Audio

Hungry Teen Owl

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Great-horned Owlet by Teddy Llovet

For the past couple of months we’ve been hearing a lot from the latest progeny of our resident Great Horned Owls. The youngsters are loathe to fend for themselves, preferring instead to follow their parents around all night and beg. The owls’ begging call is a rather unnerving screech, appropriately Halloween-ish. Sometimes the screech is loud and insistent, and sometimes softer and more plaintive. Perhaps the teens are trying out different tactics for attracting a few more free meals before the folks kick them out of the house for good.

Great Horned Owl, scream

Photo by Teddy Llovet, released under a Creative Commons license // Recording by Tayler Brooks.

Scooter

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Concept electric scooter in bamboo, by Antoine Fritsch

I’m becoming a bit jaded when it comes to concept vehicles. Most of them are either wildly impractical, overly futuristic, gauchely shiny, or all of the above.

This concept scooter by French firm Antoine Fritsch, however, looks both elegant and practical. Bamboo has a natural springiness that would make this a sweet ride, and with decent-sized wheels and disc brakes it looks efficiently capable.

The text is in French, but here’s a rough translation of the description:

“The T2 O project proposes a sweet mode mode of alternative travel. This study is part of research projects that the Agency Fritsch-Durisotti leads regularly on the themes of the evolution of our behaviors and of sustainable development. Somewhere between bike and scooter, this product proposes a structure entirely in bamboo, evidence of the relevance of natural fibers in areas where we do not expected them. Powered by an electric motor, the accelerated phase is assisted by the user as on a scooter. Its cruise speed is 35 km/h for a range of 40 km.

Materials used: bamboo, cork, steel, aluminum, rubber.”

More concept bikes can be seen on the website // story via Wired

Audio

Kinglets

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Golden-crowned Kinglet, Regulus satrapa

Winter is my favorite time of year to work in the woods. Here in the Pacific Northwest lowlands, it rarely snows and temperatures hover just below 50 degrees in the daytime. It’s usually overcast and damp-to-wet. You’d think the woods would be a bit on the depressing side, but I find them intimately composed. The constant dampness stimulates the growth of the most amazing moss gardens (which deserve a post of their own) and sounds are muffled.

One sound, however, infiltrates the muted woodland: the calls of flocks of Kinglets. In the Pacific Northwest the Golden-crowned Kinglet is a year-round resident, but his high, thin call is drowned out by stronger singers – except in winter. If you happen to be working or hiking in the woods and stop to take a breather, you might become conscious of a high-pitched tzee-tzee-tzee from somewhere in the trees around you. The sound diffuses quickly and is difficult to pintpoint, but if you look towards the sounds you might catch flickers of movement. Kinglets are diminutive and move ceaselessly, searching for tiny geometrid caterpillars (better known as inchworms).

Kinglets are such beautiful exemplars of winter survival that Bernd Heinrich devotes several chapters of his book Winter World to them. I highly recommend the book if you spend any amount of time outdoors in winter. Or just listen to the song recording below, and next time you’re out in the winter woods open your ears and listen for the call. You might find that the woods in winter are not empty and silent, after all.

Golden-crowned Kinglet

“Kinglets are small, beautiful, and pure in their simplicity.”
—Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival By Bernd Heinrich

Photo by Brendan Lally, Creative Commons license // Recording by Tayler Brooks.

Genius

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Among the many tributes and articles about the passing of Steve Jobs, Roger Black’s stood out for me this morning:

“And all of us Apple users are wondering what we’ll do without him. Will Apple be as good? How can they be as good? That genius, that leader, that great impresario who staged an exponential synthesis of culture—the very essence of great design—is gone.”

By its very nature, genius cannot be replaced. By the same token, it cannot be predicted. The individuals in Apple’s 1997 Think Different video appeared in our world, changed it forever, and passed. Their passing didn’t mark the end of change, or the end of genius.

And we never saw any of it coming. Who could predict Martin Luther King? Frank Lloyd Wright? Jane Goodall? Or any of the others. Just so, we won’t know the next genius until he or she lights upon us.

“…Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
—Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford commencement address

Death cleared out Steve Jobs. That’s a harsh way to put it, but it’s true. No one will replace Steve Jobs, because that’s not the way it works. Genius is one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable.  All we have to look forward to is someone wildly unexpected and marvelous, someone who will change our world in ways that we could never have imagined.