Think Draw - Picture - Catch of the Day

Title: Catch of the Day
created on 22 Sep 13

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Comments on this picture (63):
1. mum23 wrote: I visited New York earlier this year. On my second day there, an osprey flew past, only metres away, with a fish it had just caught in the river nearby. It was fantastic!
2. AFSOUTH wrote: This is fantastic mum23!
3. marg wrote: just stunning !
4. DebbieBreau wrote: What a beauty this is.
5. clorophilla wrote: what a beautiful sight! I saw an osprey just 2 weeks ago here near Rome. It was looking for fish flying around above a pond. A magnificent bird. They pass on Italy in autumn and stay just some days... may be this was the same osprey! :-)
6. Burgandy wrote: I should have known - This is so powerful with terrific shape and shading!
7. chelydra wrote: New York ospreys are yards, not meters away, let alone metres away. But it was a fantastic sight and it is a fantastic rendition. After the adulation dies down, If Mum23's consents...
8. chelydra wrote: ...I could throw in some Chelydropedic notes on why there are still ospreys in the world... if I don't forget why before the adulatation dies down, that is...
9. Nata wrote: Looking at your pix, so wonderful, skillful. Thank you.
10. Hazer wrote: New York...fishing ospreys...these are a few of my favorite things!
11. clorophilla wrote: tell us Chelydra!
12. mum23 wrote: Thanks everyone! Who knows clorophilla... maybe it was the same bird we saw... it's highly unlikely, but a lovely thought. :)
13. mum23 wrote: chelydra, I knew I could count on you to nitpick! ;) However you measure it, it came wonderfully close to us... one of many fantastic memories. Looking forward to your Chelydropaedic dissertation on ospreys...
14. Bowden wrote: Magnificent!
15. Normal wrote: So glad you got your close up view! Beautifully drawn.
16. chelydra wrote: So the reason there are still ospreys in the world...
17. chelydra wrote: The story begins about five miles west of the headwaters of the Peconic River (where this osprey got her fish), back in the 1960s...
18. chelydra wrote: ...at the headwaters of the nearby Carman's River - at two millponds in Yaphank... Yaphank used to be sort of famous for other reasons... It was the subject of Irving Berlin's Yip...
19. chelydra wrote: ...Yip...
20. chelydra wrote: ...Yaphank!
21. chelydra wrote: when it was a big army campground in World War One...
22. chelydra wrote: known also as Camp Upton (later the site of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, best known lately for leaking plutonium into the Peconic headwaters, but that wasn't its only accomplishment)
23. chelydra wrote: And then Yaphank became a summer camp for the German-American Bund... there are still maps showing proposed housing developments in the pine woods with a street named for Adolph...
24. chelydra wrote: ... but anyway... we're try to zero in on the Yaphank Ponds in the 1960s but we keep getting sidetracked, and now we'll have to jump back to somewhere around Manhasset or Glen Cove in the early 1950s...
25. chelydra wrote: ...because that was the time and place when there occured what I think was the first recorded (NY Times) concern about the connection between increasing use of DDT and decreasing bird songs... A bunch of folks noticed the woods around a little pond there
26. chelydra wrote: (maybe 40 miles west of Yaphank, and maybe 15 years before our story finally begins in earnest) didn't sound right...
27. chelydra wrote: ...too quiet... much too quiet... they invited some scientist neighbors to help them think about what was going on... they all concluded it had to be related to the massive new spraying programs in all ponds and marshes...
28. chelydra wrote: ...remember, that was when (a) DDT was the new miracle cure-all for all creepy-crawly buzzing things, and (b) the polio epidemic was going full-blast and schoolchildren were spending in years in iron lungs and on crutches (there were lots of crutches arou
29. chelydra wrote: nd then, 2 or 4 or 6 in just about any gathering of kids my age)... so no one could see any reason not to spray the bejeezus out of every little swampy spot in creation..
30. chelydra wrote: so this little grouplet of worried citizens and scientific types was a distinct minority... I suppose it was seen as a choice between having healthy mobile (and alive) children versus abundant songbirds in patches of suburban woods...
31. chelydra wrote: ...they went to court against the spraying programs and lost... but one of the people who heard about the case and took it seriously was a popular nature writer named Rachel Carson...
32. chelydra wrote: and Ms Carson suggested to her friend William Shawn (the editor at the New Yorker magazine, whose essays about the Vietnam War etc changed my life - his low-keyed reasonable voice got through to me when more strident peaceniks just sounded like noise)...
33. chelydra wrote: ...that he ought to assign one of his staff writers to do a piece on the growing doubts about DDT. Shawn agreed it was a worthwhile subject, but insisted Carson hereon was the best woman for the job...
