The joy of modern means of communication

We already had plans to go check out the river this afternoon, but right about 1:30 I saw that someone had emailed PA Birds about a Glaucous Gull visible from the John Wright boat launch in Wrightsville.  The hunt was on!

Now, I have been down to the river multiple times in the last week or so, and there's usually hundreds if not thousands of gulls present, so I figured I would have to be very lucky to be able to pick out the single slightly different one.  

I was right - we scanned the river and saw many many Herring and Ring-Billed Gulls, and about a dozen Greater Black-Backed.  But no Glaucous.  Another birder arrived, she had seen the email, too.  She also told us that she recognized the cars of the people who first reported the bird.  They had to be in a nearby restaurant, having lunch.  We waited a while for them to emerge, to no avail, so decided to head down to the next boat launch to the south.  

We were just wrapping up there when I got a phone call.  The lunching birders had re-emerged and had found the Glaucous Gull again.  Turns out the lady who we had met told the lunching birders about us, and one of them recognized my name and still had my phone number from a few years ago, when I met her through some peregrine falcon sightings I made in York city.  Whew!

We hopped back up to John Wright and were able to get distant but nice looks.  The Glaucous was hanging out on some rocks with a few Greater Black-Backed Gulls.  Greater Black-Backed Gulls are the largest gulls in the world, and as you can see, the Glaucous is very nearly as large as they are.  Its size alone made it pretty obviously different from the other non-black-backed gulls on the river.  This one is a juvenile, an adult would have a light gray mantle and would lack any black in the wings.

Some good luck and a nice set of coincidences turns out to net me one more life bird for 2014!

Mr. Norrell is strange, and finished!

One of the things I like to do when I have finished a book, especially if it's one I have mixed emotions about, is look at reviews on Amazon and Good Reads and see what other people think of it.

While I did this for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, one thing struck me.  I've never seen an author compared to so many other wildly different authors:  Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Helprin, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, China Mieville, and trust me, I'm just getting started.  I think this happens because Clarke is a total original who quietly echoes many literary traditions.  

Another thing that made sense is that the book can be interpreted, at least in part, as a look at the moral implications of quickly evolving technology, with magic standing in for technology.  At one point, Clarke even brings up real historical advances, and the Luddites as a group.

   

Published in May 1812 by Messrs. Walker and Knight, Sweetings Alley, Royal Exchange

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, copyright expired

Another interesting take is that the man with the thistledown hair, who is a powerful fairy, also operates in many ways like a vampire.  Cheating life from people through enchantment.  Strange even brings up vampires at one point, although in no relation to fairies. This is a very clever book that way, directly referencing its themes every so often.

But there is no getting around the fact that this book is really, really not for everyone.  Even if it's right up your alley, you have to be in the mood for it.  It tested my patience, despite the writing being truly outstanding.  For example, I'm still not sure that we needed hundreds of pages of Strange & Wellington, for all the more character development that occurred.

The Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler, c1838

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, copyright expired

The characters - these characters are complex and often you don't really like them much, even the 'good' ones.  The bad ones don't always get what's coming to them.  You want to punch Strange in the head for being so oblivious for 500 pages, and Norrell for being so small-minded for 700.  Women and the poor are not treated nicely here, by humans or fairies, and that doesn't change much by the end.  And, on page 782, you're still not sure what the Raven King is all about and why he's restoring magic to England.  Although his appearances at the end are handled nicely.  It's rumored that Clarke is writing a sequel, I can see why.

I have also seen that the film rights for the book were sold a while ago, and a BBC series is underway, too.  I can't wait for the BBC edition, this is prime material for them.

  Final call:

Please read, but proceed with caution and an abundance of patience!    

Birding the Icepocalypse

The office where I work rarely closes for weather.  But yesterday they did, so I took advantage and scoped out the river again.  While everyone else was dealing with Icepocalypse, I was the lone birder.

I took care to stay out from under the trees.  Plenty of branches had already come down and more were doing so as I watched.  We had anywhere from a quarter to a half inch of ice that fell on trees already covered with snow.  

 But, yes, the birds.  A fellow birder in town posted what she had seen the day before at 3:00 in the afternoon.  Then, the storm lasted most of the night and next morning.  I saw virtually the same birds in the same numbers as she did; I assume the weather kept them grounded.

This is a red-necked grebe, one of a pair that have stayed in the area for a few days now.  I don't think I've seen this species in this county until now.

 Among the ducks, scaup (about 30) and goldeneye (about 50) were the most common.  Bufflehead and canvasbacks were around in smaller numbers.  Here's a group of scaup, with the Columbia River Park as a backdrop.

As I watched the goldeneye (who unfortunately were always as far from shore as possible), I noticed many of them were gyrating.  I knew goldeneye perform courting dances that would break lesser ducks' backs, but I didn't think I'd see them in action.

  
This isn't high quality footage, but good enough for being taken at 100X digital zoom, with only my camera resting on my scope, which was on a tripod, for stabilization.

Mr. Norrell is strange ...

For the second book in my 2014 Man Booker Challenge, I picked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.  This is a 700 page beast, and I wanted to tackle it early in the year.

I'm a little over half-way through.  It's full of British wit and charm..  I can see why some draw parallels to Harry Potter, although its ultimately very far from Rowling's series. 

Three Men in a Boat  is a classic of British humor.  Would it have been as delightful if it were 700 pages, instead of 170?  No, I'm afraid even that book might wear thin.  So one of my issues is that the comedy often wears out before the scene moves on.  

