The first European image of California Quail by Jean-François de Galaup Compte de Lapérouse

its weight in gold

We are in the middle of a funding crisis in the sciences.  Word of mouth among academics is that projects such as The Quail Diaries, involving the study of the evolution of animal behavior using field and molecular biological techniques on nonmodel and challenging bird species, has about as much chance of being funded federally as a snowball in hell.

the world will end in fire

In 2002, when I was a young post-graduate with a PhD in biological science (and not incidentally an MFA in creative writing) under my belt, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was funding 26% of the grant proposals submitted to the Directorate of Biological Sciences.  There was a sense then that, while it might take 2-3 submissions, a scientist with good ideas and willing to work hard to put them into place would get funded. In 2011, that number had dropped to 18%; the total number of grants in biology going from 1,405 to 1,309 over that time period.

There is no subject in the field of natural science that is of greater interest than the important position that the living bird occupies in the great plan of organic nature.

NSF funds basic scientific research in this country–this includes research into fields such as biology, mathematics, physics and geography.  Basic scientific research is in contrast to applied research–where an application of the research (for humans, in particular), be it medical, veterinary, agricultural etc., is defined.  Applied research requires basic research.  To generate the annual vaccinations for influenza, researchers use information garnered from many years of basic research into evolutionary biology and systematics, as well as mathematics (for the foundational statistics).

To put this into context, while NSF’s annual budget request for 2012 is approximately $7.8 billion; of the total military request of approximately $1.030 trillion includes $46.9 billion alone for Homeland Security (enough to fund NSF for more than 6 years at current rates).

This place is a sanctum of all there is to lose

The anxiety about funding decreases and hiring freezes at Universities and Colleges (the primary home for those conducting basic research) and the substantial amount of stress involved in securing funding for one’s research (including the salaries for people working on the project [read JOBS here people]) affects scientists in a variety of situations from the current graduate and undergraduate students to the most well established scientists.

The name Quail is a misnomer, for 

All of this is to give you a sense of why there is now something called Petridish.org, as well as SciFund  on Rocket Hub ,where researchers are asking YOU, the public, to support our work.  The projects on this site are valuable but the funding crisis means they are unlikely to be supported through traditional means.  At this point, for these sorts of projects to get off the ground, they need your help.  By helping them now, you may ensure they obtain grants later. If we are going to maintain any real level of basic research in this country, our federal funding agencies including NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) need to be shored up. Crowdfunding, however, is poised to make a difference right now in whether dedicated scientists are able to actual pursue their research or not.

the bird is not a Quail but more nearly a Partridge, as it is called in the south. 

It is also clear to us on the site that we as scientists have not successfully communicated what we do and how we do it.  This means that there is not enough interest in our work, not enough understanding of its importance and not enough recognition of the need to support this work an awareness that negative results, contradictory results and subsequent discussion are a central part of the scientific process.  If, four years ago, John McCain could get the public so riled about a manufactured controversy centered on the study of threatened Grizzly Bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) clearly the public has no real sense of how science works and how the results benefit us.

we are a form of a form

And by benefit I do mean conservation but I also mean something else–that being touched by the knowledge of the other that is out there.  This knowledge gives us life.

dismantled

There is enormous value in basic research into the lives of other organisms–the New World Quail work, for example, serves to provide necessary information about how birds respond to habitat change and to indicate where our understanding and assumptions about the evolution of bird behavior falls short.  The results of the work with the New World Quail are filling in a big piece of the story of how and where the diversity of bird behavior currently on display in species around us emerged.  The ability to conduct New World Quail research is directly affected by this funding crisis and by the shortage of academic positions.

A correspondent wrote me that he had watched the Quail feeding on potato beetles and other insects on his farm, 

I am not a savvy and ambitious scientist; my ambition aims along a strange and interdisciplinary route (getting my MFA in creative writing, for example).  My research tends towards discovery field, archival and genomic research rather than direct experimental studies.  I’ve two children and I teach biology, creative writing and American literature at a small public liberal arts school.  If even the most ambitious  and focused scientists are struggling to ensure their work continues to be supported federally, it is clear that I, while still shooting the moon and submitting NSF proposals, need to be seeking alternative sources of funding.

and believed that each bird raised on his place was worth five dollars to him as an insect killer. 

This is why there is a Quail Diaries project currently on Petridish.org.  While the NSF proposal I submitted in November pulls the research together in a more cohesive whole, Kickstarter, a small grant, and now Petridish (if successful) are funding the pieces of the research that make up parts of the whole and this is how, I expect, I am going to have to make this work fly.

See my heart It beats like a/sentence underneath my skin

The Kickstarter funding allowed enough to be completed that a small grant is now paying for the work on the natural history of the Elegant Quail in Alamos now.  The Petridish.org project is different.  It is based on the observation that:

the California Quail has demonstrated considerable adaptability to a wide variety of habitats in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the world.

and the subsequent hypothesis that the California Quail is more able to adjust to novel habitats than the other three species of Callipepla.  Whatever answer–a support or a refutation of this hypothesis–will be extremely informative.

