Monkeyman

Last of the Hollywood Swingers - a short story.

Bobby's Cliff Notes - "Why Darwin Matters"

Here are some of things I gleaned from Michael Shermer's book Why Darwin Matters. Be advised that the book is now six years old and some of the material and studies are probably slightly out of date. Nevertheless I think that we can assume that most of the data and suppositions are still valid.

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According to a 2005 poll by the Pew Research Group, 42% of Americans hold strict creationist views, holding that man has been in his current form since the "beginning of time." 48% believe that man evolved over time into his or her present form. 64% or respondents were open to the teaching of creationism along side of evolution in the public schools. 60% of Republicans were creationists and only 11% accepted evolution compared to Democrats at 29% and 44% respectively.

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Populations tend to increase indefinitely in a geometric ratio, 2. 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 1024...

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In natural selection, there must be a struggle for existence. Not all of the organisms produced can survive. Organisms that are better adapted leave behind more offspring than those that are not. This is called differential reproductive success.

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The fossil record records mostly the equilibrium or static period. Species change happens rapidly and there are less transitional organisms extant to create fossils. This theory is called punctuated equilibrium. 

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Vestigial structures stand as evidence of evolutionary history. This is why men have nipples. Because females need them and it is more efficient to build the human architecture in the uterus from a single structure. Men have an evolutionary remnant of the uterus on their prostate.

Eight percent of humans have a 13th rib like our hominid cousins, the gorillas and chimps.

The human coccyx is a tailbone left over from our common ancestor's tails.

Goosebumps are a vestige from an evolutionary time when our forebears puffed up their fur for warmth. He goes into the utility of similar spare parts like appendix's, third eye lids, hair and extrinsic ear muscles (which allowed the relatives to discriminate precise sound.

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The earth is approximately 4.6 million years old.

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The seven strongest predictors of religious beliefs are 1. Being raised in a religious manner. 2. Your parents religiosity. 3. Low levels of education 4. Being female. 5. a large family 6. lack of conflict with parents. 7. being younger.

[Note: I find this survey very poorly written and near incomprehensible. Such as #5. Is that being in a large family or having come from one?]

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Ain Soph © Rick Griffin Estate

The six cosmic numbers of Sir Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal:

The first number, Ω (omega), 1, is the amount of matter in the universe. If this number had been one unit higher, the universe would have collapsed upon itself long ago.

 ε (epsilon), defines how strongly atomic nuclei bind together.

D = 3 - the number of dimensions in which we live.

N is the ratio of the strength of the electrical force to the gravitational force.

Q =1/100/000th, the fabric of the universe, if it was smaller the universe would be featureless, larger, it would be dominated by black holes.

λ (lambda) = 0.7, the cosmological constant or antigravity force.

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String theory allows for 10 to the 500th power of possible alternate worlds, all with different laws and constants. For your information, merely twelve zeros are a trillion.

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Exaptation is when a structure evolved for one purpose is co opted by the organism for a different purpose.

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Our genomes include a bunch of junk dna, orphan genes, fragments, tandem repeats, pseudogenes and a lot of other useless trash.

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Entropically, systems change from hot to cold, ordered to disordered and from complex to simple.

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Symbiogensis is a theory proposed by Lynn Margulis in 1970 that argues that species evolve, at least microbially, through an exchange of genes.

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Over 300 species engage in same sex sexual activity.

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Most plants and a quarter of all animal species have individuals that can not be classified as either male or female.

Goodbye Pork Pie Hat

Ray Manzarek

Rock me on the water

Eva Cassidy

Mr. Sandman

I am having a very interesting show up here in Santa Barbara. It was a miserable affair for the first day, then the second day of setup. I did a grand total of seventy five bucks, not a very good sign when you figure that show expenses will tally out around fifteen hundred for this shebang. Just more of the same. People around me seemed to be selling fine. I am on a bad streak and am having serious doubts about my material, my business model, the shifting tides. I am feeling like roadkill, the tibetans are ready to drag me up the mountain and cut me into little pieces for the vultures.

