The Blood Of The Hybrid Is Just A Recipe

Hybrid? No. This Lesser Black-backed Gull is as pure as uncut Colombian cocaine. This bird was photographed on December 26 basking on the northern shores of the Salton Sea, just south of Salt Creek at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area. I believe this was in Riverside County, but I could be mistaken.



I'm back in San Francisco now, hunkering down to face the new year. I hope the catatonic depression you probably slipped into over the holidays is beginning to fade...and if not, I highly recommend the therapeutic powers of staring at birds for prolonged periods of time. Selah.

Our MacGuffin

It's Christmas, and I'm down in Ventura to spend the gratuitous holiday time with my parents. Among the gifts I recieved this year were two (2) wallets, and "A Supremely Bad Idea", a birding book written by Luke Dempsey, whom I have never heard of. Knowing the many shortcomings of birdwatchers, I expected to see horrible shit smeared all over its pages, but I was pleasantly surprised to see otherwise.

"Birdwatching in England is part of that proud heritage - the word birdwatcher is a synonym for "completely unshaggable" - and it is generally thought of as an exercise for older folks who aren't physically able to play sports anymore, or else never did. If you set aside the attendant social stigma, "twitching", as birdwatching is also called, has its merits: It's harmless enough.....and it gets you out of the house. It also has a social use for younger people, keeping those nerdy kids who have no chance of ever making a real friend out of already overcrowded bars and the like.

Here in the United States, the pursuit of birds is not considered much sexier, though the use of the word "birder" instead of "birdwatcher connotes a more active particpation, I suppose, a veneer of science and perhaps adventure."

Being British, Mr. Dempsey is inherently funnier than the average American, for reasons so obvious that you should probably be experiencing a debilitating sense of shame right now if you don't understand Why. But I digress....

Tomorrow I'm off to the Salton Sea, pictures to follow, etc. Have a good one!

This Off And On And Back And Forth And Home Then Gone

One of the White-eared Hummingbirds that were hanging out in Arizona's Miller Canyon last summer.

Just when you thought my short attention span was going to get the best of me, I'm bringing it back home. Mostly feathered, one scaled and scuted, some respledent, some drab, but all nerdy action for you. There is no real unifying theme here, but here's a few photos that I don't think I've ever put up before. Since I've yet again stayed away from any Christmas Bird Counts this year, this will have to be my contribution to you....you the bedraggled, you the unsocialized, you the wealthy, you the probably white, you, my kindered spirits....you, the birding community.

In other news, I have developed a deep and unabiding hatred for California's unemployment program....whoever set it up to run how it does must have a severe case of shitbrain. Absolutely brutal.



A female Berylline Hummingbird goes back to her hair larder. She had impaled a small dog on this fence earlier.....truly the new butcher bird.



One of the many friendly White Terns that reside at Midway Atoll.



All sea turtles have a terrible survival rate in their first year of life (something like 99% get killed I think), but once they grow up, life seems good. If you pass out face down in the sand it generally means you did something horrible the night before, but it's just daily routine for the turtles.



Another beautiful day at Midway, with another beautiful Laysan Albatross. I must return.....

I'd Rather Steal Your Whiskey Than Your Heart: BB&B's Best Albums of Y2K9

Hi kids. Being a birder, you know that I'm a sucker for making lists.....so in another post completely unrelated to the feathered ones, here's my favorite music that came out this year. They're not really ranked in any order, because I'm lazy and can't really make up my mind.

2009 was a really good year for music for the crew here at BB&B....better than last year I reckon. Living in places like Midway Atoll and Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania made it extremely difficult to see much live music (aside from the beloved Chugach Band on Sand Island), but I got my grubby little hands on a lot of good stuff. Nothing was really a big let-down, which is a pretty great thing to say considering my music scene largely consists of people who want to shit on almost everything they hear....often for good reason, and often not. The BB&B staff is not excluded from this phenomenon, for good or ill (probably good).

Ok, I'll leave you to it. The next post will be saturated with bird gossip, I assure you.

The Lawrence Arms - Buttsweat and Tears.

I hate the Mondays and the Fridays because they always define
the endless march of pushing ruthlessly to the light.
Well, if I’m gonna be dying then I’m gonna get high,
and scream until I’m not feeling the pain.

If you've spent any time with me, you've heard this band. I'm a sucker for 'em. I can relate a lot to these songs.

NOFX - Coaster

"It's not a walk of shame, it's a walk of pride."

You know this band.

Vic Ruggiero - On The Rag(time)

Amorous and envy, Lord you know these sins are deadly,
Greed and vanity, they hurt a good man plenty,
So you must take care, you must be aware in your youthful insobriety,
Your cup may be full now, but in the end honey, it will be empty.

