Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

Something a little different - a match on two categories of technology for reasons that are pretty abstract. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the shotgun and the bicycle. Bear with me - I think a case can be made.

Near-platonic simplicity. Lightness is important for both - more so, perhaps for the bicycle, which could weigh nothing and not effect performance - for the shotgun, some weight damps recoil. The general unwillingness of folks to carry/pedal around extra ounces leads to a paring away that leaves just enough gun/bike to get the job done. On a good bike or shotgun, everything there is necessary; all parts contribute and integrate.

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Fit. Shotguns are not so much aimed as they are pointed. When you put the gun to your shoulder, you want it to be in the same place every time and you want your head positioned so that you are looking down the length of the barrels consistently. If the gun is oriented slightly differently every time you mount it (stop giggling - that’s the right phrase), it doesn’t matter how well you swing through - you’ll miss more often than I do (in other words, lots). If you are looking to minimize wasted energy, fit is important on a bicycle. You can pedal a bike in a lot of different positions, but if the idea is to translate your effort into forward progress, you’ve got to pay attention to the saddle/pedal relationship. I can’t think of two other things (and I’m including clothing) that benefit more from a good body-object match.

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Decorative elements. Somewhat in tension with point 1, but within the tight constraints of weight and function - and often augmenting the effort on both in an artistic way - is the human urge to decorate and add meaning thereby. Color case hardening (shotgun), pantographing (bicycle), engraving (shotgun), lugwork (bicycle), choice of wood (shotgun), drilling out (bicycle) - all, when done well, enhance the object. On a personal note, I’m nuts for color case work. My ideal would be a sidelock with a tiny amount of engraving around the edges of the sideplate and any screws and the rest bare save for an oil slick of case hardening (and gold-washed inside, where no one can see, but where it will help prevent corrosion).

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Made by people. At the high end (where the similarities are most apparent), there are craftspeople involved - brazing, filing, carving, drilling. It shows, again, both in form and function.

I’ve had this little set of arguments (”bike and shotgun, why do I like thee so much? let me count the ways.”) floating around in my head for years. It’s getting attention now because of a recent post on Knucklebuster. Seems there was an American motorcycle manufacturer named Merkel.

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Way back when, bicycle and motorcycle (and aircraft) technology bled into each other pretty seamlessly. Shotgun lovers will also recognize the name - not the same company, but there is a famous German shotgun maker also named Merkel.

So - here’s thought 1. Since old motorcycles shared a lot of elements in common with bicycles - what would be cooler than a board track-ish moped? Small motor in that U-shaped down tube, pedals well positioned, brass tank with ‘Flying Merkel’ lettered in green paint and gold leaf. Design student - we need to talk.

Thought 2 - perfect pairing with the slightly greater complexity of the Flying Merkel moped? A Merkel 96k drilling (that’s a side-by-side shotgun with a rifle barrel tucked underneath, usually) in 12ga x 12ga x .30/06. Dinah running along side, the little teckel that I hope to get this spring tucked in a saddlebag or in my coat - jaeger, jaeger, über alles.

A good trip to a part of Maine that I’d never visited before - down east/Grand Lake. A cottage in Pembroke is sounding pretty attractive; you’d have the ocean, upland bird covers, trout fishing - don’t know if stripers get that far north. We saw moose, bald eagles, Canada - with that kind of foreign policy resume, it’s only a matter of time before the State Dept. calls. Lots of walking for not too many birds - I think the woodcock flights are still north of us.

I think this is Pink Earth (Dibaeis baeomyces).

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My friendly neighborhood spidey-librarian got me a copy of Six Legs Better - a book I’ve been interested in reading since Pluvialis pointed me at Charlotte Sleigh in a comment she made. I’m only 60 or so pages into it, but so far it’s really interesting - an examination of how the study of ants has linked back to larger topics in science and society. A nice middle ground between faux-Kuhnian relativism and ivory tower idealized science (Pluvi - what’s the right word for the latter?):

The scientists and naturalists discussed in this book studied ants for their own sake, and often did so with remarkable passion. They did not merely adopt ants instrumentally as vehicles for social and political agendas. Yet neither could they step outside the cultural frames within which they operated. In each case there was a two-way traffic between science and broader culture, with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition.*

To go along with the reading, I moved The Naked Jungle to the top of my Netflix queue. I gotta admit - all I remembered of the movie (from a Saturday morning creature feature long ago) were the !attack of the marabunta! scenes - turns out the movie is mostly about Christopher Leiningen’s psycho-sexual confusion regarding his mail-order bride. I can’t decide what the right frame is to put around Chuck Heston’s scenery-chewing - 50’s? Turn of the century? 1954’s idea of 1901? Or how it looks from where I sit right now? I couldn’t for the life of me move out of my right-here-right-now reaction to Leiningen’s problem - in a phrase, what a douchebag. Leiningen freaks when he finds out that his talented, pleasant and very attractive new wife is a widow - yes kids, another man has already had carnival knowledge of her. This is an especially serious issue because Leiningen is a virgin. I guess he has some 1st time performance concerns. Pinhead. I’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis Costello recently - Mystery Dance fits, but I really like these two bits from Two Little Hitlers:

