Wasillite Paul Gil was on a deer hunting trip to Prince William Sound in October 2017. On that trip, Gil shot and killed a Harbor Seal, using an AR15-style assault weapon. Harbor Seals haul out of the water at various places in the Sound. Shooting them is every bit as challenging as shooting a motionless…
Plovers are a group of about 68 species across nine genera, all in the family Charadiidae. They are found on every continent but Antarctica, and they get pretty close there. The systematics are far from fully sorted out, and the life histories of most of those 68 species are pretty much unknown. Ornithologists cannot even…
The Austral Thrush is the southernmost member of the 83 (!) members of the genus Turdus. It’s found on the southern tip of South America, north along the western side as far central Chile, and in the Falkland Islands. In the Falklands, it is sedentary; on the South American mainland, there is some irregular migration…
Back in 2016, WC read Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? It’s not an easy read; Dawisha’s analysis is a fire hydrant of absolutely damning information on Putin and the crony kleptocracy he has established Russia. But it’s worth the effort; eight years after publication, few, if any, or Dawisha’s allegations have been refuted.…
North America is graced with four species of Tanager: Scarlet, Summer, Western and Hepatic. Exceptionally colorful, beautiful and relatively common, they are long-distance migrants that grace our spring and summer days. But, alas, they aren’t really Tanagers; they aren’t members of the family Thraupidae, the true tanagers. Rather, they are members of the family Cardinalidae,…
In principle, at least, the use of seismic – earthquake – waves to understand the interior of a planet is less complicated than it first seems. You’re probably familiar with bats’ use of echolocation to navigate the night skies: they emit high-pitched squeaks, and then use the reflections, the echoes, to navigate and find prey.…
Certainly the most difficult North American family of birds to see, let alone photograph, are the Rails. While there are some 139 species of Ralidae worldwide, WC in this post focuses on the six “true” North American Rails.1 WC has photos of five of them – for a given definition of “photo” – and is…
Several readers have asked WC what he thinks is at the heart of all the problems facing America. It’s more than one thing, of course. But with this post, WC continues a new, semi-regular series, using only photographs to illustrate the problem. WC cautions readers that some of these photos contain obscenities. But that’s part…
7.2 million cubic feet of natural gas. Enough to heat WC’s poorly insulated Boise home for the next 62,000 years. Enough to meet the City of Boise’s entire natural gas needs for most of a year. Never mind the horrific greenhouse gas implications of that discharge: natural gas – methane – has 43 times more…
WC has exhausted his collection of even marginally presentable photos of Trogons, so we will move on to another family of birds, the Thrushes, the taxonomic family Turdidae. There are some 174 species of Thrushes spread across 18 genera. Some will be immediately familiar. Some will surprise you. WC has photographed only a small fraction…
WC will celebrate this Friday the 13th, a day founded on superstition, by following up on a series of seriously geeky science subjects. Black holes, even galaxy-sized black holes, have magnetic fields. You can give yourself a headache thinking too long about that. Black holes, which are as real as an earthquake, have always felt…
Exhibit ASteven F. Holtze, is a Texas multi-millionaire and a major Republican donor, who runs a natural-health and hormone replacement clinic, paid more than a quarter million dollars to ex-Houston police captain Mark Aguirre to find election fraud.1 It was Aguirre who on October 19, 2020, rammed his car into the a cargo truck owned by…
A reader commented recently in response to an older blog post, “Flycatchers are boring.” WC acknowledges that a lot of North American flycatchers are small, gray and difficult to identify. That doesn’t make them boring for WC; just a little challenging. But WC takes the point to be that the reader thinks all flycatchers are…
It’s been a while since WC wrote about a BUCIP – a Big, Ugly, Complicated and Intractable Problem. The typical BUCIP is complicated, with multiple sides, entrenched stakeholders and packed with emotional positions. The problem of wild horses in the West is a classic BUCIP. Wild horses1 are an introduced species, not native to North…
It’s not a desert, although the area only gets about seven inches of precipitation a year, on average. It’s a playa, the dry bed of a former lake, and it’s about 8 miles wide and 70 miles long. The surface of the dry lake bottom is absolutely, unnervingly flat, and bare of any visible trace…
Several readers have asked WC what he thinks is at the heart of all the problems facing America. It’s more than one thing, of course. But with this post, WC introduces a new, semi-regular series, using only photographs to illustrate the problem. When ignorance is held out as desirable, by persons in authority, yeah, it’s…
A supremely lovely bird; the most beautiful, all things considered, that I have ever seen. He owes his beauty to the intensity and arresting contrast of his coloration, the resplendent sheen and glitter of his plumage, the elegance of his ornamentation, the symmetry of his form, and the noble dignity of his carriage. Alexander Skutch,…
