pileated woodpecker gender roles Tuesday, June 11 2019
In the course of watching the pileated woodpeckers for the past few days, I've learned something about their gender roles. It appears that the female does all the feeding, while the male carries away the excrement. I can't tell for sure that thing being carried by the male out of the nest is actually extrement; it mostly just looks like wood chips. But that's the only thing that it would make sense for a parent to regularly remove. From a hygiene perspective, it makes sense for the two parents to concentrate their parenting talents on separate ends of the alimentary canal; it's not like the male has access to soap and water. I'd never seen this division of labor mentioned in descriptions of pileated woodpecker parenting. (Similar divisions of labor have been observed in other woodpecker species, however.)
When I got home from work today, I saw that a high quality smarphone telephoto lens had arrived in the mail. I'd specifically ordered a 20x lens, since that seemed to be a good resolution for a close-up view of the woodpecker nest. Trying this out, though, it was clear that 50x was more what I wanted, and that was about what I was getting with the thrift store telescope and a 20mm eyepiece (that telescope had come with a 10mm eyepiece, which had been giving me about 100x resolution, which really had been too much). At this point, it was seeming like my existing telescope-based system was the way to go if I could just address the issue it was having with glare washing out the middle of the picture. Because of the curving shape of this glare, I was now suspecting that it was an artifact of the short piece of plumbing pipe positioning a steel washer parallel-to (and about a half inch from) the eyepiece. (The Raspberry Pi camera attaches to the washer via a pair of rare earth magnets.) That plumbing pipe consists of some sort of white plastic, either ABS or PVC. I know from experience that tubes used in optical equipment is always painted black, and there is probably a very good reason for this. So, while Gretchen was telling me a story (I forget what it was about), I used the magic marker to darken the inside of the short piece of pipe. To make it even darker, I wrapped the outside of the tube with black electrical tape. With this installed in the telescope, I was delighted to find that the image from the surveillance camera was nearly perfect. And once the female pileated woodpecker arrived to feed her baby, the resulting clip looked like something made by a professional. See for yourself.
Next I turned my attention to another technical problem: the bad serial data coming from the solar controller in the basement. That controller is supposed to send a string of sensor data every so often (every second or so) via the serial port, but all I've been getting from that is digital noise. I'd tried several different serial-to-USB adapters, so that wasn't the problem. And I'd swapped out the Max232 RS-232 adapter chip on the controller, so that wasn't the problem.. Perhaps the problem was the 70 foot long cable connecting the boiler room to the laboratory. So I grabbed a laptop and headed to the basement. The laptop felt weird in my hand, and I soon found out why: an additional battery (called a battery slice) that adds thickness to the laptop (it's one of my many EliteBook 2740ps) had developed issues with its lithium batteries, which were now bulging unpleasantly. Fortunately, that battery slice had been cheap, and the batteries might still be usable in certain applications. One good use for a bulging battery might be in a remote gun-nut-hassling robot. I don't really want to take the risk of keeping bulging lithium batteries in the house, so for now I'm storing it in the woodshed. As for the solar controller's serial port issues, today's diagnostics didn't point me towards a solution. All I was able to determine was that the problem happens even without the 70 foot serial cable.
After a third evening of extracting staples from the steps down to the basement, I finally reached the point where all the staples that need to come out have come out. Some of the last staples were particularly hard to get out. Hard in this case also means dangerous in a sense, since greater force is required. It's pulling out the hardest of staples that leads to little injuries like skinned knuckles and minor lacerations.
This evening, my old colleague Dan decided we in the Mercy For Animals diaspora should have a happy hour. The only people available tonight were him, Cameron, and me (Allison was supposedly at a The Humane League retreat), but there was enough to say to keep us talking for about two hours. Nothing much has changed for Cameron, while Dan had a big announcement: he and his wife are going to have a vegan baby. Beyond that, topics ranged wildly, from what the fuck happened to Nicole (who has been radio silent since leaving MFA) to the amusing stories to be found in the Vaults of Erowid. Dan said the accounts of crack cocaine use were particularly amusing, though he'd also read about poppers such as amyl nitrite. Cameron was away for part of this discussion, arriving just as I was saying, "Amyl Nitrite and the Unending Erection." "That sounds like a Harry Potter book," Cameron observed.
Another amusing topic was "monkey-free coconuts." Cameron, you see, prefers coconut milk to the other non-dairy milks, and recently this preference came up in a discussion with another vegan. "But are you sure your coconut milk is monkey-free?" the other vegan asked. It seems that in some countries, monkeys are enslaved to gather coconuts from coconut palms. One assumes they aren't treated particularly well, but even if they are, many vegans are zero-tolerance when it comes to the exploitation of any animal (though perhaps seeing-eye dogs are an exception). From a purely practical standpoint, it makes sense to deploy monkeys in gathering fruits of all sorts from trees, given that monkeys are much better climbers than humans are. That all being said, I was dubious that a monkey would make for either a reliable or trustworthy slave. As for Cameron, no, he was not sure that his coconut milk was monkey-free. And, from the sound of things, learning this was even an issue was something that could have waited, perhaps indefinitely.
