We were warned

By: | July 31, 2018

A satellite map of smoke wreathing the west coast of the USA

I am so angry, so sad. Today I drove my two children to the first day of a weeklong day-camp with a nature theme. They are learning about local species, pressing flowers, that kind of thing. The teachers expected that the kids would spend most of the day outside in nature. Instead, the kids will likely spend the entire week indoors, since there is so much wildfire smoke in our area that the air is designated by the EPA as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy,” depending on the time of day and the wind.

There have been so many wildfires in our area in recent years that Smoke is officially becoming the season after Summer and before What Happened To Fall. This increase isn’t random. It is due to climate change–climate change that we humans have known about since at least 1981 and have done next to nothing to stop.

As the Sacramento Bee put it: “This is climate change, for real and in real time. We were warned that the atmospheric buildup of man-made greenhouse gas would eventually be an existential threat.”

We were warned. And yet here we are.

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Redux: A Worm Breeds in Brooklyn

By: | July 30, 2018

This post originally ran May 31, 2012. But you won’t even notice. Worm sex is perhaps the most evergreen of evergreen topics. 

My husband and I often take nighttime walks. On one such walk, I noticed something strange on the ground. It looked like a shiny stick. I leaned in for a closer look and realized I was looking at a long, fat worm. “Is this a worm?” I asked my husband. (I like to ask questions for which I already have an answer.) As he made his way over, I spotted more worms. The scruffy patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the curb was laced with them. “Oh God!” I yelped. “They’re everywhere. Look at them all!” I was shouting now. “Where did they come from!?”

My first thought was that someone had dumped their fishing bait. But as we circled the block, I noticed more worms. Hundreds of worms. This was no bait dump. The entire worm community seemed to be above ground. I couldn’t see well, so I ran into the house to get a headlamp. And, yes, there they were, dozens upon dozens of long pink bodies, all groping the ground with their pointy heads.

I ran back inside. My husband was watching TV. “Sex!” I screamed. “They’re having sex.” I was sure of it. But just to be double sure, I googled. Up came dozens of pictures of worms fornicating. They looked exactly like the worms in my front yard. I was elated. I felt like Christopher Flipping Columbus setting foot on the shores of an unknown continent. Except the continent was my front yard. And instead of people, I found worms.In one spot, I found two worms that seemed to be attached. These worms lay perfectly still. This could only be one thing. Sex. Worm orgy. And I had front row seats.

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The Last Word

By: | July 28, 2018

July 23 – 27, 2018

Oh my goodness gracious sakes alive and it’s Snark Week, LWON’s answer to the blithering obviousness of Shark Week, We bring you the creatures that are infinitely more likely to do you wrong.

Erik warns you about the burrowing owl, a creature of a vast underground crime syndicate who decorates his house with the bodies of those he’s killed.

Sally’s creature is the CryptoKitty, the unlikely, energy-sucking outcome of a merger between Bitcoin and Beanie Babies:  “Are you enjoying the northern hemisphere’s nuclear summer? You want more? Then by all means, invest in a CryptoKitty.”

Craig, lover of all things natural, never much liked bugs.  It wasn’t until he met chiggers though, that he learned to hate them:  “Insects, though I am amazed at your existence, even the most exquisite of you are disgusting.”

Sarah has spent time around sea birds, most of which poop and ralph on each other and her, but which are charming compared to the stormy petrel. I’d post the picture but like all photos of stormy petrels, it’s covered in blood.

Poor Becky, trying to grow annuals in posts.  Poor geraniums, poor dusty miller, and oh the poor, poor coleus — all uprooted, tattered, dying because of those rat bastards, the squirrels.

 

Snark Week: American Carnage

By: | July 27, 2018

The murders began, as they usually do, with the coleus.

I had walked out my front door on that May morning to sit on my porch swing. But I saw immediately that something was wrong, very wrong. Soil was spattered everywhere. A telltale sign of a massacre, as I knew from experience. Dark-chocolate dirt, flecked with white fertilizer crumbs, was strewn all the way down the steps, onto the sidewalk, and into the grass. It looked like someone had spilled a gallon of freeze-dried Rocky Road. I stared numbly. Not again!

