in today's news, owlet #1 sits on owlet #2's head and then gets hollered at by mom.

Wow!  My mom would have killed to have a referee's chair like that when my brother and I were growing up! She could have literally stayed above the fray, and still been able to hand out the yellow cards!

Talk about the intimidation factor - that poor youngster looks like he's getting yelled at by mom IN the principal's office!

Many states have programs such as Hunters for the Hungry: http://www.h4hungry.org/
This is particularly effective in states where there are way too many deer, and way too many hungry people.
Carol
WV

Here's the nationwide list for those not in VA.
http://www.nrahq.org/hunting/hungry_nat_list.asp

Unfortunately, even though Kris G's link is correct, the Wildlife tracking site is designed so that it just kicks you to the home page.  Click the <Search> button on the menu bar, and enter <74435> into the first field on the Search page to come to Camellia's page.

Complements of David and Janet Shaw!

http://www.chichesterperegrines.co.uk/galleries/%20April%2024%202010/gallery.htm

Simply amazing!

[Eager beavers build a giant dam that would have made Hoover proud]

From http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1272045/Eager-beavers-build-giant-dam-Hoover-proud.html

Eager beavers build a giant dam that would have made Hoover proud

By Daily Mail Reporter

This woodland construction is actually the world's biggest beaver dam. It is so big that it spans twice the width of the Hoover dam and can even be seen from space.

The enormous edifice measures 2,790ft (850metres) in length and shows the skill of the big-toothed furry animals.

The mammals use trees, mud and stone to make a type of moat where they can use their swimming skills to evade any predators.


This 850m long beaver dam in Alberta, Canada, is the world's biggest and can be seen from space. Beavers have been building the dam since 1975.

The families live in lodges on the dams and spend their days adding to and repairing the incredible structures.

The dam was spotted by experts monitoring the size and spread of the beaver dams in north America.

It is located on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta, Canada.


A small section of the beaver dam in Wood Buffalo National Park in Alberta, Canada


This annotated version of the Google Earth image shows the dam and the principal lodges

While beaver dams are often found to be around 1,500ft in length, this one has surprised biologists because of its length.

It is thought that several beaver families joined forces to create the massive dam that contains thousands of trees and must have taken many months to complete.

The dams are an important part of the ecology and wider environment and climate change can be judged by the spread of the dams.


An industrious beaver at the site of the worlds biggest beaver dam. It is thought a number of beaver families clubbed together to make the dam


The Hoover Dam is 1,244ft long

Sharon Brown, a biologist from Beavers: Wetland and Wildlife, an educational organisation in north America, said: 'Beavers build dams to create a good habitat. They are very agile in the water but they're a bit slow moving on land.

'They create a habitat with lots of water like a moat around their lodges so they can swim and drive and keep one step ahead of predators such as coyotes and bears.

'They also use water to move the trees they use in their dams because it is easier floating wood on water than dragging them over land.

'These habitats are not just good for them but for other animals and the environment.

'This dam is particularly big and Google Earth has also shown the beavers moving north because of climate change.

'Their dams are also good because they slow the flow of water leading to less drought and less flooding.

'And when plant matters dies in water it turns to peat and that is one of the best ways for storing CO2.'

[types]

I found an interesting book at my local book exchange, The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky. It is a series of short essays about how the mind works, and article 7.2, Uncommon Sense, just struck me as amazingly obvious, but I never thought about it that way before.

We've all heard jokes about how stupid present-day computers are.  They send us bills and checks for zero dollars and zero cents.  They don't mind working in endless loops, repeating the same thing a billion times.  Their total lack of common sense is another reason people think that no machine could have a mind.