It is a bad time for the negativity and introspection and a bad time to be broke. Significant bills to pay or the whole damn house of cards comes down. Ill mother that I must see on the other side of the country immediately, tax payment due. Having lit the money incense, stuck the tangerine on the case (an antique dealer superstition once championed by Napa wine antique dealer Jim many years ago) prayed to all the suitable deities, I could do nothing but try to put on a happy face and trudge on.

Lo and behold, the wind shifted around noon yesterday. A past client bought a painting, somebody else bought another, then a major dealer bought a few significant works. It was a phenomenal reversal. Things that I thought I might die with and that would have been thrown into my sarcophagus with me in pharaonic times magically dissappeared. One of the greatest runs I can ever remember having. My peers congratulated me on the remarkable streak. I am close to getting religion. Tragedy narrowly averted, Robert still lives! Thank you clients and universe. I am grateful. Thank you Leslie. Thank you friends and loved ones. The bills get paid this month. Happy to be on the other side, despair is so unbecoming.

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Celebrated with the largest bone in ribeye I have ever tackled at the Tee Off. A piece of cow that would tip over Fred Flintstone's wagon. The dark saloon was very crowded and so I sat at the bar. Ordered a greyhound but it was so stiff I mostly left it on the counter. Good meal, I dig the funky place. Bartender had been there 14 years and was still the new guy. Another nice meal at the tee off, just enough light at the bar to read the independent and I got to watch the Pacers polish off the poor Knicks.

For such a big shot town, Santa Barbara has some pretty crummy restaurants. After Superica there is not so much to talk about. I went back to Presto Pasta the first night, a client's joint and had chicken parmigiana. Good but not the Four Seasons. Went to Harry's the next night, hadn't been there in over thirty years and it was pretty disappointing. The famous salsa was good but my corn beef dip was fatty and funky and honestly made me a little ill. Ted and I went to Saigon the third night for thai/vietnamese and it was decent. Spring rolls, duck curry and a mixed vermicelli. Had to beg for proper utensils but I would go back.

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I have a sister named Barbara. I seem to recall my mother, who knew a lot of obscure stuff, tell us that Saint Barbara, who I assume this town was named after, was the patron saint of toilets. I checked Wikipedia this morning and found no such reference. She was apparently the patron saint of artillerymen, military engineers, miners and others who work with explosives because of her old legend's association with lightning, and also of mathematicians. There is a reference to a bath house in the entry so it may require further digging.

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I booked my hotel on Expedia and selected one I had stayed at before, the Sandman, conveniently located close to the show and frankly the only room in town this side of Motel 6 under a c note. I paid 90. Still your basic shithole.

This is a picture of the bathtub in room 151. I can deal with a little chipped paint and a bathtub that leaks onto the floor. Hot water that took approximately four minutes to arrive.

What is more disturbing is the brackish brown water that comes out of the pipe, water that makes you feel like you are soaking in one of the less hygienic sections of the Tigris or Euphrates. Really disgusting.

The free breakfast ain't so bad, started off my day all week with honey nut cheerios and a hard boiled egg. Yesterday I mixed in a cinnamon donut. Sinful but quite good.

Will stay in touch.

Sorrow - McCoys

Powerballin'

I was a bit astounded to hear that out of the millions of tickets sold for the current $600,000,000.00 Powerball jackpot, only 80% of the possible number combinations have been selected. I decided to look into the statistics a bit. Here is a link to  a page illustrating the frequency that balls are selected, both as white balls and power ball.

56, 26 and 23 are the numbers with the historically highest chance of being picked as a white ball, with the corresponding frequency of 18, 17 and 19. 29 is by far the winning number as a powerball selection.

Your odds of winning the Powerball this week, about 1 in 175.2 million. But you have to buy a ticket.

I read a book once on the science of picking lottery numbers and the author stated that your best chances are picking the upper strata of numbers and mixing in some numbers that are close to each other sequentially. It only stands to reason that you want to pick the numbers that most people don't pick.