My gaze followed the grim trail of evidence to the blue glazed pot on the west side of my porch. I gasped when I saw the slaughter: lime-fringed purple coleus fronds lay on their sides, limp and wilting, their roots upturned and exposed. I ran over. Noooo! You bastards! I screamed internally, cursing the attackers, who of course had long since hidden themselves. Continue reading →

Snark week: Beware the bone breakers, and other warnings about seabirds

By: | July 26, 2018

 

Welcome to Snark Week 2018!

There was one thing I was certain of: My toes were not polychaetes. They were not mollusks. They were not fish, nor were they squid. They were me.

But there was one thing the giant petrel was equally certain of: My toes were meat.

The seabird was approximately the size of a schnauzer with the head of a pterodactyl and cold, pale, undead eyes. Grounded from flight by a recent molt, it chased me at a surprisingly quick waddle around a chain-link cage on webbed feet bigger than my palms. My host, a jovial Chilean biologist, had neglected to tell me that closed-toe shoes were advisable when visiting the giant petrel at the wildlife rehabilitation center.

“It must be around feeding time,” the biologist said with an indulgent chuckle. I hopped ineffectively around the enclosure, squeaking as the bird used its evil-looking pterodactyl bill to spear the appendages that my sandals left so unwisely exposed. Thus bloodied, I faked right, then left, then sprinted for the door. Had I not, I surely wouldn’t be alive to tell this tale.

You know what happened to the Ancient Mariner, right? He shot an albatross with a crossbow while it was flying over his ship and the wind vanished, marooning the unlucky sailors in the open ocean. Everyone on board except the Ancient Mariner slowly cooked to death and then skeletonized in the sun.

If there is a lesson here, it is not that you should not shoot albatrosses lest you incur the wrath of nature***. It’s that, given the chance, seabirds will kill you. Continue reading →

Snark Week: The Entire, Horrible Insect Kingdom, Especially Chiggers

By: | July 25, 2018

Disclaimer: chiggers are not actually insects as the title suggests, but arachnids, and insects are not a kingdom, but a class. I personally classify them all together into one creepy kingdom of small mechanical exoskeletal pests up to no good.

They wear their skeletons on the outside and inside are nothing but goop. They bite each other’s heads off and inject digestive juices reducing that goop to liquid that they drink through their horrible mouth parts. They are an affront to all that is acceptable in the world. Pollinators and protein for the masses, whatever, they are hideous.

The other day, an enormous fly bumbled into the house and I caught it under a glass. What a beautiful and robotic creature, I thought. Its face was banded black and white, thoughtful, pensive even. With its facial bisymmetry and wrap-around eyeballs, it was almost panda-like, or raccoon. I felt an inkling of affinity. Hi, what must you be thinking? With some searching, the amazing beast came up as a bot fly. That is the fly that lays eggs beneath your skin, producing a larva the size of an almond or a walnut that writhes as it grows and breathes through a blowhole in your flesh before bursting out as big as your thumb and lumbering through the air to find a mate and more living flesh to keep the savagery going. Continue reading →

Snark Week: The cat that jumped the shark

By: | July 24, 2018

cats dressed up as various people

Welcome to Snark Week 2018!

Not all cute-but-scary animals are biological. Allow me to expand the remit of Snark Week to include the dreaded CryptoKitty. Adorable and fluffy? Absolutely. Existentially dangerous? Most certainly.

This creature packs a triple punch. Once critically endangered, it is now trying to claw its way out of jeopardy – on the back of a real-life endangered animal. But we mustn’t let it. You see, if it succeeds, the next endangered species could be us. Continue reading →

Snark Week: An Underground, Organized Crime Syndicate

By: | July 23, 2018

Welcome to Snark Week 2018!

Many years ago I worked as an environmental consultant for developers looking to meet and/or skirt federal and state regulators. People used to tell me I was on the leading edge of environmental work – where the rubber met the road.

It didn’t feel that way. Mostly I felt like I was a speed bump for powerful and amoral people who wanted to build expensive homes. But the most amoral of all – the characters that to this day make my blood run cold – were not working on the site, but rather under it.

A widespread and powerful criminal organizations of burrowing owls.

Now, I know what you are thinking. The idea that all burrowing owls are part of some kind of crime family mafia is a hurtful and inaccurate stereotype. Plenty of them are legitimate businessmen (very few convicted burrowing owls are females, though there are notable exceptions). And besides, the notion of a burrowing owl crime family is charming and even a little cute.

But you would be so, so wrong.

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