I’m moving my blog, to here…

January 26th, 2007

I wasn’t getting many comments over on the Myspace location, so I have copied all the old posts to this site on WordPress.  You can comment here without being a member, so please reread the old posts and feel free to comment on the old entries.  Sorry, the few comments from the old site weren’t copied, but feel free to recomment as you see fit. I’m leaving the old blog up on the old location, but I won’t be posting anything new there.

I’ll be putting up something new on this location very soon.

Regards,

Glenn Nevill

Return to Kenya

 January 23, 2007

There is a chapter in the book about Peterson’s return to Kenya and the birds he found there.  Very fascinating reading, and I will not bore you with the list of birds he saw, plus his descriptions are much better than mine, though I am not going to do large pull quotes for you.  I recommend buying the book, or if your library has it, then check it out for yourself.

The sentence that caught my eye in this chapter is simply this one:

“I am not an obsessed lister; but bird photography is my therapy, and I would rather shoot a roll of film on some relatively common species than add a new bird to my life list.”

After thinking about this for a few days, I think he speaks for me too.  Photographing birds is my therapy too.

What’s yours.

Good birding,
Glenn

Return to The Pribilofs

January 22, 2007

All Things Reconsidered

 

In 1953, Roger Tory Peterson paid a visit to the Pribilofs, a small chain of islands in the Bering Sea to document the wildlife there. He filmed 300,000 murres nesting and tufted puffins, auklets, snow buntings, lapland longspurs etc. He also documented the recovering fur seal population there. In 1983, he returned and found quite a reduced number of all these creatures. And so here is the concluding paragraphs written in 1984, (22 years before the movie Happy Feet came out with the same message.)

“But what has all this to do with birds? One cannot talk about the Pribilofs without bringing up fur seals. The survival problems of seas and seabirds are similar; both depend on fish. The deepwater gill nets of the commercial fishing fleets not only ensnare many seals but also drown untold numbers of seabirds. It has been estimated that gill nets of the Japanese North Pacific salmon fishery alone ensnare and drown 150,000 to 200,000 marine birds – mainly diving birds, such as murres and puffins – each year. A U.S. State Department environmental impact statement estimates that, overall, the Japanese kill about 1 million seabirds annually in their efficient purse seine nets and trawler gill nets. The murres and some of the other cliff nesters lay but a single egg and have a low reproductive potential. They cannot sustain this continued drain.”

“In a recent letter, Bill Rodstrom informed me that this year was the poorest yet for nesting success on St. Paul. Fewer than 10 percent of the black-legged and red-legged kittiwake nests still had live young at the end of the season. Red-faced cormorants also had a dismal year. Murres did somewhat better, although there were more dead chicks than he had seen in the past. Is overfishing affecting this food supply?
Add to these woes the constant threat of spills in these oil-exploited seas and the future looks bleak. We may never again see the numbers of birds that crowded the cliffs when Fisher and I made our 1953 visit.”
So 22 years ago, the problem of overfishing was know and published, and yet it is only in January of this year that something seems to be happening, at least in our government. An Oceans Protection Bill was introduced on Jan. 4th by the new Democratic Congress Read Here Also in Great Brittain here
Then of course there are problems with plastics polluting our oceans and killing birds, fish and sea mamals Marine Debris Abatement

Oh and of course there is the global warming problem and what it will do to the coast line should the ice melt on Antarctica…

Here’s what San Francisco will look like if the sea level rises by 100 feet:

I created this chart using some software called Vertical Mapper, you can see the posting online here.

Looks like we have a lot of work to do…

What are you really?

 Friday January 19th, 2007

So the second essay in this book talks about what kind of bird watcher are you.

Anyway here are the categories Roger mentions in the 2nd article:
Ornithologist
Ornithophile
Bird Watcher
Birder
Bird Bander
Bird Fancier
Bird Spotter
Ticker
Lister
Twitcher

I consider myself a bird watcher.

So which are You?

If anyone wants to know what these categories mean then some one has to comment  with a question.  I’m not going write anymore on this subject for now till I have some feedback.

I just say that of all the categories, ticker is one of the strangest I have heard of.

All Things Reconsidered, (Introduction)

So I started reading a new book, listed in the title above, and for those unfamiliar with the author Roger Tory Peterson, let me quote from the introduction.

  “In the modern era, by any measure, Roger Tory Peterson was a great man. His accomplishments greatly surpass those of his peers. A list of his accolades, awards, and honors would fill several pages of this book. His legendary field guide simplified bird identification so that everyone could understand and enjoy it. Today millions of people around the world enjoy bird watching because of the simple, methodical identification methods Peterson put into print.”

I’m going to post a blog about each chapter that I read, as I read it, to try to keep my thoughts fresh on the subjects in the book. I hope that those that read this blog will contribute their thoughts as well.  I would love to hear what others think about Peterson and bird watching.

Peterson was well known for his guide books and illustrations, but what I have learned from reading the introduction to this collection of his contributed essays to the periodical Bird Watcher’s Digest is he was also a very good writer and a good bird photographer.

So here’s a a few questions along with my answers to start the ball rolling.

Do any of you reading this have any of Peterson’s bird guides on your shelves? (Yes, it was one of the first guides I ever owned)

Do those that have them still use them, or have you moved on to newer authors such as Sibley’s?

(I still refer back to his guide, but I use the Sibley’s and Audubon books more frequently now.)

Did anyone reading this blog ever meet Roger Tory Peterson and if so what impression did he leave with you?

(Sadly no, I never got the opportunity to meet him.)

Ok, that’s enough for my first post.  Please feel free to comment on this post.  I want to hear what others think about this and I’m sure the other readers will be polite and kind to anything you wish to contribute. If it is one thing I have learned, bird watchers and birders of all kinds are some of the most polite and helpful individuals I have ever met.

Regards to all and good birding,
Glenn