How to Stop a Bird-Murdering Cat

Photo from The Atlantic

This month in bird news: a few weeks ago, I had a story in The Atlantic online about one way we might mitigate a serious threat to native birds: getting eaten by pet and stray cats. Ed Yong at National Geographic, as well as blogs at Smithsonian and Mental Floss, gave the piece a nod. Long-time readers, thank you so much for supporting my writing over the years.

Also, for the 30 Rock fans among us: the headline chosen for the story made me think of "The Rural Juror" episode. I think "bird murder" would have fit in well with Barbara Walter's interview with Jenna:

Both Ends of the Chain

In the Wild North, Ivan Shiskin

Around Christmas, I often turn to Chekhov’s stories. His all-penetrating skepticism might seem at odds with the holiday spirit. That’s because it is. As some might feel a need to roast a beast for Christmas dinner, I feel called to roast up a nice juicy pile of sentimentality. It stands in the way of what’s real and worth remembering. And where else could we find a wintery field evoked so sharply than with Chekhov? Here is his description of a spring day turning back into winter:

A woodcock chirred by, and a shot rang our boomingly and merrily in the spring air. But when the forest grew dark, an unwelcome east wind blew up, cold and piercing, and everything fell silent. Needles of ice reached over the puddles, and the forest became inhospitable, forsaken, desolate. It felt like winter.

The setting is not Christmas but Good Friday. It’s the first paragraph of the story “The Student,” about a seminarian on his way home. He feels that the contradiction between the season and the weather is a sign of nature’s indifference for him and his wishes, a favorite theme of Chekhov’s. But against this familiar backdrop, the good doctor does something strange: he questions his own skepticism.

Winter Travelers

Rusty Blackbirds are one of the fastest declining species in North America. In the same family as orioles, red-winged blackbirds, and grackles, it has lost between 85 and 99 percent of its population over the last 40 years. This past weekend, we saw two pairs of Rusties in our neighborhood in St. Louis county. 

 One of the pairs (male on the left, female on the right.) Their buffy-colored eyebrow and the rusty ends of their feathers distinguish them from other small blackbirds.

Both pairs together.

Rusty Blackbirds typically forage in bottomland forests with standing water. They flip over leaves, looking for small arthropods. They arrived shortly after a rainstorm and after my dad had blown the leaves into piles, so the yard must have looked like a good place to eat. Traditionally, they winter in the bottomlands of the American South and breed in boreal forests in the Northeast U.S. and Canada. Both habitats have suffered serious damage in the past century.

They were following a group of European Starlings. Migratory birds, especially blackbirds and starlings, often form mixed flocks for protection from predators. There's also evidence that Rusties, which have smaller beaks than grackles, follow other blackbird species around and pick up the scraps from nuts that the larger birds have cracked open. 

It was truly special to see the Rusties so close to my home. It's a species that I have learned much about: my research adviser at Truman surveyed the birds in their wintering grounds and is an expert on their ecology. But their existence was somewhat theoretical until I saw them through my front door. It was fascinating to realize that they were only midway on their journey to Arkansas or Mississippi. Reflecting on how a small songbird carries itself thousands of miles every year is always a source of wonder for me.

On a Physicist Who Understood the Human Side of Science

I dug into the MIT archives to learn more about late physics professor Victor Weisskopf. His apprenticeship with Niels Bohr taught him not just about quantum electrodynamics but also about the value of living in a frequently silly community that could approach problems from multiple angles. Read the story on Scope.

Notes on Conversations that Matter

This week we've seen people in the public square, notably Donald Trump, saying some poisonous things. At this point I think it would be a mistake to see him as someone who is not taking his role seriously. Instead we should interpret his lack of a filter as strategic and planned. And if the goal is to derail our efforts to talk productively about issues that matter, like the Syrian refugee situation, and draw folks toward his inscrutable brand of nationalism, he's doing pretty well.

So we need to take note of conversations which add rather than subtract. That's why I'm grateful that one of my roles this year is to write summaries of MIT's CommForum, which brings together panels of experts to have engaging and thoughtful discussions on the big issues. The first one I wrote up dealt with the legacy of Jim Crow and the future of the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week I summarized a conversation on women in politics, why we still don't have a woman president, and how likely we are to have one in 2016.

The summaries are highlight reels rather than transcripts. These are lengthy pieces (2500+ words) and, like real conversations, they have threads but not a driving plot. But you might consider skimming through them as some small antidote to the poison being dished out elsewhere in the public forum.

On NOVA Next: Stereotype Threat and Biased Testing

The good folks at NOVA Next were good enough to publish my article on a new social psychology experiment. Stereotype threat is when someone fears they are at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group. It helps explain why women and ethnic minority students underperform on standardized exams that begin by asking for your sex and ethnicity. The researchers I spoke to found that stereotype threat's effect can be reversed under certain conditions, though.

Reporting on Brain Implants for Depression

from WIkimedia Commons, user Andreashorn.

Right now my classmates and I are focusing on how to write a science news article. My first go at this can be found on Scopeweb, which is our program's online publication. It involved diving into research on using deep brain stimulation, a treatment involving a small electrode implanted in the brain, to treat depression. It was fascinating to learn about an area of medical research in which doctors do not agree on where to take the research next, and I'll be interested to follow the story as it evolves. 

