The Problem of the Panther

If you want to start a fight quickly with your standard southern US hunter, all you have to do is suggest that Black Panthers are not a common part of American fauna and you will be stunned by the number of fervent eyewitness accounts that you will be told. Every hunter and outdoorsman seems to have a story.

...All for a cat that has never been photographed or killed in the country. There are no laws protecting it, (because it is either unknown to science or it is a potentially dangerous escapee)... and yet nobody has EVER dropped a bead on one. It is essentially bigfoot. The gun always jams. The camera always malfunctions.

I will give my opinions on all this... but FIRST... the disclaimer... before I wander in to this minefield.

1. I am NOT saying what you saw or did not see when you were out in the woods.

2. It is absolutely theoretically possible you saw a black panther in Arkansas... Georgia... or any other state in the union. The question is simply what species it is and how did it get there.

My point with this blog post is to let you know, why, (should you make such a claim), people might treat you with skepticism. This way maybe you won't feel like it is a personal attack if you are not believed.

By a little more understanding of what a "Black Panther" is... and the known data and science surrounding them, you might perhaps cut people some slack when they roll their eyes at you.

OK. LET'S GO.

THE FOLLOWING IS A COMPLETE LIST OF THE WILD BREEDS OF FELINE THAT ARE KNOWN TO NATIVELY LIVE IN THE USA, (EXCLUDING ESCAPED CAPTIVES.)

1. the Bobcat (Lynx rufus) - Named after it's short tail, it is not a particularly large cat at all. Male bobcats will generally weigh between 14 to 40 lbs (6.4 to 18.3 kg), while females weigh around 8.8 to 33.7 lbs (4 to 15.3 kg). The largest bobcat ever officially recorded was a bruiser 52 lb cat killed on December 31, 2008 in Wisconsin, though there are reports of 60lb cats found as roadkill. I definitely would not want to be trapped in a confined space with a bobcat, but I routinely use dumbells in the gym heavier than the largest ever recorded. They primarily are hunters of squirrels, rabbits, and other small game though they are capable of taking a small fawn or injured deer on occasion.

ARE THEY BLACK? - sometimes. HERE is a report of the 12th melanistic bobcat ever reported in North America. (seen above)

2. The Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) - Closely related to the bobcat and only found in the far northernmost states with a handful in the Rocky Mountains. They are a little taller and lankier than bobcats, though their fur makes them look much larger. They don't weigh much more than bobcats though. Females weigh around 11–26 lb (5–12 kg) while males weigh around 13–37 lb (6–17 kg). A 40 lb lynx is an impressive one. They also chase small game, with the snowshoe hare being its speciality.

ARE THEY BLACK? - at least one was... so it is possible. The first melanistic Canadian Lynx was filmed in 2020 up in the Yukon. (Story HERE.)  More could have been born or even survived to adulthood... but when most of your year consists of hunting in snow, melanism is extremely maladaptive and most probably wouldn't live to pass the genes along.

3. Ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) - The Ocelot is a little smaller than a bobcat and mainly is a jungle cat of South and Central America. But a few range up in to the very southern tip of Texas as well as extreme southern Arizona and New Mexico. It preys on Armadillos and Opossums and other similarly sized prey.

ARE THEY BLACK? Melanism seems to be most common in spotted cats, but I am having trouble finding any photographs of black ocelots. That does not mean it never happens.... but it certainly doesn't seem to be common.

4. Jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) - This feline hardly even looks like a cat. It is about twice the size of a common housecat and eats reptiles and ground birds and small mammals like mice. It HAS been found in extreme southern Texas before but hasn't been in some time.

ARE THEY BLACK? Eh. Kinda dark gray... but if one ran across the road in front of you late at night in south Texas... you could be fooled. Of course... it is the size of a really big housecat.

5. Jaguar (Panthera onca) - The Jaguar is the only cat in the western hemisphere who fits the scientific definition of a "Panther"... being a member of the Panthera genus. They historically ranged up into Arizona and New Mexico where the last one was reported killed in 1949, though occasional sightings throw that in to dispute. They now are considered extinct from the US except when one occasionally swims over from Mexico. There was one named "El Jefe" that was well known from 2011-2015 in the Santa Rita mountains near Tuscon, Arizona. But was last photographed south of the border in Sonora, Mexico. There might be a couple of others though. It wouldn't suprise me if a half-dozen were roaming around in the southwest states.

ARE THEY BLACK? Sometimes. Yes. Melanism is known in Jaguars. In fact it is a dominant trait (black jaguars can produce both black and spotted cubs, but spotted jaguars only produce spotted cubs when bred together) and it is estimated that up to 10% are black globally. However... there is a caveat to that. Black Jaguars are most common down in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. Rarely is one ever seen in a Central American country, and never in Mexico or points north. There has never been a black jaguar photographed or killed in the USA. There are no skins. There are no bones. There are no photographs. There are no records. But it technically is possible. HOWEVER... where there are black Jaguars there are ALWAYS spotted Jaguars... and nobody is reporting any of them out in the deer woods. If a black jaguar is seen in the deer woods it is almost certainly an escaped captive.

