Readers’ wildlife: owls! (and a new piece on owl research)

February 26, 2013 • 6:59 am

This weekend, reader Diane G. went on a birding trip to northern Michigan, and, still juiced from her avian adventure, sent me some of her photos with this excited note:

I am still on cloud nine after a fantastic Michigan Audubon Society field trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula this past week-end. We could not have had a better time–weather-wise, group-&-leader-wise, and especially bird-wise!

All of her photos, and a description of the trip, can be found at the whatbird.com forum, but I thought I’d put up three species of owls snapped by Diane. There are two videos, too!

Two shots of the great gray owl (Strix nebulosa). What an intimidating glare! (Go here and click on upper left to hear the variety of sounds it makes.)

And a video of the great gray, showing how far it can turn its head. (Many owls can swivel their heads a full 270°. Researchers have recently found how the owl’s anatomy permits this, and I’ll post about it soon.)

The northern hawk owl, with the mellifluoous name Surnia ulula. (click on the upper left of the link to hear its calls).

And a video. Note the head-swivelling again; it’s as if it’s a toy owl with its head on a stick:

And my second favorite owl (favorite is the pygmy owl), the magnificent snowy owl, Bubo scandiacus.

Fortuitously, Natalie Angier (fellow winner of the EHNC award) had a nice piece on these birds in yesterday’s New York Times, “The owl comes into its own.” It’s written in her inimitable humorous style, but has, as usual, lots of interesting biology, including these tidbits (bullet points are direct quotes from her piece):

In the Western imagination, the owl surely vies with the penguin for the position of My Favorite Bird. “Everyone loves owls,” said David J. Bohaska, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who discovered one of the earliest owl fossils. “Even mammalogists love owls.”

Researchers have discovered, for example, that young barn owls can be impressively generous toward one another, regularly donating portions of their food to smaller, hungrier siblings — a display of altruism that is thought to be rare among nonhuman animals, and one that many a small human sibling might envy.

The scientists also discovered that barn owls express their needs and desires to each other through a complex, rule-based series of calls, trills, barks and hoots, a language the researchers are now seeking to decipher.

Other researchers are tracking the lives of some of the rarer and more outlandishly proportioned owls, like the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl of Eurasia. Nearly a yard high, weighing up to 10 pounds and with a wingspan of six feet, Blakiston’s is the world’s largest owl, a bird so hulking it’s often mistaken for other things, according to Jonathan Slaght of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia program. It could easily look like a bear in a tree or a man on a bridge.Or maybe Ernest Hemingway. This powerful predator can pull from the river an adult salmon two, three or more times its own weight, sometimes grabbing onto a tree root with one talon to help make the haul.

Okay, so when I read this I immediately had to see a Blakiston’s fish owl (Bubo blakistoni). Here’s a photo and a movie:

A video from Japan:

Storm warning footwear

February 26, 2013 • 5:41 am

The wind is blowing like a banshee in Chicago, and we’re predicted to have a fairly large storm: four to six inches (10-15 cm for the rest of the world).

In such a case one doesn’t want to wear fancy footwear, for the combination of snow, slush, and salt (liberally applied to Chicago’s streets and sidewalks to melt the ice) is toxic on boots. Ergo, I donned my special pair of “storm boots”: a tough-as-nails pair that I never clean or condition. I’m not sure who made them, but they’re probably Mexican, and have fancy stitching on the vamps and shafts:

Rabbi Lord Sacks touts atheist churches

February 25, 2013 • 2:39 pm

The Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Sacks, has a piece at at HuffPo: “Worship at the atheist altar,” whose title is just a wee bit misleading. Yes, he does urge atheists to worship at churches, and describes one of them in London, but his real point is that even “church”-going atheists are doing it rong.

It is, so the reports say, the first atheist church in Britain. Set in a former church in Islington, hymns include Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” The altar is surmounted by an image of saintly former pop star turned physics professor, Dr Brian Cox. In place of a sermon there is a stand-up comic routine, and instead of readings from the sacred texts, there is a power-point presentation on the origin of dark matter.

It sounds terrific, though as a Jew I have to advise the organisers: If you want to flourish, make sure there are whisky and fishballs after the service.

Well, Sacks’s attempt at humor falls a little flat, but I have to say that I’d rather get a root canal than worship at that atheist church. An altar with Brian Cox on it? Really? Don’t they know that atheists don’t have gods? And if I want a stand-up routine, or a talk on science, I’d rather trawl the internet.

The whole thing sounds like an ineffectual substitute for church—much like Tofurkey substitutes for a vegetarian’s Thanksgiving turkey—but to each their own. I doubt that this type of faux worship is what atheists would suggest to fill the lacuna left by the faith we strive to dispeal.

