Mixed rain and snow is falling as WC writes this blog post. WC has lost track, but this probably Third Winter, following First and Second False Spring. Still, there’s more daylight, even in these middle latitudes, and some of the more excitable flora are starting to green up. And, of course, March is over, meaning…
Another of the spectacularly colored Tanagers of Southeast Brazil, this is another tree-top foraging species, making it pretty difficult to photograph. As a result, these photographs don’t begin to do justice to the species, but this subspecies offers a brassy crown, a variably yellow-orange back, a black mask and throat and blue-black-green wings. WC has…
WC is obviously biased in favor of birds, but from time to time will aim a camera at mammals, too. Including the New World Monkeys, our distant cousins and wildly diverse primates. The Howler Monkeys are the poster child for that diversity: there are about 15 species of Howler Monkeys alone. And Howlers provide another…
The Arctic Ringed Seal is one of five subspecies of the Ringed Seal, a circumpolar sea mammal dependent on sea ice and snow drifts on top of the sea ice. The Arctic Ringed Seal is threatened across its entire range as polar sea ice vanishes. The females pup – give birth and nurse their new…
It’s National Joe Day. The origins of National Joe Day are as obscure as the day itself. Does it celebrate people named Joe? Or the average guy – “just another Joe”? Or, as WC chooses to interpret it, WC’s beverage of choice, a cup coffee? But treating National Joe Day as a celebration of coffee…
WC’s former profession was law. WC spent 45-plus years in the private practice of law. For at least the last 15 years of WC’s active practice, WC was constantly warned that computers, and specifically artificial intelligence, would be replacing lawyers any day now. Those voices have gotten louder as AI has expanded its reach to…
WC genuinely does not understand the attraction that Donald Trump holds for a substantial portion of the American electorate. The Christianists have long since abandoned any critical thinking skills, but even so someone who is the utter antithesis of everything Jesus told them to do, everything the Bible extols, wouldn’t seem to have any attraction…
Myelination is the process by which axons are given a myelin sheath. The myelin sheath functions as an insulator, a bit like insulation on a copper wire, except that the myelin sheath also nourishes the nerve that it surrounds. The myelin sheath allows longer, thinner neurons, more rapid transmission of nerve impulses, tighter packing of…
WC’s photos of this delightfully named, spectacular species don’t begin to do the bird justice. But this species’ foraging behavior is like a Ruby-crowned Kinglet’s – hyperactive, constant motion – except that it’s in the middle and upper canopy. This bird, for example, was almost straight overhead. It’s a challenge. The Brassy-breasted Tanager sports a…
Tick season is about to start. Ticks in Idaho spread among other diseases, West Nile virus, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, tick-borne relapsing fever and tularemia. Lyme disease gets all the press, but so far the tick species that transmits Lyme disease, Western Blacklegged Tick, is found only in North Idaho. Still who wants a blood-sucking…
A reader noted that almost all of the bird species in Saturday’s regular Return of Bird of the Week series are species of Least Concern according to the International Union for Conservation – one of the organizations that attempt to monitor endangered species. What, that reader asks, are some of the species that are not…
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…
There are a lot of duck species. WC hasn’t begun to photograph them all, but has more than can reasonably be shown in a single blog post. So here’s a third and final set, another 17 species, in no particular order. Notes follow the photos. (Click on an image for a larger version) Notes: WC…
Rep. Mike SimpsonU.S. House of Representatives 2084 Rayburn HOBWashington, DC 20515 Re: Your Letter to the EPA and Electric Vehicles Dear Rep. Simpson: I have before me your March 3, 2024 email, boasting of your harsh criticism of President Biden’s efforts to wean American drivers from gasoline-powered vehicles. Before addressing that letter, I want to…
WC and Mrs Wc are volunteers for a raptor research project. Our volunteer work requires us to count raptors once a month along part of the Snake River Valley, from a few miles east of Marsing to a few miles west of Murphy, driving along Idaho Hy. 78 and some of the spur roads off…