6. The Mountain Lion (Felis concolor)  ALSO KNOWN AS - "Cougar"... "Puma"... "Florida Panther"... "Painter"... "Catamount"... and many others.

It is the cat with the most common names but they are all the same species of animal. They were once all but extirpated east of the great plains aside from the everglades, but they can travel enormous distances, and seem to be recolonizing old areas like my home state, Arkansas. No cubs have been found yet but it is only a matter of time, IMHO. There is prey. There is empty habitat. It won't stay empty for much longer if it even is now.

ARE THEY BLACK? - There are almost NO reports of black or melanistic cougars on the books. There is only one photograph that I can find of such a cat and that is of a dead specimen shot in 1959 by Miguel Ruiz Herrero in the province of Guanacaste along Costa Rica's north Pacific coast. Estimated to weigh 100-120 lb, its carcass is seen here alongside Ruiz's herdsman, but what happened to it afterwards is unknown.

One thing you will notice about this cat is that its underside is light... like a cougar... not black.. like a melanistic Jaguar or Leopard.

The picture above is the only evidence for black cougars that exists. There are no specimens. No skins. No Photographs other than this one. Don't let the nickname "Florida Panther" fool you. The cougar is not even a member of the Panthera genus... and they are all the same tawny brown as any one ever encountered in any zoo or wildlife park.

SO HERE IS OUR PROBLEM...

This is the science. I live in Arkansas and have had dozens of people matter-of-factly explain to me that Black Panthers are as common as any other predator out there. But, out of the six species of American cat outlined above, only TWO of them have ever been recorded in MY state (Arkansas) in historical times... The bobcat and the mountain lion.... and there have only been 12 cases of black bobcats in the US and Canada combined, and 1 or 2 of "black cougars" in the world.... and NEITHER of those fit the description of what many people I have talked to claim to have seen.

So what are all these people seeing? Is it an animal completely unknown to science that has never been photographed clearly or killed? Or is it a thriving population of a well-known cat from another country?

WHAT IS A BLACK PANTHER?

Short answer... a Leopard.

There is no SPECIES of animal that is known as a "Black Panther". There are several subspecies of leopards (Panthera pardus)... AND in SOME of the subspecies, melanism is somewhat common. As opposed to Jaguars, in Leopards, it is a RECESSIVE trait. This means that two spotted leopards carrying the gene may produce black cubs, but black leopards will breed true when mated together.

When leopards are black, they are sometimes called a "black panther".

Where do they live?

Well, the leopard is the most adaptive and successful of all the big cats, stretching from the whole of Africa through the deserts of the middle east throughout India and Southeast Asia and all the way up to the snows of Russia, where the Amur Leopard hangs on by a thread next to the Siberian Tiger. But the recessive allele that causes some of them to be "Black Panthers" is most common in Southeast Asia. In fact, on the Malay Peninsula, almost ALL of the Leopards are "Black Panthers" They are rare occurrences anywhere in Africa and unknown in the desert regions.

Here is a photo of a well-known mated pair of leopards from a park in India. Both are the species Panthera pardus. Same species. Same subspecies. Different color phase. A blonde and a brunette. No different than that.

"Black Panther" is just a descriptive nickname for the brunette.

The problem is, that, as widespread, successful, and adaptive as leopards are.. they never managed to swim the ocean and are not native to any part of the western hemisphere.

...so the question we have before us now is this. How might a population of a rare color variant of a species native to Africa and Asia... BUT ONLY THAT RARE RECESSIVE COLOR VARIANT... have managed to colonize the entire southeastern united states to the point that thousands have been reported, yet never photographed or killed? No dead bodies ever found. No road kills. No skulls or skins. ONLY reports of sightings by the thousands.

It also strikes me as odd that nobody ever reports a regular spotted leopard on their deer lease... or a tiger... or a pride of lions. I have actually seen footage of a kangaroo hopping by some Oklahoma goose hunters. Escapes happen for sure. 

Big Cats are commonly kept as pets. They say there are more tigers in Texas than in the wilds of India. Black Leopards are chic. Many have been bred for the zoo and circus and exotic pet trade, and NO cat would be more capable of survival if turned loose than a leopard would be. In a sparsely populated state with tons of deer and small game, a leopard would be right at home. It would not surprise me in the least that someone turned loose a black leopard and that it survived just fine. They are very secretive and capable.

But one or two escaped or released captives cant explain the number of sightings being to the point that many hunters don't even think that there is any controversy whatsoever. In their mind, there are coyotes, bobcats, armadillos, black bears, black panthers, opossums and whitetail deer in every large patch of forest.

I don't know what the answer is. I can't say definitively what someone HAS seen or not seen. If I saw a giraffe run across the road in front of me, you couldn't tell me I didn't. The question would just be what a giraffe was doing in the area. It is the same with any sighting of a "Black Panther" in the continental USA. They are natives of the other side of the planet. 

I have spent hours in the wild. That being said... I haven't seen a wild bear in Arkansas yet... or an otter... and both have heathy populations.

All I can say definitively is this...

