November – a nail-biting month if there ever was one – is behind us. Can December possibly be worse? WC isn’t taking any bets. Either way, it’s time for a look back, to review stuff that’s happened, stuff WC didn’t write about that did and stuff that needs an update. As alway, the Magpie Sensibility…
As 2020 mercifully heads towards an end – at least a chronological end – we’re approaching the time for WC’s annual Hypocrite of the Year Award. The recipient is selected by WC’s readers from among an impressive list of egregiously hypocritical political leaders. Past winners of this dubious honor have included The Dirty 13, Captain Zero, Moscow…
We have exhausted WC’s even marginally decent photos of Cracids – the Chachalacas, Curassows and Guans. So we’ll shift to woodpeckers, the Piciformes, and start with North America’s largest surviving woodpecker, the Pileated. In the late 1990s, WC was flyfishing for steelhead trout along the Situk River, in southeastern Alaska, near Yakutat. One early foggy…
As you might suspect, WC finds birds and bird photography a refuge from the dumpster fire that is current events. For WC’s own peace of mind, if not yours as well, Wickersham’s Conscience will feature bird photo posts irregularly through the balance of the year. Some of these images may have appeared earlier this year.…
Mark Hamilton, past president of the University of Alaska and a man WC formerly respected, gave a presentation on behalf of Pebble Mine in late September. He told his audience to “trust the process.” Seriously? Anyone interested in the Pebble Mine project has seen Environmental Investigation Agency’s secret videos and read the reports where the…
One of WC’s readers recently asked for an explanation of cross-bedding. Although many of you have had enough geology posts already to last you into the new year, WC will offer another, because the explanation is pretty cool. Here’s a bit of cross-bedding photographed in a close-up, deep in Buckskin Gulch. The Navajo Sandstone formation…
The 11th floor of the Abbott Hall dormitory at Northwestern University Law School had a telephone booth – a closet, really – by the elevator. But calls to it were almost always from Arnie Sherman’s mother, so Arnie was the unofficial telephone answering service most evenings. But one night Arnie was at WC’s door, to…
I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must…
Last week we looked at the Rufous-headed Chachalaca. This week we go to the other end of the bird for the critical field mark. Mrs. WC thinks it’s unseemly to name a bird after its naughty bits, but there it is. These photos are more than fourteen years old, taken with an Olympus E-1, Olympus’s…
Ben “Little Ben” Stevens, son of the late U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, is a one-man, ethical disaster area. He recently proved it again, as disclosed by the Anchorage Daily News. But before we got to the most recent ethical lapses, let’s have a look at a few of the earilier ones. This would be the…
WC likes technology. For decades now, since the release of the Apple II personal computer in 1976, WC has been an early adopter, a technogeek. But the Internet of Things, the addition of web connectivity to everything in sight, the IoT? Not so much. This is the second post on ways that the technology is…
WC has written here many times about the impending extinction of the Snake River populations of salmonids. The four dams on the lower Snake River are a deadly barrier to anadromous fish. Efforts to manage the sharply declining populations with fish hatcheries and tinkering with water releases have utterly failed. Just 16 salmon made it…
In the hierarchy of crises facing America: the pandemic, a criminal, petulant president and mistreatment of a subset of our citizens are all second tier problems. Anthropogenic climate change is an existential threat, jeopardizing our future on this planet. WC is sure you don’t want or need another crisis, but this is one that should…
Readers know WC is mostly a birder. But if a mammal wanders by, especially an uncommon one, or one new to WC, it’s likely the critter will end up in WC’s viewfinder. Here are a few from our recent trip to Utah. By far the rarest mammal was the Utah Prairie Dog, once counted in…
There used to be a guy peddling scorecards outside of one of the gates at Wrigley Field. He had a nearly impenetrable southside accent as he shouted at you to buy a scorecard for the Cubs’ game. WC has adopted the guy’s sales pitch to headline the first of an interimittent series that will attempt…
In WC’s experience, at least, this is the flightiest, the most easily spooked of the Cracids that WC has seen. You can see some motion blur in the head in this photo; even at ISO1600, the fastest WC’s Olympus E-3 could shoot without very serious grain, the shutter speed was only 1/200th of a second…
