Author: Seth Inman

Short Story Dispensers Aim to Dispense with Unproductive Waiting Time in Grenoble

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Screenshot from a spot by the French news channel M6

Last week Konbini, the online magazine dedicated to popular culture, featured a short story (the nonfiction kind) on the French city of Grenoble, so-called capital of the French Alps. In a collaboration between the city council and the French publishing company Short Édition, certain public spaces that frequently feature waiting time–libraries, the post office, the tourist center–have been equipped with short story dispensers.

After pressing a button to select between one-, three-, and five-minute stories, a long strip of paper is printed from the kiosk and the user can enjoy a piece of short fiction from Continue reading →

An Itchy Canivet’s Emerald at Xandari

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Earlier this week, while out on my morning bird-watching walk, I was lucky enough to watch this female Canivet’s Emerald (a small hummingbird that you don’t see every day here) stay at the same perch for over a minute.

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US Dept. of Interior’s Greater Sage-grouse Conservation Plan

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This July we shared the first news we had of the proposed western wildlife conservation plan as it related to the sagebrush habitat, and yesterday Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Interior, announced that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that the charismatic bird species will not be placed on the endangered species list due to the collaborative efforts in place to protect “the great empty.”

Here’s what John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, had to say on the matter:

This decision by USFWS is an important milestone in the history of the Endangered Species Act. It shows how the Act can be effective, not only when it calls for emergency regulations to save a species, but also as an incentive for governments, conservation groups, and private landowners to collaborate towards conserving a species before its populations become critically endangered. To all of those in the West who are working together, amidst so much controversy, to preempt a listing through proactive conservation, we say, ‘Great progress so far–please stay the course.’

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The Laughing Falcon

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James and I first heard a Laughing Falcon from Xandari property on the 6th of July last year, according to our eBird records. Since then I’ve heard the raucous call plenty of times but never actually got a glimpse of the bird until last month, when one individual happened to perch in the same area of the orchards two mornings in a row.

The Laughing Falcon primarily feeds on snakes, including venomous species, as well Continue reading →

The Gray-necked Wood-Rail

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Last month, I was using our most unique room at Xandari, Villa 20, as an office for a while. I say most unique — despite the fact that we have a Star Suite (Villa 27) — because 20 is constructed in a completely different way from all of Xandari’s other buildings. It is a round structure with a natural thatch roof, and it has huge windows affording about 180 degrees of view into the wooded gardens above the orange orchard. It so happens that this vegetated spot, not too far from the river that creates the southern border to Xandari’s property, is one of the stomping grounds for the Gray-necked Wood-Rail, a resident species of bird that is more often seen than heard, not only because it is extremely secretive and suspicious, but also incredibly loud.

As you can see in the final footage of the solitary individual above, they move cautiously while looking all around them for threats, and they move quite quickly when they perceive one. Continue reading →

The Blue-and-white Swallow

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A Blue-and-white Swallow with a view of Alajuela and the Santa Ana wind turbines

Nearly every day at Xandari you’re quite likely to spot some swallows zooming around anywhere between roughly ten and seventy feet above the ground, foraging for small insects on the wing. Chances are that these aerial insectivores are Blue-and-white Swallows (Pygochelidon cyanoleuca), although Northern Rough-winged Swallows have been seen here before too. The Blue-and-whites are typically in groups of five to twenty, but sometimes they’re solitary or in pairs, and you can also expect to see some swifts mixed in with the flock if there are lots of bugs in the air.

The footage above is from one afternoon last week when the swallows were enjoying Continue reading →

The Montezuma Oropendola

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A week or so ago, Jocelyn discussed the Montezuma Oropendola’s song as heard on Xandari property in Costa Rica. As you could hear from the linked vocalizations in her post, the bird makes an incredibly strange, gurgling/bubbling sound, recently described by a Xandari guest as “the sound of pouring water from one jug into another.” James and I have put up photos of the oropendola as Bird of the Day posts before, but I realized after reading Jocelyn’s thoughts on the bird that we haven’t featured any video of this common resident species at Xandari in the past. So I went out with my camera this weekend and was lucky enough to capture a minute of behavior footage to share here. The main thing missing is what the male often looks like when he’s vocalizing: perched on a branch, he typically leans forward as he calls, bending down so far that it appears he might suddenly fall off. At the end of his call he swings back up, and starts the process again.

Although the Montezuma Oropendola is a species commonly seen (or at least heard) from Xandari on most days, they don’t appear to have any nests on property. And you’d notice Continue reading →

Can a Casual Birder Have a 500+ Life List?

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A Swallow-tailed Kite – a relatively common CR species I first saw just last week – spotted from the El Copal Reserve in Cartago, Costa Rica.

About three years ago, I wrote in a post from Ecuador that “Even after taking a pretty intense ornithology class at Cornell University and working for the Lab of Ornithology, I don’t really consider myself a birder.” Last year I revised that statement a bit, clarifying that “now, as James and I add our observations around Xandari to eBird every day, my opinion may have changed slightly (though I can’t yet subscribe to the labels of bird-head or bird-nerd by a long shot).” Then, this January I wrote of myself and my friends John and Justin that, “Although none of us are the type of birder that pursue ‘life lists’ — a checklist of the thousands of bird species in the world that one has seen — we all use eBird and are definitely interested in seeing and identifying wildlife of any sort.”

