It's about all the Pine grosbeaks in Southcentral Alaska this year

Pine grosbeak male

I've been having quite a conversation today about Pine grosbeaks. Yes, I know, like counting flowers on the wall.  So what?

For starters, I have noticed larger numbers of the grosbeaks around the feeders this year. It's not exactly the attack of the Redpolls like a couple of years ago but where i might see one or two a couple of times a week, this year I have seen as many as a dozen several times, and there are always a few around the feeders. A friend in Seward said today she has had as many as 200 in her yard, but she has mountain ash with the berries a lot of these birds like.

Pine grosbeak female

With that in mind a post showed up on the Birds of Alaska Facebook page with two pictures of grosbeaks, one an obvious female with the subdued orange and olive colors and another with those colors but right red on its head. The poster asked why the difference in colors. After no one posted an answer for more than four hours,  I chimed in with this:

I have read that juvenile male grosbeaks are colored like females well into the first winter and begin to show the red as spring approaches. The one on the right is probably a male going through puberty. lol

Almost immediately another person posted this:

Photo by Alysse Zimmerman

Immature male Pine grosbeak posted on Facebook.

 You are correct Tim! I found a picture of a juvenile male on Google

With that issue settled, I thought I would share my thoughts about numbers and posted this:

I am curious. I have seen more pine grosbeaks at my feeders this year than any time in the past 10 years. I have also noticed a lot more pictures of them on this page and a lot more people reporting larger groups of the birds. Anybody have an idea why there are so many this year? Might it have something to do with the unusual winter? Higher survival maybe?

Fairly quickly another responder wrote: 

I seem to get a handful each winter but this winter has been greater than normal. Have had large numbers at our place a half dozen winters in the 35 years we have lived in this house. My theory is that their natural foods are in short supply during the years when they are fairly common. There also seems to be more crossbills around this winter but I see that as the Spruce Trees have a bumper crop of cones. So its feast or famine depending on the species we are talking about.

I added this: 

This from the Cornellab page: During most of the year, 99% of diet is vegetable matter, especially buds, seeds, and fruits of spruce, pine, juniper, elm, maple, mountain ash, apple, and crabapple. It feeds insects and spiders to its young, though, often mixed with plant foods. It drinks water or eats snow daily. I thought of the food supply too, but with low snow cover it seems like there would be plenty for them.

A bunch of "likes went back and forth after that and then it looks like everybody moved on.

So, I posted this:

The ( Cornell Lab) page mentions irregular irruptions where flocks will show up pretty far south. Maybe this year they think they are in British Columbia.  

You have to wonder.

Cornell Lab All About Birds Pine grosbeak page

Degrees of legality: managing marijuana

Tuesday recreational marijuana became legal in Alaska. By Tuesday night Anchorage police had arrested three people for smoking it in public.

In more than 40 years of life in Alaska I had only heard of one other arrest for smoking pot in public and that was Irwin Ravin who toked up in the police station wanting to be arrested so he could begin the legal action that led to the first legalization of marijuana in the state. That legalization allowed a personal amount based on protection of the individual's right to privacy derived from an Alaska Supreme Court decision.

According to the new law, officials have nine months to come up with permanent regulations regarding sale and use of weed. In the meantime local officials have been passing a hodgepodge of regulations allowed by the original ballot measure that let municipalities opt out of some provisions of the law, particularly involving growing and sale. Meanwhile no one can sell it and no one is allowed to buy or barter for it.

For instance, in Wasilla, you can't bake pot into brownies. Apparently you can bring in brownies baked somewhere else. Also there is some confusion as to how much a person can transport. According to the law an adult may have one ounce in possession. However in Wasilla if the police pull over a car with four people in it, there can only be two ounces in the car, not four ounces, one for each individual. A fun aspect of the Wasilla rules is you have to cease immediately if your smoke bothers someone else. Mind you probably half the houses in Wasilla have wood stoves and there has never been an uproar over that smoke.

Anchorage also has adopted some regulations one of which doesn't allow the reduction into oils. Another is the restriction against smoking in public along with a long list of what constitutes a public place.

