On Thursday at the museum I worked on preparing a Yellow-Shafted Northern Flicker, which is a species of woodpecker that has the most amazing sunflower-golden coloration on the inside of its wings and tail feathers (there is a Red-Shafted variation that lives in the western United States, and has scarlet coloration instead). The Flicker also had a red bar across the back of its neck and a constellation of wonderfully elegant black spots on its lower belly, which made me think of a pattern on a fine silk summer dress. It was an utterly gorgeous bird. I am always slightly surprised when Dave hands me a pretty bird to skin, as I generally feel that when I am done with them they cannot help but have lost at least some of their beauty.

I wish I could say that I did the Flicker justice, but I’ve had a two-week hiatus from the museum, and it showed. For one thing, I ripped the skin in several places as I was working it away from the body. Most of the time, this isn’t terribly devastating to the final result, since once you finish up and fluff the feathers on a bird into place (I lose far fewer feathers as I’m working now, which is a huge relief) small tears are not at all noticeable and don’t have to be repaired. But this time I managed to create a significant gash right near the bird’s right ulna, so that when I slid the wingbone back into place it popped out of the skin. I had to sew that tear up. I also had trouble securing the two ulnas together, which you do by simply knotting them together with a piece of thread that runs across the bird’s chest cavity. This keeps its wings close to its body as the bird dries, protecting them from damage and allowing the bird to be stored in a smaller space when it is unpinned. You have to work the skin right down to where the ulna meets the carpus (see the fourth picture on this page) and make the knot there; otherwise, the string doesn’t stay tight enough and the wings will fall open once the bird has been sewn up. This happened to my Flicker. I could see one of the other volunteers look over at it as she was leaving, and I cringed.

There’s no denying that I’m improving, though incrementally—there’s just such a mountain to climb. A good skin is perfect. No feather is out of place, the shape of the body is just right; you feel the bird could open its eyes and take wing.

My second bird that day was a Common House Sparrow, a dowdy brown thing, but I adore sparrows. I gave it all the delicacy I could muster, and it turned out reasonably well. Fluffy poof of a bird.

P.S. When I had worked the Flicker’s skull out of its skin, I noticed two extra bands of cartilage spanning each side of the head that you don’t see on other birds: extra shock-absorption for all the drilling it does. Walking back from the gym this morning, Ross and I heard—and then saw—two downy woodpeckers hammering away sonorously in the upper branches of a tree behind our apartment building. I thought of those bands of cartilage, cushioning their brains, and grinned.

I was sitting at my table in the bird preparation lab this morning, sewing up a small Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, when a member of the maintenance staff at the museum poked his head out of one of the side rooms next to the lab, where he’d been working.

“Excuse me. Excuse me?”

It took me a while to turn around, partly because sewing up a bird is close work, and partly because while I am in the lab I usually feel like such a tenderfoot that I imagine I must exude an air of complete ignorance, and who would ask me a question? But turn around I eventually did.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, but what’s that hanging in there?” He pointed inside the room.

“Huh?”

“What’s hanging in there?”

“Um—I don’t know, actually—I haven’t been in there.” But by this time I had swiveled around in my chair and gotten up, because if I’d learned anything in my time at the museum so far it was that whatever was hanging in that room today was going to be something I wanted to see.

“It’s a wolf,” said Dave, the head of collections. He came over from the other side of the lab, grinning. Dave led the maintenance guy in, and I followed.

People, I don’t know if you have lived until you have had a day on which serendipity affords you the sight of the skinned carcass of a wolf hanging like a magnificent totem of death from the ceiling. Apparently the unfortunate beast was shot by a moron living in Minnesota, who claims to have mistaken it for a coyote. (The wolf was at least as long as Ross is tall; no coyote it.) It had been recently skinned by a member of the mammal department, and its hide was being prepared to be stuffed. Because they didn’t have enough room for the carcass in the mammal rooms at the moment, the rest of the wolf was drying out in our lab until it was ready for the Dermestids. At the end, the museum would have both a skeleton and a skin, each a fascinating and instructive remnant of the animal.

The wolf was gorgeous: sleek, a deep ruby red, made all of muscle laid out in curvilinear lines, and very recognizable. If its skull hadn’t been obscured by the edge of the sink it was hanging over, I’m certain the maintenance guy would have recognized it immediately.

