Broken Wings Research Articles

Anecdote of the Jar, or A Gift from My Dead Californian Housemate, and: Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin

Anecdote of the Jar, or A Gift from My Dead Californian Housemate, and: Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin Kristin Robertson (bio) Anecdote of the Jar, or A Gift from My Dead Californian Housemate I capitulated his ghosts were humming in the attic after he’d conceded there was no attic. I cradled his teacup Rottweiler named Magic and sang her the blackbird songs: All your life, all your life. Take these broken wings. And the other one, Pack up all my care and woe. Once he’d surrendered his broom handle, early morning knocks on the spirits’ floorboards, I thumbed his crosses and crystals with tenderness, acknowledged the voices when they instructed him to leap naked off the pier. I even led the rescue copters astray in the dead of night. (Bye, bye, blackbird—) All of this after he agreed to bequeath me his jar. Windowsilled with its sisters full of rainwater and moth-eaten endearments, the jar he said sat brim with lush left-alones and ordinary lightning. Everyone warned me about California and its crazies, so I’m driving this jar back to Tennessee, [End Page 55] where grandmothers ban housecats from nurseries and during sun-showers the devil beats his wife. Like nothing else, this jar, a legacy of my housemate once he was forever out of hand, the moon in. Hiking to Le Cimetière Marin Sick as a dog in Sète, I don’t tell Sonja who’s hell-bent on seeing Valéry’s grave. I snap in half these fishing-town gimcracks, souvenir shell rings and whistlers, objets d’art for our winding footpath, anything to distract myself from pain sharp as sea change. Ahead she traces scars on headstones, dried funeral rosebuds like pill cups flush with salt-spray. At these cliffs, where scores of stone Marys overlook the Mediterranean, surrender feels right— give up your dove, your angel, whatever lightness helped you get here. Watch your white wings turn to sails. [End Page 56] Kristin Robertson Kristin Robertson’s first book is Surgical Wing (Alice James Books, 2017). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, and Pleiades, among other journals. Copyright © 2017 University of Nebraska Press

Nesting of Lesser Whistling-Duck Dendrocygna javanica (Horsfield, 1821) (Aves: Anseriformes: Anatidae) and broken-wing distraction display at Kamrup District, Assam, India

We observed 13 nesting attempts of the Lesser Whistling-Duck during 2011–2014 at Rani, Kamrup District in Assam, India. Failure in egg laying by the ducks and nest raiding by Grey Mongoose were recorded, while the breeding success was 38.5%. For the first time we witnessed broken wing distraction display exhibited by this species as an anti-predator strategy, which we have recorded here.

Beyond Bars and Broken Wings: A Review of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz

Beyond Bars and Broken Wings: A Review of @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz Mary Thomas (bio) @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz. Alcatraz Island, For-Site Foundation, National Park Service, and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Curated by Cheryl Haines. 09 27, 2014– 04 26, 2014. www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/. Who could be more appropriate to create an aesthetic meditation on imprisonment than Ai Weiwei, a contemporary artist whose critiques of the Chinese government have led to his arrest and the seizure of his passport? @Largewas initially proposed in 2011 by Cheryl Haines, founder of the For-Site Foundation, an organization that sponsors site-specific art projects, following Ai’s eighty-one-day detainment. Over the next three years, after clearance from the State Department, negotiations with the National Parks Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, and raising four million dollars in private funds, Ai designed seven artworks from his Beijing studio without being able to visit Alcatraz, the installation site. Despite these challenges, the exhibition featuring those seven compelling works marks a laudable achievement. An underlying theme of @Largeis that freedom prevails in the face of repression. At times, however, the urgency of the political conditions to which the work responds becomes enmeshed with the aesthetic spectacle of the work itself, leading to a troublesome conflation of art with an abstract and universalized concept of freedom. This conflation inspired questions over whether visitor interaction with the works would undermine the exhibition’s larger goals of engaging viewers in questions around freedom, human rights, and individual expression. Specifically, did the work rely on visitors stepping beyond the paradigm of the museum-goer-as-consumer, or the Alcatraz-visitor-as-tourist? The exhibition tried to facilitate this shift by creating venues for viewers to learn about and involve themselves in ongoing political struggles. In one piece, titled Yours Truly, the success of the work relied on visitors writing postcard messages to a portion of the nearly two hundred prisoners of conscience incarcerated worldwide who [End Page 137]are represented throughout the exhibition. Although museum directors and curators have written about the challenges of facilitating meaningful visitor engagement, the unpredictability of audiences was recently evidenced after the spring 2014 installation of Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. The work stood as “an homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant” in Brooklyn, New York. 1Much like Ai, Walker’s piece consisted of a site-specific installation that drew massive crowds into a defunct space. A Subtletyraised evocative questions about the violent and exploitative history of sugar production. Walker’s work, grand in scale and located in a condemned site, compelled attendees to photograph the work and circulate the images on social media platforms. However, many of the photos merely revealed their creators’ racial blind spots in posing near the breasts and genitals of the large sculpture of a sphinx with caricatured features of a “mammy” figure. Though the ignorance of some viewers cannot be a measure of the work’s success, it demonstrated (unsurprisingly, for many) a casual disregard for black bodies and the traumatic histories they carry at a moment when black Americans are subject to ongoing racial violence. It did not seem impossible, then, that some viewers might overlook the exhibition’s larger political context or simply find it uninteresting. As one critic noted, the United States’ reputation of having the world’s largest prison population casts doubt on Americans’ investment in questions about justice. 2This contradiction was implicit throughout the exhibition and raised the question of whether the installation privileged a particular condition of imprisonment as unjust in place of critiquing the institution itself. However, envisioning the abolishment of prisons would have posed a formidable challenge when the circumstances of imprisonment are the catalyst for the work’s creation. Consequently, it is perhaps necessary to first think beyond the prison’s walls, even as one is enclosed within them. When Alcatraz operated as a prison, the...

Learning to fly with broken wings - forcing a reappraisal of time and space.

When living with a chronic disease, the whole human being is affected and his/her experience of health challenged. This study had a dual aim: to obtain a new understanding of experiences of the body among persons suffering from the chronic neurological disease multiple sclerosis (MS) and how they come to terms with such experiences. A total of ten interviews were re-analysed using a hermeneutic approach. The experiences of the body were revealed as 'Learning to fly with broken wings', comprising two themes: 'Getting to know the foreign body' and 'Building a new living space', both requiring reappraisal of time and space. Living with a chronic disease such as MS means learning to fly with broken wings, which involves subordination to the body leading to a higher level of integration in the process of becoming towards health and well-being.

Evaluation of Free-Range broilers using the welfare quality® protocol

Scientific information on the welfare of broilers reared in alternative systems is scarce. The objective of this study was to assess the welfare of free-range broilers using the Welfare Quality® protocol. Free-range broilers reared in ten farms were observed, and measures were made in broilers of five of these farms. The collected data were transformed into scores (0-100), with higher scores indicating better welfare, except for emotional states. Prevalence percentages were calculated for the remaining data. Median (min-max) scores were 81 (63-98) for lameness, 93 (83-99) for hock burn on the farm, 100 (95-100) for plumage cleanliness, 35 (8-70) for podermatitis on the farm, 56 (26-88) for density, 53 (20-53) for dust, 34 (14-67) for litter quality, 93 (41-100) for drinkers, and 100 (100-100) for birds panting or huddling on the farm. The following average (min-max) prevalence percentages were obtained: total mortality 2.0% (1.4-7.2%), culling 0.0% (0.0-2.2%), feed withdrawal time 875 min (715-945 min), water withdrawal time 220 min (170-275 min), dead on arrival at the processing plant 0.00% (0.00-0.01%), broken wings 0%, (0-0%), inefficient stunning 3.9% (1.3-6.7%), pre-stun shock 49.3% (26.7-56.8%), hepatitis 4.5% (1.8-11.0%), bruising 9.3% (6.7-16.7%), and ascites 0% (0-0%). The negative broiler welfare points detected were pododermatitis, litter quality, density, dust, culling, feed withdrawal time, inefficient stunning, pre-stun shock, and hepatitis. The positive points identified were the absence of birds panting or huddling on the farm; low prevalence of lameness, hock lesions, dead on arrival, broken wings, and ascites; good plumage cleanliness scores, and short water withdrawal time.

