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Oarfish in La Jolla
[Posted by Chuck Almdale]
It’s a long deep-sea fish, and it’s only the 20th time one has washed up in California since 1901. There are of course superstitions attached to it, as with hoot-owls calling.
Oars, when captured, are sometimes mounted on the wall as trophies.
The following links to a film.
A few articles:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/rarely-deep-sea-fish-found-california-scientists-112875324
San Diego news station
https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/rare-sighting-oarfish-washes-up-at-la-jolla-shores/
L.A. Times
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-15/rare-giant-oar-fish-washes-ashore
Spiders & their Webs | Air Talk
[Posted by Chuck Almdale]
At our house we’ve been trying to leave our spiders to themselves as much as possible. Sure we bang into a web once in a while walking between bushes, but it’s refreshingly nice to see them hanging in their webs, doing next-to-nothing, waiting for some annoying flying insect to blunder into them, at which point they leap into action. We relocate the long-legged ones inside our house when they get into a poor location with little chance of food or if we’re likely to accidentally step on them. Certain spots are reserved for them. Unlike bird-killing cats, they ask for nothing and provide a useful service, the perfect house guest.
LAIST 89.3 FM recently had Lisa Gonzalez, program manager of living invertebrates for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, talking about spiders on their Air Talk program which was interesting and informative, but unfortunately only 18 minutes long.
Their blurb:
If you feel like you’ve been running into a lot of spiders recently, you’re not alone. Whether catching a glimpse of them in the corner of your eye or walking straight into a spider web, it’s almost like they’re everywhere at the moment. So what’s going on? After a healthy season of rain the past two years, Los Angeles is welcoming a more robust and flourishing community of our local, arachnid friends. But where are you most likely to run into them? From Jumping Spiders and Orb-Weavers to differentiating between Black and Brown Widows, we’re talking all things spiders this morning to help us get a sense of why we’re seeing so much spider activity this time of year. Joining us to talk about it is Lisa Gonzalez, program manager of living invertebrates for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Return to Ecuador’s La Selva Ecolodge | Femi Faminu video
[Posted by Chuck Almdale]
Femi Faminu, who frequently birds with us (and without us) at Malibu Lagoon, recently returned in June 2024 to Ecuador for some more northwest Amazonian Basin birding, specifically at the excellent La Selva (“the forest”) Lodge on the Rio Napo, designed and operated with the birding aficionado in mind. Not only do they serve you “fluffy white stuff” for dessert three times a day, but they supply Wellie-style rubber boots. You will need rubber boots.
This film includes a few zoom-in shots wherein whatever is hiding among the twigs and leaves is finally revealed. The long narrow watercraft is typical transportation for these long, sometimes narrow waterways.
At the end of the video is her phylogenetically-sequenced trip list which includes 219 species: ten woodpeckers including the diminutive piculet, 25 Ant-“thingies,” 5 cotingas, 24 tyrant flycatchers, but I’m sorry to say only 21 tanagers, leaving another 371 neotropic tanagers unseen. Yes, there are that many tanagers, not just the one, two or maybe as many as three in your neighborhood, and most of them in stunning colors. Femi’s all-too-brief YouTube photo & video film is as enjoyable as always.
If you go here https://www.youtube.com/@femif9792 you can see her other films.
La Selva Ecolodge is conveniently located a bit downriver from a town with an airport so you don’t have to traverse the Andes on elephant-back or hauling an ocean-going sailboat.
Over the Andes and over the forest, to Rio Napo they go.
Record Bird Sounds and Make Merlin Better!
[Posted by Chuck Almdale]
We’ll probably go another fifteen years and never post another word about Merlin, but just to balance the prior posting about Merlin and your phone’s memory, here’s an article from the Tuscon Audubon Society about how to work with Merlin to make its ID skills better.
— Chuck Almdale
Record Bird Sounds and Make Merlin Better!
By Scott Crabtree, 1 August 2024
Opening paragraphs:
How often have you thought, “I wish the Merlin app was better at identifying the birds I’m hearing. Why haven’t those people at Cornell fixed this?”
The developers at Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology use computer vision and machine learning to create the sound identification algorithms used in the Merlin Sound ID app. It’s all based on the sound recordings resident in the Macaulay Library—those are the recordings submitted by birders like you and me!
Cornell needs a minimum of 100 quality recordings of a single species to train that species’ model. They need good spectrograms (a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time) because the Merlin app uses them for identification.
Merlin, the Memory Hog
[Posted by Chuck Almdale]
I don’t use Merlin but I know others that do. The following, written by Ben Newhouse of Seal Beach and posted on OrangeCountyBirding bird alert, is something you should know about if you use Merlin. It may well apply to other apps like iNaturalist (just to pluck a name out of the air).
— Chuck Almdale
Hi All.
I’ve been doing some file management and have noticed some things about Merlin. I’m just sharing information in case it helps anyone.
So obviously any recordings in Merlin take up data storage space on your phone. And any bird packs as well, those photos and recordings will take up storage space. So I’ve gotten in the habit of deleting recordings and bird packs I no longer need.
That said…
I’ve noticed that deleting files doesn’t necessarily free up the corresponding data storage space. I went so far as to delete all the recordings and bird packs from Merlin, yet after doing so Merlin was still taking up 29.7 GB on my phone. Then I entirely deleted Merlin…reinstalled it and the US bird pack and then it was taking up 1.6 GB. In other words…It was taking up 28 GB on my phone for files I had previously deleted.
So I did a couple of trial/error tests. This is specific to my phone (Merlin version 3.2 on IOS 17.3.1). I have no idea if it does the same on other versions and/or operating systems.
Deleting method 1. Click on My Sound Recordings. Click on a recording. It opens. Click on the “three dots in a circle” menu icon in the upper right. Click on Delete. This method seems to free up any storage associated with that recording.
Deleting method 2. Click on My Sound Recordings. Swipe left across a recording. A red “Delete” button appears. Click on delete. Method 2 removes the file from the recordings list but does not seem to free up any associated data storage.
Deleting bird packs. When I deleted a bird pack it did free up the corresponding storage space.
Anyway… I’m just posting this in case it saves someone a headache.
All the best,
Ben
SANTA MONICA BAY AUDUBON SOCIETY BLOG 