According to the Center for Disease Control, the C.D.C., the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1920 killed “about 675,000 in the United States” and about 50 million worldwide. It was the worst pandemic of the 20th Century, and one of the worst in American history. Not the worst any more. The COVID-19 pandemic has an official…
The last few weeks, Bird of the Week has been focusing (sorry) on birds in the Icteridae family. There are about 105 species in the family, spread across 30 genera. We’ll have a look at birds in the Quiscalus genus next, the Grackles. We’ll start with the Great-tailed Grackle, an exceedingly common bird across much…
WC isn’t talking about Idaho’s politicians here; a comparison of Wild Turkeys to Idaho’s legislators would be an insult to the genus Meleagris everywhere. Nor is WC talking about Wild Turkey, a nearly undrinkable brand of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey distilled and bottled by the Wild Turkey Distilling Co. and, by most reports, the favorite beverage of the…
Alaskana / Commentary / Law
It’s been a while since WC has visited the weirdest community in Alaska. It isn’t that there’s been fewer strange stories to tell; it’s the challenge of picking out just one from the many. Here’s a tale of someone who decided if she was gong to break the conditions of her bail release, she’d really…
It’s more than a little scary. WC, along with 69% of his fellow Americans, is on Facebook. What that means, gentle readers, is that Facebook knows far more than you think about who you are, what you do and, especially what you do on the internet. If you think WC is overstating the case, here’s…
Bill Walker is running for governor; Heidi Drygas for Lt. Governor. Both as independents. I have known Bill Walker for many years. I have known Heidi Drygas since she graduated from law school. Heidi and I are former colleagues in a law firm. Heidi was Walker’s Commissioner of Labor in Walker’s first term as governor,…
We pulled into Amanita Campground on the west side of Cascade Reservoir for lunch. It was open after Labor Day, mostly unoccupied and had sites looking over the reservoir. The choice was very nearly random. We found an unoccupied campsite, looking over the reservoir. Again, selected almost at random. We sat down a the picnic…
WC has gotten complaints that geology is too complex. Piffle. Until now, WC hasn’t tackled complex geology. Nevada’s geology is notoriously, infamously complex. WC had a glimpse of that complexity in his recent hike in the Ruby Mountains in northeastern Nevada. While Idaho has some interesting geology, for the most part everything but the volcanism…
When WC photographed this bird in 2014, it was called a Bay-winged Cowbird, and believed to be a brood parasite like other cowbirds. Upon further study, ornithologists have decided it is a not a member of the genus Molothrus at all but instead have moved it to Agelaioides badius. As it turned out, not only…
Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge is a 37,632 acre refuge on the easterly side of the Ruby Mountains in northeastern Nevada. Fed by some 200 springs along the base of the Ruby Mountains, it’s a year-round wetland, and both an important breeding area and a major migratory stopover for countless birds. It’s also a fine…
Calling John Nolte, the Editor of Briebart News1 a scumbag is an insult to scumbags everywhere. WC needs to offer just one example of Nolte’s “reasoning”2 to illustrate that claim. Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the…
The Ruby Mountains, in northeast Nevada, are just one of the dozens of basin and range systems in Nevada. Oriented north-northeast to south-southwest, they top out to over 11,000 feet. The Rubies are unusual in that they feature a paved road running up into the middle of the range, reaching an elevation of 8,800 feet…
WC is just back from a five day birding trip. There will be longer blog posts, but WC wants to report on more proof, if you needed it, that the Bird Gods have a sense of humor. WC’s birding buddies, Jeff and Dave, wanted to see a Chukar. After some four hours of pretty intense…
Some photos from an early September visit to Long Valley in Central Idaho, where fall migration is under way. WC is chasing birds and this post was prepared more hastily than usual. WC apologizes for the brief post and somewhat sloppy photo editing.
