Canada's Only Great Auk

by Jan Thornhill

"Museum" page from The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk (Jan Thornhill)

While working on my new book about the extinction of the "northern penguin," The Tragic Tale of the Great Auk, I became aware that the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto was in possession of Canada's only stuffed one. Hoping to see it, I visited the ROM's brilliant Schad Gallery of Biodiversity, but was disappointed to find no Great Auk, though there was an equally extinct Labrador Duck on display. How sad, I thought, that the regal bird I sought was not on view, was instead tucked away in some dark cupboard, sealed, perhaps, inside a titanium box, safe, but invisible.

The extinct Labrador Duck (John James Audubon)

But a couple of months later, when I arrived at the ROM to talk auks with Oliver Haddrath, the ornithology reasearch technician whose specialty is extinct flightless birds (like the poor Great Auk), I was thrilled to be led out into the same animal diversity gallery where this time—ta da!—behind two layers of glass, there it was, one of the last of the millions of Great Auks that once thrived in the North Atlantic. 

Me and Canada's only Great Auk (Frankie Thornhill)

There are only 78 stuffed Great Auks in the world, almost all held by museums. American museums own a decent chunk of them—eleven—though that number used to be twelve. The twelfth one was once owned by John James Audubon, the American bird painter famous for his Birds of North America book published as a double-elephant portfolio, "elephant" because it had to be big: Audubon presented all of his subjects life size. Though each page is a huge 39.5 inches tall and 28.5 inches wide, the largest birds—cranes, herons, flamingos—had to be doubled over in his compositions to fit. 

Because Audubon painted birds life-size, he had to double
over the biggest ones to make them fit on the pages. 

Audubon included the Great Auk in the book, but he never saw one alive. He had to base his painting on a taxidermy model, a specimen killed in Iceland in 1830 that he bought in London in 1836. 

Audubon's Great Auks

Eventually, Audubon gave has stuffed auk to a birder friend, Jacob Post Giraud Jr., who, in turn, gifted it (along with the rest of his large collection of stuffed birds) to Vassar College in 1867. There, "Audubon's Auk" gathered dust—quite literally—for more than 50 years, until it was found under a lab sink by Dr. L.C. Sanford who had connections to the American Museum of Natural History. Though the college continued to own the bird, Sanford convinced them in 1921 to allow him to send the auk off for renovation and remounting. When it was all spiffy again, it wasn't sent back to Vassar, but was housed instead at the Museum of Natural History in New York, hidden away in a double crate for the next 43 years. 

The friendly face of the Royal Ontario Museum's Great Auk

Though Canada had once been home to the largest Great Auk colony in the world—on Funk Island off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, (there had been no colonies on American soil at all)—by the early Sixties we still had no stuffed Great Auk of our own. The ROM was desperate to find one. Finally, they convinced Vassar to sell them Audubon's auk. In 1965 they paid $12,500 for it (the equivalent of about $100,000 today), and got a stuffed Labrador Duck thrown in for good measure—the same Labrador Duck I had seen on my earlier visit to the museum.

Signs on a door in the ROM's ornithology department (Frankie Thornhill)

Oliver explained that, because bird feathers deteriorate more quickly when subjected to light, the museum only shows off its Great Auk for six months of the year. For the other six months, the Labrador Duck is the star. 

The ROM's Great Auk came from Eldey Island in Iceland,
 the last place these birds nested after a volcanic eruption caused safer Geirfuglasker to sink beneath the waves. (Jan Thornhill)

As thrilling as it was to finally see an actual Great Auk, I couldn't exactly get close to it, displayed, as it was, at a height and behind double panes of glass. But then Oliver led me and my sister, (who had the camera—yay!), into the secret storerooms of the bird department. First he showed us the egg room. The ROM has a lot of bird eggs. In fact, it has roughly 12,000 sets, a "set" being the number of eggs normally laid in a nest. There is a bird skin room, too, where thousands of boneless birds from around the world are laid out in drawers. 

A tiny sample of the ROM's 11,715 bird egg collection (Frankie Thornhill)

These collections are kind of shocking to see, since each skin and each egg represents a life cut short, but almost all were collected long before any of us was born, in an era when there were a) way more birds of all kinds, and b) different attitudes towards killing wildlife. 