You call selective dating
For some effective mating

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You say you’ll never know him
He’s an unnatural man
He doesn’t want your pleasure
He wants as no one can
He wants to know the names of
All those he’s better than

But, of course, the ants (standing in for the rainforest/Ma Nature) are held off, and Joanna Leiningen’s bravery wins her husbands heart. Yay!

Went off to the Manchvegas herp show on Saturday to pick up various and sundry food items. Andy the phasmid guy was there and had some young Macleay’s Spectres (Extatosoma tiaratum) - I couldn’t resist. I’ll post some pix when she’s a little bigger. In reading up on their natural history, I was semi-surprised to find a commensal relationship with - you got it - ants:

The outside material of E. tiaratum eggs consists of lipids and other organic compounds that ants identify as food. They carry these eggs to their colony, consume the edible outer portion, and dump the intact eggs into their waste piles.

Newly-hatched E. tiaratum nymphs are ant mimics and resemble the insects in whose nest they are born. Their aposematic pattern — orange head, white collar, the rest black — mimics the ant genus Leptomyrmex and makes them appear toxic. Although most adult stick insects are notoriously slow, these nymphs are speedy, active, and quickly make their way to the trees.*

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Last, but not least, this post over at BLDGBLOG caused me to immediately order Ant Farm: Living Archive 7(yes, I know I’m pushing it, connection-wise). It came in on Saturday - I haven’t had a chance to do more than leaf through it, but chapter/section/part III looks esp good - “Projects for a New Mobility”. Ferrocement! Inflatable structures! Media/culture jamming! Info on a current Ant Farm project here.

Wade Davis - student of Richard Evans Schultes - on disappearing indigenous culture.

I don’t remember how I found this (blog? twitter?), but thanks, someone!

Some people (me) post GPS data from lame little trips on Rte. 128. Others - see here - post data on bar-hopping. In this case, the bars are floating on the igarapé do Tarumã Açu (a tributary of the Rio Negro), just west of Manaus. I’ve got radio towers and he has peacock bass - don’t know about you, but I’d rather be there.

I’m working on converting Mr. Lawrence’s track data to something that’ll show a path in Google Earth - so far, I’ve gotten waypoints and that may be where it ends - we’ll see.

The N810 I recently purchased has a built in GPS receiver. I had a drive to do this morning and figured I’d put it to the route-finding test. There was very little route to find - directions were about as easy as can be imagined - a perfect first outing. Call me conservative, but I prefer to shake things down before I’m in desperate need of them (when possible). There are two options, as far as I can tell, on the N810:

• Wayfinder comes preloaded on the N810 with a big caveat - to get route finding, you need to spend $$ to upgrade to the ‘full’ version. At this point it looks like a 36 month subscription is about $140 - too rich for my blood.
• Maemo Mappper is a free open source app that’s a one-click install, To get voice directions you also need to install flite, so maybe I should characterize it as a two-clicker.

I spent 10 minutes or so yesterday with Maemo Mapper - figuring out how to ask for directions, download maps along the route, etc. First thing this morning, I fired up Mapper and set out. A note on the N810’s GPS performance - every review you read says the same thing - it takes forever for the receiver to find satellites. True fact. I think my ancient Garmin 12XL comes up faster. However, once it’s up the N810 does a great job staying connected. I drove with the little beastie on the passenger seat (the Garmin would have lost signal for sure) and it knew where I was throughout the trip. No tunnels - it would be interesting to see how quickly it re-composed itself once above ground again - but as I said, baby steps. The voice directions were just fine; standard syntho-voice, something I prefer - don’t startle me with a “who the heck is in the car?” moment. All in all, a positive experience - encouraging for the first time out.

Mapper generates a track as you move - I saved the ‘going away’ track and loaded it to my server. Right-click here, choose save link as and it’ll load into Google Earth like a charm. Some pics from the ride:

Local point of interest

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Navigator/radio operator’s station

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Got the radio on

I’m like the roadrunner

Alright

I’m in love with modern moonlight

128 when it’s dark outside

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(I’ll bet a million bucks Steve knows exactly where these antennae are.)

Some pictures taken during the last week or so…

My office spider, a male Lasiodora parahybana. He has a small fan club led by a middle-school girl (her curiosity and fearlessness rock).