This suggests that…highly local adaptations to climate and habitat…are not so fixed as to preclude adjustment to other favorable environment

I’ve asked you to help before…I’m asking you to help again–anything from $1 up will demonstrate your support for this work.  The numbers matter and the sooner you support this project the better–if the project can pick up momentum early on, it will more likely succeed.

Please head over to http://www.petridish.org/projects/quail-project and consider helping out.

puddling butterflies, coyote, coati/tracks, white tailed deer, magpie jays, blue doves/palomas, cholis, codurnices,

a vision

zolin

a waking dream

the quail

——

quotes are by Inger Christensen , A. Starker Leopold, Edward H. Forbush, Andrew Grace, John Keats

Information about funding rates from:

http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/publications/2011/nsb1141.pdf

http://dellweb.bfa.nsf.gov/awdfr3/BOTTOM.ASP?DRILLINFO=08BIOLOGICAL+SCIENCES

I took this photo yesterday as I was running the dog in the late afternoon. This is in Seattle and it is where I once saw and heard a male California quail almost three years ago.

knotted with light and shade

This male Callipepla californica was making an “advertisement,” cow, call. And maybe it is advertisement although, honestly, I do not think we know enough about the call’s function to call it that.

I have intranscience.  Salt away.  

The name comes from the lone males sitting up high in live oak trees(Quercus agrifolia) or lemonade berry bushes (Rhus integrifolia) making this call:  http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/121975/autoplay .  While the covey is a memory, while the other males are with females, while every female is with one or more males, these “cow-callers” sit up visible sending their call across the top of the vegetation so it travels.

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?  

I’ve said all this before but I feel compelled to repeat myself.  Perhaps this is part of the obsession.  Until I’ve found a way to spend the time I need in the field I will continue to play these questions in my mind–the function of this call, the function of the antiphonal (duet or interrupted) calling, what makes a covey, what makes a family a family.  What makes these Callipepla and what makes these?

mind has mountains, cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed

In a week we’ll try a bit more fundraising, through http://petridish.org/.  Petridish looks promising and we are happy to be invited aboard–and to pull our head out of the teaching and start to work directly on another small part of our larger project–to understand the evolution of the Callipepla.   We want to know if California quail are more successful being introduced to new environments than the other species. We are hunting traces in the past and tracks in the present.  If the California quail tolerate novel environments more readily, at least as implied by past versus present distributions, this will be interesting and will tell us something about what we can expect in our current anthropocene era, where every organism is living inside of a changing world.

There is no one we cannot do something/for even if it is impossible

What will this work say about my Laurelhurst friend, about these Seattle quail, about quail in Hawaii, in Corisca–cow calling from up high, searching out new seeds, new leaves.

We share a world when we are awake

That male was only around a few weeks–there was construction in Magnuson park and I wondered whether he’d taken off and found himself miles away in Laurelhurst, calling from different trees and finally vanishing.  When their site was bulldozed, birds I had banded in San Diego traveled miles, across roads and fields and backyards, to wind up in the botanical gardens.  And then vanish.

Fire, in time, catches up with everything

Andrew Grace, John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Inger Christensen, Heraclitus of Ephesus

Impermanence.  

Jen Gee is in the field in Mexico–chasing Gambel’s and Elegant quail–

I was not in the field–just on visit in the middle of working on my preproposal.  And, after Christmas but before New Years, also gaining some sun for the small primates and myself.

As long as I am, I am

Of course, I could not help but set the traps despite the strong sensation I had that the quail were not visiting what I call the Middle location on the site.  This location is most convenient for me–it is right outside of where I stay so I can set traps and head into work, returning every 45 minutes or so to check.

(Mourning dove:  Zenaida macroura)

And to pull whomever is in back out of the trap.

I will be wind-awry

But I didn’t have time to walk the site and this time of year the quail are in coveys.  Some upwards of 100, at least where I was staying.  The coveys are glued together with a social bond like cement and move about the site, exploiting particular areas for roosting and food for days and weeks, then suddenly vanishing to exploit a different portion of the covey range. I say suddenly though I know there must be some reason–I’m just to obtuse to figure it out.

(Immature White Crowned Sparrow  Zonotrichia leucophrys)

gathering swallows twitter in the skies

I had no time to walk and find them.  The traps were in an area covered by tracks–dove and towhee–no quail though there may have been and they’d just been obliterated by everyone else.

(White-Crowned Sparrow: Zonotrichia leucophrys)

Whatever.  I never caught quail though I did, for the first time ever (in over fifteen years of trapping quail) catch a Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus)

He/she was unhappy and stressed from being trapped,but recovered quickly and dove into the brush.

And why into the trap in the first place?  It’s a nagging question because roadrunners are carnivores–insects, rodents, eggs, baby birds, lizards.  Perhaps he/she was after something that went after the seed–perhaps the roadrunner had a full meal before realizing the problem of his/her situation.  It does trouble me–because it is wrong in some way but also what a magnificent creature.

but out of what began?

—

quotes are by Lucie Brock-Broido, John Keats, W. B. Yeats