Wait, it’s the end of March already? How did that happen? WC is still struggling to remember to write the current year and it’s already a quarter over? WC has summer afternoons in junior high school that lasted longer than March 2022. But here we are, the month gone by, and time for a look…
Starlings are not native to the New World. The European Starling was introduced in North America when a total of about 100 individuals were released into Central Park, in New York City, in 1890 and 1891. The entire North American population, now numbering more than 200 million and distributed across most of the continent, is…
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a…
Birds of the World (paywalled), in its article on Sunbirds, the Nectariniidae, says, “Sunbirds do much to make up for the lack of hummingbirds in the Old World.” Sunbirds won’t make you forget hummingbirds, but they are colorful, tend to hang around flowers and can hover, albeit not nearly so well as hummingbirds. Thailand hosts…
Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring U.S. Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) was convicted last week on three felony counts for lying to federal investigators about illegal campaign contributions from a foreign billionaire. Fortenberry, who represents Nebraska District 1, eastern Nebraska, excluding…
(These photos, taken back in 2009 with WC’s even-then elderly Olympus E-3 camera, are noticeably less sharp than they would be with WC’s later cameras. The Olympus E-3 was wretched at acquiring focus in low light – which is all you find under the jungle canopy – and generated too much noise at any setting…
Alaskans like to pretend they are different than their Lower 48 cousins. More independent, more rugged, free of the problems that plague the Little States. It’s an especially bad instance of self-deception. Consider this recent press release from the Alaska State Troopers, Mat-Su Unit: The Alaska State Troopers, Palmer Police Department, and Wasilla Police Department…
The Babblers are yet another large family of birds found only in Eurasia. The taxonomies and systematics of this group of birds and still being resolved – what was formerly the Babbler family was split into five (!) families a couple of years back – but even in the new, restricted Babbler family, Timaliidae, there…
Long-time readers will recall one of WC’s ongoing projects is to track the number of bird species he has photographed. The recent trip to Thailand certainly boosted that project. Subject to sorting out Leafbirds and resolving the differences between the World Bird Lists issued by the AOU, the IOC and Clements, the three authorities who…
Trump, of course, has claimed for years now that there was election fraud in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. Now there seems to be overwhelming evidence that election fraud did occur. Admittedly, it didn’t affect the outcome, but it was fraud all the same. A Colorado grand jury has indicted Mesa County, Colorado county clerk,…
The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick! Darwin, C. (3 April 1860). “Darwin Project letter 2743”. Letter to Asa Gray. When WC was taught about evolution in high school biology, back in the late Pliocene, the focus was exclusively on natural selection. That’s likely because the other important…
In Don Young’s 26 separate campaigns for U.S. Congress, WC never, not once, voted for Don Young. Indeed, WC gave substantial sums of money to many of the folks who ran against Young. Alaskans kept electing him to Congress anyway, despite Young’s appalling ethical, moral and legal lapses. Now, in the time-honored tradition of Americans…
WC has exhausted his current inventory of photos of Manakin species that are fit to be shown in public. So we’ll move to a new family of birds, the Trogons (“TRO-gun”). This is an ancient line of birds; there are fossils of Trogons going back 49 million years. This family of birds is distributed across…
There’s another outsized family of Old World birds, not found in the Western Hemisphere, called Bulbuls. There are 151 (!) species in 26 (!) genera spread from west Africa to northern Japan, and most points in between. Thailand boasts 37 species, although not all of them were in the parts of Thailand we birded. We…
It’s St. Patrick Day. There will be parades in Chicago and New York, pandemic permitting, and people with no ear for accent will attempt to speak with a brogue. WC hasn’t a drop of Irish blood in him, to his knowledge. But in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, WC will do a very small favor…
