Ahoy! Sea Turkeys

I've often mentioned the flock of wild turkeys wintering at our house. The number has shrunk from two dozen to just eight (not sure where the others went), but those survivors are both hearty and seaworthy. This week Pamelia looked out and saw them roaming and pecking in the low tide. Perhaps they were gobbling up sand, pebbles and crushed shells—good grit for grinding grub in their gizzards.

All Ears

A bit farther south, in Montville, New Jersey, an owl has been keeping Sarah Markwood awake some nights with its hoots. Her dad, Scott, reports that when he was out chopping ice in the driveway at dusk the other day, he saw the silhouette of something large perched in a tree. He says it was size of a huge raccoon, with two ears sticking up. Then he realized that it was an owl—"much larger than I imagined an owl could be," he says. From his description (about two feet tall), it may have been a great horned owl, an aggressive hunter and, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the only animal that regularly eats skunks. A (literally) smaller possibility is the long-eared owl, which stands only about 15 inches tall but has a resounding voice that might keep someone awake: Its call can be heard three-quarters of a mile away. Scott says his daughter, a budding naturalist, put the sighting in context: "Sarah reminded me that the original name for the area (English name, taken from the local Indians' name for the area) was Owl Kill. And the town crest still has the owl on it."

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A great horned owl, hunting for a skunk?

Veggies Vs. Fruit (Cont.)

As promised, after the last post about the scientific differences between fruits and vegetables, my botanist friend weighed in—and confirmed (whew) that legumes are indeed fruit. So green beans do qualify. He added this note:

A scandal! It's not all veg!

"During one of my programs as an interpretive ranger at [a national park], I would have everyone sit down beside a carriage road, and we would discuss fruits vs. vegetables (with appropriate props). One of the items I brought along on the walk was a can of Veg-all, which really should be called 'Veg-half' because four of the eight main ingredients are fruits. I recall that at least one of them was a legume. Another misnomer on store shelves is V-8. It’s pretty close to being correct because the only non-V is the tomato. But, in the interest of accuracy, the ad should say, 'I could have had an F-1/V-7.'"

A thank-you to my longtime friend and colleague Roger Jackson for flagging this tale of a cat burglar in California that had stolen 600 items from neighbors' homes—and turned out to be an actual cat: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110216/od_afp/uscrimeanimaloffbeat_20110216210804

Answer to the Last Puzzler:

What has two big arms and three smaller arms and be seen only at night? The Milky Way galaxy. The arms are the arms of its spiral shape.

The Milky Way, our galaxy, is made up at least 200 billion stars. The universe contains at least 200 billion galaxies. Do you think there's maybe a slight chance that there's some other form of life out there?

Today's Puzzlers:

A memory builder: Study these animal names for 30 seconds, then look away and try to write them down in the same order. Porcupine Mink Squirrel Badger Porcupine Deer Badger

A tongue twister: Say "Good grit for grinding grub in their gizzards" three times, fast.

Birthdays

Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who made the revolutionary discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun (instead of the other way around), would have turned 538 years old today. Amazingly, he had so many talents and occupations (including mathematician, diplomat, jurist, translator, military leader and economist) that astronomy was essentially just one of his hobbies.

Nicolaus Copernicus

Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin who coined the term "nurture versus nature," created the first weather map, and invented the silent dog whistle, would have been 189 this week. A former child prodigy, he was prolific in his ideas and research, coming up with the concept of statistical correlation, exploring and mapping southwest Africa, and pioneering the study of inherited intelligence, meteorology and even fingerprints. He did not coin the phrase "can of worms," but in coming up with the term eugenics and believing that selective breeding could raise the intellectual level of humans (apparently without considering the full consequences of that idea), he opened one of the largest such cans in history.

Francis Galton

Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who in 1800 invented the battery (and was the namesake of the volt), would have been 266 yesterday. His historical significance was recognized a few years ago by Toyota, which produced a prototype hybrid sports car that could go from zero to 60 mph in four seconds and was called (what else?) the Alessandro Volta.

You'd have needed a lot of lira to buy a Toyota Volta.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian-born, Cree Indian folk singer who grew up in Maine, turns 70 tomorrow. Her environmentally-themed songs include No No Keshagesh, about the despoiling of the planet through greed; keshagesh is a Cree word for a puppy that tries to eat everything.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

And finally, Jackie Gleason, the comedian and early proponent of space travel ("To the moon, Alice!"), would have been 95 tomorrow.

The Great One

Of Mice and Moon

Would you ever pick up a mouse? You would if it were a Douglas Engelbart mouse.

Engelbart grew up in a small town in Oregon as the son of a radio-shop owner. In World War II he joined the Navy and became a radar technician. While sitting in a hut on stilts in the Philippines in 1945 taking a break, he read an article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine that changed his life and led to an entirely new type of rodent. The article, "As We May Think," was written by Vannevar Bush, a scientist who had helped oversee the development of the atomic bomb and soon would be one of the advisors urging Harry Truman to drop it on Japan to shorten the war.

Ironically, Bush was concerned that science was increasingly being used for destructive purposes and that important knowledge wasn't being disseminated. He envisioned a collective-memory machine that would use microfilm reels to make the world's collected information more accessible to people. He in effect anticipated personal computers and the Internet.

