Le Guin Binge

I recently read and posted about an Ursula K. Le Guin "... short story from Earthsea". I described it as "A dark tale of adultery, betrayal, and revenge." But, it was "from Earthsea" only in setting - no characters from the earlier novels - a little disappointing.

So I was very pleasantly surprised when I read "book 6 of the Earthsea Cycle", "The Other Wind", 2001, 260 pages, 70k words. This book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 2002. All the characters from the original Earthsea books, including the oldest dragon. It was an excellent read.

Le Guin so often includes dreams in her work. I liked this passage:

The last night of the sea voyage was calm, warm, starless. Dolphin moved with a long, easy rocking over the smooth swells southward. It was easy to sleep, and the people slept, and sleeping dreamed.

It was followed by the dreams of all the major characters, including some we hadn't heard from in a while.

I enjoyed that book so much that I decided on a Le Guin binge.

Next up, "Changing Planes", 2002, 238 pages, 64k words. A short story collection based on a bad pun. Someone discovers that when you are in an airport and are between planes or changing planes, you can change planes of reality! The stories are set in various alternate planes of reality, with varied, odd cultures. Fun, quick reads, nice!

That left me with a series of 3 YA novels, "Annals of the Western Shore", which I expected to be, mmm, Hunger Games maybe. Nope. The stories are set on a new and different world, and are dark and adult in tone.

The 1st was "Gifts", 2004, 214 pages, 58k words. Marginally existing upland clans all have a different superpower, which they obsess over keeping via careful breeding. Feudal with a vengeance - this clearly seems like a bad bargain to me. How will our young heir handle his power, which is to undo things - i.e., to turn a person into a bag of bones, among other things?

The 2nd book is "Voices", 2006, 267 pages, 72k words. The action occurs 10-15 years later and moves south to an enlightened city known for its libraries, which is overrun by a desert people who believe the written word is sacrilegious - oops. The major characters from the 1st book show up 1/2-way through as supporting characters, nice.

The 3rd book is "Powers", 2007, 412 pages, 112k words. It says this won the Nebula Award for Best Novel; I'm surprised it took me this long to find it. More time passes, and now we move south to constantly warring city states. The main characters are mostly slaves. Writing about slavery seems fraught with peril to me. We have another new young protagonist, and our major characters from the 1st 2 books show up.

I enjoyed all 3 of these. The only thing I will say is that when the main story arc ends, that's it. You turn a page and its "About the Author". I like it more like "The Return of the King", where after Sauron is defeated you have the wedding, the Cleansing of the Shire, the voyage to the western lands. After all the suspense and tension of a good novel, I like to bask in the afterglow of a successful conclusion a little. UKL seems to be more, "OK, we're done, we're outta here!" ;->

Well I just got another Le Guin short story collection: "The Unreal and the Real", 2012, 873 pages, 237k words! This one I will leave for later.

Birdwatching in IslandWalk

[Updated 2023-08-04]
I am changing this page to be the homepage for the topic "Birdwatching in IslandWalk". I will add links to later birdwatching posts chronologically at the bottom of this post. This post will be entered in the "Links" section of the blog.

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[Updated 2024-03-06]
This is really not enough data yet to do much analysis on, but I figured I would start this table, which is the most aggregated form of the data. Even so, the # of Avg Birds can be thrown off by a vulture or crow get-together, which can be 50-200 birds, but not too badly I think. Not sure what the increases mean, but I guess that's better than decreases.

OK, I've thought about it a bit, I think what's going on is that 2020 goes thru March, 2021 goes thru April, 2022 goes thru May. Mating season starts in late February, early March. All the passerines, in particular the mockingbirds & grackles, start singing 5-10x as much, so their numbers soar. I hate to cut the counts off in March tho. This year I am planning to be in IW October-April. I could use that as a consistent sample moving forward. This would all be so much easier if I were in IW year-round, but my wife wants no part of that :-(. If anyone else can step up and help, that would be great.

Season	Counts	Avg Species	Avg Birds
Dec-2020 : Mar-2021	9	22.0	170.4
Dec-2021 : Apr-2022	22	24.8	209.9
Dec-2022 : May-2023	26	25.4	222.3

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I started counting birds in IslandWalk in January, 2016. Last week I entered my 200th complete checklist of birds counted in IslandWalk to ebird.org, the world headquarters of birdwatching. It is run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Audubon Society. Here's the IslandWalk hotspot page from ebird.org:

https://ebird.org/hotspot/L4138659

There have been 91 93 94 95 species of birds observed from IslandWalk.

A couple of years ago I changed my counting methodology, and I wanted to document why and how.

