WC is lucky enough to know of a Greater Sage Grouse lek that’s close to a road, reasonably close to home, not well known and still has a reasonable number of birds. The lek is so close to the road that sometimes the lek actually spills onto the road. But the road runs north-south, so…
WC has a sad. Not just because his favorite writer and candidate for Best Human on the Planet died back in 2015, and WC is still grieving. After all, Sir Terry Pratchett left us some 60-plus books. Not just because of how Sir Terry died, robbed by post-cortical atrophy – a variety of dementia –…
Commentary / Law / Obituary
WC has helped dismantle a couple of Ponzi schemes, most famously Raejean Bonham’s World Plus Ponzi. That one caused immense amounts of pain among more than 1,500 people. It took eleven years to wrap up, and included 1,300 lawsuits and a trip to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Lives and careers were damaged, and…
WC thinks it might be instructive to compare two science/social experiments that are happening in American society as you read this. Sometimes such a comparison can be insightful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been administered to about seven million Americans. That’s the single-dose, anti-COVID vaccine approved by the Food & Drug Administration for emergency…
Even for a jungle canopy photo, this was a tough shot. The bird was in pretty dark shadow, against a bright sky. There’s a trick you can use to get a photo, if not a very good photo, in this situation: crank the exposure compensation up to +3.0 or so, a ridiculously high setting. Use…
Matthew Rexford has an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News, where he criticizes federal oversight of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and praises the Alaska Legislature’s recent resolution criticizing the Biden Administration’s freeze on oil and gas lease development on federal land. Rexford characterizes the issue as a human rights question, describing the native…
(This is a part of a sometime series on artists WC has known and doesn’t want forgotten. The first post in this series was on Steve Goodman. The second was on Sir Terry Pratchett. This one is closer to home.) It’s a bit ironic that a world-class wildlife illustrator like the late Bill Berry is…
Back in 2016, WC wrote about the late Steve Biko, who was murdered by South African police. Playing for Change has released a fine version of Peter Gabriel’s song of the same name, featuring Gabriel himself, Yoyo Ma, Silkroad and others. In the forty years since Gabriel wrote it, the song has lost none of…
WC understands you are supposed to feel guilty when you experience schadenfreude. After all, by definition it means that someone is suffering and, worse still, you are taking some degree of pleasure in their suffering. But. The National Rifle Association is taking a flogging in bankruptcy court right now. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Harlin D. Hale,…
WC blames Dr. Brewster M. Higley, the songwriter who gave us “Home on the Range.” That’s the song that mis-identifies Pronghorn as “antelopes.” “Pronghorn” didn’t scan, WC supposes. They are more closely related to the giraffe and okapi than to true antelopes. That makes them much less distant cousins to goats and extremely remote relatives to the Bovidae, the…
In a lot of ways, it’s hard to care about the seemingly endless fight between Oracle and Google over the Java software copyright claims. Two mega-corporations, slugging it out like two drunks playing Irish Stand Down outside a sleazy bar. Who cares who wins a drunken brawl? Who cares about who owns a software development…
Another strikingly handsome woodpecker, although it forages more on the ground than on trees and rarely pecks wood. The Green-barred Woodpecker’s primary prey is ants, which it picks up off the ground with its tongue. This photo was taken in the pre-dawn, where WC and his guide had staked out a Hyacinth Macaw nest. (A…
So much is unknown about the Narwhal. Even the name is a puzzle. From the Oxford English Dictionary (paywalled), WC’s go-to reference for word etymologies: The etymology is uncertain, but likely comes from variants of Danish narhval (cognate with Norwegian narkval , Swedish narval and further cognate with Old Icelandic náhvalr. The first element “nahl” or “narl” is of uncertain origin,…
WC can generally get along with almost anybody. In the worst case, if someone is annoying enough, WC will generally simply ignore them. But there is a particular class of individual for whom WC has little patience. That would be the attention-seeker, whose need for attention overwhelms everything else about them. WC has received training…
Banbury Hot Springs is in the middle Snake River Canyon, right along the Snake River. After you’ve soaked yourself to a limp noodle, you can go down to the river’s edge in the late afternoon twilight and photograph birds returning to roost for the evening. It’s a pretty good show. A part of the large…
The best place in the United States to view polar bears in the wild is Kaktovik, in the far northeastern corner of Alaska. The polar bears are present in decent numbers because of two human impacts: anthropogenic climate change, which has delayed the arrival of sea ice more each year, keeping the bears ashore; and…
In another instance of abject failure of imagination, the State of Idaho has at least three different places called some variation of “City of Rocks.” WC had a chance to visit one of them recently, the Little City of Rocks, in the Bennett Mountains. It doesn’t look very much like a “city,” it’s not “little”…
