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Jan 23

FOR THE BIRDS

These two avid bird watchers do not qualify for work on the bird census

For the seventh year in the row, the great tit comes out on top! Both throughout Austria and in Vienna. Get your ornithological-ignorant mind out of the gutter. The great tit is a chickadee (OK – fair enough, I admit that I didn’t know either so enlighten yourself with the Wikipedia tit entry ). Our Austrian

Great tit

friends had the sense to call the little critter a Kohlmeise. But what makes the chickadee this year’s champion (again!)? He/she happens to be the bird who most frequently showed up for dinner at bird feeders throughout Austria for 4 days at the beginning of January.

Yes. From Wednesday, January 6 (a holiday in Austria – Three King’s Day) until Saturday, January 9, over 8000 Austrian bird lovers heeded the call of the wild and became official census takers for the Austrian Bird Protection Organization – Birdlife. Dedicating themselves to an hour’s watch at a bird feeder at a time and place of their choice, participants agreed to count how many birds visited the selected feeder within the hour and then take the point in time when the most birds simultaneously visited the feeders — how many were there and which birds they were.

House sparrow (Spatz)

The 8062 participants submitted 5699 reports which recorded a total of 243,499 birds. Somehow that amounted to an average of 43 birds per Austrian garden, which was up from 39 in 2015 and 34 in 2014. Apparently the birds showed a distinct preference to Styrian (50 birds per yard) over Salzburg (last year’s seed distributor of choice) cuisine. But is it any wonder that our feathered friends choose to hang out with the green-hearted, bird-loving Styrians who can boast 2,014 bird-counting participants? The Tiroleans obviously had better things to do this year (watching skiers in flight?) and can bow their heads at the embarrassing 49% drop in participants.

Blackbird

The siskin seems to be attempting to steal the great tit’s thunder this year by endearing the Austrian media with its incredible jump in rankings from a miserable 29^th place in 2015 to sliding into this year’s top 10 at number 10. Not to be outdone, in press coverage, however, is the greenfinch’s uplifting tale of overcoming incredible odds with an apparent come back after a parasite outbreak depleted its numbers (2.4 per garden up from 1.9 last year).

Vienna had 567 bird lovers who submitted 405 reports that indicated 10,691 birds had been spied in the country’s capital city, averaging to about 26 birds per bird feeder. More surprising than the siskin was the rank of the street pigeon sightings in Vienna. The Columba livia came in 10^th in the Vienna bird rankings. Or maybe they missed the BirdLife memo and were all too busy collecting leftover kebab and pizza scraps at Schwedenplatz to be bothered with bird feeder visits in Prater.

Don’t miss out on the action next year. Be sure to mark your calendars now for the 2017 winter bird census (Thursday, January 5 – Sunday, January 8, 2017) because as the old, wise Austrian saying goes, a sparrow in the hand is better than a pigeon on the roof! (if only cats understood German)

Just a side note, if you came to this website because you entered “great tits” into your search engine and ended up here: “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.” (Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency)

The top 5 birds in Vienna?

Carrion crow

Great tit (of course)
Rook
House sparrow (is it any wonder that the Austrian near equivalent for “sweetie” is “Spatz” which is the nickname for the house sparrow?)
Carrion crow (raven)
Blackbird (my faithful, feathered friend who sings me through the Viennese summers)

Top 10 Birds sighted in January 2016 in Austria

Great tit
House sparrow
Siskin – the Austrian media darling
Field sparrow
Blackbird
Blue tit
Chaffinch
Greenfinch
Goldfinch
Brambling
Siskin

Because you know you’re dying to learn more about the birds:

Austrian bird website BirdLife that conducts the annual bird census

PDF of 2016 Registration form with instructions and bird images at BirdLife http://www.stunde-der-wintervoegel.at/img/sdw2016.pdf

Results from 2016 – click on map to see more exact results and whether there was an increase or decrease in sightings: http://www.stunde-der-wintervoegel.at/index.php?id=auswertung

Some fun with a bird quiz in German – do you know the bird? http://www.news.at/a/quiz-wintervoegel

Hear the great tit in action: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parus_major_15mars2011.ogg

My personal favorite and most frequent visitor to my summer sanctuary: the blackbird answering another bird’s call: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EB1lgjg9e4Y

Jan 11

NEW YORK CITY AND THE NATIONAL SEPTEMBER 11 MUSEUM

When you visit a city on a return visit, or after several return visits, you are free of the pressure to cross off site-seeing lists, making return visits almost always more rewarding because you can finally ease into a place and let the day take you where it wills without maps or guide books. Sometimes, however, the will of the day takes you where you are not eager to go, but definitely need to be.

