Sustained attention reveals that species vary across geographic space

Evidence

Then there was bird space. Magpies abounded near my parents’ house an hour south, but never here. There were mockingbirds in West Oakland but not in Grand Lake. Song sparrows had different songs in different places. The blue of scrub jays got duller as you went inland. Crows sounded different in Minneapolis. The dark-eyed juncos I saw at Stanford had brown bodies and black heads (the Oregon subgroup), but had I traveled east, I would have seen slate-colored, pink-sided, white-winged, or gray-headed and red-backed variations. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 523

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Seasonal territory asserted by migrating birds overrides documented human ownership — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 134; Observing other species’ lives can recover a forgotten common language — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 36; Climate, animals, fire, and people all shape which plants grow where — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 70 (+10 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Seasonal territory asserted by migrating birds overrides documented human ownership — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 134; Observing other species’ lives can recover a forgotten common language — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 36; Climate, animals, fire, and people all shape which plants grow where — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 70 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Industrial attention farming displaced diverse attentional modalities with one mechanomorphic species #complicates (0.75) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488
• Attention is unequally distributed along class and environment lines #complicates (0.73) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 665
• Selection favors conformist transmission in both spatially and temporally varying environments #complicates (0.72) — Joe Henrich and Robert Boyd, The Evolution of Conformist…, 14