IslandWalk is a gated community in northern Collier County, Florida. It is at the northeast corner of Vanderbilt Beach Road and Logan Boulevard, around 7 miles from the Gulf, ~9 miles as the crow flies from downtown Naples, and ~3 miles south of the Collier-Lee county line. It has a perimeter of 4.4 miles, so I'm guessing its area is ~1 square mile. Construction began in 1999 and I'm guessing lasted 4 years - each quadrant was a separate phase, starting from the southwest and going clockwise. 1800 doors, it is a huge community.

IslandWalk has a wonderful system of lakes (retention ponds): 30 lakes, 170 acres of water. The lakes mean that in addition to passerine (perching) birds, you can also observe swimmers, divers, and waders.

IslandWalk also has a wonderful system of trails and bridges for walking and observing.

There are actually 3 lake systems: southwest, southeast, and north. The 3 roads that go from the perimeter to town center (IslandWalk Blvd, Guadeloupe, and Whidbey) all go over fake bridges. The 27 real bridges in IslandWalk are all pedestrian; they also define the watery boundaries between lakes.

There are no bridges that support motor traffic - I'm sure this was a large cost savings. So if you're kayaking from Lake #1, you have to portage across Guadeloupe to get to the north lakes, or across IslandWalk Boulevard to get to the southeast lakes.

Here's IslandWalk from Google Earth. The lakes are numbered, and our house at 5836 Charlton Way, on the west bank of Lake #1, is shown by the yellow asterisk (*).

All the water from the entire 2 mile square bounded by Vanderbilt Beach Road, Collier Boulevard, Immokalee Road, and Logan Boulevard drains to the west through the IslandWalk lake system. This image from our most excellent Lakes Committee shows the water inflow and outflow locations, as well as the lake and bridge numbers.

I started counting birds after there were some statements to the effect that there were not near the number of birds frequenting our lakes as in the past. I had the thought that'd it would be a lot easier to guess at trends if we had some data, so I started counting birds whenever I walked in IslandWalk. When I am here (lately Dec 1 - May 1) I walk Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, 3-8 miles.

A couple of years ago I decided that counting every time I walked was not the best way to get a consistent data set. I decided to count only on 2 walks, both of which walk the 4 diagonals of IslandWalk. 1 adds the east and west sides, the other adds the south and north sides.

The 1st I imaginatively named "X" (the bowtie or the butterfly would be a bit more catchy ;->). It is 5.41 miles. Here's what it looks like (from my iPhone walking app):

The 2nd I named ... "X2" (or the hourglass). It is 5.47 miles. Here it is:

Both of these walks go by all the lakes on one end/side, and go by ~1/3 of the lakes from both ends. I think these are about good as can be done to systematically cover all of IslandWalk.

I've only gone into this data once to try and draw a conclusion about our bird population. That was a couple of years ago when there was concern about the muscovy ducks. The data from 2016 to 2020 showed a slight decrease in muscovy duck numbers, and a slight increase in mottled duck (our brown mallard-like dabbling duck) numbers.

With regard to the question that got me started counting birds - do we have fewer birds than in the past? - my gut level would be that yes, there are fewer birds. We purchased our house in IslandWalk in spring 2009, so I have an additional 7 seasons of bird observations before I started counting. I would posit 2 possible reasons for a decrease:

1. There are so many new developments, many of which have water features like (but nowhere near as nice as) IslandWalk. So there is more competition for the bird population.
2. The Climate Crisis is changing migration patterns and times. Additionally, it was widely reported a few years ago that since 1970 we have lost 1/3 of the birds in North America.

I should probably take a stab at the data again. I need to revisit how to pull the data, and how to select for just X and X2 in the spreadsheet they provide. If nothing else I can edit it manually.

I'm definitely going to do the 1st of an annual blog post: "Birding in IslandWalk, 2021-2022 Season".

If anyone else wants to be a bird-counting citizen scientist, I recommend the X and X2 walks for counting. That will give us the most consistent data set. I put the name of the walk (X or X2) in the Comments section of the eBird form.

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[Updated 2022-03-08]
Lake #1 Birding
Earlier post with anecdotal bird watching on Lake #1.

[Created 2022-04-13]
Initial post of "Birdwatching in IslandWalk".

[Updated 2022-05-18]
IslandWalk Birds, 2021-2022 Season
This is the 1st annual report I posted, it contains ~10 years of accumulated anecdotes & theories re IW birds.

[Updated 2022-08-29]
IslandWalk Birds, 2020-2021 Season

[Updated 2022-08-31]
Cormorant Menace?

[Updated 2023-08-29]
IslandWalk Birds, 2022-2023 Season