‘Broken wing display’ in an unfledged Indian Eagle Owl Bubo bengalensis

A young Bubo bengalensis was encountered in a ravine near Ousteri Lake. It was monitored for a period of 6 months. During this period it showed the broken wing display only once, which is considered to be exclusive to adults in defense of their nests, eggs, or young.

The Effect of Beam Intensity on Temperature Distribution in ADS Windowless Lead-Bismuth Eutectic Spallation Target

The spallation target is the component coupling the accelerator and the reactor and is regarded as the “heart” of the accelerator driven system (ADS). Heavy liquid metal lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) is served as core coolant and spallation material to carry away heat deposition of spallation reaction and produce high flux neutron. So it is very important to study the heat transfer process in the target. In this paper, the steady-state flow pattern has been numerically obtained and taken as the input for the nuclear physics calculation, and then the distribution of the extreme large power density of the heat load is imported back to the computational fluid dynamics as the source term in the energy equation. Through the coupling, the transient and steady-state temperature distribution in the windowless spallation target is obtained and analyzed based on the flow process and heat transfer. Comparison of the temperature distribution with the different beam intensity shows that its shape is the same as broken wing of the butterfly. Nevertheless, the maximum temperature as well as the temperature gradient is different. The results play an important role and can be applied to the further design and optimization of the ADS windowless spallation target.

食鳥処理工程におけるブロイラーの関節損傷

食鳥処理工程におけるブロイラーの関節損傷

Social Reformations of Jibran Khalil Jibran in the Novel “AlAjniha Al-Mutakassira” (The Broken Wings)

Social Reformations of Jibran Khalil Jibran in the Novel “AlAjniha Al-Mutakassira” (The Broken Wings)

Exposure of Bald Eagles to Lead on the Northern Channel Islands, California

Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) were one of the upper-trophic-level avian predators on the Channel Islands, California, prior to their extirpation by 1960 caused in part by large amounts of DDT discharged into the Southern California Bight. From 2002 to 2006, 61 Bald Eagles were reintroduced onto the northern Channel Islands, as part of a 5-yr feasibility study conducted under the auspices of the Montrose Settlement Restoration Program. In December 2005, a yearling Bald Eagle female was found on Santa Rosa Island with a broken wing and elevated lead levels in her blood of 52.2 ug/dl (0.522 ppm). This incident raised concerns that lead poisoning could be a potential threat to the restoration effort and prompted further investigation. Femurs from five female and two male Bald Eagles reintroduced to the northern Channel Islands were collected postmortem for analyses of lead and other metals. Lead levels detected in femurs of these birds ranged from 0.2 to 55.0 ppm (dry weight). Lead levels in liver were also determined for two of the seven Bald Eagles. Analysis of Bald Eagle movement data from satellite telem- etry transmitters suggested that eagles that spent the most time on Santa Rosa Island had the highest lead levels. The results of this study suggested that spent ammunition containing lead found in carrion (offal and entire carcasses) from deer and elk hunting on Santa Rosa Island may have been a primary source of contamination. The on-island hunt program converted to nontoxic bullets in 2007 and ended in late

Book Review: The Supervisor Training Curriculum: Evidence-Based Ways to Promote Work Quality and Enjoyment among Support Staff, Melanie, Bird with a Broken Wing: A Mother's Story

Book Review: The Supervisor Training Curriculum: Evidence-Based Ways to Promote Work Quality and Enjoyment among Support Staff, Melanie, Bird with a Broken Wing: A Mother's Story

Like Happiness (review)