On a (return) visit this past week to NYC, one of my days willed me to two gaping holes in the earth where two towers once stood that years ago had afforded me impressive views of the city. This time, however, instead of cruising in an elevator hundreds of storeys skyward, I descended into the depths of the National September 11 Memorial Museum.

Steel beams displayed at the September 11 Memorial Museum

Steel beams displayed at the National September 11 Museum

Words are insufficient to describe what it is like to stand dwarfed next to naked steel beams once an integral part of a skeleton great enough to extend the whole way up to the “Windows of the World” and to be overwhelmed by the fragility of life reflecting in the smiling faces of portrait upon portrait of those who didn’t manage to make it home the evening of September 11. Volunteers in blue vests stand discreetly next to exhibits and politely answer questions as you navigate in stunned silence through bare concrete halls displaying poignant reminders of a day forever etched in all of our memories.

Having studied in DC and often visited the museums and memorials there that are free, I was struck, even before entering the National September 11 Memorial Museum, by the steep entrance ticket price of 24 USD per adult and 18 USD per student. If the funds were going to the families of victims and first responders, the fee seemed a small price to pay. But if not….

It just seems wrong that any company or individuals should make any profit from anything related to 9/11 or any such tragedy for that matter. Neither of the two volunteers I asked were able to say for sure where the money for the tickets went. Since then I’ve looked online. I was surprised to discover that according to Wikipedia’s National September 11 Memorial Museum page, the museum is not administered by the National Park Service like the Flight 93 National Memorial but rather a non-profit corporation?! After trying to figure it all out, I still don’t really get it. How much more costly can this museum be than all the museums in Washington DC that are free? I also don’t quite understand who owns the September 11 Museum, who runs the museum, the logic of a non-profit corporation as opposed to a national park service and where all the funding goes and for what but it would seem to me if the museum is a public museum, funded by public funds and sincere in its mission statement, any and all balance sheets related to the administration of the museum as well as meeting minutes, etc, should be publicly available online directly from the museum website at the click of a mouse button. Sadly, it didn’t seem from what I could find that steep ticket costs were being used for the health and well-being of any of the families at all but I could be wrong. I definitely hope that I’m wrong.

September 11 Memorial Museum

When you visit NY, you immediately recognize that there is no place in the world with as much pulse, edge and grit as NYC. There just isn’t. At the same time, beneath all the chaos, glitz, glamour and lights, you have what really makes the city great – the New Yorkers themselves – the brash, no-nonsense, genuine New Yorker who didn’t hesitate that morning on 9/11 to rush down to the eye of the hurricane and sacrifice his/her life to help another or spend weeks in the ruble searching debris and now dedicates retirement days to discreetly standing next to exhibits patiently answering visitor questions.

Lots of my fellow Americans – particularly those of us who grew up more in the burbs and countryside like I did, often don’t get the gushing, outpouring of enthusiasm for New York that many Europeans seem automatically prone to. But I do. I get it. And it has nothing to do with the neon lights so bright on Broadway.

Dec 20

PARIS IN DECEMBER

Because in the book of life, everyone should have a chapter about Paris. – KC Blau

There’s a lot you can do in two hours time. If you’re adventurous and bad at planning and expecting guests for dinner, you can attempt the 2-hour turkey cooking recipe. If you’re bored and your electricity is down you have to entertain a bunch of friends, you can suffer through 2 hours of monopoly together. If you were an average employee with an average work day back in 2007, you wasted an average of two hours a work day every day. If you live in Chapel Hill, it will take you about two hours to hit the waves (unless it’s hurricane season and they come to you). And if you’re a good date, you can spend 2-hours of quality time with that special someone experiencing the new Star Wars film in 3D. And if you live in Vienna? You can fly to Paris.

Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris – final resting place of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Modigliani, Proust, Rossini, Moliere, Edith Piaf and Getrude Stein.

Which is what I did this past week. Which is why I didn’t blog. Forgive me because I’m not sorry. Passé, perhaps, but I love Paris.

Clock at the Museum d'Orsay on the Impressionists floor overlooking Sacre Couer

Clock at the Museum d’Orsay on the Impressionists floor overlooking the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur

In Paris, with over 300 types of cheese to choose from, you have to leave off most of the endings of words, just to give yourself enough time to have a bite or two. And you find yourself forced to slaughter a language that when spoken by a native French person, sounds so seductive that even the subway guy announcing the metro stops makes you loosen the top button of your blouse. Nothing in Paris is in English and no one ever seems to know any despite the songs and films from – gasp! – America. But Pierre knows he’s strict and after letting you flounder a bit, when your Parlez-vous’ start to provoke some Parlez-Please-don’ts, Pierre and his Parisian friends will indeed toss their sweet boorish foreigner a life preserver with a sudden epiphany that, oh yes, well maybe they do indeed perhaps understand and speak a little — well some — English after all. A Parisian miracle.

Christmas exhibit in the Notre Dame

Ahh Paris, the City of Light. Every museum holds a masterpiece, every masterpiece a deep underlying symbol, every guy a fashionable scarf, every girl a colored brassiere, every street corner a cafe, every cafe eclairs, and the Eiffel Tower always keeps a gentle watch over her cultivated flock. Visiting Paris from Vienna is like a whirlwind tour with the crazy friend who makes you dance, laugh, eat, drink, spend more money than you intended, and then eat, drink and spend more than you should. When you finally wave a remorseful au revoir, you drop into your cattle class 5B contraption called a seat and before the stewardess can tell you to turn off your electronic devices and the guy in 5C can give her an I-dare-you-to-say-something stare as he inserts his earbuds, you instantly fall into a 2-hour recovery coma. Paris…

Me in Paris but from another trip – the book of life is big enough for many Paris chapters

Because in the book of life, everyone should have a chapter about Paris.

Some interesting literature:

Mentioned in this blog: Average Work Day Wasted Hours

The book I picked up in the apartment where I stayed and couldn’t put back down again: Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

The movie I downloaded from i-Tunes and watched while in Paris: Paris, Je T’aime

The song that always makes me think of Paris: “Comptine d´un autre été: l´après midi” Yann Tiersen

Dec 8

Krampus on the run looking for naughty you

NAUGHTY OR NICE – KRAMPUS WAS HERE

That time of year again… I passed the Krampus test. How about you?

Schloss Neugebäude in Vienna and the Krampusse were once again on the loose. Would have enjoyed seeing all the boys aged 5 – 13 who had elbowed their ways to the front of the crowds, rush to duck behind their Dads when the beasts came galloping out, gnashing their fangs, rustling their chains, chiming their cow bells, and then charging straight for those rascals. Yep, quite a scene. Or it would have been, had I not been plagued myself with a miniscule tinge of concern that those Krampusse might do some sloppy detective work or someone could have slipped them some false intel and they could have accidentally mistaken me for someone who had misbehaved this year. Fortunately, the Katscher Krampusse filled their baskets with folks obviously much naughtier than me and I could duck off into the 73A at the end of the evening and bring some scenes fresh from the castle straight to your home or workplace or man cave, far away and safe from those hunting, hungry demons. Then again, they travel fast and you might be in a completely different time zone, so best stay alert, tune an ear for the cling of cow bells, and clang of chains and random grunts and your nose sensitized to goat odors. And if they come? Be sure to take a selfie and post. And keep your GPS on your phone switched on. The NSA, Facebook, LinkedIn or the online Christmas vendors are bound to find you eventually – and start posting you ads for goat food, ear plugs, chain cutters and a nice vacation away from the cave.