(orchestral music) - [Announcer] Production of Applause on WVIZ-PBS is made possible by grants from the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud Family Trust, the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation.

And by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.

(jazz music) - Hello, I'm David C. Barnett.

And welcome to Applause.

During these times of travel restrictions, Zoom meetings and quarantines, gazing out your window or going for a stroll in the park to enjoy nature's bounty has become a favorite pastime.

The Audubon Society reports traffic on its website has spiked 23% over the last few months.

During the winter, birdwatching in Northeast Ohio heats up as throngs of Northern birds make their way here.

- There's a lot of birds that come here for the South.

This is South for the winter.

This is their Florida.

The first of our winter residents really start to show up in late October, early November, the majority of them showing up probably mid-November through early December.

And they're just going to be here until probably March or April.

They're coming from places in the Northern reaches of Canada and in the Arctic Circle itself.

So these are places that are not getting a lot of sunlight and they're not, this time of year even though it's cold there year round, it's still in winter time when you don't get a lot of sun, a lot of their food sources get cut off.

So they have to go further South just to find more food and food is really what drives migration.

It's not so much cold, particularly like the snow geese or some of our raptors.

They live up in the Arctic circle.

They are Northern Northern Canada.

So they're coming a few thousand miles to Northern Ohio for the winter time.

So they're going to come down here and maybe not go further to like Florida or the Caribbean because they're cold weather birds, but they just don't have the food.

So they still want to go somewhere that's pretty cold.

And we all know it can be pretty cold here in the wintertime, but there's just more food here.

There's more sunlight.

So the plants are still seeding, there's still lots of seeds out there.

And there's even some invertebrates and insects around this time of year.

Not a lot, but there's some.

We also of course have a lot of our trees still have berries on them, still have fruit on them.

So a lot of birds will eat those too.

These are things that just become pretty scarce the further North you go.

Good places to go in winter really kind of depends on what you want to see and what kind of elements you want to brave.

Anywhere near Lake Erie is good in the winter time because you're going to get a lot of those winter ducks.

And a lot of them come in like those scoters I mentioned earlier.

They come in and they need large open bodies of water.

So they're not going to come to just your local pond.

They need a larger body of water.

So Lake Erie is a great spot in the winter time for sea ducks that make their way over here.

There's a lot of gulls that come in that aren't necessarily common around here in this region.

And you're going to see brown creepers or nuthatches or woodpeckers, or your chickadees and cardinals.

They're going to hang out in the forest.

That's just where they live.

They don't necessarily want to be out in the open.

And other grassland birds that want an open area in Lake County, Headlands, there's a little bit of forested area there.

The dunes have a large open space for some raptors and some sparrows, and then you're by the lake too, so you get a lot of the winter waterfowl and the gulls and stuff out on the lake.

In this area, that's one of the best spots to go.

Birding isn't just going out with a pair of binoculars and seeing what you can see.

It's really about immersing yourself in your surroundings and observing what's around.

Birding by ear is a very important thing for all birders.

Some of us are better at it than others, but even if you're not that great at it you typically will know the more common sounds.

You know what a blue jay sounds like, you know what a robin sounds like, and that helps because if you hear something that's not something that you are familiar with, now you're like, okay, now I know to look over there 'cause I hear something I don't know what it is.

Another good thing to keep in mind when you're talking about birding by ear is those blue jays, like I said.

Blue jays, crows, these birds commonly will harass predators, raptors, hawks, even eagles and owls.

So if you started to hear a lot of blue jays just sort of screaming, it's a pretty good indication that there's something else around that can often lead you to an owl that thought he was hiding in a tree or the hawk that's been circling, looking for some lunch.

One of the cool things about winter birding is it's kind of ongoing.

There's other birds that typically migrate South for the winter that we're seeing staying around longer and longer.

I just saw a great egret a couple of weeks ago and those are birds that are usually gone by now, hanging out down in Florida.

