WC wishes his readers a Happy Hallowe’en. In keeping with the season, WC offers a slightly spooky critter considerably less scary than Rep. Lamar Smith or Dr. Ben Carson. Let’s talk about the Butcher Bird. The Northern Shrike, Lanius excubitor, which means “butcher watchman,” an appropriate name for this alert, efficient and somewhat gruesome predator. It’s a…
WC will post the monthly look back a day early; there are plans for tomorrow. This month’s look back is mostly items WC found interesting or amusing, but didn’t warrant a full blog post. As always, the Magpie Principle applies. The Washington Post discovered Santa Claus has been elected a city council member in North…
As a service to his readers, WC will from time to time offer tips on how to survive an Interior Alaska winter. Tip #1: Endeavor to be somewhere else when it is at its worst. Hawai’i is good. Yes, it’s true, WC missed the entire, record-shattering 3.5 week cold snap in 1989. WC left Fairbanks…
It’s nearly Hallowe’en, surely the strangest of the American holidays. All Hallows’ Eve is a Christianized version of Samhain a Gaelic harvest festival, thoroughly commercialized by modern capitalism. But in what now passes for tradition, we terrorize ourselves with made-up monsters de jour. All the while ignoring the really scary monsters that actually exist. Like Rep. Lamar Smith (R, Texas and…
Specifically, Brown Creepers, North America’s only creeper species. Brown Creepers look like nothing more than a piece of tree bark, defying gravity and going up the trunk of a tree. And then a dead leaf as they flutter down to the base of another tree. Brown Creepers almost always climb up a tree trunk, often in…
WC is an avid fly fisherman. Mostly catch and release; what one friend calls “playing with his food.” And that zeal to catch just one more fish before freeze-up has gotten WC into trouble more than once. Back in the day, Chena Lakes, the gravel pits from the construction of the Chena River Flood Control…
After The Donald and Carly Fiorina, Dr. Ben Carson is the Republican presidential wannabe that WC finds most offensive. Not because of his skin color; not because he is a neurosurgeon; not even because he has staked out an impossibly right-wing political position. WC dislikes Dr. Carson because he intentionally says stupid, offensive and outrageous things…
WC generally applauds any news story that highlights the plight of birds. But an article is more helpful if it can get the facts straight. An article that gets details wrong hurts the case an author is trying to make. Dave Taft’s recent article on American Kestrels is a case in point. Taft points out…
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on…
Last night WC and Mrs. WC fought the Boise rush hour traffic on I-84 out to Caldwell and the Jewett Auditorium to see Jake Shimabukuro live. WC isn’t often at a loss for words. But there are not enough superlatives in the English language to describe this young man’s talent. He gets music out of a ukelele…
One of the first principles of high latitude ecosystems is that they are less complex than their low latitude cousins. That doesn’t make the antarctic and arctic systems “simple;” any ecosystem is complex. Just a little less complex. In the antarctic, the staggering numbers of animals are supported almost exclusively by a handful of species…
Long-time readers of this blog may be tired of hearing this, but it’s important enough that it needs repeating. And repetition seems to be necessary to pound the ideas into our thick-headed legislators’ skulls. Exhausting more of the state’s budget reserves before imposing taxes is a terrible, stupid, awful idea. Unfortunately, it is the default option,…
Senior U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland last week signed off on the agreement by the State of Alaska, the United States and our friends at Exxon Mobil: the effort to use the re-opener and force Exxon Mobil to complete the cleanup of Prince William Sound has been abandoned. The re-opener was a set of…
Yesterday, under smokey skies, WC and Mrs. WC took a drive east of Boise, through the Danskin Mountains along Blacks Creek Road. The road runs from the Snake River Plain, over Three Points Mountain Pass and down into the South Fork of the Boise River. The river canyon itself is pretty impressive. This part of Idaho…
The density of Fox Squirrels, Sciurus niger, in residential Boise, is astonishing. True omnivores, they will eat pretty much anything. including, as it turns out, pumpkins. Mrs. WC rode the Pumpkin Liner Train last weekend and scored half a dozen small pumpkins. They made a nice Hallowe’en decoration around the front door. Except. The remaining,…