For a while there was a question about whether or not museums should waste precious space storing so many skins and eggs, especially when some species are represented by multiple specimens. The ROM's collection wasn't culled, which is fortunate because it has become clear that these lovingly stored remains hold a treasure trove of information that no one a hundred years ago could have imagined: DNA. When the DNA from skins of birds of the same species that were collected in different places, or ones collected from similar locations but years apart, is compared, we can learn a lot about how our world has changed, and how it continues to change. 

Nine of the ROM's 136,350 study skins (Frankie Thornhill)

Similarly, each egg in the collection has documentation of exactly when and where it was collected. These dates, sometimes from more than a hundred years ago, can be compared to the nesting dates of contemporary birds to help us learn how various species are adapting—or not adapting—to climate change. 

Great Auk bones collected on Funk Island (Frankie Thornhill)

Though the eggs and study skins were fascinating and often gorgeous, the pièce de résistance of the tour was yet to come. Without saying anything, Oliver opened a drawer and pulled out a small, nondescript cardboard box. He opened it. It was filled with bones. Great Auk bones. Auk bones that included a skull and upper beak. Which Oliver handed to me. 

Me giddily holding an extinct Great Auk's skull and beak (Frankie Thornhill)

Maybe that doesn't sound like a big deal. But it was. I'd just spent the better part of a year living with the Great Auk, reading about its amazing and tragic history, its connections to prehistoric and First Nations peoples on both sides of the Atlantic, learning about its anatomy, writing about it, drawing it, painting it, dreaming it. I was so familiar with it it had become my totem animal. And I was holding in my hands the head of one that more than two hundred years ago had swum the North Atlantic. Though you can't tell from the photograph, I was so excited my hands were shaking. 

There's only one thing that could have been better. To see an actual, living Great Auk. But, of course, that would be impossible, since the Great Auk has been extinct since 1844. But,wait! Maybe in the future it won't be impossible. Stay tuned for my next post about efforts to resurrect the Great Auk!



I made Great Auk cookies for my book launch!

published by Groundwood Books 

Graston® Technique: Modern Therapy with a Chinese Antecedent

by Helen Mason

Graston® Therapy works on the body's connective tissue.

No pain, no gain is an exercise maxim popular among many athletes. Although many medical practitioners question the validity of that motto related to exercise, they support it when referring to the Graston® Technique, a therapy originally developed by David Graston and today credited with helping athletes like Michael Phelps maintain their competitive edge.

 

The Graston® Technique uses stainless steel instruments to assist clinicians in helping people maintain the mobility of their body's soft connective tissue, the white membrane that wraps and connects the muscles, bones, nerves, and blood vessels. It was originally developed by David Graston, an American water skier who suffered a debilitating injury to his right knee.

Disappointed by his slow recovery following surgery, Graston used his machining background to create stainless steel instruments he used to treat his soft tissue injury. After achieving success with the technique, he shared it with Ball Memorial Hospital and Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where the Graston® Technique was further developed. An outpatient clinic was opened in Indianapolis in 1994.

 

Graston® tools fit the various contours of the body.

The Graston® tools serve multiple purposes. Practitioners run one of six instruments along the affected part of the body. If fascial restrictions, scar tissue adhesions, chronic inflammation, and/or fibrosis are present, the practitioner detects a distinct feeling of grittiness or bumpiness. The instruments are then used to break up the adhesions, promoting healing.

The instruments prevent practitioners from getting the hand, wrist, and muscle injuries so common to those who try to break up fascial restrictions manually.

Be warned. For patients, the technique is painful. I came across it following a car accident in 1998 during which I suffered a fractured skull and level 3 whiplash. Although I thought these injuries had been treated, over the following seven years, I experienced more and more intense pain in my back and neck, finally accompanied by the inability to concentrate. After trying without success to find a non-drug method of alleviating these symptoms, I visited a chiropractor who used Graston®.

Gua Sha and Graston® break up scar tissue.

