So I’ve turned comments off on new posts, and will be turning them off on older ones as time permits.

This is not a move I make without regret: due to my increasingly stringent moderation here and the overall cleverness and joy among the commenters I allowed to stay, we had some good conversations at this joint over the last 12 years.

But the vandals and the people trying to drag fights here just make it no longer worth seem my time and energy. File under “why we can’t have nice things,” I guess.

I find your profits over the next fiscal year way less important than the existence of the species your company threatens.

I think the stories told by species’ distributional ranges are way more compelling than your favorite multivolume fantasy epic.

I have wondered aloud whether running for elective office should be a privilege granted only to those who achieve a 4 on the Biology AP.

I mistrust people who assume human comfort is sufficient excuse for hurting wildlife.

I kinda thought that proposal to preserve half the planet as wildlife habitat was a weak compromise with The Man.

I’d rather listen to silence on the playa than techno.

I think people who wear earbuds while hiking need a couple weeks in a reeducation camp.

I would support Americans going without power for two hours every day as a more reasonable approach to limiting climate change than paving another square mile of desert with solar panels. (Hospitals and nursing homes could be exempt.)

I consider all writing that mentions the non-human world solely as scenery to be part of a minor literary genre.

I am unconvinced that human beings are more important than all other species combined.

I seem to harbour more than a passing crush on David Sibley. My office is now turning into a DS shrine. I have his 2015 bird calendar, a poster of his backyard birds, and a copy the Sibley field guide all comfortably coexisting with barely two feet separating them.

And yet this weekend, by technological and meteorological error, I accidentally forgot Sibley (in the form of a field guide) at home. The situation wouldn’t have been dire if I hadn’t accidentally ended up at Ashbridges Bay in the midst of what felt like a veritable warbler fallout. I didn’t even have to go looking for warblers; I just stood under a tree and they flocked toward me in impressive numbers. I’d like to say that it was me they were attracted to, but that would be a gross, megalomaniacal exaggeration of my person. No, they were after the last remains of the bugs that early fall still has to offer. That coupled with the pouring rain we had the day before and voila! A fallout.

All of this would have been most wonderful, a dream situation, but here I was in the midst of “confusing fall warbler” mania with nary a field guide! How would I confirm my sightings? How would I tell a Tennessee from an orange crowned warbler? How would I remember what a drab cape may looks like? How would I make certain that I wasn’t committing arch ornithological faux-pas?

Well, I couldn’t. Here I was in the midst of the highest density of warblers I’ve seen this season and I couldn’t even be sure of what I was looking at!

And you know what? After a moment of slight panic and fear of mis-identifying everything (you’d think that with my mad skills I’d be used to this, but no, it turned out it was almost too much for my fragile ego to bear!), it turned out to be remarkably liberating. I pointed my binoculars toward the birds and marvelled. I was thrilled to recognize a black-throated green, an American redstart, a black-and-white, a blackburnian, and a magnolia with certainty. Those I knew. And as I spent time with each of them, focusing on the plumage, head, tail feathers, it really did feel like reconnecting with old friends. And the ones I didn’t recognize exactly? Well I marvelled at them also. I watched them flutter from branch to branch, engaged in their game of hide and seek by practicing my binocular-skills, I befriended even the ones I didn’t know. The greyish green warblers and that lone flycatcher-esque bird remained my favourites, precisely for the mystery they held.

How rarely I give myself permission not to know. And how often it can turn out to be a gift.

The thing is, I’m at a bit of a frustrating point with birding. I know so much more than I did five years ago (for instance, i never would have been able to say flycatcher-esque and known what it meant even a year ago), and yet I still know virtually nothing. Every other song I identify is incorrect. And remember last may when I accidentally mistook a green heron for a HUMMINGBIRD? Yes, that was me. Birder extraordinaire.

Too often when I’m out in the field, I get frustrated by my lack of knowledge. I’m at the stage when I want to accumulate more and more and the more I focus on the accumulation the more I sometimes miss the pleasure of simply looking.

This past Sunday my accidental forgetting of Sibley at home turned out to be a blessing. For the first time in months, I looked with nothing but pleasure and excitement at this miraculous world around me. I took the time to genuinely attend to everything I was seeing. And is there anything in the world better than that?