Here are a couple links to sites regarding power ball numerical statistics. Business Insider and Daily Herald. And a good wikipedia article on lottery mathematics.

In a typical 6/49 game, six numbers are drawn from a range of 49 and if the six numbers on a ticket match the numbers drawn, the ticket holder is a jackpot winner—this is true no matter in which order the numbers appear. The probability of this happening is 1 in 13,983,816.
This small chance of winning can be demonstrated as follows:
Starting with a bag of 49 differently-numbered lottery balls, there are 49 different but equally likely ways of choosing the number of the first ball selected from the bag, and so there is a 1 in 49 chance of predicting the number correctly. When the draw comes to the second number, there are now only 48 balls left in the bag (because the balls already drawn are not returned to the bag) so there is now a 1 in 48 chance of predicting this number.
Thus for each of the 49 ways of choosing the first number there are 48 different ways of choosing the second. This means that the probability of correctly predicting 2 numbers drawn from 49 in the correct order is calculated as 1 in 49 × 48. On drawing the third number there are only 47 ways of choosing the number; but of course we could have gotten to this point in any of 49 × 48 ways, so the chances of correctly predicting 3 numbers drawn from 49, again in the correct order, is 1 in 49 × 48 × 47. This continues until the sixth number has been drawn, giving the final calculation, 49 × 48 × 47 × 46 × 45 × 44, which can also be written as . This works out to a very large number, 10,068,347,520, which is much bigger than the 14 million stated above.
The last step is to understand that the order of the 6 numbers is not significant. That is, if a ticket has the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, it wins as long as all the numbers 1 through 6 are drawn, no matter what order they come out in. Accordingly, given any set of 6 numbers, there are 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 6! or 720 orders in which they could be drawn. Dividing 10,068,347,520 by 720 gives 13,983,816...

andmoreagain

Mom talk

My mother is dying. She is in an intensive care unit in Maryland, hooked up to a dialysis machine, with no independent kidney function. She has been in and out of the hospital all year with a serious infection but it appears that we have finally reached the tipping point. We don't know if it is a matter of hours, days or even weeks but the doctor told my sister that next week might be too late. Barbara flies up from Florida monday and will suss everything out.

I talked to my mom last night, she asked me if I wanted the painting in her bathroom. I have no idea what she is talking about but a painting is honestly the last thing on my mind. I would like to go see her and say goodbye, can't afford to at the moment but can't afford not to either and might have to borrow some money to pull it off.

You get issued one mother and father in this life, for better or for worse and I am happy that we are at least speaking again here at the end. My mother is brilliant and eccentric. While much of my childhood I felt like collateral damage in her enormous wake, she always fed and clothed us and I never doubted her love for a second. What else can you ask for? She taught me a lot of valuable life lessons, the principle one being that people matter more than things. She never met a stranger in her life. Going into a restaurant with her could be a very embarrassing proposition.

Last night I had a dream that I was marching down the street at her memorial, in front of Swamis in Encinitas, only I was holding a huge and heavy iron gate. Somebody, I forget who, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You know, you can put that down now." Not sure what it means. Will keep you posted.

Sleepy John Estes

The red queen and the court jester

I finished a really interesting book last week, Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters. Written in 2007, the book clinically and dispassionately takes the precepts of creationism and intelligent design and pretty much lays them to waste.

I first got acquainted with Shermer when I was judging the Fallbrook Film Festival and previewed Stephen Auerbach's movie Bicycle Dreams. At that time he was a long distance bicycle racer racing across the United States in the R.A.M..

Shermer was raised a devout evangelical christian and creationist. At some point he had an intellectual epiphany and changed his worldview. Now the editor and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, he took a trip to the Galapagos in 2004 with a cohort to retrace Darwin's steps. The book recounts some of the things he learns about evolution and natural selection on this trip.