This is the singer from The Slackers, one of the best ska bands going. Vic is incredibly talented and has recorded an incredible amount of music over the years....this album is pretty much just him singing over some ragtimey piano, and it sounds great.

Dear Landlord - Dream Homes

Left me all but dead there, headed out back east
Woke up on the porch where the night before we drank ourselves to sleep
Stuck between a drunken daydream and real eviction threats
I though that you might love me
Fuck the landlord, fuck the rent.

One of my new favorite bands. Straightforward, fast and gritty, with a knack for writing amazingly catchy hooks.

Cobra Skulls - American Rubicon

Am I the end?
Am I the beginning?
Or am I just a product of infidelity
Between an immigrant and a rich girl?
"You better never make
The same fucking mistake"
Was the first thing I failed in this world

Another local San Francisco band, transplanted from Reno. They can do straightforward punk, ska, rockabilly, acoustic stuff.....they're really diverse. SOOOOOOO SF, as some would say.

Strung Out - Agents Of The Underground

This portrait of reality, the fever and the sound.
Our place in this gravity is nowhere 'til we hit the ground.
Electrical and alkaline, rhetorical and less divine.
Impulses activate, receptors drawn to stimulate.
As the girls walk by then fade away.
As an old man dies a little everyday.
The lonely poor and arrogant all make their graves.
So stand up brave and kiss goodbye any chance we'll live forever.

Strung Out was my favorite band for many year's....1996's Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues had a huge impact on me and I listened to it practically every day for a couple of years. That said, I haven't been as attentive to them the last few years, but this album changed that.

Teenage Bottlerocket - They Came From The Shadows

I could have made a list of all the things you'd do
And given it to you weeks before you'd do them too
I find it funny that I'm picking on your predictability
When I knew you'd drive me crazy.

In my mind, the quinessential pop-punk band that's going strong right now. Like Screeching Weasel without the conservative politics. Brilliant.

Bomb The Music Industry! - Scrambles

I’d rather steal your whiskey than your heart in conversation. I’d rather break three strings a song than stick to a routine like I’m ripe for the picking after growing on a tree and then talk about the industry, cross-market positivity with vinyl nerds and brightly colored, quirky messy record sleeves. I’d rather be vomiting and I despise vomiting. Blugh.

This band started with one guy writing and recording all the music for this band by himself, and is begininning to morph into a slightly more streamlined beast. I think this is the best and slickest album they've ever done. There's a live drummer for most of the album, but still all the weird keyboards, bips and bleeps, and anxious lyrics that make this band great.

Strike Anywhere - Iron Front

...But their science of injustice can be dispossessed everytime we organize. From the halls of litigation to the empty docks where the product rolls on by, Production is protected like an innocent while our dreams are hung and dried. The straw men built up will be burning my friend, to light and guide our way.

A return to form? It seems very....focused. Strike Anywhere hasn't changed much over the years, but this album is one of their best in my opinion. Great songs about social, environmental and personal justice...inspiring stuff.

Paint It Black - Amnesia and Surrender EPs

We play the early bird.
Their schemes are absurd, buy in and get burned.
We discern at day’s end we’re just food for the worms,
so we work at what we love, and live on our own terms.

PIB put out two EPs this year, both of which, as expected, are great. This is the only hardcore band that I'm in to these days.

Andrew Jackson Jihad - Can't Maintain

"I don't have a drinking problem, I have a drinking solution."

Generally a simple two-piece arrangement with an upright bass and acoustic guitar, AJJ plays as a full band for most of this album, and it works pretty damn well. More songs about fear and loathing (of the self) that I've grown to love.

Other quality releases were made by Propagandhi, Banner Pilot, Dead To Me, Frank Turner, Star Fucking Hipsters, The Loved Ones and The Devil Makes Three.

Plunge Us Into Unrelenting Night

As you probably don't know (unless you do), things are going pretty poorly at the Copenhagen climate talks right now. There has been a pretty brutal and sweeping crackdown on protesters, progressive groups, activists, etc. There has been very little progress in terms of any binding agreements in terms of cutting carbon emissions, pledging funds for developing nations, etc. My colleague Fiercekitty and her mate, Kris Krug (who is attending the talks and documenting the whole situation), put together this little video to the tune of a very appropriate Bad Religion song, showing what the streets are looking like outside the meeting hall. Enjoy.



p.s. this video made it onto the Huffington Post....great job guys!

