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.

Interrupted Thought: Pacific Wren

1657, (4:57 PM for the time-challenged) and I was plugging away at work, pretty much lost in thought. Certainly had no idea of it being 3 minutes away from what many regard as quitting time, because in what I do, there really is no quitting time.

Gradually realized that I had been interrupted by a persistent buzzing from the front yard. Pacific
Wren! Since I've lived here in Oregon, I've associated this bird with cold weather -- a winter bird here on the banks of the Willamette River. Right now, it's in the low 60s (F) outside, and Pacific Wren was a bit of a surprise. But this whole fall period has been a bit of a surprise. Several species have appeared early. This is not my first PAWR (to use the bird-banding alpha code, which you can reference at the USGS Patuxent River Wildlife Research Center USGS Patuxent River Wildlife Research Center, and it's a very useful shorthand notation, particularly in field notes) of the year, but I think it might be the most benign conditions.

No photos to show you, which is a bit of a shame, as they're cute little buggers, as most wrens are. But it's an easy image search. Some of the results are even correctly identified! Or you can go to the Cornell Lab http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Pacific_Wren/id - an authoritative source. And apparently the sole US university with more ornithologists than Oregon State, which is just across across the river from me.

I have to get back to work, which one of the reasons I didn't even consider trying to get a photo. Yes they are way photogenic. But beyond that, they are interesting, beyond the cute imagery so beloved by the millions of Internet cat-video fans. Ann Nightingale put up a post back in 2011, writing from Victoria, B.C. It is, of course, filled with cute: that is pretty much unavoidable when the subject is PAWR. But it's also personable, informative, and interesting.

I wish I could do content like that. Sadly, all I can do is point to the people who can.

Late September Birding in the Willamette Valley

I had a great morning. I'll pay for it by working a late night, but unless thing go completely to hell, it will have been worth it. It started innocently enough, drinking morning coffee on the deck, munching on an enormous cinnamon roll, and doing a mental review of what I needed to get done today. Because that's how we roll, on the mean streets of a semi-ghost-town in the central Willamette Valley.

Mostly, I was thinking about infosec projects, data analysis projects, how soon I needed to get firewood delivered, and the huge goodness of that cinnamon roll. Then the birds began to trickle in. I didn't end up with a particularly long checklist, though 30 species counts as good, this time of year, and it took a long time to get there. Hence my expectation of a late night.

Since May, I have been wondering if I were having a Big Year. Not in the sense of the 2011 film of the same title, and certainly not in the sense of what fellow Oregonian Noah Strycker is up to. Which is to see 5000 birds in a year, and he has already beaten the previous record of 4341, with a bird named the Sri Lanka Frogmouth, of all things.

The only thing we have in common is having something like a quarter of the year left.

What is my current idea of a Big Year? 111 species. Seriously. A lot of birders are all about lists and counts. There's certainly a place for that. I use it as a rough-and-ready metric for how much I am learning. My goal is to better understand this very cool place that I inhabit. More species, if careful records are kept, means a better understanding of the flow of seasonal change, etc. All very Thoreau.

But I don't know how many birds might be on my life list, and that's an important thing for many birders. I know it is at least 250, and suspect that it is more like 275 or something. That may seem like a lot of birds, but it is well under half of the species recorded just in Oregon, which I think is around 600. There are probably counties with higher numbers.

As a birder, I pretty much suck. I'm fine with that, as I can still use counts as motivator. Something to get me off my ass, outdoors, and learning about something other than infosec. Previous to this year, there was no month in which I had found 70 species in the yard. This year:

• April: 72
• May: 76
• August: 73
• September 71 (so far)

Today, I picked up on something called a Warbling Vireo amongst a tree full of Bushtit. Neither of these species is spectacular -- far from it. Being able to do it means, to me, that I am slowly getting a clue as to the subtle things that are happening all around me. I'm learning, I can more fully appreciate bird migration, etc.

I mostly use eBird for record-keeping these days. Imperfect as hell, for reasons that I will probably get into in subsequent posts. But they do supply another powerful motivator: bar charts. Seriously. Read eBird: Engaging Birders in Science and Conservation. It worked on me, in that I am constantly looking at bar charts, and targeting birds that I either know or suspect should be here, but have not been able to find. Filling in that last blank spot, turning Belted Kingfisher into a year-round bird, motivates me. Then it might get deeper, as you start to think about the shape of the graph. Does a bar chart begin to show activity in March, gradually, or explode into being in April? How about that unexplained absence in Q3 of July? How did it vary in 2013, 14, and 15? Might weather have affected it? If so, how?

This is a bottomless pit of learning, the scope of which is best appreciated with a cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll, and a complete absence of IT security stuff. Well, except for the data analysis bits, which is common to both. And much else, these days.

So how is my yard Big Year going?  Second-best, so far. At 109 species, I've beaten my 2014 record of 107 species, but I am still one shy of my all-time 2013 record of 110. Even with a full quarter of the year to go, it isn't (quite) a certainty. If you are just looking at your yard, travel is out. And it gets progressively harder to find anything new for the year. Today I added a new bird for the first time since August, and that was the first since probably May. That said, I suspect that I am going to stonk my previous best, and finish the year at 114 or so. Unless life intrudes, which it often does.