The problem with all this, what is bothersome, is establishing how marijuana will be allowed has been left up to people who have opposed legalization for years, people in city councils, city assemblies and people in the state legislature. Voters passed the referendum by a large margin but it seems now the politicians will whittle it down until there is little freedom left.

A side benefit, and part of the winning argument, has been that legalizing marijuana would eliminate a number of arrests for minor non-violent violations that lead to backlogs in courts and overcrowding in prisons, along with the costs of those results, and also allow police to focus on more serious and violent crimes.

It may have been the letter of the law but certainly not the spirit for police to actually target people smoking in public, which they obviously did the Tuesday marijuana was first legal. What's amazing is given the celebratory nature of the day they couldn't find 100 people to put in jail for OMG toking up in public. And can anybody doubt with the three arrests that day that police weren't looking for smokers to bust? Consuming alcohol in public is also a crime. How many people drinking in public did the police arrest that same day?

It remains to be seen what the legislature and then local government will come up with for regulations, but if they are anything like what has been adopted so far legal marijuana isn't going to be as legal as what people imagined when we voted. Instead the old paranoia will continue as you light up and then wonder if you are on the right side of a city border, or if you have more than an ounce, or if this place is public and any of a dozen, maybe hundreds of nitpicking restrictions apply. And rest assured taxpayers will foot the bill for prosecution and incarceration of the violators.

It's really about time these obstructionist tea bag politicians started paying attention to their constituents and serving the public rather than the vested monied interests. Instead of looking for all the ways they can find to slow progress, these elected officials need to heed the desires of the public and look for ways to make legalization work with the least amount of restriction possible. Taxing legal sellers could go a long way toward bolstering weakened government budgets if they do.

Meanwhile police could stop targeting smokers and look toward serious crimes.

Or maybe we'll just have to go have a drink to celebrate.

Anchorage police "Know your grow" site
Anchorage Dispatch News "Highly Informed"
Cannabis North

Comment from Facebook:

Tim, we're both familiar with the lovely purple haze that hung permanently over Talkeetna and Trapper Creek during the mid 70's and 80's...and thickened to an impenetrable fog over Town Park on warm summer nights...and especially on Blue Grass weekends...good days...and better nights. A time when a major economic engine in this Valley was pot cultivation and sled dogs. I smile to think of do-gooder politicians who have no experience of that once parallel universe trying to organize the new law out of existence. They're doomed to fail. I might just reallocate garden space this summer...cut back on veggies. Got any good seed? – Joe May

In case there was any doubt about why I like Lady Gaga

There was a conversation sometime in the past year in Hollywood that I wish I could have heard. I don't know how the organization of the Academy Awards show takes place, but it must involve several meetings over the preceding year. At one of those they decide what musical numbers will be part of the program and who will provide the music. At the meeting I am wishing I had attended, the group decided since this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the release of the movie "The Sound of Music," songs from that one should be included. The part I wanted to hear was how they decided who would sing the songs.

I can picture several names  being tossed around but none of them generating much excitement. Then someone suggested, "how about Lady Gaga?" Imagine the gasps around the table at that idea. Lady Gaga? "Sound of Music?" But someone must have persisted. Perhaps there was a request for an example from the artist. Somehow despite some probable resistance, the idea grew into reality.

The ads for the show and even her tweets about rehearsals gave no clue what she was going to sing in the show.

It came as a bit of a shock when they introduced her and identified what she was going to sing. It has been a treat over the past couple of years as she and Tony Bennett began to collaborate and then earlier last year released an album of popular swing and jazz songs from the past, the kinds of music Bennett sang his whole career. So I thought, what the heck, let's see what she does with "Sound of Music."

I wanted to say she rocked it, but that doesn't quite address the music itself. What she did was own it. No Gaga gimmicks, no outrageous costume, no fancy arrangement to bend the music to her own will, she sang it all straight, and powerfully and beautifully. She owned it.

