To me, the evidence presented over the previous four weeks is not reasonably subject to any conclusion other than that the President did commit the crimes alleged against him. — Senator Mike Crapo (R, Idaho), on the Impeachment of President Bill Clinton, 1999 Dear Senators Crapo and Risch: The Idaho Statesman reports that your votes…
Boise, Idaho is a long, long ways from the nearest seawater. And yet there are gulls here year around. Among them are Ring-billed Gulls, a medium-small gull species that breeds, feeds and winters in the area. This gull, photographed in truly terrible light last Sunday, is a classic Ring-billed Gull in non-breeding plumage. The dark…
Alcids, the “Flying Footballs” of marine birds, are the family of Murres, Auklets and Puffins. There are some 25 species, spread across 11 genera. It’s hard to generalize about them. They range from drab to spectacular, common to exotic and are all wonderful to watch. They are superb swimmers, dreadful on land and, in flight,…
Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake. — Frank Herbert, Dune WC has read articles from many political pundits pronouncing the Republican Party “dead.” When the U.S. Senate voted to acquit, they claim, the subsequent voter backlash will kill the GOP. Trump’s guilt,…
We’re a dozen or so species into the woodpeckers, here at Wickersham’s Conscience. It’s probably about time to talk about the family Picidae, the woodpeckers generally. Birds of the World (paywalled) states: Woodpeckers have diversified into every treed habitat on Earth except for Madagascar and Australasia (east of Wallace’s line), and ground-living woodpeckers even occur…
WC has posted a lot of political posts lately. While discussion of those issues is important, it can also bring even more stress to readers’ already stress-filled days. So, subject to the Magpie Principle, WC will endeavor to focus a little more on nature, birds and nature photography the next few weeks, to “depressurize” from…
This is a re-run, triggered by WC’s struggles to work through an acronym-laden Environmental Impact Statement recently. But it’s been twelve years since the original post, and the lesson is still pertinent. WC was surfing the web the other evening, and came across an acronym: RAGBRAI. WC had no idea what it meant, but Google…
WC’s house was graced with visit by an adult male Anna’s Hummingbird on February 15. A lovely visitor in all that snow and rain. Which helps inspire this post. Anna’s Hummingbird has experienced an impressive range expansion over the last century. The species once nested only along the Pacific slope of northern Baja California and…
WARNING: Serious Ear Worm Hazard A recent blog post reminded WC of the great folk musician Tom Paxton. If you are lucky enough to have been to a Paxton concert, you know he introduces his songs with stories, sometimes long stories. At a show at The Quiet Knight in 1973 or 1974, he told this…
“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.” — Attributed to Catherine Aird WC supposes it was entirely appropriate that Trump’s impeachment defense team, rather than seriously addressing the facts presented by the House Impeachment Managers, engaged instead in a smorgasbord of logical fallacies. Aping their client,…
Valentine’s Day is a mostly commercial affair; candy, cards and flowers. But the first known link between the Catholic saint and romance comes from Parlement of Foules (1382) by Geoffrey Chaucer: For this was on seynt Volantynys dayWhan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make. — Geoffrey Chaucer, 1382 [“For this was on St.…
WC will jump from last week’s tiny Olivaceous Piculet to one of the largest New World woodpecker species, the Lineated Woodpecker. Larger than the familiar North American Pileated Woodpecker, its close cousin, the Lineated is very widely distributed, from Northern Mexico to the northern two-thirds of South America. It’s accidental in the United States. The…
And ofte tyme swich cursynge wrongfully retorneth agayn to hym that curseth, as a bryd that retorneth agayn to his owene nest.1 — Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale, 1390 When Dominion Voting sued Trump attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani for defamation, WC noted that the chickens were coming home to roost, that Powell and Giuliani…
WC plans to explore the Heron family, the Herons, Egrets and Bitterns, in the Return of Bird of the Week series, if we ever finish up the Woodpeckers. In the meantime, here’s a teaser, looking at a half a dozen of the thirty-seven or so species of Neotropic Herons. A crepuscular (late twilight and pre-dawn…
At least for those of us riding on the North American Plate, the Yellowstone Hot Spot rivals the Hawai’an Hotspot as the most famous of its kind. As North America has moved westwards, shoving itself over the Pacific Plate, the fixed point of the Yellowstone Hot Spot has left an extraordinary trail of volcanic activity…
(Loosely based on “Goin’ to the Zoo,” with apologies to the great Tom Paxton. And to Zoo Boise.) Nancy’s taking me to the zoo today, Zoo today, zoo today; Nancy’s taking me to the zoo today, We can stay all day. [Chorus:]We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo;How about you, you, you?You can come too, too, too.We’re going…
WC marks the death of Rennie Davis on February 2 with a look back at the Chicago Eight, the defendants in Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s and the Nixon Administration’s political show trial after the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Long-time readers will recall WC had two personal connections with the…
