WC had summer afternoons in junior high school that lasted longer than May 2020. But, regardless, it’s time for the end of the month look back at developments on stuff WC blogged about, other stuff WC almost blogged about and whatever else attracted WC’s Magpie Sensibility. Disclaimer: No journalism was committed in writing this post.…
The Volcano Hummingbird is tiny, even for a hummingbird, just 7.5 centimeters (a little less than 3 inches) long. It also has a tiny habitat, ranging in the higher mountains of Costa Rica to western Panama. And within that habitat it prefers to scrubby vegetated areas. In that part of Central America, taller mountains tend…
Our president uses language in unusual ways, a mix of babble, Orwell’s NewSpeak and nonsense. His recent bad weeks have once again spawned a stream of new and unusual terms. Newer terms and phrases are towards the top. It’s tempting to wait and see what new phrases appear as the pandemic proceeds, but WC will…
WC was off the grid the last few days, which explains the absence of a blog post yesterday. It wasn’t exactly a hardship post: Banbury Hot Springs, which has a very nice RV camping area and private hot spring-fed, jacuzzi-jetted hot tubs, which are very thing for a geezer’s sore muscles after schlepping a camera…
The United States has no monopoly on stupid. There have been dozens of cell phone tower arson events in the UK and mainland Europe. Why are Europeans burning cell phone towers? Because the arsonists think the cell phone towers are spreading COVID-19. So the nut jobs are burning cell phone towers to prevent the spread of…
Several readers have accused WC of being a pessimist recently. Subject to the observations in this post, which WC will get to in a moment, the accusation is untrue. Rather, WC is a realist. Any realist is at least mildly pessimistic, as a side effect of just how dismal reality can sometimes be. Here’s a…
WC might have mentioned that he heated with wood for the 3.5 years when he owned a home above Ester, Alaska on Ester Dome. The house had electric heat, but no one could afford to heat with electricity. The big, drafty, modified A-Frame WC had purchased could go through eight cords of seasoned wood in…
Among birders’ favorite hummingbirds has to be the Violet-bellied. Not only is the male’s coloration spectacular; this species favors the flowers of the understory, making it more accessible than most hummingbirds. And it is sometimes attracted to feeders. It’s a handsome bird from this angle, but when it catches the light right, well. It can…
WC lost his sister-in-law, his brother’s wife, Laurie DeWitt, yesterday. She was a sweet, smart, wonderful woman and the world is a poorer and darker with her gone. She fought a six year battle with lung cancer that had spread throughout her entire body before it was even discovered. Throughout that struggle, she showed unimaginable…
On November 3, 2002, just a little after noon, WC was upstairs at his home in Fairbanks, working on his email. Mrs. WC was downstairs doing chores. The whole house gave a very strong, sudden and sharp jerk. There was a pause. And then continuously, for two minutes and 18 seconds, the house thrashed around…
The last two days, WC’s backyard has been filled with Western Tanagers. This is not normal. There have been as many as 20-25 birds present at one time. It’s a treat to see these brilliantly colored birds, of course. It would be more of a treat if it weren’t raining most of the time under…
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was tried by the inquisition, charged with suspicion of heresy. He was forced to recant his theory that the Earth orbited the Sun. Catholic Church dogma said the Sun orbited the Earth. Legend has it that after he recanted, while still in the presence of the Inquisitor, he muttered, “E pur si muove“ (“And yet…
WC has written before about this summer working on the R/V Acona for the University of Alaska’s Institute of Marine Science. One of the research projects involved a trip to Lituya Bay, in the northwestern part of of Southeast Alaska. In 1958, an earthquake and consequent landslide created what was then the largest tsunami –…
WC isn’t a serious lister. A serious lister is a birder who focuses – maybe over-focuses – on the lists of birds seen. But WC does keep a life list. Recently, doing a bit of research on the family of birds called Rallidae WC discovered that the Clapper Rail had been split into three species:…
WC has written about Sora before, and the difficulties of photographing them. Sora are rails, a clade of birds that are famously secretive. Sora are probably the most widely distributed of the North American rails. You hear them much, much more often than you see them. The Sora takes its name from one of its…
