Charlie Mezak

The Birds App now has a website at www.charliemezak.com/birds/

Check it out!

- Charlie

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Disappointments are inevitable, but most days end well.

I have recently been working on an iPhone application that I hoped would be a full-fledged field guide to birds.  How awesome would it be to have an entire field guide at your fingertips whenever you need it?  Very awesome.  The catch is that there are at least two awesome field guides in the works for the iPhone (this one and this one).  I was pretty bummed out about it this morning, but after a day slogging through nonlinear differential equations I stepped out on my fire escape to watch the birds.  In about an hour I saw nearly a dozen different species, including a baltimore oriole, a cardinal, a blue jay, a hummingbird . . . I realized that I would like to track my sightings.  I also immediately realized how easy it would be to write an iPhone app to handle this simple task.  I plan to get to work on it tonight, and a lot of my work on the defunct field guide project will help me out.

As I am wont to do, I’ve come up with big plans for this app.  I look forward to posting about its development!

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How awesome. An application for the iPhone has just been released allowing users to connect and post to their wordpress blogs (like this one!). I’m typing this post on my iPod.

I have actually been doing some iPhone development of my own. I’m very excited about it, and I hope to make it public in the near future.

We shall see!

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I brought my tripod out onto the fire escape this morning to see what my camera could see in the neighbors’ mulberry tree.  It’s a very popular feeding spot for medium-sized birds, both for the berries and for the many larger trees next to it that provide some quick cover when they decide to split the scene.

It’s a windy day today, which makes eating berries in a thin-limbed tree pretty difficult for these birds.  In fact, when a strong breeze is on, the tree looks like a dangerous place to be hanging out, leaves and limbs flailing everywhere.  The wind comes in sudden blasts that audibly rustle the surrounding trees before the mulberry tree gets hit.  The birds hear this and most of them run for it.  One juvenile robin either didn’t know to dash away or just didn’t mind riding the tree through the wind, because it stuck around when everybody else fled.  I was standing on the second story of the fire escape, at about the level of the center of the tree’s crown, and this robin seemed to be curious about me.  It sat a few feet from me and watched me for about ten minutes.

An unobvious advantage of the tripod is that it actually seems to camouflage me.  Any person would clearly see me standing behind it, but the tripod must obscure me enough so that I don’t set off the birds’ instinctual flight mechanism.  Some of them do keep an eye on me when they’re in my vicinity, but their desire for berries must push them to give me the benefit of the doubt.  Some, like that robin, don’t seem afraid at all.

I finally got some nice photos of a cedar waxwing!  I had only seen this species once before, and even then I hadn’t been sure.  I only had one photo of it, in which it looks rather extraterrestrial.  Now that I have seen it up close and taken some better photographs, I’m still not sure.  Frankly, it looks like a superhero with it’s soft orange body, black mask, and sculpted crown.  If you don’t believe me, look at this.  The cedar waxwing’s call is not quite what I expected, either.  It’s a high, half-second trill that sounds almost like a cricket chirp.

I read The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill over Christmas last year.  I’m sure that it inspired many attempts at reproducing Mark Bittner’s remarkable story.  I’m not out to do exactly that, but I am reminded of the book when I watch these birds.  They’re not parrots, but they are pretty goofy.  Sometimes a few robins come in for a noisy landing and fall all over each other and down through the branches as they do so.  I have to try not to laugh too loudly lest I scare them away.

I also walked over to WPI today, where I caught a few interesting things.  These new photos highlight my need for a diffuser or polarizing filter on the end of my lens.  I’ll start looking into that.

Everything new is in my Flickr photostream.

Tags:   birds · mulberry · robin · waxwingNo Comments.

I abandoned Facebook months ago for numerous reasons, and I’ve resisted getting sucked into any other virtual networking websites.  One thing I do miss, though, is the photo-sharing features of Facebook.  For that reason, I’ve started to take Flickr more seriously.  As with so many things Web 2.0, it has some features I don’t use, lacks some I would like, but more or less does what I want it to do.  It sure is nice to be able to archive fullsize photos, given all of the hard disk trouble I’ve been having lately.

I’ve been working on compiling photos of plants, animals, and fungi that I encounter.  I’ve been shooting everything with my Nikon D40x and a 55-200mm lens.  The lens is alright for telephoto shots in good light (Its long end is equivalent to about 300mm on a 35mm camera) and alright for macro (although the minimum focusing distance is pretty long, so I have to stand far away and zoom way in.  It’s hard to get sharp photos that way).  I’m happy with what I’ve got so far.  It’s all posted on Flickr here.

Tags:   photography nature animals plants fungiNo Comments.

When I was pretty young, I read the book Hot Zone by Richard Preston and immediately became sure that I would be a virologist.  The book is a sort of non-fiction science thriller about the (extremely terrifying) ebola virus.  I would recite to my friends the gory facts that I had learned, and I still remember some of them today.

I hadn’t read another book of Preston’s since, partly because I developed the opinion that his books were a little exploitative of science and manipulative of the reader.  They seemed (judging by the covers I saw at my job at a used bookstore) to be more like Michael Crighton novels than works of scholarship or literature.  I hadn’t read any other books of his, that is, until last week.

I first heard about Preston’s book The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring on John Stewart’s The Daily Show some months ago.  Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, my current home in Worcester MA has me missing the gigantic conifers of my homeland, so I took note.  A couple of weeks ago, I spotted the book in the WPI library and decided to give it a shot.  The book has had a huge impact on me.

