Running Commentary 10/21/2024

Hello,

I had an incredibly good weekend of birding. Saturday night I went to Big Marsh Lake in Bellevue, where many of southwestern Michigan's migrating sandhill cranes come to roost. I saw at least a couple thousand all gathered by the time the sun was setting and I had to leave. It was quite loud (as you'll be able to hear in the attached video).

Then yesterday morning I checked in on one of my regular duck ponds and found a small group of green-winged teals, along with a few other migrating ducks (and the usual Canada geese and mallards).

The most exciting was the bird I didn't get a photo of: a Virginia rail. I heard one of these exceedingly shy little marsh birds calling from in the reeds, then I was able to spot it. It moved around, and I was able to see it in pieces between the cat-tails before it dropped down out of sight. While they aren't rare birds, it's rare one gets an actual view of a rail, even obscured as this one was. Spotting this bird absolutely made my Fall, and my report made eBird's emailed Rare Bird Alert for Michigan. (Expect the Virginia rail to be Bird of the Week sometime soon.)

Also everywhere I went, including my own yard and a friend's, seemed full of white-throated sparrows; keep an eye out for them this year.

Anyway...

Watching...

Elementary

I saw that Elementary was now available from Prime Video, and it occurred to me that I'd never seen it, despite being a Sherlock Holmes fan. It's an American adaptation set in modern NYC that came out around the same time as the BBC's Sherlock (set in modern London), but unlike Sherlock it seems to have maintained its good reputation throughout it's run. And since that run lasted 7 (or, apparently, more like 6-and-a-half) seasons, it promises quite a bit of good Sherlock Holmes stories.

I'm not going to go episode-by-episode through the show in this newsletter; it's not currently airing and there are 141 episodes in total, but I will drop in to write about it as long as it stays interesting. Presently, I'm 13 episodes into the first season. So far, so good.

• Jonny Lee Miller makes a decent modern Holmes. He doesn't have quite the presence of Benedict Cumberbatch, but I think often Cumberbatch had a bit too much presence for the character. Miller's Holmes is presented as a opiate addict, true to Doyle's original stories but here emphasized to near-Dr. House levels. Of course, this being a network TV show, he's not exactly shooting up on screen; he's actually recently gone clean at the beginning of the show, which is how he meets Watson. Miller's Holmes is not presented as a superhero or a rockstar or whatever; he's a gifted investigator, but those around him, even Watson, are not living in awe of him, which I found refreshing.
• Fun fact: Sherlock Holmes is the most-portrayed on-screen fictional character, and Miller holds the record for most screentime as Holmes.
• While Holmes is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the character, Watson is a bit of a creative take. Yes, here she is Dr. Joan Watson, an Asian-American woman, rather than the usual Dr. John Watson, British man, but those are rather surface-level differences, really. Doyle's Watson isn't deeply characterized, hence why there've been so many different interpretations of him over the years; he could basically be anybody, and, on screen, his core role is given over to the camera. But Lucy Liu's Watson is really basically a new character. She's not a veteran, she's not an active physician, and she's not Sherlock's chronicler, the three things Watson generally is to some degree in other adaptations. She is someone who works to keep Sherlock off drugs, the way Doyle's did; that's her main role initially: she's hired by Sherlock's father to keep by his side and watch him to make sure he stays sober, something she does professionally for recovering addicts. Quickly she becomes engaged in his work as a consulting detective, although she's not blogging about it or producing a true crime podcast or anything like modern Watsons are wont to do.
• The mysteries are just a bit too goofy to be true, which fits Holmes stories. They are, from what I've seen so far, all original, not adaptations of specific Doyle mysteries, which is probably for the best since more episodes of this show exist than Doyle wrote stories. The show is, thus far, entirely episodic, but I can see some running plots starting to develop. (Moriarty is name-dropped in episode 12.)
• I like this show. It's not the greatest thing I've ever seen, as yet, but even if it just maintains this level, I'll be happy. If it improves, I'll be happier. I'll let you know.

Bird of the Week

As we gaze at some ocean greyhound lying at her moorings, we note with kindling eye the graceful lines of bow and stern, the suggestive inclination of mast and funnel, and we declare her perfect for her chosen element, the sea. We know that a transatlantic liner would cut a sorry figure on land and a sorrier still in the air, but we do not allow ourselves to be disturbed by such comparisons.¹

 So opened William Leon Dawson, the noted ornithological writer of early 20^th Century America, his account of the Common Loon in his 1903, two-volume work The Birds of Ohio; he re-used the same language twenty years later in the fourth volume of his The Birds of California. He brought up the subject of ocean liners to praise loons by comparison and to rebuke those who would mock the loon as a clumsy creature.

Loons are non-anserine, fish-hunting waterfowl found throughout the upper Northern Hemisphere. There are five extant species of loon, of which the common loon is the largest but may be only the second-most abundant, depending on how many of the rather poorly surveyed arctic loons there are in the world. Common loons are certainly the most widely seen loon. The loons differ in color and pattern of their plumage, but they otherwise look much the same: smooth-headed, stout-necked, and spike-billed with red eyes and wide, flattened bodies. The common loon is the darkest; in its breeding plumage, it has an all-black head and a black back heavily dappled with white spots. In winter, loons take on a duller appearance, with white bellies and throats and dark gray backs, the sort of dark above, pale below color scheme favored by many piscivorous creatures.