All those turkey vultures that we see throughout the summer, they're sticking around later and later and they'll stay here all year if they can find food.

The reason, they're eating mostly dead animals.

And if it's too cold, they can't actually get into the frozen carcasses.

So that's why they fly South.

But if it stays warm, there's still available food around.

So yeah, you start to see more and more species, their ranges are sort of expanding northward and we're seeing colder species come down.

I'm not sure if those numbers are dropping.

That's hard to tell with a lot of the wintering species as there's a lot of factors in play.

Not just temperature, like I said, available food is another one, but we're definitely seeing ranges start to change over the last few decades.

- Each year at the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys, astronomers gather to photograph and gaze at the night sky.

We now hear from the director of the event and learn all about the wonders of astrophotography.

- My name is Taimur Khan.

I'm the director of the Winter Star Party here at Big Pine Key.

(outer space music) An astrophotographer is basically somebody who points a camera to the sky and tracks the sky and takes long exposures.

Sometimes these exposures can last over several days.

So we might start and take 10- minute exposures and take 100, 10-minute exposures in one night, and then continue in another night and even a third night.

And we'll take all these images and put them together to get a photograph.

And the photograph will reveal things that you just cannot see with your naked eye looking through a telescope.

The light is so dim that it takes hours or even perhaps days to gather all that light to make an image, so you cannot just see it instantly with your eyes.

When I first got into the hobby I used to be let me see how many I can do in one night.

And it's the other way around.

I would try to do three images in one night but you don't get a good image.

You get very grainy, noisy images when you do that.

The trick is to do one object over three nights.

A favorite is the Orion constellation where Bellatrix is the top star is the head of Alfred Hitchcock.

And you'll see an arc, which is called Bernard's Loop.

That is the stomach.

And then you have an arm, a very faint reddish arm and Betelgeuse is like the cigar that he typically smokes.

So that's why we call it the Alfred Hitchcock nebula.

This is Omega Centauri and this entire constellation, this is one of the largest globular clusters with millions of stars in it.

Don't know exactly how many millions, but there are several million stars in this cluster, all orbiting each other.

The neat thing about it scientists say, is if our solar system was inside that cluster it would never be dark.

There will always be light.

It's a very interesting cluster.

Everybody loves to come down and see it because it's so big and the largest one that we get to see.

This is a great place to have a star party.

We have a lot of people that come down, about 600 astronomers that set up the telescopes on the beaches because it's one of the Southernmost places where you can see objects that are below 67 degrees declination, which basically means we can see certain objects that you just cannot see anywhere else in the continental United States.

So because of that, it draws a lot of people down to point their telescopes low in the horizon and see objects such as eta carinae, which is one of the largest nebulas that are out there.

So here at the Winter Star Party you'll notice that we don't use regular flashlights.

We use a red flashlight and the reason why we use a red flashlight is because your eyes get dark adapted and it takes roughly 25 minutes for your eyes to be truly adapted to the dark.

You're at the mercy of the weather.

You're at the mercy of the equipment.

Things go wrong.

Even the wires hanging off the scope can cause trailing in the stars because you're following the star.

So the motion of the stars going across the night sky is so smooth and so precise that there's really not much manmade mechanical equipment that can accurately move in the same way.

It is a form of art in its own right, in its own way, because different people have different ways of manipulating the data and showing the photograph or how they do it or how they image it.

And each one is a little bit different.

♪ Alone in Knoxville, it's 4 a.m. ♪ - Folk musicians and educators Kevin Richards and Charlie Mossbrook met up musically for the first time years ago, thanks to the songs of American folk legend Woody Guthrie.

On the next Applause, it's the blues that brought them back together.

♪ I don't know where I'm going in any town ♪ - Then we take a look inside in historic publishing shop.

- The idea of this shop is that it's about 1875.

We use all manually operated presses.

All this and more on the next round of Applause.