I had promised on this blog a long while ago that I would scan and make available online a copy of my article “Are Warblers Less Important Than Tigers?”. This article was published in the long-out-of-print (but update: still available via Amazon) book “In Danger” edited by Paola Manfredi (with photographs by Joanna van Gruisen who was the one who spotted my essay and solicited it for the book) for the Ranthambhore Foundation in India. To my continuing pleasant surprise and gratitude, this article continues to resonate with people in India (and elsewhere). It has been reprinted and anthologized several times. I keep getting requests (two in the past week) from people who want to reprint it, distribute it among students or citizens interested in conservation, and continue to share it widely. For what I was then told, as a Ph.D. student, to consider a rather frivolous bit of writing because it was not SERIOUS SCIENCE published in a PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL, this essay has probably had a much broader impact than many of my more serious science papers. Depending on how one measures such impact, of course, and something for my more serious scientist colleagues to consider as some of them keep looking down upon time spent writing for a broader audience outside of peer-reviewed journals.

Anyway, pardon me for being late in keeping my promise, but I have finally scanned the original article, and invite you to read and share it as you please. Do let me know what you think of it too, if so inclined.

Here it is, my Hit Single:

Either way, I am becoming an apprentice of weather. I’m paying closer attention to the modes and moods of meteorological fluctuations. That parameters can shift within the span of hours, and what was suddenly is no longer. And what puzzles — or entices — me most is the body’s tendency toward near-total amnesia. In the throes of the heatwave, I knew not how to understand this concept called winter. It felt beyond my body’s capabilities to venture to that place. And today, this morning at twenty past seven, to be precise, wearing a sweater for the first time since returning from Iceland, my body knew, again, how to process the idea of winter. No longer a foreign concept, it turned into something my body instinctively craved.

Is that how migratory birds feel on the eve of their return south in late summer? Is it a physiological jolt of sorts, almost as if their bodies awaken to the idea of winter and a simultaneous drive to seek it out physically. That their perilous migratory journeys are motivated by a physical impulse had never dawned on me.

View from the bakery in Borgarnes, Iceland. You’ll be delighted to know that I did not break my routine of eating two vinarbrauds (croissant w/custard and almonds)/day.

And just like that. It bothers me that things can change so swiftly; sometimes I would like smoother transitions. That two weeks ago today, I sat in a bakery-cafe in Borgarnes, halfway between Reykjavik and Stykkisholmur, staring out at the bay filled with shorebirds and lamenting my lack of a scope and perhaps even more serious lack of shorebird ID skills beyond a killdeer and a semipalmated plover, and that now I sit in my comfortable office in Toronto, overlooking a Burrito place, a sex-shop, a retirement home and a cemetery (oh, the progression of life, I suppose), and that both worlds coexist unnerves me.

And yet isn’t that the beauty and tragedy of life? That things happen, birds take flight southward, weather patterns change, years — lives — begin, and end just like that.

But things are slowly starting to fall into place here in Toronto, extreme heat notwithstanding. I went out birding yesterday in the oppressive heat, and thought the day was a complete wash, and then out of the blue, a Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), with its competing polka-dotted, barred, and crested plumage. These patterns would clash on anybody else, but the Northern flicker sports his attire with dignity and confidence. And after the flicker, a House Wren (Troglodytes aedon) appeared, and I managed to recognize the bird’s wren-like nature by its shape, and then knew it was a House and not Winter or Carolina wren by its song, which seemed like nothing short of a miracle to me. A Carolina Wren later bewitched us with its song, and a Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) let out chatty, squirrel-like calls nearby. I caught a Warbling vireo’s burbling, warbling song, and then we were rewarded with great looks at a Nashville warbler, a Wilson’s warbler and a Magnolia warbler, all fluttering about in the low shrubs for a few minutes. And just like that, within moments, I forgot about the dire heat. For a moment everything seemed in order, exactly as it should be. September is a wonderful, but slightly melancholy month for me. These are the last sightings we’ll have of warblers before they make their perilous journey south. A good-bye of sorts.