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A couple dart frog pictures taken when I dropped by a fellow frogger’s place to pick up a D. fantasticus. An E. bassleri Black in an ?Aechmea?:

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And a Phyllobates terriblis - the really toxic one - looking tough.

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Shifting gears a bit - a couple awful pictures of a killer vehicle. Spotted in Portsmouth on a misty evening, a Swedish Unimog. It looks like it’s set up for pumper duty - man, I love these trucks!

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“Yes. Your breath and a buffalo fart.”

With that bit of juvenilia, we kick off a feature I’ve had rattling around in my head for some time now. Out in the world of stuff, there are objects that go together perfectly and create mental images more interesting and exciting than one would expect from simple addition (n.b. - with all due respect to Bucky, I refuse to use the s-word).

Because of the time I’ve spent recently in the southern edge of the great circumpolar boreal forest, I’m going to start with two things that mean north woods to me:

The crooked knife.

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I don’t remember where I first encountered the crooked knife - maybe McPhee’s Survival of the Bark Canoe - but since then I’ve run across them in places that make me think of cedar swamps, balsams, sphagnum, and tussock-hopping. The Hudson’s Bay Company museum in Montreal has a couple nice examples, I saw one in Old Town, but - sad to say - I don’t have one yet. If you want to know more, Mocotaugan: The Story and Art of the Crooked Knife is available on line.

Tumplines.

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Tumplines are not unique to the north woods; people all over the world use them for carrying burdens. That being said, for me they mean one thing - portaging. You can rig them on canoes - especially useful if you are paddling an old wood and canvas canoe which may not have perfectly placed thwarts (the builder assuming tumpline use anyway) - wannigans, pack baskets, barrels, you name it.

There are other things that go along with this dynamic duo: a decent axe, a pole, the afore mentioned wannigan and packbasket, a freighter pack frame (with a fresh moose rack and cape on it), a reflector oven with a pan of bannock cooking away. Woo-hoo - still plenty of time to go canoeing - the water around here isn’t close to freezing over.

Heading north yesterday, I noticed that a neighbor had pulled his Ultravan out of the barn. I popped by this morning to ask permission to take some pictures and got a surprise. I didn’t know these folks - had only spotted the Ultravan nose peeping out of the barn on previous trips past - turns out they are the folks that drive the Isetta, the Messerschmitt, and other little vehicles in the Madbury Day parade. Also, very nice people. Not only did I get permission to photograph the Ultravan, I got a lot of info about the vehicle and I got a quick tour of the basement (Daihatsu three-wheeler, France Jet, motorcycles, outboards) and the garage, where the current active project sits: a Goggomobil Dart. Pictures:

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The whole photoset is here.

The weather isn’t going to cooperate forever (in fact, the remnants of Noel are supposed to scream through tomorrow), so we went back north to the covers today.

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I hunted Boone for just a short time - turned him loose in a pocket cover with Dinah. He goes to it with a will, but when we circled back to the truck after 15 minutes, his legs were shaking. I sat down on the ground next to him and we just relaxed for a bit.

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Tamarack (aka The Larch per Python, Monty)

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Janey was wonderful. She can be frustrating - she’s field trial stock and wants to range too far for the kind of covers we hunt. If she doesn’t find birds as quickly as she thinks she should, her urge to range and self hunt grows - thus the e-collar she always wears. But, and it’s a big but, what a nose! What staunchness! She’s one of those dogs that will not release from point if you haven’t flushed the bird she knows is there. If I go in and tell her “OK” and she doesn’t move, I know I need to kick around a bit more - and be ready. She ran one big cover for an hour and a half today. Her final flourish, as we got back to the truck, was to lock up on a bird. I was 150 feet away - not too bad - it was reasonably open - and as I started towards her, a grouse went up to my left (Janey was at 2 o’clock). “Oh, crap”, said I, “the bird must have run.” She didn’t move. I kept walking towards her and a second grouse went up right where she indicated. As I swung on the grouse, I heard a woodcock go up - Janey had managed to line on the 2 birds and not bump either. I never saw the woodcock - only heard it - but I did see the grouse (yum).

The cover, just before it opened up for Janey’s last find (those aspen/poplar/popple are about 1 1/2″ in diameter and 1′ to 3′ apart):

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Dinah has come a long way in two working days. When she first hit the ground Wednesday, she was working on defining “gamboling”. By her second cover today, she was moving pretty smoothly, using her nose (she’s not sure exactly what smell is the most important, but she know it’s one of those scents) and when she bumped her last woodcock, she spun and threw a flash point. I love watching a puppy figure out birds - there’s a fit there that is sublime - the world’s best key clicking into a damn fine lock. Not to get too full of myself - let’s end on a lighter note. There are a lot of moose in the woods where we hunt. You’ll never confuse their droppings with deer turds…