...as we head south to the TEDx Dirigo conference at Bates College, where we'll be setting up our interactive, spectrum-linked history-of-the-universe installation and meeting hundreds of creative, innovative idea people. The foundation of TED and TEDx gatherings is the notion of "ideas worth sharing." We're looking forward to that sharing, and to talking with folks who keep moving forward even when, as Edison put it, they discover ways that don't work. Those discoveries are valuable too.
A Harp With No Strings
Harp not on that string, madam, that is past. —William Shakespeare, Richard III
You can harp not on that string at the Glasgow Science Centre, because the harp on display has no strings. It replaces them with thin beams of infrared light. Break a beam and a note plays. It's a bit like the sophisticated alarm systems you see in jewel-heist movies—you know, the ones in which the star has to wriggle and contort his way through a cross-hatch of infrared rays to reach the diamonds. Playing the infrared harp is considerably easier, though it's an odd experience to create music by plucking thin air.
Infrared radiation also can create funky photos. This is a shot of my parents taken at the Glasgow Science Centre with a camera that—like night-vision goggles—can detect infrared waves given off by our bodies. Certain snakes can sense the infrared radiation given off by warm-blooded prey, and use that when hunting. The snakes detect the radiation through holes in their faces called pit organs.
That's my mom, who studied piano at Juilliard, skillfully playing the stringless harp in Glasgow in the video (top). This was the second harp-related moment of our British Isles trip. The first came in London, when we visited the former home of George Frideric Handel, the German-born Baroque composer. (Jimi Hendrix later lived in the adjacent flat.) Handel had a beautiful harpsichord, an instrument that got its name from the way it creates sound: Its strings are plucked, like those of a harp, rather than hammered, like those of a piano. Which raises the question: Shouldn't a piano be called a hammerchord?
An interactive element of the Handel House museum is its wardrobe. My dad and I tested out replicas of the composer’s wig—reminded me of the mad-scientist wigs we have at the Notebook. Pamelia looked quite dashing in Handel’s blue jacket.
But returning home is always enjoyable too. This was the first Maine sunrise we saw, while driving north from Boston.
Back in Maine: A young cormorant at dusk on Saturday on Jordan Pond.
The Notebook hosted a fun birthday party yesterday for 7-year-old Max and 14 of his friends. The dinosaur cake was an especially big hit.
Here’s a peek inside a brown paper bag full of the dinosaurs and dino bones (carefully planted in advance) that young partygoers dug up on the Seal Harbor beach. Is that a cool party activity, or what?
The Mount Desert Island Marathon made its way through Seal Harbor this morning in the cold rain. The runners very much appreciated our yells of encouragement.
One more illusion, from the Glasgow Science Centre:
No, I am not actually standing on the chair. See next photo…
A camera shoots the image from a spot outside the left edge of this picture, with the legs and the chairback lined up to create the illusion. In our photo, Pamelia stood closer to the camera, by the two chair legs, while I stood on the seat in back, making her appear larger.
This explains the science behind it.
O.K., one FINAL last illusion, again from the Glasgow Science Centre. As you might have guessed, I was lying on the floor when this photo was taken.
Our room in a former sea captain’s home offered Pamelia a scenic sill for her art materials.
The Isle of Skye
If you drive on the wrong side of the road until you reach what seems like the wrong West Coast ocean—the Atlantic—you're either dreaming or in Scotland, or maybe both.
Pamelia, my parents and I continued our unique family/Naturalist's Notebook adventure by heading west and north from Edinburgh to the Scottish Highlands and the Isle of Skye. The frequency of rainbows—about one an hour—and the beauty of the scenery suggested that we might in fact be dreaming.
The Isle is rugged, rocky and surprisingly large—about half the size of New York’s Long Island.
It's odd, given the natural beauty of Scotland, to realize how unnatural the landscape is. Until the Romans invaded almost 2,000 years ago, the British Isles were 98% forested. The old line is that a squirrel could go from the south of England to the north of Scotland without touching the ground. By the end of World War I, the forest cover was down to 3%.
