years, an edited version of it has been the wallpaper on my main workstation, which is always named feynman. I'm just a bit strange that way; the wallpaper on my phone is an image from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

Before that, wallpapers were slideshows, but that is an historic, and also somewhat biographical, note. But that is for another post, along with that workstation name, which rolls from machine to machine as technology improves.

I could leap from this to some ranty post about why various sorts of hamburger, skate boards, etc., are not awesome. That, too, should be in another post.

I find myself rather sad this morning. Last night I was looking for a bit of imagery related to the UA Mirror Lab. I've mentioned them over at G+. They are currently producing optics for another European effort, the Large Magellan Telescope. No link there, because I just found them trying to do some highly obnoxious Web tracking, involving HTML canvas. That might be another post, but one more suited to my security blog. Some days, the sadness just piles up.

On a brighter note, I found what I was looking for (and much more) by stumbling across, then doing a topic search, on a great blog. GMT4 Unveil, about casting the 4th GMT mirror. Here's the time-lapse video, on YouTube, but you should really read the blog post, and follow the link from there. Casting an 8.4 meter mirror -- a process which takes months, even at what is unquestionably the finest large-scale optical fabrication facility in the world, is a nontrivial process.

So, why so sad?

Because in the course of checking out that great Ketelsens blog, I found a couple of things. One was a mention of Bob Goff. That name rang a bell -- he was a friend of a friend, years ago. Now dead at an early age, as is the friend (Larry Forrest, founder of since-sold Glass Mountain Optics) who used to mention him. Larry died unexpectedly, also before his time. He and Sharleen, his wife of many years, Forrest are two of the finest people I have ever known. Notice my use of the present tense for Larry. That is intentional. In ways that seem important to me, Larry is very much alive; he's just impossible to contact. Which sucks, but there it is.

In addition, the Ketelsens Blog mentions yet another person who has passed far too early, Dave Harvey. They both worked at Steward Observatory, but Harvey was on the software development, as opposed to the optical fabrication, side of things. He apparently regarded himself as more of a photographer. This guy, I can only wish I had had some connection to. Yes, I would be even more sad right now, but I still feel that that was a connection I missed out on, to my loss. 

When I was a child, I messed around with telescopes. No surprise, right. I was mainly interested in the structure of our galaxy, probably because some of the more spectacular sights were accessible to my small telescopes -- the classic 6-inch f8 Newtonian reflector I owned at the time was very mainstream. And even then, what we were learning about something like the structure of the galaxy, or establishing the distance scale of the universe, set the standard for what might be regarded as awesome. An awesome hamburger? Yeah, right. Awesome was a reserved word for me before I even hit my teens, and this not subject to change. Period.

So here's this Dave Harvey guy, also a telescope and software guy, who is using small but drool-worthy gear to photograph to take some fantastic imagery. Such as the Rho Ophiuchus region (Go there. Really. He did it with a 5-inch astrograph.) of the Milky Way, the subject of another long-term wallpaper on feynman. He was also a general-purpose photographer who was deeply knowledgeable about his craft, and who put in a lot of effort to get things right. 

I loves me some birds. Always have. But there are a lot of bird blogs out there by people who do a lot of photography (with far better/heavier/bulkier gear than I am willing to carry) who seem more interested in being cool. I have no firm idea of how birding might be seen as cool, seemingly by the same people who might judge that a hamburger could be in any way awesome, but I digress. More importantly, they don't seem to get things like the time-honored wisdom of 90% of all images needing a border. Or they simply can't be bothered.

In the few images I have ever posted, anywhere, I have tried to follow that rule. But sometimes I got in a rush, or simply lazy, and didn't. I suspect that it would not even have occurred to Dave Harvey to do such a thing. That, my friends, is attention to detail, and dedication to your craft. So Dave Harvey is still around, too, if one appreciates the debt we owe to all of those who teach and inspire.

There is no deep wisdom, now becoming obvious, in all this. At some level we all realize that associating ourselves with smart, dedicated people, who are also willing and able to teach something of whatever it is that they do, is a useful guideline. But it was one of those weird moments, which we probably all have, when many seemingly-disparate things all became connected. 

So why even write this?

Two reasons.

1. The off chance that it might be my subconscious getting impatient and shouty. Which does happen to me. For instance, I have had great results from "sleeping on" problems.
2. Spreading the word about outstanding work by others is always A Good Thing.

520 days in space

Scott Kelly will be retiring from NASA on April 1. I can't help but note that date; he doesn't strike me as the sort of individual that would ever really retire. Retire from NASA? Sure. I can buy that. It might boil down to something as simple as, "At this point in my career, will I ever get another mission?" Or perhaps one really can become jaded to almost anything, and 520 days is quite enough spaceflight, thank you very much.

Obviously, this is all speculation; I am amongst that large collection of people whom Kelly does not call to meet for a beer, and talk about career plans. Duh.

That said, I suspect that Kelly is just _really into it_. Beyond the point of willing to be strapped to the top of an enormous of high explosives and fired into orbit. He has, after all, treated us to a remarkable collection of photos from the International Space Station.

