Viral Variations on eBird
Friday July 31, 2020
It’s been a while since the last blog…. The original concept of finding a mode of ‘knitting for the mind’ morphed into a weekly regimen something more akin to an exercise program.
Not that I don’t also enjoy exercise, or haven’t on occasion doubled down on weight loss projects or other forms of regimentation or deliberate attempts to try to structure my time or direct my energy.
It’s more that other enthusiasms crowded in and usurped my attention. Specifically, a project to build rocking chairs for the front porch of the house. The vision was pitched to me by my wife: a ‘pair’ of matching rockers.
We could rock gently in the shade of the porch, casting our benign gaze on passers by as they strolled through the fire-fly spangled evening. The cares of the day would seep out of our souls as we breathed in the mingled scents of citronella candles and pipe tobacco.
There followed an internet search for something modern, yet classic. Simple yet comfortable looking.
The upshot was that for the past two months, whenever I wasn’t actually in the workshop bandsawing backslats I was visualizing joinery and mentally rehearsing the sequence in which to mark and make the various components so as to avoid having to draw the whole thing up in advance.
The results are quite pleasing, in spite of a bad moment where I realized I hadn’t allowed for the length of the tenons when making the seat slats, and therefore the seat would be an inch shallower than I had imagined. Luckily the rockers and armrests were still uncut and could be adjusted to match.
Then I began to lose sleep over whether the shallower geometry of the seat combined with the tall back would make the whole thing unstable. I imagined sitting down and pushing off, only to continue over backward in a graceful catastrophic crash.
So I worked on in a fever of anticipation and apprehension until the day the last mortise had been cut and the whole thing could be dry-fit with clamps. But the clamps themselves threw the balance out, and there was no way to have confidence in the final result without committing to the point of no return and gluing the whole thing up.
Now the raw sanded finished product grace our porch, and we rock gently, casting our benign gaze on the middle distance, pondering the finish. Tung oil or varnish? Dark stain or blond?
The pipe tobacco is running low, and blog thoughts are rising to the surface. Maybe it’s just procrastination before plunging into all the risks and rewards of the hand-finishing process…
These are the dog days of summer, and my daily walk to the office finds me choosing the shady side of the road coming and going. The spring flowers on the verge have yielded to hardy varieties that thrive in the margins on the drifts of winter grit that accumulate at the road edge.
A riot of deep blue and white flowers dominate the edge of the road. The blue flowers fascinate me. Every morning they are deep blue, by noon they have faded to a sky blue, by evening they have wilted, leaving a small seedy pod. But each day new buds open all up and down the kinky stalks. Amazingly prolific for something growing in such harsh conditions. The lacy white flowers, each with a black dot in the exact center seem much more efficient, apparently lasting for weeks.
Meanwhile the seed pods of the blue flower are attracting a brilliant yellow and black bird. As I walk along, a small flock of maybe 6 or 8 birds flickers along ahead of me, eventually rising to a telephone line to let me pass so they can return to their feeding once I’m gone.
I always thought these yellow birds ate thistle seeds, but maybe they have adapted. Or maybe they just go with what’s available. Still it’s interesting that just that one kind of bird is eating the seeds.
If you are a bird watching fanatic, you look for the habitat first, and then you are attuned to the type of bird you might see there. Birds can be identified not only by sight, but also by their songs.
I worked with a guy once who had downloaded a bird-watching app called ‘eBird’. Whenever we traveled together, he would plan a few stops along the road to pick up some bird sightings. The app would show lists of recent birds, and he himself would log what he saw.
One time he logged a sighting of some kind of rare crane at a small pond near where I live. For days cars with out of state plates were parked illegally in nearby lanes, and scruffy looking men in baggy pockety khaki clothing carrying cameras with impossibly long telephoto lenses could be seen lurking in the shadows of the wood edge.
I read an article recently about eBird and white-throated sparrows. Apparently bird watching enthusiasts upload recordings of bird-songs as well as photos as a way of verifying their sightings.
As thousands of uploads of white-throated sparrow songs were reviewed, analysts observed slight variations in the song trending across Canada and the United States. It has been known for some time that there are local variations or ‘dialects’ in bird songs, but in this case eBird technology allowed bird geeks to actually observe an unusual occurrence where a variation went viral across the whole white-throated sparrow population to the point where the previously almost universal double-triplet ending (ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta) has been almost entirely replaced by a jaunty set of three syncopated pairs of notes (ta-da, ta-da, ta-da).
How does this happen? Bird geeks speculate that new variations are cooked up in the wintering grounds in the Rockies where young males congregate each year. But why do some changes go viral?
Who knows. Maybe there’s like a Bob Marley for birds. Or maybe the white-throats as a population were looking for something new and just felt like it was time for a bit of syncopation in their lives.
The yellow and black birds don’t seem to sing that much, and appear quite happy with their seeds.