How Small Jaws Got Bigger in Prairie Cornfields

Image from Doudna and Danielson (2015).

It can be hard to grasp how much humans have reshaped the landscape—particularly in agricultural regions like the Midwest. I struggle to picture prairie where corn and oak-lined subdivisions now stand. One window into these changes is to look at how our farms have widened some of the smallest of mammal mouths.

The arrival of massive corn and soybean fields forced prairie deer mice to shift their diets, according to a study by John Doudna and Brent Danielson of Iowa State published in the journal PLOS ONE this June. The researchers compared museum collections of deer mice skulls from before major agriculture to mice they trapped during 2012 and 2013 from the same regions. Instead of tiny wildflower seeds, deer mice started eating the many-times larger corn and soybean seeds left behind in Midwestern fields. The selective pressure of the new food sources led to populations with larger, more robust jaws able to handle cracking corn. I hope to give this topic a fuller treatment soon. For now, check out the original study!

--
Citation
Doudna, J.W., and B.J. Danielson. 2015. Rapid morphological change in the masticatory structures of an important ecosystem service provider. PLOS ONE 10. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127218.

Fly in Your Burger?

"In a typical fast food meal of a hamburger, fries, and a milkshake, most of the components required an insect somewhere along the way; although the wheat in the bun is wind-pollinated, the other plants, from the cucumber for the pickle to the feed eaten by the cow, are insect-pollinated. Nicola Gallai from the University of Montpellier in France and her colleagues estimated the world economic value of pollination to be $153 billion, pointing out that this is nearly 10 percent of the value of agricultural production used for human food in 2005."

- Marlene Zuk,  Sex on Six Legs: On Life, Love, and Language from the Insect World

Just one more reason to think twice about that squeeze bottle of Bug-Blaster.

For me, science writers fall into two broad categories: those with scientific backgrounds and PhDs who have entered the realm of journalism, and those with hard-boiled reorting backgrounds who are exploring the realms of science. In practice, you hopefully won't be able to tell, from the text alone, what kind of writer wrote which successful popular science article or book. Dr. Zuk, an entomologist at the University of California-Riverside, falls into the first category. In preparation for my master's program, I'm trying to read a wide swath of authors and steal as many of their tricks as I can. Zuk spins off a new riff on the ever dependable method of putting economic value to overlooked wildlife: she shows us how many dollars worth of insects it took to produce your double cheeseburger with pickles and diced onions.

Reconciliation

Today seems like a good day to say something that’s been on my mind for years—

To all the LGBTQ people that went to Catholic schools with me: I’m sorry for not taking the time to realize how screwed up the church’s policies about queer people are. Sorry for anything I said or did, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that made you feel less than equal, less than infinitely meaningful. Or at the least, towards the end, for not doing anything substantial for you in a culture that was frequently hostile to your identity. And thank you to the friends, teachers and writers who woke me up.

 "It is so ordered."

We all will benefit from today’s victory in ways impossible to count or predict, but this belongs to you, and you are so deserving.

Red Leaves, Yellow Cello Case

I don't think I could have posed a more autumnal scene on the Quad last evening. A cellist and a violist were playing pop songs and improvising around sunset.  

"Wasn't it a revelation...?"

Galway Kinnell thought cancer would kill him years ago. After a prognosis gave him only a short while to live, he wrote the poem "Why Regret," which takes the form of a series of questions--to his wife or to the reader. Shortly after, he found he had years more to live. Kinnell's ecstasies in that poem and others like it--"That Silent Evening," "St. Francis and the Sow," and "Rapture"--are all the more intense and believable for the way in which he sucks the marrow of ugliness in much of his other work, such as "The Bear" and "The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible." Poems like those won him his critical acclaim, establishing him as the nature poet unafraid of the inhumanity of nature. He told the Los Angeles Times that “I’ve tried to carry my poetry as far as I could, to dwell on the ugly as fully, as far, and as long, as I could stomach it. Probably more than most poets I have included in my work the unpleasant because I think if you are ever going to find any kind of truth to poetry it has to be based on all of experience rather than on a narrow segment of cheerful events.”

But now that Kinnell has finally passed away from leukemia, perhaps it is time to return to the rhapsodic poem he wrote when he believed he was dying--to focus more of our attention on what brought this poet of fingernail-rot and earthworms his deepest joys. 

Three Watercolors Find a Home

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, which published my poem about biting an apple in 2013, was kind enough to publish some recent watercolors of mine. Two are from Ireland and one is of a Monarch butterfly emerging in our backyard in St. Louis. Now to find homes for my other stray poems and paintings!

Index Ferguson Feature

Here's the link to my feature for the Truman Index on the Ferguson protests. For those of you who read the perspective that Nick and I wrote for the Prep News, it's mostly similar stuff, but this one is more from my viewpoint as a participant and less as an observer analyzing the situation at a remove, and is therefore a bit more personal to me. I also felt that the need for this kind of work at Truman was greater than at SLUH, since in Kirksville we are hours away from St. Louis, and many of us come from elsewhere and do not have a local angle on the story. 

