Raccoons

I have lived in urban areas my whole life, and I personally never had to worry about putting out the trash for the trucks to take away.  Either someone else took care of this (thanks, Dad!), or I lived in apartment complexes that would have a giant dumpster into which our trash could disappear, never again to be seen by us.  As a consequence I never fully realized how wily raccoons could be until I got here this summer.  Until today, actually.  My previous two raccoon encounters had been:

1. At the Bursley Hall bus stop freshman year, a bunch of us kiddies were startled to hear some rustling in a nearby trash can.  After some minutes a raccoon popped its head up, climbed out, and slinked away.  To my rather immense relief, the bus arrived shortly after.
2. Outside a branch of the Ann Arbor District Library earlier this spring, the fiancé and I saw a raccoon skulking around the dumpster which, due to the layout of the library's grounds, was relatively close to the sidewalk where we happened to be.  We watched in fascination as it managed to pry open the top and drop inside, after which we heard a bit of a commotion coming from inside the dumpster as I wondered how it would be able to get out.  We didn't stick around to find out exactly how.

This morning I arrived at the library to find two of the trash bins knocked on their sides and spilling their contents.  At first I suspected a raucous party--likely involving copious amounts of alcohol--had occurred last night (hey, you know, I have firsthand experience with going a bit crazy with end-of-semester stress--is it not unreasonable to think this happens to others as well?), but the wonderful people at the admin office immediately knew it was raccoons' work and made a call to the facilities staff to help clean it up.  Sure enough, when I got back to the library a closer inspection revealed paw prints all over the floor behind the reference desk--where I'm sitting right now, though in a chair, not on the floor.

Everything is now cleaned up thanks to one of the TAs and the quick response of the staff here; someone just came by to put signs on the doors exhorting people to please "CLOSE doors when you leave" (there have been multiple raccoon incidents recently); and we are all thankful that the raccoons didn't do anything worse to the collections or facility than going through the trash.  As far as I can determine they didn't help themselves to any books while they were here.

Cute, right?  UNTIL IT GETS INTO YOUR LIBRARY.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

No one ever suspects the Asian librarian.

The fact that I, a relatively small Chinese American librarian, play hockey (in a co-ed league, no less), never fails to elicit reactions of surprise from people I mention this to.  This happened at lunchtime today during a conversation among a group of women talking about their kids playing sports.  It's a fantastic conversation starter because people usually want to know how I got into it, do I like it, what's it like, etc. which I don't mind at all because I usually have very little to say in a given conversation around here and it forces me out of my usual reserve.  Nobody, nobody suspects the unassuming Asian librarian of being the type to get under the other team's skin enough to draw penalties out on the ice.  Excited to play again in the fall!

Fact: Bears eat beets.

A more corroborated fact: Ian Fleming named the secret agent protagonist of his books after the ornithologist James Bond (of Philadelphia!) after seeing a copy of Bond's book Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies in Jamaica.  One of the neat things about working in a library at a biological research station is that the collection is likely to have such a title as this among the "old" books, by which I generally mean the part of the collection assigned Dewey Decimal call numbers rather than Library of Congress call numbers.  So I was able to take a look at this unassuming book that relatively few non-birding people would have ever heard of were it not for this bit of trivia.  Among the herons, macaws, parrots, hummingbirds, and flycatchers (along with the curiously-named "Old Man Bird" native to Jamaica), the book lists "Ivory-billed Woodpecker" as a potential bird one might see in Cuba, but notes that its range was "Formerly widespread" even in 1947.

When trying to find information sources for this entry other than Wikipedia, I found this dandy from the Washington Post in an obituary of 17 February 1989:

PHILADELPHIA--The real James Bond has died peacefully in his bed of unreported causes with never a fear of being blown up, poisoned or tortured by a horde of archvillains who threaten western civilization.

The actual James Bond, unlike his fictional namesake, never toted a gun and never drank a martini that was shaken, not stirred. He spied on birds, not beautiful female enemy agents, for a living.

Interestingly, many of the obituaries seemed to point up the pop culture reference of Bond's life, and only secondarily the fact that he was a renowned ornithologist.

EDIT: It appears that the book Fleming had was not Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1947), but simply Birds of the West Indies (1936).  The Field Guide seems to take material from the 1936 book judging from its copyright dates.  Still a neat little book and honestly, was that quote above not worth finding even this lesser-known James Bond work?

Mackinac Island

Last weekend my parents came for a visit.  We went to Mackinac Island on Saturday which calls for another photo post!

The Arnold Line of ferries has two trips each morning that go under the bridge before heading over to the island.  How awesome is that?  Naturally we took one of those!

Unfortunately there were no cars driving over the grating when the ferry went under the bridge.  Still pretty amazing.

Once we got to Mackinac, we took a carriage tour.  This is Arch Rock along with some stunning waters.

They mean business here.

On the carriage tour we stopped off at the Wings of Mackinac butterfly conservatory.  Definitely an unexpected highlight of the island.

Here's another butterfly.  I took several more photos of butterflies (and one giant moth which was kind of creepy) but these two were the ones that came out best.

We stayed at the Grand Hotel!  Not only that, but our room faced the lake and had a balcony!  (So it was one of the few rooms that you see right above the main entrance.)

The view from the balcony.  Just off the left side of the photo: a wedding featuring 10 bridesmaids and just about the complete opposite of what my wedding will be like.

Being at the Grand Hotel we took advantage of the "world's largest front porch", where instead of reading the book I had bought earlier, I used my phone and the "grandhotel" wireless network to look up the relative sizes of Mackinac Island and the nation of Nauru.  Nauru is a bit more than twice the size of Mackinac but probably gets far fewer tourists.

A view of Round Island at sunset.  That's the old Round Island Light on the right, and the newer Round Island Passage Light on the left.

Woo!

Delicious?  Not so sure about the green, orange, purple, or pink varieties of fudge.  But this particular shop advertised that it had made some Mt. Gay Rum fudge, so of course I had to ask for a sample!  Were it not for the fact that I had bought a half pound of maple walnut earlier, I would have gotten some of the rum walnut.

The fiancé's interest in all things boat-related has influenced me not a little bit.  Here we have one freighter heading west and the other heading east.

Harry Potter

Four years ago tonight I stood on the steps of Caernarfon Castle in north Wales with a group of fellow study abroad students proudly posing with our new copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  We were all bummed to find out that we'd be on a field trip to Wales when the book was released, rather than in Oxford, but an enterprising student on the trip called the only bookstore in Caernarfon and convinced them to open at midnight so long as we could guarantee that at least 25 copies would be sold.  We got our books at the shop and ran to the steps of the castle for a photo op, and only one person (not me) immediately read the ending and called her friends in the States who would otherwise have had to wait another five hours to see how it all turned out.

I had only jumped on the bandwagon that spring, but I read all six of the previous books in a four-month time span--two while I was here at the Bio Station for a spring term class--for the sole purpose of being able to go to a launch party in Oxford (or Wales, as the case turned out to be) when it came out.

I have not seen the movie as of yet.  But it's not like I don't know how everything will turn out...