Journey North invites us to come online and Meet the 2008 Whooping Crane Chicks. For this post I have selected Crane #804, born May 9, 2008, shown in the two pictures with this post. Like all 2008 chicks, #804 was born in captivity because none of last year’s nests produced live young. The egg care givers report in their notes that:
This chick has huge personality. He already had a lot to say while still in the egg! Barb said, “When it was in the hatcher, we would check on the egg by making crane vocalizations to assess its strength and progress. Each time I did this, #4 just peeped and peeped and peeped. It was like a little girl who had her phone privileges taken away for a month and finally was able to talk on the phone again to her girlfriends. Chick #4 did this before hatching and also after being old enough to go to a pen.”
Read more about this chatty crane on #804’s personal page. It includes the explanation for the second picture above: “Bees were a problem at the refuge and 804 was stung. The bee sting made his beak get out of line, but it was soon back to normal.”
Chick #804’s page is part of Operation Migration, a remarkable project to reintroduce Whooping Cranes to their natural migration. The cranes, including #804, are now almost finished with their October 2008-January 2009 migration.
The virtual birth, life, and migration of Chick #804 is gold for learning within the internet swamp. A printed textbook and/or the most creative and exciting classroom work cannot provide the learning experience that a student gets by following Chick #804. This is not a substitute for education as we have known it. It is a marvelous phoenix of learning hatching in the swamp.
This learn node is centered in the 2008 discovery at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of how the dolphin kicks with huge power — something that has been a mystery called Gray’s Paradox. Six nodes emerge from the open internet in this animation, providing connected places to learn about dolphins and their power kick.
Remote sensing imagery and study materials abound on the internet. An excellent cluster of information can be found at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program which “is a multi-laboratory, interagency program, and is a key contributor to national and international research efforts related to global climate change. A primary objective of the program is improved scientific understanding of the fundamental physics related to interactions between clouds and radiative feedback processes in the atmosphere. ARM focuses on obtaining continuous field measurements and providing data products that promote the advancement of climate models.”
To learn scientific and technical background for the field MIT offers open couseware on Atmospheric Radiation that is “an introduction to the physics of atmospheric radiation and remote sensing including use of computer codes. Subjects covered include: radiative transfer equation including emission and scattering, spectroscopy, Mie theory, and numerical solutions. We examine the solution of inverse problems in remote sensing of atmospheric temperature and composition.”
Illustrating this learn node is the beautiful elephant named Oldiri, who wears a tracking collar that lets scientists know his locations as they study him and his herd. The Current Elephant Locations page of the Elephants of Cameroon project describes the work. Under the umbrella of Field Trip Earth, Elephants of Cameroon for several years has been one of the finest online environments for learning about wildlife. The monitoring of elephant locations is explained in detail and includes many accounts of the adventures of the actual teams doing the collaring and monitoring. Work going back several years is available. The Cameroon Field Diary: Winter 2008 is currently unfolding online, as it is written by Dr. Mike Loomis, Chief Veterinarian at the North Carolina Zoological Park who left the United States on January 6th to begin the 2008 collaring season.
Good things can have a long life on the Internet as the following review of Elephants of Cameroon shows. It was written in April 2000 for HomeworkCentral.com’s Top Eight newsletter:
Dr. Mike’s departure for Cameroon on April 12, 2000 begins an expedition whose purpose is to save Africa’s vanishing giants, and that can be followed as it unfolds through the Internet in these pages. Supported by the North Carolina Zoological Park and other wildlife organizations, the Web project is a big one, like it’s subjects. There are sections describing Cameroon and elephants in general, and another on the place of the elephant in the culture and oral tradition in Northern Cameroon Dr. Mike’s diary provides updates and questions can be emailed to him. Current sightings of individual elephants are given, along with listings of previous sightings accompanied by maps. These and other pages make this a Web site rich in learning opportunities for a wide range of students, and for anyone interested in elephants.
For a different view of elephant study, the Tufts University Veterinary Medicine Open Courseware provides a detailed lecture outline on Ungulate Medicine. The lecture includes a focus on elephants.
The image for this learn node is a chameleon from an animation in the terrific tutorial Optics for Teens created and hosted online by the Optical Society of America. If a look through the tutorial makes you curious to learn more about optics, a full Optics course is offered by MIT Open Courseware (tree illustration from Lec# 3). If your interest is roused to know more about chameleons the report of scientists developing computer models for learning about chameleon habitats in Madagascar is offered here by the American Museum of Natural History. And you can learn a lot more about these amazing lizards at the San Diego Zoo’s Chameleon page. There the optical mastery of chameleons is described:
The chameleon’s eyes are the most distinctive among the reptiles. Each eye has a scaly lid shaped like a cone, with only a small, round opening in the middle for the pupil. The chameleon can rotate and focus its eyes separately to look at two different objects at the same time! This gives it a full 360-degree view around its body. When the chameleon sees prey, both eyes can focus in the same direction to get a clearer view.
