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Birdsong by the Seasons – Donald Kroodsma

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Birdsong by the Seasons

A Year of Listening to Birds

Donald Kroodsma

Genre: Nature

Price: $11.99

Publish Date: August 11, 2015

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


A multimedia experience that lets you look at—and listen to—birds in a whole new way!   Birdsong by the Seasons is a celebration of birdsong from January through December. The stories begin with a pileated woodpecker on New Year’s Day; they unfold through the year, covering limpkins and scrub-jays in February in Florida, prairie birds in May, Scarlet Tanagers in July, and a chorus of singing birds in Massachusetts just before Christmas.   With this book, the acclaimed author of The Singing Life of Birds —a winner of the John Burroughs Medal—provides a unique experience: with his gentle guidance, the pairing of sonagrams with the audio makes birdsong accessible and fascinating.   This Kindle ebook contains embedded audio files. This audio content will play only on Kindle Fire tablets (excluding the Kindle Fire 1st Generation) and iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices. It cannot be accessed on Kindle e-readers (including the Kindle, Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Touch, and Kindle Voyage) or on Kindle reading apps on other tablets or computers.  

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Birdsong by the Seasons – Donald Kroodsma

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 November 2016

Mother Jones

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Guess who’s getting a Presidential Medal of Freedom? Hopper! Well, Hopper’s namesake anyway, Adm. Grace Hopper:

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, known as “Amazing Grace” and “the first lady of software,” was at the forefront of computers and programming development from the 1940s through the 1980s. Hopper’s work helped make coding languages more practical and accessible, and she created the first compiler, which translates source code from one language into another.1

It’s a posthumous award, but Adm. Hopper is now right up there with Vin Scully and Newton “Television Is A Vast Wasteland” Minow. Naturally, this means that the furry version of Hopper is the star of this week’s catblogging. She is trying her best to look visionary.

1Meh. I guess that’s close enough. No need to get pedantic here.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 November 2016

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The Eco-Friendly Reason Rio’s Olympic Medalists Didn’t Get Flowers

The Olympic Games are held every four years, and although the medals change, the award ceremonies are usually very similar.

Olympic medalists typically receive a bouquet in addition to their medal, but flowers werestrangely absent from the podium in Rio. Why? Turns out it was part of the Rio Olympic Committee’s efforts to make the massive event more eco-friendly.

Flowers are not very sustainable, said Christy Nicolay, the executive producer of the victory ceremonies, told the New York Times. We give it to an athlete, and very often they just throw it away.

Even those of us who aren’t Olympic athletes know this to be a painful reality of life. We get flowers for special occasions or perhaps simply cut them from our own gardens to bright up the house, but it seems they wither and die almost instantly.

Like any crop, growing flowers is a resource-intensive process. “Seventy percent of the cut flowers sold in the U.S. are imported from Latin America,” reported Diane MacEachern for Care2. “Though the hot climate is just what the flowers need, those constant high temperatures are also conducive to bugs and disease. Consequently, growers in Columbia, Ecuador and many other countries rely on pesticides that have long been banned in the U.S. to produce flowers worth selling in international markets.”

Related: Why Buying Local Flowers Is Just As Important As Buying Local Food

With all that in mind, Rio’s decision to nix the bouquets seems very noble…until you hear about what they gave athletes as a replacement souvenir.

Those who managed to finish in the top three of their events at this years Summer Games receivedsmall sculptures of the Rio 2016 logo,designed in three dimensions for the first time in history. It’s said that the figurines can double as a display stand for the medal. Sadly, the sculptures were made ofresin, polyresin and PVCnot exactly the most eco-friendly materials. It remains to be seen whether future Olympic host cities will follow this example.

While the athletes are far less likely to toss their sculpture in the trash, it’s worth noting that fresh flowers and plants were still used to decorate the podiumsI wonder, where did they end up?

Related: 5 Simple Ways To Recycle Your Fresh Cut Flowers

Image Credit: Thinkstock

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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The Eco-Friendly Reason Rio’s Olympic Medalists Didn’t Get Flowers

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America’s "Most Exciting" Playwright Takes On the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Mother Jones

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Illustration: Miles Donovan, Source Photo: Kevin Berne/Berkeley Rep

What if everything you knew about school discipline was wrong?