And yet this year, I’m seeing more. I’m recognizing a few more songs, I’m noticing a few more plumage details. It’s slow, this birding-knowledge-acquisition, but it’s marvellous. A year ago I couldn’t have told you a bird was “wren-like” and I certainly wouldn’t have thought to pay attention to a greyish, drab warbling vireo’s bright eyestripe that now looks to me like rebellious eye-shadow and brings me right back to those trips to the mall in 7th grade and all those unfortunate, but oh-so-earnest experiments in make-up. Is it wrong to see myself in these birds? To recognize pieces of my life? Because perhaps what’s happening is that birds have unexpectedly, completely unintentionally turned into an inextricable part of me.

In other good news, a piece I wrote about migratory restlessness (Zugunruhe), both birdy and personal, has been long listed for the CBC Creative Nonfiction award.

I’m back from two weeks in Iceland and am trying to figure out how to readjust to Toronto life where the weather doesn’t change drastically every couple of hours, where the northern light doesn’t blind you at 8pm in late August, where I can’t sip a delicious latte in a cowshed cafe. Yes, you read those last words correctly. We discovered Iceland’s best cafe, located in a bona fide cowshed about 10 km south of Akureyri. Where else in the world could we sip lattes and eat waffles with fresh cream whilst surrounded by 200 cows going about their (somewhat smelly) business? We even watched the milking process via webcam, and it was nothing short of riveting (yes, our portion of the cafe was glassed in).

Here are the lovelies at KaffiKu. Not your usual coffee shop. Many great black-backed gulls flying overhead, above the barn.

It’s not easy to readjust to a landscape with trees, with more than one lane of traffic, with crowds of people. I seemed to have no problem getting used to the miles of lava fields, volcanic rock covered in thick moss, and to the near constant crisply harsh sounds of arctic terns overhead. I miss being surrounded by ocean, I miss the omnipresent geothermal swimming pools (we tried out eight different ones; if you’re planning a trip to Iceland, I have plenty of advice!), I miss the delicious vinarbraud (custard and almond croissants of which I consumed at least two every single day), I miss the herring (sadly we didn’t make it to the national herring museum), I miss the colossal sky and fabulously fickle weather, I miss Icelandic non-nonsense ways and absence of garrulous & often meaningless politeness, I miss it all. Perhaps, if I’m being brutally honest, I also miss being on vacation.

In birdier news, I was proud of my modest ID skills that I managed to exercise: we saw Kittiwakes, Oystercatchers, White wagtails, a gazillion great back-backed gulls, and shore birds of every persuasion, but I was scope-less (not to mention skill-less in the shore bird department!), and couldn’t ID much of anything. I studied the birds I knew and contented myself with that.

I did have one unexpected birdy experience. While visiting Halldor Laxness’ house/museum, Gljufrasteinn, I happened on the most lovely sight in his bedroom. Right there, on the windowsill, across from his bed, lay a pair of Zeiss binoculars, which Laxness used every single day of his life. I was alone in the museum and probably proceeded to do something semi-legal: I picked up the binoculars and took a look through his mid-century Zeiss optics, to catch a glimpse of the world — his ancestral hills, mountains and fields — exactly as Halldor Laxness saw it. And to think that five years ago, I wouldn’t have even noticed the binoculars; they would have meant as little to me as the religious paraphernalia on the bedside table.

Halldor Laxness’ Zeiss binoculars. Gljufrasteinn museum.

How delightfully strange life is. How miraculously unexpected its twists and turns.

The sun has not yet risen. Caspian terns regard us sidelong, dive with abandon. Cormorants stand on the low tide banks. They air their wings in solemn, funereal circles. Judgments of cormorants.

We skitter along the surface, water striders in sit-on-top kayaks. Anchovies leap like tossed pebbles, and she grins, and then so do I. We pivot and veer, compass needles in search of true north. We drift on the sea’s slow breathtaking.

Pink sky, then gray, then blue and pink again. White pelicans on the far shore. An early morning siren howls from a firetruck on the road along the slough; coyotes call back to it like yard dogs.

A slow pull on the paddle, blade slicing the water silently. It leaves deep vortices in its wake, one for each edge of the blade. They spin for a very long time. I have made my intentions known to the water: more than two hundred pounds of jetsam wants to go that way. I skate forward, a fractal rosary of whirlpools for my Newtonian reciprocal.

Have I ever been quite this happy? Spirals in spirals. The whirlpools off our paddle blades and our boats’ long languid arcs. The tide swelling slow and the sun finally cresting that eastward ridge. Terns circling, diving. The dark galactic sky we watched last night, the night before. Our long, deliberate circling of a common north star.

