Searches

My entire year has been devoted to searching and finding amazing things in nature and in schools.  But here is a short post about other kinds of searches.

I assume most of you are here because you know me – my family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, etc.  Or perhaps you found one of the hundreds of cards I have been leaving in my wake as I have been touring the country:

I’ve been trying to spread the word that preserving the natural world can go hand-in-hand with a healthy business environment and a strong local economy.

Although most visitors to this blog have met me before, quite a number arrive here through an internet search using a engine like Google or Bing.  How do I know that?  Because WordPress tracks visitors to my site that arrive through search engines, AND it records which searches were used to get here.  A little creepy, no?  But it has been very interesting to look through the search terms that landed visitors to my blog.  Some of them are very predictable, like:

• sleeping spotted owl
  
• authentic and needed innovation
• ediz hook reservation for native birds
• bronx science high school

Others are a little unusual, but I can still understand why someone might do such a search, and how they might end up here:

• sparkle and flicker owl
  
• small sea duck 4 letters
• location of mineral water
• how many owls are there in the us and what states do they live in?
• bird at obtuse angle

And then, there are the howlers and real head scratchers:

• how do you wipe your butt on a cactus
  
• land/geographic characteristics of delaware in the 1600s
• goose rocks me christmas tree made out of lobster traps
• emu sleeping blanket
• diagram of olympic jumping zones
• should a student in australia come up with a formula for magnesium oxide other than mgo?

I promise I did not make these up.  Any fabricated search terms I could come up with could not complete with the genuine article, anyway.  How DO you wipe your butt on a cactus?  I hope to never, ever find out.  I will include more funny search terms in later postings.

Another search I did recently was for a replacement knob cover for my Nikon binoculars (seen here at the end of the red arrow):

It seems I’ve been using my optics so much this year that I’m wearing them out!  The covering for the focus knob (which apparently goes by the official designation of ‘central axis button’) has come loose, making it very difficult to focus my binoculars.  And focusing, as you might have guessed, is an important function in any pair of optics.

I visited two local repair shops in the Seattle area, neither of whom could help me. A call to the Nikon service center was answered by a very polite and helpful-sounding woman, who ordered a free replacement part for me.  The downside: the piece is back-ordered, and won’t ship for at least 6-8 weeks.  Needless to say, this is not an acceptable solution during the spring of a big year.  So I visited my local hardware store and bought some waterproof silicone plumbing tape.  After removing the offending knob cover, I was able to patch together a temporary fix:

Hopefully this will hold until the new part arrives.

Finally, I will leave you with a cool ‘find’ that I wasn’t even searching for.  It’s a new short documentary entitled Gulf Crossing, and you can watch it FREE online.  It talks a great deal about the migration phenomena that I have discussed in recent posts, and features truly tremendous video of some spectacular migrating birds.  You can watch it here: http://gulfcrossingmovie.com/Gulf_Crossing.html

Enjoy!

Night in a Michigan Pine Forest watching Goatsuckers

If you really want to see all of the birds in North America, you have to venture out at night.  While most birds are active during the day and sleep at night, many of the 19 species of owls and 8 species of nighthawks are only active when it’s dark.  I spent my last night in Michigan tracking down and observing Eastern Whip-poor-wills, a member of the nighthawk family (some people call this group of birds nightjars or goatsuckers).

I tried to record some audio that night and embed it in a powerpoint presentation (the basic wordpress blog does not allow direct uploading of audio and video files unless you pay them a lot more $$$), and then added the .ppt file to my blog (click on the link below!).  I’ve never tried this before, so this is a test.  You’ll need to download the file by clicking on the link, and then run the presentation as a slide show.  You’ll probably have to turn up the volume on your computer (the recording is very quiet) to hear the Whip singing.  The photo is the woods where I found them just after sunset.

Whips singing