Shrikes are the bad boys of songbirds, a passerine gone to the Dark Side. Where raptors, who have the same diet, are romanticized, shrikes are cultural villains. Anyone who disagrees hasn’t read Nathaniel West’s harrowing novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, whose nasty villain is named Shrike. But shrikes are beautiful, efficient and fascinating. There are 34 species…
Sheesh. WC leaves home for three weeks and (a) Vladimir Putin starts an ugly war in Eastern Europe, (b) the U.S. Congress sinks to new lows of ineffectuality, (c) the Republican Party adopts neo-Nazism as political platform, (d) The Idaho Legislature starts to pull ahead of the Alaska Legislature in the race to the bottom,…
Drongos are an Old World family of mostly blackish birds of the family Dicruridae. There is but a single genus in this family of birds, with some 26-29 species. Seven or eight of those species occur in Thailand; WC was able to photograph five of them. Surprisingly little is known about this family of birds,…
When WC was in junior high school, best friend John Gottschalk had one of those old-style “Punch ‘n Gro” planters in the family kitchen window one winter. Punch ‘n Gro was basically a plastic tray filled with vermiculite and covered with a transparent plastic lid. They were pre-seeded. You punched holes in the top with…
WC has seen exactly one Golden-headed Manakin, in Darién Province, Panama. The bird was initially sitting back away from the trail, mostly obscured by out of focus branches. Then it moved out into the open, in decent light, with nothing obstructing the view. And the bird just sat there. For the ten minutes WC had…
WC is back from Thailand, still jet-lagged but happy. There are thousands of photos to be reviewed, culled and labelled. WC tries to keep photos labelled as they are taken, but a species can have different names in different parts of the country, or even in different bird guides. And the world bird list published…
It’s presumptuous, at the very least, for WC to write about Thailand after a mere 17 days visiting the ancient kingdom. What is now northeastern Thailand had a prospering bronze-making center while Idaho was still buried under the Wisconsonian Ice. The current monarchy traces its origins to the middle-Thirteenth Century and has a long, complex…
It’s an 11.5 hour flight from San Francisco, California to Tokyo, Japan. Technically, it’s a day long flight, since you cross the International Date Line and arrive a full day later than you started. Here are some notes from WC’s flight. WC left Boise, Idaho. That town is located on the Boise River, which flows…
The highest point in Thailand is Doi Inthanon (“Inthanon Mountain”), located in the Thanon Thong Chai Range in north central Thailand. At 8,415 feet, it’s not all that tall, but it rises out of a 2,000 foot high plateau, so the vertical rise is impressive. The mountain is one of a series of granitic plutons oriented…
When the Indian Plate collided with the Asian Plate 60 million years ago, Indochina began to be compressed between the pressure from the Indian Plate on the west and the Pacific Plate on the east. One of the geologic effects of that immense pressure was to fold up the limestone and mudstone underlying much of…
The Pygmy Cupwing isn’t isn’t the world’s smallest bird, but it’s on the short (sorry) list. Tiny, pretty much tailless and skulky, except for its outsized voice. It’s also on the list of hardest birds to photograph. This species spends its life in the thick, tangled understory, and is colored to match the wet, moldy…
(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 really dark where these birds hang out.) There’s good news and bad…
A bit south of Bangkok, the deltas of the three rivers that flow through central Thailand meet the Gulf of Thailand. A thousand years ago, it was a giant mangrove wetland. Today, it grades from rice paddies to fish ponds to salt pans. The area is flat as far as the eye can see, and…
It’s also called Bueng Boraphet Non-hunting Area, and it’s quite a large wetland in central Thailand. We spent a few hours there before the long drive up to the mountains of the northwest. Some representative species. Click on an image to scroll through the photos; the species’ common name is at the bottom of each…
The Great Hornbill is a big bird, massing over three kilograms and more than a meter tall. They eat fruit and insects, using those big bills with surprising delicacy. Here’s a feeding sequence, to make WC’s point. All photos are from Khao Yai National Park, Thailand. They move like squirrels along the branches, too, leaping…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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