It is interesting to note that some of the earliest computer programs excelled at what people consider to be "expert" skills.  A 1956 program solved hard problems in mathematical logic, and a 1961 program solved college-level problems in calculus.  Yet not til the 1970s could we construct robot programs that could see and move well enough to arrange children's building-blocks into simple towers and playhouses.  Why could we make programs do grown-up things before we could make them do childish things?  The answer may seem paradoxical:  much of "expert" adult thinking is actually simpler than what is involved when ordinary children play!  Why is it easier to program what experts do than what children do?

What people vaguely call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire.  Neither that "expert" program for logic nor the one for calculus embodied more than a hundred or so "facts"--and most of them were rather similar to one another.  Yet these were enough to solve college-level problems.  In contrast, think of all the different kinds of things a child must know merely to build a house of blocks--a process that involves knowledge of shapes and colors, space and time, support and balance, and an ability to keep track of what one is doing.

To be considered an "expert," one needs a large amount of knowledge of only a relatively few varieties. In contrast, an ordinary person's "common sense" involves a much larger variety of different types of knowledge--and this requires more complicated management systems.

There is a simple reason why it is easier to acquire specialized knowledge than commonsense knowledge.  Each type of knowledge needs some form of "representation" and a body of skills adapted to using that style of representations.  Once that investment has been made, it is relatively easy for a specialist to accumulate further knowledge, provided the additional expertise is uniform enough to suit the same style of representation.  A lawyer, doctor, architect, or composer who has learned to deal with a range of cases in some particular field finds it relatively easy to acquire more knowledge of a similar character.  Think how much longer it would take a single person to learn to deal competently with a few diseases and several kinds of law cases and a small variety of architectural blueprints and a few orchestral scores.  The greater variety of representations would make it much harder to acquire the "same amount" of knowledge.  For each new domain, our novice would have to learn another type of representation and new skills for using it.  It would be like learning many different languages, each with its own grammar, lexicon and idioms.  When seen this way, what children do seems all the more remarkable, since  so many of their actions are based upon their own inventions and discoveries.

So they will  never teach a computer to be an eyas, because they'd have to teach it to regulate its own temperature, play with its food (feet especially), flap its wings, jostle its nest mates, sleep in a huddle, poop, take bird baths in the gorge, catch food that's been dropped to it while flying, stoop turkey vultures and mourning doves, perch on Mercury and other buildings in the area... or any of the other wonderful things an eyas/fledge can do...

Here's to child's play!

From the same people who brought you the Lily and Hope cam, here is another web cam from the North American Bear Center. It is placed in an area frequented by three local bears, and, at the moment, a very active chipmunk.

Imagine having only four hours to create a work of art, before the New Zealand high tide washes it away...



Introducing Peter Donnelly, who has been doing this for over 18 years...

Visit the Domestic Transformer in Hong Kong. (Pretty amazing stuff!)

I've been everywhere - Johnny Cash

Well, her landmarks might be a bit different, but the theme is there...

WASHINGTON—Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano...She also says there are a number of surveillance cameras in the area and they could yield valuable videotape.

From notbored.com
"In 1998, the NYCLU located a total of 2,397 surveillance cameras in Manhattan; there were 75 in Times Square (the area south of 50th Street, north of 42d, west of Fifth Avenue and east of Eighth). In May 2000, we located and mapped out 131 surveillance cameras in the same area (we did not canvas all of Manhattan). In September 2002, we returned to Times Square and (starting from scratch) located, mapped out and counted the surveillance cameras in operation there. Our findings were alarming. Times Square contained (at least) 258 surveillance cameras, fully twice the number we spotted in 2000 and more than three  times the number spotted by the NYCLU in 1998. In May 2005, we counted 604 of them."

Just a few cameras to check...

This one is about an hour west of Rochester...picture updates every 25 seconds, with live streaming at the refuge, if you want to visit.
http://newyorkwild.org/kestrel/kestrel.htm

In the decloaking process, Archer produced a long white blur to the left of his beak in photo one, and nothing there in photo two. Do falcons spit?





(movie)

The new one is just starting to lift his head...

M & D, three little ones, one egg