If you can't lick them, join them

Well, Sylvie is well on the way to adopting us. In fact, she already has. It's just that we have to keep her separated from the other cats so that there won't be pitched battles when they finally come together in the house. And, of course, she has to wait for a few more days until the clinic removes her powers of reproduction.

Spaying/neutering go a long way towards civilizing a stray, as most folk know. Sylvie will miss the excitement that goes with mating with some other local stray, the stress and responsibility of raising kittens two or three times a year, and the vulnerability to disease and early death that inevitably skews the feline actuarial tables.

The Feral Cat Coalition of San Diego puts it this way:

Many people assume their animals will survive when they move away and leave them behind. Contrary to popular belief, domestic animals do not automatically return to their "natural" instincts and cannot fend for themselves! Already, U.S. animal shelters are forced to kill an estimated 15 million homeless cats and dogs annually. ...

And think of the reproduction rate:

A pair of breeding cats, which can have two or more litters per year, can exponentially produce 420,000 offspring over a seven-year period.

The Feral Cat Coalition subscribes to the Trap-Neuter-Release theory that releasing a feral cat once it can no longer reproduce is the antidote to being overrun with cats. An opposing argument is, of course, the one that says that ferals become experts at avoiding traps, and hence they are not vaccinated against the deadly diseases that put the public, especially children, at risk. And this is in addition to the vast numbers of birds killed by cats.

A page at the University of Michigan, Detroit says:

If each outdoor cat only killed one bird per year, it would equal over 60 million birds annually.

Well, Sylvie, who doesn't know about all these facts and opinions because she doesn't spend any time on the internet, is quietly sitting in the Zinn Center at our back door, where, we hope, she will be protected from the nightly maraudings of various male cats and various raccoons of undetermined gender. In a few days, the great experiment of seeing whether she and Orange and Dusky and Kaboodle can co-exist in the same household will begin.

My guess is that there will be a few territorial puddles and some feral feces to clean up, and perhaps a number of free-floating balls of hair in the atmosphere, but the time will come when the ancient wisdom of cats will prevail, which is, I suppose, "a bird in the paw is worth two in the bush."

Robin In The 'Hood?

Yesterday, J spent several hours intently researching bird songs on the internets. She had noticed an unusually clear and melodious tune coming from somewhere in the neighborhood, a voice that seemed familiar, but yet one that she couldn't place. Off she went to the computer, and for the next four hours bird calls peeped, squawked, chirred and pippled from the speakers. This one was clearly complaining, "People never know our song tunes."

We had to leave for a drumming gig, so I busied myself loading the car. It was a day of audible contrasts. We played on the sidewalk and at the curb on a very busy street, with big diesel buses stopping beside us to board and discharge passengers. The store (10,000 Villages) had arranged for the group to celebrate Fair Trade Day, dedicated to the principle that if we're going to buy from other countries we should not take advantage of them. I bought a bamboo pan flute and J purchased a clay ocarina.

Unusually for the drummers, the noise levels out on the street were almost enough to silence them. The pedestrians had no trouble, and many paused for a while to listen. Some danced a bit, and some of the kids took over a djembe or two for a few licks. 

The band flailed away valiantly for three hours despite the physical layout. The musicians at either end could not hear their opposite companions well enough to stay crisply on the beat at times.

At dinner, J announced that she had found the bird song. It belonged to a baltimore oriole, who clearly believed in being heard and not seen. The identification of a baltimore oriole is relatively straightforward if you can see the bright orange breast and black head, but the bird is very creative when singing.

At one point, a technology company offered an in-field pair of binaural bird identifiers, the Song Sleuth, a portable device with a built-in sound matching algorithm that could identify the likely source of whatever you focused it on. According to the site, it was too expensive to manufacture for the target market ($299), but they're working on a new model and looking for a manufacturer. 