But what Sacks really want to say is that atheist churches can’t substitute for the real thing, for they leave out the important thing: the meaning that can come only from God. For those artificial religions just do bad things, like make Stalin a god.

The holy church of atheism Islington-style takes its place in a long line of attempts to create a religion without God. The most famous was that of August Comte, the man who when asked where was God in his scientific theory replied, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

The most terrifying man-made religion was, of course, communism, eventually recognised by its former devotees, among them Andre Gide and Arthur Koestler, as “the god that failed.” But 19th century intellectuals, hearing the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the retreating sea of faith, were full of suggestions as to what might replace religion as a way of celebrating the human spirit.

It’s as if Sacks is offering us a choice here: Stalin or Jesus. But of course there’s humanism, which isn’t a religion but a worldview, and doesn’t demand idolatry. In the end, says Sacks, humanists can’t bond in the same way as the faithful, so there’s no divinity around which to weave a web of empathy:

In short, we seem to have a natural disposition to worship, perform rituals, sing and celebrate together, feeling our separateness momentarily dissolve into the experience of community. The trouble is: it depends on what we worship. Absent God and we tend to end up worshipping ourselves.

What distinguished monotheism was its insight that the only thing worthy of worship is the Author of all. The worship of less than all — be it science, reason, class, race, the nation state, wealth, power, success or fame — is idolatry, and we have no evidence to suggest that idol-worshippers are more tolerant, easy-going and capable of laughing at themselves than those who feel secure in the everlasting arms of a caring and forgiving God.

Real community, the kind that you can rely on to give support in times of crisis, is made of something deeper and more demanding than singing ’70s songs together. It means sharing a world of meaning — hard to do if you believe that life and the universe are essentially bereft of meaning. It involves a willingness to sacrifice in the name of high ideals. Religions create communities because they have a sense of the holy, and are thus capable of inducing real humility, knowing how small we are in the sum total of things, yet redeemed from insignificance by the love and grace of God.

Sacks is wrong, of course, for people can sacrifice for the ideals of humanism: the idea that what gives meaning to our lives isn’t God, but the chance to help others (both human and animal), and leave the world better than when we found it. We don’t need redemption from anything, and I doubt that the Swedes and Danes, largely atheistic yet not devoid of meaning, feel a deep need for redemption. We are not born sick, but we can be better than we are.

Religion, is, of course, the real Tofurkey, for it offers the most deceptive plate of all:

Pawprints 4: Ancient monk immortalizes his cat

February 25, 2013 • 11:39 am

The first cat I had as an adult was a wonderful black moggie (a rescued stray) named Pangur, who lived to the ripe age of 18. Everyone used to ask about his name, and I told them that it is was first cat name to appear in English literature—if you count Gaelic as English!

Well, I’m not sure if that’s accurate, but the name does appear in a 9th-century Irish manuscript written at Reichenau Abbey, and has since been turned into both poetry and music. It all started when a bored monk took a break from his studies to write a poem about his white cat (“Pangur Bán” apparently means “white Pangur”).

As The Victorian Librarian recounts:

When I began learning Old Irish, one of our texts was the poem written by a monk about his cat and was found in the Reichenau Primer (MS Stift St. Paul Cod. 86b/1), a ninth-century manuscript which comprises of said monk’s Greek language study notes. Compare it to Zürich Zentralbibliothek MS C 58; as mentioned above, Dr Lähnemann described it as an arts student’s lecture notes. The poem has become known as Pangur Bán.

Whitley Stokes’ translation is available here. [JAC: Stokes’s translation is scholarly, but I prefer another that I’ve put below.] You’ll find that the poem compares the study of Greek to the cat’s hunting of a mouse, and it makes for a most entertaining read. I don’t doubt for a second that all cat owners will see their own cat’s adventures as they read.

More information appears at Fish Eaters:

But let’s end this digression and move on to the absolutely delightful poem, Pangur Ban. It was written in the 8th or 9th century, on a 4-page manuscript (see picture at the bottom of the page) by an anonymous Irish Benedictine monk who lived in the extant St. Paul’s Monastery on Reichenau Island in Lake Constance (Bodensee), where Germany meets with Carinthia, Austria. Imagine the monk at night in his candlelit cell, delving into Sacred Scripture’s eternal Truths, together and happy with his kitty, who went about his own business. Little did he know that 1,200 years later, others would fall in love with Pangur Ban, too.