Winds of Death: Wind Energy In The United States (Not Farts)

This article will appear in the second issue of LOINS, available in early 2010. - Ed.

If you are reading this, I am going to make a great, brave leap of faith and assume……yes……that you are not stupid. I will gamble that you believe climate change is happening, that humanity is largely responsible for it, and that the consequences could be nothing short of catastrophic, on all fronts. Yadda yadda yadda…. old news, right? Sure. So I don’t need to bum you out by regurgitating tidbits of doom.

So welcome, boys and girls, to the much-hyped Green Revolution. Privileged people around the world are realizing that their way of life is not sustainable, and they want to do something about it…..as long as it’s convenient, of course. At the same time, governments and businesses alike are slowly realizing that oil, Texas Tea if you prefer, isn’t going to be around forever…..and so they are finally beginning to turn their heads towards hydrogen, solar, and yes, wind, as alternative sources of energy. The basis behind generating power from wind is simple; you get some behemoth-sized windmills that power an electric generator that is hooked up to a power grid. The wind blows, the rotors turn, and you have that oh so sweet clean, sustainable energy that all the girls want and all the guys want to be. Or something like that. Right?

I spent three months this year working with Bat Conservation International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bat research and conservation. Our field site was a wind energy project in southwestern Pennsylvania, a pastoral part of the country largely dominated by farms and forests. The study’s hypothesis: If the speed at which the turbines’ rotors spin is slowed, there would be a significant reduction in the number of birds and bats that collide with the giant rotor blades. Our work consisted of walking transects under each turbine, searching for downed birds and bats. Some of the common species we found included Hoary Bat, Little Brown Bat, Tricolored Bat, Red Bat, Silver-haired Bat, Swainson’s Thrush, Red-eyed Vireo and a number of warblers. The carcasses could be pretty gruesome, with some being quite literally chopped in half. These poor things usually had a very pained expression frozen on their face, as you could imagine. Others, curiously all bats, would have no visible injuries to speak of. When bats fly into a narrow zone of air near where the rotor blades are spinning, the size and speed of the spinning rotor causes a change in air pressure. So when a bat flies into this area, it causes the bat’s arteries and veins to burst open. Subsequently, the bat falls to the ground and dies from internal bleeding.

The basic problem that we were dealing with is the fact that bats get absolutely hammered by wind turbines. No one is quite sure why. It seems they may actually be attracted to the spinning blades. Far more bats than birds, at least at our site, were found dead or injured. This trend is common across much of the eastern United States. At a 44-turbine site in West Virginia, a stunning 4,000 bats were estimated to have been killed in one year alone. These incredible numbers, coupled with a very low reproductive rate and the deadly white-nose syndrome that is plaguing many species, has absolutely brutal implications for bats in the eastern United States. Our site, with 23 turbines, is estimated to kill somewhere in the realm of 700 bats per year.

Of course, birds have been getting the dirty end of the shit-stick for decades now. It is estimated that between 500 million to 1 billion birds die in the U.S. from anthropogenic causes every year. That’s a lot of death folks……I can barely wrap my head around numbers like that. The most (in)famous wind energy project in the country is the Altamont Pass site, between the San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley. It is one of the oldest wind projects in the country, with almost 5,000 turbines. It is estimated to kill close to 5,000 birds a year, including roughly 1,300 raptors....and I’m sure a good number of bats meet their fate here as well. The grim statistics of the Altamont site are championed by anti-wind activists, because it clearly demonstrates the slaughter that can occur if the wrong site is chosen for wind development. However, of all American and Canadian sites that are being monitored, it is thought that this is far and away the biggest raptor-killer. In two years of monitoring at our Pennsylvania site, I think there was exactly one (1) raptor found. The variability of impacts between sites is vast.

So what’s the lesson here kids? Lets make this clear….wind farms are bad for wildlife. From direct mortality to habitat destruction to disturbance, there is no direct benefit to our winged brethren. Some grouse won’t even breed with turbines around….I guess they just don’t feel comfortable getting their lek on with turbines looming menacingly nearby.

Ostensibly, wind is clean, but all the blood that is spilled paints a very different picture from what the industry likes to say. But, and this is a big BUT, at this point it’s very difficult to predict what the impacts to wildlife will be at each specific site. There simply hasn’t been enough science done to predict how many raptors, birds, bats etc will receive The Big Chop at a particular place. In Pennsylvania, species like Grasshopper Sparrows, Vesper Sparrows, Upland Sandpipers and Eastern Meadowlarks lived quite happily between the turbines all summer long.

