Watch them fly. There they go.

[cincinnatus_c]

Today was the 365th day in a row that I have reported my bird sightings on ebird. I think I missed the day before this streak started because I made one last run to the public water tap in Coe Hill. (It would've been interrupted on one of the days I visited my father in the hospital at the end of the summer, but B. was determined to save the streak and took me to Marie Curtis park in Etobicoke as the sun was going down.) At that time we had no firm reason not to believe COVID spread from surfaces, and I thought it might be the end of self-serve gas stations. Now it seems kind of miraculous that there were never any hand-sanitizing rules at gas stations (while we're still doing a great job of stamping on any toehold the flu might get by sanitizing the hell out of other things ... say what you will about the effectiveness of our COVID strategies at dealing with COVID, they've been a resounding success at keeping anyone from getting the flu)--you're still supposed to stick your hand in a plastic bag to use the tap in Coe Hill. On my current streak I have added 45 new species to my lifetime list, bringing me to a total of 104. Today I counted my first phoebe of the year. The robins, vultures, red-winged blackbirds, and maybe-Compton's-tortoiseshell butterflies showed up a few days ago, red-shouldered hawks a bit longer ago than that, crows a bit longer again. Purple finches and red-breasted nuthatches could show up any day now.

Today's bible reading was Nehemaiah, which is a twin of the immediately-preceding book of Ezra; both are about the return of the Jews to Judah, to rebuild the temple, after seventy years of exile in Babylon. Ezra and Nehemaiah are notable for their xenophobia: Ezra concludes with Ezra making Jewish men get rid of their non-Jewish wives, and their children by their non-Jewish wives. Near the end of Nehemaiah it's determined that all "foreigners" are to be excluded from "Israel". Both "foreigner" and "Israel" are funny concepts here. It strikes me again and again how the Israelites are foreigners in their own land--and as part of that, how the Babylonian exile is a return to the place Abraham originally came from. And the "Israel" that "foreigners" are to be excluded from is a people, not a state--Judah is still part of the Babylonian empire; Nehemaiah is its governor at the pleasure of the king of Babylon. It struck me this time around how the relationship between the state and the religion of its people is completely different from what it was in the descriptions of the Israelite kingdoms. In those, there is no daylight between the religion of the king and the religion of the people. If the king goes astray, the people go astray (in such a goes-without-saying way that it seems like the relationship is logical rather than causal). If the king comes back to God, the people come back to God. But foreigners, non-Hebrews, were never excluded from the kingdoms, despite God's pronouncements that they should be, and they always mingled with the Israelite people. In the kingdoms you had a pluralist people in a non-pluralist state; in post-exilic Judah you have a non-pluralist people in a pluralist state.

--
Currently under my porch: 7. Currently at Belmont Lake: 1.8, which, that's an awfully big gap there. High there today: 19.3. High of 17.6 at Peterborough airport today, 0.4 45 minutes ago at midnight, huh. Small chance of the UW first-time-to-20-degrees contest ending on Thursday, it looks like.

Comments

[meanwright]

Lots of robins this year. Huge flock a couple of weeks before the storm, and still several this morning. Usually, they're pretty rare this far South.

Listening to some Yale lectures on what I assume is 1st semester bible stuff. Almost every word I try to use instead of stuff makes it sound like a Baptist revival. The early lectures correlate nicely with the book on Caananite religion that I'm currently reading in the tub.

The Legend of Ba'al: The king of the gods who lived in his parents basement.

...and half the inspiration for Jehovah, strangely enough.

[cincinnatus_c]

> Usually, they're pretty rare this far South.

Naturally, this was a claim I was going to have to test. ;) Maps of ebird reports of robins around Houston and across the US and southern Canada, Feb. 2020 vs. Feb. 2021:









So that's a neat illustration of the difference between there being robins around but too few and far between that you're likely to see one (which is the case here a lot of winters, if not most, too), and there being enough robins around that you can't miss them (which happens here the odd winter--looks like 2017 was the last one--when there's enough crab apples or whatever, and people say "the robins are confused!").

Someday I ought to dig more deeply into the context of the bible ... maybe. I have just a little scanned-some-wikipedia-articles awareness of theories about the development of Yahwehist monotheism out of the amorphous pantheon in the general area, and a similarly vague awareness of theories about how different texts were woven together into the received scriptures ... but even just that little is hugely helpful in terms of looking out for certain kinds of glitches in the bible (like the places where it seems ambivalent about what a "god" is and how many real ones of those there are) and for places where the narrative is out of order in one way or another. Without any awareness of those contexts (let alone sticking to the the-whole-thing-was-dictated-as-is-by-God! idea) I don't know how anyone could read the bible at all carefully and not be very confused about why it is the way it is.

[meanwright]

That is definitely what the internet is good for!

I like that it confirms what I've been seeing, but given the fact that people weren't freaking out about the virus in 2020 and many are still working from home today, I wonder how representative it is.

[cincinnatus_c]

Yeah, definitely could be an issue for the Houston map, but on the larger-scale one you can see that other places don't increase in concentration like Texas does.

The best piece of evidence I've seen for the effect of COVID on ebird stats generally is that the number of checklists submitted for this year's Great Backyard Bird Count, which is the second weekend in February, was up 47% this year. The number normally trends up over time but not by nearly that much in a year. But it's a backyard bird count; there are more people counting birds in their backyards, but that doesn't mean more people counting birds overall, since people aren't traveling as much to count birds. Personally, I have counted birds way more because of COVID (though I was already counting birds most days when COVID started, so maybe not as much more as I think) ... I guess there will also be people who have counted birds less because of COVID, because counting pretty much the same birds in your yard every day could get boring for some people.