I wrote this thinking it would just be in my normal opinions page column spot, but they made it a full-spread feature. I'm not sure how I feel about the design above the story, but I'm glad they used some of my pictures (recognize anyone in the bottom left corner?)

More importantly: the #HealSTL office, led by Alderman French, is open as of this morning in Ferguson. They are calling for volunteers from anywhere and everywhere to help work on solutions for St. Louis. Their website is due to launch soon, but their Twitter is live.

Ferguson Perspective

Nick Fandos and I teamed up once more for the Prep News as emeritus editors to write a perspective on our experience of attending a protest march in Ferguson. I was deliberately hesitant to publish thoughts on the Ferguson crisis on this blog, because I feel that there is a lot of substantial work as well as a lot of unhelpful noise out there on the Internet already about this issue. While the press corps has done good in bringing national attention to the protests, some have also done a disservice to the community by only focusing on the late-night confrontations with militarized police forces, making what was in fact mostly a series of peaceful, passionate protests look merely like a string of dust-ups. I don't want to add even in a small way to that mistake. The minority of violent agitators are as much of a menace to the nonviolent protesters as they are to the police. 

But we sat with our thoughts for a while, and this piece is what we have so far.  (If you're like me and prefer to pretend you're reading a print newspaper, click here and turn to page 6. Check out the other great coverage there, too.) What we hoped to do with this piece was engage with our high school community, the place we learned big lessons in journalism, civic engagement and the value of urban neighborhoods. However, I think it could also serve as one source for my friends who do not live in St. Louis to get a handle on the situation, which looks quite different day-to-day than what cable producers have typically chosen to show.

But for the developing story, I suggest you follow protest leaders on Twitter. The hashtag #HealSTL was recently created to bind together actions directing the protest's energy towards initiatives to move forward and combat racial injustice.  Look up State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (@MariaChappelleN), Alderman Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) and Committeewoman Patricia Bynes (@patricialicious), for a start. We could be nearing the crucial point at which protesters either disperse slowly or coalesce into a unified movement, and leaders like these have a good sense of what's happening on the ground and what's coming next.

While I will welcome questions and comments about this issue, please be civil, and please read up elsewhere on the issue before making claims about it. Our feelings and opinions are complex enough; we can at least try to be familiar with the set of established facts and debunked myths.

Summer Leaves

Here's the link to my first post for the blog of the vernal pool research program at University of Maine-Orono, "Of Pools and People." They're also on Facebook. It's my first foray into writing about a branch of ecology which is still very new to me: biogeochemistry, the study of fundamental environmental processes. There's a couple formatting hiccups in it that will probably be rectified soon, but I figured I might as well just link to it now, trusting in your generosity not to condemn me too badly.

Mind-Congestion Release-Valve of the Weekend

"All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas."

-Dean Young, "Belief in Magic," Poetry magazine (July/August 2014)

The Pony Express

In poetry workshop this semester, our professor told us that the only difference between us and published poets is the "pony express." In other words, the difference is that published writers send their stuff out. It's fitting, then, that the journal in which two poems I wrote for this workshop will appear is named after the saddlebags used by Pony Express mail-carriers: the Mochila Review. (Our teacher encouraged us to submit to this journal, published by Missouri Western, without being aware of the coincidence. Kismet!) Here's the link to the PDF. My poems are on pages 35 and 61. Shout-out to two of my classmates, Lydia Frank (pp. 52 and 78) and Paula Vaught (pp. 25 and 79) , who also are in print in this issue. Here's to the pony express!

We also published the 2014 issue of Windfall, TSU's undergraduate literary magazine, this past Thursday. Let me know if you want a copy (free but limited supply) and I'll try to put one aside for you.

Off to Orono

This summer I am headed off to the University of Maine-Orono to work as a Research Assistant on a project studying ephemeral wetlands. The small bodies of water we will be studying are called vernal pools. They fill with snowmelt in spring and dry up at the end of the summer. In the time in between, they are important habitat for frogs and salamanders. The project is supported by a National Science Foundation grant for research on small-scale landscape features with an out-sized impact on the surrounding ecosystem.

The graduate student I am working with is focusing on biogeochemistry and the cycles of nutrients in the pools, including dissolved oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorus. Keeping an eye on these chemical concentrations can give us a better idea of the quality of the habitat and how it is being affected by runoff from nearby human activity. That's my slapdash explanation before actually having seen any of these pools. I'll know much more soon.

As the ice is melting right about now, I will have to head off to Maine quickly after exams end. I'll be back in Saint Louis in mid-August.

This is my first experience on a biology project with national funding, so I'm very excited to start. In Orono, I will also be an hour from Acadia National Park. It will be a different kind of summer than I'm used to, but it should be very rewarding! I hope to keep some updates here throughout the summer.

The True Confessions of a Teacher's Pet

The most Notebookish of my Index columns so far considers the possible causes of lackluster class discussions and students' reluctance to answer certain questions. I also wrote but did not draw the notebook-scribble info-graphic below the column, which I feel like I should have made either more simple or more obnoxiously complicated. (It's a Catch 22!)