Summer Of Books, 2022 -- On Rare Birds -- July 26, 2022

One and done: they're reading the blog. The other day -- was it yesterday or last week, I forget -- I said with regard to the Fed: one (more) and done: link here.

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Summer of 2022 Reading

My "summer of books, 2022" is tracked here.

• Today, I finished On Rare Birds, Anita Albus, translated from the German by Gerald Chapple, c. 2005 by Albus; copyright 2011 by Chapple.

The author covers ten birds species (with some closely related species) that have either recently gone extinct or those in extreme danger. 

The extinct birds:

• the passenger pigeon
• the parakeet and its practices
• the ways of the Great Auk
• the loneliness of the macaw

The birds that are threatened and endangered:

• the wonderous waldrapp
• the shy corncrake
• the uncanny goatsucker, or the willful nightjar
• the beautiful barn owl
• the intrepid hawk owl
• the wise kingfisher

My favorite chapters:

• chapter one: the passenger pigeon
• chapter eight: the beautiful barn owl

Chapter one, the passenger pigeon, was number one for historical information on a subject most of us seem to know something about. 

However, chapter eight really was the best, learning about the barn owl. Truly amazing. Some excerpts later, perhaps, but a chapter that I will share with Sophia.

Chapter ten, the wise kingfisher was probably the third best chapter. 

Just for the fun of it, I'm going go through chapter eight, page by page, and note every word that was new to me or of special interest, although I may have already come across it elsewhere.

• veil: the veil forms the face of the Barn Owl, and all species of owls have one (a veil) 
• Augapfel: German for "eye-apple" -- what the Germans call the eyeball 
• belle de nuit: 
• shivareee 
• "owl levy" (Eulengebühr): a vent in the gable end of a barn left specifically for Barn Owls.

Now, the same for chapter ten; words that are completely new to me in bold:

• Alcyone: the daughter of Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds; Alcyone and her deceased husband, Ceyz, were transformed into kingfishers, a story re-told by Ovid; I've read Ovid, but I don't recall this story; Pliny mentions "the starre Virgiliae; Alcyone, a star in the Pleiades
• meerschaum: a leather coral; we all know meerschaum pipes (for smoking, Turkish, Greek)
• Halcyones: from Alcyone, faithful wife
• the Halcyon days: also at the wiki link above; the seven days in winter when no storms occur;
• halcyon: often used interchangeably with the word "kingfisher"
• Alcedo: also used interchangeably with the word "kingfisher"
• Alcyon (male) and Alcyone (female): used interchangeably with "kingfisher"
• in bono or in malo:
• kairos:
• sophrosyne:
• azure-blue and malachite-green plumage
• schadenfreude

Other data points from the kingfisher chapter:

• The Australian kookaburra is a kingfisher, one of twenty-three species among fourteen genera and two sub-families.
• One of the names of the Australian kookaburra is "Giant Dacelo." The genus name "Daceloo" is an anagram of alcedo.
• High-speed hunters such as kingfishers, hawks, swifts, hummingbirds and parrots have two foveae (small depressions in the retina) in each eye, allowing their eyes to focus sharply on their prey and estimate distances better. Swallows and terns are equipped with three fovea in each eye. 

If the barn owl goes extinct, it will go extinct not because of any deliberate / direct act by any predator or "enemy" (such as man) but because the loss of an adequate number of field mice to keep the barn owl population alive. Modern farming techniques have pretty much eliminated the number of field mice the barn owls need.

Extinction:

• since 1500 A.D., 133 bird species worldwide have become extinct
• since 1800: 103 of those 133 bird species became extinct
• four categories of threatened birds:
• critically endangered
• endangered
• vulnerable
• near-threatened
• worldwide, currently, number of species:
• critically endangered: 192
• endangered: 362
• vulnerable: 669
• near-threatened: 838
• as of 2010:
• 20 species in the large parrot family are already extinct
• 15 species are critically endangered
• 79: more or less endangered