NASA, in their https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/astronaut-scott-kelly-to-retire-from-nasa-in-april press release has managed to ignore this. As I write this, they haven't provided a collection of the photos https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html. That's to be expected, as the NASA Web site has always rather sucked.

That is unfortunate, as many Americans still regard NASA as a huge waste of taxpayer money. This is far from the truth: NASA gets 0.005 of the budget; for every tax dollar half a cent goes to NASA. This is a matter of public record, and can be checked. See http://www.penny4nasa.org/mission/.

Meanwhile, we still have a lunatic fringe who believe that the Apollo moon landings were faked. Dealing with that is an exercise in futility. Real questions, given that NASA can't even get a penny of the budget, seem more likely to involve tradeoffs between robotic vs. manned missions.

I want both. We don't have demonstrated technology to send humans beyond lunar orbit, and robotic missions have an undeniable track record of scientific success. But manned space flight is inspirational. I don't buy purely economic arguments against it. First off, because economists are famous for getting almost nothing right. Secondly, because even if economists had a solid bead on things, some things are worth doing for reasons that have _nothing whatever to do with economics_.

Back to those Kelly photos.

And bite me, NASA. Why do you provide nothing, from one of your own people, while ancient (and largely irrelevant) IT trade rags such as PC Magazine can manage it? Though they will drop a pop-under ad in front of you, despite your settings in popular browsers. Given the rate at which ad networks are currently being compromised, hence being used to compromise user systems, that's a problem. And even then, you still have another click to get to a slideshow. Not going to do a link.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160229-scott-kelly-nasa-astronaut-space-year-pictures-photography/ seems to be one of the more honest ones. You still have to click another link, and you only get 15 images, and there is a bit going on behind the scenes that seems a bit dodgy. As is the case with some mass-media, such as http://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/coming-home-look-back-scott-kelly-s-year-space-n525226.

One might try scottkelly.com but will take you to a domain-squatter.

So, yeah, NASA continues to be it's own worst enemy, in both the PR/outreach and history departments. That is really unfortunate. I didn't save some images that I loved, and they don't seem to be available any longer. Articles that got some press about how they screwed this particular pooch in the past, such as http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lost-lunar-photos-recovered-by-great-feats-of-hackerdom-developed-at-a-mcdonalds/ seem to be lessons not learned.

Oh noes, the weather got beautiful!

Most people I know love to bitch about the weather. Living in western Oregon, my winter sniveling is usually something like, "Oh $DEITY, please turn off this endless {rain|fog}. And please, while you're at it, please pump the duration of reasonably bright daylight to something beyond 12 minutes. kthxbye."

For the record, I have to note that response time is usually terrible. But luckily, I still get to bitch.

During the roughly half of the year that the weather is beautiful, I label various things as official Winter Projects. The professional stuff (there are always new things to learn) take priority, and always get done. Particularly if I'm going to do something that keeps CPU cores/threads pegged for the better part of a week, I'd rather do it in the winter. Because who wants to run the furnace in August? This happens. A couple of days ago a batch job that was spread over two systems pegged a total of 7 cores (14 threads) finished. Wall time 119 hours, with no restarts from checkpoints. And no, public cloud lovers, it was not something that I could run on Amazon AWS. Sensitive data.

Right now, it looks like we might have another early spring. Flowers are blooming, trees and shrubs are budding, bird behavior is changing. So I need to do some math, and run another couple (at least) long batch jobs. Also do a pile of reading, and write more than a little software. It's going to be hard to get through the tail end of that list of winter projects, and some non-professional things aren't going to happen.

One thing that will happen is a bit of work related to a local map, on the scale of a few hectares. Specifically, I need a series of GPS readings from locations that will be impossible to get once trees leaf out. The notion is to gather as much data as possible, then beat the noise level down via least squares. I wonder if it is possible to achieve precision approaching single meters, with on-hand tech. That's more precision than I really need -- I'm just curious.

So, what's with the map? I do a bit of birding. Not well, in terms of what seems to be the standard of who has the longest 'life list' of birds seen. Or county list, or whatever. Types of lists are important to many birders. I totally get that, but am not that into it. I don't even know what my life list would be, save that it would completely fail to impress those who are impressed by such things. If I had to guess, it would be around 275. That's less than the number recorded in just my county (287), according to eBird, but I took seven states to arrive at that number. So it goes, and yes, I suck as a birder. I could write a whole post about that. But I'd rather post a crop of a poor photo of a Merlin. Because I only see this small falcon in winter, when the light is usually bad (complain to $DEITY, not me) at ranges beyond what my gear can really handle.

In the checklists I submit to eBird, I refer to specific locations, such as the Greenway, or the Willow Corridor. That is meaningless to others -- I do it for my own obscure purposes. Now I want a fairly precise map to support those obscure and meaningless purposes. Simple as that. I may suck as a birder, but I prefer to suck precisely.

Spend a couple of decades in system and information security, where attention to detail and nuance is critical, and you too might end up somewhere between strange and deranged. Not knocking the field, mind you. Huge challenge, huge satisfaction.