IF you see a black panther in the forest of the eastern US. I don't know of any law prohibiting you from shooting it. That seems harsh but leopards and jaguars aren't supposed to be running around. In the Southwest US, Jaguars may have some legal protection. MAYBE there are laws protecting exotic escapes elsewhere... but they would be dumb in the case of big cats with thousands of years of records of man-eating such as the leopard. 

...and if it ISN'T a leopard of jaguar, then it is a new species unknown to science, and you might even get to name it... and science will be thankful for the ability to study a completely new species of big cat unknown to them.

If hunting isn't your style...then at the very least be the first to ever get a photo of one in America. I was in Kruger national park in South Africa for a grand total of four days and managed to photograph three different leopards. America's wildlife photographers are really slacking if there is a species of big cat living in the forest that has never been photographed here since the invention of the camera... (and everybody has a camera in their pocket these days.)

One other point....

Don't believe everything you see on social media. Every few months, the following photo pops up in my feed with a caption like "Taken with a game-cam near (Insert small town in your state). ...And they say they don't exist!"

YES. This IS a game-cam pic of a black panther. No it wasn't taken in your state.

This particular black panthers name was "Cole" and he belongs to a guy in South Africa.. where this photo was taken. 

All I am saying is this...

If you claim to have seen a black panther in the forest of the USA, you are claiming to have seen an animal that has never been photographed definitively... and never killed... just understand that you are essentially claiming to have seen the equivalent of a tiger (at best) or a "bigfoot".

Black Panthers DO exist... 100%... in India and Southeast Asia (and very rarely in Africa) and in zoos and private collections... and if you count Black Jaguars too... they are walking through the amazon rainforest right now just a few thousand miles away. 

But claiming you saw one the forest in Alabama is exactly the same as seeing a tiger. It is possible.. but it doesn't belong.

So if people don't believe you, don't get angry with them or think they are silly. You are the one who is making the extraordinary claim. You might just not be aware of how extraordinary it is. :-)

The Book of the Dead

For a guy who makes his living in the IT field today, I was a latecomer to all things computer.

In the late eighties I had one or two semesters of a computer class in high school. Very basic programming... (I think it was literally in Microsoft Basic). Green and black monitors. A few quick commands and you could make the screen fill up with your name.

My lab partner and I soon bored with the assignments.. and so we undertook a project of our own. Once I learned the command for making the computer play a tone for a certain length of time. (it was something like [SOUND 3, 22] for each note... or something like that.)

I decided we were going to program the computer to play the guitar solo "Eruption" off of Van Halen's first album.

In one of my many guitar player magazines I had Steve Vai's written transcription of Eddie's masterpiece. So I started there and got to writing down the program on paper at home.

Every day in class, instead of doing our classwork, we would work on programming "Eruption". Then... in the last few minutes of class... we would find a classmate who was having problems with their classwork and quickly debug it for them. (It was usually a simple typo) and then save a copy to turn in as our own work for the day.

The problem was the enormity of the project. We got 1/3 of the solo done before the semester was finished. (I should have started with the last 1/3rd... that is when the fun stuff comes in.)

I still have the big floppy somewhere. But nothing to read it with and the data has long ago degraded. But though it was 8-bit... we were on our way to an impressive feat that was sure to firmly secure our place in Sheridan High School history.

After that, I really didn't do much with computers. I was a music major for a year in college.... then an art instruction major.... then I moved to Atlanta and attended the Art Institute to study Photography for 2 years.

It was well before the digital revolution, so we had ONE "Computers in Photography" class which never even got into Photoshop (if it was around back then.)

All my photography classes were film... camera.. and chemistry. (I didn't even break down and buy a digital camera until 2017.. stubbornly clinging to the F4 and Hasselblad and Sinar. Not that I did much shooting after 2000 or so.)

It was probably around 1995 or 1996 when my buddy, Gordon, turned up at my apartment with a bunch of parts and said "We are going to build you a computer." It was a i386 I think... with 8MB of RAM and Windows 3.11 on it. I think it had Windows Office but as far as I know it might have been pirated. Too long ago to remember. I don't claim to have ALWAYS been by-the-book on everything.

Then I got a modem and set out to figure out how all this stuff worked... starting with email and word processing with Microsoft WORD.

One of the first things I did was to go get a book off my shelf on extinct animals and typed up the paragraphs on the "Quagga"... It was one of the first extinct animals I had ever learned about when I was learning to read at age 5. It was a variant of Burchell's Zebra that only had stripes on the head. I inserted a GIF of a drawing of one and then forwarded the word document to some friends. There is no telling how long it took to send over my old router but it went eventually.

I had no purpose other than just playing around to learn how to do things on my computer.

But my friend Bob, who was way more advanced than me, took my document and set up a rudimentary web site. I was fascinated. I wasn't interested in learning to code HTML at the time but I got a copy of Adobe PageMill and learned to how set up a web page. I didn't even know that this was a thing regular people did before Bob did it.

I chose the name "Steve's Typewritten Book of the Not-So-Grateful Dead" and I would do pages on different extinct animals when I felt moved to. I later branched out in to odd color phases of animals.. pages on White Buffalo... pages on the Kermode Bear, a white color phase of the American Black Bear that shows up in British Columbia in a small area. This section I called the "My-nagerie" and the page containing both sections became "Steve's Hodge-Page". It was written more on a young teen and pre-teen level. Kinda chatty stuff.

