I noticed something strange while at DC’s St. Patrick’s Day parade this weekend. After the third or fourth dancing middle school had passed by, my attention started to wander, and I decided to do something much more stimulating than watch the procession – feed wild animals!
I crumpled up a bag of potato chips that my friend Alyson had brought along, and in seconds we had an audience of a dozen chirping sparrows. And then I saw it – nearly all of the sparrows had a little colored tag around one – or both – of their legs.
We took some pictures. Here are a few of the birds:
The first bird has an orange tag, the second a black and purple tag. The third has two tags: one orange and purple, the other black.
How did the tags get there? I still have no idea. Is it some sort of scientific study? Part of a disease control program? Are the tags just little bits of garbage that have gotten stuck on the birds? I tried to Google my way to an answer but didn’t find anything.
How many sparrows in DC are tagged this way? There must be tens or hundreds of thousands of House Sparrows in DC. If the majority are tagged, like the majority of the (random?) sample that I saw, then someone has been doing quite a lot of work. Readers, let me know if any of you can solve the mystery – I’m dying to know more.
said
Wallace Forman
@ 7:17 AM.
Comments (1)
So I sort of attended the Inaugural Concert and Obama’s inauguration itself. I say “sort of” because, while I was indeed in a crowd of millions on the National Mall watching events on a jumbotron, I was too far away from the actual events to really see them (farther, in fact, than my Heritage Foundation housing).
I am not very impressed with the quality of the videos I got with my phone, so I’m not going to inflict any of them on you. The most impressive thing about the enormous crowds was how they clogged up the streets all around the actual events – something that couldn’t really be captured in any single photograph. At the inauguration, my vantage point – given my slightly below average height – was sufficiently unimpressive that I didn’t even bother taking any pictures. I mostly concentrated on taking videos of the crowd’s reaction to the various attendees. Most embarrassing was the booing and catcalls as Vice President Dick Cheney was pushed out of the Capitol in a wheelchair.
I’ll post one semi-worthwhile photo. It’s a picture of the crowds beneath the Washington Monument that were arrayed to watch the Inaugural Concert two days before Obama began his term. It’s from the beginning of the event, so the crowd grew from the size shown below. Keep in mind that the people here were all overflow from the actual event, at the Lincoln Memorial.
said
Wallace Forman
@ 3:33 PM.
Comments (0)
And I wasn’t that impressed.
Maybe it was the fact that I woke up at 7 and walked for an hour and a half to watch something on a jumbo-tron two miles from the actual event, when I could have watched it in my bedroom only a half-mile from the Capitol. Maybe it was the fact that I had to wait, standing, for three hours in a crowd of strangers, in weather cold enough to steal the feeling from my toes through wool socks and boots. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve heard him speak dozens of times before and am now bored of his cautious, academic style. Or maybe it was the fact that I have always been steadfastly opposed to the most salient feature of his candidacy – not his race, but his liberal policy platform.
I don’t claim by any means to have been an objective judge, but Obama’s speech was, to my ear, platitudinous and uninspired. It blandly complimented uncontroversial American liberties, proclaimed a moment of national emergency in tones too calm to dim the crowd’s excitement, and made no efforts to defend, explain, or acknowledge the redistributive program that I have little doubt our new president will now advance.
said
Wallace Forman
@ 5:15 PM.
Comments (0)
