A small portion of the Armed Forces section of Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise, Idaho. It’s the final resting place of some of the Boiseans who died in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War. It is impressively, depressingly large for a comparatively small town like…
WC has been a member of Alaska Conservation Foundation for decades. WC was a board member of ACF for ten years, and is a past treasurer and board chair of ACF. WC has donated thousands of dollars to ACF and its mission. At the risk of stating the obvious, WC is a strong supporter of…
The Orange-crowned Warbler is an unusually drab wood warbler, found in breeding season across Canada and Alaska and in the intermountain west. It’s a comparatively short-distance migrant, wintering in the southern third of the Lower 48 and Mexico. This species is dusky olive-green above, with brighter yellow on its rump and upper-tail coverts, grayer on…
A reader recently asked WC what WC thought of “Photoshopping”. By the question, WC assumes the reader means using Adobe Photoshop to create fake or misleading photos, to digitally alter them in dishonest ways. Photoshop is a tool. It’s a powerful suite of software algorithms to enhance digital images. It’s likely accurate to say that…
Alaskana / Ancient History / Climate Follies / Commentary / Natural History / Obituary / Photography
This post is dedicated to the late Dr. Vera Alexander, marine scientist, equestrian, musician, philanthropist and much more. It was WC’s privilege to serve as a marine technician on the R/V Acona in 1967 on a cruise where Dr. Alexander, a newly minted PhD, did some of the original research on the relationship between Harbor…
A reader recently asked how birds with extraordinarily long bills could possibly get the food from the end of their bill into their throats. WC can offer an insight. One of the North American bird species with a long bill is the aptly named Long-billed Curlew. It has a body length of body length 500–650…
There are about eleven active phosphate mines in the United States. Four of those mines are in Idaho, in the southeast corner of the state, centered on the small community of Soda Springs. The town’s claim to fame – other than being a Superfund site – is that travelers on the Oregon Trail stopped there…
WC and Mrs. WC visited Summer Lake Wild Life Refuge this spring instead of its bigger, better known federal cousin, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But our route back took us too close to Malheur not to spend a few hours in the Refuge. While the birds, especially at the headquarters, weren’t especially cooperative, the species…
WC is associated with a prominent environmental organization. Be clear: the views expressed in this blog post are WC’s views and in no way reflect the position of any organization with which WC is associated. WC has written before about the Simplot Grand View Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation – CAFO – just north of Grand…
This species has a special place in WC’s heart: not only is it beautiful; it was the logo bird for the late, lamented Alaska Bird Observatory, appearing on everything from coffee mugs to stickers to t-shirts. In Interior and Southcentral Alaska, it is associated with stands of mature white spruce. That preference seems more closely…
WC has written about the amazing geology of Summer Lake, and promised photos of the birds that migrate through and breed in the area. Here’s that bird photo sampler. Please don’t call them “seagulls.” This handsome fellow was more than 200 miles from the nearest seawater. All the rails, including Virginia Rail, are famously difficult…
There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at. uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as…
First, consider Martin Shkreli’s business model: found a company. Use it to acquire sole-source drugs that treat life-threatening conditions in small populations of patients. Then dramatically jack up the price. In August 2015, Shkreli did just that, buying the rights to the decades-old anti-parasitic drug Daraprim for $55 million. Daraprim is used to treat the…
Citizen science is important. In the face of increasing threats to the environment, federal and state funding is simply inadequate to monitor, let alone resolve, the avalanche of threats and challenges facing officials charged with protecting the environment and the flora and fauna that need and use that environment. One part of those efforts is…
WC recently spent a few delightful days birding in Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge, in southcentral Oregon. Because it all starts with geology, WC will start there, too. Multiple geology theses, a few books and hundreds of geology papers have been written on Summer Lake and its ancestor, Chewaucan (chee-WAU-can) Lake. WC is necessarily going to…
All but the most recent readers here at Wickersham’s Conscience know WC has been struggling for more than two years to answer a reader’s simple question, “How many bird species have you photographed?” It turned out to be much more tedious and complicated to answer than you have patience to read. Busted software, vast numbers…
There’s no getting round it; this is a remarkable warbler. No wood warbler is more different in breeding and non-breeding plumage. It has the longest trans-oceanic flight of any warbler, from 2,500 to 3,500 km and is estimated to take up to 88 hours to complete the trip. It is the most southerly migrating of…