The best way to get on a crow’s good side is through their stomach.  Unsalted peanuts in-shell work wonders (i.e. crow crack).  The best thing you can do is put out peanuts consistently and don’t look directly at the birds when you do so (at least initially).  Be conspicuous about you being the one to drop the food, but do not throw the food toward the crows or look at them initially, but do make sure they are in the area.  Then, go back inside.  It may take them no time at all to come to your food, or it may take them a while before they trust it.  Crows are very neophobic and suspicious, and even if it’s a food they love, they will be careful simply because it came from a human.  (I suspect if you live in an area with high traffic or restaurants nearby, they will take less time to come to your offering than if you live in a quiet, low-traffic suburban area.)

Over time they will get more comfortable with you and start to expect food from you, and from there, you can build a bond of trust.  The big thing is not startling them once you put the food out.  Eventually you can look at them, be outside when they come down, and in some cases, they might just perch nearby while you are hanging out in your yard.  Other foods that are great for them are things like dog and cat food (high protein) and even cooked eggs and egg shells (especially during the spring).  Cheeze puffs and cheezits also tend to be a favorite, though I can’t say much about their health value.

A word of caution: You may alter social dynamics.  Neighbor crows may get wind of what you are doing and challenge the family that normally occupies your yard.  If you provide too much food, your home may become a communal site, and the number of crows can get out of control.  Use your best judgement and I recommend just feeding a particular amount on a schedule and maybe supplementing them as you see them, to build your relationship.  Another thing to keep in mind is the dynamics with your neighbors.  Most people are fine with occasional feedings, but sometimes neighbors get upset if too many crows hang around for too long.  Be mindful of your neighbors, and better yet, as you build your relationship with the crows think about educating your neighbors and getting them interested in your new buddies too.

Observing crow families and getting to know their individual personalities is highly rewarding.  Having them trust you enough to use your yard as a safe haven for foraging and eventually, even bringing their young kids around is especially rewarding.  Enjoy and I hope this helps you make some new, wild friends!

Cecil’s right to life and his right to be undisturbed were violated. But we were also violated in a key way. Cecil, a 13-year old lion, lived safe in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe under legal protection. But he was unfairly lured out of his refuge, tricked by poachers who tied a dead animal carcass to the back of a truck. Father to many cubs (who will likely now die), Cecil was an easy target while eating. Minnesota dentist and trophy-hunter Walter James Palmer then shot Cecil with an arrow. But Cecil suffered for 40 hours before he was tracked down, killed with a rifle, beheaded, and skinned. His body was left to rot in the sun.

Cecil’s head—with its distinctive (and incriminating for the trophy-killer) black mane is missing, as is the now notorious Walter Palmer. Cecil wore a GPS tracking collar, as part of an Oxford University research project. Ironically, Oxford’s study challenges the ridiculous notion that killing animals incentivizes the public to conserve them (and conserve them for more killing, i.e. “hunting”). So it is simply beyond reason to believe Palmer didn’t notice that collar when he shot Cecil, twice, once using a crossbow scope and 40 hours later using a rifle scope, or when Palmer later skinned and decapitated the lion. Palmer is a marksman with at least 43 large game animals on his killing resume (according to the Safari Club International, who has now revoked Palmer’s membership), including a rhino, a lion previous to Cecil, a cougar, a leopard, a polar bear, and an illegally killed black bear (for which he Palmer was convicted). Damage to Cecil’s collar suggests someone tried to destroy and hide the evidence of yet another of his crimes.

And so, lions lost a key individual of a highly threatened species (only 20,000 wild lions remain). Members of the nation of Zimbabwe lost a natural tourist attraction, and frankly an animal much loved by locals. And Oxford University lost a key subject in its long-standing research of lions. But that still doesn’t explain why the rest of us feel such grief and betrayal at this treacherous act. Every time someone kills an animal for fun, every time someone breaks poaching and national park laws, every time a human betrays and undercuts our wildlife and wilderness laws, we all lose a bit more of our freedom.

