From GrrlScientist:
What better way is there to celebrate the Nobel Prizes by helping kids in impoverished classrooms throughout the nation begin their own pursuit of their dreams? By helping kids improve their science education, you will be helping them focus on the positive aspects of their lives and give them an outlet for their energy so they realize that they do have a future!
So, why am I posting about it here? Because if you click over to GrrlScientist, you may have a chance to win a PUP book:
In recognition of your kind gift to help others, Princeton University Press is offering 2 books with a value of up to $30.00 each as prizes to two of my DonorsChoose Challenge donors: one book will be awarded to the donor who gives the largest gift, and the other book will be given to a donor who will be randomly chosen by my parrots using a method that I have yet to develop (suggestions welcomed). This kind offer covers most of Princeton University Press’s trade science titles and guide books (view their catalogue PDFs here) and they also pay postage, so this costs you NOTHING! All that you have to do is send me your mailing address after making your donation and you will be automatically entered into this competition.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 12:31pm EST
We were following our excellent birding guide, Dennis Yong, through the leech-infested montane rain forest near Berestagi, Sumatra. We were searching for one of the rarest and most beautiful birds of the world, the Sumatran Trogon.  We’d been hiking for miles, and the leeches were ferocious. I pulled off about 45 of them in 45 minutes of hiking, and then stopped counting. My companion, Rae Anderson, a submarine officer in WWII and Korea, was splattered in blood nearly head to foot and joked that he never looked so bad during the war. His grandson Christopher Anderson, an expert herpetologist, who was then a high school senior, took everything in stride, keeping a keen-eyed vigil for birds with his snake-stick in hand. Nonchalantly, Dennis claimed that wearing sandals allowed him to feel the leeches and remove them at once before they could bite – and his strategy worked !
Despite this irritation, we were in an enchanted forest – a botanical wonderland full of orchids and epiphytes featuring large bird’s nest ferns in nearly every tree. However, we had to walk about five miles through heavily logged forest to get to this area of undisturbed habitat.
Dennis Yong is famed for his ability to mimic bird songs. Usually when he called a bird, we could not tell the difference between his vocalization or the bird’s – and apparently neither could the birds. Because of the repetitious call of the Sumatran Trogon, Dennis saved his vocal chords and used a tape to play its distinctive song – a high-pitched whistling “wiwi…wheeer–lu” repeated every few seconds. We proceeded quite a while without a response. Then we finally heard a Trogon in the distance. The most heart-breaking moment of our expedition occurred when the Trogon’s song was drowned out by the sound of chain saws, operated by local timber cutters. This jarring jolt of reality seemed to crystallize the plight of Trogons in tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia. Dennis felt that this area of forest would be gone in about ten years.
 I was eventually able to sketch several Sumatran Trogons at close range in a nearby location. Dennis called them up and Chris immediately spotted them, enabling me to be, most likely, the first artist to correctly paint their true colors which rapidly fade in captive birds. The Sumatran Trogon is restricted to a narrow altitudinal range in montane forest on that island and nowhere else in the world. If recent observations in other parts of its range match my own observations, this Trogon may now have reached threatened status due to the accelerating rate of timber cutting which is descimating its habitat.
The Trogon family including the Quetzals has a distribution that roughly coincides with the world’s rainforests. I made several expeditions to tropical America, Africa and Southeast Asia to draw Trogons from life to illustrate the newly published, limited edition book, Trogons, a Natural History of the Trogonidae by Joseph M. Forshaw. My color plates depict each species in its natural habitat, and Forshaw’s comprehensive text highlights the need to protect these birds by safeguarding the tropical forests so critical to their survival. |
“I was able to sketch several wild birds in the area, and carefully noted that all had bright yellow flanks without traces of orange. This painting, perhaps the first drawn from life, also shows the diagnostic maroon-chestnut lower back of the male. The upper tail can appear iridescent blue or green, depending on the angle of light.”
Harpactus mackloti AMNH 633878 adult male
|
Here is a slide show of photographs from Al Gilbert’s experience in the Sumatran rain forest
Gilbert with Sumatran Rhino sculpture
Rae Anderson in Sumatran jungle
Chris Anderson with avian friends (NOTE: Chris was on the Sumatra trip, but this photo may be from a different expedition)
Al Gilbert with Dennis Yong, birding guide extraordinaire
Al Gilbert at Taman Negara, Malaysia
Al Gilbert on canopy rope bridge
Hotel Sibayak, Berestagi, Sumatra, showing nearby Sibayak volcano
Rae Anderson on canopy rope bridge
Al Gilbert searching for Sumatran Trogons
Joe Forshaw with avian friends (NOTE: Joe was not on the Sumatra trip. This is simply a good photo of the book's author)
by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 9:44am EST
Spurred by the annual Jamaica Bay Shorebird Festiva, Wayne Mones at Audubon compiles a list of three must-have shorebird guides and surprise surprise, two of them are PUP books. So, why shorebirds? According to Wayne:
I got hooked on shorebirds in the early 1980s when you could still see 50,000 Red knots gorging on horseshoe crab eggs on the Delaware Bay. I love them because of their mystique as super-long-distance fliers. Because their lives depend on the right timing of migration, mating, fledging, and return migration. And because they are so damned hard to identify — even after all these years. Peeps are hard to sort out even in breeding plumage. On the return trip you have to work through worn plumage, transitional plumages, and fresh juveniles.