Alaska has many real problems. Alaska is faced with a real, if mostly self-inflicted, fiscal crisis. We have an appalling rate of suicide, highlighted by the recent tragedies in Hooper Bay. The state has the highest rate of rape and other assaults on women in the nation. We have communities washing into the sea. We must…
Yep. Elton John and his band came to Boise, Idaho. To the Taco Ballerina, er.. Taco Bell Arena, which has exactly the acoustics you would expect of a large basketball court. But it was still immense fun to revisit some of the big hits from John’s four decade songbook.1 WC last saw Elton John live…
Sometimes, in the middle of an age of wonders, we fail to notice them as they happen around us. True, we don’t yet have flying cars, but we all have smart phones in our pockets that are very nearly magical in themselves.1 But WC wants to focus on this age of exploratory satellites, and the visions…
John Muir is one of WC’s heroes. Not just for his writing, which is very good. But because, one-on-one, he was easily the most effective preservationist in history. In many senses, he is the father of the National Park system. It was Muir who persuaded President Teddy Roosevelt to create Yosemite National Park. WC was…
WC has seen the aphorism, “He who would govern others must first learn to govern himself,” attributed to the Buddha, Confucius, Alexander the great and half a dozen others. For WC, it’s a self-evident precept. But to the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives, it seems to be a foreign concept. WC takes it…
Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Dana Fabe has announced her retirement in June 2016. Chief Justice Fabe has served on the Alaska Supreme Court since January 1996; she’s the third longest-serving supreme court justice in Alaska’s history, after the extraordinary Jay Rabinowitz and forgettable Skip Matthews. To give you a sense of the loss of experience…
Sometimes, even in the middle of the week, you can have a perfect evening. First, your baseball team shuts out the opposing team in a sudden-death playoff. That’s right, the Chicago Cubs defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-0 to advance to the National League Divisional Series. Cubs’ ace pitcher Jake Arrieta shut down the Pirates’ offense,…
There is evidence that the voters in the Fairbanks North Star Borough have stepped back from the precipice. The voters chose as Borough Mayor the genial, reasonable, consensus-building Karl Kassel over Tammie Wilson, who is none of those things, by a generous margin. Wilson’s ongoing effort to remove local control over air quality was defeated…
It’s autumn in the Salmon River Mountains, and the colors are pretty good. WC, Mrs. WC and Mrs. WC’s brother spent a few hours prowling around upper Long Valley and Jug Handle Mountain, admiring the colors and looking for birds in a kind of desultory way. But mostly to enjoy the colors. Mrs. WC’s brother…
Sometimes it’s disappointingly easy to tell when a state legislature is working for someone other than the voters. Or the persons to whom individual legislators feel accountable. Today’s example is the so-called “ag-gag” laws – statutes making it illegal to gather data on open space. Banned behaviors under these laws include performing water quality tests or taking photographs…
During his recent visit to the United States, Pope Francis reportedly met with scofflaw Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who achieved her 15 minutes of fame by refusing to discharge her duties. Allegedly because her religious beliefs required her to discriminate against gays. Davis surprised folks by announcing she had been granted a 15 minute private…
Gravitational waves are a logical inference from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Explaining this without getting wrapped around the axle of very complex mathematics is difficult; WC apologizes to any Real Physicists out there who are offended by gross oversimplification. Or analogies. Gravitational waves are ripples on the curvature of spacetime, somewhat like ripples on…
WC knew that the Republican Party in Alaska was deeply in the pockets of Big Oil. But the extent of Big Oil’s ownership of the G.O.P. wasn’t completely apparent until the Alaska G.O.P. Chairman, Frank McQueary, wrote his opinion piece for the Anchorage Daily Dispatch yesterday. The G.O.P. has sold its small, mean soul to Big…
You’ve never heard of Richard Dadd. Or if you have, you know the short version: painted a very strange photo, murdered his father and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. That’s an unfair summary of a brilliant, if tragic, artist. WC became aware of Dadd because Terry Pratchett built one of his…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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