Reviewed by: Like Happiness Marianne Kunkel (bio) Michael Hettich . Like Happiness. Anhinga Press. Just as a seesaw is designed to give way to the load on one end and then the other, Michael Hettich's new book of poetry, Like Happiness, is in constant play between the opposing, weighty forces of happiness and its inaccessibility. "Housekeeping," for instance, begins with a pleasant, tranquil scene—an early Sunday morning during which two parents, as one of them describes it, "walk around our house / collecting the turtles and frogs that have slipped in." The speaker continues with "While we gather them we sing," creating a cheery image of the parents cleaning that in a different book might signal sweeter details to come. But Hettich seems capable only of approaching, not dwelling in, happiness, and the difficulty of achieving happiness eventually colors every poem. During the parents' song "mourning doves line up on the gardenia bushes outside" to listen, and the birds' hunger for sweet music prompts the speaker to consider his sleeping children similarly pursuing in their dreams "happiness we haven't ever really known." The author of twelve collections of poetry, Hettich is a Florida-based poet in the imagistic tradition of William Carlos Williams; like Williams, who built images line by line, famously turning a red wheel into a red wheelbarrow, Hettich excels here in deftly nudging cheerful imagery and language into a realm of muted disappointment. He presents human happiness as both an ideal and a near-impossible emotional state, all the while questioning how to separate happiness from poor imitators or, to borrow from the book's title, the "like." Hettich took three years for this book, developing its survey of stages and attitudes about middle age, family life, and matured creativity. The book's three sections and thirty-nine poems gradually shift from an outward [End Page 164] to inward gaze. The first section seems strongest, perhaps because it establishes a powerful point of inquiry—What is behind the human desire to comfort others?—which sections 2 and 3 meaningfully complicate. The book's second poem, "The Teacher," is a coming-of-age poem about two wide-eyed boys who sneak into a school classroom late one afternoon and discover an elderly teacher asleep at her desk. To the shock of the boy speaker, his friend approaches her and is drawn without explanation to stroke her gray hair with the tips of his fingers,as though he were trying to understand somethingor comfort her—until she sat up, startledand blinking, and he whispered it was growing dark outside,and he told her gently it was time to go home. But the teacher puts her head back down and the boys watch her sleep "until the room went dark," finally returning home to their families. Saddened and puzzled, the boys try to reconcile their expectation that the teacher would head home, and thus their embrace of a safe, childish world in which teachers are reliable authorities, with what must be the solitary teacher's desires: emotional relief, a home and family, happiness. Numerous poems in the book's first section reveal individuals, like the teacher, who need comfort, from "The Windfall Fruit" (about a pregnant woman's anxiety over her changing body) to the hilarious and grotesque "Mouse" (in which a just-woken child witnesses a pet cat torture and kill a mouse in his bedroom while his father, oblivious, snoozes next to him). In some poems a comforter, like the speaker's friend in "The Teacher," stands nearby with intentions to help. For example, in "The Moon," which concludes the book's first section, a woman confides in her male partner her frightening, disembodying dreams—that she is a bird that her grandmother finds "in tall grass with a broken wing" or that she is much larger things, such as schools of fish or the tide. To the latter, her partner responds, "But the moon pulls that tide, / . . . Let me be that moon." Hettich ends the poem there, leaving unresolved whether the man's declaration of strength ultimately comforts the woman. Dreams, romance, and out-of-body experiences carry over into the book's second...

Migrant Common Eider, <em>Somateria mollissima</em>, Collisions with Power Transmission Lines and Shortwave Communication Towers on the Tantramar Marsh in Southeastern New Brunswick

Between 1971 and 2009, 85 dead, injured, or grounded Common Eiders, Somateria mollissima, were recorded on the Tantramar Marsh in southeastern New Brunswick, apparently the result of collisions with power transmission lines and shortwave communication towers. Of 82 location observations, 53 (65%) were near a series of power transmission lines and 21 (26%) were in the vicinity of shortwave communication towers. Of the 85 birds observed, 43 (51%) were found dead, 18 (21%) were found alive on the ground with undetermined injuries, 5 (6%) were found alive with broken wings, and 9 birds (11%) were found alive with no obvious external injuries and were released in water. A further 10 live birds (12%) were observed on small bodies of water and appeared unable to fly. Occurrences appear to be predominantly during fall migration, with most sightings recorded between 9 October and 21 December (99%, n = 73). The effects of cumulative mortality on Common Eiders should be considered if further infrastructure within the Tantramar Marsh or infrastructure involving other known overland routes used by Common Eiders during migration is proposed.

