| | | polvo~
teaching does help us to learn more. don't know if i have ever mentioned this before, but i used to write teaching materials for the 4-H club programs up here. i wrote quite a few project sets over the years. one of the main objectives is to get the youths to "teach" what they learn - because -- as you have said, teaching is learning. i sometimes like to write a teaching article on some topic as it helps me to increase my own understanding or knowledge.
ah.. the AudioMoth. yes, it requires going through and identifying the bird calls. there is some software for that as well, but probably out of my purchase range. you can also create spectrograms of the recordings and then use visual sound indexes to help identify the birds that you can't recognize immediately. i do know a lot of our native songbirds by call -- the most common ones. however, there are some that are tricky and where spectrograms can come in handy. it's all very interesting stuff to me.
i have used trail cams (game cams) to monitor places. i used to have one at the house i rented in AZ because there as a lot of wildlife up on the mountainside. lots of javelina activity. i had some fun shots of javelina knocking over a composting bin during the night -- a sort of party -- and then coming over to put their snouts on the camera -- a sort of 'HAHA!! See what we just did!!"
when i was at the cabin, i set up my cam to monitor some burrows in a mound under mesquite bushes. turned out that it was a family of kit foxes -- the little foxes that aren't much larger than cats and are actually considered somewhat "at risk" populations. it was really quite interesting. all of those photos were shot using the infra-red. i got my cam maybe 2010 -- so it's pretty old technology and cost probably 130 or so bucks back then (it was not a very high priced model). the prices have come down so much and the technology is so much better now. i've thought of getting a new one with higher resolution and greater motion range. it would be nice to have -- but then there are lots of things that would be nice to have and only so much $$ to go around -- and i tend to live fairly low to the ground (as one of my good friends likes to say). i'll see if i can find the kit fox shots and post them if i do.
uhm.. hmmm... what about that dream, eh? it was more a vision than a dream. of a powerful gravity force pulling all of the stars toward it. maybe it was a black hole --- but i don't know if i'd even heard of those back around 1970. the stars were being dragged through the sky, and i was having trouble staying in one place in spite of crunching down and hanging on. what did i learn from that? that nothing is really as stable and structured as we think it is. all things are actually fluid. time is fluid too -- our respect for it is kind of weird and meaningless. many things exist outside of time. so, yes, i think this vision did have some impact on how i think -- how i turned out. for most of my life, i have regarded life as being like a river -- and you just pick your route through it -- moving downstream for awhile, finding a quiet eddy to hang out in when you need a rest -- moving on when you are ready. there is no right or wrong journey -- you just go with it and make the choices that seem best at the time. later, they might not seem like they were the best choices, but you have to realize that you weren't working with the full knowledge of how things would turn out -- you did the best you could with what you knew just then. you also learn that other people don't have the same value system and so they are on their own journeys and maybe they just don't parallel yours. that means going on alone sometimes -- and that's okay. you learn a lot from doing things on your own -- at least, that has been the case for me.
there, that's some of what i have learned. i am a constant learner -- but i think you already know that about me. :o)
~croco |
|
