Animal may have lost way during migration.

Milan, January 8 - The Italian National Association for the Protection of Animals ENPA said on Tuesday that an adult Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) found wandering in the center of Milan had most likely lost its way during migration or lived at a nearby city reservoir. Police were alerted after passersby saw a large swan walking down the sidewalk of Via Lombroso in a busy city neighborhood of the Lombardy capital. The swan was given water and fed lettuce by the police until the ENPA volunteers arrived.



Gazetta del Sud

As part of an assignment, an ETH architecture student visualized bird migrations. The animation recreates the amazing seasonal movements of these animals.
Every autumn, millions of migratory birds leave the northern hemisphere to spend the winter in warmer areas in the southern hemisphere. They cover vast distances, sometimes from the North Pole to the South Pole and back - a natural spectacle that fascinated people since time immemorial.

This also fascinated Nicolás Miranda. The student of the Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Information (MAS AI) at ETH analysed the migrations of six species of migratory birds as a project of the second module of the MAS course. The result is an animation that accentuates the amazing journey of these birds.

From southern South America to Alaska
The short film shows in fast motion when and where birds fly through and where they stay for longer periods of time. The birds, however, are only visible as colored dots that move according to a time factor on a world map. These points migrate sometimes from the southernmost point of South America to Alaska, and from South Africa to Central or Northern Europe. Resting areas and wintering grounds are shown as areas with dense flying patterns while the flyways of the birds can be seen as thiner lines.

"Fly away ...", as Nicolás named his presentation, is based on data collected during 17 years, using satellite transmitters. Data were stored in the database www.movebank.org. For its visualization, Nicolás analysed about 600,000 data points of 193 different bird individuals. He coded the data and programmed algorithms, which allowed him to make visible the pattern of migratory movements.

Comparable networks
Nicolás Miranda's "fly away ..." is part of the Atlas of Networks, in which he and his fellow students were working as part of the "Programming" module of the MAS AI. With the Atlas, the architects explored various complex networks, which were graphically represented. This way, they looked for ways of visualization and simulation of networks starting from big amounts of data, in order to make them comparable.

Nicolás Miranda studied at the University of Chile, where he gained his master's degree in architecture in 2009. In the past two years, he worked as an architect in Basel, becoming last September a postgraduate student in Architecture and Information (AI MAS) at the ETH Zurich.

 http://youtu.be/D-c0XMHSfl8

ETH Life

They've had more problems with this brand, if it's made in China, forget it! Very sad.

Look who flew in!

Parts of this skit seem vaguely familiar.

Has he been to your house too? 

http://www.wimp.com/superbored/ A bored cat!  

http://www.wimp.com/chickengoat/ A goat that thinks he's a chicken. I couldn't stop laughing at this.

As big as mom!

http://youtu.be/xiO4xiGYRe0  Buddy gets his beak in shape

Funny, saw this while not even looking. Carol mentioned this in her tweet this am.

I live in America’s first boom town—Rochester, New York—on Linden Street. Linden trees, unsurprisingly, line much of my street. Down the street is the Genesee River, once one of America’s most polluted—and possibly still. My street is a historic district that was once part of the world’s largest nursery. The Ellwanger and Barry Company supplied the first fruit trees to California…

The trees were initially grown in Rochester greenhouses and shipped via rail. The introduction of cherry blossoms from Japan to Washington, D.C., initially came through Ellwanger and Barry, where they were listed in pre-Civil War catalogues. In the nineteenth century, a wall six feet high stretched the length of my street and encircled the nursery grounds. Victorian homes line the opposite side of my street. The homes on my side are all American Foursquare, built after the turn of the twentieth century; by that point, Ellwanger and Barry had shifted its business to real estate development. The company donated land to create Highland Park, Rochester’s first park. Eventually the first statue in the U.S. of an African American, Frederick Douglass, was erected in the park near the site of his home that burned in 1872.

Floral catalogues from Rochester helped the city win the recognition as the Flower City of America. The city’s current logo, with its abstract water wheel/flower design, nods to both the flour-milling industries, which moved westward in the 1830s, and seed and flower industries which declined by the 1890s. Rochester was the world leader in both. Rochester also boasts one of four complete park systems in the nation designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (the other park systems are in Buffalo, Louisville, and Boston). Olmsted recommended engineer Calvin Laney as Rochester’s first Park Superintendent, who in turn hired John Dunbar, a Scottish immigrant, to supervise the planting and maintenance of the collection.

As the first Assistant Park Superintendent, Dunbar surpassed Olmsted’s plans and eventually introduced lilacs to Highland Park, for which the city is well known. In 1903, Dunbar built and lived in the house that I now call home.

By Joel Helfrich

A picture of a picture of a guy on the roof- helps give a sense of the scale. By Ryan Green fb

I thought this pic was awesome!

Juvie at the Cathedral





Peregrine Falcons in Worcester
Yet another juvenile on the cathedral east tower top this morning. The Saturday bird was sub 2 years; this one looks to be sub 1 year & from the size another female. She was eating prey when I spotted her, 10 minutes later she flew off chasing more pigeons over the Travelodge before returning.

This pic was taken from 1 1/2 miles away, so imagine the lens.

Nubble Light was a bit over 1 1/2 miles from where I shot the photograph.   

   

Evening folks…this is a photograph I took right after Christmas with the last full moon at Nubble Lighthouse in York, ME. 'Christmas at Nubble'

I LOVE LOVE this shot!!

from fb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aDG9jXvXhyQ#!

That was cool Larry, thanks!! Heres the animated gif

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-zd9V8cd5s50/UM9RqH4gf0I/AAAAAAAAHok/j41OFN4TqXI/w497-h373/Parahawking%2BIn%2BNepal.gif