This is not a total condemnation of the whole industry. The cumulative effect of producing clean energy can quite literally help save the world. And for some good news, the results from our study show that bird and bad fatalities can be substantially lowered with an insignificant loss of energy production. But there needs to be a balance between what casual environmentalists with their heads in the clouds think is going on, and what actually happens on the ground. At any rate, I do know that wind turbines should not be put up with reckless abandon and minimal review of the consequences (hellooooo, Texas). When all is said and done, wind energy is just like anything else…..if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.

A Shroud Of Expensive Optics And Denial: An Update From The Human Birdwatcher Project

Hey there! We here at the Human Birdwatcher Project just wanted to stop by BB&B for a quick holiday greeting, and to get you up to date on all of our current research.

First of all, just a quick update on our mission and general purpose in this prolonged, embarrassing rectal exam that we all call "life". The Human Birdwatcher Project's primary goal is to prove to the world that birdwatchers do have some humanity, and we are not all bad. One of the possible mottos we may be using next here is "People Who Watch Birds Are People Too." Catchy, am I right? A line like that is sure to help rake in the big bucks to fund our research.

A few ongoing projects:

*The HBP Interviews are expected to continue indefinitely. The next likely candidate is a Doctor Lee Vining, an expert on birdwatchers.

*In order to discover more about birdwatchers and biologists alike, HBP is funding intrepid explorer and great ornithologist Felonious Jive to go and live amongst them. Felonious is currently becoming aggravated with finding his next assignment but is confident that he will land something soon.

*Steroids. HBP has procured a massive stockpile of human growth hormone and a number of other illicit drugs to create an army of beastly uberbirders.

*HBP is throwing its support behind the second LOINS publication, which is currently in a state of pre-production. This zine is likely to change the course of history, bridging the gap between self-confessed bird-nerds and the granola-dorks who wrap themselves in a shroud of expensive optics and denial.

It's hard to believe its the middle of December already. Most birds have settled into their winter homes, and many vagrant-crazy birders have significantly lower adrenaline and testosterone levels than they had back in October. At the moment, HBP's resources are currently being utilized to figure out what Felonious' mother would want as a Christmas present. Since she has no interest in anything at all beyond Korean movies and soap operas (of which she claims she has seen all of them), a meaningful gift is just baffling at this point.

In another holiday related note, we here at HBP just want to send our love out to all of our friends, colleagues, and comrades....it's great to be amongst family again.

The Day Is Already Done

A fishless Osprey.....



....normally doesn't concern Bald Eagles.....



...but when an Osprey is flying around with a fat fish.....



...eagles try to go for the free meal...



...sometimes it works out in favor of the eagle....



...and sometimes the osprey.....



...but getting chased off by crows is always embarrassing. All photos from Everglades National Park.

Mute The Sea, Stop The Clocks

I've been unemployed for a solid month and a half now. And let me tell you.....it's been great. Now that my fall tour is officially over, I don't have many expenses anymore beyond food and spirits. But since I am constantly celebrating various reunions among various friends, this can get costly.....but I'm not too worried about it. Take this to heart.



My very first blue Ross' Goose! I've looked for these for years in California's Central and Imperial Valleys, but finally found one at Bosque Del Apache NWR.

The gears are turning here in birdnerd world, and granolaheads everywhere are looking for late winter and spring work. I am in the thick of doing interviews and shooting emails at a rapid rate, and it ain't pretty boys and girls. I just might know what is next for me and the great ornithologist, Felonious Jive, by the end of next week...the ramifications could be staggering.



I got access to Whitetail Acres, which are man-made wetlands created by a wealthy conservationist in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. They provided the only real shorebird habitat for miles around, and also had Bobolinks, Eastern Kingbirds, Orchard Oriole, Swamp Sparrow, etc.

I spent some time at New Mexico's famous Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge a month ago, which I'd heard about for many years. Winter is the best time to go for thousands of cranes, geese, ducks and various raptors, so I was a little bit early.....but it did serve as a good conclusion to my long fall tour (Portland was mostly a social call, although I did squeeze in some decent birding), and certainly wasn't disappointing. To be honest, I was happy just to be listening to White-crowned Sparrows again.....that song is somehow entwined with my very core, I reckon....I've been hearing it ever since I was but a fetal birdwatcher, and its damn hard to forget.

Sparrows aside, its great to be able to spend some time with cranes and geese, especially when they know not to be terrified of you (thanks hunters)....there is something about that ridiculous cacophany that has a very calming effect on me. No rhyme intended.

Well, I'm going to see NOFX and Dead To Me tonight and it's going to kick ass. I love San Francisco!



Sandhill Cranes. Lurking. Bosque Del Apache NWR.