I don't have the book in front of me at the moment and would like to revisit it for a future post but it is full of good scientific information that I will share at some point soon. He gives an insider's look at the intelligent design movement and explores and explains Darwinism, neo Darwinism, symbiogenesis and other similar evolutionary hypothesis in layman's terms.

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I was reading something about evolution yesterday and heard about the conflict of the Red Queen and the Court Jester for the first time. What are you talking about, you may ask? My kind of metaphor.

The Red Queen is a concept developed in 1973 by Leigh Van Valen that maintains that evolutionary developments and counter-developments cause co-evolving species to mutually adapt. This is referred to as biotic adaptation.

The Court Jester hypothesis, championed by Berkeley Professor Anthony Barnosky in 1999, maintains that such changes in evolutionary speciation are better explained by abiotic forces, like climate or meteor strikes, some kind of outside of the box, wild card event.

"[W]hether this march of morphology and species compositions through time, so well documented not only for mammals but throughout the fossil record, is more strongly influenced by interactions among species (Red Queen hypotheses), or by random perturbations to the physical environment such as climate change, tectonic events, or even bolide impacts that change the ground rules for the biota (Court Jester hypotheses). . . . A class of alternative ideas, here termed Court Jester hypotheses, share the basic tenet that changes in the physical environment rather than biotic interactions themselves are the initiators of major changes in organisms and ecosystems. . . . Court Jester hypotheses imply that events random in respect to the biota occasionally change the rules on the biotic playing field. Accelerated biotic response (relative to background rates) is the result." Anthony Barnosky - 2001

I look forward to having Shermer's book in hand and sharing it with you.

Stay Calm

If you are in the Santa Barbara area the next three days, friday through sunday, the Blue Heron Gallery will be exhibiting at the CALM Antique Show. The event is held at the Earl Warren Fairgrounds. Drop by and say hello! Some really great decorative dealers at this show, looks really good.

Bitch, moan and dish

It is pitiful when a grown man with a megaphone engages in a repeated public renting of garments and plaintiff blubbering about his sorry lot. Especially when his misery is largely self imposed. (see bad buy-ed.)

Notwithstanding this fact, it has been a wretched week, in a wretched month and I honestly find little to commend this whole 2013th year of ours. Of course I take solace in the fact that it can always get worse.

It got so bad today I decided to consult the old Chinese oracle. Retreat, first and fifth line changing. Sommers, you are treading on dangerous ground. The worst place to be in a retreat, right on the front lines. Not good to lounge around in the snapping jaws of the lion's mouth while plotting your next move. Of course unfortunately, that is where my clan feels most comfortable. Does wonders for your adrenaline. How did the old song go, never did nothing that my spirit couldn't kill.

I get the third leg of the show trifecta tomorrow, my Belmont Stakes up north. Getting a little barn sour after the bad works and failure to hit the old pay window. So shoot me already.

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Dropped my phone and busted it in O.B. the other day while waiting for Les to arrive from Dallas. She was driving back there with her brother when some girl broadsided them and now her neck is sore and her headaches are worse. Really sucks.

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If Verizon doesn't screw up the new HTC-One too badly I am seriously thinking of getting it. Sexy phone. Reports are that they want to rename it the butterfly and I am afraid that would be a deal killer.

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Had a high pressure main line break and the four hour fix didn't work. I woke up this morning to the bucolic sound of water bubbling out of the ground like a desert spring. I have been fixing irrigation for about 40 years but learned a new trick from the neighbor.

Being at the bottom of a mountain, the water coming down from on high, we get enormous pressure. It takes hours sometimes to clear the water out of the lines to make a proper fix. You can't use red hot pvc glue on high pressure mains because it won't hold. Ditto the blue, the grey is best.

So he let me in on an old plumbers secret. You stuff the pipe with bread and it absorbs the excess water and doesn't kill your pvc joint, which needs to be dry. Eventually it blows out the pies. In a remarkable show of kismet and the good lord's divine plan, a greek friend gave me half a loaf of bread yesterday (we had none in the house) and I was able to try the cure. So far the pipe is holding.