Our right to freedom, and to a place in the world where legally protected wilderness and wildlife remain safe, was also desecrated by Palmer’s cruel greed. There is no consent—the consent characteristic of a democratic society—in the violation of anti-poaching laws, and it is not just Cecil’s lack of consent, but ours too. We are disgraced by transgression of moral law, by the loss of sanctuary, and by the bloodlust of leaving a privileged human community with the sole purpose of entering a wild community around the world to needlessly slaughter its magnificent alpha male. (This video shows Cecil with his cubs at the national park).

In doing so, this sport-killing dentist has left a morally repugnant graffiti upon a wild canvas. Like the graffiti left in Joshua Tree National Park by André Saraiva or the myriad defacements of an attention seeker who foolishly shared her vandalism at more than ten national parks on her social media accounts. The selfishness of killing, of vandalism, of littering are at the heart of our disgust. As much as littering in the forest is a trespass of a right to a wilderness free of human influence, so too is trophy hunting, and poaching of a lion in a sanctuary, a trespass of our right to biodiversity, to an asylum of wild that is free from human debauchery and brutality.

Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe

So our horror at this tragedy is that there are places and animals who should be left alone – and the majority of us have made that moral contract through international laws and cross-cultural understandings. That is our consent – we will not kill endangered animals for fun, and we will leave that which is wild alone, for all our sakes.

In violating those explicit and implicit agreements to leave wildlife alone, we destroy ecosystems and biodiversity that will not be there for future generations. This trophy-hunter dentist has deprived us of real freedom, and left a tainted tyranny from which we cannot escape. In many ways, these wild places we hold sacred, these safe havens for wildlife, are fundamental to a truly free world and a human right to have them. And that is what he transgressed by taking Cecil’s life in such a callous, and torturous way.

And in many ways this dentist is symptomatic of the worst excesses and tyrannies of our American culture – and the ways our democracy is thwarted by those who disrespect the freedom of others. Palmer is symptomatic of a culture that celebrates unmitigated human power and dominance, qualities that are inherently problematic to a free democratic society.

Palmer with a lion he killed before Cecil.

There are those who believe all land, animals, and humans are for “use,” and that laws which limit the destruction of wildlife prohibit their own personal “freedom.” But what they really mean by freedom is “power.” This dentist simply wanted to kill whatever he wanted to kill, and that isn’t freedom. It’s doing what he wants to do, regardless of the impact it has on others. Palmer, the trophy-hunting lion killer, already had a felony conviction for illegally killing a black bear, another charge for fishing without a license, and a $120,000+ settlement to a woman who accused him of repeated sexual harassment. Palmer exhibits no sense of moral duty to follow the laws that are our social contract with each other, or respect the freedoms of others that he violates when he chooses to do whatever he wants to do, no matter what.

And that’s why we – and animals like Cecil – need serious wildlife protection laws if we want a truly free society. By protecting the sanctity of places that are free from human domination, we protect our own ability to be free. So what legal repercussions does Palmer face when he finds to courage to come out of hiding, lured out by the law? (nearly one million people have signed a petition demanding justice for Cecil, and more than 120,000 have asked Delta to stop allowing trophy-hunters to bring back their spoils on American flights). Animal Legal Defense Fund experts tell us:

• He could possibly be extradited to Zimbabwe and face charges under their laws. The U.S. has an extradition treaty with Zimbabwe, and 150,000 people have signed a petition asking the U.S. to extradite the trophy hunter.
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could hold Palmer accountable for importing wildlife taken in violation of foreign law. Palmer claims he didn’t realize he was breaking laws (unlikely given his expertise and the circumstances of the lion’s collar and being lured out of the park). But it doesn’t matter, because Palmer should have known, and can be liable for a fine of $10,000 minimum under the Lacey Act.
• Racketeering charges, under the “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).” If Palmer, who has already been convicted in the U.S. of felony poaching, in any way convinced his hunting guides to lure Cecil out of the park and destroy the collar, Palmer could be charged with racketeering.

Read here for more legal background from ALDF experts on the charges Palmer could face.

One thing is clear: it is time for U.S. Fish and Wildlife to fast-track the listing of lions as an endangered species (100,000 people have signed a petition asking for that) and prohibit the import of lions, and lion parts, which would squash the boastful urges of people like Palmer, who enjoy killing wild and rare animals in other countries and bringing their body parts back to the U.S. as showpieces of deep-seeded disregard for freedom.

As the Center for Biological Diversity’s new report shows, The Politics of Extinction, Republicans have increased their attacks on Endangered Species laws in the last five years by 600%.