For artist Jennifer Angus, insects are her medium of choice rather than paint, shape clay, use pastels or ink.

Angus works with bugs when she creates.

Right now, we go to St. Petersburg, Florida to get an inside look at an installation of her work.

(quixotic music) - My name is Jennifer Angus, and I'm an artist and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

At the MFA St. Pete's we are installing my largest exhibition to date.

"The Grasshopper and the Ant and Other Stories".

And it's a multi-room or multi-gallery exhibition that really explores not only insects, but our ideas of what art and artists contribute to our society.

- It really is an experience that is site-specific.

So she came to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at our space and was inspired by a work in our collection.

That was really the jumping-off point for this exhibition.

So when this exhibition comes together, it's really only for this space and only for this community.

So this will be the only time that it's available to be seen.

- When you enter the exhibition it'll probably be a bit surprising because it's very dark and you will encounter a painting that's called "The Grasshopper and the Ant".

Quite simply it depicts the grasshopper and the ant which is a story from Aesop's Fables.

I wasn't familiar with the story, and as soon as I read it it really raised my hackles because it was obvious to me that the grasshopper was an artist and that these ants were not appreciating his effort.

So you'll see that painting when you first walk in and then it's like going down the rabbit hole in "Alice in Wonderland".

It is a dark room, and on your right-hand side you will see preserves, jelly preserves but they'll look a little bit like oh, specimens in formaldehyde.

If you read "Alice in Wonderland" you'll recall that she falls down the rabbit hole.

It's a long time, and she actually gets a little bored.

She gets a little hungry.

And at one point she reaches out her hand and she grabs a jar and it's a marmalade jar which turns out to be empty.

But that was really sort of the inspiration.

The hallway gets smaller and smaller and you're sort of spit out into the big gallery.

And when you walk into the bigger room the scale is tremendous.

And the goal here is to really make you feel just as Alice did.

Alice shrinks at one point, that you have shrunk, that you have perhaps become insect size.

And then from there you come into a large, long narrow gallery which we call the cabinet of curiosities.

The drawers are all filled.

They are to be explored.

The most common questions I get asked are, "Are the insects real?"

Answer, "Yes".

Is this their natural color?

Yes, with one exception, there are some scarab beetles, maybe half a dozen that have some gold leaf applied to them.

Another question I get asked is have I collected the insects myself?

And the answer is no, that would be a whole nother job, nother profession.

The insects come from specimen dealers and people are always surprised.

Yeah.

I need to get in touch with my dealer, insect dealer.

Yeah.

There are such people that exist.

They sell to large institutions, whether it be museums or universities, and to individual collectors.

Now individual collector probably just needs two of a species, maybe a few more if there is some color variations.

Obviously I need considerably more.

And what you see here is probably I haven't done a thorough count, but there's probably about 5,000 insects.

- When we're kids, we're fascinated by insects.

And it's only when we become young adults that we're conditioned to fear insects.

It's something that is really important I think for us to examine as adults because insects are so important for the health of our planet, they do so much work.

And in fact, without them humans wouldn't survive.

Remember then in a lot of children's literature insects are these benevolent and helpful creatures often.

Think of everything from "Charlotte's Web" to "Alice in Wonderland".

We often lose that sense of wonder.

And my hope is that a show like this may help us all rediscover the wonder and beauty and importance of insects to our planet.

- I really had very little interest in insects as a child, but my interest really grew when I was doing research in Northern Thailand.

My background is in textiles, textile design and I was photo documenting these traditional costume.

And I came upon a garment and a shawl actually that had a fringe and on the fringe were strung green metallic beetle wings.

So really these are nature's sequins and it makes total sense to just use what's in your backyard.

And for me, that's what started things.

But I would say nowadays, I'm much more interested in the opportunity to have a platform to let people know how important insects are to our environment.

- We have a terrific team in public programs, creating opportunities both for young people and for adults, for school-aged children.

