binocular vision

Move

I've moved this blog over to metabirder.blogspot.com. Blogspot seems to let me do a bit more ... like host a blogroll. I've moved the posts from this TypePad space over to the blogspot site.

Oil-Spill Cleanup and Damage to Birds

The ABA posted this powerful video about the environmental impact of cleanup efforts.

BP Logos (Involving Birds)

Flickr makes it easy to follow how visual artists and graphic designers are responding to the growing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Here is a roundup of some of the more powerful logos featuring birds. As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm struck by how images of the spill (like other spills) tend to focus on the impact of the oil on birds, with common birds (like gulls) being featured less frequently than rare species. But there have been plenty of images of dead dolphins. I've seen one of dead jelly fish and even a gripping image of an oiled dragonfly.

The LA Times has this powerful review of images of the spill.

Anyway; on to the roundup of revisions to the BP logo (involving birds):


above image from http://www.thisblogrules.com/2010/06/contest-opened-to-give-bp-logo-a-new-deserved-look.html


above image from http://www.thisblogrules.com/2010/06/contest-opened-to-give-bp-logo-a-new-deserved-look.html


above image from http://www.thisblogrules.com/2010/06/contest-opened-to-give-bp-logo-a-new-deserved-look.html


above image posted by Flickr user "jaredwrightus"


above image posted by Flickr user "Jeff-Frost"

Birding the Oil Spill

It's the end of May, 2010, and BP's massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill is turning out to be one of the biggest environmental disasters in recent memory. In fact, we have no idea how big it will get. The New York Times reports today that the recent effort to top-kill the broken pipe has failed, and efforts to cap the open well and ultimately divert the oil may take months to accomplish--if they work at all.

As with all oil spills, the effects on birds have figured prominently in the press. Birds are used as measures of the hazards of spilled oil. Images like this one, in the Guardian, give the sense that birds may be in danger ... but they are being cleaned off by well-trained teams of specialists. Pelicans like this one have been of particular interest to photographers; it's been hard to find pictures of oiled gulls and other common birds. (This article at AudubonMagazine.org does a nice job discussing gulls.) It's also worth noting that Procter and Gamble has been promoting it's image with hype about how useful Dawn dish soap is in cleaning oiled birds.



One image of a cormorant has been making the rounds, however, and it's a photo that paints a much bleaker picture of BP's spill. This one, an AP Photo by Gerald Herbert, features an oil-covered cormorant with what looks like very little hope. (The image appeared in a powerful oil-spill-image-roundup via Yahoo News.)



The American Bird Conservancy has a powerful datagraphic featuring bird habitats that are being hit by the spill as it's currently configured. The map shows both how many vital habitats in the area are at risk and just how few protected habitats there are. Of course, the Gulf may just be the starting place for this spill.



Lastly, eBird.org is a piece of social software that has great potential for sharing and compiling upcoming bird sightings all around the Gulf. It'll be interesting to see how many common birds show up in this data.

Field Guide to Dead Birds

Field guides typically feature thriving, healthy-looking birds. But this guide takes another approach, featuring birds commonly killed as a result of flying into windows. The top part of the page on the American Woodcaock looks like this:

The descriptions are supplemented with data on the numbers of each species that are killed each year (regionally) in this way, so the page on the woodcock reads "Estimated collisions for the GTA: 12,400 annually."

The guide is a powerful appropriation of field-guide rhetoric, I think, for the purposes of this important environmental message. And it's worth noting that the guide is sponsored by Flap.org, a group "working to safeguard migratory birds in the urban environment through education, research, rescue and rehabilitation."

Another page from this guide:

Birding at Sewage Lagoons

Gavan Watson today posted the first of two planned blog posts responding to my recent piece on birding in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. (This is his second post.) In the article he mentions, I discuss competitive birding at three toxic sites: EPA superfund sites, sewage treatment facilities, and landfills (both active and "recovered"). One way to state the gist of my argument is that birding at these sites runs counter to longstanding links between birdwatching and conservation.

What I appreciate most about Watson's post is how he complicates any simple notion of pollution being localized. He writes "it is not just classically constructed 'waste spaces' that pose health risks to avian populations. Culturally, and this is damning, we have impacted the whole environment in such a way that we can’t judge the health or toxicity of a location by its ecological role or appearance as natural—marshes and sewage lagoons can both be sinks of organic contaminants."

The thing about sewage treatment facilities that Watson leaves out, and this is something which many people don't realize, is that such facilities process sewage into sludge, and much of that sludge becomes fertilizer. That sounds like a terrific recycling loop, except for the fact that a sludge can contain toxics.

Doing a simple search for "sewage pond" on Flickr, these are the images that one gets: mostly birds. These images appear in the search because so many of the narratives associated with the images include references to sewage ponds.

My take on things is that birding at these sites works to render them somehow more hygienic than they are. I say this because I think that everyday environmental activities like birdwatching have consequences in terms of larger conceptions of things like "nature." With such a strong history of connections between birdwatching and conservation, we birdwatchers can do more, I think, to make visible the presence of toxics not only at "toxic sites" but where we least expect them to be, like wherever toxic sludge is used as fertilizer.

Green Police or Greenwashing the Superbowl?

In the 2010 medley of Superbowl commercials, this add from Audi hyping the Audi A3 TDI Clean Diesel wagon.