By killing an animal who belonged to all of us by not belonging to any of us, this power-hungry trophy hunter put each of us in a cage, where no matter what far ends of the earth, an American can pay to kill the wildest of animals even in a place designated as safe refuge. Is there nowhere for nonhuman animals to simply be left alone?

So as we mourn Cecil, we mourn all the animals cruelly harmed, and the wild places torn asunder by greed. Cecil represents a wounded, crowded planet violated by a greed that sees freedom as power, not consent. Without spaces free from the influence of those who would kill endangered animals – itself a violation of our right to a diverse and profound wild – none of us are free. We recognize that intuitively and we are outraged. We know that killing threatened and endangered animals (or imprisoning them in zoos) isn’t conservation. It’s just killing and exploitation.

In part because of poaching like this (and in part because of animal agriculture and enormous human population growth) lions will likely be extinct in the wild in our lifetimes. Future generations will not know a Cecil, or any other of his kin. Here, in this moment, we recognize Cecil was not an individual’s to kill but rather ours to value. His refuge was our refuge, and his ability to be left alone a measure of our ability to be left alone. People are outraged because he represented real freedom, now and for the future.

As our human population continues to expand exponentially, far beyond the resources the planet provides us, large mammals like lions will become even more vulnerable. Already, lions are reproducing more slowly than the rate at which they will be poached (despite Ted Nugent’s idiotic claims to the contrary). Because of population growth, climate change, industrial agriculture, and aggressive poaching like this, future generations will probably never have the privilege of living in a free world with wild lions.

Who are the people we want to make up our society? Are they greedy, bloodthirsty, power-driven trophy-hunting killers (like Palmer and Nugent) with an unquenchable desire to deprive the rest of us (including future generations) of the freedom of the wild? If we value freedom we must value wilderness and wildness, and our wildlife trafficking, poaching, and trophy-hunting laws must reflect that.

I try to talk to people about this place but that too twists sideways. The feeling of loss turns to hostility. Stupid lawns. Stupid Monsanto. Stupid almonds. Stupid dams. Stupid invasive wild oats. Stupid people who I also love. Stupid. My time with California reminds me of one and only one thing.
A dying relationship. which i have had, with the backdrop of these mountains. I say something originating in love but it filters through the fear and anger in my heart and it comes out mean. She does the same. Our conversations as through a filter. The end is already written and we must act it out regardless of how aware we are of the end. A drought mixed with feverish heat we brought on knowingly. A trail we always loved viewed through the filter of failure. Looking at this oak covered hill feeling love and desperation. Feeling the end. Not here yet but coming. When I do leave it is reluctantly but am made to re avow my loss again and again. When called back I always had to answer no. So I left. It wasn’t my choice at first but later it is. Worst of both worlds. That lichen smell brings back my love of this place as strongly as that summer so long ago. It always will. I left. And coming back even for these moments is an emotional battlefield.
California… I tried. I really did. Maybe in a different time, a different world. Not this one. Sleep well.

Where do I start with this mess? What a squandered opportunity! Lawler refers in passing to the pecking order in domestic chickens but doesn’t mention Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, the Norwegian biologist/psychologist who introduced the concept. Fascinating recent research on chicken cognition and behavior, much of it in Australia, is ignored. Having spent considerable time in the company of chickens in the last few years, I can tell you that their social life is more complex than you might think. Complex, hell: it’s a soap opera, with a strong tincture of Game of Thrones. I’ve witnessed chicken coups; it wasn’t pretty. You wouldn’t know that from this book, though.

The discussion of pre-Columbian chicken remains in South America and the Polynesian role in their introduction is confusingly written, and I suspect not just because the data is confusing. And there’s no mention of the wild chickens of the Kaua’i highlands, descendants of birds that came to Hawai’i in the great voyaging canoes and still close to the original red jungle fowl stock.

Chapter 8, “The Little King,” is a particular treasury of howlers. Lawler is talking about the shifting image of the rooster in medieval Europe: “Magical amulets displaying fierce creatures with snake legs and a cock’s head date back to Greco-Roman times, and were popular among ancient Jews and Persians as well as medieval Christians.” Snake legs? How can you write “snake legs” and not immediately think, “Wait a minute”? How could “snake legs” make it through any kind of editorial process? I don’t think he’s referring to the vestigial hind limbs of some boas and pythons, or the legs of ancestral snakes. Did he just mean “reptilian?” Or “scaly?” All bird legs are scaly, more or less.