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I caught a painting in the act of sliding over and taking out a $4500 zuni olla today so maybe, just maybe my luck is turning.

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They sealed the genetics thread that I had done my rabble rousing on. Funny thing, you rarely if ever meet a racist who is willing to admit he's a racist. Even that guy over at the Heritage Foundation who thinks Mexicans are stupid.

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News today that the United States State Department is now carrying water for Monsanto. Now they effectively own all three branches of government. Soon we will work them into the Pledge of Allegiance.

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The worst story of the week is the one Wasem sent me about the Bakersfield cops beating the poor "possibly drunk" man to death and confiscating all the passersby's cellphones that had recorded the incident. You know they will walk. It's a good old boy town. I watched one of the videos and it was truly sickening. Don't be hispanic in Bakersfield. It could get you killed. Sheriff might have a shot in Obama's Justice Department.

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I actually talked to my mother on Mother's day. I thought that I was home free when I got the answering machine but she called me back and I didn't recognize the number. I got a half hour dissertation on her fatalities so she must be doing all right. We had a little kerfuffle last fall and a long period of silence but I did my duty and all is now peachy.

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I loved this story, Joe Biden endorsing bullets made of chocolate.

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I was listening to a Grateful Dead show on Sirius today and thinking damn, it has been such a long time. Over forty years ago I listened to the infamous Wall of Sound at the Cow Palace in Daly City. I had seen the Dead many times back east but this was my first West Coast Dead concert. Where the hell did the time go and why didn't they warn us that we would never be able to have that kind of fun again?

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New study out that weed helps bladder cancer. Didn't help mine, I had about six surgeries for it, but it certainly helped with the long term recovery... My recurring kidney, bladder and ureter cancer was probably caused by some of the lethal solvents that I was breathing in my sign shop.

It is a terrible catch 22, still classified as a worthless, dangerous substance, scientists aren't even allowed to study it properly. Raise your hands if you thought that things would be different with this president. Bastards.

A Merman I Should Turn to Be

President flashback

While initially it looked like President Obama was trying to be a transformative president on the model of a JFK, recent events lead me to believe that he is actually more a student of Richard Milhouse Nixon.

On the heels of reports that his IRS targeted conservative groups comes the news today that they tapped all the communications from A.P.. Not individual reporters, the whole freaking Associated Press. Including their home telephones. An unprecedented dragnet and data sweep. Tricky Dick, meet Tricky Barack. So much for that quaint little notion of a free press.

I still think that given the choice and the competition, even in hindsight I would hold my nose and pull the lever for this man again but have lost my faith in him near completely. And I think that there will be fewer and fewer true believers that he will be able to rely on for support for the remainder of his term. Why should anybody go to bat for this president?

His U.S. Attorneys are still shutting down medical marijuana dispensaries and putting weed patients in jail at a record rate. He has turned his back on civil liberty, in this country and abroad. When we look back and ask ourselves at one point we surrendered our liberty to Big Brother in this country, he will surely be a prime candidate for review. He has a sorry ass record regarding whistleblowers in his administration.

He thinks that he has the right to target american citizens with drones, even on their home soil, not to mention his eradicating questionable targets abroad in sovereign foreign nations. Talked a good game about getting us out of Afghanistan. He has been so willing to accommodate the opposition that his favorite move is the unprovoked surrender, he really ends up standing for next to nothing most of the time. Keystone XL will be the final nail in the coffin.

It is really too bad, things were so promising. We have wasted a great opportunity in this country. Don't ask progressives for support, Barack. When did you ever support us?

Sandy mollusk

Pearl Chinese Cuisine
11666 Avena Place
Rancho Bernardo, CA 92128

www.pearlchinesecuisine.com


My wife Leslie and I are celebrating our nineteenth wedding anniversary one day this week. Unfortunately my job is calling me out of town and we will not get a chance to be together that evening.