When she spread her arms with the last note, the auditorium was deadly silent, I think stunned, and then all of Hollywood gave her a standing ovation. As the applause dwindled Julie Andrews herself, who sang those songs in that movie 50 years earlier came out onto the stage. Seventy-nine years old, her voice destroyed by a surgery, she appeared to be on the verge of tears as she walked straight to Gaga and hugged her hard.

The Lady departed the stage, leaving Julie Andrews to speak to the crowd and the first thing she said was an appreciation for the way she just heard her own music sung by someone else.

I can honestly say a few years ago when I first encountered her, I sort of saw this coming. I thought at the time as I came to appreciate her music that she was destined for a Broadway musical, not exactly "The Sound of Music," but close. And it was kind of cool to see a tattooed rock and roller, take on more traditional music from the past and pay the homage at the same time making the songs her own for a time. They will always belong to Julie Andrews, but for one night they lived in another singer's voice.

And once again that singer took on yet another genre of music and amazed her audience with a talent that continues to stretch the limits, her own and then again the ones we in the audience foolishly saddle her with.

Smoke screens, bad love and Lady Gaga

Define music

Take a sad song and make it better

The Lady and Maria

 The Gaga is a Lady   saw her in person

God, cancer, a hairdresser and Gaga

The definition of cool

Fair and fall  – Gaga and the woodpile

There's a trampoline in the cow pasture

No, really, there is. For what purpose is anyone's guess except maybe the farmer's. But there is one potential logical explanation. Hellacious winds blew through that area last week, some in excess of 70 mph, enough to lift a trampoline and carry it some distance. You have to wonder what the cows think. Then, of course, there is something else terribly wrong in that picture. I mean this was taken Feb. 17 in Alaska and it sure looks awfully brown for this time of year.

Another weather event occurred today as well: the first kiss of Spring.  Not exactly welcome this year, it is the first time in the year when you can feel the warmth when the sunlight hits exposed skin. I felt it today but I still have some winter stuff to do and I am not ready for this.

Thinking there should somehow be a story involved here. The title sure sounds like something Shel Silverstein would write. He's the guy who wrote Where the Sidewalk Ends and others.

It's always something.

This blogger goes on the radio

That's right, we are going to be on the radio.

Years ago shortly after I built the cabin at the East Pole, while I was away for a while I learned a radio station had begun broadcasting from the town closest to the cabin. When I returned that March, I got the radio going and found the station, then listened too it while I did those things you need to do when you first start activating a cabin after you've been gone for a while.

Now and then I caught what was on the radio.  It was a radio reader program where someone reads a book in segments daily. Occasionally I heard a familiar phrase or word but I never really focused on them. After maybe an hour I took a break, opened a beer and sat down and then listened more closely. That's when I realized why some of those snippets had sounded so familiar. It was the time of year the Iditarod race was running and the guy on the radio was reading MY book. Holy author, Batman. What a treat. I knew I was home. It has remained a high point in my life.

Now I am going to be on the air at the very same station. I will be on March 4 with Joe May, who won the race in 1980 and is a grand story teller, and Raine Hall who has worked with the Iditarod since Day 1 and was a guiding force behind our new book Iditarod – The First Ten years. Joe  won the race in 1980 and wrote several articles in the book including a classic history on the evolution of the dogs, so the show should be quite entertaining.

And here's the best part. It will be live-streamed. The station is KTNA a public radio station in Talkeetna, Alaska, and the show is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. March 4. That's 2 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Central and 11 a.m. West Coast. Here is the link to the live stream. So no matter where you are you cannot escape (unless you want to).

After the show we will be over at the Talkeetna library where we can chat and sign books.

I will put up a reminder again the day before the show.

Here is the live streaming link again

KTNA radio in Talkeetna Alaska

Talkeetna Public Radio facebook page

Iditarod – The First Ten Years web site

Book published and more links

Temperature hovers near zero as white stuff falls on a ship three football fields long

I participated in an interesting disagreement the other day over word use. It came up on a post with a headline on a story about a sled dog race which in part said "… temperature hovers near minus 50 …" Instead of taking my own counsel and letting it go, I posted a comment simply asking "Why do temperatures always hover?"

