I learned about plastics but birds are pretty cool too

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Hello to the no one that will be reading this event review. Maybe you Professor Vesna or perhaps you TC, but I don't think I'm getting any fellow students in here. This is quite late to the event that Jess Irish put on. First, I would like to say that the event itself was actually really great. I thought that the production of the documentary was PBS tier because I feel like I could have viewed that on the big screens of my TV at home with my mom and my dad. Also, Jess's presenting documentary voice was impeccable. The content of the documentary itself flowed like a river and I would give my viewing of it 5 stars, very cool, would watch again with my parents.

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Jess Irish's Talk

In this section, I will now irrelevantly talk about a very small part of Jess Irish's talk before the documentary and also some birds that have been lately on my mind because I see them on campus all the time. Jess (I'm gonna call them Jess because calling them Irish sounds way weird to me, probably because it's already a word associated with a person as well) spoke initially about a short story excerpt "A Fabled Tomorrow" of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring that inspired her to think more about the environment and the effect of plastics I would think (as in I'm pretty sure she said that, it's been a while, and it makes sense that she would say that). Here is a synopsis of the story. There is a nondescript town that is awesome and happy and filled with nature. Then, an unknown plague befalls the town and now it is anti-awesome, anti-happy, and filled with gross turmoil. Then, Carson narrates that she does not know of a town where all of this has specifically happened, but she knows that in some places that some bad things have happened and that we should be wary in case bad things continue to happen in the future. Maybe I'm being a little harsh but it was a pretty generalized lesson but nonetheless has spawned great ideas and media like Jess's documentary. If you would like to read it yourself (it's maybe 200 words), then check out the references and the link should take you directly to the short story.

Separately and slightly irrelevant to Carson's "A Fabled Tomorrow" story is that she specifically writes about the birds that sing and then no longer appear after the unknown plague and it made me think about the birds that we have at UCLA. Well not really, because lately I have been walking around campus and I always see birds and am surprised to see that actually most of the birds I am seeing are different species. I think it's really neat and perhaps on a birdwatcher's visit list to come to UCLA because we have a lot of stinkin birds here. According to iNaturalist (a site for members to log seen species updated live) and another catalogue, there are more than 60 species (and I would say notably different so I'm not counting nearly identical sub-species kind of thing, as in there are over 60 species that are worth the short glance you get when you spot them) here in UCLA. Here is the most common and recognizable bird that I (and you) have seen flying around campus: the dark-eyed junco.

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What a cutie

And to bring it all around, I found an oldold catalogue listing the birds on UCLA's campus. Its foreword relevantly spoke about the choice to establish UCLA on land that seemingly had no settlement. Miller (the author of the catalogue and foreword) described a Prairie Falcon circling overhead its desecrated land that is now UCLA. Similar to Carson's warning, we have the power to grasp everything on Earth, but we selfishly and nearsightedly do not handle the consequences to others and eventually to ourselves. And now to bring it back out of the round, in Miller's catalogue, there are sightings of the california quail, the roadrunner, and a host of owl species that I doubt you'd be able to see here anymore. It's just neat to know about the species that once were here and maybe some species that we see now will be of the past in the future too. So here is a drawing to honor some birds of the past and present.

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Junco and Roadrunner.

 

 

References

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin. pp. 21-22. 27 September 1962. <https://www.kth.se/polopoly_fs/1.198402.1600688376!/Menu/general/column-content/attachment/A%20Fable%20for%20Tomorrow.pdf>

Housel, Morgan. "Stories vs. Statistics." Collaborative Fund. 4 May 2017. <https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/stories-vs-statistics/>

Miller, Loye. Birds of the Campus. University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1947. <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/geog/sagehill/_Media/_IMG/birds/BirdsofUCLA.pdf>

"Birds of UCLA." iNaturalist. 2022. <https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/9042>

"Goodly." Oxford Languages. Oxford University Press. 2022. <https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/goodly#:~:text=%E2%80%8B(old%2Dfashioned%2C%20formal,a%20goodly%20number>

 

Image References

https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/23267970/medium.jpg