WC is off chasing birds. Again. Access to the intertubes will be intermittent, at best. Regular posts will resume in a bit. And this time, can we maybe try not collapse Alaska’s economy and burn the nation down while WC is away? Advertisements
Commentary / Geology / Science
Most of Oregon is igneous rock. Pretty recent igneous rock, as geologists measure time. It’s almost embarrassing. While some of it is pretty well understood, parts of all that volcanism are unexplained. The stratovolcanoes of the High Cascades? Subduction of the Juan de Fuca Plate and Pacific Plate. The lava that flowed into the Pacific…
Pervert, pimp, serial sexual predator, felon and multi-millionaire Jeffrey Epstein reportedly committed suicide in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan a week ago. Even before his corpse had cooled, there were dozens of conspiracy theories. The facts, at least the facts we know, suggest enough irregularities in the Feds’ treatment of…
The White-shouldered Tanager is a close cousin to the White-lined Tanager featured here two weeks ago. It’s distinguished from its cousin by the much larger, white shoulder patches instead of the thin, sometimes invisible, white wing lines. The White-shouldered often shows a bit more purplish iridescence in its black than does the White-lined. Like the…
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, Moscow)1 is starting to feel the heat. Reportedly, #MoscowMitchTraitor is trending on Facebook, and even in his home state of Kentucky voters are wondering why, after Robert Mueller’s strong warning of ongoing Russian interference, he is bottling up all election reform legislation. McConnell really dislikes being called “Moscow Mitch.”…
It was 25 years ago this past Monday that the 1994 Major League Baseball season came to a sudden, unplanned and wretched end. The last 52 days and 668 games of the regular season and, for the first time, the playoffs and the World Series. It was no loss for Cubs fans; the Cubbies were unusually…
WC is again taking heat from readers for being avian-centric. WC could point out that birds are what he does. WC could plead that birds are the only taxonomic area in which he is even marginally competent. But instead, here’s a sampler of mammals, specifically a set of rodents, that have wandered in front of…
This nifty animated GIF shows movement of the magnetic north pole, the bigger green dot, from 1965 to present. You’ll notice two things immediately: (1) it has moved a long ways over that interval, and (2) the rate of movement has accelerated in the most recent time. A recent survey by a Canadian–French international collaboration…
WC is an admitted, unapologetic conservationist and environmentalist. For most of his adult life he has been actively involved in conservation organizations. As a contributor, as a lawyer, as a member and even as a member of boards of directors. WC understands the issues and challenges conservation organizations face pretty well. And the recurring issue,…
It’s hardly news that water in the West, especially the intermountain west, is scarce. Whether it is the seriously over-allocated Colorado River, the freshwater streams flowing in to the Great Salt Lake, or the salmon wars of the Klamath Basin, water is scarce, a limit on most kinds of western development and, in the face…
Back in early May, when the Bird of the Week shifted to Tanagers, WC warned that there were dozens of species. Here’s the fifteenth. This is a species WC has only seen one time; it’s a canopy dweller, spending most of its time in the upper canopy, a hundred feet or more over the heads…
Archaeologist Robert A. DePalma, working in Southcentral North Dakota, has found the best evidence yet that the dinosaur killer, the huge meteor that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, leaving the Chicxulub crater, did indeed kill the dinosaurs. He has found, entombed in the rocks of the Hell Creek Formation, the archaeological equivalent of a smoking gun.…