34. chelydra wrote: ("hereon" must have been an auto-correction... shoulda been "herself")
35. chelydra wrote: So Carson reluctantly started writing... and the more she wrote the more she thought... and researched... and thought... and researched... and a year or two or three later she handed in her finished article...
36. chelydra wrote: entitled "Silent Spring" (and book-length)... I think that was 1962... within about one year, that book, plus The Other America and The Feminine Mystique plus the speeches of MLKing and Malcolm X and the SDS's Port Huron Statement, had done a lot to chan
37. chelydra wrote: ...change how Americans saw themselves, and other people, and the earth... intensely well-written books on pollution, poverty, and "the problem without a name" (Friedan's phrase) all stayed on the bestseller lists for ages...
38. chelydra wrote: But Carson was already dying of cancer while she was writing, and that plus the fact she had no kids were used by the chemical industry to discredit her - portraying her as a sick, bitter spinster who was just expressing (projecting) her own bad feelings
39. chelydra wrote: ...about her own life... and of course she was female, so her science was tainted by emotionalism. (She actually cared about the subject! Unforgivable!)
40. chelydra wrote: I remember well a high school science teacher in 1962 or 63 saying his mailbox was jammed with attacks on Carson from chemical companies.
41. chelydra wrote: (That teacher kept a blowgun by his desk, to shoot darts at kids who were goofing off or dozing, which tells you how long ago that was.. nowadays it'll be a shotgun or a taser I s'pose)
42. chelydra wrote: The character assassination campaign carried the day, overcoming the huge sales and critical acclaim of Carson's masterpiece... DDT spread across the world like a chemical tsunami... all through the 1960s... everywhere there bugs, there was DDT...
43. chelydra wrote: ... and that include the Yaphank millponds, which served as the community swimming holes during the childhood of a young lady named Carol Yannacone. Mrs. Yannacone noticed some dead fish floating around in her beloved millponds one day around 1967 or so..
44. chelydra wrote: She was not happy about it. She was so unhappy about it, in fact, that her unhappiness lead directly to the US Congress outlawing the use of DDT.
45. chelydra wrote: and since one of the side effects of DDT is to make eggshells very thin and fragile, the great birds of prey at the top of the food pyramid were facing extinction...
46. chelydra wrote: ...until Mrs Yannocone (and her hubby, Victor) saved the day. And now there are ospreys all over the place. This place anyway. So let's hear it for New Yawk and the New Yawkas who live and fight here!
47. chelydra wrote: .And let's not forget Art Cooley the Bellport HS science teacher who helped launch the Yannacone's crusade (not the guy with the blowgun, whose name was Mott and taught in Massachusetts). And a lot of others whose names I forget or never knew.
48. KJLavigne wrote: Love this!
49. chelydra wrote: and let's hear it for Mum23, whose joyous witnessing (and artful recording) of this noble sight was the made possible by Carol Yannacone's unhappiness (and Wm Shawn's editorial acumen, etc etc)
50. chelydra wrote: (Back around comment 28-29, I seem to have erased the point of the DDT-polio connection, which is that mosquitos were the main suspects behind the epidemic)
51. chelydra wrote: (And if a few words look slightly plagiarized from the Wikipedia piece on Mr & Mrs Yannacone, it's because there are Chelydran influences subverting our competition, not the other way around.)
52. mum23 wrote: You didn't disappoint... fascinating, as always... thank you. And thank all those you mentioned, too.
53. mrozowski wrote: Thanks for reminding me why Silent Spring was so important. Rachel Carson was required reading in high school. I still remember the DDT trucks spraying for mosquitos in my neighborhood in the 60's.
54. DilCoura wrote: Arrasou!!!!!
55. Qsilv wrote: Wonderful drawing, magnificent stories --and deep thanks to Mum, Chel, Rachel (ok, both Rachels!), and Carol Yannacone.
56. Qsilv wrote: http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/bios.htm l?id=368&year=2003 (remember to get rid of any spaces)
57. sandm wrote: so kÃ¼nstlerisch und genial-schlicht, gefÃ¤llt mir sehr gut,... und interessante Chelydristik:)
58. ilirias wrote: c'est magnifique !!!
59. mum23 wrote: Hi Q... thanks for the link. The CWA sounds like a fantastic idea and event; another thing to add to the bucket list... :)
60. chelydra wrote: Good little link - I never knew Carol Y had scientific credentials, just assumed she was a regular folk who got mad defending her home turf (like Lois Gibbs, e.g.)
61. clorophilla wrote: thank you Chelydra. Silent spring was a must in my generation. We owe so much to it!
62. Login wrote: This is education as well as enjoyment. History, science, how to draw birds in flight and how to put Gothic to excellent use.
63. nancylee wrote: An extraordinary drawing of a spectacular sighting and that you so much to Chelydra! I knew much of this story , but not the Yannacone part.