Monday, February 07, 2011

-- Another Day of Miscellany --

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1) First, today marks the 137th anniversary of the birth of Louis Agassiz Fuertes... one of the greatest bird portraitists of all-time, including one of my personal favorites (Pileated Woodpeckers):














2) An old joke (originally from George Carlin, I think???) asks, "WHAT do you do if you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?"
But in the world of conservation it's not such a joke, as similar situations actually occur on occasion. Sadly, the competition between Barred Owls and Spotted Owls in the Pacific Northwest appears to be such a case. Read about the tough decisions being made there:

http://tinyurl.com/65xvpqb

3) An early review of Richard Crossley's new bird field guide, due in bookstores soon, here:

http://tinyurl.com/5se976b


(
GOTTA have it!!)

4) And finally below, physicist Richard Feynman's classic discussion of bird names... and science:



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1 comment:

Cotinis said...

Yes, that is a good painting of the Pileated. If you got it from Wikimedia Commons, I confess it was I who scanned and brightened that image. Someday(!) I'm going to get through all the Birds of New York images and make medium-sized, cleaned up files. (Decent scans are now on-line at the Biodiversity Heritage Library, but they need cleaning and downsampling.)