One of the first things they teach you in journalism school, if not in creative writing courses, is to avoid cliches. Still very seldom is a story written that concerns weather and particularly temperature when the temperature doesn't hover. It's one of those words so overused the  mind barely notices it and if it were left out the reader's mind would put it there anyway.  Incidentally the temperature here today rose and around 20 F. (Admit it, you thought "hovered" didn't you?)

Anyway another commenter, incidentally a writer, wrote something like because it is a "cool" word. My thought was maybe it was a cool word the first million times it was used, but has lost its cool and is just another cliche poor writers use for lack of creativity and vocabulary. I didn't say that, I posted that it was a cliche and let it go at that except for an admonition that writers ought to be constantly looking for original ways to say things but I didn't add the rest of that thought that when nothing clever comes to mind, write it the regular way. Just say the temperature was minus 50 instead of writing a cliche thinking it is clever or even cute writing.

What was most bothering was not the use of the word itself, but that a working writer would defend its use, defend an overused cliche as if it were something to admire as cool rather than admit it was at least  questionable given how often it shows up.

It may sound petty but these are the kinds or discussions tossed around copy desks the world over. The joke is you go through copy looking for cliches with a fine-toothed comb.

In my most recent turn  on a copy desk I encountered a fellow traveler and we agreed on many of these uses. Two of our favorites were "white stuff" and "football fields." Time after time writers looking for synonyms for snow will use white stuff. And who hasn't read a story where the length of something is compared to football fields. I even used it recently in a  post saying I had no idea how many football fields it took to measure the mass of acreage withdrawn into wilderness in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I always wondered, do average readers recognize what three football fields look like any better than they can visualize 900 feet? Doubtful. Might as well be accurate.

I have ranted before about terms that run through the national syntax until they are exhausted. These three have endured and, outrageously some have defenders among the newest crop of writers. Language is alive and changing and that's as it should be, but does every generation have to learn all the mistakes of the past first, or can we start where we left off. It really gets old changing things like football fields and white stuff and hovering temperatures as each new batch of writers offers their perfectly crafted creations. It gets even older having to argue about it. Even good editors some days must want to throw their hands up and say the hell with it, write it the wrong way, see if I care.

Floating in a winter wonderland

Bette Midler "Angst on a shoestring"

"Counting flowers on the wall, that don't bother me at all, playing solitaire 'til dawn with a deck of fifty-one, smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo, now don't tell me, I've nothin' to do …"   Flowers on the Wall – The Statler Brothers. 

Some days it feels like that, like when the biggest accomplishment is moving more firewood from the stacks in the woods to refill the rack just outside the door.

Temperatures floating in the single digits on either side of zero discourage more than a few minutes endured outside even when the sun is shining. Once in a while the temptation hits and a foray to photograph the birds in the yard breaks up the monotony. But even with those: I'm pretty sure I am looking at the same dozen chickadees and the same dozen grosbeaks day after day. Our conversations grow stale for lack of fresh input. There's a larger bird lurking in the back-side woods but not ever where he could be identified or photographed.

You read of old people isolated in their living quarters and wasting away in dingy brownstone apartments, and have to wonder. An idea for something to write about comes and then flees; who would want to read about that anyway, or care what I have to say about it, or, gees, that's a year's commitment at least.

A search through the refrigerator uses some time, not looking for food, looking for something I'm running out of for an excuse to drive into town, my exchange with the woman at the checkout the only interaction with another human being this week.

Then a bowl of soup and nap and it's time for Rachel Maddow, the gateway into the night's prime time but only to watch shows of secondary interest because the good ones are being recorded to watch later when sleep doesn't come in the night. Reading holds no appeal; all it does is add to the creative malaise the idle computer broadcasts into the room.

Sun crosses the southern sky showing briefly in the morning over the mountains to the east, then slipping behind the big mountain in the front yard only to emerge again in late afternoon to cast light and shadows across the yard for about an hour.

More interesting are the moonshadows in the evening as a waxing moon lights the night sky so brightly most of the detail in the yard is discernible and sparkles highlight the snow. Then there's the curiosity about what activated the motion-sensing lights, what critter wandered past their electronic eyes and turned them on. New tracks would tell the tale but that's too much of an effort to find out it's only the neighbor's black cat making his rounds and crossing my path several times in the process.

