Sunday, May 11, 2014

Bird Assassins and Rock-Science Lunacy Spoilers

My recent reading has included some of the natural sciences stuff that especially helps me cope with too much time indoors.  And, yes, time with prickly people.

This year I was much quicker than in prior years to pick up on the reappearance of Peregrine Falcons in a nest-box established high up on one of Seattle's skyscrapers, and which I was excited to learn last year is visible in quite clear but distant view out my office window.  I have once or twice seen falcons leaving and entering the nest area.  This year I had the good fortune to see one bird leave the nest and join another on a nearby roof-edge, reinforcing the idea that the pair are both in action.  There is a webcam focused on the nest, so anyone with bird-voyeur tendencies (ahem) can check in at any time.

I was pleased to sight the first of these returning fabulous flying assassins a little over a month ago.  Image courtesy of Wikipedia.  The average bird weighs in at around two pounds, but that beak and the talons are absolutely lethal.  I'm not sure how long I would want to look directly into those eyes!

Checking in at the web-cam periodically, I was gratified to note first one egg, then three, then four in the spartan gravel nest.  Once the eggs were laid, there has been a bird atop them 99% of the times I have checked.

Given what I find at Wikipedia about falcon incubation, that first egg really ought to have hatched last week, so I am on tenterhooks.

My Wiki search also drew my attention to the book The Peregrine, by one Mr. J. Baker.  Quite an interesting account of an amazingly persistent October-March stalking of an estuarine/farmland/meadow area in eastern England via pedestrian and bicycle transport.  Having this book touted as a masterpiece of nature writing and I believe elsewhere compared to Sand County Almanac put it in the must-read category for me.

Some tid-bits that resonated from my from reading of Peregrine, admittedly all based on observations prior to the breeding period that is my only time of observation, and of rural birds in England vs. urban in my case:
  • the falcon bathes daily
  • typically two birds are consumed per day
  • a falcon was seen to fly over a mile at an estimated speed of 30-40 mph carrying a bird at least half its' own weight
  • in an amazing stoop (the term for the falcon's killing high-speed attack on prey birds), probably approaching 200 mph, the author observed a falcon killing a gull over twice the weight of the falcon
And, for you crossword-puzzlers, the female is a falcon, the male a teircel, though spelling on the latter varies, hence the Toyota name.  And the chicks are referred to as eyases.

In the meantime, while continuing to fret over "our" eggs, I have moved on to The Rocks Don't Lie, a book that recounts a University of Washington geologist's self-imposed challenge of investigating "Noah's Flood."

This is also a fine book, covering a lot of interesting geological territory, though delving a bit more than I expected and perhaps would have preferred into what to me are the pretty weedy fine points of biblical debates over topics like Noah's flood.  At least some of it came across that way, although later in the book I greatly appreciated the tactful but firm calling out of modern-day creationists for their full-blown rejection of reason, given that they are basically re-running a program that was almost entirely rejected by actual cogitating sorts decades ago.  With no new information at their disposal, yet!  There was a lot of dumbfoolery way back when, but as evidence grew even the devout sheep-followers of those who maintained the inerrancy of the bible largely came to adopt one or the other of a couple of escape-clauses when it came to the age of the Earth.  Either those first few creation "days" were intended to be metaphorical, standing in for, say, a few million years each (or more), or there was a comparably long "gap" that preceded the surprisingly codified and clocklike process of creation as recorded in Genesis.

By coincidence, a website I just bookmarked recently happens to feature what I gather is a seminal site for geologists, namely the spot on the Scottish coast, Siccar Point, where James Hutton, not exactly a household name, found two quite different sandstones piled atop each other with one vertically oriented, the other more familiarly horizontal.  And a gazillion years of erosion and uplifting in between.  So much for that 6,000-year-old Earth.

The cover photo for The Rocks Don't Lie happens to feature a photo of the remarkable rock uncomformity at Siccar Point.

I heartily recommend both of these books.  You will learn good and interesting stuff from both.  I found Peregrine a bit more of a challenge given its narrow focus, but then I was unprepared for Montgomery's appetite for wrestling with the fine points of religious debates over global versus local floods and so forth.

Update 5/14/14

One of the major topics towards the end of Rocks especially resonated with me.  A major aphorism of geology, preached by Lyell, one of the patriarchs of the science, is the idea of uniformitarianism, namely that the processes of change in the earth we see today are the same as they were in the past, a concept also captured in "the present is the key to the past."  And a critical offshoot of that is that what we see in the rocks and landforms around us represent the result of extremely slow processes that have had dramatic effects only because they have continued to be in effect for eons of time.  Erosion is a good example.  We instinctively know that it takes a lot of pounding to turn sharply quarried and cracked gravel into the rounded stones we find on the beach.

This was important as an antidote to the concept that "Noah's flood" was the explanation for more or less all that we see in the world today, including fossils on mountaintops.  Comical as it seems, that was what a long-ago batch of Bible true-believers insisted on.  Basically, it is apparently what the current bible zealots have resurrected as a part of their platform.  Facts and reason seem to mean nothing to them.

But my main point is that after all this work to prove (at least for those with open minds) that Noah's flood could in no way explain more than a minute amount of the world we see around us, a renegade free-thinking geologist proved that wild events with major consequences do occur.  J (no period) Harlan Bretz came to realize that huge floods (!) left remarkable landforms in eastern Washington State in the last Ice Age.  As you might imagine, his theories, counter to the established science of gradual uniform processes over millennia, took decades to be accepted.  He was an old man by the time his scientific peers were prepared to acknowledge his genius.