When walking through fields and along the coast, we often had company. Thousands of Highlanders were kicked off their land in the 1700s to make room for sheep. Many of them—the Highlanders, not sheep—were forced to immigrate to Canada, especially Nova Scotia, which still has a significant Gaelic-speaking population.
This mountainous section of Skye, known as the Quiraing, is still geologically shifting and has dramatic features called the Needle, the Table and the Prison. It also had 45 mph winds blowing when we wandered around it.
These gray seals were among the wildlife we spotted. We also saw many hooded crows (which are a mixture of gray and black), a couple of gray herons (similar to the blue heron we see in Maine) and several gannets, along with countless gulls.
Lovely grass-rimmed pools like this dotted the edge of the intertidal zone.
Centuries of sheep trails have carved permanent wrinkles into the rounded hills at Fairy Glen.
We walked in the footsteps of giants; Skye was once prime dinosaur territory.
The winds at one spot topped 60 mph and nearly blew my dad over. This sign sums it up nicely.
The only blights on the landscape were recent timber-company clear-cuts such as this. The good news is that Britain is now trying to increase its forest cover by planting more native trees.
Speaks for itself.
The fishing village of Portree, in which we stayed. Sad to say, overfishing has taken its toll in Scotland just as it has in the Northeastern U.S. (and virtually everywhere else in the world’s oceans).
Sunrise in Portree.
On our way back down through the Highlands we stopped at Loch Ness, where my dad says his camera jammed right when he saw Nessie. You music fans may be amused to know that there’s an annual festival near the lake called Rock Ness.
The incredible shrinking Pamelia? No, just an optical illusion created when the two of us stepped into an Ames room in Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura museum. If we could just find enough space to build one of these rooms at The Naturalist’s Notebook, we would.
Illusions from Scotland
Can you find the hidden tiger in this photo? It’s also a visual trick from the Camera Obscura.
What’s the old Kipling line about keeping your head when all those around you are losing theirs? Pamelia seems to be keeping her head even after she’s lost it. Don’t worry; she’s fine.
We're still on the road, heading for the Scottish Highlands. More soon...
The Notre Dame Sparrows
It's no revelation that house sparrows congregate in large numbers outside the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Or that tourists feed them. But watching birds flutter and land on the hand of a wide-eyed child (or grownup) is cool indeed. Here are a few shots from our visit to Notre Dame this week, part of our ongoing road trip:
Lots to catch up on here in the blog as Pamelia and I (now joined by my mom and dad) continue our journey. More will be coming soon!
First stop: Concord, the capital of New Hampshire and, if you’re interested in science, home to both the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium (named for the Concord schoolteacher who died in the Challenger space shuttle explosion) and the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, an air-and-space museum named for McAuliffe and astronaut Alan Shepherd, another New Hampshire native. Pamelia and I were on our way to visit artist, writer and turtle expert David Carroll, who lives north of the city.
A Notebook Road Trip Begins
Pamelia and I are taking several trips over the next few months to visit naturalists, scientists and artists with whom we either already collaborate or would like to work. We left Maine this week for the first of those journeys. Here's a glimpse of the opening days of what will be a three-week trip that will take us to a total of four states as well as England and Scotland (for a family vacation):
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE We arrived in early evening after a beautiful drive south through the slanting fall sunshine. There is something distinctive about autumn light. The Sun is lower in the sky and closer to the Earth than in summer. Perhaps that's why the roadside fields glowed an especially bright yellow-green. Maybe the sunlight was illuminating the grass from behind, like stained glass.
