Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Reading News & Citizen Science

Someone tweeted that Ursula Le Guin's Powers had won the Nebula award. Alas, I couldn't remember anything about it, so off I went to the library, lined up Gifts, Voices and Powers on a table near the YA shelves. Managed to dip into the first two and refresh my memory without being caught up, but slipped under her spell and reread the whole latter half of Powers. After a while I stopped imagining I was going to get up and leave the library soon, even just to check it out and finish reading in comfort on the couch. Just sat there till I was done. (M.S. says that Le Guin would long since have won a Nobel Prize if she weren't writing genre fiction.)

Really what I'm reading at the moment is COASST Protocol, A Guide for COASST Volunteers. I am now officially a citizen scientist signed up as a volunteer with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, to make a record of beach-cast bird carcasses on Rialto Beach from the parking lot to Ellen Creek once a month. Took the six-hour training, have identification manual, Beached Birds: A COASST Field Guide by Todd Hass and Julia K. Parrish (unofficially, Dead Birds for Dummies) and protocol notebook and a backpack of data sheets and rubber gloves and cable ties to attach to the carcasses to number them and a paintbrush to remove sand before photographing them, and who knows what else.

Also data sheets for any marine mammal carcasses I happen to find, and data sheets for tracking debris (nets and styrofoam and things) and human use of my beach. It's all about absolute consistency. If I'm going to miss going out in a given calendar month, I have to let them know and they will try to get out there and do it for me.

I've never noticed a dead bird on my beach. Either I don't know how to look, or quite likely there aren't usually any. Still gotta do the survey to get a baseline, so if there is a mortality event where a lot of dead birds turn up (they call it a 'wreck'), they can say firmly, 'This is not normal for this beach, we need to examine this."

1 comment: