Wheels within Wheels

Last Wednesday, I met a friend for lunch. I drove up to Longmont and met my friend Steve and his friend, Greg, at the Longmont airport, and we flew to Greeley and had lunch, then flew back. My friend owns a 1963 Beechcraft Musketeer, and it was the first time I’d been in a plane this small since a flight in a Navy trainer.

It was an interesting flight, and I’m glad I took him up on the offer, even though I get nervous flying. Steve’s also giving Greg some informal flying lessons, which didn’t do a lot for my equanimity. It wasn’t quite as bad as the tight turn Steve threw us into to check out the “spirit level” application in Greg’s cellphone, which required pulling a few G’s so that we could determine whether the cellphone used an inclinometer or an accelerometer. We determined that it was an accelerometer, which means that they can use the cellphone to develop an application for flying. I don’t think I left any crush marks where I was holding on …

Marion didn’t like hearing that we came within a few hundred feet of a collision, though. One of the ways they control air traffic is to assign certain altitudes to traffic in different directions. As we were climbing to cruise altitude on the way from Longmont to Greeley, another small aircraft passed almost over us travelling west at the eastbound altitude we were climbing toward – we were about 400 feet below the cruise altitude at the time. I was actually less nervous about it than the turn or Greg’s shaky flying, actually.

Then, on Thursday, Marion and I went to Grand Junction. She had a trade show to attend, and I didn’t have a job to prevent me from accompanying her. Nor had I spent any time in Grand Junction before, although I think I may have stayed there overnight while travelling cross-country in 1975.

I spent much of Friday wandering around downtown Grand Junction while Marion was busy, then met her at the end of the day. I did get to wander around the exhibit floor a little and picked up some swag. I skipped the pens except for two places: Ecos Environmental and Olsson Associates. The first one was just because I’ve been working for the last few years with the eCos RTOS, and I thought it was amusing. The second one was because the pen was multifunction: it has a bottle opener back end and is a refrigerator magnet. Neat. I also picked up few thermal beer/soda can holders, including one from Halliburton.

Anyway, fun activities for the week that were related to things starting with the letter ‘G’, giving me the post title.

We saw lots of birds while we were in the Galapagos. Of course, we saw the Darwin finches. The problem was that they’re fairly nondescript, and you’d need to examine them fairly closely to tell the differences from island to island. Not being an ornithologist, about all I came away with was that they look a lot like sparrows, particularly the females. The males are darker-colored, as shown in this photo, so they look less like sparrows to me.

The birds that were both common and more noticeable were the warblers. This is a male (I think), denoted by the red markings. The ones without the red markings are, I believe, the females.

It was surprising to me that there were flamingos on the islands. It turns out that they’re considered a native species.

We also got to see the Galapagos Mockingbird. This is one that Tim, our guide, coaxed into view while we were on our hike around Volcan Negra.

One of the famous birds of the Galapagos is the Blue-footed Booby. There are actually three species of Booby in the islands – the Blue-footed, the Red-footed, and the Nazca. We didn’t see any of the Red-footed, and saw the Nazca only at a distance. We did, as you can see, get close enough to at least one Blue-footed Booby to show just how blue the feet and legs really are.

We also saw the Galapagos Penguin, the second-smallest penguin in the world, and the only species of penguin found in equatorial waters.

Frigate birds are found world-wide. It was getting to be the start of the breeding season, and the males were making their displays. This was on a small, uninhabited island that we passed, not much more than a large rock. It did have a number of birds roosting there, as well as marine iguanas.

On the same island, I got my only photo of a red-billed Tropicbird, which has a distinctive long tail. As you can tell, it’s an action shot. I consider myself lucky to have gotten it – I only saw three tropicbirds during the trip, and none of them were posing for us.

Another bird we saw was a Night Heron, which was hanging around a nature preserve. Actually, most of the land area of the Galapagos (about 97%) is nation park/nature preserve. Only four of the islands have permanent population, ranging from about 120 on Floreana to about 10,000.

We saw other birds, such as pelicans, sandpipers, and Calfornia oystercatchers. On one of our inter-island legs (Santa Cruz to Floreana), the boat crew identified some birds as albatross, but they were too far away to get good photos, even with my telephoto lens.