Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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A.J.S. Rayl gives a status report on reintroducing California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) in the wild. The trick seems to be teaching young birds how to behave like condors, how to give them scavenger mojo.
Scavengers, it turns out, have to be especially resourceful. Unlike a peregrine falcon or an eagle that can snatch prey out of the air or water, a condor has to wait for something to die." It's a knowledge game, an information game for them," says [Mike] Wallace [of the San Diego Zoo]. "It's a case of an ephemeral resource out there, and if they don't find it on a schedule that can keep them alive, then they're not going to make it as a condor." A condor will often have to fight for a carcass. "There may be a cougar or coyote waiting in the brush, and usually there are turkey vultures, eagles or ravens already feeding there, so condors will come in—changing the color of their faces to blood-red and blowing their necks up, and just as they are about to land, they flash their wings showing the white underneath—whoa!" says Mike Clark of the Condor Recovery Team, feigning the shock of another bird. "They get in there by intimidating, power-tripping and bluffing."
posted: 7:05:13 PM |
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I have a new piece of equipment for my walking workouts: a 20 GB iPod. I've got a playlist loaded up with crunchy rock from the 90s (Curve, Garbage), some tracks of what Vince calls "hokey trance music" (I'm fond of Sandra Collins), and some fast Latin pop (Thalía is my guilty secret). I crank it up and I'm off. It's a lot easier to maintain a 39:00 pace for 3 miles with Veruca Salt banging away. I have found that a belt clip is essential to keeping the box steady enough for the disk drive to be happily spinning. I'm importing with Apple Lossless, so I'm trading space for quality, but that means the iPod has to refill its cache about every five minutes. I do keep the iPod at home on weekends, because there are just too many bikes on the trail on Sunday morning. Not all of the cyclists are willing to give a shout as they're passing, so I rely on tire noises to let me know I'm bring overtaken. posted: 6:54:26 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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