Every time I visit Mountsberg Conservation Area, I’m compelled to go get a few sketches of this bird. His name is Conan, and he made his living as an urban predator in Toronto before suffering a permanent wing injury (likely the result of being hit by a car) and ending up at Mountsberg’s raptor centre.
I love those colours and those markings, that stern little falcon face, and that periodic bob of the head while watching something that’s captured his interest.
I try to take him seriously, but cute and fluffy isn’t very convincing.
I had to share this animation, taken from a press release made by NASA this morning, and YouTube’d by the ever-awesome Phil Plait (who has a great blog post about it here). It’s an exceptionally clear and powerful illustration of just what that high-tech toy known as the Kepler Space Telescope is doing way up there in orbit. Kepler was only just launched in March, and this data is the result of a quick test of her abilities on a previously discovered planetary system — specifially, the roughly Jupiter-sized planet known as HAT-P-7b, which is so close to its own star that it completes an orbit in a mere 2.2 days. Measuring the exceedingly miniscule changes in the brightness of a distant star sounds like an awfully difficult means of inferring the existance of extra-solar planets (and it is!), but the animation does a spectacular job of illustrating just what the results mean. The first big drop in brightness shown is the planet transiting its star. The second is, amazingly, the star occulting the planet. And the remaining fluctuations? Those are the phases of HAT-P-7b as it orbits — just like the amount of light we see reflected off the Moon changes as it goes from new moon to full to new again!
This data shows that Kepler will be sensitive enough to detect Earth-sized planets, once her planet seeking begins in earnest. Most of the over 350 known extrasolar planets are broiling gas giants, but little rocky planets like ours are predicted to be more numerous. They’re out there, and Kepler will find them.
And once we do … then what?
We can use what we know about a star to determine where its habitable zone is — that Goldilocks region of not-too-hot and not-too-cold needed for liquid water to be present. We can determine approximately how old the system is, and thus whether or not there’s been enough time for life to evolve. And once we have a good candidate, we can do something like what LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) did last week when it turned its instruments to Earth:
LCROSS: Near-infrared spectrum of Earth (NASA).
LCROSS: UV/Visible spectrum of Earth (NASA).
Yes, it’s more graphs. No shiny animation to accompany them this time, but this is still pretty cool. These are measurements taken by LCROSS’s spectrometers, showing the spectra of our planet’s reflected light. There’s lots of methane (CH4), and ozone (O3), and carbon dioxide (CO2), and other things you can find on plenty of lifeless planets. But there’s also oxygen gas (O2), which is something you generally don’t find unless there’s some process continually producing it. Oxygen is unstable, and it gets eaten up pretty quickly by various chemical processes, but here on Earth we have organisms to replenish it. Which brings us to something else showing up in this spectral analysis — a signature that could be attributed to the large amount of vegetation that covers the Earth’s surface.
There’s a path that runs along Eastport Drive in Burlington, far more overgrown than most city trails. It winds its way along the shoreline to a small platform overlooking Hamilton Harbour, although the view is largely obstructed by trees and vegetation. It is not a peaceful place: behind you is the heavy drone of traffic crossing the towering Skyway Bridge, and before you is the incessant cacophony of hundreds of terns, cormorants and gulls crowding little islands of concrete and gravel. The smell is also less than pleasant, as seabird colonies tend to be, but the opportunity witness the hustle and bustle of so many breeding birds is worth it.
I came by a few weeks ago, slipping in a page of sketches before wisely fleeing the rumbling thunderheads that had swept in while I was absorbed in my work. I returned on Sunday to find that the small groups of bob-tailed tern fledglings had dispersed since then, and many appeared to have perished (the cause of so many strewn bodies was not evident). A few adults were seen brooding again, one bird sheltering both an egg and a day-old chick from the blazing sun.
There is little to no shade on the islands. This particular hairless primate wonders why they didn’t venture into the water to cool off, although such an activity may have little practical value to a buoyant and well-oiled bird.
The cormorants were sunning themselves on the far side of the island. I love sketching these birds. Smooth feathers and round shapes. Perfect.
Saturday morning I headed out to Grass Lake. The local Sandhill Cranes had been spotted several times recently engaging in courtship behaviour — unexpected for this time of year, I would think, but having never witnessed the famed crane dance I was only too eager to take advantage of their out-of-season amourousness.
The cranes were not visible when I arrived, so I took a stroll down Shouldice Road to see what I could stir up. The fields had been cut since my last visit, and there was no sign of the Bobolinks, or Meadowlarks, or even the Savannah Sparrows. But as I reached the end of the road I caught the weak, insect-like song of a Grasshopper Sparrow (one of Grass Lake’s specialties). He was quite caught up in his own performance, fluttering one wing or the other continuously as he threw back his head, thrust out his chest, and let loose with a disappointingly frail and pitiful buzz.
Grasshopper Sparrows are one of the more cryptic members of an already secretive clan. While most birds will pop up to a nearby high perch when flushed, this species would rather drop to the ground and scuttle off unseen. They are also rather particular about their desired breeding habitat, and so it’s not often that I encounter them here in southern Ontario. I’ve been birding long enough that, with most of the species I come across, a quick first impression is enough to identify the bird without tallying field marks. With sparrows, however, this method only seems to get me into trouble. A singing bird is much easier to identify conclusively, and I took the opportunity to make a few careful field notes to help out with my more ambiguous future encounters.
