Juncos, Sparrows, and Crows in the Transnational Poetry of Shirley Geok-lin Lim

This essay explores Lim’s efforts to express and encourage inclusivity through the agency of her poetic imagination. As Lim renavigates the Pacific and other terrain and writes, she strives for a “utopian goal,” or to “voice authenticity as a signified.” Her poems advocate self-empowerment so that her nestlings can find their way in a world full of individuals of every race, creed, and gender. Lim shapes her poems to recognize the exhausting, long-term efforts a traveler or migrant must make as he or she wanders; a journey is not always finite, circular, or linear. To propel her inclusivity efforts, Lim often draws on imagery, not just of birds, but also of political movements in Hong Kong and elsewhere, natural disasters such as wildfires, or even a sunshine-filled Californian moment. She crafts her form to share her advocacy via haiku, alphabet, and prose poems. The intersections of her form, poetic imagination, and transnational crisscrossings reveal the painstaking ways in which a crosshatched identity develops and emerges over a lifetime. This article offers a bird’s eye view of some of Lim’s recent poems, mostly published after 2014, including her “Cassandra Days: Poems,” as well as works from Ars Poetica for the Day, Do You Live In?, and The Irreversible Sun, not to mention an unearthed and unpublished interview from 1985

Sidney Hurwitz: Five Decades

This is the catalogue of the exhibition "Sidney Hurwitz" at Boston University Art Gallery

American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) Migration Ecology in Eastern North America

Across temperate regions of North America, migrating animals must contend with seasonally influenced thermal extremes, changing food abundance, and stochastic weather events. Migrating individuals must locate suitable areas, termed stopover locations, to rest and rebuild energy reserves needed to continue migration (Rodewald and Brittingham 2004, Taylor et al. 2011). The American Woodcock (Scolopax minor; woodcock hereinafter) is a migratory forest bird that has experienced long-term population declines (Seamans and Rau 2019). We created the Eastern Woodcock Migration Research Cooperative, including 34 provincial, federal, state, and non-governmental partners, with the goal of describing the migration ecology of woodcock in the eastern portion of its range. We were primarily interested in understanding migration phenology, identifying weather conditions that were associated with migratory departure events, and quantifying survival during migration. Recent advances in transmitter design allowed the cooperative to remotely obtain high resolution locations of migrating woodcock. We deployed 304 satellite-gps transmitters in three provinces and 12 states and collected movement data from 1 October 2017 to 18 June 2020. We begin by describing the phenology associated with migration initiation, timing of stopovers, and termination of migration during fall migration, and the initiation of spring migration and describe the spatial, demographic, and body-conditions based variation in these events. We then built predictive models to estimate the dates associated with fall and spring migration and provide a framework for wildlife managers to evaluate the timing of hunting seasons under current and future harvest regulations. Next, we evaluate the environmental cues associated with migratory departure events and found that age influenced cue selection in the fall and sex in the spring. Furthermore, the specific conditions in which an individual initiated migration could influence the distance an individual traveled in a single migratory flight, but not the pace of migration which was more spported by spatial features. Lastly, we quantified survival of woodcock during migratory periods and found that survival varied by migratory behavioral state, through time, and depending on the season, but was not influenced by age or sex

“Animal Spirits”

In “Animal Spirits” looks in some depth at several of Williams’s poems about dogs or cats written over the course of his career, from “Sub Terra” (1917); “Poem (As the cat)” (from the 1930s); the dogs of Paterson; and “To a Dog Injured in the Street,” which exemplifies the elegiac poetics and representational paradoxes of Williams’s late triadic style. Cats for Williams exemplify energy in precise control, its perfection in form—and that was his lifelong quest. Dogs, on the other paw, embodied for Williams the boundary-breaking force of uncorraled creativity breaking form. Both spirits, figured as animals, were totems central to Williams’s understanding of the human creative act, and these twin aspects of Williams’s method have proven profoundly inspirational to later writers. This article concludes with a brief consideration of the final poem Williams wrote, “Stormy,” a tribute to the Williams’s dog; in many ways it sums up the goal of his life’s work. The article ties that to A. R. Ammons’s poem “WCW,” also from the 1960s, which features an irrepressible dog as part of Ammons’s homage

Reproductive insularity in a migratory sparrow: A field study of Lincoln\u27s sparrow populations in Southern California

Melospiza lincolnii -- San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountain ranges -- migrational return -- Dispersal - Morphometric analysis

SageSTEP News, Summer 2007, No. 4

Seasonal newsletter of SageSTEP.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/sagestep_newsletters/1001/thumbnail.jp

Blackbird Population Management to Protect Sunflower: A History

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus) growers in North Dakota and South Dakota harvested 593,522 ha in 2012, valued at $US600 million. Blackbirds, numbering about 75 million, annually damage 2 to 3% of the crop. Damage tends to be clumped around cattail (Typha spp.) dominated wetlands with standing water. In an attempt to reduce sunflower damage, three general population management strategies have been tested over the past three decades. One potential strategy was to reduce blackbird numbers during winter in the southern U.S. A second strategy was to use an avicide at spring roost sites in eastern South Dakota. A third approach was to reduce local blackbird populations that were doing or about to damage ripening sunflower. All three schemes largely relied on the use of DRC-1339 (3-chloro-4-methylaniline hydrochloride) and related compounds and all failed because of logistics, cost-effectiveness, environmental risks and societal concerns. In this paper, I chronicle significant research efforts to implement these strategies