This bird presented WC with an unusual photography challenge: the bird was too close to WC to properly photograph. It was about five feet from WC. The camera and lens WC was using at the time, An Olympus E-3 with a 300mm f2.8 super telephoto, could focus as close as two meters. We found the…
You’ve probably never heard of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It’s a Cold War-era research facility that’s still active today, located on 890 square miles of sage brush steppe in eastern Idaho, on a chunk of the Eastern Snake River Plain, about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls. Located in the high desert, surrounded by…
There’s nothing loonie about loons. They are a beautiful genus of birds, handsome, skilled diving hunters and devoted parents. WC has been lucky enough to photograph all five species of the genus Gavia, although most of the photos are nothing WC would want to hang on his wall. Among other challenges, they are extremely wary…
March seems to be ricocheting between lambs and lions, but either way, it’s behind us now. So it’s time for another look back at a mercifully Tweet-free month, where logic, reason and evidence have done a little better than any time in the last four years. Here’s the usual journalism-free, Magpie Principle-inspired look at past…
WC will once again dive into the Wickersham’s Conscience email. Setting aside the Nigerian unclaimed fund scams (~ 15%), invitations from putative scantily clad or unclad young ladies (~18%), dubious queries from folks who think WC is still practicing law (~30%), links to known malware (~17%) and advertisements for sexual stimulants (~19%), we’re left with…
On the North Slope of Alaska, between Prudhoe Bay and Utquiagvik (the village formerly known as “Barrow”) lies Teshekpuk Lake, the largest fresh water lake on the North Slope and the third largest lake in Alaska. At 3.65 million acres, it’s big by anyone’s standards. Most Americans have never heard of it. “Teshekpuk” is Inupiat,…
WC will attempt an occasional series of blog posts at least partially cataloging Trump’s crimes against America. The first in the series discussed Trump’s lies and their impact on American politics. It’s not possible to catalog all Trump’s crimes. And to even attempt to do so in a continuous stream would violate WC’s recent pledge…
As their common name suggests, this is a small woodpecker, although not as small as Piculets. It’s drab (at least in comparison to some of the woodpeckers featured here recently), and widely distributed, found across South America east of the Andes and north of Argentina. The species is a bit of a generalist, occupying a…
(WC recognizes the mass media have picked up on the three astrophysics papers that are behind this story. But the mass media have gotten it stupidly, hopelessly wrong. WC makes an effort to clarify. Doubtless, real astrophysicists will sneer at this effort, but at least it distinguishes between the elliptical galaxy M87 and the black…
Readers may recall WC wrote a polite (at least for WC) open letter to U.S. Senator Mike Crapo (R, Idaho) regarding the Senator’s claim that the federal estate tax was the most unfair tax and required immediate attention. WC has now received a reply. WC has put Senator Crapo’s response in bold and WC’s responses…
In a weird, ritualized exercise, a kind of would-be attempted magic, each year the Idaho state legislature adopts a Joint Resolution condemning the very idea of breaching the four Lower Snake River Dams. The resolution is packed with lies, half-lies and distortions. It also simply ignores the proposal from their fellow Republican Rep. Mike Simpson…
It was the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century. Thirteen cubic kilometers of molten rock and ash blasted out onto the surface of our planet in just 60 hours. An entire valley was filled 100 – 600 feet deep with rhyolite, burying rivers, forests, swamps and lakes. For more than a decade afterwards, thousands…
Chukar were introduced in the Intermountain West as a game bird. It’s an Asian species, but unlike so many introduced species, it doesn’t seem to have seriously disrupted ecosystems or adversely affected native species. Chukars’ preferred habitat are rock slopes, screes and steeply walled canyons. The carved basalts of the upper South Fork of the…
I did not attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. — Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, U.S. Attorney General, 1884, speaking of abolitionist and orator Wendell Phillips WC’s buddy BHC recently advised WC that Stephen Merrill had died. Among WC’s lawyer’s friends who have not had the misfortune to litigate…
The White Woodpecker is a close cousin to the Rocky Mountains’ Lewis’s Woodpecker; a small- to medium-sized woodpecker that isn’t really much of a hammering species. It’s primary foods are fruits and seeds, and honey when the opportunity presents itself. It will take insects – adults and larvae – but primarily as a protein source…
The big lotteries are best understood as a voluntary tax on the statistically challenged. PowerBall is the biggest of the big lotteries, with 45 states and several Canadian provinces participating. PowerBall jackpots are sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course, your chances of winning are so vanishingly small as to be non-existent.…
WC, as many readers must know, was a huge fan of the late Sir Terry Pratchett. Pratchett died six years ago this week. In his novel Going Postal, Pratchett wrote that no one is truly dead so long as someone remembers their name. In the spirit of that idea, WC presents a recording of the…