She has been in Texas visiting her brother and I picked her up at the airport last night. She didn't have the greatest flight, sandwiched in a middle seat both ways, but did enjoy her time with her brother very much. I was starving when I picked her up, thinking Chinese but she still wasn't hungry as I slowly drove up Convoy looking for something that looked good and I forlornly passed Jasmine and headed back on the freeway.

When we got to Rancho Bernardo I made my move. We had heard about Pearl Chinese Cuisine for several years but had never dined there. Located at the location of the old Anthony's, the parking lot was packed as we approached. This would be a substitute for our anniversary dinner.

We were greeted by a tall and beautiful hostess and quickly seated at a table covered with white linen. The seats were also white and quite comfortable. The first thing I noted was how extensive the seafood menu is, filled with some of the same exotics I see in San Francisco goose webbing included.

Pearl is primarily a dim sum place I believe, but the normal dinner fare was quite intriguing. We were served delicious chrysanthemum tea and ordered a honey glazed barbecue pork appetizer. Leslie was not real hungry and we decided to only order a few things this time.

Her pick was the clay pot chicken curry. I ordered crab in garlic but the server came back to tell me that there was no more crab and anyway the ginger was better. I said fine change it to lobster and hold the scallions.

I went to the men's room to wash my hands and noticed the chipped wood on the plate stand. The bathroom was not filthy but was a long way from spotless. Not a good sign. I came back and Leslie took her turn to freshen up. The staff at Pearl was super friendly all night, very genuine.

While she was gone they brought our prospective entrée to the table. Mr. Lobster looked healthy and as happy as one could expect considering the circumstances and I said okay, fine. In a few moments I had a reality flash and inquired just how much the grabby crustacean was going to set me back. "Two and a half pounder," she said. "Seventy two bucks." I gulped but didn't want to appear the cheap skate. What the hell, it was our anniversary. At that moment I felt my back pocket and realized that I was out of cash and my sweet wife would be picking this one up.

I am going to make this short and sweet. The meal pretty much sucked. Pork was dry and tough. The chicken curry was ghastly, sour and frankly inedible. The lobster sure didn't show its weight for being a two and a half pounder, looked more like a 19 ounce weakling. And it wasn't all that good. Certain parts of it also had a curious sour taste, the one lasting memory I will have from this meal. I should mention that they don't give you nutcrackers and meat was hard to find and recover.

The acrid taste of the food meshed well with the omnipresent mothball smell that I had been trying to put my finger on the whole meal. Very unappetizing.

We, or should I say, she, asked for a bill. They brought us a bland mango pudding and some orange slices for dessert and we paid our check and sashayed on into the night.

Would probably never return.

Space Oddity

A revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Twitter: twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield
Facebook: www.facebook.com/AstronautChrisHadfield?­­fref=ts
Google+: plus.google.com/113978637743265603454/po­­sts/p/pub

Fledging

I like to think that I have a fairly decent grasp of the english language but I am continually confronted by gaps in my knowledge base. The other day somebody asked me if the hawklings were still fledging? Not absolutely sure what they were referring to and now wanting to appear like a dolt, I blustered a vigorous assent and ran to the dictionary. What does it really mean to fledge? I was of course aware of the term fledgeling but felt that it covered any nascent period of adolescence.

Not quite. From Merriam Webster:

Definition of FLEDGE

intransitive verb

of a young bird

: to acquire the feathers necessary for flight or independent activity; also : to leave the nest after acquiring such feathers

transitive verb

1: to rear until ready for flight or independent activity

2: to cover with or as if with feathers or down

3: to furnish (as an arrow) with feathers

Examples of FLEDGE

1. The young birds haven't yet fledged.

Origin of FLEDGE

fledge capable of flying, from Middle English flegge, from Old English -flycge; akin to Old High German flucki capable of flying, Old English flēogan to fly — more at fly

First Known Use: 1566

Now, this is sort of confusing. I am in reality no closer to understanding what it means to fledge. Why, you may ask? Because the event describes the act of acquiring feathers prior to flight at one point and being capable of flight in another. To rear until ready for flight and to leave the nest after acquiring your wings, in aircraft parlance. Which is it?

