Saturday, January 6, 2024

From a letter written about the Ft. Benning jump school experience, spring, 1960

 

From a letter written to my then fiancé, now wife, in the spring of 1960:

This new place isn’t too red hot but it’s a lot better than the other BOQ. Here I have a private two-room apartment, share a bath with one other person, and the first thing I did was unload every single item out of that car. I have no idea what I’ll be doing for the next one-and-a-half months, but should find out Monday. The jumps were fine, not what I’d call real fun, but enjoyable. I guess there’s a natural or subconscious fear that keeps them from being fun, but it’s such a fascinating feeling, like being on dope maybe. You probably don’t want to hear all of the details, but since I’m vain enough to think someone might ask, you’re going to get them anyway! It’s really strange how the guys change personalities in the waiting room, everyone doing something different to keep from being scared. Number 45 sang and hummed constantly, and 47 and I laughed and kept telling each other what was going to happen if he came out too close behind me, etc., how I was going to grab his chute and collapse it, and how he was going to run my static line thru the harness so I’d get dragged behind the plane and all, real funny stuff like that. After about five inspections you get up and walk out on the runway (it’s sheer misery to walk in a parachute, they crush you from every angle). About this time I was just a little dazed but not scared, and your heart just starts beating faster and faster and faster. They sit you down in the plane and count you off and you fasten your safety belt and the plane takes off (about this time I started getting a little scared and tight). You go thru the jump commands and look up and the plane is roaring so loud you can’t think and the doors are off and the wind is blowing thru the whole plane like a tornado. Finally the first guy “stands in the door” and when they start to go is when the whole thing hits you like a ton of lead. When they start, the cable from your static line is on just starts jerking, and you think it’s going to jerk the plane apart, and you can see your buddies up there and then they’re gone. The second when that cable starts jerking is the most exciting because it just jerks you out of a daze and into a mechanical awareness; As soon as I got close to the door all the fear and excitement left and I just turned into a shuffling machine and did every movement by reflex action. I don’t remember standing in the door, or how my door position was on any of the jumps except the last one. On the first jump I was the last man out of the plane, had a good exit (my exits are pretty good!) and snapped right out. It’s pretty funny, you have to fight your way to the door because of the wind, and when you jump the prop blast (you’re traveling 130 mph) hits you and you’re gone. It’s sort of like dropping a. ping-pong ball in front of a fan, there’s no falling sensation whatsoever but only a feeling of being swept away. When you first go out it turns you sideways and then sweeps your feet out, so that you’re traveling feet first and facing upwards; as soon as your chute pulls out the prop blast blows it over your head and jerks you over so you’re traveling head first facing down; about then it opens and you feel a sort of tug at the shoulders and you’re airborne! The first jump I landed in a ditch in the mud. The wind was pretty strong, but they jumped us anyway. I hit on the side of the ditch, I was “holding a slip” (steering into the wind to decrease impact velocity) and came straight down on my feet and took all the shock on my left foot, but I did have them together, and so what would have been a broken leg was only a sprained foot; still I landed pretty hard, in the mud, tried to get right up, made it about half way m and got jerked right back down again a couple of times and finally made it up and ran around the chute and collapsed it. The second jump I started getting scared when I got close to the ground and tightened up a little, again hit like a rock, and didn’t enjoy it a bit. The third jump I was scared stiff before even boarding the plane because I knew something was going to happen, and it almost did. As soon as my chute opened I was almost on top of another guy (your chute will collapse if it gets over another) and my lines were twisted so badly I couldn’t get my head back or steer—I just kept drifting in until my feet were hitting the edge of his canopy, and I kept yelling at him to “slip away” but he didn’t hear, and I kept thinking “I’m glad we’re high enough so that if mine collapses it will fill back up again before I hit the ground!” But finally my twists came out and I was able to steer away; I did a perfect (for a change) landing and got dragged about 200 feet before I was able to get up. The fourth jump was perfect, good landing and all. The fifth one we did with about 100 lbs. of equipment, rifle, pack, and all that stuff, and we had a graduation ceremony right there on the drop zone. All in all it was a great experience.

 

 

 

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

The Ongoing Birdbath Fauna Check

 

 

Continuing with some backyard biology, with a focus on the microscopic fauna of our birdbath. Here are a couple of YouTube videos, made four plus years apart, but I can assure you that just about any time I look at our birdbath contents under the microscope, the community of organisms is pretty similar, especially with the rotifers and Vorticella, at least as long as the heater is in there in the winter. If we clean it out in the summer, it usually takes a couple of weeks before the community starts to reappear. And where do these organisms come from? I have no idea, but there is a lot of bird traffic in that water, and birds pick up all kinds of dirt, especially the robins who are messing around in the mulch, leaves, and grass continuously. Some of you may be able to put a name on the rotifer, but rotifer identification has always been far beyond my abilities, even though in another life, I might study them instead of parasites. However, the ones you see in these videos are the same kind that show up month after month, year after year.