Concord has an old, quaint downtown centered on the State House building. As we walked its streets in search of a dinner spot, we felt as though we'd gone back in time a few decades. There was even a record store still in operation. We had never been to this Concord, as opposed to the Concord in Massachusetts, the one of Lexington-and-Concord fame. I wondered how the two cities got their names. I learned that Concord, N.H., was originally called Rumford until the governor renamed it Concord (as in the word meaning harmony and agreement) to symbolize the end of a nasty boundary dispute between it and a neighboring town. The naming of the other Concord is uncertain, though it too probably arose from some sense of peaceful accord involved in its settling. This much is certain: The Concord grape is so named because it was developed by Ephraim Wales Bull in Concord, Mass.
Pamelia and I ended up venturing into Concord's former police station, which has been converted into a Mexican restaurant. And thus, in our only night in New Hampshire's capital, we ate our fish tacos and skillet enchiladas while sitting in a onetime jail cell.
We were up early the next day for a 7 a.m. appointment at the 1790 home of David Carroll, the renowned naturalist-writer-artist and 2006 recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the so-called genius grant that is bestowed upon a small number of extraordinary Americans each year. Besides being a gifted painter, David is among the world's foremost experts on freshwater turtles, and is a lyrical and observant writer. His wife, Laurette, is a talented painter as well, and the two of them welcomed us for a "quick" visit that lasted five hours.
David’s lifelong observation of turtles and wetland environments has brought him worldwide respect, a John Burroughs medal for distinguished natural-history writing, and a McArthur fellowship. Most important, his efforts have helped us understand and learn how to protect turtles, the amazing creatures whose habitats humans continue to destroy.
I will be writing more about David in the future, because he will be helping us with an installation and we will be featuring some of his work at The Naturalist's Notebook next year. But I'm first going to let David tell you in his own words about himself and his approach to combining art and nature:
David and Laurette took us to their detached studio, where we got to see some of their original work.
"The watercolors and pen and ink drawings I produce to illustrate my published books and other written work are of a more specifically natural-history mode and mood. In most cases they include specific plants or other details and ambient settings that relate directly to the turtles' habitats and thereby their ecology.
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"As I look over the art work I have done for my five books, one of my most personally satisfying realizations is that with but three or four pieces out of the entire collection, all watercolors and drawings represent something I have seen myself over the course of my swampwalking. Some I observed many times over, others only once in over five decades. Occasionally I make very rough field sketches.
Pamelia and David in the studio.
"When I am in the swamps or along streams and rivers my focus is on my searching for turtles and observing and analyzing, their surroundings. I take photos now and then, and more frequently write background descriptions and details in my swamp notebooks, which I later use in my art and writing, ninety per cent or more of which is done during the time of the turtles' hibernating—my 'indoor season.' The weather conditions and at times biting-insect status of the habitats I wander are rarely conducive to prolonged drawing sessions; and my focus is certainly more on the natural landscape through I am ever-so-slowly moving, in seeing and documenting what I come upon. And I am always keenly bent on finding turtles.
We talked with David and Laurette talked about art, ecology, turtles, David’s McArthur fellowship and much more, including the beautiful wild asters growing in their dooryard.
"My art, which I do at my indoor drawing and writing tables, comes from sketchbooks in which I have drawn from natural specimens, from turtles I bring home for a day, plants I collect, a red-winged blackbird unfortunately killed when it flew into a window, and so on; plus photos and the occasional field sketches, and my memory and imagination."
As I say, we'll be getting back to David and Laurette in future blogs, but consider this an introduction if you haven't had a chance to read any of David's books. For now, Pamelia and I must return to the road. We'll tell you in the next post about more adventures that will include dinosaurs, dioramas, dancers and danger (to wildlife)...but I hope no more jail cells.
This is Concord’s McAuliffe-Shepherd Discovery Center.
Here’s the jail cell in which we enjoyed a fine, if confined, dinner in Concord.
Today's Puzzler The statue below of a U.S. president stands in front of the New Hampshire capitol building. Which president is it?
a) Martin Van Buren b) Calvin Coolidge c) Franklin Pierce