A third of the year gone by. Wow. WC had summer afternoons in junior high school that lasted longer than April 2021. But it’s time for the monthly look back at stuff WC didn’t get to, to follow up on stuff WC did write about earlier and to note events worth a mention. As always,…
The William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge in the central Willamette Valley was established in 1964 to protect the wintering habitat of the Dusky Canada Goose. But to do so it also protects some of the remaining pieces of the native habitat. And those natural habitats attract an impressive number of bird species. WC and…
WC and Mrs. WC had a chance to spend a few days in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The spring songbirds weren’t there yet, but pretty much everyone else was and the birding was excellent. Photos were taken. Here’s a sampler (please click on an image to see a larger version): WC will have a more…
WC notes that Tucker Carlson at Fox Entertainment is all over the “replacement” theory, that the evil Democrats are packing the voting booths with immigrants, folks from undesirable countries – read: Third World countries – who are ignorant and “obedient” and will vote as the Democrats want, ousting True Americans like Mr. Carlson. No one…
On the recent birding trip that featured Greater Sage Grouse, WC and Mrs. WC also saw about 30 other species, some of which got photographed. Here’s a sampler, because you can never have too many bird photos at Wickersham’s Conscience. (Click on an image for a larger view.) (WC apologizes to the Beach Boys for…
The Idaho Legislature has a Republican super-majority, something like 58-12 in the state House. In the face of number of crises afflicting the State of Idaho, the Republicans are busy ignoring those crises and instead playing power games with the state governor, Brad Little who, yes, is also Republican. Earlier the focus of the Republican…
Not all woodpeckers are called “woodpeckers.” In the genus Colaptes, which includes the Green-barred Woodpecker, there are about seven species called “flickers.” The name is supposedly based on the flickers’ call. One of those seven species of Flicker is South America’s Campo Flicker. The Campo Flicker is probably the woodpecker species least commonly associated with…
Another photo series from WC’s recent trip to a Greater Sage Grouse lek. This time it’s two males unhappy with each other, with the poor treatment by the nearby female and with excessive levels of testosterone. The two males charged each other, and a brief, furious fight involving a lot of wing blows and the…
WC understands that Earth Day is supposed to be aspirational, that we should be positive, focused on making the environment better. WC has been mostly focused on that task his entire adult life. As a board member of Alaska Conservation Foundation and now Idaho Conservation League, WC has invested a lot of time, money and…
WC is lucky enough to know of a Greater Sage Grouse lek that’s close to a road, reasonably close to home, not well known and still has a reasonable number of birds. The lek is so close to the road that sometimes the lek actually spills onto the road. But the road runs north-south, so…
WC has a sad. Not just because his favorite writer and candidate for Best Human on the Planet died back in 2015, and WC is still grieving. After all, Sir Terry Pratchett left us some 60-plus books. Not just because of how Sir Terry died, robbed by post-cortical atrophy – a variety of dementia –…
WC has helped dismantle a couple of Ponzi schemes, most famously Raejean Bonham’s World Plus Ponzi. That one caused immense amounts of pain among more than 1,500 people. It took eleven years to wrap up, and included 1,300 lawsuits and a trip to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Lives and careers were damaged, and…
WC thinks it might be instructive to compare two science/social experiments that are happening in American society as you read this. Sometimes such a comparison can be insightful. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been administered to about seven million Americans. That’s the single-dose, anti-COVID vaccine approved by the Food & Drug Administration for emergency…
Even for a jungle canopy photo, this was a tough shot. The bird was in pretty dark shadow, against a bright sky. There’s a trick you can use to get a photo, if not a very good photo, in this situation: crank the exposure compensation up to +3.0 or so, a ridiculously high setting. Use…
Matthew Rexford has an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News, where he criticizes federal oversight of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and praises the Alaska Legislature’s recent resolution criticizing the Biden Administration’s freeze on oil and gas lease development on federal land. Rexford characterizes the issue as a human rights question, describing the native…
