Engineers and Vanity- 17 January 2009

This should actually be two separate posts, but since I don't seem to be able to blog as frequently as I'd hoped, I'm combining them into one.

At my refuge, we work with a variety of engineering staff on a regular basis. Our staff of wildlife biologists provide services to various construction projects such as environmental awareness training for the workers, biological monitoring during the project, and wildlife surveys to reduce the impacts of the project on the various wildlife and habitat at Kokopelli Wildlife Area. In so doing, we interact with everyone on the project from the security personnel to the equipment operators to the engineers who act as project managers. Most of the time this works out pretty good. There have been notable exceptions but I'm not going to discuss those today.

What brought this topic to my mind was when I was out making my rounds the other day and I noticed the aftermath of one of the projects that I was the biologist on. We have this utility line bissecting one of our large wetland cells and riparian areas and one of our jobs is to keep the trees in the area from encroaching on this corridor. A few years back, three of the poles needed replacement because they were rotten. I know this doesn't really sound like it would require the services of an engineer, but here at KWA, engineers are put in charge of all kinds of small projects. Basically, anytime you have to hire somebody to do some work, you can plan on having an engineer facilitate the process. Sometimes, even the best engineer gets a little "engineery" for lack of a better term.

I guess this guy thought that the project wasn't worthy of an engineer either, so he decided to add a little pop to the job. He decided that the row of fifty or so poles wouldn't possibly be able to function properly in the future unless each was individually numbered. It came out something like this:

You'll also notice that not only was it not good enough to merely number each pole, but also to name them "PL" which, to my knowledge, stands for pole, or maybe powerline. Brilliant. These letters are probably about 8" tall and they are possibly smelted from 98% pure sterling silver to avoid corrosion. I know what you're thinking: four symbols times fifty poles equals 200 characters. Wow. Especially at what, $7 or $8 bucks a pop? But is that really good enough? What if you're standing somewhere that you can't see the labeling? What do you do then? Circle the pole while hopelessly lost, looking for some kind of sign to tell you where you are? Which direction do you go? Clockwise? Counter?

Fortunately, this guy thought of everything:

Yes, that's right. You will only have to walk halfway around the pole to get your bearings.

On another note:

Many people assume that humans are the only animal that has the capacity for vanity. Actually, nature is full of examples of this superficial behavior. Look no further than peacocks, or even drake mallards. It's not often, however, that you see animals that are worried about their figure. I snapped this photo of a red-tailed hawk. I must have surprised him, because he didn't even bother to suck in his gut. I probably caught him in between smokes.

After he realized what was happening and saw that I had a camera, he decided to show off a little bit.

Now that's what a hawk should look like. But the take home message is this: the next time you start to worry about humanity and our superficial nature, just realize that we are fighting against something that's probably buried deep in our genetic code somewhere.