As I sewed up my tiny bird, smaller than my own right hand, I was filled with tremendous admiration: for the wolf itself, yes, and also for the people whose skill would give it a respectful, wondrous scientific legacy.

After another volunteer showed me a couple of things today, I did a tremendously improved job on the two bird study-skins I prepared: a blackbird and another starling. There is still a really long way to go; my tremendous improvement means only that the birds did not turn out looking entirely as if they’d just been chewed on mightily by a cat. Nevertheless, I felt really proud. And when I got home I was able to explain my achievements to Ross in great detail (and over dinner). I am lucky it is hard to gross him out.

In case anyone is interested, I stuffed a starling yesterday. I feel I should clarify that I did not stuff it well. I didn’t put enough cotton inside it, I tied its wings too far apart, I pulled the skin down its legs too far, and I dumped so much sawdust and water on the poor thing while I was working that its shiny plumage looked very much the worse for wear by the time I was done. But to cut a long story short (I took notes while I was watching more expert hands and counted more than three dozen distinct steps), I started out with an ordinary* dead bird in my hands, and ended up with a somewhat mauled and bedraggled-looking stuffed skin. Getting through this process with a series of tiny birds like warblers and tanagers (much fiddlier and more tricky) took the two other volunteers, both of whom have spent a day or two a week for the past two and a half years doing this and are very meticulous and practiced, about 45 minutes per bird.

It took me a full three and a half hours, with some assistance. I was a little sweaty and faint by the end, to tell you the truth, not from the gore (it is a little gory) but the concentration and exertion. Even though it didn’t turn out very well, I’m glad I tried preparing my own skin on my first day. Working on it was one of those things that lies very much outside my natural set of talents, and resulted in a kind of focus I very rarely experience. If you’d like to know more, ask me next time you talk to me. I figure some of you might not want to hear about this in much more detail than that.

Anyway, besides that, I’m currently preoccupied by the fact that we’ve started fostering, because we decided we weren’t ready to commit to owning a cat right now. Our first foster is a rescued street kitty who turned out to be the sweetest creature on the face of the earth. See?

(Email me if you live in the Chicago area and are interested in adopting an awesome, healthy, friendly cat.)

*I shouldn’t say ordinary; it was a very beautiful starling. Much more beautiful before I got my hands on it, but oh well. I’ll improve.

Listen, I know it has been quiet here lately, but I have started building something that I have been planning to build for two years now. It isn’t ready to share with you yet, but I’m very excited to say that I think it will be soon, hopefully some time in my (now rapidly approaching) birthday month. I will need a lot of inspiration and perspiration to continue its construction, though, so wish me luck. And thank you, so much, for the sweet support I know you will give me when the time comes (because you guys rock).

I am also terribly pleased because I visited the Field Museum today and received the most marvelous possible tour of the Bird Division’s specimen preparation room. I do not think I need to tell you how incredibly cool it was to be invited into the room where tiny black beetles eat the flesh off various small-to-medium sized carcasses.

Wait, do I?

P.S. Ross and I are going to get our drivers’ licenses converted tomorrow and—since we have to take a written test—we have just spent two eyeball-drying hours studying the astonishingly badly written Illinois state drivers’ manual. I leave this process with so many questions. To wit: Why, DMV writers, do you include six impressively redundant diagrams and two pages of bulleted lists to illustrate the many ways in which it is right and proper to turn from one lane into another, and then go and toss around the snazzy term “hydroplaning” without explanation? Why is it that after three pages of photographs and text, I am still not clear on whether you are or aren’t required to stop when coming upon a school bus unloading children (like screaming offerings unto the world) in a roadway with four or more lanes? And finally, do you think it would be possible for me to meet and shake the hand of the singularly brilliant individual who came up with the term “aggravated fleeing”?

That is all. Luck, my friends.

Dear Governor Palin,

today you gave what your campaign called your first “policy speech” to an audience in Pittsburgh, PA, on the topic of the McCain-Palin ticket’s three broad reform proposals for addressing the issue of education and services for children with special needs. One of these proposals is the commitment to fully funding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA: legislation signed into existence in 1975, but never backed by enough cold hard government cash to properly benefit those for whom it was written.