This was in the very early days of the internet and there were simply not many sites about extinct animals. So my page got pretty popular. By today's standards, the design is primitive and rudimentary... but at the time, it looked better than many of the sites. And I was about the only site on the subject of historical extinction, which is a subject that had always fascinated me.

Pretty soon I was getting emails from all over the world, and thousands and thousands of hits.

Kids doing school projects on different extinct animals... Magazine writers complimenting me on my writing style.... I somehow ended up as a Wikipedia source on the Kermode Bear... I was interviewed for the book "Internet Guide to Birds and Birding: The Ultimate Directory to the Best Sites Online" by Jack Sanders, which was published in the year 1999. (Many of my pages were about extinct birds such as the Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon, and Ivory Billed Woodpecker.)

Later, in 2005, when Scientists from Cornell claimed to have rediscovered the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas. My page count went crazy. I was the first or second hit if you googled "Ivory-Billed Woodpecker" (and MANY people were googling it at that time.)

At one point, when the page was going strong.. I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I had an Australian.. (or maybe it was New Zealand)... television producer contact me. He wanted to do a series of kids programs and wanted me to write the part of an animated computer who would teach them about extinct animals... at least I think that was the gist of the offer. All he needed me to do was to put up a few more posts on animals so he could pitch it and get the ball rolling.

but I, at the time, was spending more time on my band's web presence and so I completely just... dropped the ball. We emailed a few times and I was like... "Yeah man.. I will get some stuff up..." and I never did.. and never replied to him again.

Who knows what would have come from it? Maybe nothing... or maybe the start of something cool.

Perhaps the pressure was too much and my confidence in my abilities was too low.
I don't know.

I THINK it was just laziness, though.

We don't get a second chance sometimes. That is life. You have to see the opportunities when they come... for what they are truly worth.. and I didn't.

Eventually the "deadbook" just went away when I stopped using that ISP. I have it backed up on a drive at the house... I would never think to try to start it up it again.

I was just at the right place at the right time. Now there are hundreds of sites about extinct animals and I wouldn't get ten views a month.

But for a while... I was a mighty web designer and one of the world wide web's foremost authorities on extinct species. It is funny. It looks SO rudimentary now. But few could imagine the state of most web design in the late 90's if you weren't there to see it.

Little did they know I was just a broke photographer doing it from the bedroom of my tiny two room apartment because I was bored and lonely. Reaching out to talk about something nearly nobody was interested in but me. I found people all over the world who cared about it.

Pink Shoe, Green Shoe... is this dress gold or is it blue?

We have a new blue dress, apparently.

Remember the dress debate from 2015 when people were arguing about whether this dress was Black and Blue... or White and Gold?

I will be honest... that one got me for a minute. I was team gold and white for a few minutes.... then I saw black and blue... then I saw gold and white again.

...but then I saw an advertising pic of the same dress in good light.

After that... nothing I could do could make it look Gold/White again. My brain had re-centered my color memory. 

It appears we have a new entrant in to this little game. The Pink or Gray Shoe.

This is the pic that is making the rounds that is causing debate, though, I admit this one doesn't phase me much.

It is a pic of a hand holding a VAN'S tennis shoe with a small table in the background. The color balance is horrendous. It looks like someone shot it on slide film under fluorescent light back in the days of film. (More on this in a moment)

Some people see a gray shoe with mint green laces and sole. To me it is clearly a pink and white shoe. Maybe I would be fooled if the hand weren't in the picture. But I clearly see the hand of a man. I would say it looks like someone of possibly Indian or Middle Eastern descent... but I happen to know that nobody has blue-green skin. So, coming from a photography/art background... that lets me know the color tint has a strong cyan-green shift. The soles and the stripes immediately correct to the most likely color for sneakers from this company (White) and I can see that the shoe is pink.

Why do some other people see it the other way? I have looked around and seen some try to tie it into the left brain/right brain argument, though I view this skeptically and would like to see some data on that. It seems unrelated and unscientific to me, but we can look at that at the end.

First... a little about color balance.

Have you ever done one of these?

You stare at them for a while intently with relaxed eyes... and then quickly look over to a clean blank white surface or wall and you should notice that the image persists in your eyes for a while but in the correct colors. The "CORRECT" colors are simply the OPPOSITE colors of these. 

The opposite of red is cyan. The opposite of blue is yellow. The opposite of white is black.

But... WHY are the visual centers in your brain trying to pump in exact opposite colors from what you see? The short answer is that is probably a selected-for trait to help the survival of the species, but we can break it down a little bit better than that. Your eyes simply do this all the time. To assure we can sense food and predators, we rely on having good color perception in many different lighting situations. And that means we need to correct under many different colors of light.