Engelbart became fascinated by the idea of collective intelligence and globally shared knowledge. He became involved in the development of computers and turned out to be a visionary in that field. He invented hypertext, the links you click on to jump to a different page on the Internet. He also got a patent in 1970 for what he called "an X-Y position indicator for a display system." That is, the computer mouse.

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Englebart's computer mouse prototype.

It was made of wood, with metal wheels. Engelbart, who turned 86 yesterday, has said that the device became known as a mouse "because the tail came out the end." He never made much money from it; not realizing its value, his research group at Stanford licensed it to Apple for a pittance.

Douglas Engelbart

Interesting Mouse Notes:
Mouse comes from a Sanskrit word that means thief. A male mouse is called a buck, a female is a doe and a baby is a pinky (or a kitten). Unlike humans, mice can produce their own vitamin C, and thus came to North America on ships without developing scurvy, as many of the C-deprived sailors did. And if you're trying to find where mice have been, try a black light bulb; mouse urine is fluorescent; if will glow in black light.

How to Read the Moon Like a Book (Even in Arabic)
Pause to look at the southeastern horizon before sunrise tomorrow. You'll see Venus, currently 100 times brighter than any other object in the pre-dawn sky (other than the moon). Our neighboring planet is now higher in the sky than it has been at any point in the last three years.

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Terrible picture (for some reason my camera fares poorly when shooting through a double-paned window in nearly pitch-black conditions), but this is what the moon and Venus looked like before dawn this morning. Can you tell whether the moon is in a phase of waxing (getting bigger each night) or waning (getting smaller)? Read on.

This morning Venus was above and to the right of a crescent moon that looked like a C tilted slightly to the left. Here's a photo.

When many of us see this star-and-crescent configuration, we can't help but think of the Moslem world. Because the astronomical image was used on the flag of the Ottoman Empire, it became an unofficial symbol of Islam. Some variation of it appears on a dozen national flags, including those of Tunisia, Turkey, Pakistan and Algeria. When Tunisian Islamist leader Rached Ghannouchi returned to his government-toppling country yesterday after a 20-year exile, he posed at the airport with the star-and-crescent flag.

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The flag of Tunisia is one of many bearing the star and crescent.

But I'll bet that—like most non-astronomers—Ghannouchi doesn't know whether the moon is coming or going. That is, whether it is waxing (getting bigger each night) or waning (getting smaller). A trick for figuring it out comes from Central Park in the Dark,, one of several terrific books by the superb naturalist writer Marie Winn (http://mariewinnnaturenews.blogspot.com/). She recalls her father telling her to focus on whether the moon's curve looks like a C or like the curved side of a D. If it looks like a C (as it does in the star and crescent above), then the moon is getting smaller. If it looks like the curve on a D (as it does in the Dreamworks animation logo of a boy fishing while sitting on the moon), then the moon is getting bigger.

Marie's erudite dad threw in some Latin words to help her remember the C from the D, but I'm really simplifying for the Latin-impaired.

Here's another way to think about it. Start with a totally dark moon. Watching night after night, you will see that light creeps across the moon's face from right to left. The first sliver that appears is the Dreamworks logo—on the right, shaped like the curve on a D, as in Dreamworks, the Steven Spielberg company that always gets bigger, just as the moon is getting bigger when it's shaped like this. When the moon is down to its final, shrinking sliver, it's on the left side and is shaped like a C—hey, moon, C ya! You'll be invisible tomorrow!

For what it's worth, right to left is the same direction a person reads Arabic, the language of Tunisia and many other countries with the star and crescent on their flags.
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The Quiz Answer
(from last post) What do you call those gatherings of animals? A herd of elephants A mob of kangaroos A squabble of seagulls A convocation of eagles A school (or pod) of whales

Today's Puzzler
What is the only fruit with its seeds on the outside? (Answer in the next blog post.)

Dinosaur Joke Contributed by a Naturalist's Notebook Correspondent: Q: Why can't you hear a pterodactyl going to the bathroom? A: Because the P is silent.

Birthdays

James Watt, the famously anti-environmental Secretary of the Interior during the early years of the Reagan administration, turns 73 years old today. Watt, a political appointee with no scientific background, believed that the government shouldn't stop private companies from developing public lands. He set a record for the fewest endangered species protected and summed up his environmental approach thusly: "We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber." Constantly embroiled in controversy (he even tried to ban Independence Day rock concerts on the mall in Washington, D.C., because he felt that groups such as the Beach Boys and the Grass Roots promoted drug use, alcoholism and crime), he became a lobbyist after leaving office and was eventually indicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in an influence-peddling scandal. (He took a plea deal of a fine, five years' probation and public service.) As recently as 1991 he told a cattleman's group in his native Wyoming, "If the troubles from environmentalists cannot be solved in the jury box or at the ballot box, perhaps the cartridge box should be used."

James Watt

Twelve days ago we missed the 275th birthday ofa more accomplished James Watt, the Scottish inventor and engineer for whom the unit of power called the watt is named. This Watt vastly improved the steam engine, turning it into the force that powered the Industrial Revolution. He also came up with the concept of horsepower, which compared the output of a steam engine with the might of draft horses. As you'll recall from a blog post of about 10 days ago, Andre-Marie Ampere, for whom the measure of electrical current called the amp is named, was also born in January, 39 years after Watt. To calculate watts, you multiply amps by volts, which are named after Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, a contemporary of Watt's and Ampere's who invented the first chemical battery.

The earlier James Watt