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June 4,1998
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The starling nestlings look like lizards with beaks. Their gray, scaly, reptilian skin shows through the soft fuzz that passes for feathers. I got a good look at one of them - actually I think I was seeing two, one piled on the other - through the crack. I could see the whole body moving with each breath and heartbeat. They must get cold at night with such sparse feathers. The mother broods them for the first week after they hatch, but I notice she is not there continuously. I can tell when one or the other parent arrives with food because the peeping chorus intensifies. Today's menu included what looked like a carpenter ant. The ant looked pretty big compared to the size of the nestlings. Eileen reminded me that you can teach starlings to talk. They are related to mynah birds. Now I really wonder why they never caught on as pets. The guy who introduced them to North America (gee, how often can you identify who brought an alien invader here) brought a flock of something like 80 of them to Central Park in 1890 as part of his project to introduce every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. They've naturalized pretty well I'd say. I've read estimates of the starling population of the USA at something like 200 million. Too late to make them pets I guess. Meanwhile, with starlings as a steady background noise, I kept trying to work on the new improved IDRI page today but I am having a hard time scanning the drawings. They're on that transparent paper and if I scan them as line art, they disappear into the black background of the scanner lid and if I scan them as 256 shades of gray, they show up but the background looks all smudged and there's not enough contrast. I put opaque white paper behind them and used the gray scale mode and at least got images I could manipulate. Fiddling with the contrast and brightness got me something closer to what I wanted. I'll have to fool around with it some more. While I was messing with the scanner, Istvan called from the arboretum wanting to know if I could scan some slides he wanted to borrow from the arboretum's archive for the Hungarian conifer book he and Zsolt are working on. The arboretum was concerned that I'd be using a drum scanner or taking the slides out of the mounts. I explained that I have a flatbed scanner with a transparency attachment. Nothing touches the film. So after discussion, all parties agreed and the slides should be here early next week. Only one problem, I'll need to put the images on a CD and snail mail them to Hungary. I'm not sure why e-mailing them JPEGs isn't good enough. So I'd better find out if the guys at the museum have Mac or PC. I know there are places on the internet that'll write the CD - until I get the grant money I'm not buying the CD writer (famous last words - I seem to acquire hardware that I can't afford at the drop of a hat). Meanwhile, I am having awful trouble reading PC diskettes on my Mac. The diskette loads and I can see the files on there but if I try to copy them or open them I get disk errors. I think the problem is the batch of preformatted diskette's that Istvan has, but PC people are telling me there is a problem with my floppy drive. I don't want to take the Mac to the shop until I finish the project , so I'll do what I can. I scanned in a printed copy of the document using Textbridge, imperfect but better than typing the whole thing. When the guys leave for the collecting trip to China, I'll cart this Mac over to the repair shop and get its little floppy drive reamed out. Of course, I could test this first with a diskette from a PC other than Istvan's lap top. Hmmm, I should definitely do that before I spend lots of money on this "problem" only to find out that Istvan's floppy drive is out of alignment or he has a bad batch of diskettes. I'm sure there is some relationship between the altricial nature of starling young and the naked vulnerability of Mac users in a PC world, but I'm too tired to think through the metaphor. |
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