September went by in a blur of criminations and recriminations. But whatever the nouns and adjectives, we made it through September without the wheels coming completely off. So it’s time for the usual look back at stuff: following up, clearing up and sending up but never, ever making up. Here’s a Magpie Principle-driven, journalism-free attempt…
WC continues a new, semi-regular series with this post, reviewing endangered species that WC has been fortunate enough to photograph. The photos aren’t always the best, but adequate to identify the species. Reason Endangered Very small range in old growth juniper-oak forests in central Texas. Destruction and fragmentations of that habitat for land development, agriculture…
Among the odd-looking Cotingas, the Three-wattled Bellbird probably wins some kind of prize. The wattles – the leathery-looking three blackish-grey tendrils at the base of the upper bill and either side of its large gape – are strange enough. Contrasting with the white head and copper-brown body, they qualify as bizarre. But then there’s the…
The Columbia River Basalt Group (CRBG) was the largest known volcanic event in the Western Hemisphere. Between 17–14 million years ago, in a series of four episodes, lava poured up and covered 81,000 square miles in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Nevada in thick layers of basalt, as thick as 5,900 feet in some areas. Those voluminous…
It’s pretty clear that the world isn’t going to make the goal of limiting global warming to the famous 1.5° C increase. We’re going to blow past that target in the next year or two. Mitigation of anthropogenic climate change is approaching a tipping point. There’s something you can do. You can burn less gasoline.…
WC starts a new, semi-regular series with this post, reviewing endangered species that WC has been fortunate enough to photograph. The photos aren’t always the best, but adequate to identify the species. Reason Endangered Very small range in Southeastern Brazil, just 130 square miles, which is undergoing rapid urbanization and development. Ongoing development gravely threatens…
WC and his buddy, Jeff, had budgeted two days to try and find the Himalayan Snowcock. When we were successful the first day, that freed up a day to spend in the nearby (as the raven flies, at least) Ruby Lake National Wildlife Refuge., The marshes are located on the easterly side of the Ruby…
Donald Trump portrays undocumented refugees crossing the U.S. border as wholly evil: “Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.” It’s untrue; the crime rate for immigrants – “illegal” or otherwise – is lower than for U.S. citizens.…
What to make of Polar Dawn, SpaceX’s latest private space flight? For those who don’t obsessively follow developments in humankind’s ventures away from Earth, SpaceX ran another Billionaire’s Joyride recently, with one billionaire, Elon Musk, launching another billionaire, Jared Isaacman and three passengers, into high Earth orbit. At an altitude of 1,408 kilometers, it’s the…
This is another Cotinga, less flamboyant than last week’s Long-wattled Umbrellabird, but still possessed of a shorter wattle and the same kind of booming, distance-carrying calls. WC supposes that “Short-wattled Umbrellabird” was undignified, so it’s the Amazonian Umbrellabird instead. The Amazonian Umbrellabird is officially monotypic – no subspecies – but it’s known to have two…
“Glacier Doodle” appears to be a name invented by Carl Lundblad, a USGS avian behaviorial and conservation ecologist based in Reno, NV. It’s a neat slang name for a Himalayan Snowcock, Tetraogallus himalayensi. Readers will recall WC has had two knee surgeries, replacing and repairing a worn out right knee. WC set a goal for…
Famously, the late Jimi Hendrix closed 1969’s Woodstock Music Festival. But which rock and roll act preceded Hendrix on stage? Who was the penultimate act? Sha Na Na. Yes, really, and the doo-wop, revival band got a pretty good reception from the 30,000 or so fans still at Yasgur’s Farm that last day. Sha Na…
WC is sorry, but he just doesn’t find it that complicated. Alaska election law requires a candidate for public office to timely complete a financial disclosure report. Hillary Palmer, a Wasilla resident and candidate for Matanuska-Susitna Borough Mayor registered as nonpartisan, and Steve Ault, a Wasilla resident and candidate for Borough Assembly District 3 registered…
WC is off chasing birds and away from the internet. Blog posts for the next few days are pre-written, but comments and emails may not be managed promptly. For the low, low price of $200,000, you can buy a HPHT Cubic Press Synthetic Diamond Making Machine and manufacture lab grown diamonds. Available from Henan Huanghe…
WC can offer readers a genuine, straightforward way to become famous. All you have to do is translate the Voynich Manuscript. There are even brand new, multispectral images of the manuscript available on the Web to make the translation even easier. This isn’t a scam. This isn’t click bait. It’s a real deal. You can…