But let’s move on. Then there’s this: “Scientists have been struggling since Aristotle to understand the mechanisms that determine whether an animal is male or female. The Greek philosopher believed that the hotter the sex a man had with a woman, then the greater likelihood that a resulting fetus would be male. This is not as absurd as it sounds, since temperatures can play a role in sex differentiation among some animals. The hotter the nest during incubation of alligator eggs, for example, the more likely than males will result.” Lawler may be right about what Aristotle believed, based on my recollection of Armand Marie Leroi’s recent (and excellent) book The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. And he’s right about nest temperature and the sex of hatchlings in alligators, an effect also documented in turtles and some lizards. But not in birds! Not even the megapodes, whose eggs are kept warm by rotting vegetation or geothermal heat. Besides, doesn’t he get the, um, metaphorical nature of “hot sex?” Ancient joke: “Do you smoke after intercourse?” “I don’t know; I’ve never looked.”

Still in Chapter 8, he mangles the names of a couple of dinosaur taxa and says Triceratops had feathers on its tail. Nope. That was Psittacosaurus, a basal relative of the giant horned dinosaurs, and the tail ornaments in question were bristles, not the true feathers of some theropod dinosaurs and their modern avian descendants.

Lawler recounts the rise of the American poultry industry in some detail, but inexplicably omits the saga of the Jewish chicken farmers of Petaluma. California enters the book obliquely, in a reference to how the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II deprived the industry of most of its skilled chick-sexers. If true, this is remarkable, and I’d love to know more about this professional specialization.

I was shaking my head and muttering as early as page 10, on which we learn that all but two of the world’s 49 pheasant species inhabit the jungles of South Asia. Leaving aside the Congo peacock, a biogeographical outlier, it’s true that all other living pheasant species are Asian. But from the range maps in the definitive Pheasants, Partridges & Grouse by Steve Madge and Phil McGowan, the distribution seems as much East Asian as South Asian. A couple of species are endemic to Japan, not a notably jungly country; others restricted to scrubland in the Himalayas. I’m not even sure Lawler got the number of species right.

I could go on, but that would be beating a dead chicken. All right, just one more, in the context of poultry-raising among slaves in the antebellum South: “Since black women often did the cooking in plantation kitchens, West African foods like okra and kale crept onto plantation menus.” Kale? This man doesn’t know the difference between kale and collards! (Collards, of course, are only West African by adoption, but that’s another story.)

Joe Eaton is a science and natural history writer based in Berkeley, California.

This past Thursday, it took me and five teammates seven hours and 45 minutes, including about an hour’s worth of quick breaks to eat, drink, and put on gear, to ascend approximately that same vertical distance. It was a journey of 5.5-miles (in one direction) that took us from Mile Marker 20 on the Cascade River Road to the knife-edge that is the summit ridge of Eldorado Peak at 8,868′, and during it we traversed a rushing river, pushed through rainforest, scrambled over boulder fields, crossed open, rocky meadows braided with streams and small waterfalls, and climbed steadily up and across both the Eldorado and Inspiration glaciers. When we were done we sat, full-hearted and sunburned, on the rocky spit that marks the edge of the peak, for three-quarters of an hour, naming cloud-lashed summits in every direction. Chocolate, dried mango, and satisfaction made a feast day. And then we turned around and headed home again, making it back down to the cars in about another five and a half hours.

If you add up our ascent, summit, and descent times you will arrive at 14 hours, car to car. This is enough time to sweat through your shirt once, twice, thrice, and then again; enough time for strangers to become, if not exactly friends, then partners of a wild and vital kind, who sense each other’s lightness and debility through strands of rope. But it is not enough—not really—to allow for the glory of how close you’re getting to the sky.

I was the slowest of the six of us, and I’ll admit that this was hard. The slowest climber in a group is always moving just a little faster than her own capacity, to keep from falling too much more behind. She rests the least and, if she is like me, frets the most. And yet climbing as far and fast as I did this week was more than I could ever have imagined, four short (long) years ago. I’m stronger than I was, and more forgiving when I fail to live up to my expectations for myself or to the standards that I steal from others without meaning to. I don’t give up, and though I grunt and pant and sometimes cry, I don’t give in to my frustration. Days like Thursday I still find a lump in my throat when I can’t go as fast as my companions, and it’s hard to speak to tell them not to worry—but even so, I think I’m better company.