Humans actually have pretty good color vision, (having evolved as both predator AND prey.) Not the best in the animal kingdom, perhaps, but we hold our own pretty well, and can detect around 10 million different colors. Humans are trichromats. We have three color receptors in our eyes. But a dog has only two... and so dogs cant see red.  Mantis Shrimp, on the other hand, have TWELVE color receptors to our three... but for some reason, they can only differentiate wavelengths of 25 nanometers or more... (whereas we can differentiate 4 nanometer differences.)

But I digress. We evolved seeing things under the sun, which... on a sunny day floods our world with bright 4800 Kelvin temperature light. Our eyes are tuned by thousands of years of natural selection to see the most different colors of reflected light when lit by a source of this color temperature. That is why the camera flash has been created to produce the same color as the sun.

But even cavemen had to deal with the constant changing of the color of the light. It is warmer in the morning, and red under a beautiful sunset... or in the shade where the sun cant reach, everything is lit by the blue sky instead... or sometimes before a storm... the sky might turn green. Our eyes are designed to automatically correct that color... they do this by pumping in the complementary color. The brain is constantly playing with the color balance in our visual cortex to CORRECT for different color casts caused by the changing world around us.

As man evolved we brought even more unnatural colored light. A regular tungsten light bulb is about 2800 degrees kelvin. Cool White Fluorescent is about 4000 degrees kelvin. Halogen is 3200.

BUT YET your eyes and brain constantly adjust... that red shirt you are wearing looks just as red under the office fluorescents or your bedside lamp as it does in the parking lot on a sunny day. Because your eyes are constantly adjusting the overall environment color to try to correct what it sees. 

Todays digital cameras use "Auto White Balance" to do the same thing. But back in the days of film... it was much more tricky. Film couldn't adjust on its own. We had "Daylight" film that was optimized for 5500 degree Kelvin light and "Tungsten" film that was rated for 3400. Then we had to use all kinds of filters to fix the color so that the pics didn't look all weird. Multiple light sources were a nightmare to deal with. Things got so much easier with digital photography

Still... there are limitations, and there is only so much the brain can do to compensate for different colors of light. Under a red light bulb, red is the only color. Flame is pretty close as well... so around the campfire with your camping buddies, or beside the fireplace with your lover...

If the flame is the only source of light, you might not be able to tell blue from green from black... you have simply gone too far from the norm. A cat could do better at that range.

So back to this shoe. I am used to correcting for color, having been in the photography field since the days of printing color photos for a living. These days photoshop makes it easier. But stuff happens instantly in my brain, depending on clues. And here I see a hand holding the shoe that gives me all the info I need.

Lets run a quick "auto color correction" on this image in photoshop elements. This will adjust the image until it shows the most different colors possible... (since a color cast mutes this.) This is a down and dirty way of correcting MOST color bias quickly.

So... one click and now we have this. It is a much more natural version. The hand also looks more like a normal skin tone.

But we still aren't quite there though. There is still a little unnatural cool bias in the white... so I do a "remove color cast" and click on the stripe... then we get THIS. A more or less color corrected version of the pic.

If you saw gray and green... is your brain still holding on to it and trying to correct it back?

That is OK if it is, and fascinating... but using photoshop or any photo editing software, we can remove our brains biases from the equation. I opened the color swatch and clicked on the shoe with the eyedropper tool. The little circle on the color swatch tells us where the color sits in the visible spectrum.

If I take these color values and make a swatch it is this color.

Further corroborating evidence... I give you a video of an unboxing for the model of the shoe itself...

So this one is cut and dry to me... it just needed white balance.

But what about the right brained/left brained argument that is being talked about on some sites discussing this? Is that really relevant?

I am not the best judge. I did one of those silly online tests this morning and this is the response.
(This is ALWAYS my result, BTW. and I have been doing them for years.)

(I am also an INTJ and "Brain Type 9" if any of that stuff is real.)

I believe in some of the right-brained/left brained stuff. Some people ARE more logical and see things simply as they are. They ask no questions. Some people will ask "Why" and come to different discussions. But I see no compelling link between whether you are artistic or logical and how you perceive this image.

Another problem I have with the whole "If you see gray/green then you are left brained" is this. These articles say that it is the more logical people that view it as green... but I just gave you my VERY Left brained "logic/facts/investigation" pathway that got me to the shoe being pink. I would think that the left-brained would be the ones to see the pink and vise versa.

The intuitive right-brained people would be more likely to see it as green, I would think. They don't ask as many questions and accept possibilities. Not the other way around.

So my conclusion... (worth what you paid for it)... is this.

It is just a crappy pic in crappy light of a pink shoe with white laces. Some people will see it a different way... assuming you are color correcting for the source light present as being something different.

But I don't think it says anything about how your mind works. Not in this case. I bet I could find accountants galore that see it as pink and poets that see it as grey and green.

This has been my TED talk.

The Birds

My friends on social media have noticed that I have started posting a lot of pictures of birds over the past year or so. This is for them, in case they are wondering what the bird thing is all about.

I have been a novice birdwatcher since the early eighties. I want to say that it was "Mrs Pat", our Sunday-school teacher from church, who first exposed my brother and I to the concept of birdwatching, but my memory is fleeting from that long ago, and my brain may have invented that. I just know at some point, a copy or Roger Tory Peterson's "Field Guide to the Eastern Birds" appeared at the house and I found it fascinating as a young budding amateur naturalist.

I remember looking out the back sliding door and watching birds in the snow in 1982 or 1983. I remember going through the guide finding birds I wanted to see one day. I desperately wanted to see an indigo bunting back then, but I wasn't old enough to fully grasp that different birds had different dietary or habitat preferences. In my mind, birds could fly ANYWHERE, so why wouldn't they show up in my back yard if I threw some bread out in the winter?

As I got older, my brother and I would occasionally let each other know if we saw a new bird, and we went out birdwatching a handful of times over the years, but it was never anything super-serious. If I saw a new bird I would make a note in the checklist at the back of my guide, but it was a rare thing.

In October of 2017, my traveling buddy and I took a trip to South Africa, and I had booked us three days/four nights at a camp in Kruger National Park. Africa had always been my dream so I knew I needed to take a decent camera for the game drives, so I broke in and finally joined the 21st century by outfitting myself with a Nikon D750 and the 200-500mm f5.6 zoom lens.

The plan worked perfectly and after getting up to speed on the workings of the camera, I took it to Africa and put it to use exactly as planned.

Lilac-Breasted Roller (Coracias caudatus)

After returning home, I now owned a camera and a large lens. I had loved the excitement of trying to get decent wildlife shots in Kruger from the back of the safari truck, but I had no rhinos or leopards here at home to chase, and Whitetail Deer are, frankly, kind of boring (...unless they have a large rack of antlers, and if they have a large rack around here, it is usually because they are good at avoiding people... with guns OR cameras.)

Enter my old friends the birds. I enjoy the hunt for decent pictures of any wildlife, from bug to beast, but birds were a logical place to start, so that is what I did. I went out to the England (Arkansas) fishing pond to take some pics of Black-bellied Whistling ducks on November 30th of 2017 and my hobby of chasing birds with my camera was begun.

Black-Bellied Whistling Duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis)

eBird

Somewhere along the line, I must have heard, or read, about setting up "Rare Birds Alerts" on the "eBird" website, because I set up an account a few months later (on May 31, 2018 to be exact) and configured it to send me an email whenever a rare bird was sighted. I can enjoy taking pictures of a Blue Jay in my yard if the light is good, but a rare bird is more of a challenge.

There are a few applications/websites around that allow birdwatchers to track their sightings, but none of them compare to ebird. It is free to join and is a huge database of millions of bird  sightings that are used by ornithologists for tracking population dispersal and trends on almost every bird species on the planet.

For the user, it is an easy way to keep track of what species you have seen while also helping to provide the scientific community with data.  For photographers like me, who shoot pics only for myself, it also allows a central repository for my best pics that will likely outlive me, and give those images a small purpose beyond gathering facebook likes. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)

Northern Parula (Setophaga americana)

eBird is one of the best examples of "Citizen Science" around, and even if you are just a backyard feeder watcher, I would recommend setting up an account and tracking some of your better sightings via the app. Some old school birders who have years and years of written records look that the work involved in data input and decide it isnt worth the time to manually type all of those old sightings in... I understand where they are coming from. But I only had a handful of field guide notes and no bird journal.

(NOTE: You set your account up at the website, there is an app that will connect to it via your phone, but it is more for making lists in the field and is very limited for anything other than that.)

If you ever notice birds, you should go set up and ebird account. Just do it. It is 100% free and will take you like eight minutes to set up. Simple stuff.

NOT A BIRDER

Even though I joined eBird on May 31, 2018.. I only did it to get the "rare birds alerts". I was more interested in photography than in keeping a list of bird species I had seen. I wasn't a hardcore birder, after all... I was a photographer chasing birds. So I never uploaded a list for the first 8 months that I had an eBird account.

In late January of 2019 I got an alert that said that a Rock Wren was seen on top of Pinnacle Mountain. A day or two later, on the 26th, I threw my camera in my backpack and decided to head to the top to look for the bird. As I got there, I sat on the rocks at the summit breathing hard and reconsidering my cardio regimen, I had just started to think "I wonder where this bird is" when I looked down and he dashed by my legs a couple of feet away. My camera was still in my bag but the bird was friendly enough that I had time to get it out and shoot some shots. Success! I got my first "rare" bird and I got some decent documentary shots.

Rock Wren (Salpinctes obsoletus)

One of my friends told me that I needed to upload the pics and the sighting to eBird since it was rare. I had never done that but figured it out.

OK I'M A BIRDER

That is when it really all started. My OCD kicked in and I starting adding my older sightings to my eBird account. Because of the rare wren sighting, I was contacted by the local editor of ebird, who then sent me info on the local chapter of the Audubon society and told me about a state wide LISTSERV for birders. I joined the local Audubon society chapter and went on a couple of field trips starting in the winter of 2019.

When I would be out and about looking for birds, I would also stop and talk to any birders I might stumble across and have made a number of important contacts that way. They taught me how and where to look for birds of different types in their respective habitats.

Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinicus)

As of this writing, it has been a few months short of two years since I got my pic of the Rock Wren on Pinnacle Mountain. My current list stands at 283 species in the state, , which is a solid number for a couple of years of chasing. It starts getting tough around 290, and few people get above 300. Almost everything left is rare and incidental at that point, (though there are a few more I should be able to knock out this winter.) [UPDATE: 307 on 8/14/21]

In Arkansas, there have been a total of 417 species ever reported in the state, but some of those are now extinct, (such as the Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet and Bachman's Warbler,) and some others have only been recorded once or twice, having been blown in on a storm or something. I don't know of anyone who has ever reached 400, though a couple are close.

I have a decent number, but I am a mediocre birder (at best). I have somehow managed to get to know some of the best birders in the state, and without their help, my list would be nowhere near where it is. I have a lot to learn.

Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea)

My time with the birds is split into a couple of categories. 

If I am BIRDING, I am usually with other people, learning about species and their habits and trying to add to my list. I might have the camera with me, but it is only there to document if we see something good we need proof for. (There is a high standard on ebird for "rare bird" sightings. A photo might be the only way to get it accepted.)

If I am out SHOOTING PICTURES... I am almost always alone. I wake up as early as I need to. I will often google the sunrise time at the destination and estimate my travel time so I can get there 30 min before sunrise. It is nothing for me to wake up at 4am and brew a thermos of coffee and be on the road by 4:30 AM... or earlier. Many days I spend half the day (or more) and don't get a single decent shot. I don't need to deal with anyone else's needs or preferences. A wary creature, which can be approached to within photo range by one silent, attentive and focused person, will remain unseen if I have a bored fidgety copilot.

Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus)

Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis)

So this is what I do now in my free time. I go hunting for birds with my camera. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn't affected this hobby in the least, thankfully.

It is a peaceful and quiet hobby. I don't have to interact with screaming overly-political keyboard commandos if I am watching the sunrise in the cab of my truck, as the rising steam from my coffee mixes with the smoke from my pipe. A small field can be as wild as the Serengeti if you scale down your view.

Blue Grosbeak (Passerina caerulea)

Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea)

I don't know how long I will be concentrating on avifauna. I have always liked seeing new birds for the first time, and I always will... and I will always view birds as a wonderful subject for nature photography. But they are not my ONLY interest. I will shoot any creature. I plan to start working on my macro photography in the spring. There are dragonflies, butterflies, beetles, and wildflowers to learn about and photograph as I scale down my view even further.

I also want to go larger. I want to work on my landscapes. I want to shoot waterfalls and even mess around with astrophotography a bit. There are always new skills to learn. 

But for now... it's the birds.

I am improving as a birder and as a bird photographer. Perhaps I will do a couple more posts about the photography end and get in to the details.

'

Black-and-White Warbler (Mniotilta varia)

On Republicans and Confederate Statues

The battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia was rejected as the national flag of the CSA, but is the most common confederate symbol known today.

Currently in our country (June 2020) there is a national discussion in regards to public statues dedicated to the memory of confederate soldiers. I personally believe that this is a healthy discussion currently being had in immature and unhealthy ways, but we will set that aside for a moment.

The puzzling part is that, judging from my social media feeds and the mainstream media... it seems to be primarily southern Republicans who are defending the statues with the "history not hate" mantra, and the Democrats on the left who are trying to remove them. Both sides have some valid points... and some nonsense ones.

But THIS post is directed towards those southern Republicans currently opposed to the removal of the confederate monuments.

Ya'll need a little history reminder.

I am generally very opposed to oversimplification of thorny issues. It is natural to take complex issues and reduce them down to good guys in white hats and bad guys in black hats. I am of the opinion that this is not the best way to process history, though I fully admit I fall victim to it sometimes.

But in the interest of making a larger point and not getting off in the weeds, I am going to have to simplify a bit. I know you could pick around the edges and find individual exceptions that prove the rule... I acknowledge that, and if we ever find ourselves with 37 hours to sit and discuss it... then we can get in to the details. Right now we need a quick overview.

So here are a few things for my Republican friends to understand about those statues and that flag.

Slavery is wrong.

Slavery was always wrong. This is the entire basis for the founding of your political party. OK?

There were abolitionists from the moment the first slaves hit the shore. There were people who were horrified the first time they became aware of the practice. There just weren't enough of them. But they were always there and their ideas spread, even if not as quickly as we might have wanted.

In the mid-1850s.. things started to reach a tipping point. The agricultural south had built almost their entire economy on the use of slave labor in the fields, and the politicians and rich landed slave owners (often the same people) were far more reluctant to see the horrors of slavery than the industrial north where slavery wasn't as critical a part of the economy. 

This is the environment in to which the Republican party was established in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854 by a bunch of abolitionist Whigs. (...OR on July 6, 1854 on the outskirts of Jackson, Michigan if you guys need more stuff to argue about...) In any case, they soon developed a following in the north and grew in power and the Democrats in the south soon saw which way the wind was blowing. By 1860, the southern Democrat states threatened secession if the Republican, (one Mr. Abraham Lincoln) won the presidency. 

He did... and we were off to the races.

