The Wandering Naturalist: Do YOU bird by GISS?

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Do YOU bird by GISS?

GISS, or jizz as it's sometimes called is a mnemonic for "General Impression of Size and Shape."

It's a term that many birders use this term to describe the way they bird. However, is it truly what we use?

This post at the Bell Tower birding blog offers some insightful comments as to what we really do: http://belltowerbirding.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-it-giss-or-what.html

Definitely one of the more interesting blog posts I've seen lately. Enjoy!

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Bird quotes.

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

(From William Beebe's "The Bird: Its Form and Function," 1906)

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'"
--Isaac Asimov

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
-- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

"I once had a sparrow alight on my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn." --Henry David Thoreau

"God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages." --Jacques Deval

"Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?" --Rose Kennedy

"No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings" --William Blake

"A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw, the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren't we like that wise old bird?" --E.H. Richards

"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song" --Maya Angelou

"When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head!" --William Blake

"He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls."

--A.L. Tennyson, "The Eagle"

"This monument, perched like a duckhawk on this cliff, will scan this wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March, it will watch the geese go by. For many an April, it will see the redbuds come and go, and for many a May the flush of Oak-blooms on a thousand hills. Questing wood Ducks will search these basswoods for hollow limbs; golden Prothonotaries will shake golden pollen from river willows. Egrets will pose on these sloughs in August; Plovers will whistle from september skies. Hickory nuts will plop into October leaves and hail will rattle November woods. But no pigeons will pass for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one graven in bronze on this rock.
Tourists will read this inscription but their thoughts will not take wing."
--Aldo Leopold ("on the monument to the pigeon". A Sand county almanac)