(Click on an image above for a larger view) These three tanagers of the Thraupis genus can be tough to tell apart in the field. The Blue-gray Tanager, while widely distributed, only narrowly overlaps with its two cousin species. But the Azure-shouldered and Sayaca Tanager have extensive range overlap. Generally, the Azure-shouldered is slightly larger,…
There are a lot of duck species. WC hasn’t begun to photograph them all, but has more than can reasonably be shown in a single blog post. So here’s the second set, another 21 species, in no particular order. Notes follow the photos. (Click on an image for a larger version) Notes:
In the name of protecting unborn children, Idaho has some of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the nation, so tough that those laws are driving obstetricians and gynecologists out of the state. Which, of course, harms the very children the Legislature claims to be protecting. That’s pretty bad. But it’s not the worst. Idaho also…
WC doesn’t especially care for March 13. This is the 60th anniversary of the murder and sexual assault of Kitty Genovese, who, despite her cries for help over the course of more than an hour, was largely ignored by at least 20 people. Reports at the time said 38 or even 49 people ignored her…
So I always supported the editors. I – you know, my defenders would get all excited and call it censorship, and I kept cautioning them. I said, no, no. Censorship’s when the government gets involved. It’s called editing. And that same editor has decided not to run 10 or 20 other things that day. He…
There are a lot of duck species. WC hasn’t begun to photograph them all, but has more than can reasonably be shown in a single blog post. So here’s the first 21 species, in no particular order. Notes follow the photos. (Click on an image for a larger version) Notes: WC will continue work on…
The view in this Webb Space Telescope photo is of a fraction of one degree of the night sky, of an area that appears empty to the unaided human eye. It’s not empty; instead, it is packed with hundreds of galaxies, each with millions to billions of stars. Many of those billions of stars have…
We’re continuing a mixed series of bird species whose families have already been previously covered here, but had additions from WC’s 2023 trip to Southeastern Brazil, a region rich in endemic species. Today we dip a metaphoric toe into an ornithological dispute, the Blue-gray, Sayaca and Azure-shouldered Tanager controversy. All three species are recognized by…
WC and Mrs. WC reduced their carbon footprint just a bit, selling their 2016 Toyota Highlander, a wonderful freeway vehicle but something of a gas hog and much larger than needed – and our elderly, decrepit 2007 Toyota Prius. The Prius had only 110,000 miles, but those were Fairbanks, Alaska miles for the most part,…
We’ve been Very Serious here at Wickersham’s Conscience lately, dealing with Big Issues and Serious Problems. Sometimes the Magpie Principle steers WC wrong. Let’s take a break. The Toucanets, as the name implies, are the slightly smaller, slightly less mandibly-gifted cousins of the Toucans. The Saffron Toucanet is a near-endemic to Southeastern Brazil, and WC…
After the Dems impeached Donald Trump twice, both times with absolutely damning evidence, the Republicans were desperate to return the favor, and searched desperately for any reasonable excuse to impeach Biden. In May 2023, U.S. Rep. James R. Comer (R, Kentucky), Chair of the House Oversight Committee, picked up rumors of an FBI source with…
Alleged human being Wayne LaPierre got tagged by a New York jury for $5.4 million in benefits that he improperly received from the NRA. He’d reimbursed the NRA for about $1 million before he quit as Executive Vice President of the gun nuts club, so he still owes about $4.5 million, plus interest at the…
In 1963, astronomer Maarten Schmidt identified a strange stellar object. It was a remarkably bright star of the 12th magnitude, yet its red shift implied it was extremely far away. That, in turn, implied the strange object was impossibly bright across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Schmidt called his discovery a “quasar,” a quasi-stellar radio source.…
WC is setting out to organize to some extent sixteen years of blog posts. At least some of the blog posts. Here is a curated set of WC’s Epic Fails theme blog posts; the total posts on this theme are too many to fit in a reasonably sized key. To see them all, and Bog…
This is another Brazil endemic tanager species, found in a narrow band along the Atlantic Forest remnant in Southeastern Brazil, from coastal zones to as high as 1,750 meters. It’s a member of the genus Thraupis, along with the ubiquitous Palm Tanager and two other Brazilian endemics we’ll be getting to later. While it looks…
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