For a limited time only
May 11, 2009 by
DaveC
From my doorstoop:
Blackburnian Warbler, Mourning Warbler, Nashville Warble, Yellow Warbler
These little fuckers won't sit still, and I'm afraid I'm hurting my neck trying to look at them.
The Indigo Bunting and Rose Breasted Grosbeak yesterday were much better behaved
A week and a half ago the Myrtles, Magnolias, and gazillions of Palm Warblers were around by work, along with Ruby Crowned Kinglets.
Golden Crowned Kinglets have been trickling by since the end of March. Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers last weekend.
Come and gone, mainly in April, from the lake across the highway and elsewhere close by:
Redheads (hundreds!), Coots, Goldeneye, Bufflehead, Lesser Scaup, Ruddy Ducks, Shovelers, Pintail?, Hooded Mergansers, Red Breasted Mergansers, Pied Billed Grebes, Horned Grebes!, Western Grebe! (by work), Loons, Crested Cormorants, Caspian Terns, Osprey.
Some of these stick around, but most are just passing through.
Comments
May 12, 2009, 01:56:16 russell wrote:
Sweet. Thanks for sharing this Dave.
We have three nesting pairs of sparrows in the back yard. Two in birdhouses, one up under the eaves on top of an outdoor speaker. Apparently they are music lovers.
Most of what we see around my way are the typical suburban mix -- sparrows, goldfinches, titmice, woodpecker, nuthatch, cardinal. Sometimes an oriole, sometimes a red wing blackbird. Robins.
Oh yeah, crows and grackles.
Your mix sounds quite nice.
May 12, 2009, 07:39:54 tgott wrote:
I find a backyard full of birds simply enchanting.
On one side of our garage, our ivy is really fourishing and practially covers one of the outdoor lights, where right above it a robin just gave birth to three babies. And as corny as it sounds my wife and I are so proud they picked our home to be theirs.
I read the Sunday NYT on the back porch, the mom eyeing me up every once in a while -- I was clearly doing more ogling. She spent the whole day collecting worms, back and forth, back and forth to the nest, covered in ivy, the baby birds' mouths wide open and poking out; just lovely to watch.
I won't turn on the back lights when I let our old Beagle out to pee at night. Yesterday I made quick work of cutting the grass and didn't dare get to close to the little rascals, fearful the mower would freak them out. Saturday night we had a wind/rain storm and I kept telling the wife I was worried about the birds; she was, too. Silly, I know. But I guess there is something about a newborn, no matter the species, that is precious and dear.
I love our backyard. Three old trees give it character. Getting ready for work this morning, I saw a crow chase a squirrel up a tree. The squirrel was dumbfounded.
In general, I've noticed the size of some of these crows are outrageous. Steroids?
We get those red-wing blackbirds, too, the stripe giving the impression of a faster takeoff.
Cardinals are my favorite. Period. I love their movements and sounds. Both heavenly and majestic.
I know people who've cut down healthy trees because they find them to be a nusance.
These people are nuts. And a nusance.
---bedtimeforbonzo
May 13, 2009, 02:08:00 DonaldJ wrote:
Off topic, but has anyone else had trouble posting a comment at ObiWi? I just tried, but found the "post" button doesn't work.
May 13, 2009, 04:35:40 Ugh wrote:
DonaldJ - it happens to me every so often. Usually I just close the browser and re-open it and it goes away, but sometimes that doesn't work.
May 13, 2009, 05:25:42 DonaldJ wrote:
Thanks, Ugh. Unfortunately I tried it , but it didn't work. First time I've had this happen.
May 13, 2009, 06:52:26 tgott wrote:
DaveC: Your workplace seems to afford you some pretty good scenery in the birding department.
You'd think I'd be in a kind of hell working the blacktop of a used car lot. However, our lot abutts train tracks -- and separating the tracks and the lot are a row of grown maple trees, the size of almost two football fields.
On a nice spring day, the birds make sweet music. I throw nuts up to the squirrels from time to time and have had to chase some off the lot that have wandered too far down near the main road.
One of the coolest things I have ever seen was several months back. I think I was showing a customer a truck of some kind when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a red fox strutting down the train tracks as if they were there for him to stroll. And stroll he did.
The fox was a beauty, heading in the direction of downtown Newark and the University of Delaware campus. My customer was nonplussed but I thought it was an awesome sight and still do.
---btfb
May 13, 2009, 08:39:08 DonaldJ wrote:
Still can't post. Anyway, what I wanted to point out is that according to a Guardian report a few years ago, the British did use torture on German prisoners.
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/u...">Link</a>
May 15, 2009, 14:16:27 marbel wrote:
Donald: I don't remember reading this specific article, but I googled for another article I remembered, [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/p...]with photo's[/url], and found that it was from the same author. As is [url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/u...]this article[/url]
If you click his name, you'll see that he has written extensively about british complicity.
May 15, 2009, 14:18:05 marbel wrote:
I never seem to get the linking right in bbcode. This article should link to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/u...
May 16, 2009, 11:06:39 DonaldJ wrote:
I just read your link, marbel. Good lord. If that's true, the British were quite possibly worse than Bush.
