Northern Goshawk Photo used by U-Haul
Sometimes my previous life as a wildlife biologist comes into play. U-Haul has used one of my photos of a northern goshawk (Accipiter gentilis) chick in the nest on their Supergraphics information site for Alaska, which features goshawks on the Tongass National Forest.
My goshawk thesis summary site, From the Egg to the Air is the top visited site for goshawk information. In my summary I describe the life of goshawk chicks in northcentral Nevada from hatching to post-fledging (after they leave the nest and start learning to survive on their own). I spent 2 summers radio-tracking fledgling goshawks, monitoring their movements around and away from the nest. I was involved in studying goshawks in Nevada from 1994 to 1998 on research about feeding habits, mate and nest fidelity, population dynamics, and my own project. In the animal world, I'm a bit partial to predators, and goshawks are very efficient and elegant in what they do. Watching a goshawk swoop down silently off a branch like a stealth fighter, dogfight an American robin around a lodgepole pine, or dart in and out of tangled branches like an acrobat gives a person greater appreciation of what it takes to survive in the wild.
In Ecology there are a couple sayings, "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and "Everything is connected to everything else". These principles are true no matter what lifeform you are or what environment you live in. Humans realized this long before the science of ecology was born. A simple Lakota Sioux prayer, which I learned while working on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations is "Mitakuye Oyasin" is variously interpreted as "We are all related", "All my relatives" or "We are all brothers". It means that for survival all life depends upon one another as well as on the non-living components of the planet we live on, the earth, sky, water, air, and fire. It is a truth in the deepest sense of the word.
I'll stop there before I end up completely off the topic. I'll save that discussion for later.
My goshawk thesis summary site, From the Egg to the Air is the top visited site for goshawk information. In my summary I describe the life of goshawk chicks in northcentral Nevada from hatching to post-fledging (after they leave the nest and start learning to survive on their own). I spent 2 summers radio-tracking fledgling goshawks, monitoring their movements around and away from the nest. I was involved in studying goshawks in Nevada from 1994 to 1998 on research about feeding habits, mate and nest fidelity, population dynamics, and my own project. In the animal world, I'm a bit partial to predators, and goshawks are very efficient and elegant in what they do. Watching a goshawk swoop down silently off a branch like a stealth fighter, dogfight an American robin around a lodgepole pine, or dart in and out of tangled branches like an acrobat gives a person greater appreciation of what it takes to survive in the wild.
In Ecology there are a couple sayings, "There is no such thing as a free lunch" and "Everything is connected to everything else". These principles are true no matter what lifeform you are or what environment you live in. Humans realized this long before the science of ecology was born. A simple Lakota Sioux prayer, which I learned while working on the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations is "Mitakuye Oyasin" is variously interpreted as "We are all related", "All my relatives" or "We are all brothers". It means that for survival all life depends upon one another as well as on the non-living components of the planet we live on, the earth, sky, water, air, and fire. It is a truth in the deepest sense of the word.
I'll stop there before I end up completely off the topic. I'll save that discussion for later.
posted by Mike Shipman | 1:50:00 PM
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