Running Commentary 11/25/24

Hello,

Thursday is Thanksgiving, and I'll be taking next week off from this newsletter so that I don't have to spend my holiday writing it. I'll be back December 9th with, among other things, my impressions of the premiere of Skeleton Crew.

Also, just because Fall migration is over doesn't mean there's no birding to do. Yesterday I went out and sat by a river for a bit, and I saw two pairs of bluebirds, a brown creeper, a piliated woodpecker, and a golden-crowned kinglet (which was calling to one or two others that I didn't see) along with more common winter birds like titmice and juncos. Keep an eye out!

Anyway...

Eating...

Green bean casserole is a dish that was sort of astroturfed onto the Thanksgiving table by Campbell's, who were trying to sell more cream of mushroom soup. The original recipe was developed by Dorcas Reilly, a Cambell's Soup Company employee, in 1955; she called it "Green Bean Bake" and the recipe was printed on the cans, which helped boost its popularity. (You can read more about Reilly and her invention in one of this week's Curation links down below.)

All that said, if you want it to be good, you really shouldn't use Campbell's Condensed Cream of Mushroom Soup, you should make your own mushroom cream sauce. I like the one in Alton Brown's recipe; he makes his own fried onions and starts from fresh green beans, but you can used prepared for those if you're busy with Thanksgiving dinner. It is very much worth your time to make the mushroom sauce.

Best Ever Green Bean Casserole Recipe | Alton Brown

A Thanksgiving favorite, Alton Brown’s best ever green bean casserole swaps canned goods with homemade mushroom sauce and fresh green beans.

Alton BrownAidas Ciziunas

Bird of the Week

Owls are hard to study. It's not just that they're nocturnal, though the fact that they are typically active at night, in the dark, doesn't help those who want to observe them. There's also the fact that they don't build their own nests, typically taking over the nests of yesteryear made by other birds; this means recognizing an owl nest is nearly impossible unless an owl is sitting in it. There's the fact that owls depend on camouflage to stay safe from predators. There's the fact that they are, themselves, predators, equipped to attack or injure researchers who've intruded on their territory. For birds that so many people know of, owls are not birds that we have known terribly much about for very long.

I should mention before I get really started, that my write-up this week is going to be particularly reliant on one source, Jennifer Ackerman's book What an Owl Knows. I'll cite other things, but a lot of it will be found through Ackerman's book. Ackerman met with many owl researchers, who studied many different kinds of owls, but the one I remember most from the book, not least because it's the one on the cover, is today's bird: the Northern Saw-whet Owl.

The saw-whet owl is the smallest owl in North America. I usually leave looking at the bird's name until the end, but in this case I really need to address what "saw-whet" means, or else you'll be wondering the whole time. "Whet" is an oldish word for "sharpen";¹ nowadays it's mainly found in the term "whetstone" and the idiom "whet one's appetite", and in the second case it's often mistaken as "wet one's appetite", which is more evocative of a mouth-watering experience, anyway. The saw-whet owl is so named because it's repetitive, peeping call is thought to sound like a file being used to sharpen a saw.²

Saw-whet owls are highly nocturnal, highly arboreal owls, that is, they are only active at night and back in the woods. For this reason, they tend to get overlooked, and were thought to be quite rare before concerted efforts to count them were undertaken.³ It was also not always understood that they migrate; the earliest clue that they did so came in 1906, on Thanksgiving Day – that is, Canadian Thanksgiving Day, in October – a man named Newton Tripp spent his holiday on the southern shore of Lake Huron, where he found thousands of dead birds. These were Fall migrants caught by a sudden chill wind. W. E. Saunders, of London, Ontario, went to investigate, finding nearly two thousand birds dead along the tow miles he was able to walk, though he estimated the dead birds lay along at least ten miles of lakeshore in total. The vast majority of these were songbirds, but twenty-four were saw-whet owls. Of these he wrote in a note in The Auk:⁴

The Saw-whets were a surprise. They are rare in western Ontario, and one sees them only at intervals of many years. Evidently they migrate in considerable numbers.

