That Eagle Optics shirt?

The previous post showed a mere outline of the awesome-yet-to-come:

The actual screening on the shirt, of course, is by Louise Zemaitis - now autographed, initialed and accompanied by fangirl antics. Who knew birders had such rabid fans? Oh, wait.

Sleeve art by Michael O'Brien... how awesome is that? Clearly another perched Black-and-white Warbler would have been too boring, but way to one-up the original art!

RGV Birding Festival

We may or may not have seriously nerded it up over the weekend:
Louise Zemaitis autographed her Black-and-white Warbler shirt
Michael O'Brien drew another Black-and-white Warbler on the sleeve of the shirt
Jon Dunn autographed the newest Nat. Geo. on our honeymoon spindalis page
...and we wrangled a booth all weekend, too!

The "why" of window monitoring

Birds hit windows. It's pretty much impossible to overstate the  extent of the issue. Pretty much everyone knows that it happens but very few people look beyond face value of the smudge on glass.

This is more eloquent than anything I've seen yet, so please take a look at
Tim O'Connell's piece: A window into the perils of migration. He beautifully outlines the "how" and "why" of dead birds as educational tools, as well as one example of the mind boggling architecture that causes such high mortality rates. Flat-sided buildings are bad enough, but a horseshoe with a 'corridor effect' cluster at one end? Yikes!

On a coincidental note, I'm about half way into a paper on the complexities of North American window collisions - they've been my constant companion since 2003 and I need to get my thoughts out of my head and into writing. Unfortunately it's a rather dry, sciency sort of writing, but I think the discussion will be helpful. It's just terribly difficult to keep citations sorted out since there are about 20 papers that cite each other ad infinitum and the resulting citation loop is frustrating. One paper that I criticize lists my paper in its citations, too, for that matter!

Anyway, here are some lovelies - Tennessee Warblers - from Principia, circa 2004-2005 (a tiny fraction of the actual species diversity and even fewer of the overall body count.)



External link: dead bird album


This is also cross-posted over at Big Bend Birds & Nature.

Eyes

The eyes have it.

More of this lovely caterpillar over at Big Bend Birds & Nature!

Happy Halloween!

From our pack to yours...




























The onesie was too big to fit Anakin, so hopefully these uh, lovely, pictures of Nauga will suffice!

general update

Matt has been wrangled into a super-awesome opportunity to represent the Gage Hotel/Gage Gardens at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival! We'll both be attending and are very much looking forward to being back in the RGV - plenty of friends we've not seen in years, plenty of birders who haven't been to the Big Bend region and definitely a good opportunity to get caught up on all of the above. Long time, no travel! And this will be right before Thanksgiving, which is always in Missouri.

Other than surviving midterms, there's not too much to report on the academic front; GPA is better than anticipated and classes for the winter mini-mester have been determined. Spring might actually be less hectic (hah!)

And in other news: Nauga is a happy puppy.

Houston, we have a Pupa!

Edit: this has now been blogged (with more pics!) at Big Bend Birds & Nature - when inch worms grow up.

I should be blogging this over at the other blog, but I managed to forget to take a picture of an inch-worm that adopted us. I harvested some mesquite nibbles for the hubbardi bunch and the little critter caught a ride and found itself in with a bunch of non-geometers. So while I forgot to take its picture, it thrived. Then it started to look pretty bad and I felt terrible and was certain that, along with ~40 other caterpillars this season, it had died. It turned this bizarre shade of teal blue on one end and darkened and instead of being a long, juicy inch-and-a-smidge long... it was barely half an inch long.

But then it turned into a pupa. How ridiculously awesome!

t-shirt dress 2

This shirt/dress/thing was a fun challenge: I wanted to loosen the neck and lengthen a shirt that already fit (size small, but a shirt from the 80s, so a bit longer and narrower than a 'modern' size small). This should really only be done with shirts that already fit or are too large... anything too small could get really awkward.

Unlike the last dress, there were no scraps left over - 100% of the shirt was used and very little fitting was required. Practical! Basically it's the same cutting as was done on the first t-shirt dress; cut sleeves off, once they're off, cut the under-arm seam of the sleeve. Cut the shoulder seams. Attach sleeves to the shoulder seams! This lowers the front neckline considerably (and turns into the back of the final product unless you're layering!) and lowers the back neckline to a reasonable level for front or back. Stitch up the former sleeve holes to fit; the top of the old shoulder should be about at arm pit level.

The resulting long tunic type thing was definitely not something I'd wear without jeans, but it's not scandalous enough that it'd be inappropriate in public for some people* (depends on your taste!)














Apologies for the blurry comp photos; it has since been gifted to a friend who enjoys the color black, layering clothes, and happens to also be a similar size.