Sometimes, a molecular biologist has a lot of time on her hands, and she wants to explore a new environment. I moved to the San Fransciso bay area a year ago, and love an excuse to get outside and see what this biome has to offer. I volunteer in the aviary at CuriOdyssey on Friday mornings, and I've used their philosophy of experiential learning to gain as much expertise on area birds as I can. I spend four hours in an enclosure with seven species of birds (and two species of turtles) once a week, and every single time I've done it, I've seen something completely new to me. My school training focused on the chemical level, so my knowledge about macro-level biology is embarrassingly-TV-based.
When I drive home from the park, Science Friday is always on my radio, and there have been a lot of citizen-scientist projects highlighted on it lately. All the changes that seem to be coming with global warming deserve some kind of documentation. I won't necessarily know what things were like around here before 2014 but I can tell you what I'm seeing now.
To begin with, I can report that there are great egrets nesting in Mountain View. When I see something neat, I tweet at magneticksara. In my other blogging life, I am pretty heavy into politics, so expect my political musings to be mixed in with nature observations. I'll tag my nature tweets with #baynaturalist so you can sort out my bons mots and get straight to the good stuff. Until I get some good nesting egret video, here are some cell phone photos of the CuriOdyssey aviary residents:
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| John, the great blue heron |
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| Unnamed red-eared slider |
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| Greenie, the green heron |
