Boreal B[l]og

In 2009, when Arizona allowed guns in places that served alcohol (read: bars), the owner of the gun was not allowed to drink alcohol.  This is “people will do the right thing” mentality, and if you believe people do that, you haven’t been on an aircraft lately, driven on an Interstate, picked up roadside litter, or heard of Curry Todd.

Mr. Todd is a Tennessee legislator who was arrested for DUI and carrying a firearm.  Todd claimed it was the prescription medicine that caused him to weave in and out of traffic, but the law reads “alcohol,” he had been drinking and taking medication, and was jailed for 48 hours.  Todd repeatedly argued during a debate about the law that gun owners were responsible and would not drink while carrying a firearm.  If gun owners are so responsible, why was Todd irresponsible?  Why do 600 people die each year (50 shot by a child less than 6) unintentionally?  Why are there more deaths due to firearms in states where there are more firearms?

Some gun owners are responsible; many are not.  Indeed, 22 million Americans are estimated to have anger issues and access to guns.  They don’t just get pissed off occasionally, like I do, but get skunk anger, red hot road rage sort of stuff.  One doesn’t have to drink in a bar to see people who have clearly imbibed too much.  Really, now.  Does anybody honestly believe we will have a “designated gun owner” who doesn’t drink?  Curry Todd didn’t.  He was an irresponsible gun owner that night.

Let’s look at the “people will do the right thing” mentality.

At Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska, 600,000 Lesser Sandhill Cranes, 90% of the world’s population, migrate through every spring, the greatest migration in the contiguous states, and the largest crane migration in the world.  Cranes are extensively hunted, Nebraska’s being the only state/province where they are not, so they are wary of humans.  The only way to see these birds close up is to be in a viewing blind where one is hidden.  Stand outside, and the birds will not land near you.  Try to approach the birds on foot (illegal in Nebraska; it is harassment), and they will move away.  That doesn’t stop people’s trying to do it.  A couple did it once and ruined one of my blind tours in 2004 over in Grand Island.  The birds left.

The migration is viewed by 20,000 people at Rowe annually; I have been in the viewing blinds 110 times watching, wondering, learning, simply in awe of these birds, which may live to be 35 in the wild, are usually monogamous, and may migrate 14,000 miles roundtrip (24,000 km) each year, to nest.

A lot of people capture this migration using cameras.  In the old days, there was limited time people could shoot a picture using a roll of film.  Digital cameras were a game changer.  At Rowe, we do not allow flashes, we tape over the automatic focuser light, and we do not allow LCD screens to be illuminated after dark.  These regulations occurred because flashes may spook the birds into the air at night, where they may collide with power lines and die.  Flashes don’t work at photographic infinite distance.  Automatic focusers may be seen a mile away.  LCD screens reflect off the face and are visible out on the river.

Before these regulations, we had banned automatic firing of the shutter, because the migration is an auditory and visual experience.  Even a rapid use of a manual shutter detracts from the experience.  We don’t allow lenses or any object to be outside the plane of the outer wall, because the birds will likely perceive the object as a rifle.  Tripods are not allowed in the corner of a blind, because they take up space for three or four windows.  In a dark viewing blind, more than one person has tripped over a tripod, sometimes the owner, who has also been known to drop lenses.  As a guide, I have seen every camera violation there is.  Some people become irate when I ask them to move the lens inside the blind.  Glad one didn’t have a gun.

Photography has become an issue among the volunteer guides.  Some think we ought to ban it outright, the way some museums do.  I don’t have a problem with photography, so long as the birds’ safety is not compromised. I like to take pictures, but I don’t need the perfect picture:  I want to show pictures to people so that they may understand the beauty that is in this world, seek out this beauty, and work to keep these special places…..special.

What would happen if Rowe Sanctuary had no regulations?  Nobody would be viewing the cranes, because people would be walking up and down the river.  People would pitch tents, promise to be quiet, wouldn’t be, leaving human waste and a mess, because people do those things.  People can’t be trusted not to throw trash into a composting toilet at a trailhead on Oregon Route 58 by Mt. Hardesty, despite a sign in the restroom telling them not to do it.  Go see, if you don’t believe me.  How difficult would it have been to have taken the trash back home?

Without regulations, we would have blinds full of tripods, large equipment, flashes, automatic focusing lights, automatic shutter speed, 8000 pictures in one two hour session (yes, a man once bragged to me that he had done that) the birds would be spooked, and the blinds become worthless.  But hey, got to have that one good picture that one can sell, put on Facebook, put it on one’s Web page, be a famous person.

Fact is that photographers failed to regulate themselves, so we regulate them to protect the migration.  We have rules about noise, how many may go to a blind, how they must enter, leave, and conduct themselves.  Left alone, people don’t do the right thing.  Remember Curry Todd.

If people did the right thing, we wouldn’t need speed limits.  We wouldn’t have litter along roads, we wouldn’t have signs shot at, we wouldn’t have scams, NINJA mortgages, the SEC, insider trading, derivatives that nobody understood, worthless supplements declared off limits for FDA regulation, thanks to conservative Orrin Hatch of Utah, need to regulate lasers shot into the air which blind pilots, or drones over important air space.

I don’t want a nanny state, a government that takes over every stage of a person’s life.  When people effectively self-regulate, we won’t need laws.  If people just voted right, we wouldn’t elect people like Curry Todd, who is still serving.

Unopposed.  I’m speechless.

