The Nature of Things

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Baltimore Orioles have been reported to be passing through the area on migration, but I can't claim to have seen or heard one. I generally see them during spring migration but seldom during late summer and fall. I photographed this one in my backyard in spring. *~*~*~* As Hurricane Florence lashes the coast of North Carolina , it is somewhat ironic to recall an action taken by the Republican led North Carolina state legislature a few years ago.  North Carolina's long, low-lying coastline is considered one of the most vulnerable areas in the U.S. to sea level rise, and i n 2012, the state's Coastal Resources Commission predicted that sea levels along the coast could rise by as much as 39 inches over the next century. The legislature didn't like that science and so they passed a law against it! They banned any policies based on such forecasts and mandated that the state could only use historical data in its...

" Science itself, however precise and objective, is a human activity. It's a way of wondering as well as a way of knowing. It's a process, not a body of facts or laws. Like music, like poetry, like baseball, like grandmaster chess, it's something gloriously imperfect that people do. The smudgy fingerprints of our humanness are all over it." - David Quammen in The Tangled Tree In The Tangled Tree , popular science writer David Quammen gives us the history of a field of study called "molecular phylogenetics."  Have I lost you already? Well, hang with me a bit longer; this is actually pretty interesting. In the late 1970s, a research team at the University of Illinois announced that they had identified a "third domain" of life. This "domain" was made up of single-cell microbes which they called archaea. They were genetically distinct from what were then the only two recognized lineages of life: prokaryotes, which include bacteria, and ...

The contributions of women to scientific research and resultant breakthroughs are frequently overlooked or their importance downplayed. This has undeniably been a continuing theme throughout history.  One of the most egregious examples was that of Rosalind Franklin . Franklin, using X-ray crystallography at King's College in London, was able to obtain images of DNA which allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to create their famous double helix model. Franklin unfortunately died from cancer in 1958 at age 37 and when the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick in 1962, Franklin was not mentioned even though at that time there was no rule against awarding the prize posthumously.  I've been pondering this recently because I've been reading a book called The Tangled Tree by David Quammen , a book which details the history of the struggle to understand evolution at the molecular level. Again, women have participated in the research and, in some cases, have made significant...

John Updike (yes, that John Updike, the one who wrote the Rabbit series and The Witches of Eastwick and all those other grown-up books) was a poet as well as a writer of novels. And not only did he write poetry, he wrote some poetry specifically for children. In 1965, he wrote A Child's Calendar which included poems for each month of the year. Here's the one for September. September by John Updike The breezes taste Of apple peel. The air is full Of smells to feel- Ripe fruit, old footballs, Burning brush, New books, erasers, Chalk, and such. The bee, his hive, Well-honeyed hum, And Mother cuts Chrysanthemums. Like plates washed clean With suds, the days Are polished with A morning haze. ~~~ I simply love the images in this little poem, even though it doesn't really describe the Septembers that I experience. It is perhaps the September of my imagination. I imagine breezes that "taste" like apple peel and air that is full "of smells to feel." Ripe fruit,...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : A group of Sanderlings along with two Royal Terns in winter dress (the picture was taken in January) watch the waves roll in from Galveston Bay. Yesterday, September 6, was World Shorebirds Day and this weekend is part of the Global Shorebird Counting Program which runs from September 5 through September 11. If you are near a shore this weekend, consider observing and counting the shorebirds there and reporting them to the program site. *~*~*~* The 200-year-old National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, the largest natural history museum in Latin America, was destroyed by fire in a preventable tragedy this week. Millions of priceless specimens collected over the last two centuries were destroyed in the fire. Over the past five years the museum had faced severe cuts in its budget and had not even received all the money allotted from the federal government. The infrastructure had suffered as a result and was an accident waiting ...

All the politicos, pundits, and journalists in Washington are currently obsessed with discovering the identity of the anonymous op-ed writer in The New York Times . Not least among them are the president and the people who work in the White House. Well, at least some of the people who work in the White House; presumably some (or at least one) know who it is. The rest of us look on bemused and in some cases amused by all the scurrying around looking for answers. It's not like this op-ed writer, whoever he or she is - and I'm going to refer to him as "he" - is telling us anything that any of us who have been paying attention didn't already know. The president is amoral; he serves no "first principle" except that of his own egotism. He doesn't believe in free minds, free markets, or free people; he continually attacks all of these ideas to inflame his deplorable and deluded true believers. His natural impulses are anti-trade and anti-democratic. He ...