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Revamped Xandari Pysanky

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Last time I posted about pysanky at Xandari was about six months ago, when I showcased some new designs revolving around simple geometric patterns and Costa Rican soccer teams. A few months before that I made a video that displayed the process of making an egg sped up quite a bit. Now, as you can see from the egg photos above with before-and-after wax shots, I’m working Continue reading →

Winnie-the-Pooh Wants to Save the Bees

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Planting a bee-friendly tree beneath Warwick Castle. Via The Telegraph.

Last month, I shared a story from Cornell’s orchards, where apple blossoms were pollinated this year solely by local wild bee species rather than commercial honeybees. Funnily enough, the same day I posted that story, the science editor for The Telegraph wrote a piece concerning bees across the Atlantic, where the British Beekeepers Association has partnered with one of the original Winnie-the-Pooh illustrators to make a new story encouraging children to care for these productive insects. As Pooh tells Piglet in the new story when they realize there is a shortage of honey, “you can only be careful for so long before you run out altogether.” Sarah Knapton reports:

Beekeepers are also hoping to engage children by encouraging them to bake with local honey, become beekeepers, visit nearby apiaries and throw seed-bombs to help the spread of wildflowers.

New illustrations show AA Milne’s characters Christopher Robin, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore and Pooh making a vegetable patch in the Yorkshire Dales, building a bee box in the shadow of the Angel of the North in Gateshead, and planting a flowering tree in the shadow of Warwick Castle.

The friends are also pictured dropping bee-balls in Birmingham, painting in Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire and visiting a honey show in Glastonbury.

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Cornell Orchards Stick to Free Bees

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Bryan Danforth inspects apple blossoms and native pollinators at the Cornell Orchards. © Jason Koski/University Photography

Earlier this spring, instead of hiring commercial honeybee keepers to bring in their hives to apple orchards, Cornell decided to try relying solely on wild bee species for pollination of the blossoms at their Ithaca site. Based on research from the university’s entomology department, the Cornell Orchards knew it had a robust population comprised of twenty-six different wild bee species among the Ithaca apple trees. They counted on this local bee life to do all the pollinating work that the imported European honeybees would have done, and by the end of May it was clear that a full crop’s worth of flowers had been pollinated! We’ve featured plenty of stories about the deeply troubling colony collapse disorder in Apis mellifera and are always eager to emphasize the importance of pollination, so it may seem strange to celebrate the non-use of European honeybees in this case, but the main point here is that the value of wild native bee species should not be forgotten! If commercial honeybees continue to struggle, alternative methods of pollination will be necessary, and fostering local biodiversity is a great way to compensate for that potential eventuality.

As a fun coincidence, I heard about this story because the lead researcher in the wild bee population was my entomology professor sophomore year. You can read more about Professor Bryan Danforth’s role and the Cornell Orchards decision in the piece for the Cornell Chronicle below, by John Carberry:

As the state’s land-grant institution, Cornell University was born to explore science for the public good – a mission that can sometimes require a leap of faith.

Just such a leap is paying off now at Cornell Orchards in Ithaca, as researchers and managers from the Horticulture Section of the School of Integrative Plant Science and the Department of Entomology celebrate a solid spring pollination season for the site’s apple trees. While crisp apples and fresh cider Continue reading →

Back at Xandari

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My first Xandari sunset of 2015.

This week, after about six months away from Costa Rica, I’m working at Xandari again, and it’s good to be back! On Saturday morning I walked around the trails for a couple hours and logged thirty-one bird species seen or heard, which counts as a pretty good list for Xandari, in my experience. Among the usual suspects were a few birds that are relatively uncommon sights, though not rare by any means: Chestnut-collared Swifts, Sulphur-bellied Flycatchers, and a male Long-tailed Manakin, which is always a pleasure to see or even hear. I also got an uncharacteristically good look at a Rufous-and-white Wren, a species that long eluded our efforts to spot when James and I first got here a year ago, despite its eerily human-sounding whistle that frequently pierces the forest trails. And although it’s a very common bird around here, I did get an okay photo of the male Red-crowned Ant-Tanager, which can be tough given their predilection for skulking around among dense vines.

One of the plots of coffee planted last June, now shaded by banana and tiquisque.

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Casual Cultural Conservation Through Dance

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The only working Danish windmill in the US.

A few weeks ago I visited a friend from Cornell whose family lives in Nebraska and comprises a good portion of the Scandinavian Folk Dancers of Omaha. I’d seen them perform before at the New England Folk Festival in April, held in Mansfield, Massachusetts, but unfortunately at that point my phone’s camera wasn’t the right tool for the job of documenting their great dancing. This time, when the group performed on a much more intimate stage at the Danish Tivoli Festival in Elk Horn, Iowa, (Elk Horn and neighboring Kimballton apparently make up the largest rural Danish settlement in the US) I was ready with my camera and was able to take some half-decent videos of several of the dances. The audio quality isn’t the best given the slightly windy conditions, but hopefully you can get a general feel for the experience in the video below.

We’ve featured some thoughts on dance on the blog before, especially given Kerala’s Continue reading →

Another Step Forward for Merlin

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© Visipedia

I don’t mean the bird species, which is found in North America and also in different varieties elsewhere in the world. I’m not talking about the wizard, either. I’m referring, rather, to the Merlin Bird ID app that I wrote about last month. It turns out that Cornell Tech and Caltech, working together as a team called Visipedia, have been developing a new tool with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for Merlin Bird ID that involves computerized identification of bird photos. Called Merlin Photo ID, this beta-stage program can take an image of one of North America’s most common bird species (a pool of 400) and identify it after a human user has pointed out where its bill, eye, and tail are.

And after testing it out for a bit I learned that it doesn’t even need all of those Continue reading →