I hope they succeed, because as everyone knows, spring is the best time for birding: the birds are calling, the leaves are not fully out on the trees, and in the clear air of a fine spring day, what can be more satisfying than to know that even if you haven't seen it, you can be sure of the bird you heard. Meanwhile, pass the mnemonics, please.

Archaeology: can you dig it?

Yesterday, for something completely different, we took our portable GPS and set off for the Cincinnati Museum Center, a huge former train terminal from the 1900's when trains were the preferred intercity method of travel.

On arrival at the parking lot, we were told that all the handicapped spaces opposite the building appeared taken, so we parked in the main lot and tugged out the wheelchair. The wind chill was pretty palpable, but we survived the push up the sloping drive to the main building.  After a few attempts and some compression, we were able to get the 24-inch chair through the 24-inch doors, and proceeded to buy tickets to the Natural History Museum section.

We navigated several areas of the NH, mainly by trying to brake the chair from rolling down the interior ramps. Many exhibits display the natural history of Ohio. It gives one pause to contemplate the lower jaw of a mammoth, compare it with that of a mastodon, and realize that both stomped the Ohio landscape from the Ice Age until about 10,000 years ago.

As a learning center, this museum is not burdened by today's computerized electronics. Rather than clicking mice or breaking lightbeams, these exhibits tend to offer specimens mounted on the walls, with a bit of natural history narrative below, terminating in a question which can be answered by lifting up a cover, below which is printed the correct response. Most of these are multiple-choice. This simplistic, non-mechanical approach means, essentially, that the only thing that can go wrong is that a lightbulb may burn out inside a display case. In fact, the few displays that actually used computers didn't seem to be working.

Have you ever seen the underside of a blue jay? Perhaps. But all of the birds in the collection are mounted on their backs, so the undersides are pretty much all you see. This is interesting because it's not the usual way you see birds, except in flight, and they are too fast to study in that mode.

It took about two hours to move through to the end of the museum, which terminates in a display of the contents of a number of 19th century outdoor privies, excavated in the back yards of older houses in the earliest parts of the city. What is left of a 38-caliber revolver tossed down the hole is perhaps the most interesting of the many household articles and vast quantities of hand-blown bottles. This exhibit is artfully located just down the hall from the restrooms on the lowest level.

At 3:00 pm it would be time to watch the Omnimax film "Grand Canyon Adventure". We were led to the elevator, where we ascended to the globe-shaped theatre. While waiting for the current showing to release its audience, we bantered with a couple of older couples, who "always wanted to see the Grand Canyon/always wanted to go whitewater rafting".

The movie itself is an experience that can be, at times, disorienting. It's a bit like watching the news crawl at the bottom of a weather channel: when you look up at the main screen after watching the marquee scroll for a while, you could swear the screen was moving. But because the Omnimax is like having your head inside a globe, some scenes, such as lifting off over the edge of a mile-deep gorge, can make you feel as though you were actually on board the helicopter. It's not 3D, unless you mean disorienting, dizzying and death-defying.

So, yeah. We got our money's worth, and more. And we left promptly at 4:00 pm. Within 20 minutes, we were in a traffic snarl that came close to being a parking lot, on I75.  There had been "an accident". All it takes in the big cities is one car to depart from the norm, and we're all in trouble. I truly believe that an evacuation order from Cincinnati would be impossible to fulfil.

Some time later, after successive arguments with Jill, our GPS unit who seems always to want to bring you back to the route that you were taking when the trouble occurred, we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to fill the stomach and pass the time. On the wall were three old tools that evoked some reminiscences of my days in the cottage country of Central Ontario.

The first was a two-man crosscut saw. My Dad and my Uncle Sid (who is now about 98) are preserved on DVD cooperatively trimming the logs that underpinned our lakeside dock with one of these. 

The second was a drawknife, used to rip the bark off branches when making wooden rustic furniture.

The third was a nipper, that I had seen a couple of times used by a blacksmith to pull the old nails from horses' hoofs.

Was that a day!