(This is a part of a sometime series on artists WC has known and doesn’t want forgotten. The first post in this series was on Steve Goodman. The second was on Sir Terry Pratchett. This one is closer to home.) It’s a bit ironic that a world-class wildlife illustrator like the late Bill Berry is…
Back in 2016, WC wrote about the late Steve Biko, who was murdered by South African police. Playing for Change has released a fine version of Peter Gabriel’s song of the same name, featuring Gabriel himself, Yoyo Ma, Silkroad and others. In the forty years since Gabriel wrote it, the song has lost none of…
WC understands you are supposed to feel guilty when you experience schadenfreude. After all, by definition it means that someone is suffering and, worse still, you are taking some degree of pleasure in their suffering. But. The National Rifle Association is taking a flogging in bankruptcy court right now. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Harlin D. Hale,…
WC blames Dr. Brewster M. Higley, the songwriter who gave us “Home on the Range.” That’s the song that mis-identifies Pronghorn as “antelopes.” “Pronghorn” didn’t scan, WC supposes. They are more closely related to the giraffe and okapi than to true antelopes. That makes them much less distant cousins to goats and extremely remote relatives to the Bovidae, the…
In a lot of ways, it’s hard to care about the seemingly endless fight between Oracle and Google over the Java software copyright claims. Two mega-corporations, slugging it out like two drunks playing Irish Stand Down outside a sleazy bar. Who cares who wins a drunken brawl? Who cares about who owns a software development…
Another strikingly handsome woodpecker, although it forages more on the ground than on trees and rarely pecks wood. The Green-barred Woodpecker’s primary prey is ants, which it picks up off the ground with its tongue. This photo was taken in the pre-dawn, where WC and his guide had staked out a Hyacinth Macaw nest. (A…
So much is unknown about the Narwhal. Even the name is a puzzle. From the Oxford English Dictionary (paywalled), WC’s go-to reference for word etymologies: The etymology is uncertain, but likely comes from variants of Danish narhval (cognate with Norwegian narkval , Swedish narval and further cognate with Old Icelandic náhvalr. The first element “nahl” or “narl” is of uncertain origin,…
WC can generally get along with almost anybody. In the worst case, if someone is annoying enough, WC will generally simply ignore them. But there is a particular class of individual for whom WC has little patience. That would be the attention-seeker, whose need for attention overwhelms everything else about them. WC has received training…
Banbury Hot Springs is in the middle Snake River Canyon, right along the Snake River. After you’ve soaked yourself to a limp noodle, you can go down to the river’s edge in the late afternoon twilight and photograph birds returning to roost for the evening. It’s a pretty good show. A part of the large…
The best place in the United States to view polar bears in the wild is Kaktovik, in the far northeastern corner of Alaska. The polar bears are present in decent numbers because of two human impacts: anthropogenic climate change, which has delayed the arrival of sea ice more each year, keeping the bears ashore; and…
In another instance of abject failure of imagination, the State of Idaho has at least three different places called some variation of “City of Rocks.” WC had a chance to visit one of them recently, the Little City of Rocks, in the Bennett Mountains. It doesn’t look very much like a “city,” it’s not “little”…
This bird presented WC with an unusual photography challenge: the bird was too close to WC to properly photograph. It was about five feet from WC. The camera and lens WC was using at the time, An Olympus E-3 with a 300mm f2.8 super telephoto, could focus as close as two meters. We found the…
You’ve probably never heard of the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It’s a Cold War-era research facility that’s still active today, located on 890 square miles of sage brush steppe in eastern Idaho, on a chunk of the Eastern Snake River Plain, about 50 miles west of Idaho Falls. Located in the high desert, surrounded by…
There’s nothing loonie about loons. They are a beautiful genus of birds, handsome, skilled diving hunters and devoted parents. WC has been lucky enough to photograph all five species of the genus Gavia, although most of the photos are nothing WC would want to hang on his wall. Among other challenges, they are extremely wary…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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