The Wild Trees tells the story of the first people to explore the redwood canopy along the Pacific coast in northern California and southern Oregon.  These trees are the remnants of what used to be a global realm of redwoods that began over 200 million years ago.  The old growth redwoods that still stand are thousands of years old, and nobody (except, to some degree, the logging industry) had ever really explored them from the ground, much less from their crowns.  As it turns out, the redwood canopy is a sort of forest in a forest.  There is enough light, water, and soil in the canopy to support entire elevated ecosystems parallel to that of the forest floor.  We’re talking ferns, bushes, and sometimes small trees growing literally in the crowns of these giant trees.  Salamanders seem to be able to live their entire life cycles on and in the redwoods.  even copepods, tiny insect-like marine creatures that normally live on riverbeds have been found living quite happily in wet moss over 300 feet above the ground!

Woven in with these astounding facts is the equally engrossing story of how they were recorded.  It took a unique and varied cast of characters to break into the redwood canopy, and Preston traces each of their beginnings, from youths living in a lakeside cabin in Canada, selling cutco knives in Santa Barbara, and playing Dungeons and Dragons in basements.  Sometimes it truly does take an oddball (or several of them) to do something great, and the development of these people’s passion for trees into full-fruiting (or cone-bearing, I suppose) success is inspiring to behold.

So, on one level, the book has inspired me to keep moving forward with my interests in spite of everything that I don’t know.  On another, more direct level, I’ve been inspired to get into trees - figuratively and literally.  On the figurative end, I’m trying to learn the names and stories of the trees around me.  On the literal end, I am going to take a course in climbing through the New England Tree Climbing Association as soon as I can afford it.

And in general, I’m trying to take note of more of the flora and fauna that I see.  I’ve always thought of the great naturalists as being geniuses beyond the realm of most other people.  That they may be, but I’ve found that I can at least drink from the same well as they.  The well of nature is, after all, everywhere.  Gary Snyder says that if you want to find nature, start where you are.  Some photographs of birds from my kitchen window are up on Flickr.

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There’s a tree in my neighbors’ yard that unloads berries all over my car during the summer.  It also attracts a pretty lively cast of birds and squirrels.  I’ve posted some shots of the birds on Flickr.

I’ve begun to employ my camera and some guidebooks in an effort to get a better grip on my natural surroundings.  After travelling to Namibia this spring, I thought I might be underwhelmed by the variety back home, but it turns out that there’s quite a lot to see just about everywhere you look if you really look.

I’m going to start looking into better ways of tracking and sharing my observations.  I’ve had trouble making some identifications, and guidebooks can only be so much help.  Harnessing the social power of the internet towards this stuff might be extremely useful.

Tags:   birds · photos1 Comment

I recently drove up to Keene, New Hampshire to visit Antioch University and check out their environmental studies graduate program. Many things impressed me about the visit, including the beauty of southern New Hampshire in early summer. The program at Antioch is small in size but not in stature - it generates the third highest number of Switzer Fellowships each year, behind UC Berkeley and Yale.

After many information sessions, the remaining visitors were taken on a short hike with Tom Wessels. This was one of the coolest experiences I’ve had in a while. We walked along a trail in a nearby forest, stopping every few minutes when Tom would point to a tree or a patch of ground and ask us a simple question about it, like “Was this tree alive or dead when it fell?” The answers were worked out in a Socratic fashion, with Tom asking more questions and leading us through to understanding before giving us all of the details. Since then, I’ve been looking much more closely at my surroundings when I walk to campus or take my bike out for a ride. What used to be inert scenery is now rich and navigable in a new way.

Before leaving Keene, we stopped at a bookstore where I picked up a copy of Tom’s book The Myth of Progress, which I finished reading yesterday. I knew I had to read the book because when I first opened it I found a reference to Edward Lorentz’s system of equations that led to the creation of chaos theory. I’m currently working on a study of those equations, and although my project is strictly a mathematical study, I know that this work is relevant to my studies in ecology and environmental issues.

Although I have appreciated more rigor in his treatment of some of the technical concepts dealt with in the book - nonlinearity, chaos, bifurcations, etc. - Wessels does a good job of using these concepts to explain why the reigning economic system is unstable and unlikely to ever fulfill the many promises of peace and prosperity made by economists and politicians. The greatest underlying problem he identifies is the belief that economic progress relies upon or is identified with economic growth - i.e. the transformation of an ever-increasing amount of resources into salable stuff - something that is not possible for simple reasons having to do with thermodynamics and the finiteness of the planet. Even if it were possible, Wessels also describes how an obsession with economic abstractions like GDP and CPI divorce measures of economic progress from the well-being of real people, which is what we are supposedly all striving for in the first place.

The book is relatively short - about 120 pages - but the endnotes of each chapter are a really good starting place for further reading. One topic I am certainly going to look into is steady-state economics, an idea put forward by economist Herman Daly in the late 70s that proffers a way of framing economic progress in a way that reflects real improvements in the lives of citizens. The WPI library has a few books by Daly that I’ll check out today.

Tags:   antioch university · books · ecology · economics · herman daly · mathematics · tom wessels1 Comment

I was a little dissappointed my diploma wasn’t a scroll
Originally uploaded by kjax

My lovely ladyfriend, Kathryn, has just graduated from Bennington College. Yay for her!

Tags:   kathryn2 Comments

I finally spent the few minutes that it took to organize my flickr photos from my recent trip to Namibia.

I went there with WPI to work with the Desert Research Foundation of Namibia (DRFN) on water and sanitation management in the large, arid Fish River Basin. We interviewed experts, public officials, and community members about water and sanitation issues in the basin and compiled it all into a huge report to assist in the beginnings of basin management.

Anyway, there was also some time for leisure travel, too, and it’s all up - and organized - on flickr.

Tags:   DRFN · flickr · namibia · photos · travel · water · WPINo Comments.