WC offers a snarky birthday card to former Captain Joseph Hazelwood on the occasion of his 70th birthday, today, September 24, 2016. Captain Hazelwood’s legacy in Prince William Sound will outlive him. In 1999, WC was sea kayaking on the east side of Prince William Sound. Under the rocks at one beach on a small…
WC isn’t so old he can’t remember reading looking at books that focused his attention like this. Luckily, WC’s parents never found out. We’ll pretend this is about the excitement of the autumn equinox, even though the event is mostly irrelevant 10° from the equator. WC reminds reader he has only intermittent access to the…
Some random bird photos from trips into the Wet Andes in Peru. Keep in mind this part of Peru is a desert, among the dryest deserts in the world. WC first saw a Scrub Blackbird from his hotel window in Miraflores, a department of Greater Lima. It was making the most amazing noises, a whole…
Sometimes even a rank amateur geologist like WC sees an outcrop of rock and would really, really like to get on it with a hammer and a geologist’s loupe. What a story this pile of rock could tell to a trained eye (i.e., someone better than WC). Unhappily, this particular outcrop was part of a sheer…
Some birds, maybe a lot of birds, resist coming out into the open for the classic “Bird on a Stick” shot. Instead, they skulk deep in their habitat. Photographing them is tough. Friday, WC was at the edge of a marsh, trying to photograph the birds that spend most of their lives in the reeds…
We’ll finish up cormorants with the Brandt’s Cormorant. Unlike the other three, this species breeds only in North America, and reaches the northerly limit of its range at Kodiak Island. This species’ life history and populations are tied to the rich upwelling associated with deep upwelling currents like the California Current. Long-term monitoring of the population at…
Readers could say, with some justice, that WC needs to learn to focus. But this stuff is pretty amazing. Wednesday WC took a cultural tool of Lima, Peru. The trip included a visit to the Museo Arqueologico Rafael Larco Herrera – a private archaeological museum – in downtown Lima. The pre-Columbian Indians took pottery to…
WC will be chasing birds in places without the Intertubes the next few weeks. Actually, places without electricity, too. Posts, comment review and email will all be intermittent.
WC doesn’t usually read the Salt Lake City Tribune, but one of WC’s readers pointed WC to an opinion piece appearing there and WC’s correspondent was right: it’s a perfect illustration of why James Madison was right to separate church and state. One Stuart C. Reid, described as a “former U.S. Army chaplain, government relations manager…
Rep. Tammie Wilson (R, Pure Selfishness) has staked out yet another outrageous, irrational political position. Once again, she has grossly overreacted to a constituent whinge and sabotaged an important government function. It’s a predictable, absolutely destructive pattern. This time, a constituent has complained that the Office of Children’s Services improperly acted against his or her kids,…
Hells Canyon has an amazingly convoluted history. Geology is messy, but Hells Canyon takes that truism to an extreme. As geologists understand it,1 about 150 million years ago, the Pacific Northwest ended approximately along the Idaho-Oregon state line. It was ocean, the proto-Pacific Ocean, westwards from there. The Pacific Plate, or maybe a smaller plate…
Back in January 2011, WC noted that Joe Miller had finally, more than a year after the election, conceded that, yes, Lisa Murkowski had won. WC named Joe Miller “Bad Penny.” WC predicted that, like a bad penny, Joe Miller would keep turning up. Unfortunately, WC has been proven right. Miller has a strange mix of paranoia, an unseemly…