WC enjoys the challenge of writing on complex topics that aren’t the usual subject to blog posts. Admitttedly, sometimes with indifferent success. WC reaches for a new benchmark of difficulty in this post: public utility law. In Ada County, Idaho, WC’s adopted home, the public water system is owned by Suez, a French conglomerate. The…
Hold tight, wait ’til the party’s over Hold tight, we’re in for nasty weather There has got to be a way Burning down the house — Talking Heads, “Burning Down the House” WC doubts he is the only one who thinks he has fallen into a Talking Heads song. With no competent evidence – accusations…
(This is a re-post, explaining WC’s ambivalence to Veteran’s Day, first posted back in 2012.) WC’s maternal grandfather served in France in World War I. He wanted nothing to do with Veteran’s Day. He regarded it as a cheapening, a betrayal of Armistice Day. He solemnly, sometimes tearfully, celebrated Armistice Day with a minute of…
As readers will recall, the primary purpose of WC’s recent trip to Utah was geology, not birds. But because it is impossible for WC and Mrs. WC not to bird while traveling, birds were seen, listed and photographed. Here’s a sample of those birds, in no particular order. (Note: Some of these birds have been…
A bird with a 5.0-6.5 meter wingspan? How can WC not want to see it through his binoculars? WC was lucky enough to take a trip to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. On that trip, WC was even luckier to see a Wandering Albatross, the largest flying bird by wingspan alive on the planet today.…
There’s an ironic saying: “Fusion is the power of the future… and always will be…” Fusion, the energy cycle that powers our sun, seems like a perfect source of electric power: more energy than nuclear fission, no dangerous radioactive byproducts, fueled by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. One gram of hydrogen is…
Another “cha-cha” bird, this time a smaller member of the Chachalacas, the Speckled Chachalaca. Like a lot of the Cracids, it has consistently denied WC a clear photo opportunity. This species has a fairly wide distribution, from Columbia to Bolivia, along the eastern slopes of the Andes. It’s an easy bird to identify, with the…
WC was going to let the latest news from Wasilla pass without comment. But subsequent developments pushed WC over the top, so you get the sordid, violent tale of Gavin Christiansen. Gavin Christiansen was a a wannabe Libertarian candidate for Alaska’s State Senate Seat F, the Mat-Su Valley. He withdrew his candidacy, reportedly for “medical…
The California Condor captive breeding program is a qualified success. From a low of 22 birds, all in captivity, there are now more than 500 birds, some 200 in the wild. That’s a very impressive recovery, and a credit to a lot of hard-working folks at The Peregrine Fund, San Diego Zoo and Los Angeles…
WC and Mrs. WC made a final stop in their recent visit to southern Utah. Rather than fight the abominable traffic on I-15 past Salt Lake City, WC drove up through Nevada on U.S. 93, exploring the Basin and Range country of eastern and central Nevada. Admittedly, the drive involved a lot of very long…
WC made a point of thanking retired Justice Bud Carpeneti recently. The specific instance involved disgraced former Alaska Attorney General and serial sexter Kevin Clarkson’s candidacy for the Alaska Supreme Court. WC got the facts wrong. WC’s source – a member of the Alaska Judicial Council at the time – was emphatic that then Chief…
The old Jim Crow was the body of segregationist laws used largely (but not exclusively) in the Old South to suppress and disenfranchise African-Americans. The name “Jim Crow” has nothing to do with corvids; it has been traced to “Jump Jim Crow“, a song-and-dance caricature of African-American people performed by white actor Thomas D. Rice in blackface. Jim Crow laws…
Donald Trump has announced repeatedly that we have “turned the curve” in the pandemic, that cases are on the decline. The claim is patently false in fact. The only “corner” was back in September, when the incidence of new cases began a steep climb. New cases are at an all time high: 90,728 in a…
Apparently, while WC was visiting red rock country in southern Utah, the rest of you experienced a presidential debate that degenerated into a farce, Trump was infected with COVID-19 at a superspreader event, still more of California burned, there were even more Republican efforts to suppress voting and yet another hurricane or two arrived in…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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