WC recently answered readers’ questions. But WC set aside a couple for a more extended answers than the batch format permits. One of those deferred questions was, “What’s been the hardest bird to photograph of the birds you’ve seen?” The answer for WC is a whole family of Neotropic birds — the Rhinocryptidae, the Tapaculos.…
WC proposes to spend some time looking at a few of the Cotingas, technically Cotingidae, a Neotropical family of birds. Birds of the World says of Cotinga, No family of birds exhibits more diversity of auditory, behavioral, and plumage elaborations, all the result of rampant sexual selection, than do the cotingas. The species in this…
WC was taught that photosynthesis was the root of all life on Planet Earth. Using carbon dioxide, water and sunlight, plants, green algae, some protists (such as phytoplankton) make their own food. And serve as the base for other kinds of life that use those organisms for food. We studied the Calvin Benson Cycle, the…
Some additional reptiles, following up on Part 1 posted earlier. As before, WC claims no expertise in identifying reptile species and cheerfully accepts corrections. What’s most striking about reptiles is there incredible diversity of forms and sizes, far greater than that of birds. Of course, reptiles have been around a lot longer than birds.
In the November general election, Idaho voters will be asked to vote for or against a citizen initiative that would abolish Idaho’s current closed primary system and instead adopt ranked choice voting (RCV). Alaska readers are familiar with RCV already; it was adopted by initiative and has been used in several elections. Idaho’s initiative is…
Watch Duty is a free smart phone app that provides a very nice graphical user interface to the much less nimble National Interagency Coordination Center (NICC) website. Each flame icon is an active fire. The size of the flame roughly indicates the size of the fire; gray fire symbols are fires that are now inactive;…
Sir Terry Pratchett, WC’s favorite author, across his fifty-plus novels, offered a lot of opinions on an amazing variety of topics, almost always seasoned with a little humor. The point has already been made in an earlier post that looked to Sir Terry for direction. But that earlier post didn’t show the sheer breadth of…
As Donald Trump tries to find issues that will gain his campaign traction against Kamala Harris, one of the many issues he has tried has been to blame President Biden for the recent bout of price inflation. But when you really look at recent inflation, Trump’s blaming Biden turns out to be dishonest. To understand…
Readers will recall that we are currently focusing on new birds in families of bird species that WC has posted about earlier. WC visited Manakins, the Pipridae, earlier this year. Here’s another Manakin from that family of birds. There are five members of the genus Chiroxiphia; of them, the Swallow-tailed Manakin, also called the Blue…
Felix came from a cardboard box attended by a little girl in the foyer of the Bentley Mall in Fairbanks. “Please, Mister, won’t you take a kitten. My Daddy says he’s gonna drown ’em if we don’t give ’em away.” The little girl was crying. WC came home with a kitten, a black, brown and…
Reptiles – proto-birds, if you will – are never a primary subject for WC, but that hasn’t stopped WC from photographing a decent selection of this class of vertebrates. From time to time, WC will post albums of reptile photos. The photos ar of widely varying quality – some are scanned from slides or negatives…
One of the things that distinguishes the United States from most of the world is that our electrical service is quite reliable. When we flip a switch, 99.99% of the time the lights come on. That happens because a lot of folks work really hard, forecasting the supply and demand of electricity across the nation,…
A few years go, WC was associated with a conservation non-governmental organization (NGO) that was fighting a proposed mine. The mine attempted a SLAPP suit, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, to intimidate the NGO into backing down. Part of the SLAPP was an attempt to discover the names, contact information and contribution amount for…
This is (approximately) the hundredth anniversary of the development of surrealism, the art movement that rattled the intelligentsia from 1924 to some vague point during World War II. Surrealism impacted most forms of creative art, even cinema. Famously, three [in]famous movies, the Cremaster Cycle. Although a girlfriend dragged WC to the first of the three…
If you blinked, and as smokey has it has been you can’t help but blink, you missed August. But it happened. So it’s time – actually a day late – for WC’s usual look back at items that deserve follow up, items that got overlooked and events that simply triggered the Magpie Principle. Circumstances resulted…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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