Here is the meaning of the term fledge from Wikipedia:

Fledge is the stage in a young bird's life when the feathers and wing muscles are sufficiently developed for flight. It also describes the act of a chick's parents raising it to a fully grown state. A young bird that has recently fledged but is still dependent upon parental care and feeding is called a fledgling.
In ornithology, the meaning of fledging varies, depending on species. Birds are sometimes considered fledged once they leave the nest, even if they still cannot fly. Some definitions of fledge take it to mean the independence of the chick from the adults. Adults will often continue to feed the chick after it has left the nest and is able to fly.

Interesting that it also indicated feathering an arrow, In spanish an arrow is a flecha, the archer a flechador. I called my baby hawks hawklings. I don't know if it is correct terminology or not so I looked it up. From Answers.Com:

A newly hatched bird might be called a hatchling, while the term nestling or chick is sometimes applied. What is probably the most correct term for the young is eyass (pronounced "EYE-ess"). 

I get another new word, eyass. Definitely never heard that one before.

In terms of venery, two or more spiraling hawks are a boil. A cast or lease is a general word for multiples and a kettle are a large group flying together, something that true hawk watchers will tell you that they rarely or never see.

Here is a bit on the fledging and early stages of the red tailed from Wiki:

A clutch of 1 to 3 eggs is laid in March or April, depending upon latitude. Clutch size depends almost exclusively on the availability of prey for the adults. Eggs are laid approximately every other day. The eggs are usually about 60 x 47 mm (2.4 x 1.9 in). They are incubated primarily by female, with the male substituting when the female leaves to hunt or merely stretch her wings. The male brings most food to the female while she incubates. After 28 to 35 days, the eggs hatch over 2 to 4 days; the nestlings are altricial at hatching. The female broods them while the male provides most of the food to the female and the young, which are known as eyasses (pronounced "EYE-ess-ez"). The female feeds the eyasses after tearing the food into small pieces. After 42 to 46 days, the eyasses begin to leave the nest. The fledging period follows, with short flights engaged in, after another 3 weeks. About 6 to 7 weeks after fledging, the young begin to capture their own prey. Shortly thereafter, when the young are around 4 months of age, they become independent of their parents. However, the hawks do not generally reach breeding maturity until they are around 3 years of age. In the wild, Red-tailed Hawks have lived for at least 21 years. The oldest captive hawk of this species was at least 29 and a half years of age.

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I drove out of the Santa Margarita River valley today and saw the mother red tailed hawk on a telephone pole. I grabbed the heavy camera off the car seat and jumped out of the car, motor running, with a quick look to ensure that I didn't lock myself out of the car. She flew away and I didn't get the ideal shot. Damn.

A short while later, I arrived at the nest and saw my hawk progeny. I would like to continue to use the word hawklings but found to my chagrin that it is not actually a word. Shame, it fits so well.

Mother showed up shortly thereafter, checking on her fledgelings. (Note, both fledgelings and fledglings are permissable spelling - ed.) They are in that gawky stage, quite large now and the nest is getting a bit cozy for three. They are losing some of the down of infancy and getting their darker feather foliage that they will wear throughout their adult life.

The shot you see above isn't very sharp. I should have shot at a higher f-stop for more depth of field. I include it because it is nice to see a little of mom's preening!

After spending a few minutes observing the birds I drove a bit further and saw this raptor on the wire. I believe that it might be a sharp shinned hawk although it may prove to be a plain old coopers. Its small beak makes me favor the former. Perhaps one of you birders will tell me?

I went for a walk with my pals Ron, Lena and Liz in the early afternoon yesterday and espied this yellow fellow high in a tall conifer. I am no birder but my guess is hooded oriole.

Reconnaissance One

My friend, the artist Michael Maas, just sent me a link to this film that he has produced. It is the creation of film maker Eric Minh Swenson, the music by Dave Blackburn. Fascinating lysergic panoply of sound and color detailing the act of artistic creation.

5.12.13