It’s clear that the problem isn’t confined to Alaska, or even to just the United States. At this metropolitan park in downtown Guayaquil, Ecuador, sitting in front of the sign saying “Don’t feed the animals” – in this case Green Iguanas – this nice Ecuadoran family was . . . feeding the animals. In Palmer…
The tiniest woodpeckers are called Piculets, and are tiny indeed. The Olivaceous Piculet is just 3.5 inches long; the entrance to the nest cavity in this rotting fence post if about 8/10ths of an inch across, about the diameter of a nickel. The Olivaceous is just one of the 26 species comprising the genus Picumnus,…
Alaska’s Governor Mike Dunleavy took himself to Texas recently. Strangely, only Dermot Cole has reported on Mikey’s expedition. While he was there, Mikey participated in something called the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF, is what is laughably called a “think tank,” a right wing think tank. “Laughably,” because there’s…
In 1989, popular Anchorage Daily News columnist and sometime substitute teacher Gordon “Satch” Carlson was accused of having sex with one of his students. He was charged in November 1989 with statutory rape. The victim was 17 years of age, above the age of consent, but it was still a crime under the laws at…
The EPA estimates there are more than 15,000 abandoned mines across the West that are leaching dangerous chemicals into the environment. Sometimes it’s windblown dust, laced with arsenic, cadmium lead and other toxic heavy metals. More often it’s groundwater discharging from mining adits and shafts, laced with dangerously high levels of dissolved heavy metals, running…
There’s a place just a few hours drive from Boise where the old magic still works. You want to get there on an early spring morning while it’s still dark. Park, stay in your vehicle, but roll the windows down. It will be cold in the pre-dawn darkness, but the reward is hearing that strange…
The U.S. Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia – the D.C. Circuit – issued a decision last week on the Trump Administration’s attempts to throw out the Obama Administration’s Clear Power Plan. As you might expect, there were lots of lawyers involved. Platoons, companies, entire brigades of lawyers. The list of lawyers in…
January probably set some kind of record for sheer volume of news. It was exhausting: the pandemic, a seditious insurrection in the U.S., a new president. WC is going to ignore all that in this month’s recaps and focus on stuff that might have gotten lost in the sheer volume. As always, no journalism was…
A remarkably widely distributed species, it’s found from southern Mexico to northern Peru, along the easterly mountain slopes in Central America and the westerly face of the Andes in South America. Surprisingly for that wide range, there are no subspecies. In the male, as you can see in the first photo, the red crest comes…
His client has announced he won’t be paying Rudy for his “work” trying to overturn the presidential election. Never mind that the client has a long record of stiffing his creditors. Never mind the client has far more serious financial problems than his A/Rs with Rudy, leaving Rudy standing at the back of the line.…
Drop a large vase on a stone floor. It shatters, of course, pieces go everywhere. Now cover the fragments with 5,000 feet of layered sand, basalt, mud and gravel. Let it sit for 20 million years. Allow tectonic forces to then fault the mile-thick pile, shifting some it vertically and some of it horizontally. Allow…
For WC, Wasilla was always the place you had to go through to drive between Fairbanks and Anchorage. It seemed inoffensive enough. True, there would be traffic jams that sometimes slowed Parks Highway traffic to a crawl. But otherwise, it seemed inoffensive enough, in a bedroom-burb, multiple-strip mall kind of way. But why is it…
A “baseline,” in science, is a measure where things stand, to be held up against a later point, for comparison. WC thinks it would be interesting to establish a baseline here, at the transition from Trump to Biden. For convenience, WC has broken the observations down into categories, with data points at the third week…
This post is dedicated to WC’s buddy Doug Toelle and the long-gone Polarnet, Fairbanks, Alaska’s first internet service provider (ISP). The world certainly has gotten more complicated. When you use your mouse or touchpad to virtually click on a link or a button on a web site, a whole lot of your information gets transmitted…
It’s been a while since WC wrote a screed, a phillipic, a rant. It’s time to fix that. The Idaho Statesman is the principal daily newspaper in the Treasure Valley here in southwest Idaho, including Boise. It’s part of the McClatchy Group, which filed Chapter 11 in February last year. The newspaper has driven its…
Another very handsome, very colorful woodpecker, the Crimson-mantled is found along the eastern and westerly slopes of the Andes from Columbia to central Bolivia. It’s a medium-sized woodpecker, about the size of the Hairy Woodpecker, and fairly common across its range. There are believed to be five subspecies, and these these photos are probably of…
In WC’s forty-four year legal practice, the hardest kinds of cases to deal with were those where one or both parties were unable to recognize their own economic self-interest. For example, WC served as a mediator in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve a bitter dispute over land ownership. At issue was a strip of land…
Meet Scott Rhodes. He a racist, a criminal, a serial harasser and a neo-Nazi. And he owes the Federal Communications Commission 10 million bucks. One of Rhodes’s favorite means of getting his scurrilous messages out is robocalling. He’s used thousands of robocalls to attack Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial race, to attack Andrew Gillum…