There are camps going on, there are book clubs meeting, there's even a gourmet dinner, a gourmet dinner with Brooklyn bugs.

And it should be a very interesting opportunity.

Yum.

- My goal for people coming to this exhibition is to leave thinking about insects in a different way.

- While artist Jennifer Angus uses bugs to create works of art, an artist in Phoenix, Arizona flips the switch on a Roomba vacuum to paint.

Take a look.

(upbeat piano music) - I couldn't handle the implications when I was 20, because I associated it with my identity.

And I had given that capability of creating that identity to a robot.

My name is Bobby Zokaites.

I am a sculptor.

I've been living in Arizona for the last six years.

What we're doing here is we are using a Roomba vacuum cleaner to create a painting.

And so this is a project I came up with in 2005 and really solidified in 2006.

So now it's a decade later and we're re-examining the implications of what it means to have a commercially available product create a painting.

The project started with an assignment in a painting class and it was meant to be a self portrait.

As opposed to trying to copy myself and paint, I came up with the idea of what if this was representative of a generation that grew up on the cusp of the internet growing up as well.

So this is an original generation Roomba vacuum cleaner without its vacuum system.

Totally took all that out.

And what I've done is created this paintbrush where we've got a foam brush and a reservoir.

So it really acts like those giant magic markers.

So the first iteration, I had gotten a small grant to buy a couple of Roombas, buy the canvas and I set it up, hit go.

And there was like this moment where I was like I knew I had made gold, right?

Like I knew it.

I had this like euphoric thing going on.

Like it was pretty unexplainable.

(quixotic music) This was 10 years ago.

So I mean, there are a lot of things happened that year.

But as far as my art production, I realized that all of a sudden this was not empowering me no more.

Now, because I look at art from the perspective of a sculptor or public artist, meaning like I'm making a product, all of a sudden it's a manufacturing capability, like a manufacturing process as opposed to a process of identity.

And so now I can look at it as a complete new media work with a performance and a finished product.

And it's all in a nice, neat little art package.

Whereas 10 years ago, like it was, I mean I don't let my twin brother speak for me.

I kind of let a robot speak for me.

(laughs) So if you look at it as a painting and you look at the robot as a tool, then you need to control your tools.

That's what painters do.

They have a significant understanding of the brush.

Normally it's intuitive how they do it by hand.

But here you've got to be able to control the robot, which is the brush.

And so like while I'm doing it it'll wack it, or like you can see a fence set up and really getting that control back from the robot, that's the challenge.

And so the decisions like color and size of the paintbrush and that sort of stuff are very important decisions for me as an artist to make because it allows me to control the painting.

If we're going to call the finished product a painting then we do have a successful example of a Turing test.

The Turing test is to put a human in one room and a computer and another room and ask them questions until you figure out which one's the computer and which one's human.

Now, if you ask the Roomba to paint a landscape you're not going to get a landscape, but this robot will create an original work of art every time you set it on the canvas and hit go.

And again, if you don't show somebody the robot, and you show them just the painting, they're going to think somebody painted them.

And so like at that point because we think of art as expression, then that dichotomy that this work exists in is that the robot's expression or my expression, because it's the tool, and for a while, that's what I struggled with when I was in my youth, was that ideal, and under no circumstances am I willing to give up my expression to a computer.

(quixotic music) I think they are better paintings than I can make by myself.

I think it's a better painting than a lot of people can make by themselves.

And so if art is about human expression, then they're not, then this is a joke.

But if it's art about society like everybody's got smartphones now, right.

And the expression of society, then why can't a robot make a work of art.

- That's it for today's show.

You'll find more stories online at arts.ideastream.org.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Ideastream's David C. Barnett.

We'll see you next week for another round of Applause.

(pensive music) (station ID music) (orchestral music) Production of Applause on WVIZ-PBS PBS is made possible by grants from the John P. Murphy Foundation, the Kulas Foundation, the Stroud Family Trust the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation.

And by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture.