The phoebe and the porch light

 (An Eastern Phoebe with an insect.  Is it the same bird nesting on my porch light year after year?)

Each year in late March, Eastern Phoebes (Sayornis phoebe) return to my property from having spent the winter as far south as Mexico.  Today, they returned.  I can always tell, because the male sings incessantly when he returns, and his favorite song perch seems to be at the corner of our house next to our bedroom.  The singing starts just before it is light, so spring phoebes and DrTom are on the same schedule, fortunately.  I love early morning.

Bird migration has always fascinated me.  I have been more interested in why birds migrate, than in how they do it.  The answers to the how question are truly astounding, and there are many good summaries of this.  Much of the early pioneering work on this topic was done at Cornell University by Bill Keeton, who used homing pigeons as his model.  And the Germans Kramer, Sauer, and Wiltschko are important.  Depending on the species, they might use visual landmarks like rivers during the day, or they use the sun’s location, or they navigate at night by orienting to the stars, or they use the earth’s magnetic field.  Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus), for example, contain small deposits of an iron compound called magnetite in their skulls.  This is presumably used to detect the weak forces of the earth’s magnetic field to help them migrate between North and South America.

Eric Bollinger and I published a number of papers in the 1980s on Bobolinks and the behavior known as breeding site fidelity, or breeding site faithfulness.  This is the tendency of individuals to return to the exact location where they bred the year before.  It turns out that this is a common phenomenon in migratory songbirds: adults often return to the exact location where they bred the year before, but their babies rarely return to the place where they were born.  In Bobolinks and most songbirds where this has been studied, adults tend to return to the site where they bred the year before if they were successful in producing babies at that location.  If the nestlings had been eaten by a snake or a skunk, for example, or the nest was destroyed by farming equipment, then those adults tend not to return to the same location the following year.  It appears there is a simple Darwinian algorithm operating in those pea-sized brains: if I was successful in producing offspring, return; if I was unsuccessful, do not return.

So, every year since 1980 we have had a pair of Eastern Phoebes near our home.  But the observation is more remarkable than that.  Phoebes originally nested on ledges beneath an overhang, probably rocky cliffs.  Houses, however, are a great substitute, because of the overhanging eaves and the existence of some kind of platform beneath that overhead protection—like a window ledge.  At our home, phoebes almost always use the light fixture next to the front door.  (They also use a window ledge on the back of the house.) This is convenient for me, because every morning during the breeding season, I step outside, reach my hand up and into the nest, count the number of eggs or nestlings by feel, and then resume drinking my Cafe Britt coffee (which, by the way, you can buy on this site).  Although I have never formally studied phoebes, this would make for pretty easy field work.  The bottom line is that nearly every year, the nest over our light fixture successfully fledges 4-5 young.

Now, I have never banded the phoebes at my house, and this is unfortunate.  I am missing a lot of the biological story, because I do not know if these are the same individuals that return to my property each year.  But for 28 years, phoebes have nested on this light fixture and yet these birds probably live only a few years—they can not be the same individuals during all of that time.  This means that new birds sometimes settle near my house, start looking for a suitable nest site, see the light fixture under that overhang, and a “CFL light bulb” goes off in their little head.  (Research has proven that light bulbs in bird heads are fluorescent and not incandescent).  Each succeeding generation of phoebes spots that nest location and simply can not resist it, in spite of the fact that every time we enter or leave the front door, the attending adult is flushed off the nest.

As you can see, my original interest in site fidelity has blended with a fascination for this incredible innate focus by the bird on a suitable resource, in this case a nest site.  I am sure that exactly the same consistency and skill go into locating and capturing food—phoebes mainly eat flying insects like moths.  Many thousands of years of natural selection have honed these abilities into a razor-sharp performance, which ensures their survival and successful reproduction.  For me, spring has not really started until I hear that simple, yet distinctive song of the phoebe.  My coffee is ready, so all I need now is this year’s nest.

Is life better with cell phones or is it just different?

(Electronic stuff.  Is life better or just different?)

My previous blog criticizing cell phones caused me to reexamine a question about which I have long pondered.  Are we better off with the invention of modern conveniences like cell phones or is life just different?  This is an extremely complex question, and one should not answer this glibly.  It seems to me that the only way to approach this problem is by using a cost-benefit perspective.  Let's return to the cell phone example. 

Cell phones allow us to communicate with other people and their electronic devices from almost any place at almost any time.  We can not only make voice calls, but we can send text messages that sit there until the receiver responds, and send photos.  With the "smart" phones, you can connect with the internet, and there are thousands of applications that can be downloaded that provide music, games, other forms of entertainment, and tools that range from determining what elevation you are at to helping you identify birds in the field.  Basically, you can send more information faster than ever before.  Very kewl, and extremely useful at times.

What about the costs?  Most people probably pay more per month than they would for their land line, cell reception is not as clear or as reliable as a land line (we need more frickin towers on more hills?), and the recent 10-year study released by the World Health Organization demonstrates that prolonged cell use increases the chances of developing a brain tumor.  One noted neurosurgeon, Dr. Vini Khurana, believes that worldwide there will be more deaths from cell phone use than from cigarette smoking, given that 3 billion people use cells.  Children, in particular, are warned not to use cell phones for long periods of time.  There are 330,000 vehicle accidents per year due to cell phone use while driving.  But other studies do not find a link between cancer and cell use.  So, innocent until proven guilty, or should it be guilty until proven innocent, like the FDA treats prescription drugs until rigorous tests prove otherwise?