There are eight species of Brilliants; WC has photos of four of them. If anything, this species iseven more territorial and belligerent than its Fawn-breasted cousin. This male is making a threat display against a rival or another hummingbird. WC has more than two dozen photos of this hummingbird reacting in this way. So, yeah,…
WC mentioned that he saw an astonishing number of Lewis’s Woodpeckers on his last road trip. One bird was especially memorable as it struggled with a series of pressing problems in front of a bemused WC and Mrs. WC. The bird had found or maybe excavated a nice-looking cavity in a Ponderosa Pine snag. Lewis’s…
WC and Mrs. WC were driving along one of our favorite county backroads recently when we saw this: This photo was taken with WC’s backup camera, with a 35-135mm lens, zoomed to 135mm. The crane has nested just across the roadside ditch, less than three feet from the edge of the road. The photo was…
It’s not a prairie; it’s another victim of Idahoans’ tendency to name any modest-sized, nearly flat spot a “prairie.” In fact, Prairie is in the middle of Smith’s Prairie, a volcanic caldera, the same caldera that is believed to have produced the basalt flows that dammed the South Fork of the Boise River. The “prairie”…
It’s beyond embarrassing. It’s humiliating. What Timothy Eagan, writing in the New York Times has called “the lethal ineptitude of President Trump” has brought the United States to the point that other countries pity us. We were the leader. Now we are the bad example. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in…
Chukar are an introduced game bird. Native to Eastern Europe and Southern Asia, they were introduced in more than 40 states, more than a million birds. The Idaho introduction came in 1933, and breeding populations are established in the southern half of Idaho, except in the middle parts of the Snake River Plain. They are…
A lot of sedimentary rocks are composed of other sedimentary rocks. But no rock is more obviously composed of other rocks than conglomerate.1 Geology’s technical language is both an annoyance and sometimes lovely. The language can be a barrier to understanding. WC’s geology text described conglomerate as A coarse-grained clastic sedimentary rock that is composed…
Another clade of hummingbirds that aren’t called “hummingbirds” are the Brilliants, which you will likely agree is a terrific name for a kind of hummingbird. One of the nine or so species of Brilliants is the Fawn-breasted Brilliant. The Fawn-breasted Brilliant is a medium-large humming bird, averaging 11.2 centimeters (4.4 inches) in length, with a…
Even by the sometimes bizarre standards of Wasilla, Shawn O’Shea-Grantham was a very strange person. O’Shea-Grantham comes to mind because she died last week, back in prison for violating the conditions of her probation. She was proof, if we needed it, that sexual abuse isn’t always committed by men. In her sick world, she thought…
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Corona. Corona who? And that’s the point, isn’t it? The failure of the federal government – the failure by the Executive Branch of the federal government – to provide adequate coronavirus test kits in the face of the pandemic, means we don’t know who may be infected with the virus. Because…
The late Terry Pratchett wrote the Foreword to the 16th Edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. He said, It was my introduction to mythology and ancient history and a lot more, too, because Brewer’s is a serendipitous (see page 1063) book. In other words, you might not find what you are looking for, but…
The Idaho State Capitol Building is off-limits as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a screenshot grabbed from a virtual tour. It shows the four kinds of marble that make up the rotunda floor: swirled green marble from Italy at the lower left left edge, white marble from Vermont in the upper left…
Donald Trump is obsessed with undocumented immigrants to the United States. Egged on my the various scumbags he has surrounded himself with, he has repeatedly staked out extreme positions, even anti-Republican positions, in his effort to act out his obsession. One example would be his reaction to sanctuary cities. A sanctuary city is one that…
It’s Remdesivir. It’s not a magic bullet. It doesn’t cure COVID-19. It’s certainly not a prophylactic for COVID-19 (although we can expect President Trump to claim it is). What it does do is reduce the amount of time for recovery. By about 30%, based on a limited clinical trial. Remdesivir was developed as a treatment…
At about 5.5 inches long, this species’ name is nearly as big as the bird itself. A resident of the cloud forests of Columbia, Ecuador and northern Peru, you can see where the buff-winged part of the name comes from. When the bird turns, in the right light, you can see why it’s a starfrontlet.…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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