The other is related to the particulars of some events.  It's unsettling to read of decidedly uncharming  to downright frightening activities in a manner that implies there is charm or wit or humor in the situations.  For example, the story of the seventeen dead Neapolitans is chilling.  A gentleman magician won't kill with magic, but has no problem resurrecting seventeen dead men, using them shamelessly, then messing about with them for weeks until they meet a hellish end (again).  Throughout the book there is this strange feeling that you are expected to laugh at things that just aren't funny, it must be intentional.     

Some other thoughts.  Is there a plot to this book?  Kind of.  There's forward motion that gets tangled in literally hundreds of digressions.  Many of which are complete stories in their own.  Where will it go?  Sometimes I glimpse the shape of what I hope is the big picture.  I don't necessarily need much of a plot to enjoy a book, but this one really does lurch along.  If the Raven King chapters don't deliver, then I will wonder what the journey was for.

There's also an absolute overload of imagination.  Delightfully creepy descriptions of eerie magic, mad fairies, etc.  A different author probably would have milked four or five or fifteen books out of this much content.  

But, I'm wondering if Clarke's imagination crosses itself up at times.  Jonathan Strange sends a message to a military officer using a very small rainstorm to spell patterns in the dry dust, and a few chapters later can't figure out how to put out a house fire without resorting to awkward machinations.  He tries to make creatures out of water, but unfortunately, we hear that water is the fussiest of the elements and doesn't hold its shape well when magic is used.  Except, I guess, when Mr. Norrell blockaded French ports for at least a week with ships made out of ... water.  

In fact, the entire presentation of how magic was used in the Napoleonic Wars doesn't sit right with me, but I've gone on too long here as it is.  Back to finishing off this book!   

 

It's snowing ... geese

It's February and snow geese are collecting in large groups in the mid-Atlantic, at staging areas where hundreds and thousands of geese collect and coordinate their migration further northward. 

Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge had somewhere between 1500-2000 snow geese this last weekend.  They were divided into two smaller groups, and one of these was on the ice right beside the wildlife drive.    

 A healthy number of Canadas were around, too, of course.  Here are some fresh tracks.

Some other excitement was at Steel Pier in Atlantic City.  Large rafts of ducks were present just off-shore.  Hundreds upon hundreds of what were probably black scoters and long-tailed ducks.  

Closer in to shore, I found a common loon, and a female long-tailed duck.

And on the pier itself, more tracks.  Although nowhere near as fresh as the goose tracks at Forsythe.   

Shore birding and bunting

Two or three years ago, we went on a field trip with the local bird club to Barnegat Lighthouse State Park in New Jersey.  It was a fantastic trip, and it introduced me to a group of birds I was not at all familiar with.  I haven't been back to check out the sea ducks and other various wintering coastal birds, until this weekend.  I'll have a post or two on those later, but first, a detour.  

Word on the internet was that an very rare Smith's Longspur had been sighted at Stone Harbor Point, to the north of Cape May.  The most recent news was that it hadn't been found in a day or so, so our hopes weren't set on seeing it.  But it was also supposed to be a good place to find these guys:

Snow buntings aren't shore birds per se, but they can be found in the dunes.  For not being a particularly rare bird in the winter, this is my first encounter with them.  So, that was exciting, finding life bird #1 for the day.  There was flock of about a dozen, scurrying back and forth through the grassy dunes.

This group was very tolerant.  We were within 10 feet or so of some.  A few were messing in and around an old washed up tire.  Later, one jumped up and posed for us.  

Birders drifted in and out while we were walking around Stone Harbor Point.  One told us how to find a pair of king eider hens hanging out with some scaup two bridges over.  King eiders are unusual in New Jersey, but nobody told these two.  They have been in the area since some time in December.

These two were easy to find, but hard to actually observe.  The only clear views were distant ones, so a documentation-quality shot will have to do.  The eider are the two brownish birds at the back left.  An unexpected life bird #2 for the day!  

Quote Storm: Fire from Heaven

I intended to post some of my favorite quotes from the Man Booker Challenge books I read.  And I'm already behind, so here goes.

Fire from Heaven, by Mary Renault

Alexander and a tutor discussing the proto-Olympic Games:

     "No. When I went to watch, I thought nothing would be so wonderful. But we stayed on after, and I met the athletes; and I saw how it really is.  I can beat the boys here, because we're all training to be men. But these boys are just boy athletes. Often they're finished before they're men; and if not, even for the men, the Games is all their life.  Like being a woman is for women."
    Epikrates nodded. "It came about almost within my lifetime. People who have earned no pride in themselves are content to be proud of their cities through other men. The end will be that the city has nothing left for pride, except the dead, who were proud less easily."

Hercules, to young Alexander in a vision:

By laying myself on the pyre I became divine.  I have wrestled Thanatos (death) knee to knee, and I know how death is vanquished.  Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

Alexander and Hephaistion, at a turning point in their relationship:

Alexander rested from his thoughts in a waking sleep. Hephaistion watched him, with the steadfast eyes and tender patience of the leopard crouched by the pool, its hunger comforted by the sound of light distant footfalls, straying down the forest track.

At the assassination of Philip, Alexander's father, by the bodyguard Pausanias:

Philip slid stiffly down, smiled, and began to speak.  Pausanias' left hand took his arm in a tightening drip.  Their looks met.  Pausanias brought out his right hand from his cloak, so swiftly that Philip never saw the dagger, except in Pausanias' eyes.

There are actually quite a few more, but they need more background to set up than I care to include here!