Wildlife Benefit BBQ

On June 9, Mary and I went to a benefit barbecue for the Wildlife Education and Rehabilitation Center (WERC)in San Martin, CA. The center is located in Morgan Hill and it's primary goal is the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned animals. Most of the animals that go to WERC are eventually released back into the wild. In some cases the animal's injuries are too severe to make a complete recovery. In these cases these animals are used for education programs. Some of the educational animals were present at the BBQ, including:

Ariel - a Merlin, which is a type of small falcon. Merlins hunt other birds by catching them in flight. Ariel came to WERC with a damaged wing which never healed completely. As such, she is not able to fly well enough to hunt on her own, so she has become on of WERCs educational animals.

Horus - a Peregrine Falcon, considered the fastest animal on earth. In it's hunting dive, called a stoop, it can streamline it's body and reach over 200 MPH. Horus also has a defective wing and can not survive in the wild. It is quite a treat to see such a spectacular animal.

Loki - a Great Horned Owl, one of the larger of the owl species. Loki was found abandoned at a young age by a well meaning person. However, by raising the owl by hand, the person inadvertently caused to Loki to imprint on humans. He does not really know that he's an owl.

Oscar - a Western Screech Owl, one of the smaller species of owl. Oscar was found near the side of a road, apparently having collided with a car. The people at WERC were able to rehabilitate him, but his right eye was damaged to the point of blindness. The eye is still there, but it appears black now.

WERC has helped a lot of animals over the years, not just birds. On a couple of occasions they have successfully raised and reintroduced orphaned bobcat kittens. Check out their website to read about some of their success stories. They accept donations via PayPal if you're so inclined. You can see more pictures of the birds above on my gallery, just click on the pictures or their names.

Technorati Profile

Energy Race

I was playing around with a website called EnergyRace. If you join and go through their questionnaire, they give you a rough estimate of your carbon footprint. Later, you can indicate any changes you have made to you car, home, etc. and they show you ho much you have reduced your footprint. They even give you a little badge you can put on your website with your latest results:


It looks like I still have some improvements to make.

There's a similar site encouraging and tracking the use of Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFL) called One Billion Bulbs. They provide ratings of various CFLs, and if you create an account, they will show you how much money and carbon you are saving as you switch to CFLs.

CCTO and SJ Peregrines

I ended up going to the California Clean Tech Open (CCTO) Technology and Entrepreneur Matching Event on Monday. It was pretty interesting, but as I feared, most of the research technologies being presented were way outside my areas of expertise. Most of them were related to alternative fuels and large scale energy production.

There were a bunch of guys running around with CalCars t-shirts. CalCars is a non-profit initiative promoting plug-in hybrid cars. They have a plug-in modified Toyota Prius (left) that is getting over 100 MPG. Basically they added additional rechargeable batteries with the ability to charge them by plugging in to a standard residential power plug (right - the plug receptacle is on the left of the bumper just above the word "THIS"). The added battery allows this Prius to run much longer on the electric motor without needing to use the gas engine. Apparently this group is looking to spin off a for-profit company, which I guess is why they were at the event.

I did make one interesting contact at the event. I met a researcher at UC Berkeley working on a project which utilizes wireless sensor networks for energy management applications. Since this is similar to some ideas I have been considering, I will be meeting up with him later in the week to see if we can pool our ideas and resources.

On the nature front, the San Jose Peregrines are getting bigger every day. Actually, they're pretty much full grown now, and should start flying any day now. The picture on the left shows one of the chicks that has made it on to the top of the 2 foot high parapet next to their next box. They look quite similar to the adults now, except for the coloration. Apparently it will be a year or so until they develop their final adult plumage. In the mean time, I'm hoping to be able to spot them flying around the downtown San Jose area soon.