Loons’ feet are webbed (in contrast to the lobed toes of the smaller and unrelated but otherwise remarkably similar grebes) and are specialized for swimming underwater. Their legs are set right at the back of their bodies, and are too weak to hold the loon’s body up from this disadvantageous position for very long; a particularly agile, athletic loon might be able to rear upright and briefly sort of walk like a penguin (some grebes can do this,² and Dawson claimed loons could as well³) but generally when they do come on land, they sort of flop along, standing just long enough to pitch forward onto their bellies again. When they take flight, they’re a bit more capable, although they need a great deal more of a “runway” of water to take off than ducks and geese do, and they cannot take flight from land. Loons can actually become trapped if they land in either a pond that is too small for them to take flight from, or, as they’ve come to do in modern times, if they land on a road or parking lot; wet pavement looks lie open water to a flying loon.⁴ Loons come up out of the water only to nest, really, and they never go much further than a few feet inland on purpose, so if you ever see a loon sitting up away from water, it’s in trouble and you should alert your local wildlife authorities so they can rescue it.

Their difficulty in moving on land may be the source of the very name “loon”. The etymology of the word is unclear. What is known is that “loon” comes to English from Old Norse. It might come from a word related to the Dutch loen, which certainly seems to be an influence on the other English word “loon”, meaning a clumsy or stupid person. Or it may be related to the old Germanic root word for “lame.” Then again it might not refer to the bird’s mobility at all; it may instead come from the very old root word for “wailing”, from where we ultimately derive “lament”.^4,5

Or perhaps “loon’ is simply onomatopoeic, not a word meaning “wailer” but the wail itself. Henry David Thoreau seemed to think so; in a comical scene he described pursuing a loon around Walden Pond, trying to get a decent look at it. (Thoreau lived before the day of birding through binoculars.) He recounts how the loon, after diving out of view only to pop up again some distance away, seemed to taunt him with its “laughter” – what’s properly called its tremolo call – and also with its more famous sustained wail:

But why, after displaying so much cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly and swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked me most successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls. This was his looning,—perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide.

The cry of the loon is indeed an iconic part of the north woods, where loons live in interior ponds to breed and raise their young, before they depart for the coasts of the sea for the winter. Loons feature as shorthand for wild northerliness in many instances: they feature prominently in the New England-set film On Golden Pond; they are named the state bird of Minnesota; they Great Lakes Loons are a baseball team out of Midland, Michigan (a town that lies at roughly the latitude beyond which loons can commonly be found in Michigan in summer); Canada features a loon on their one-dollar coin (on the tails side – the heads side features a profile of the sitting British monarch), hence the coins being colloquially called “loonies”.⁸

In Europe, loons are not called “loons” but “divers”; the common loon, which is there a rarely-seen visitor along the coasts during winter, coming down from Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroes, is called the “great northern diver”. The Danish naturalist Morten Brünnich, who first described the common loon, called it Colymbus immer, adopting the Norwegian name for the bird for the species name.⁹ The genus name (originally referring to an unknown bird in classical texts) became a matter of some controversy when Americans used it for grebes while Europeans used it for loons. Eventually it was agreed that Colymbus would be suppressed, with grebes being placed into Podiceps (the European grebe genus, whose name refers to the extreme-rear position of their legs) and loons being placed into Gavia (the American loon genus, whose name refers to another unknown classical bird).¹⁰ So don’t pity the loon for its difficulty walking; pity it for its difficulty in getting a clear-meaning, consensus name.

Curation Links

What's the deal with the popcorn button? | Technology Connections

[VIDEO] Microwaves generally come with a button marked “popcorn” for popping bags of microwaveable popcorn. Said bags generally come with a note printed in the instructions asking customers not to use said popcorn button. Not all microwaves are created equal, but a bit of experimentation should be enough to determine whether or not the popcorn button will produce a good bag of popcorn. (I don’t eat microwave popcorn but I found this investigation interesting regardless.) (14 minutes)

Ancient Artillery | Robin Alington Maguire, Antigone

A look at ancient heavy weaponry, from before the introduction of gunpowder; These were largely simply huge crossbows, with some catapults thrown in.

She Who Remembers | Jesmyn Ward, The Atlantic

[FICTION] "People crowd the streets. White men wearing floppy hats coax horses down rutted roads turned to shell-lined avenues. White women with their heads covered usher children below awnings and through tall, ornate doorways. And everywhere, us stolen. Some in rope and chains. Some walking in clusters together, sacks on their backs or on their heads. Some stand in lines at the edge of the road, all dressed in the same rough clothing: long, dark dresses and white aprons, and dark suits and hats for the men, but I know they are bound by the white men, accented with gold and guns, who watch them. I know they are bound by the way they stand all in a row, not talking to one another, fresh cuts marking their hands and necks. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over an invisible horizon into their ruin."

See the full archive of curations on Notion