Cloud Poster in PDF

Art Rangno has posted a pdf of the 10th edition his popular Guide to the Sky Poster for mass consumption. Printed copies of these beautiful posters, published between 1987 and 2005 are no longer available so this is your chance to enjoy Art's beautiful photographs of clouds and his clear, succinct, and poetic descriptions of the clouds, how they form, and what they mean weatherwise.

Art is a meteorologist formerly in airborne cloud studies at the University of Washington and now lives in Arizona where he has an unobstructed view of the western sky and posts fabulous photographs of the clouds, meteorological news, and fun facts for skywatchers on his website Cloud-Maven.com

It was Art's poster, taped to a closet door, that sparked my interest in clouds in 2008. And, because there are so darn many of them, it has taken me longer than I had planned to write my book about them. I am making progress. Stay tuned!

Give War & Peace a Chance

I have apparently been waiting all my reading life for the publication of this book so I could tackle War and Peace properly. I knew I was going to like Andrew Kaufman's latest book from the start: I like how the 219-page book seems lighter than it looks (light=easy reading, right?), I love the cover, I love the clever title, I love the epigraph: 

"To be able to affect others, an artist has to be an explorer, and his work of art has to be a quest. If he has discovered everything, knows everything, and is just preaching or entertaining, he makes no effect. Only if he keeps searching, then the viewer, or listener, or reader fuses with him in his search." (from Tolstoy's diary, December 1900)

And this from page xv:

'"There is nothing stable in life," Tolstoy said when he in his seventies. "It's the the same as adapting to flowing water. Everything--personalities, family, society, everything changes, disappears and re-forms, like so many clouds..."'

Ah, yes, the clouds. It's been a long while--almost a year now--since I abandoned full-time writing my book on clouds to take up the torch for the needy and deserving marbled murrelet after Rare Bird was reissued in paperback by Mountaineers Books. You would think giving book talks would be easy (I wrote the book after all!), but for a closet introvert not practiced in public speaking (for an hour without notes...and with fidgety technology) they took longer than I had planned to prepare. Plus, my talks this round were less a standard author talk and more a conservation talk that required plunging into the nitty-gritty of marbled murrelet management issues. Which is fascinating, complex, and not easy to sum up in the span of a 45-minute talk.

   I was, as it turns out, searching for another story in my talks, the story of how an individual can make a meaningful contribution to saving the marbled murrelets from extinction and the story of what happens when you try. The lines from Tolstoy's diary made me feel good about that story and, I believe, my search contributed to a feeling of fusion with my readers and listeners during my talks.

  So it is in the spirit of searching that I continue my work on the clouds, happy to be discovering what wisdom these unstable atmospheric wonders have to share with us.

  This summer I'm reading Tolstoy and Kaufman side by side while I study the clouds from both sides. From my hammock.

Marbled Murrelet Resources for Kids

In response to a recent request for information on introducing kids to marbled murrelets and how they can help these threatened seabirds, I compiled a list of online resources and decided to post them here. Since many summertime vacations include camping trips, hikes, picnics in the coastal old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest, teachers and parents might find these various links valuable.

I was thrilled to discover a science-class curriculum based on Joan Dunning's Seabird in the Forest (her beautiful non-fiction picture book for children on the marbled murrelet). http://sciencenetlinks.com/lessons/seabird-forest/. This curriculum uses Joan's book and also a video produced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the marbled murrelet: http://sciencenetlinks.com/videos/mysterious-marbled-murrelet/

This particular video is a bit dry and not geared to kids; I prefer a video produced for Big Basin Redwoods State Park http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=540.  It is more engaging and addresses the threat of nest predation and explains how keeping a clean campground is important (kids are featured in this video).

From the California's Redwood State and National Parks there is a nice description of the murrelet  http://www.nps.gov/redw/naturescience/marbled-murrelet.htm with links to the crumb-clean sign: http://www.nps.gov/redw/naturescience/crumb-clean.htm and a coloring sheet focused on raising awareness of murrelet nest predators at old-growth-forest campgrounds.

And, here are links to two short (1+ minute) videos created by 7th and 8th grade students in Newport, Oregon, after a field trip to the old-growth forests (Siuslaw NF) along the central Oregon Coast this spring. The students learned about the forest and the family of birds--the corvids (jays, ravens, crows), nest predation, and our role in causing and solving this problem. Of the many student videos now posted on YouTube, these are two of my favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPrbF8ypbJY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI5XXmb_pNY

And, because kids (and everyone else) are likely to hear a murrelet before they see one, here is a link to my website where you’ll find the best set of murrelet call recordings by Steve Singer http://www.mariaruthbooks.com/marbled-murrelets/.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology also has much on murrelets and a recording of the calls http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Marbled_Murrelet/sounds

Enjoy Your Adventures in the Forest!

Why I Shop at the Farmers Market

This is the total harvest of "bounty" from my garden this morning: micro-plump  garlic and  second-growth rhubarb--two of the hardy "crops" shunned by the slugs, rabbit, and deer that graze in my unfenced front yard.

Find your way to the Olympia Farmers Market.