The famous Pangur Bán poem, which I dearly love, is in the lower left here, and is enlarged in the second photograph:

Here’s the original Gaelic, which you can make out in the manuscript above, and what I think is the best (or most artistic) translation, by Robin Flowers. It resonates with me because I was a postdoc and young professor when I owed my black Pangur:

Wikipedia gives a bit of other information:

A critical edition of the poem was published in 1903 by Whitley Stokes and John Strachan in the second volume of the Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus.^[2] The most famous of the many English translations is that by Robin Flower. In W. H. Auden’s translation, the poem was set by Samuel Barber as the eighth of his ten Hermit Songs (1952-3).

Fay Sampson wrote a series of books based on the poem. They follow the adventures of Pangur Bán, his friend, Niall the monk, and Finnglas, a Welsh princess.

In the 2009 animated movie The Secret of Kells, which is heavily inspired by Irish mythology, one of the supporting characters is a white cat named Pangur Bán who arrives in the company of a monk. A verse of the poem is read out during the credit roll.

Here is a rendition of Samuel Barber’s song by Gerald Finley. I really like what Barber did with the poem.

More sex scandal in the Catholic church: Cardinal of Scotland resigns because of sexual improprieties

February 25, 2013 • 8:17 am

I don’t know what is going on in the Vatican, or how much truth there is to the rumors of a secret sex club that led to Ratzi’s resignation, but the troubles in the Church continue to mount. Just today, the Cardinal of Scotland, Keith O’Brien, the Vatican’s senior official in the UK, resigned amidst rumors of (his) sexual improprieties:

A report in Saturday’s Guardian gives details, and the pattern is familiar:

Three priests and a former priest in Scotland have reported the most senior Catholic clergyman in Britain, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, to the Vatican over allegations of inappropriate behaviour stretching back 30 years.

The four, from the diocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, have complained to nuncio Antonio Mennini, the Vatican’s ambassador to Britain, and demanded O’Brien’s immediate resignation. A spokesman for the cardinal said that the claims were contested.

O’Brien, who is due to retire next month, has been an outspoken opponent of gay rights, condemning homosexuality as immoral, opposing gay adoption, and most recently arguing that same-sex marriages would be “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of those involved”. Last year he was named “bigot of the year” by the gay rights charity Stonewall.

One of the complainants, it is understood, alleges that the cardinal developed an inappropriate relationship with him, resulting in a need for long-term psychological counselling.

The four submitted statements containing their claims to the nuncio’s office the week before Pope Benedict’s resignation on 11 February. They fear that, if O’Brien travels to the forthcoming papal conclave to elect a new pope, the church will not fully address their complaints.

“It tends to cover up and protect the system at all costs,” said one of the complainants. “The church is beautiful, but it has a dark side and that has to do with accountability. If the system is to be improved, maybe it needs to be dismantled a bit.”

This is what happens when an authority figure grossly abuses his power.

It is understood that the first allegation against the cardinal dates back to 1980. The complainant, who is now married, was then a 20-year-old seminarian at St Andrew’s College, Drygrange, where O’Brien was his “spiritual director”. The Observer understands that the statement claims O’Brien made an inappropriate approach after night prayers.

The seminarian says he was too frightened to report the incident, but says his personality changed afterwards, and his teachers regularly noted that he seemed depressed. He was ordained, but he told the nuncio in his statement that he resigned when O’Brien was promoted to bishop. “I knew then he would always have power over me. It was assumed I left the priesthood to get married. I did not. I left to preserve my integrity.”

In a second statement, “Priest A” describes being happily settled in a parish when he claims he was visited by O’Brien and inappropriate contact between the two took place.

In a third statement, “Priest B” claims that he was starting his ministry in the 1980s when he was invited to spend a week “getting to know” O’Brien at the archbishop’s residence. His statement alleges that he found himself dealing with what he describes as unwanted behaviour by the cardinal after a late-night drinking session.

“Priest C” was a young priest the cardinal was counselling over personal problems. Priest C’s statement claims that O’Brien used night prayers as an excuse for inappropriate contact.

This is what happens when you take a bunch of single males and forbid them all sexual contact. Men are not so constituted by evolution as to abstain wholly from sexual acts. It works itself out in these ways, and the only way to stop it is to eliminate the odious doctrine of forcible celibacy. That, mixed with the huge and unquestioned authority of priests and their immersion in toxic superstition, almost guarantees that these things will happen.

Oh, and there’s this little tidbit:

O’Brien has been an outspoken critic of gay rights, denouncing plans for the legalisation of same-sex marriage as “harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved”. He was named bigot of the year in 2012 by the gay rights group Stonewall because of his central role in opposing gay marriage laws in Scotland.

Guest post: Bigwig Oxford theologian tries to harmonize science and faith

February 25, 2013 • 6:03 am

Here’s a guest post by pseudonymous reader Sigmund (Martin Corcoran). He was brought up as an Irish Catholic and is now an atheist and a scientist; this made him particularly incensed when he saw an Irish Catholic from Oxford University bang on about how science and Catholicism are friends.