Ecuador, wedged on the western side of South America between Columbia on the north and Peru on the south, straddling the equator, is WC’s favorite place on the planet to look for and photograph birds. Ecuador has an area of about 109,500 square miles; by contrast, Colorado has an area of about 114,000 squares miles.…
The Shiny Cowbird is opportunistic. It’s opportunistic in its choice of food, and in its choice of nests to parasitize. Like its fellow Cowbird cousins, the Shiny Cowbird is a brood parasite, leavings its eggs in other species’ nests for the unknowing foster parents to raise. The Shiny Cowbird is also expanding its range. It…
WC is off birding. Posts will be short, sketchy or missing altogether for a few days. WC has from time to time written about logical fallacies, describing specific fallacies and analyzing rhetorical content to illustrate fallacies. During Donald Trump’s candidacy and administration, WC pretty much stopped writing on the topic because we were all living…
Since Elon Musk’s SpaceX has succeeded in making money launching rockets, an entire battalion of rocketeer wannabes have sprung up in an effort to get some of that cheese. They are discovering that rocket science is hard. Some examples. Firefly Aerospace Inc. (“Firefly”) is headquartered in Austin, TX. Firefly launched its first Alpha rocket September…
WC was working through a long New York Times article (paywalled) recently on U.S. House of Representative’s Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bizarre terroristic threat to “get even” with folks who complied with the law. When this jumped out at WC: [The House panel investigating January 6] demanded records of communications between the White House and…
Wood Bison – bison that live in forested areas, as opposed to the more famous Plains Bison – very nearly went extinct. Overhunting, introduced diseases and hybridization with Plains Bison had devastated the Wood Bison populations. The species vanished from Alaska in the early 1900s. They very nearly vanished entirely. A small herd of 23…
WC has written before about the looming crises in public use of recreational lands. Those crises will worsen as the rest of the Boomer Generation retires and seeks to recreate. National Parks and Wilderness Areas, in particular, are starting to suffer damage from the sheer number of visitors who are flocking to them. Yellowstone National…
WC was listening to a folk music playlist a few days ago. It’s responsible for this blog post. You can, as you choose, blame the Bible, specifically the first eight verses of the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes; or the late Pete Seeger; or The Byrds, whose cover was on WC’s playlist. Or better still, WC.…
Most readers, if they know about cowbirds at all, are familiar with North America’s Brown-headed Cowbird. In fact, there are five species of cowbirds, the genus Molothrus, in the Western Hemisphere. All are brood parasites. The Giant Cowbird, as its name suggests, is the largest of the five. WC admits that in this photo the…
Once in a while WC sees a truly lovely malapropism. This one is a classic. Patricia Silva, a certified “life mastery consultant,” is a candidate for the Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly. For non-Alaskans, “boroughs” are Alaska’s equivalent to counties. The Fairbanks North Star Borough, as the name implies, is the borough around Fairbanks, WC’s…
WC suspects readers may be getting tired about reading blog posts about legal decisions. Certainly, WC, who wants to be retired from the practice of law, is tired of reading court decisions. But the thing is, really important issues that affect our nation and its future are being addressed in the federal and state court…
Clearly, the Idaho Legislature doesn’t trust Idaho voters. To safeguard the sanctity of laws it has passed, the Legislature has over the years set increasingly, impossibly difficult requirement for signatures to get a citizen initiative enacting a law or a citizen referendum repealing a law onto the ballot. You just can’t trust those voters to…
August drifted by in a haze of wildfire smoke and painfully high temperatures. And in a virtual cloud of wretched events. Wretched it may have been, but it’s time for a look back at stuff that happened after WC wrote about it, stuff WC didn’t get around to writing, and stuff too good to pass…
WC can’t add much to the excellent tributes and obituaries from Rolling Stone and the New York Times. The guy had a voice like an angel, and despite heavy drinking, drugs and decades of smoking, he never lost that pitch-perfect sound. Or the skills that created those amazing parallel thirds harmonies with his brother, Phil.…
It seems increasingly likely that humanity’s inaction in the face of the existential threat of anthropogenic climate change means we are going to have more than than the 2° Celsius of global temperature increase that climatologists regarded as manageable. So, without in any way diminishing the urgency that humanity’s CO2 emissions be reduced, it’s time…
Except when they sing or call, it can be tough to tell an Eastern Meadowlark from a Western Meadowlark. And because the Eastern Meadowlark is strongly polytypic – some 16 subspecies are currently recognized, although some ornithologists describe the species as perhaps “over-split” – with slight variations across the subspecies, it’s especially challenging to tell…
T-Mobile has suffered yet another massive “security breach,” the euphemism for being hacked by unknown persons. T-Mobile learned it had been robbed when The Motherboard reported T-Mobile’s customer data was for sale on the black web. Some 7.8 million T-Mobile customers had their personal information, including names, addresses, social security numbers and telephone numbers, stolen.…
Across the evening sky All the birds are leaving But how can they know It’s time for them to go Before the winter fire I will still be dreaming I have no thought of time For who knows where the time goes Who knows where the time goes — Sandy Denny, “Who Knows Where the…
Some blog posts are harder to write than others. WC has a clear memory of seeing and hearing Nanci Griffith at The Quiet Knight in Chicago in early 1975 (she started singing in clubs when she was 12 years old). Somehow, WC had gotten a seat down close to the stage. A law school classmate…
WC gets a lot of blowback from readers on his geology posts. “Who care about rocks?” one reader wrote. Yet geology really, really matters, and WC will offer one case in point, from the island of Hispaniola,1 to illustrate his claim. Hispaniola, the island divided between the Dominican Republic on the east and Haiti on…
It’s a classic case of the bad guys getting out-lawyered. And a pretty nifty result. OAN gets to pay Rachel Maddow more than $247,000 as a result. But WC is once again starting in the middle. On July 22, 2019, Rachel Maddow reported on MSNBC about a Daily Beast story. It seems that a reporter…
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