The technical, linguistic term for it is a Gricean Implicature.1 You know, the Mafia thug walks into the store and says, “Nice place you’ve got here. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.” Or, if you prefer, U.S. House Speaker Kevin “You’ve Sold Out” McCarthy2 looks around at the U.S. economy and says,…
There was a lawyer WC knew back in the day. When you asked her a difficult question she didn’t want to answer, she’d respond, “How ’bout those Phillies?” It’s an evasion and a not very clever way of ducking an issue, attempting to change the subject. It’s now the Republican Party’s go-to solution to the…
White-throated Sparrow, until 2023, was kind of a nemesis bird for WC. A nemesis bird is one that, on the. evidence and experience, doesn’t want you to see or photograph it. For example, there was one reported at Hull’s Gulch, a city park half a mile from WC’s house. Despite a dozen trips there to…
WC was raised on salmon. Canned salmon, frozen salmon, fresh salmon, smoked salmon, dried salmon; growing up in Alaska, it was the most abundant, least expensive food and WC ate a lot of it. Based on nearly 70 years of eating all five Pacific species of salmon, there’s no question in WC’s mind that king…
On September 18, 2018, the New York Times ran a long article titled, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Scheme as He Reaped Riches from His Father.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. Donald Trump, outraged that his niece had cooperated with the Times reporters and provided documents to them, sued the Times.…
Florida Governor Ron “Pander” DeSantis has picked a fight with the Disney Company. As Jimmy Buffet noted many years ago, “You don’t mess with the mouse in Orlando,” although he was putting words in the mouth of the fictional Skip Wylie at the time. The Disney Company employs 75,000 people in Florida, brings some 50…
If last week’s Black-throated Green Warbler is an eastern bird, this week’s Wilson Warbler is a cross-continental bird, a species which between breeding range, migration and winter range covers all of North America except the Florida peninsula. A brushy habitat specialist, WC has seen it in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska…
In the NPR’s obituary of Gordon Lightfoot, they played parts of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” WC doesn’t think “Edmund Fitzgerald” is Lightfoot’s best song, but it’s certainly his best known. What makes the song remarkable to WC is that, consciously or unconsciously, Lightfoot adopted a rhyming pattern, a mode of epic poetry in…
In 2005, on a birding trip to Trinidad, WC met two extraordinary birders, two pharmacists from St. Louis, Missouri. We got along well and, as things turned out, over the next 18 years we have made a dozen or more birding trips together. They were along on WC’s and Mrs. WC’s recent trip to the…
As WC has recently written, this spring included a trip to the Dry Tortugas, the westerly end of the coral ridge that includes the better known Key West. Of course, to get to the Dry Tortugas you have to go to Florida, currently governed – for a loose definition of “governed” – by the reprehensible…
WC, as readers likely suspect, is not a fan of missionaries, or at least not Christian missionaries. WC has little experience with other flavors. All too often, in their ignorance, arrogance and zeal, they have destroyed indigenous peoples and cultures. But if there has been a missionary in Alaska that WC nearly admires, it could…
Long-time readers know WC gets twitchy if there isn’t a geology post for a while. The geology and geomorphology of Florida, where WC was most recently, is frankly boring. Missouri, WC’s other recent destination, was all about the ages of layers and layers of limestone. Boring.1 So WC will reach back to his trips into…
An endless cold, snowy and dank April has ended. Which makes it time to have a look back with updates to earlier posts, mention of stuff that didn’t rate a post and lost opportunities for snark. Because WC spent a chunk of April is warmer climates, there is less to update and this post is…
WC has exhausted his usable Alcid photos, and probably his readers’ patience with pictures of seabirds as well. So we’ll move on to a new family of birds, the Parulidae, the Wood Warblers. There are about 115 species of Wood Warblers, about half of them occurring in North America. WC only has photos of a…
WC wore a coat and tie most of his professional career. Perhaps in an over-reaction to that long costuming requirement, WC mostly wears shorts and a hoody these days. But occasionally Mrs. WC can persuade WC to put on slacks, a dress shirt, one of his elderly tacky ties and a blazer and pretend to…
In 1963, when WC was a surly teenager, and his Dad was feeling unusually prosperous, we took a late spring vacation from Fairbanks to visit the relatives in central California. For five of the ten days, WC and his brother were parked with their Aunt Helen, WC’s dad’s sister, while the parents went to Vegas.…
Fort Jefferson, the 16 million brick white elephant of a fort built on Garden Key, Dry Tortugas, was constructed mostly with slave labor. Mis-engineered from the start, chasing military technology but never catching up and, in fact, never completed, it’s a fascinating case study. The federal government had several motives for building Fort Jefferson, but…
The Dry Tortugas, a set of small coral islets dominated by Fort Jefferson, is a hot, arid and storm-ridden location. But it is also home to four species of birds that breed nowhere else in the continental United States. WC, on his recent trip to the national park, was fortunate to see and photograph all…
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