These are the books featured in the article:
Shorebirds of North America, Europe, and Asia: A Photographic Guide by Richard Chandler
Shorebirds of North America: The Photographic Guide by Dennis Paulson
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by Sarah Caldwell | Filed in: Birds and Natural History - In the News - Uncategorized | 2:50pm EST
Because it’s almost Friday…
Because PUP is up on science news…
Because we KNOW you’re frantically googling “Swine Flu” - excuse me - the “H1N1 Virus”…
I present NPR’s latest blog post: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/index.html?ps=ib
I hope you will enjoy not only the dancing bird, but the spotlight hogging hippopotamus. (At the very least, least it’s a nice distraction from mass panic. Props to NPR Science Desk-ers for levity.)
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:41pm EST
Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:
What is the collective term for ravens
An unkindness.
As Mynott notes in Birdscapes, “There is one final set of names, which is a sort of subclass of the vernacular British and American species names, and this is the category of Collectives. These too can affect the way we think about the creatures so assembled, and the words themselves—often archaic and much beloved in quizzes and word games—are an odd mixture of the vernacular and the technical, the apt and the artificial. Many of them are everyday words we use unthinkingly, of course—a herd of cows, a flock of pigeons or sheep, a pack of hounds, a brood of chickens, a swarm of flies, and so on; but there are many others less familiar and some quite bizarre ones. I include a few other creatures as well as birds to give a fuller flavour:
Badgers, a cete
Bears, a sloth
Bittern, a siege
Boars, a sounder
Choughs, a chattering
Coot, a covert or raft
Crows, a murder
Dotterel, a trip
Dunlin, a fling
Geese (in the air), a skein
Geese (on the ground), a gaggle
Goldfinches, a charm
Hares, a down, mute, or husk
Hawks, a cast |
Herons, a siege
Kangaroos, a mob or troop
Larks, an exaltation
Lions, a pride
Magpies, a tiding
Mallard, a sord or suit
Monkeys, a troop
Nightingales, a watch
Owls, a parliament or stare
Parrots, a pandemonium
Partridges, a covey
Peacocks, a muster
Pheasants, a nid or nide
Porpoises, a school
Quail, a bevy or covey |
Ravens, an unkindness
Rooks, a parliament or clamour
Ruffs, a hill
Shelduck, a dopping
Snipe, a wisp
Starlings, a murmuration
Swans, a herd
Teal, a spring
Toads, a knot
Whales, a pod
Woodcock, a fall
Wrens, a herd |
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:18pm EST
Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!
Birdscapes Trivia, Question #10 -
What is the collective term for ravens?
Answer will be posted tomorrow.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 11:22am EST
Listen in to this wonderful interview with Jeremy Mynott from podularity.com then head over to the New Yorker to read their briefly noted column on his new book Birdscapes.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:30pm EST
Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:
What did Leonardo call his flying machine?
Ornithopter.
From Birdscapes:
The word “aviation” itself means “flying like birds,” and Leonardo da Vinci based his pioneering designs for flying machines on an intensive study of the mechanics of bird flight, naming his flying ship the “ornithopter.” More generally, it was on birds, and in particular on birds in flight, that the art of augury relied for special insight, and we still find our own kinds of significance in them. We may wonder, as I did at the start of this book, at the artistry of swallows in the air, or the aerial mastery of the red kite and the eagle; we thrill to the spectacular stoop of the peregrine and the dive of the gannet; and we are stirred in some deeply evocative way by the wafting flight of the barn owl. Sometimes it is the combination of sight and sound that moves us: the measured beat of a line of wild swans, the war whoop of a plunging lapwing, the clamour of a thousand geese rising as a flock, or the screams of swifts hurtling round houses. All these are powerful attractants, and perhaps contribute to charisma.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:17pm EST
Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!
Birdscapes Trivia, Question #9 -
What did Leonardo call his flying machine?
Answer will be posted tomorrow.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:29pm EST
Yesterday, we posted a trivia question:
Who gave the demoiselle crane its name?
Dawn Simon is absolutely correct — the answer is Marie Antoinette.
“The story is that Marie Antoinette gave her pet crane the name “Demoiselle,” in admiration of its demure elegance, and the unusual scientific name Anthropoides virgo (“of human form, like a young girl”) has the same connotations,” writes Mynott.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History | 1:17pm EST
Just to recap, we are posting trivia questions drawn from the book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience by veteran birder and former chief executive of Cambridge University Press Jeremy Mynott. We hope you will post your guesses and explanations below in the comments section. The official answer will follow by a day, so check back again soon!
Birdscapes Trivia, Question #8 -
Who gave the demoiselle crane its name?
Answer will be posted tomorrow.
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by Jessica Pellien | Filed in: Birds and Natural History - Pod/Vodcast | 10:18am EST
Jeremy Mynott, former Chief Executive of Cambridge University Press, sat down with Australian Broadcast’s Saturday Extra over the weekend to discuss Birdscapes and the myriad ways humans imagine and interact with birds. Listen in here.
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