WC has had a bad month. Knee surgery on February 6 and a juicy head cold beginning February 23. The knee is continuing to heal; the cold seems to have resolved after a case or two of Kleenex™. But even as WC drips snot on the computer keyboard, it’s the bonus day at the end…
Fantasy is escapism, but wait… Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? Sir Terry Pratchett WC, under doctor’s orders, spends two-third of his days in a recliner, with his surgically repaired knee elevated above his heart, strapped to an…
The jet flight from Anchorage to Juneau, on a clear day, offers some of the most spectacular country in the world out your cabin window. The problem is, there aren’t that many clear days on the Gulf of Alaska. WC got lucky in August 2015. Here’s a flight-seeing guide to just some of the amazing…
This post summarizes the semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. This is a part of an effort to…
WC and Mrs. WC recently purchased a Toyota Rav4 Prime. Well, WC says “purchased” but Toyota, for reasons not evident to WC, was offering $6,000 off the purchase price if you leased the vehicle, rather than purchasing. After confirming that WC could pay off the lease without penalty after two lease payments, WC and Mrs.…
If WC were forced to choose a favorite bird species from last year’s trip to Southeast Brazil, it would probably be this species, the Red-necked Tanager. Even for the famously colorful tanager family, this species is simply a stunner. Uniquely among all the dozens of tanager species WC has been lucky enough to photograph, a…
Maybe Eagle River is just too close to Wasilla? Maybe it’s something in the air in Wasilla that blows across Knik Arm and infects Eagle River residents? Whatever the cause, sometimes citizens of Eagle River – part of the Municipality of Anchorage – act an awful lot like Sarah Palin’s neighbors. Exhibit A would be…
This post resumes a semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. In 1999, WC and Mrs. WC were lucky…
WC has already noted that Ingenuity, the solar system’s most famous helicopter, has reached the end of her life. On her 72nd and final flight, she suffered some kind of unknown failure and broke one of her helicopter blades on a Martian sand dune. Perseverance, the Mars rover that carried Ingenuity to Mars’ surface and…
As geologic hot spots or mantle plumes go, the Bowie Hot Spot isn’t exactly a gusher. The Hawaii hot spot may have produced Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea, the tallest mountains, measured from the base, on Earth. That’s a whole lotta lava. The Bowie Hot Spot has yet to break through sea level.1 The Bowie…
Winters in Boise, Idaho often involve long stretches of gray, dark skies, gloomy light and mixed rain and snow, sometimes for weeks at a time. Combine that with news that ranges from bad to terrible, and it’s easy to let yourself get depressed. Readers know that WC’s sovereign remedy for that depression is photos of…
A few readers have criticized WC and the Magpie Principle because, by definition, the Magpie Principle rarely involves doing any in-depth analysis on the potpourri of topics WC writes about. Mostly, that’s fair criticism, but occasionally an issue gets WC worked up enough that, after WC calms down enough to write coherently – to the…
This one will make your eyes water when you get him in your binos. Fire engine red, with black wings and silvered lower mandible, this species is a looker. It’s another Southeastern Brazil near-endemic, with a tiny bit of its range extending into far northwestern Argentina. The female, by comparison, is relatively drab. The female…
Year Scientist Change 1543 Nicholas Copernicus Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium places the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the solar system 1650 Galileo Galileii The Milky Way was composed of stars like the sun; our sun was not unique 1750 Thomas Wright Nebula first identified as clusters of stars like the Milky Way…
The Red Devil Mercury Mine was intermittently active between 1933 and 1971. It’s located along the southerly bank of the Kuskokwim River in southwestern Alaska, between the villages of Sleetmute and Red Devil. The mine produced roughly 35,000 flasks of mercury (at roughly 76 pounds per flask). At the current value of US $1,100 per…
WC subscribes to the Idaho Statesman, a Boise-based, very nearly daily newspaper. The digital edition includes notifications, and pretty much every locally written news story or opinion piece results in a notification in WC’s email box. Above you can see two of those notifications, sent about an hour and a half apart. Idaho cannibalism and…
Do little kids still play marbles? It’s an ancient game, traceable back to the Indus River civilizations, mentioned in Ovid’s poems and played around the world. There’s still an international tournament in England. The basic idea is for the players to each put 2-3 marbles each in a circle, and then take turns trying to…
Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray it will not become generally known. Attributed to the spouse of the Bishop of Worcester (or Birmingham), likely apocryphal1 Very few scientists have had a greater impact on our understanding of our world than Charles…
A two post day. A Burrowing Owl apparently expressing his opinion of sports ball, on the Atlantic shore of southeast Brazil, near Ubatuba.
It’s been a while since WC inflicted an ear worm on his innocent readers. If you are of a certain age, and ever owned a coon skin hat, this blog post is for you. Besides, WC is still buzzed with painkillers… Bethel, Alaska, in 1958, did not have television. Or a movie theater, really. But…
Rather than work through all the photos WC has of another family of birds, for the next few weeks WC will update bird families already explored, adding new species photographed since those earlier posts. And WC will start with his very favorite family of birds, the Thraupidae, and specifically some new tanagers. WC posted Bird…
Warning: This blog post was composed under the influence of pain-killing drugs. Read at your own risk. Have you heard about the computer malware attack on internet-equipped electric toothbrushes? Three million electric toothbrushes subverted by computer malware that attacks targets and victims with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) exploits?1 Now before we examine the details of this…
WC had his second knee surgery on October 6. This report probably tells you more about it than you wanted to know, and be warned that it does get a little gruesome. But here’s what was done and why. As WC previously reported, his orthopedic surgeon’s diagnosis was that the articular cartilage on the back…
It’s easily the most famous April Fool’s Day practical joke in Alaska history. The late Porky Bickar, of Sitka, Alaska, and a group of assistants, who mostly prefer to remain anonymous, helicoptered a couple of hundred old tires, some diesel fuel and a sterno can to the crater of Mt. Edgecumbe, an inactive volcano about…
If non-birders think about sparrows at all, they think of them as LBJs, Little Brown Jobs: Drab, boring and all the same. It’s not true, but there are 132 recognized species of New World Sparrow, the Passerellidae, and in juvenile plumages some can be tough to identify with certainty. For WC it adds to their…
The Matanuska-Susitna Borough reportedly has suspended its library policy. That policy allowed citizens to recommend books that they think should be removed from the library shelves. The library book policy was suspended when a January 18 meeting “devolved into a shouting match and name-calling.” The news led WC to write a bit of fiction which…
If non-birders think about sparrows at all, they think of them as LBJs, Little Brown Jobs: Drab, boring and all the same. It’s not true, but there are 132 recognized species of New World Sparrow, the Passerellidae, and in juvenile plumages some can be tough to identify with certainty. For WC it adds to their…
Here’s a fourth and final piculet, one of the “mini-woodpeckers” of the Neotropics. The photos aren’t very good because the subject was uncooperative, but they give you the field marks, anyway. This species has the strongly barred chest and belly that gives it its common name. It also has a roundish, brown auricular patch, bounded…
Or, WC versus his Right Knee, Round II As many readers may know, most joints in the human body are cushioned with a tough, rubbery tissue called articular cartilage. The back of the kneecap, the patella, is among those cushioned joints and is the joint in which the articular cartilage fails most often. As the…
A young Canadian writer-artist named Kate Beaton wrote an extraordinary graphic novel titled Ducks. It’s an autobiography, the story of her two years working in the tar sands of northern Alberta, Canada, to pay off her student loans. Beaton is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, which she describes: The only message (from guidance counsellors) we…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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