The opening line in that Statler Brothers song is "I keep hearing you're concerned about my happiness …" and I wonder, at times even tempted to post in the Craigslist missed-connections section for that far-off city on the odd chance the statement is true. So far it remains a temptation, but wording floats through the mind now and then, each time rejected in the silliness the thought provokes. Still there is the last line in the last dream, "From now on it's just us," in two-part harmony.

As for words, the tendrils of that novel reach out from every nook and ravine among the pixels  this computer generates. attempting to entwine me in its milieu again, just as the subject of it often entangles me in chats on the same computer. I knew it was difficult writing going in, but eventually it became discouraging and fell by the wayside. Still the tendrils and the woman alternately fill me with optimism and guilty regret but neither the tentacles nor the entreaties can entice me into the plot enough to sit and actually write something.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the Statler Brothers' song. He thought it was about divorce. Maybe so, but I don't, although divorce could be one reason a man sits lonely in a room contemplating flowers on wallpaper or the birds at the feeder just outside the window. In one lifetime we all collect a number of people who conceivably could be out there somewhere concerned about our happiness, just as we at times must be concerned or at least think about the happiness of someone in our own pasts. Maybe we ought to give those people a little more thought and perhaps in that thought is redemption. Meanwhile those flowers and those birds have a lot in common, mesmerizing, hypnotic, sculpting a person into granite inaction.

And as Peggy Lee sang so beautifully, "if that's all there is, let's keep on dancing, break out the booze and have a ball." Maybe tomorrow.

It's OK to be an introvert as long as you keep it to yourself

The day of two sunrises

Morning sunrise 2/5/15

Afternoon sunrise 2/5/15

The heck with that groundhog, this sign is more scientifically accurate – this sign that spring is coming on the Orca Jones almanac calendar. This is the first day the sun rises twice to shine in this yard barely covered with snow but full of birds. The complete explanation is in the link below.

The next item on that calendar? The first kiss of spring. That's the day, usually later in February when your are driving generally westward during the part of the day when the sun is highest and you feel a bit of warmth on your cheek for the first time in the year. That's the first kiss. Next comes Green Day but with an Equinox in between. But those are too far off to contemplate yet.

Despite those dates, I am not one of those people tired of winter and anxiously awaiting the advent of spring. Nor am I one of those people who irritate others by proclaiming they love winter for a various number of reasons and happily want it to go on forever. A lot of those people ride bicycles in winter, too.

No, I just want winter to hang in there for a little bit longer than many people do. That's because to my mind March is the best month on the Alaska calendar and it is particularly best for outdoors activity. There's a reason the Iditarod Sled Dog Race is run in March.

Afternoon sunshine lights up a male Pine grosbeak.

To begin with, we get almost a full day of sunlight as the Equinox approaches. Generally in March the weather is fairly mild with most of the potential sunshine actually lighting up the world. Temperatures drop below freezing most nights and rise into the 20s during the day making it cool for sleeping at night and warm for moving around outdoors during the day.

Snow that has fallen over the winter has had time to compact and form a good base and the surface snow solidifies in the cold overnight making travel relatively easy during the early part of the day. Often even a full grown man can walk across the surface until early afternoon when it softens enough that you can break through.

The sun that offered that first tempting kiss in February in March beats down and warms everything in its way. At times on the deck at the East Pole the temperature has reached 70 in direct sunlight and you can sit there in a t-shirt, at least until the sun goes behind a tree and the then it cools off rapidly.

It is also spring, a time of new energy and in that climate energy flows.  It's one of the best times for gathering firewood because you can maneuver in the woods so easily. It is a time to haul in supplies for the summer building season over well-packed trails.

Just generally March in Southcentral Alaska is a grand time to be outdoors. And while I am probably as happy as anyone to see spring replace winter, I honestly do want it to happen a little later than most people do. Any time in April would be just fine.

Explanation: The month of two sunrises