____________

The Conflict between Faith and Science: the Catholic response.

by Sigmund

The Iona Institute is a Dublin-based conservative Catholic lobby group whose aim is to preserve the prevailing influence of Catholicism in Ireland. Although concentrating largely on traditional Catholic opposition to female reproductive rights and gay marriage, Iona has devoted some effort in recent years to answering the challenge of New Atheism.

On February 18^th,they hosted a talk in Dublin by Fr Andrew Pinsent on “The Alleged Conflict between Faith and Science”. Pinsent is both a priest and particle physicist and is described as “Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at Oxford University, a member of the Theology and Religion Faculty, a Research Fellow of Harris Manchester College and a priest of the diocese of Arundel and Brighton.” [JAC: Note that Templeton has now insinuated its filthy paws into both Oxford and Cambridge Universities: the latter in the form of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion.]

Of course the Ian Ramsey Center is heavily supported by—who else?—the Templeton Foundation.

Here’s a 53-minute talk by Fr Pinsent (you don’t have to watch it all; see below):

Pinsent introduces his talk as a response to New Atheism.

“The challenge of our time is that it is alleged that there is a conflict between science and faith and indeed this is one of the main battlegrounds in what are called the culture wars, so it is important that we are able to respond.”

Unfortunately, he then proceeds n to elaborate what must be, outside the confines of the Huffington Post religion section, the worst set of arguments on this subject I have ever heard.

Pinsent is a dreadful speaker, and if you don’t have 53 minutes to spare, I’ll save you the pain of watching by summarizing his argument as follows:

A) In the past, lots of famous scientists were religious.

and

B) Atheists are communists.

These two points are padded out with a lot of straw about the New Atheists who, according to Pinsent, “generally argue, and probably want to believe, that theists are generally irrational and evil”.

He then describes an interminably long list of priests who were scientists: Gregor Mendel, George Lamaitre, Nicholas Steno, Ruder Boscovich, and so on.

Echoing Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’, Pinsent goes on to tell us all the wonderful things the Catholic church has done for us.

Catholic civilization is described having given the world modern geography

”Almost exclusively, the great voyages of discovery were launched by Catholic powers or Catholic individuals”

It has given us law (apparently legal systems are derived from the Catholic middle ages).

And any past transgressions are exaggerated. For example what punishment did Galileo really have to suffer?

“He had to stay in his villa and the church made him recite seven psalms a week.

Well, in two thousand years, if that’s the worst thing we did that’s not too bad, eh.

And actually the church admitted Galileo was right, once the scientific evidence came in.

Is this that dogmatic evil institution that held back science?”

Well, considering that the Church’s admission that they were mistaken, and that Galileo was correct, occurred only in 1992, nearly 360 years after the initial trial, I guess Pinsent has some other unspoken reason why this shouldn’t be seen as the church hindering research. Perhaps they are just incredible sticklers for peer review?

Pinsent then wanders off on a strange detour to describe how religious imagery has gradually disappeared from works of art over the centuries, a point that serves no purpose in his argument except provide him with an opportunity to sneer at modern art.

Finally, we get the old tired tropes about atheistic communist regimes, Soviet Russia, Albania and North Korea—this is what happens when atheists get power!—and no mention whatsoever of secular democracies like the Scandinavian nations.

And that’s about it!

The important thing to take from this talk is that Andrew Pinsent is not some nobody on the internet. He is the head of a major Catholic theological center in Oxford university. He’s turned up at the culture wars armed only with one of those toy guns that, instead of firing bullets, just unfurls a flag. Only in Pinsent’s case the flag doesn’t say “BANG!” It says “COMMUNIST!”

Having been brought up a Catholic myself (I’m better now!) I can almost feel sorry for him. Catholic teaching, as exemplified by the Nicene Creed, is so vulnerable to scientific thinking that any efforts at apologetics are, by necessity, exercises in avoiding the subject. The direct, unflinching approach of the New Atheists have made this task almost impossible and it shows, both in Pinsent’s arguments and in his clear discomfort while enunciating them. Perhaps he is seeing what we can glimpse on the edges of this clip—that the audience is almost exclusively elderly. The young, and indeed the middle-aged, have long since abandoned the fight.

Predators and scavengers pick up eggcam

February 24, 2013 • 1:24 pm

I don’t think the inventors of this eggcam intended it to be used this way. It was, I presume, meant to mimic a rockhopper penguin egg and thereby help film the colony without disturbing it. But they didn’t count on a hungry striated caracara and a vulture. . .

It’s from the BBC show “Penguins: spy in the huddle,” and has the first aerial footage of a penguin colony filmed by a flying bird.

h/t: Gattina

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