In my originally question, I used the word "better" - is life better with a modern convenience like a cell phone or is it just different?  To answer this question, someone has to define the word "better", and I will leave that to you.  Is my life better because I can listen to music on my commute to work on the train rather than reading a book, or watching people, or talking to the passenger in the seat next to me? 

I've been picking on cell phones lately as the example du jour.  But you could replace the words cell phone with plastic bags, indoor carpeting, gasoline, automobile, prophylactics, shoes, rubber bands, or antibiotics.   Many, but not all, of these items results in a short-term benefit for the individual who uses them at the cost of degrading the greater environment for everyone else.

If, in fact, we could agree that life is mostly just different, not better, with some inventions, then the cost-benefit analysis begins to take a modified form.  Is it worth this "difference" to use a cell phone but to increase your chances of developing a brain tumor?  Is it worth this "difference" to be able to carry around water you bought in a store if it increases the plastic load in our landfills significantly?

On the other hand, if everyone in your community, or neighborhood, or profession adopt this new device and you do not, are you then at a significant disadvantage relative to your peers or competitors?  Maybe these devices result in life being "better" for the individual only after nearly everyone else has already adopted the thing.  It would be tough to be successful selling real estate if you had no phone when all the other agents did. But if no one had them, maybe life would not be any worse off for anyone.

I think the original question here would be a great topic for high school or college essays.  My perspective almost always comes from thinking about the trade-off between the quality of life for individuals versus the environmental cost to society generally, and there is almost always one.  What do you think?

Walk a mile in my shoes

(These shoes now reside in Paris.  Ignore the mismatched socks; that was just an absent-minded professor thing.)

The heavy, tight-fitting leather shoes were hurting my feet something awful, and I couldn't take it anymore.  So I removed them as soon as we disembarked from the subway near our room, and set them in an obvious place on the sidewalk against a building.  I walked the remainder of the distance to our room in my socks.  I suppose this was the first time an American had ever left a pair of perfectly good shoes on the sidewalk in the 16th arrondissement (the Trocadero section) in Paris.  My feet felt better instantly and I felt liberated generally.  Nearly barefoot on a Parisian sidewalk, and I didn't give a damn.

About a year after this, I was in Kenya for an international meeting in Nairobi.  After the meeting, I went on a little safari to the Maasai-Mara, where I stayed in a small tent camp.  On this trip I took a pair of sandals, to wear around the camp, and some high-top hiking shoes for daily excursions onto the savanna.  My Maasai guide and I hit it off right away; he knew all the birds in the area, and I wanted to know them all.  But during my two days with him it was obvious that he coveted my sandals, which he saw me wear to dinner each night.  When I was about to leave on the third day, I made a gift of the sandals to this young guy, who was extremely pleased to receive them.  He promised that if I ever returned, one of his wives would fix me a nice dinner.  Sounded good to me, as long as the dinner did not consist only of cattle blood.  By the way, if you have any good recipes using this "food", please pass it along.

Then, last month in Costa Rica my feet developed a rash that would stop the bulls in Pamplona.  I was convinced it was due to the Crocs I had been wearing, and they weren't very comfortable anyway.  However, I admit that the Facebook group that I had only just discovered titled "I Don't Care How Comfortable Crocs Are, You Look Like A Dumbass" was haunting me. I seem to have a deficiency when it comes to buying footwear that works for me.  So I gave the Crocs to the cleaning lady at the Hotel Herradura in San Jose.  They were nearly new and I didn't want to just toss them in the trash.  Bon appetit, or I'd guess you'd say bon chaussures.

So, three pairs of footwear left on three continents during a 3-year period.  I had become a one-man TOMS shoes' representative.  Although I was feeling a bit like a poor-man's philanthropist, I was more taken by the kind of story I might tell about this behavior.  Of course, the idiom that came to mind was"walk a mile in my shoes".  But that is an invitation for someone to see the world from your point of view or station in life, and literally wearing someone else's shoes does not accomplish that at all.   Ironically, given that people in the countries I visited wanted to own MY shoes almost allowed me to walk a bit in their shoes, if you catch my drift.

I suppose it is not a coincidence that we focus so much on footwear.  After all, you could walk around without a shirt or pants or dress if you really had to.  You might be embarrassed, but you can physically do it.  But try walking around Paris or San Jose or the tropical savannas of Africa barefooted and your physical metal would be sorely tested.  In other words, shoes may have become a method of making a fashion statement in the modern, affluent world, but it is damned practical to have some protection on the bottom of your walking tools.  I have stated this before but, after spending time in agricultural areas of tropical America, I have never looked at a banana or a cup of coffee without deep appreciation for the human sweat it took to produce those commodities.  Similarly, I will never look again at the choices in my shoe collection with passive disdain, even if the selection of the day makes me look like a dumbass.