Let’s set aside the fact that John McCain has repeatedly voted against increasing federal funding for IDEA, shall we? (Barack Obama voted last year to raise funding for IDEA by over 44 billion dollars.) Let’s also set aside the fact that you personally have said you would, given the choice, oppose a 0.1% sales tax increase (that’s a one cent tax on every ten dollars spent) in order to fund programs for the developmentally disabled in Colorado.

Let’s just talk about how your speech today managed—somehow—to raise the display of your contempt for scientific inquiry to greater heights than ever before.

In lamenting the lack of federal funding for IDEA, Governor, you laid the blame squarely on one of your campaign’s favorite demons: earmark spending. Specifically, this is what you said:

We’ve got a three trillion dollar budget, and Congress spends some 18 billion dollars a year on earmarks for political pet projects. That’s more than the shortfall to fully fund the IDEA. And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

Governor…when I heard you speak those words, it sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you. I didn’t know quite how to react. But I’ll try, because what you said today betrayed not only an astonishing ignorance of nearly one hundred years of research in genetics, human development, and medicine, but also a stunning lack of understanding of the basic mechanisms of scientific study.

As many biology-taking high schoolers will be able to tell you, Governor, the humble drosophila melanogaster—besides being an incredibly annoying daily visitor in kitchens across the country—is also one of the most important and useful tools of biomedical research we have ever had. It helped us discover, for one thing, that genetic information is carried on chromosomes. The guy who figured that one out won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, actually. Imagine that. A Nobel Prize for fruit fly research.

Fruit flies also share almost 60% of our genetic code, and when it comes to genetic markers of disease, that number jumps to something a lot closer to 75%. That means it’s really easy to induce horrible human conditions in the tiny little buggers and try to figure out what causes those conditions, as well as how to fix them. Since a fruit fly is also very cheap to house and feed, and since its life cycle is short enough to make multi-generational studies very quick and feasible, drosophila’s been helping us make amazingly important discoveries about pathology and treatment for nigh on a century now.

In fact, Governor, to anyone who may have read a newspaper or two in the last several decades, your remarks this afternoon sounded as absurd as if you’d said, “And where does a lot of that earmark money end up? It goes to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good—things like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s research. Silly things like studying cancer and AIDS. And oh, yeah—don’t let me forget—it also goes to things like genetic research, science that enables us to better understand the origins of disorders like Down’s syndrome and autism.”

I. Kid. You. Not.

As a former teacher, Governor, and a person who now works extensively on producing educational materials, many designed for children with special needs, I applaud your devotion to improving services for this criminally underfunded population (although you might want to remember that children with special needs tend to grow into adults with special needs—who also need services). But your sunny, sarcastic, seemingly deliberate scientific illiteracy is an insult to scientists across this country and the world, the vast majority of whom work on tiny pieces of research that would probably seem worthless or irrelevant to you (stuff like investigating a tiny bit of fruit fly DNA, say). That is, they’d seem worthless until five, ten, or even twenty years went by, and some other scientist fit it together with another tiny piece of research, and suddenly there it was: a cure for cancer. Or a new kind of biofuel that could help this country become energy independent and escape the dark menace of your other favorite demon, foreign oil. Or even, Governor, a definitive answer about the causes of autism or Down’s syndrome.

There are those of us who would dearly love to be able to give you the benefit of the doubt, Governor. We would like to believe that even if you are not our choice for Vice President, you are still a competent and intelligent human being whose opinions are deserving of respect. We want to believe this because the alternative is far too depressing. The alternative is believing that someone who willfully and cheerfully dismisses the intrinsic worth of scientific research—someone who is so lacking in knowledge and education that she could make the kind of baseless and uninformed argument you did today—that a person like that is running for the second highest office in the land.

And we are letting her.

Very sincerely yours,
Me
(a permanent resident who is starting to wish with all her heart that she’d become a citizen before this election).

Today was the day of Ross’s scholarship lunch, where he and the other students awarded grants traveled to a tony building in the Loop to meet sponsors, display huge scientific posters, and talk about their work.

He wore a new suit. It looked awesome.

When he came home he seemed exhausted but exhilarated by the experience of having people be interested in and enthusiastic about what he does, asking questions, listening closely, and saying, of his poster, “Yours was the only one I understood!”

I love my guy. And I’m proud of him.

More soon on unrelated topics. I’ve been writing about meiosis all day and parsing the relationship between DNA, genes, chromatids, chromosomes, and homologous chromosomes has me a little dazed.