You know her on-screen as Gloria Akalitus in Nurse Jackie, or as Nancy McNally in The West Wing, but these days, Anna Deavere Smith is onstage, solo. As part of an ongoing project she calls On the Road: A Search for American Character, Smith has written and performed at least 18 one-woman plays exploring social issues around the country. Topics have included women tangling with the judicial system, the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and the uproar in Crown Heights following a 1991 car accident involving a Hasidic driver and two seven-year-old Caribbean American kids. Smith has been called “the most exciting individual in American theater right now.” A MacArthur “genius” fellow and a National Humanities Medal holder, she was recently selected to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

For her latest play, Notes From the Field, Smith interviewed some 170 people—from California to her hometown, Baltimore—to inhabit characters based on individuals caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. She’s taken the performance from coast to coast and will grace Baltimore’s Center Stage on December 4 and 5. In the play’s second act, which Smith calls an “interruption,” she invites audience members to brainstorm potential solutions to the issues the characters raised. Smith sees theater as a unique way into social problems: “We’re in the presence of one another. It’s not like we can start texting or doing our taxes,” she says. A live performance “manages to get undivided attention. In all the varieties of media, that doesn’t happen so often.”

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America’s "Most Exciting" Playwright Takes On the School-to-Prison Pipeline

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s Badass National Hero, Is a Portrait of Humility

Mother Jones

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s sergeant at arms since 2006, is being heralded worldwide as a national hero after he reportedly shot and killed an armed assailant in the nation’s Parliament building Wednesday morning. It was a highly emotional moment when Vickers returned to Parliament today—watch the video above—and was greeted with an extended standing ovation. Witnesses are convinced that Vickers, 58, prevented a large-scale massacre in Ottawa. And though he has not yet spoken publicly about his actions (he’s notoriously modest), his record of public service is proof enough of his exceptional character.

Eight years ago, Vickers celebrated his election as the House of Commons’ top cop by traveling in style from Ottawa to New Brunswick on a brand new Harley. “As a gift, his two daughters bought him a vanity licence plate with the letters SGTATRMS,” wrote Bea Vongdouangchanh of The Hill Times. But his career began nearly three decades earlier as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (the “Mounties”), who are responsible for policing provincial and criminal cases while monitoring Canadian internal security.

The Mounties were convened in 1873, in part to monitor and deal with Americans who were trading with Native Americans in Canada—cheap whiskey for buffalo hides. Today, the force focuses on issues like organized crime and national security, and has jurisdiction in eight provinces, three territories, 184 aboriginal communities, and three international airports. Vickers signed up almost 40 years ago, and spent 29 years on the force—a true-blue local boy from small town Miramichi who moved up in the ranks over time.

In 2000, he was put in charge of the Burnt Church Crisis, a heated battle in which Canadian fishermen destroyed hundreds of indigenous people’s lobster traps. The Native lobstermen retaliated by trashing fish-processing plants. The Mounties were called in to deal with the tense standoff and resolved it peacefully thanks to Vickers’ “thorough assessment” and “measured response,” according to an account from a book on Canadian policing. In an interview with his hometown paper, Vickers credited his experience delivering milk in Burnt Church and Neguac during summer vacations as vital to his understanding the region’s people—which helped him deal with both sides of the crisis respectfully.

Vickers was also involved in several high-profile investigations involving murders, drug crimes, and a tainted Red Cross blood supply. By the end of his term with the Mounties, he held the title of chief superintendent.

In 2005, he joined the House of Commons as director of security operations, and a year later was elected sergeant at arms. From the start, Vickers led the charge on the development of Canada’s “bias-free policing strategy”—now a part of RCMP officer training—by reaching out to the Canadian Muslim community to discuss cultural sensitivity. He served a security guard for the Queen of Canada herself, and was awarded the Queen’s Jubilee Medal to “honor contributions and achievements made by Canadians,” according to an official fact sheet. He also received the Canada 125 Medal and the RCMP Long Service Medal. The United States has offered Vickers a commendation for his “Outstanding Contribution to Drug Enforcement.”

Vickers has remained humble despite his many plaudits—he insists he’s just doing his job. A 2011 feature on Vickers in The Globe and Mail describes how he defended the right of people to wear the kirpan—a ceremonial dagger carried by baptized Sikhs—in the National Assembly. In response, the World Sikh Organization hosted a dinner in his honor. He spoke with The Globe and Mail about why he stood up for the Sikhs:

“As we go forward, we should ask ourselves what Canada should be when it grows up…We have a long way to go before reaching adulthood. The seizure of the kirpans at the Quebec legislature last winter demonstrates the challenges that lay before us as we continue on this journey of sewing together the fabric of our nation with the thread of multiculturalism. Perhaps it would be beneficial for our country, as a nation, to define its core values. What are the core values of Canada, what makes up the soul and heart of our nation?…I told them Canadian officials that if they made me their sergeant-at-arms, there would be no walls built around Canada’s Parliamentary buildings…and the fact that you may wear your kirpans within the House of Commons proves there are no walls around Parliament and I have kept my promise.”

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Kevin Vickers, Canada’s Badass National Hero, Is a Portrait of Humility

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