Saunders surmising that many saw-whet owls migrate has proved true, but his claim that they are rare in the Great Lakes region has not. In the intervening century-and-a-quarter, scientific banding efforts have found more saw-whet owls than any other species in North America.⁵ They do not migrate with the regularity of seasonal songbirds, rather moving in varying numbers across varying distances depending on as yet unknown factors that appear to change each year. In the course of writing her book, Ackerman visited a banding station in Virginia. As they retrieved saw-whet owls from a net strung in the trees, the bander told Ackerman "Saw-whets...are clean, polite, nice to handle" in comparison to larger owl species.⁶ Ackerman would go on to discover the reason for this.

While most birds depend on mobility to survive, flying (or perhaps running, or diving and swimming) away from danger, owls are unusual in that they instead count on going unnoticed. When they sense danger, they hold very still, doing their best to be mistaken for a broken-off stump of a tree branch. They're remarkably good at doing this, but that instinctive stillness makes them easy to approach. People getting into owl-spotting are warned by the more experienced not to mistake an owl's stillness for its comfort. Saw-whet owls, being as small as they are (roughly robin-sized) are particularly vulnerable to predation and are thus particularly dependent on disappearing in face of danger. That's why the saw-whets were so "polite"; they were, not understanding they were caught to be studied, not to be eten, mortally terrified.⁷

Saw-whets owls are so prone to freezing in place that they'll even stay perched in trees as they are cut down. In 2020, a 75-foot-tall Norway Spruce in Oneonta, New York, was cut down and transported hundreds of miles to Manhattan, where it received the top conifer honor of being made the Rockefeller Plaza Christmas Tree. As they unpacked the tree, workers found a female saw-whet owl in it. They turned her over to wildlife rehabber Ellen Kalish, who gave her the name "Rocky". Kalish found that Rocky was in serious need of food and water but was otherwise unharmed. Rocky was released back into the woods of upstate New York after a short recovery period, during which the bird became famous online.^8,9 Paying homage the following Christmas, the Marvel streaming series Hawkeye, whose finale battle takes place in Rockefeller Plaza, featured a saw-whet owl living in the tree and helping defeat the minions of the villainous Kingpin. Since I re-watch the show every Christmas, I'm annually reminded of little Rocky.

I already mentioned what "saw-whet" means; the adjective "northern" in the northern saw-whet owl's name differentiates the species from the closely-related Bermuda saw-whet owl and the unspotted saw-whet owl of Central America. To science, the northern saw-whet owl is Aegolius acadius. The genus name, first applied to the boreal owl (Aegolius funereus) means "ill-omened bird" in Greek;¹⁰ many cultures throughout the world associate owls or the hearing of owls with death.¹¹ The species name references Acadia, the French colony established in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada,¹⁰ in which the first specimen described of the species was found.

Curation Links

The Woman Who Invented the Green Bean Casserole | Brigit Katz, Smithsonian Magazine

Obituary for Dorcas Reilly, the inventor of a Thanksgiving Dinner classic, among other post-war dishes.

I tried to train my color vision. Here’s what happened. | Max G. Levy, Sequencer

The author, who contends with mild red-green colorblindness, describes his experience taking daily quizzes on the hex codes of colors, attempting to develop a greater talent in distinguishing colors by deliberate practice. Colorblindness is often just accepted by those with it, and this attempt to fight it is thus quite interesting.

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder | Sandra Upson, WIRED

“Lee Holloway programmed internet security firm Cloudflare into being. Then he became apathetic, distant, and unpredictable—for a long time, no one could make sense of it.”

The River and the Sea | Natascha Wodin, trans. Mandy Wight, Asymptote

[FICTION] (translated from German) “I lived for a few years as a child by the small Franconian river called the Regnitz. We were moved there in 1951, from a camp for Displaced Persons to the four new tower blocks by the river. We were former forced labourers from Eastern Europe who’d been transported to Germany by the million in the Second World War and were now no use to anyone.”

See the full archive of curations on Notion