The Republican party was non-existent in the south as the war started, and the majority of the Democrats in the north tried to foil Lincoln at every turn. Many Democrats died wearing the blue of the union army, I don't want to minimize their sacrifice. There were "War Democrats" and even some abolitionist Democrats. But for the most part, politically speaking, the Civil War was largely the Republicans in blue vs the Democrats in confederate gray. 

The confederate flag you defend is essentially a Democrat flag. It exists because a Republican won the presidency.

The southern Democrats were afraid the Republicans were going to take their slaves and the rest is history. The Republicans won. The Republicans passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments... but old habits die hard.

After the war, as Republican party chapters were being established in the south, (often by blacks), six southern Democrat ex-confederate soldiers formed the Ku Klux Klan, which quickly grew to be an underground wing of the Democrat party known for their subversive and terrorist tactics in fighting Republican reconstruction initiatives by any means necessary.

Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest joined a couple of years later and became it's first "Grand Wizard". (In fact, his Civil War nickname of "the wizard of the saddle" is why the klan has a "grand wizard" designation. That is where that comes from.) He was also a delegate to the 1868 Democratic Convention, and his friend, Frank Blair Jr was the Vice Presidential Candidate.

Nathan Bedford Forrest

The campaign slogan of the Seymour-Blair Democratic Ticket was "Our Ticket, Our Motto, This Is a White Man's Country; Let White Men Rule."

They were beaten by the Republican, Ulysses S. Grant. His slogan was "Let Us Have Peace."

The Democrats maintained almost universal power in the south after reconstruction, writing Jim Crow laws and burning crosses and lynching folks and such, but eventually, the klan died down. and Republicans and blacks made progress.

But just after the turn of the century. Democrat Woodrow Wilson (possibly the most racist man to ever serve as president, IMHO) was elected and RE-segregated the federal government. The first movie ever shown in the white house was D.W. Griffith's 1915 film "Birth of a Nation" (originally called "The Clansman"), shown in the East Room, on February 18, 1915.

That movie was a blockbuster before the term ever existed and the klan rolls swelled again among southern Democrats. The image of the righteous klansman was so popular in the south that there was even a short-lived soda marketed called "Klu Ko Kola". In many small towns, it would have not been unusual for the mayor, the police chief, and many of the major business owners to be klan members. Crosses were burned again. Republicans were targeted and killed. New Jim Crow laws were written and those that had gone un-enforced for years began to be enforced again.

...and it was during THIS period, 50 years after the end of the Civil War, that most of these confederate statues went up in parks and courthouses. The Democrat (and reportedly KKK connected) "Daughters of the Confederacy" raised funds and erected statues to confederates and klansmen alike. Schools and parks and streets were renamed after prominent (Democrat) confederates. They tried to re-define the reasons for the war into ONLY a noble states rights argument... (some of it WAS, but it was PRIMARILY over preservation of the south's slavery economy.)

There might have been SOME people who supported the placement of the statues out of a spirit of reconciliation, but again... this was ~50 years after the war. Mostly, those statues were put up by Democrats in order to show blacks and Republicans (often the same people) who was in charge in the south in the early 1900's. It is really that simple.

I could go on... the Democrats racist nonsense lasted up until the Civil Rights act of 1964 was passed (by 80% of Republicans and 63% of Dems), but that gets us to these statues, which brings me to my point.

If Democrats today want to undo monuments to their shameful history of racism which THEY erected as a threat (at the time) to Republicans... I have no idea why any Republican would object. 

I really don't. It makes no sense to me.

I say "good on 'em". It has nothing to do with me. I am not a flag waver for any party. None of them represent me adequately so I don't represent them. Every vote I cast requires me to hold my nose.

Listen... I think that confederate flags are fine in museums, or at confederate battlefields, or on confederate graves or in historical re-enactments (and I do NOT think confederate re-enactors are doing anything remotely racist - we need to preserve history to learn from it.). 

I think having a tantrum over a flag painted on the roof of a fictional character's 1969 Dodge Charger on a TV comedy from the 80's is absurd. What are we going to do next? Digitally remove all of the swastikas in "Saving Private Ryan"?

That being said.. I don't personally see any virtue or historical value in flying the flag of a conquered nation... which is how I view the confederacy. (YMMV.). And I think confederate monuments should be at battlefields or museums... not at the court house that is supposed to blindly dispense justice to people of color who, understandably, might see those statues as monuments to INjustice.

I have plenty of southern pride. I don't need to fly the flag of a failed and conquered Democrat state (or a failed Democrat attempt at secession if you prefer) in order to love the south... it's people... and much of it's culture.

but I also do not need to turn the front line confederate soldier in to a moustache-twirling villain. Some of them were... no doubt... but so were some union soldiers. For most, they were just defending what they viewed as their homeland, and many had no strong opinions about slavery either way prior to the war. My beef is, (as always), with the politicians. THEY were the rich slaveholders. THEY seceded.

Perhaps your great, great, great grandfather fought for the south. I am not saying you should replace his name in the family tree with a black bar.

But that flag, and particularly those statues erected in the early 1900s, are not YOUR legacy as a Republican. They are the legacy of southern Democrats... and if they want to undo some of the harm they have done, let them.

It has nothing to do with you.