I had just finished the last of six shows in the planetarium my first day as a volunteer at the Science Factory, a hands on museum for children, right down MLK from my house.  I had given six shows, three each of a different topic.  While the shows and my explanations had been good, I realized how much I had to learn as a volunteer, and I was tired.  As the last family left the dome, their 4 year-old daughter looked at me and made my day:

“Who named the stars?”

My fatigue vanished.  A 4 year-old had just asked me a question.    She didn’t just ask me a question, she asked a dynamite one.

That in itself is not surprising, because children are naturally curious, until they keep hearing, “Be polite, don’t bother the man,” or “don’t know, go away.”  She asked, because she wanted to know, and it’s a cinch her parents didn’t know.  I think I understood why the Science Factory wanted planetarium volunteers who knew amateur astronomy.  So, who named the stars?

I bent down to her level, and said, “What a great question that is!!”  Then I answered it:  “The ancient Arabs, Greeks and Persians named the stars.”  I didn’t get into the reasons they did: these people were desert dwellers, had no electricity, and light pollution occurred only with the Moon or a campfire.  The nights were dark.  Small wonder that they knew the sky well.  The ancient Jews knew the Moon’s irregular phase cycle to within 2 minutes.  The Saros cycle for eclipses, a repeat of a similar eclipse every 18 years and 10 or 11 1/3 days, was known 3000 years ago.

“Mommy, I want to come back here in summer and learn more names of the stars.”  I hope I am doing planetarium shows that day.

I looked in the main room and saw an 18-month old girl trying to reach a door handle. She didn’t know what it was, but she saw it, and she wanted to figure it out.  Kids run wild in that room.  That is why the museum works.  Kids need to look at how things recycle, how gravity works, how colors mix, where the lizard is in the terrarium, how we can make optical illusions, and what orbital velocity requires.

When I ask at the outset of a talk whether anybody has questions, they are invariably from children.  The questions are good.  When I was a docent at Kitt Peak in 1986, a junior high school student asked me what a parsec was.  Impressive.  It is the distance of a star from us with parallax of a star one arc second.  In other words, a star viewed six months apart in the Earth’s orbit appears to have moved, just like your thumb appears to jump when you close first one eye and then the other. The closest other star to the Sun is  1.3 parsecs.  Great question.

Young viewer of the Sandhill Crane migration, Kearney, Nebraska, 2012.
Two great sights: the migration, and seeing a young person enthralled with nature.

I was lucky.  My curiosity was fostered by my parents.  I listened to my brother ask so many questions at the dinner table that finally my father told him to ask only three.  Great idea.  Small wonder my brother became a superb grant writer.  He learned to ask good questions; because grants are difficult to obtain, the better the question, the more likelihood of success.

I wasn’t as good as my brother, but I grew up curious. In kindergarten, I asked the teacher, “What does ‘Proceed with Caution’ mean?”  When children weren’t able to read, she was impressed I could.  I still remember her name, I still have her report cards from 1954, and I was once chided by her: “Mr. Smith, we do not say goddamn in my kindergarten.”

Precocity with some words is not always valued.

Often, I don’t answer the questions but let the children find out by watching the show or doing an experiment.  I’ve shown more than one child the Sun through a solar filter, and hear them say, “It looks like the Moon.”  Yep, it does.  That’s why we can have solar eclipses.  I showed one girl Jupiter one night, and she asked about the dots near it.  She had just discovered the Galilean Moons, as surely as Galileo had.

The following day, I spoke about solar eclipses to OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.  This was a tough audience of retirees. I figured I would get a couple of questions I didn’t know the answer, and I did.  I also got mildly chastised by a man who did not understand the concept of protecting the eyes from sunlight during the partial phases of eclipses.  To me, the concept is easy.  He didn’t understand it until after I explained in great detail how the Sun’s rays damage the retina.  He finally said, “OK, why didn’t you say that?”  That’s a tough group.

I also learned I didn’t explain the concept of eclipse families well, because several asked me at the break.  I had the ephemeris and showed them the eclipses of 1997, 2015, and 2033.  Then I showed them 1991, 2009, and 2027.  They understood.  Sure, there were one or two asleep while I talked, and a few looked bored, but that happens.  When I took some out to view the Sun through filters, they were thrilled.  Without my speaking, they saw a large sunspot and noted the Sun was the same apparent size as the Moon.

I was concerned that I had gone through the material too quickly, but this group of adults has been lifelong learners for a reason, and that reason is curiosity.  They were curious as kids, and they never stopped being kids.  I opened the floor to questions, and I no longer had to worry about finishing too early.  Great questions, too.

The interesting thing about adults in these situations is that some drop the fears they have about asking questions, the embarrassment, the feeling they are being impolite, and revert to being a kid, asking questions when they don’t know.  I love teaching in that situation.  Some of the questions make me think, so I learn, too.  I watch their eyes shine in a way that perhaps they haven’t shined for years, because for too long they felt it was impolite to question or were afraid it was dumb.   Some took it to the next level by asking followup questions.  Kids, of course, are naturals at doing this.

The little girl got me thinking—I used to know the names of over 100 stars.  I just went through the sky with my eyes closed and can still do 60.  I’ve got work to do.  That girl may be back, and I sure don’t want to disappoint her.  If I can get everything in the Big Dipper and Pegasus-Andromeda right, the southern stars in Canis Major, and a few others, I’ll be ready.

There is only one dumb question, asking one that was just answered when you weren’t listening.