She quickly diagnosed the cause of my problem. The injuries from my accident had resulted in fibrosis of my back and neck muscles. They were in constant spasm, which was shutting down blood circulation and nerve impulses to the brain.

My first Graston® treatment resulted in an amazing reduction in symptoms. Over a period of time, regular treatments have promoted full recovery of my back and neck muscles.

At first, the days after each treatment were very painful as the affected areas turned red and then purplish or yellow with bruising, depending on how much work had been done. At one point, a dermatologist saw these injuries during a check-up and clearly thought I had been beaten. For me, the pain was nothing compared to the benefits of the treatments which helped me regain most of my physical abilities.

Michael Phelps credits the Graston® Technique for helping him win

Today, the Graston® Technique is used both by people like me and professional athletes such as basketball, hockey, football, soccer, and rugby players, as well as golfers. It's been successfully used to treat fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel, plantar fasciitis, tennis and golfer's elbow, rotator cuff tendinitis, shin splints, and post fracture pain.

The technique is similar to Gua Sha, a traditional Chinese method that has been practised for over 2000 years. Instead of stainless steel instruments, Gua Sha practitioners use a shell, piece of jade, buffalo horn, or other material to do their scraping. Like the Graston® Technique, Gua Sha causes redness, bruising, and micro traumas to the fascial tissue. The micro traumas trigger the brain to heal the area.

Credit Notice: Practitioner treating female from http://www.mynoblechoice.com/solutions/techniques/. Other photos courtesy of creativecommons.org.

Helen Mason's most recent books include What is Digital Entrepreneurship?, Be an Active Citizen in Your Community, and Be an Active Citizen at Your School, all Crabtree Publishing, 2016.

 

Now You See Me...

by L. E. Carmichael

If you were a superhero, what power would you pick? Reading minds? Super speed? How about invisibility? That last one is a good choice. Scientists around the world are already working on ways to make everyday objects - like humans! - invisible.

It all starts with understanding light and vision. When light waves collide with the atoms in an object, the waves bounce off, or scatter. The direction of the scatter depends on the angle of the bounce. Human eyeballs detect these scattering light waves, and our brains reconstruct the shape of the original object. So, to make something invisible, all scientists have to do is make light reflect off an object the same way it would reflect if nothing was there at all.

Easy, right? Um, no.

In fact, progress on the invisibility problem didn't really begin until around 2000, when the field of metamaterials started to develop. Engineers build metamaterials out of "artificial atoms" that interact with light in very abnormal ways. These atoms allow engineers to control the way light scatters off the metamaterial with much greater precision than would be possible using naturally-exisiting materials.

Scientists have used these materials to develop several different types of invisibility cloaks, each with advantages and disadvantages. For example, objects embedded inside a spherical cloak are invisible from all sides, but only for a certain value of invisible - they can block some wavelengths of light, but not all, meaning the object blurs rather than totally disappears. Carpet cloaks, so named because they are flat, are easier to make and work on larger objects... but those objects are only invisible from one angle. If the viewer is looking at the cloak from the side instead of dead on, the object becomes visible.

Plasmonic cloaking is a new technique that combines advantages of both spherical and carpet cloaks. Rather than trying to stop light from scattering of the object, plasmonic cloaks create a matching, opposite scatter, and the two combined cancel each other out. Mantle cloaks use a variation of the same strategy, and both types offer the advantages of both spherical and carpet cloaks. However, they also share a unique downside - size. They don't work on any object that's more than a couple of wavelengths of light across.

That's not a problem, if, for example, you're the CIA and you want to hide a tiny bug or spy camera. If you're trying to hide a human, though, you've got big problems. For example, a human-sized carpet cloak would actually have be about the same size as your bedroom. Another problem is that current cloaks block light in both directions, meaning no one could see you, but you couldn't see them, either - which would make sneaking around Hogwarts at night very difficult!

Worst of all, you'd have to stay completely still. According to invisibility scientist Majid Gharghi, going from a stationary object to a moving person would be like going from simple Newtonian physics to Einstein's relativity. He told me it will likely be decades before engineers can build something that complex. Which is kind of a bummer... but on the other hand, gives you plenty of time to come up with your superhero name!

So. What superpower would YOU choose?