Auditing animal welfare at slaughter plants

The OIE Welfare Standards on slaughter transport, and killing of animals for disease control are basic minimum standards that every country should follow. The OIE, European Union, and many private standards used by commercial industry have an emphasis on animal based outcome standards instead of engineering based standards. Numerical scoring is used by both private industry and some governments to access animal welfare at slaughter plants. Five variables are measured. They are: 1) Percentage of animals effectively stunned on the first attempt, 2) Percentage rendered insensible, 3) Percentage that vocalize (bellow, moo, squeal) during handling and stunning, 4) Percentage that fall during handling, and 5) Percentage moved with an electric goad. Each one of these critical control points measures the outcome of many problems. A good animal welfare auditing system also has standards that prohibit really bad practices such as dragging, dropping, throwing, puntilla, and hoisting live animals before ritual slaughter. On farm and transport problems that can be measured at the slaughter plant are: percentage of lame animals, percentage of thin animals, percentage of dirty animals, percentage with sores, bruises or lesions, death losses, morbidity, and percentage of birds with broken wings and legs.

A shadow looms. And the bird feigns a broken wing

A shadow looms. And the bird feigns a broken wing

Explosive Increase in Ectoparasites in Hawaiian Forest Birds

Ectoparasites, particularly chewing lice in the Phthiraptera (Insecta), affect the ecology of numerous host species. Most lice are highly host-specific, and there are no documented cases of major increases of chewing lice, within populations, over years. During continuous study from 1987-2005 at upper elevation forests on the island of Hawaii, chewing lice were exceedingly rare and, until 2003, were found in just 2 of 12 species of native and introduced birds. From 2003-2005, there was an explosive increase in the prevalence of chewing lice in all host species. There was no change in humidity, or in behavior of hosts, that could have caused an ecological release of existing lice. Based on reduced fat levels and increases in broken wing and tail feathers for most host species, there was apparently a food limitation that preceded the increase. The increase coincided temporally with detection of a nonnative bird that had recently been found in elevations below the study sites. Although there were isolated sightings of this bird on the study sites, seasonal movements and behavior of some species of native birds could also have allowed greater transmission to study sites. Both prevalence and intensity of infection, indexed by number of body regions parasitized, were lower in native species with greater bill overlap, a character that could help birds control lice. Seasonality of prevalence indicated that low prevalence preceded molt and high prevalence occurred after molting of hosts. The number of major fault bars in wing and tail feathers, a sign of nutritive stress, was correlated with intensity of infection, indicating an indirect cost to the hosts of being parasitized. In addition, birds with lice were less likely to be recaptured than birds without lice.

History's Broken Wings: "Narrative Paralysis" as Resistance to History in Amos Gitai's Film <i>Kedma</i>

