a Tuesday

I was greeted this morning by the male painted bunting at the feeder - I'm sure that he was thinking 'it's about damned time' because the feeder had sat empty for awhile.  I finally remembered this weekend to pick up some white millet seed (their favorite from my experience).  This is the fourth year in a row that I've had a pair nesting in my yard - and while my intentions have been to be an active member of the Painted Bunting Observer Team, I've failed miserably at my PBOT duties.  Over the past three years, I've always felt that I had the same pair return each year to nest - but this is the first year that I feel as if I have a different (younger) pair (offspring perhaps?).  They've just behaved differently, it's hard to explain.  I think that you can get to know a bird - if only from a distance.  I just don't feel as if I know this pair yet.

Today the laboratory was paid a very generous visit by a Professor Emeritus from Tel Aviv University.  He was in the states for a meeting, and was taking a side trip to visit a cousin in Charleston - so he had contacted me months ago about spending the day with my research group.  His laboratory was the first to isolate and characterize the coral pathogen that we are now sequencing the genome of - our first full genome of a microorganism.  This organism is becoming more and more interesting to us each day:  it's being found more frequently in coral-associated microbial communities, it's temperature-dependent virulence and susceptibility to anti-microbials is fascinating - and I'm eager to see it's similarity to other important Vibrios - cholera, vulnificus, shiloi.  The discussions today were interesting, illuminating, puzzling, comforting - when a senior scientist comes to visit your group, it's always useful to gauge their response to your on-going studies, new data, and hypotheses - especially on something like our coral project which is a field I've only recently joined.  At the end of the day, I felt good - we all felt good - and eager to get on with it.  As one of my doctoral students said as we were all leaving the place we'd gathered for lunch:  we're on the edge of a whole lot of discoveries.  I do believe that is true.  The lab's postdoc heads tomorrow up to Rockville, Maryland, and the J. Craig Venter Institute to generate test metagenomic libraries of our coral microbial communities.  A test library alone will generate more sequence data than the laboratory has ever obtained before.  It's going to be quite a summer.

Now I need to grab the dogs and spend some time in the garden.  Today was warm and it's still dry.  We desperately need rain, although none is predicted in the near future.  A nice summer thunderstorm would be a welcomed end to the day.  But that will have to wait for another day to end.     

Comments

[Vera]

Good to see the painted bunting again. Patrick has been asking me if they've come back.

[Mike]

Damn! You beat me to it. Every time I grabbed the camera today the male bunting got spooked and flew away.

[Pam/Digging]

What a beautiful bird. You're so lucky to have a pair nest in your garden each year.

[Pam]

Vera: I think it came back a month or so ago - I mostly see the male now (the female might be staying with the nest). They came back alot later this year than last year, at first I thought that I wouldn't see them. I do think it's a different pair.

Mike: I think it's great that you are seeing them - do you see them almost daily at your feeder? If so, they are probably nesting, and that's great. You should become a PBOT. They really need folks to monitor these guys.

Pam: I think they're beautiful too. Have you seen the female? She's a gorgeous color - a solid mossy green. I want to paint a room in my house (or the outside of it actually) that color.

[layanee]

I've never seen that bird before! Your post reminded me of how our lives can be so diverse. From lab to garden you are hard at work observing but on such different scales. Very interesting.

[Pam]

Layanee: Not long after I moved to SC, I was standing on the deck of my place (it's on stilts) looking out at a live oak tree and I remember thinking that it looked covered in brightly lit Christmas balls - there were a flock of them migrating through - that had landed in that tree. It was the first time I had seen them, and I've never seen them like that before. It's been nice having a pair nest each year in my yard for awhile - it's a real treat seeing them on a regular basis. As to be observers, a friend from graduate school used to call us 'trained observers'. I'd like to think that is true!

[Annie in Austin]

Pam, it might have been a google search for painted buntings that brought me here last summer- and it's wonderful to see them return.

Annie

[Pam]

Annie, I'm glad they are back as well. They were much later in arriving this year, after coming so early last year. It's a treat to see them everyday.