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Volunteers needed at Audubon Ballona Wetlands Education Program
[Posted by Chuck Almdale, submitted by Cindy Hardin]
Nature Nexus Institute has taken over the operation of Los Angeles Audubon’s school outreach program of school field trips to the Ballona Wetlands. Santa Monica Bay Audubon Society has helped support this organization for several decades.
Nature Nexus Institute is all about sharing and teaching local school children about the special habitats found right here in Los Angeles. They will be starting their six-week Fall Training on 17 September to get ready for school field trips to the Ballona Wetlands. Their tours take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. All you need to be a volunteer is a love of the outdoors and the enthusiasm to work with school age aspiring nature lovers. Please contact Cindy Hardin at chardin@naturenexusinstitute.org or give her a call at 310-745-2118 if you are interested.
The following announcement is from them.
One of the Ballona Salt Marsh channels (Leslie Davidson ’07)
We are looking for Volunteers!
Time: 9 am to noon, unless otherwise noted (see below)
Contact: Cindy Hardin, Ph/Text 310-745-2118, <chardin@naturenexusinstitute.org>
September 17th – Welcome back and welcome newcomers, an overview of the program, the mission of Nature Nexus institute, description of Learning Stations and route of field trips. Speaker: me, Cindy Hardin!
September 24th – Wetland Ecology by speaker Dr. Dave Bader. Dave handles education at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, and has lots of knowledge to share about the unique and vanishing wetland habitats of our coast. He is new to our roster, and I hear he is an excellent speaker!
October 1st – Program history and goals, Restoration Ecology and Education by Dr. Margot Griswold. Margot has been the driving force behind our work at both the Baldwin Hills and Ballona, and has done numerous restoration projects throughout the region. Her knowledge of native plants and habitats is unparalleled! She has also done huge advocacy work to spread knowledge to underserved communities-our target audience!
October 8th – To be determined. I am hoping that Greg Pauly, curator of Herpetology at the Natural History Museum will be available, but I am waiting to hear back from him. I will keep you all posted. If Greg is not available we will fill in the slot with another program. If anyone has a suggestion, I am all ears!
October 15th – Gabrieleno History, Practices and Culture by Matthew Teutimez. Mr. Teutimez has a wealth of knowledge about local indigenous culture, and he is a very compelling speaker. I have seen a couple of his talks, and they are quite informative and memorable. He will be very helpful in showing us what we can best communicate to our student visitors about local Native Peoples. PLEASE NOTE: OUR START TIME FOR THIS SESSION WILL COMMENCE ONE HOUR LATER THAN USUAL, AT 10 AM.
October 22nd – Birds and Birding with our own Walter Lamb. Walter is a fantastic birder, and patient and generous in sharing his skills and knowledge. He has a huge following for his Bird Walks that he leads during our Open Wetlands events, and I am so glad he has the time to work with our group.
Thanks,
Cindy
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.
SANTA MONICA BAY AUDUBON SOCIETY BLOG 