Meerkats have their learning duties as well as frequent recess. A Live Science report (with amazing pictures) describes: Hunting 101: Meerkats Teach Scorpion Dismemberment in which a seventy-day-old pup learns how to eat a scorpion fed to it live. Only the not squeamish click here.
Within the webpages mentioned are links to more sources chosen by the page authors. Like their burrows, the online network about meerkats is complex and connects among various chambers of information.
Tufts University offers Opencourseware like sample in this learn nod for a variety of scientific and other subjects. One of the courses, which you can click to is Rodent and Small Mammal Medicine. The webpage that a click will lead you to has valuable information on the diseases and treatment of the smallest animals we humans keep as pets. It also has this quotation from from David L. Graham, D.V.M. PhD.:
Now, ponder, please that thought of the Bard’s “what’s in a name?” Like, for example, “Pocket Pets”? In my humble opinion all veterinarians should abjure use of the term “pocket pets.”it is (at least to me and few colleagues) offensive and denigrating to the inherent uniqueness and dignity of those creatures that happen to be of such small size that they can fit into a pocket. The term suggests that such pets can be maintained in a more casual and less careful, less caring, and less thoughtful manner than is required for maintenance of other, more traditional companion animal species. Such creatures are of no lesser biological and moral consequence than are larger, more traditional pets. I’m sure that the cute alliteration of the term is a major reason for its acceptance, but I urge that some other rubric(s) be coined under which to group these relatively diminutive companion animals. Please, they are sugar gliders, gerbils, hedgehogs, mice (‘wee sleekit beasties’ – R. Burns), small pets, little small animals (to differentiate them from dogs and cats which are merely ’small animals’), minipets -but please-not “pocket pets.”
How to care for the type of smallest pets shown above guinea pigs is explained in detail at the ASPCA website. The ASPCA pages are an excellent place to study many pet subjects. The Humane Society has an article How to Care for Hamsters that contains some history and social facts too about these smallest pets. While guinea pigs are of South American origin and have been kept as pets for centuries, hamsters were “living in relative obscurity until just 70 years ago when a zoologist discovered a family of these rodents in the Syrian desert.” The ASPCA tells us guinea pigs want to live together; the hamster article said a hamster needs privacy “from others of his kind.” Respecting rodent social mores is important in their care.
There are an awful lot of beetles � and a lot beetle websites, often with titles including their scientific order name Coleoptera. The Coleopterists Society home page begins: “We live in the age of the beetles: Beetles, the insect order Coleoptera, are the dominant form of life on earth. One of every five living species of all animals or plants is a beetle! . . . ” Many of the beetle species have shown up online; for one example there are the beautiful Bembidion �where the webpage is the direct presentation of a scientist who is a leading expert on the species he showcases.
The beetle breakout of body parts in the image above is from a Russia Zoological Institute Beetles (Colelptera) and Coleopterists exhibit. From anatomy to poetry and ecology to jewelry, the exhibit showcases our human fascination with the dominant form of life on earth.
The bird in this learn node is Crane #722 who is now participating in her first Journey South. She hatched on May 21, 2007 and is a member of 2007 Autumn Release Group III of captive-born whopping cranes who this fall are on their 1st migration, led by ultralight planes . She is part of the Journey North Whooping Crane adventures in which new online participants (you) are invited to take part. The wonder of the many Journey North global studies of wildlife migration and seasonal change in which many thousands of students and nature enthusiasts have participated for more than a decade is that their subjects are real. You can, for example, visit the Journey North monarch butterfly migration map to see where the great winged beauties have been sighted this fall as they are moving toward Mexico to winter there.
Crane #722 is playing a role in efforts to reestablish whooping cranes, who had almost become extinct in the 20th century. We are learning from her more general lessons about migration of birds. For more on that, there is a student project on The Mystery of Bird Migration in these MIT engineering class materials and even more in this lecture on migration and navigation.
The illustration below shows a learn node, which you can use as an educator to make webpages more findable. The top little circles illustrate links out to content nodes related to the subject of the large circle. Bottom left, experts connect to the node affirming its quality - giving it juice. Bottom right, a student connects to the node to learn the subject of its content.
This chick has huge personality. He already had a lot to say while still in the egg! Barb said, “When it was in the hatcher, we would check on the egg by making crane vocalizations to assess its strength and progress. Each time I did this, #4 just peeped and peeped and peeped. It was like a little girl who had her phone privileges taken away for a month and finally was able to talk on the phone again to her girlfriends. Chick #4 did this before hatching and also after being old enough to go to a pen.”
Read more about this chatty crane on #804’s personal page. It includes the explanation for the second picture above: “Bees were a problem at the refuge and 804 was stung. The bee sting made his beak get out of line, but it was soon back to normal.”
If your interest is roused to know more about chameleons the report of scientists developing computer models for 
This learn node points to facts about the mammal Suricata suricatta, known as the meerkat, that are set out with excellent images (including the one to the right) in the 
Tufts University offers Opencourseware like sample in this learn nod for a variety of scientific and other subjects. One of the courses, which you can click to is 
