Annual Family Update

Dear Family and Friends,

We find ourselves in the midst of the holiday madness yet again, unprepared for the seasonal festivities and up to our ears in life. This year has been another one of transition, though we're still in Marathon and we're still juggling employment - that much remains the same. Thankfully our town was spared the wildfires that so much of our region was scorched with, but we're all in this drought together. If you feel the urge, y'all can even hear our local NPR segment on how the drought impacted birds (or our own blog entry about it).

Here's a boquet of Scarlet Musk Flower (Nyctaginia capitata, also called Devil's Boquet!) in the yard:















New in our life this year is a nearly hairless mammal who has brought an immense amount of joy to our lives... Anakin isn't always so sure about her, but he's the Original Puppy and she steals his toys. Nauga (naw-gah) was matched to us via Grand Companions shelter in Fort Davis* - she's half Chinese hairless, half Mexican hairless, and looks entirely Chupacabra (mythological goat-sucker vampire dog-lizard beast thing).

See?



* Quick note about Grand Companions:
They are AMAZING. They don't have
rows of kennels so much as rows of offices
and each office houses a person and some
pups so the critters (and people) are well
socialized, people and house friendly, and
generally quite pleasant to be around!




In honor of Kindli's candid family photos, we bring you a few of the attempts made in the last few weeks to get the pups looking cooperative:















Anakin generally likes the camera, but Nauga's photogenic side is sneaky.



















Also new to this year's update - our porch is now a *real* porch!



















While we're at it, we should mention our fantastic pup-watchers, without whom we'd never have made it down to south Texas for the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival or up to Missouri for Thanksgiving. Dione and Gerald and their flock of 2 kids, 2 cats, 1 dog and 1 turtle are to thank for keeping Anakin well entertained in our absence - he LOVES staying with them! As for Nauga, she gets pampered by our friend Kathy and her daughter (our blacklighting companion!) and their flock of poodle and people and much fun is had by all. Below is Anakin playing with Star, photo by Miracle Tedrick (sorry, no pictures of Nauga's escapades!)
















Finally, as this year winds down, there's a bit of schooling to report: 32 hours at Sul Ross Sate University means that in 12 more hours there will be a BA of "General Studies" on the wall. (Three schools and 170 hours later...) Highlights thus far have been two summer sessions at slight overload - Entomology being the Most Amazing Experience Ever, in spite of a drought year, and a fall schedule that included tutoring English, reading and writing. Work gems included a 7 hr shift in which over 30 papers were edited. Students still don't understand deadlines!

The Sul Ross longhorn, all dressed up for homecoming:















Also included in 2011 adventures: learning to crochet, turning t-shirts into dresses, trying our hand at raising Hubbard's Small Silkmoth caterpillars (conclusion: don't) and a lot of really, really good local birding. For that, we've been maintaining a second blog: Big Bend Birds & Nature.

Orange Palps of Doom

Because Coleoptera need blog time, too...
2 Dec, 2011 - 10 miles north of Hwy 385/Hwy 90 junction. ID pending.

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.