Birding Christmas Blog Alert

My favorite blogger who is both artist, writer, and avid gardener (it's a good combination) is also responsible for my interest in birding.

Bufflehead up close: I hardly knew ya

To be fair, part of the blame should also go to the professor at vet school who routinely shepherds a covey of students out to the lake and back to introduce us to the joys of spotting a bufflehead a quarter mile away. I am not sure I could recognize a bufflehead up close, but that characteristic speck of white that is almost as big as the speck of black is unmistakeable!


Anyway, the blogger is doing the twelve days of Christmas with illustration and commentary.

Coot: Not A Moorhen

The link to Day 3 is here: Three Moorhens (at Ursula's blog)

Moorhen: Not A Coot

Hawaiian Moorhen: Yes Endangered

"...Our American form of this species is not endangered, not threatened, and not apparently in decline. There is a Hawaiian subspecies that’s probably in trouble, by virtue of being a native bird in Hawaii..." 


It's as good a crash course as any in Elementary Birding for the North American Continent.

And on that note, if you are a birder, consider participating in the Christmas Bird Count. It is the longest-standing science project for citizen scientists (113 years and counting), and one of the cooler ways to "do science" without being an official scientist. Literally cooler, at this latitude. It helps track bird populations and habitat trends. Bonus point: As a poster-child for citizen science, it has helped persuade academics and researchers--to some degree--that normal people can contribute meaningful information to science, without having a PhD.*

*An actual scientist told me this.

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Testing link to a recording of piano music (Jessica's theme, from the movie The Man From Snowy River).

Studies in digestion

I beautifully procrastinated on my biostats homework yesterday by learning about the Rule of 20. This is the mnemonic for all the many many thingies* to check on patients in critical care. My favorite by far is nutrition, because it is so important and yet easy to overlook. It requires thinking of the digestive tract as a true ecosystem all of its own. Vet school was the first place I had come across this notion, in such a way that it made sense** and it recasts the world when you start thinking of your intestines as something not unlike Pike Place Market. Fewer fish flying through the air, y'know, but otherwise, just like. It's not just the easily angered proletarian masses of bacteria, either. There's the constantly sloughing, constantly regrowing cells that balance the tract and absorb nutrients and respond to the environment. If they don't get fed, they are subject to atrophy, microscopic ennui robbing them of purpose.

So feeding the patients is important and feeding the patients in a normal way, i.e. the food goes into their stomach, then moves on to their intestines in due course. The odd nasogastric tube or surgically placed stomach tube takes nothing away from this process, but parenteral nutrition (enteral being the normal way), in which we inject a nice amino acid slurry through the IV catheter, misses the point of keeping ALL the patient's systems healthy. It is sometimes necessary, but it means that the instant that patient can hold down anything--usually the most pureed chicken-flavored baby food that money can buy--someone gets to start feeding him globs of it on a tongue depressor.

But today is back to biostats. I am indulging in a good breakfast, a la the importance of digestion, inspired by my conversation with myself:
--"I want french toast."
--"We always have french toast."
--"What spices can I use that I haven't put in french toast before?"
--"Um...we've used cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, thyme, basil, pepper, cloves, and rosemary..."
--"Oo, I found rose extract!"
--"..."
--"Surely that would work?"
--"To the internets!"

And I found a lovely rose-cardamom french toast recipe here.




*technical term
**Apparently for things to make sense I need to spend about twenty hours staring through a microscope at intestinal biopsies.

Social Trust, Spaghetti Junctions

Apropos of my class in risk communication, which is starting to wind down, I came across this article ( Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on Atlanta's Metro ) about Atlanta's problem getting their metro system fixed up.

The gist of the story is that everyone in Atlanta knows the city's metro system needs to be updated in a major way, and astoundingly, everyone is willing to pay for it (more or less...about 2/3 said they would put money down). So far so good, right? Even the suburbanites have started asking when they're going to get rail, which goes to show how awful the commute has gotten.

But when the referendum to put $7.2 billion into roads and metro was up for voting this summer, it was turned down.

How?

Because the people of Atlanta, according to the poll described in the AJC story, don't trust their public officials not to screw it up.

The determinants of trust, for corporations and government agencies, are pretty basic.

• 1. Competence, expertise
• Yep, that one's been screwed up by highway construction that didn't finish on time, by decisions to put trains in politically convenient locations, and general inability to fix the existing transport problems.

• 2. Commitment to the public good
• Also damaged, mostly by political scandals and corruption cases

• 3. Concern, care
• Political shenanigans don't help with this one either. Transparency can go a long way here, and probably got damaged during previous roadwork projects where toll roads popped up without warning, that sort of thing.

Atlanta's public officials have apparently managed to strike out on all the major determinants of social trust at the city level, according to the poll. And look, consequences! No money for needed civil engineering!

Hopefully the poll will help them figure out what they have to do to prove they can responsibly handle billions of dollars. It might take a while. Especially with all the traffic.

I like Atlanta, but I have to agree, its transportation system is a mess.