A reader, in response to WC’s point that High Island is the result of a subterranean salt dome, asked what a “salt dome” was. It proved to be an irresistible opportunity for WC to geek out on geology. Imagine a salt pan, an area where salt is a major constituent of surface deposits. The Great…
Vireos, a family of songbirds distributed around the world, might be one of the families of birds least familiar to non-birders. Vireos don’t make it to Alaska; WC only had limited experience with this family of birds from trips to warmer climes before moving to Idaho. They aren’t as flashy as their warbler cousins, but…
Dear Lt. Governor McGeachin: The Idaho Statesman reports that at a campaign event on April 21, in response to a press inquiry about your botched and overdrawn Idaho Lt. Governor’s Office budget, you said, Honestly, who cares about $2,000 … in the lieutenant governor’s budget? I think more people in Idaho are concerned about their…
WC was recently in Texas.1 The occasion was spring migration and, in this case, the migration is extraordinary. Small songbirds – in the case of the Warblers that are the focus of this post, weighing about a third of an ounce – fly non-stop from South America to the Gulf Coast, a distance of some…
WC’s mailbox has been stuffed with messages from “Tito Dunleavy” lately, all asking for money, for WC to “sign” Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s birthday card, or seeking WC’s contact information for “important news.” Or sometimes all three. In the emails from “Tito,” there’s always a photo of the very small, curly-furred brown dog at the…
If you blinked, you missed April, as well as a lot of mighty fine birds. But it’s already time – past time, in fact – for a look back at stories that didn’t make blog posts, or require follow up, or just meet the Magpie Principle. As ever, absolutely no journalism has been committed in…
Quetzals, some the most beautiful birds in the world, are also members of the Trogonidae, the Trogon family. While the most famous Quetzal is the Resplendent Quetzal – next week’s bird – there are five other species, including this close cousin, the Golden-headed Quetzal. The name is misleading; the bronzish coloration of the male’s head…
There have been two recent images from the Mars Rover Perseverance and its amazing little helicopter companion, Ingenuity, that reminded WC that for all the faults and challenges of these modern times, we really do live in an age of miracles and wonders. The first was the images of one of Mars’ two tiny moonlets,…
Yesterday it was Mountain Bluebirds. Today it’s another blue bird. After an Indigo Bunting has flown 600 miles nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico, a bath in Dave’s Drip at Sabine Woods on the eastern Texas coast is pretty appealing. Of course, other bird species have the same idea, so you have to wait for…
It’s spring migration, WC’s favoritest time of the year. So WC is off chasing birds, and may have sketchy internet service as well as little time to write blog posts. In the event there are gaps in in the blog post stream the next week or two, here are some Mountain Bluebird photos taken this…
WC suspects some readers are getting tired of birds. So today WC will switch to mammals. Specifically flying mammals: Mexican Free-tailed Bats. The cave itself is an unprepossessing hole in the ground, about 20 feet wide and perhaps six feet tall. It’s home to 10-12 million Mexican Free-tailed Bats, as well as a colony of…
WC is birding in Texas. The state may be pretty weird, but the birding is excellent and with the help of our skilled guide, Sam Woods of Tropical Birding, we’ve found a lot of the birds that are hard to find anywhere else. They weren’t all that easy to find in Texas, either, but we…
WC did a post on Thailand’s shorebirds a few weeks back, complaining that Shorebirds are Hard. Bad news, patient readers; these shorebirds are even harder. Here’s a selection from the Pak Thale region of Thailand, showing off a few of the reasons that area is world famous as a place to view shorebirds. No, that’s…
This Trogon is different than the five that came earlier. This is an Asian species, not one of the Neotropic birds. Trogons are found on four continents: Eurasia, North America, South America and Africa, narrowly missing Australia. This is the Orange-breasted Trogon, one of six species of Trogon found in Thailand. While the tails are…
The late Dave Carter wrote “The Gentle Arms of Eden” more than 20 years ago. Carter died much too young, in 2002, just 49 years old, in the arms of his partner and collaborator, Tracy Grammer. Grammer and Jim Henry live-streamed a memorial concert featuring Carter’s songs recently, and closed the two hour set with…
For parts of two summers, in 1965 and 1966, WC worked as a camp counsellor for the Boy Scout camp at Lost Lake, 65 miles southeast of Fairbanks. One of a camp counsellor’s duties was to accompany a Boy Scout troop as they made day hikes and overnight hikes away from the scout camp. In…
In a testament to Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s incompetency, he has left WC on his email list even though (1) WC has not for six years now been registered to vote in Alaska, (2) WC has heartlessly mocked, dissected and ridiculed Mikey’s email messages and, (3) WC would eat broken glass on the Capitol steps…
A business is financially bankrupt when its liabilities exceed its assets, and it is unable to pay its debts as they come due. A political party, by contrast, is intellectually bankrupt when its election platform consists of nothing but lies and illusions. Such a political party has run out of substantive ideas, and has had…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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