In general I'm uncomfortable with the notion that Bush represents something uniquely bad in US/Western history, while still wanting to see members of his Administration prosecuted. If I could have posted at ObiWi I'd have been on novakant's side when he was saying that other actions in war are arguably as bad or worse than torture. (Now what was also saying this, but in his characteristically trollish way--his goal seems to be to demonstrate how toughminded he is.) I have this argument with a friend of mine in real life--he thinks that if we mention the war crimes that the US has been guilty of before Bush, it would weaken the case for prosecution and he gets angry at lefties who write articles saying "Bush's war crimes aren't all that out of the mainstream."
May 17, 2009, 03:15:49 Turbulence wrote:
[i]In general I'm uncomfortable with the notion that Bush represents something uniquely bad in US/Western history, while still wanting to see members of his Administration prosecuted.[/i]
I agree with you, I think. On the one hand, I think Bush really did represent something novel: an unwillingness to keep up appearances. American governments over the last 60 years have done terrible things but they at least acted like they had some notion that doing terrible things was wrong and that you should try to cover them up. Bush acted like he just didn't care. In a way, I found that refreshing.
But there are a lot of people who seem to think that before Bush, the US government was this great force for good in the world then Bush came along and ruined it. I find talking with such people very strange because I remind them of all sorts of bad things non-Bush Presidents have done abroad (and that Obama is mostly continuing) and they don't really object all the while clinging to their "US was great until Bush came along!" story line. Has anyone else run into that?
[i]If I could have posted at ObiWi I'd have been on novakant's side when he was saying that other actions in war are arguably as bad or worse than torture. (Now what was also saying this, but in his characteristically trollish way--his goal seems to be to demonstrate how toughminded he is.) I have this argument with a friend of mine in real life--he thinks that if we mention the war crimes that the US has been guilty of before Bush, it would weaken the case for prosecution and he gets angry at lefties who write articles saying "Bush's war crimes aren't all that out of the mainstream."[/i]
I just don't get where the novakent/now_what argument is supposed to go. War is horrible. Should we abolish war? Well, they say they don't believe in pacifism. The laws of war give war some legitimacy. Should we abolish them? They don't say. The laws of war are not consistently enforced so we end up with a lot of victor's justice...what should we do about that? They don't say. Would fewer people die if stopped implicitly condoning wars by talking about all these legal/ethical niceties like the just war theory, the UN, geneva conventions, international law, etc.? Surprise!...they don't say.
May 17, 2009, 06:34:16 marbel wrote:
[i]In general I'm uncomfortable with the notion that Bush represents something uniquely bad in US/Western history, while still wanting to see members of his Administration prosecuted.[/i]
Usually the older the country, the more black pages in the history books. We have done horrible things [url=http://indonesiadutch.blogs...]in Indonesia[/url], punishing the soldiers who refused to cooperate much harder than the ones who did. 60 years later those actions are still an issue. But looking at what happened in the past and/or elsewhere is usually not the best way to judge current actions.
I want a world where torture is seen as wrong. If one of the major powers in our current world effectively condones it, it will become more acceptable. We live in an age with more individual freedoms, more protection of personal choices, more equality independent of gender/colour/class. Human rights have never really been an issue but nowadays they are.
May 17, 2009, 10:05:02 DonaldJ wrote:
I don't know or care what now-what thinks, but I think novakant might be in favor of a strict adherence to just war theory, or it could be I'm projecting my own views on him. Not that I have a super clear notion of what just war theory would entail, but among other things it'd rule out things like the Iraq invasion, and if someone went ahead and did it, we'd all agree that it was a crime of aggression. I think this is part of what novakant is saying--by focusing on torture, we let the larger point slip by, which is that the entire war was criminal from the start. Which I know you (Turbulence) agree with (or that's my impression), but in the larger political world it's still not possible to say "Bush should be put on trial for the crime of aggression" and be taken seriously.
On the bright side, though, the idea that Bush Administration officials should be tried (at least for torture) has gotten a lot further than I would have ever guessed it would a few years ago (not that it is likely to happen in this country).
I agree that Bush's contribution to American history has been to make the pro-torture position a respectable one--we've taken a big step backwards.
And I might as well waste some time saying why I think now-what's position is just crap. I partly agree with him that torture is no worse than a lot of other things we do, but IMO inconsistency is better than consistency which goes in the wrong direction. Now-what seems to think he's a lefty, but why any lefty would want torture added to the list of things governments can legitimately do in wartime escapes me.
May 17, 2009, 10:56:02 russell wrote:
[i]In general I'm uncomfortable with the notion that Bush represents something uniquely bad in US/Western history[/i]
I don't think Bush was anything close to uniquely bad in either US or Western history. By any reasonable standard, we engaged in genocide against native americans. We enslaved blacks for hundreds of years, and enshrined slavery in our Constitution. We've engaged in wars for spurious or even blatantly fraudulent reasons.
Unlike all of those examples, Bush is the case at hand.
If we do not make a clear legal statement that torture, along with the other illegal actions of Bush et al, are in fact illegal, they will stand. They will not go away, but in fact will be a precedent.
Torture is wrong because it's wrong. It's against the law, it's against treaties we have signed, it violates the Geneva Conventions. It's morally hideous.
So are nuclear weapons. Fine, let's get rid of them too.
In the meantime, let's apply the freaking law to the folks who broke it.
Log in here
Add Comment
