WC’s end of the month review is a little shorter than usual. WC is focused on birding in Thailand and not current events or the usual outré tidbits. There will be some catchup in March’s Following Up post. Readers may recall that Alaska Governor Dunleavy’s stupid loyalty myth program has cost him two lost lawsuits.…
Pig-tailed Macaques, that is. This is the dominant male, who walks with a swagger that makes his gonads swing back and forth, banging the inside of his legs. Ma Pigtail may be looking sweet, but she’s a Bad Girl, as you will see in a moment. Quicker than you can say “Pig-tailed Macaque,” Ma Pigtail…
(Readers will see a lot more noise in these manakin photos than is most of the other bird photos WC posts here. It’s an unavoidable consequence of the very low light, mandatory high shutter speeds, limits of camera technology and simple physics. It’s dark where these birds hang out.) Sometimes WC wonders about common name…
The birds you find are all about the habitats you visit. A birding trip is essentially a visit to as many different habitats as time permits. So far, WC and Mrs. WC have visited the mountains west of Bangkok at Kaeng Krachan National Park, and the salt pans and fish ponds of Pak Thale, on…
WC got to spend about 2.5 hours in a bird blind on the edge of Kaeng Krachan National Park in Thailand February 20. To some extent, that involved sitting quietly in a screened semi-tent, slowly melting into a puddle of sweat and DEET in the steamy tropical rainforest. The blind had a small water feature…
WC is off photographing birds. Internet access may be sketchy the next few weeks, so blog posts, and especially long blog posts, will be sketchy as well. Perhaps more importantly, WC will be spending every waking daylight moment chasing birds. And some of the night-time moments chasing owls. Photos may be taken. WC will not…
Sarah Palin, the woman who quit as Mayor of Wasilla, quit as Governor of Alaska and failed as a vice-presidential candidate, did everything she could to make herself a celebrity. She went out of her way to market herself, and still does, selling 30-second videos of herself, flogging really, really bad books and starring in…
It’s increasingly obvious that Donald Trump lies and cheats, and he is infamous for failing to pay his bills. Ask most of his lawyers. No President in history has had more creditors sue him, trying to get paid, than Trump. But he’s hardly the only deadbeat Republican. Here two deadbeat Trump-wannabes, one from WC’s home…
WC got a “special message” from Reese Witherspoon recently: “In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity,” she told WC. “Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?” Huh? WC isn’t packed yet. WC doesn’t have a ticket for this train. Heck, WC didn’t even…
WC has only seen this species twice. The first time was in the jungle of Belize, where WC’s camera was an Olympus E-1. That camera’s low light performance was pitiful. In fact, pretty much all digital single lens reflex cameras had pitiful low light performance in 2006. Here’s the Belize bird: It’s amazingly dark under…
WC might have been critical of the Internal Revenue Service from time to time. WC might have suggested they were vengeful and incompetent. Partly that’s because at one point in WC’s legal career, WC developed a specialized practice in discharging what is supposed to be undischargeable federal income taxes. Ordinarily, if you file bankruptcy you…
Sophie Sergie, a 20-year old Yup’ik woman from Pitkas Point, Alaska, was murdered in April 1993 while a guest at Bartlett Hall, a dormitory on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus. It was an especially brutal, gruesome homicide. Her body was found in the woman’s shower on the second floor – a female only floor…
The Republican National Committee on February 3, 2022 adopted a resolution condemning fellow Republicans Liz Cheney (R, Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (R, Illinois) because that are serving on the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attempted insurrection. The Republican National Committee said “Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate…
Except for three miserable years in Chicago, WC has never lived outside the range of Great Gray Owl. We are both creatures of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, WC supposes. Yet it is a bird rarely seen and, at least in WC’s case, rarely photographed. In this blog post, WC will introduce you to the…
Specifically, utterly charming Parakeet Auklets. These are sequential photos of courtship behavior, and were taken at St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands, in the middle of the Bering Sea, back in 2014. You’ll have to imagine the vocalizations: when their bills are open, they are giving a “whinnying” call, a kind of hoarse…
After only five months in Idaho, WC was selected for jury duty by the good folks at the Ada County Court System. WC reported for duty on February 1, 2016, along with 40 of his fellow citizens. The case, the judge explained, involved a felony, possession of marijuana with intent to sell, an inference derived…
Manakins, the Pipidrae family of birds, have some 53 species across 17 genera. As a group they are small birds with outsized heads and almost no tail. Most of them court at leks, where the males perform impressive acrobatics and bizarre sounds to attract the ladies. Most bird photographers say the same thing: it’s like…
With this post, WC continues a recurring, semi-regular series: the worst of the worst in state legislatures, focusing initially on the Alaska and Idaho state legislatures. Neither WC nor his readers have high expectations for state legislators, but this series looks at the exceptionally appalling. Rep. Ron Nate is a Trump supporter who is determined…
Readers already know that in 2021 the Republican Party had enthusiastically opposed every governmental effort to limit the casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s just part of what WC believes to be the Republicans’ tendency over the last few years to embrace policies and positions that are contrary to survival. WC will offer a few…
The Trans-Alaska Pipeline is presently moving about half a million barrels of oil a day from Alaska’s North Slope to the Port of Valdez. Call it 175 million barrels of oil a year. That’s 350 million tons of CO2. About 4-5% of total U.S. CO2 emissions. The impact of all those greenhouse gases falls hardest…
It hasn’t been widely noted outside of Alaska, but WC’s home state adopted ranked voting, among a series of other election reforms, by citizen initiative last general election. The new election system is much like that adopted by California three years ago, except that the new primary election process returns four candidates instead of two.…
WC doesn’t want readers to think he is bashing HP, neé Hewlett Packard, in this post. After all, WC uses an elderly (2004) LaserJet 2055 laser printer for most printing, and a new HP Envoy 6458 color inkjet for his color printing needs. WC still owns and uses a truly ancient HP 12C calculator, manufactured…
With this post, WC continues a recurring, semi-regular series: the worst of the worst in state legislatures, focusing initially on the Alaska and Idaho state legislatures. Neither WC nor his readers have high expectations for state legislators, but this series looks at the exceptionally appalling. Non-Alaskans may not understand, but getting to and from Alaska’s…
The final cormorant in the series, the Red-faced Cormorant has the most northerly range of the North American members of the Cormorant family, extending from Prince William Sound in Alaska west along the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands to the Commander Islands, along the southerly shore of the Kamchatka Peninsula, with a few small colonies…
It’s time to have a look at WC’s email inbox again. Here are a few questions from readers, responses to emails, selected from among the digital detritus. As always, no journalism has been committed in writing this blog post. What are your views on the Oxford comma and why you don’t use it? For those…
One of the University of Oregon undergraduate classes WC took that had the most impact on WC was the late Prof. Dom LaRusso‘s course on Nonverbal Communication. It wasn’t just that LaRusso was a superb teacher; it was the approach he took to teaching us. LaRusso was a scholar of nonverbal communication, and much of…
When WC was visiting family in his old home town, Stockton, California, probably in 1959 or so, WC’s older cousins, Gary and Bob, were working as after-hours maintenance workers at the Micke Grove Zoo. Back then, what’s now the Lemur Island was the Monkey Island. As cousin Bob hosed off the walkways and emptied the…
It’s a new year but it’s the same old same old. See for yourself: Convicted criminal and Idaho Governor wannabe Ammon Bundy has been in the news. Reportedly, he wants to use his gubernatorial campaign efforts as his court-mandated community service. After Bundy’s conviction in July of misdemeanor trespassing and resisting or obstructing officers at…
Wickersham's Conscience 