Amos Gitai's deconstruction of the Zionist historical narrative in his film Kedma (IL/FR, 2004) generates a narrative paralysis-by displacing events, disconnecting them both their real referents and their normal temporal sequence. This paralysis is tantamount a post-traumatic rhetoric that marks the historical condition, one in which the movie was created as posttraumatic. This rhetoric can be read as subversive because it undermines the linear and teleological hegemonic narratives of both the film and the Zionist ideology that it recounts. The post-traumatic condition is, therefore, political. Thus, the film suggests alternative, if not redemptive, modes of employment that may work through the trauma and create a return reality. Kedma belongs, in terms of its structure, the road movie genre and, as such, is essentially based on movement. It follows the progress of Jewish Holocaust refugees their European countries of origin, via the ship that brings them shore, the Land of Israel, a military clash with the Arabs, and Jerusalem. In the course of this voyage, the refugees, as film characters, are expected participate in the cinematic plot that epitomizes the Zionist narrative: they must forget their erstwhile traumas, overcome the memories of the Diaspora, jettison the Jewish characteristics of their identity, fight the Arabs, and thus be transformed passive Jews warring Hebrews who fight for their lives and their fate. Yet unlike classical road movies that causally progress a point of departure a destination-Kedma's journey is deconstructed and directionless, infused with people who move to and from aimlessly, expressing a journey of obstructed movement characteristic of what Deleuze has called a sensor-motor crisis.1 Following Bhabha,2 who views the linear, teleological narrative movement as the ideological apparatus of hegemony, the obstruction of movement-and its outcome, paralysis-is perceivable as the subversion of and opposition the dominant narrative. Thus this paralysis, attributable the condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, as suggested by Freud,3 is, in this sense, the post-traumatic condition and should be read as one of historical-political resistance. A Journey in Paralysis Kedma's paralysis reflects a struggle between progressing toward the future and the inability make this progress due a post-traumatic condition that has not yet been worked through and cannot be worked through as long as the survivor-characters are compelled move forward and relinquish their past. Post-traumatic stress disorder is characterized by the repeated experiencing of symptoms long after a trauma has occurred.4 Thus, the original event is displaced and set within another experience that signifies it. This causes a state of behavioral block. The way deal with such a block, Freud claims, is reinsert the occurrence in the chain of causal events which it slipped away, i.e., integrate it into a narrative, since post-traumatic stress disorder is actually the deconstruction of a mental narrative that is based on cause and effect. Therefore, a post-traumatic condition is one of narrative failure or the deconstruction of a sequence of events. Such a deconstruction is a way of resisting the coherent linear hegemonic narrative. The first indication that Kedma is a film about movement (and thus one which can be seen as an expression of the failure of movement) is in its title. The Hebrew word kedma alludes movement through both geographical and ideological space: forward toward the future and toward the east, a direction that carries the memory of an ancient past. Kedma is also the name of the illegal immigrant ship in which the film's protagonists begin their travel.5 By starting with the ship sequence, Kedma reveals, ab initio, the paralysis aesthetics that characterize the film throughout. A ship is a space that moves but it is also immobile-its exterior moves but its interior and all its contents remain static. …

A Real Migration

Long ago I must have wished for the precarious life of a vagabond. At that time, the protection of my family was like a cage. Now with a broken wing or two, I find it difficult to build my own nest to cage up others, whether they'd be real or imaginary, existing or merely hoped for. The pieces, which I can barely identify, fall apart in this difficult construction, and I fall together with them. Sometimes I don't get up again. And I am off on the hunt for remedies, internal magic spells, and paid chats with healers. The ultimate thing is a small bottle containing liquids with the right molecules.

Me Jane, You Tarzan: gender and its relevance to transforming democracy

During a period of life when exploring ‘feminism’ enabled me to release my need, until that point unconscious, for male approval to validate my sense of self worth, I came across many hitherto little known teachings and writings by women and men of great wisdom. One saying in particular has come to mind as being particularly relevant to the subject of this essay: ‘The bird of the spirit of Humanity cannot fly with only one wing’. This quote from Vivekananda was referred to by Helena Roerich when she spoke of a ‘new Epoch of spiritual cognition that must manifest due respect to the Mother of the World, to the Feminine Element’. Equally it could be said that ‘The Bird of Democracy cannot fly with a broken wing’.Whilst the title of this article accurately reflects the topic to be discussed, it gives no intimation of the passionate emotions commonly evoked when the topic of ‘gender’ is raised. I am hoping here to use both passion and intellect to explore lucidly and justly the implications that ‘gender’ has for the process we are referring to as ‘transforming democracy’.

The Girl with the Broken Wing (review)

The Girl with the Broken Wing (review)