Video link to Birdbath Dec 20, 2015

https://youtu.be/A9EAVb03xx0    

Video link Birdbath April 23, 2020

https://youtu.be/oXGysoftEkI

The two main characters in these videos, the rotifers (telescoping inverts with prominent cilia fields at their anterior ends, looking like wheels that give them their names), and the single-celled, bell-shaped, and stalked Vorticella, are filter feeders, generating water currents that sweep in small particles, e.g., bacteria, that are their food. In the rotifers, sometimes you can see a constantly moving chewing device, the mastax, which usually you must dissect out in order to accurately identify the species. One of the rotifers in this week’s video is also pregnant and you can see the egg inside her. Rotifers are notorious for having mostly female populations, and producing two kinds of eggs, one of which is relatively resistant to environmental conditions, the other of which hatches quickly and produces more females. These eggs hatch into males only during times of environmental stress and mating results in these resistant eggs. No metaphorical possibilities here at all for my writer friends.

The genus Vorticella was officially described by Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, in 1838, in his classic two-volume set: Die Infusionsthierchen als vollkommene Organismen (liberal translation: Little beasts of infusions as complete organisms.) Infusions, as presented in a previous mailing, are mixtures of water and vegetation that have been allowed to blossom over time. The UNL library has a set of Ehrenberg’s volumes in Special Collections. When I was teaching Invertebrate Zoology, we would go over there to look at the folio-sized publications, with pages turned by the gloved hand of a staff member. The students (and I too!) were always stunned at the beauty, detail, and scholarship, given that these drawings were produced with 1838 optical technology. It’s a big-time lesson in observation. I’ve attached a pdf version of his drawings of Vorticella.

On other matters, filter feeding, like you’re seeing in these videos, has a long and glorious history in the animal kingdom. Oysters and clams are filter feeders, but so are brachiopods, which are truly prominent in the fossil record over the past several hundred million years. The structures used to generate currents and trap particles differ from group to group, but are obviously effective at collecting those life-sustaining particles that are simply (“”) floating around in the environment. Again, obvious metaphorical possibilities for my writer friends.

If you’re interested, here are a couple of links to Ehrenberg. I’ve had the privilege, and experienced the wonder, of going into the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City; highly recommended if you are in the vicinity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Gottfried_Ehrenberg

Linda Hall Library in Kansas City

https://www.lindahall.org/christian-ehrenberg-2/

 

 

Friday, November 3, 2023

Response to an e-mail regarding the changing of bird common names

 

Response to an e-mail regarding the changing of bird common names –

 

Flipping through an older edition of the AOU Checklist of North American Birds, it took me about three minutes to find a dozen scientific name honorifics. Based on that finding rate, I suspect there are at least a couple of hundred from North American birds alone. I have a sneaking suspicion that if one got into the avian taxonomy literature, some of it old and not very accessible, as well as written in German, Russian, etc., and found the original descriptions of those species, then dredged up any reasonable amount of information on the individuals so honored, you’d discover a range of personalities, including scoundrels.

 

Audubon will be an interesting case, given that he is now so famous and the National Audubon Society is so invested in that name. His role as a teacher through his art has been important in very many ways for a very long time. In my view, this struggle with an important figure’s past is always an opportunity to understand history instead of trying to erase it, so we’ll see how the NAS handles it.

 

There are a great many people who are also serious birders, with a significant economic impact involving travel, gear (including photography equipment, much of it high end), clothing, literature, seeds and suet, charitable contributions, etc. Among that crowd are some obsessive life-listers, who hopefully rely on scientific nomenclature instead of common names, even accepted ones. But there will be life list revisions and probably foul language in places, especially from those who are invested in common names, even official common names, e.g., those in the AOU checklist. From my career as an invertebrate zoologist, however, it never seemed anything more than an occasional literature inconvenience when scientific names were changed, synonymized, etc. After all, the tapeworm fans are not nearly as numerous as are serious birders.

 

I also belong to a couple of odonate (dragonflies and damselflies) groups on Facebook. At least some of the contributors to those social media groups are serious photographers, and the vast majority of them use common names that evidently are widely accepted. Some of them also take such striking photographs that I’ve sort of given up any hope of achieving similar results. However, as indicated in another e-mail a while back, one could join those groups then download their photos and end up with a truly nice digital field guide. The fact that odonates are beautiful, common, fly and mate (sometimes dramatically), and are relatively large, make them attractive targets for nature enthusiasts. So the odonate common name lexicon resembles that of the birds, and the odonaters seems to behave about like birders, but I’ve never seen a dragonfly common name based on a person’s name.

 

I’ve never gotten “into” butterflies and moths; I’m semi-sure that the lepidopterists are wondering when the culture police are coming after them and their common names. However, The Butterflies of North America (633 pages), equivalent to the AOU checklist, has no common names for any butterfly species.

 

Now, having said all that, the largest range of personalities is to be found not in the common names, or even in the scientific name honorifics, but in the describers. Sure, Linnaeus is credited with the descriptions of a lot of common North American birds, but once you get into the other groups’ taxonomic literature, you immediately discover a whole lot of names that you know are/were scientists, or at least acted enough like scientists to get an accurate original description published. On a statistical basis alone, I strongly suspect that among all of the humans who have described new species since 1758, regardless of the organisms involved, there are members of every group that for whatever reason might be demonized. Among the ones I know personally, there are a few ornery ones, but none are truly dangerous.