Afterward, though. Those 14 hours shook awake the memory of how I fell in love with these great blue heights, these sharp green places, half a world away on my first summer out. I was not so strong and not so fast. But being a little weak and slow was also (I think now) a kind of gift. I was alone, and didn’t push, and gave myself allowance for the strangeness and the glory of it all.

There’s gold in them hills. I think I need to seek it out again.

How long has it been since my life truly began, since I saw this stretch of road for the first time? I crane my neck for a better view down the canyon. 70 per and the slabs of concrete sing. The Yuba shines in the mid-afternoon, and I almost wake her by mentioning it.

“Let ‘Er Drift,” the Caltrans sign reminds the truckers on the downgrade. Foot off the pedal. Take ‘er easy. Let the planet do the work, that inexorable pull downward and toward the west.

How long has it been since I first felt that pull? Since that first breath of sun-warmed pine, that first dazzle of glacier-slicked granite?

Thirty-three years since that Greyhound door opened in Truckee. A lifetime since. It seemed impossibly long ago when half my current age, I stood on High Sierra glaciers now melted away, hiked across the earth with friends now under it, and I smelled pine and sunlight and I marveled at the turning of the years.

No need to push that pedal. Life is a juggernaut. One cannot escape forward motion, no matter how our fingertips feel blindly for the fingertips of those behind us on the trail.

A lifetime since. And yet each time is as the first, and my chest swells at the prospect of a life once more remade, my destination somewhere unknowable and remote, and the Yuba shining as I remember to let ‘er drift.

A Fiery Skipper on an inflorescence of Lantana in downtown Fresno, some springs ago.

It’s National Pollinator Week, a time to enjoy the deviant inter-species sexual dalliances of insects and flowering plants (also over 65 million years in the making, not unlike a certain monster movie currently sucking all the change out of your pockets at the box office). Also a time to curse the other plants which never bothered to enlist insects to be their highly targeted sexual couriers, but instead continued to merely spill their pollen into the air. To kill us all in what this year has become a POLLEN TSUNAMI!!

But, really, this IS the Worst Allergy Season ever:

Worst Allergy Season ever! (image via Comedy Central and Salon)

How can that be, you ask, even as you stare at that rising graph? Watch the full Daily Show clip (below), which is a brilliant example of how to communicate science—in this case a statistically observed pattern—in a hilarious fashion that will nevertheless have you scratching your head and make you go “hmm…” (and perhaps sneeze).

As funny as Jon Stewart is in that report, he is also brilliantly accurate in demonstrating the statistically and biologically valid fact that each year of the past decade has, in fact, seen the WORST ALLERGY SEASON yet on record! That correlation showed by the spokesman for the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America is a result of, you guessed it, Global Warming / Climate Change!

Well, more accurately, that correlation is a result of increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere, thanks to all the fossil fuel we’ve been burning up like there is no tomorrow. Experiments with plants grown in the controlled environments of greenhouses show that if you increase the amount or concentration of CO2 in the air, plants will increase the amount of pollen they produce, This is part of the broader growth response of plants to increased CO2 levels. More specifically, some plants (like the notorious ragweed which is one of the biggest allergen producers) make more (if smaller) flowers, and invest even more in producing pollen as CO2 levels increase. Now that we’ve turned the whole planet into a giant greenhouse with ever rising CO2 concentrations, this is what we can look forward to in terms of pollen production:

As CO2 rises, so does pollen production. Full PDF of Ziska et al 2000 paper here.

This means, unless we start bringing CO2 levels in the atmosphere down (listen to the Pope, for god’s sake!) quickly, we will continue to face allergy seasons that get worse every year, along with the real danger that television news programs will run out of dire metaphors to describe the rising tide of pollen that will kill us all!!!

Meanwhile, let’s celebrate all the other plants which have enlisted the services of dedicated pollinators to carry out their mating rituals. Make the most of this high CO2: go plant some non-allergenic flowering plants which will attract some lovely pollinators to your yard and add a dash of beauty to your day.

Happy Pollinator Week!