The add is more than a little funny, and also more than a little strange. It seems to be going, up until the Audi driver gets off, toward a kind of Daily-Show-esque critique of green regulations. In the video, it seems like a speculative joke that police may someday be going through your garbage, looking for mis-placed recyclables. But laws like this are already on the books in cities like Seattle, where there is a ban on not recycling household waste.

Instead of going toward critique, though, the add ends by hyping the new Audi as just green enough to avoid the Green Police. I suppose they're right, as buying green has been constructed as a legitimate way to help out where "the environment" is seen as suffering only from increased carbon emissions.

UPDATE: More on the video here and here.

Seeking Refuge

Robert Wilson has this terrific-looking new book, Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway, due out in June from the University of Washington Press. In Wilson's work, he attends to birds in highly contentious, culturally contingent environments. From the blurb on the publisher's website:

"Each fall and spring, millions of birds travel the Pacific Flyway, the westernmost of the four major North American bird migration routes. The landscapes they cross vary from wetlands to farmland to concrete, inhabited not only by wildlife but also by farmers, suburban families, and major cities. In the twentieth century, farmers used the wetlands to irrigate their crops, transforming the landscape and putting migratory birds at risk. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service responded by establishing a series of refuges that stretched from northern Washington to southern California."

Recent Birding Documentaries

Opposable Chums is an interesting new documentary about the World Series of Birding, taking a humorously appreciative look at competitive birding.

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Michael Gitlin's recent film The Birdpeople (2004) takes a slightly more suspicious, introspective angle on birding. Gitlin watches birders in much the same way that they watch birds, creating an unusual examination of birdwatching as an environmental practice.

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And then there is this take on the World Series of Birding from The Daily Show. Birding is so diverse that we could all be right:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The World Series of Birding
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Birdwatching Collage From a While Back

Bald Eagles at the Dump

Bryan Brasher has this post about Bald Eagles at a dump in Alaska. Brasher quotes a friend who says "it's a real turnoff to watch bald eagles feeding in garbage piles with their regal white heads blackened from soot." Then Brasher includes this graphic images of eagles feeding at the dump:

Dumps and birds have been in the news a bit lately, mainly relating to Fresh Kills, the dump that became a mass grave for many victims of the WTC disaster and is now being transformed into a park catering to birdwatchers. At Fresh Kills, birdwatchers have noted that the numbers of birds on site has diminished since the trash was covered over. What Brasher points to, though, is that associations between birds and human refuse continue to inform how we think about birds. The Eagle's reputation gets "trashed," in a sense, through the consumption of our trash. But what about our reputations?

As the trash piles up, and the human remains are added to the trash (at Fresh Kills), and then soil is added to that to cover up the piles of garbage, looking to the birds seems a bit bizarre. The presence of gulls at a dump seems somehow fitting, since they're often thought of as "trash birds," while Eagles at a dump is incongruous. Images of these dumps make me think, however, that we are the trash birds.

Birding Fresh Kills

The New York Times has an article this week about birding tours of Fresh Kills, the mega-landfill in New Jersey. "The parks department, apparently hoping for a fresh start, is smashing the two words together and lower-casing the K. The project is expected to take decades, but the department hopes to have a small part open within the next few years." The article includes this image of the newly sanitary-looking landfill:

Though it's not included in the article, I've long thought this to be the most graphic "bird image" of Fresh Kills (from NY Magazine, 2008: http://nymag.com/news/features/52452):



While most covered trash dumps have merely been layered over with dirt, Fresh Kills has plastic under its new layer of turf. I'm not sure how important the plastic is: gases that seep out of garbage go upward, but the toxics at landfills go downward via leachate.

What bothers me, though, is how toxic landfill parks of this kind work to erase the memory of human generated waste. Landfills can still be covered, by why not with a landscape architecture that speaks to the garbage beneath?

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Freshkills Park blog.

ANOTHER UPDATE: There has been a lot of discussion, in the past few days, about the remains from the WTC that are interred at Fresh Kills. This angry letter to the editor about turning what amounts to a mass grave into a birding park was posted to the New York Times website today.

AND ANOTHER: This touching letter in the NYT suggesting gravestones be placed upon the garbage piles at Fresh Kills.

Bird Busting

Over at BirdBusters.com, this animated .gif featuring several North American birds that get treated as pests.

There are over 100 species considered invasive in North America, several of which were imported by people, but note that this .gif includes native species as well as non-native ones. While nuisance birds are routinely controlled by lethal measures, businesses like BirdBusters focus on non-lethal approaches to keeping birds away.

Bird-B-Gone

At the bottom of the Bird-B-Gone website, this little .gif promoting the importance of bird identification in "deterring birds."

Clicking the link brings you to this little field guide to 12 nuisance birds: Pigeons, Gulls, Geese, Starlings, Sparrows, Crows, Grackles, Swallows, Woodpeckers, Turkey Vultures, Great Cormorant, Great Blue Heron.

Looking at this list, a few obvious things stand out: Some of the listed vermin are species (Great Blue Heron, for instance) while others are groups of species (gulls; crows), and then there are some less-well-known nuisance birds on the list. Swallows, for instance, are described in the guide in this way: "Barn swallows are noisy and emit a sharp 'vit' call in flight."