Mirkwood

1. Tom Gobbles doesn’t live here anymore. In mid-February, Kendall Square’s Mr. Gobbles was injured by a passing car while he was roaming on Broadway Street. I only found out over lunch last week in Cambridge, when Mr. Gobbles was mentioned by a friend who works in a building facing Tom’s daily route. According to this article, he has since been taken to the Animal Rescue League’s Dedham Refuge. Sadly for us morning pedestrians, his 5-year stay in Cambridge, which consisted of ponderous walks, chasing squirrels and contemplating his own reflection in tinted glass windows, has come to an end. Hopefully, he will recover completely and have a good time in his new surroundings, with other turkeys and away from barbaric rush-hour drivers.

2. Robin Song: On a (still bare) tree near the Kendall Square Cinema bus stop, a robin sings its heart out every evening around 6:30 pm. It’s always on the same tree and in roughly the same place, which is why I think it is the same bird, though I might be mistaken. The song sounds somewhat like this recording from Nature Songs. It is quite sweet, and clearly audible above the din of traffic, though you might miss it if there is an Ipod plugged into your ears.

3. Radio Program: A young birder I met at Mount Auburn Cemetery last week gushed about a radio program called Birds to Listen and Look for in Your Backyard. It aired two weeks ago in an episode of ScienceFriday on Talk of the Nation on NPR (where else?). Audio is 42 minutes long and well worth listening to, whether you have a backyard or not. It discusses the huge spring migration and the opportunities that it provides for casual and fun bird observation, and touches on conservation issues. There are some beautiful clips of bird song. Ira Flatow’s questions are pertinent and well-framed and yields useful answers from his interviewees. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that there could be hummingbirds in Manhattan, or that city lights can sometimes play havoc with a bird’s migratory journey, or that the experience of observing large sandhill crane flocks in Nebraska can get “football-stadium-loud!” I liked it a lot and felt it was really cool of ScienceFriday to prepare a radio program where enthusiastic callers from across the country could share their experiences of birdwatching.

Google offers a cool Earth Day logo on their website:

… and sets alarm bells ringing in the conservative blogosphere, which duly brings up Al Gore and then brings him down. I am no fan of Mr. Gore, or any political party for that matter, but there is little that is scientifically wrong about An Inconvenient Truth. It is a travesty that any discussion on global warming (charmingly euphemized as global climate change) inevitably begins with a political bias, when it should remain strictly a scientific issue. I participated in a passionate, and occasionally impolite debate about global warming on a public message board recently, and it was interesting to see that the people who do not accept that anthropogenic emissions affect global warming were the same people who opposed stricter gun control after the Virginia Tech massacre.

My (perhaps naive) view is this: A discussion on global warming will have an impact on political decision-making, but it ought not to begin with a political spin designed to impact the decision. Empirical observations, provided that they are honestly obtained and thoroughly validated, express the state of the world as it is, and do not admit subjective points of view. If a glacier recedes by a certain amount every year, then its recession is independent of the political slant of the observer and his funding agency, and there is no point in denying that it is happening. The objective of the global warming debate ought to be about softening man’s ecological footprint on the only planet in the observable universe that is known to support life. Given what could be at stake, it is better to err on the side of caution. Even if everyone does not agree that the current trend of elevated temperatures is more serious than a merely cyclic phenomenon of global warming/cooling, even if everyone does not agree that said trend is due to human activity, a little paranoia wouldn’t go astray.