Quarks

The sound that a Night Heron makes sounds like "quark - quark", which is the name given by the theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann to particles that are the basis of atoms. The name was taken from a passage in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. This unusual and intriguing relationship led to the inevitable attempt to name one of the Black-crowned Night Heron chicks in the Point Lobos Reserve after a quark.

According to Brian Green in his book The Elegant Universe, everything we see in the terrestrial world and the heavens above appears to be made from combinations of electrons, up-quarks, and down quarks.

In addition to "up" and "down" quarks, there are four more quarks found more recently that are named: Charm, Strange, Bottom and Top Quarks. These four, however, are not constituents of anything we typically encounter and exist only ephemerally when produced through high-energy collisions.

"Quark" seemed the logical choice for our baby bird. One of the dozen or so Black-crowned Night Herons born during the Spring of 2009 in Point Lobos Reserve, now has the distinction of that very quarky name. May he (or she) charm visitors for years to come.