Category: Inge Curtis birds

Tango in the Snow

Photo: Inge Curtis

On Valentine’s Day, I queried an AI bot about the idealistic love that Ancient Greeks called agape and compare it with the romantic notion of love. This is how it replied:

“The main difference between romantic love and agape love is that romantic love is usually based on physical attraction, emotions, and mutual admiration, while agape love is based on selfless giving and unconditional acceptance. Romantic love can change over time, while agape love is unending and unconditional. Romantic love is often focused on two individuals, while agape love is focused on giving to others and showing kindness to all.”

While musing on Valentine’s Day about how big love can be, I applied the adjective cosmic. No, I didn’t mistype it for comic love! Way back in my college days, I read an arresting thought from the cleric-cum-archeologist, Teilhard de Chardin. Can love embrace all nature for all time and pale every other kind of love by comparison? Cosmic love is gobsmacking. When one of my scientific heroes, the immunologist Peter Medawar, ridiculed him as a peddler of mystical nonsense I laid Teilhard’s books aside. Recently, I pulled his books down from the shelf, their pages now brown with age, for fresh reflection.

Pine Warbler

Pine Warbler
Photo: Inge Curtis

These cute warblers are resident in this region year-round but seen more often in fall and winter when more northerly breeders join their brethren in this warmer clime. As they feed on seeds instead of insects, they don’t need to migrate further for wintering in the sub-tropics.

Tracking Whimbrel

Whimbrel on the beach
Photo: Inge Curtis

An elegant shorebird with a lovely piping call of the wild. After they leave their breeding grounds in the tundra,  Whimbrels stop to feed on fiddler crabs in the mudflats of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. By October, they leave here for wintering grounds in the Caribbean basin and South America. The journey is thought to be along the Western Atlantic Flyway with other shorebirds, including Red Knot.

Dominion Energy is planning to build wind turbines about 23 nautical miles off our shores as a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. To study the risks for migratory birds, the Nature Conservancy and the Center for Conservation Biology have attached GPS transmitters and altimeters to 15 whimbrels this year for mapping their route(s) on fall and spring migrations. Planners will be relieved if the birds avoid the wind farm and fly higher than the towering turbines.    

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