Redux: Marine Iguanas Don’t Want to Cuddle With You

By: | September 13, 2017

So, summer is coming to an end again (damn you, ephemeral summer!) and I’ve been thinking about past summers’ best adventures. For me, a best adventure is always going to include wild animals. In this case, it was the funny-faced marine iguanas I met in the Galapagos. They didn’t give a shit about me, but I fell hard for them. My one-sided love story, from last August, is reprinted below.

I was in the Galapagos Islands in July, which felt a bit like traveling to another planet. At least, that’s what I’d imagine an interplanetary hop to be like. The land features are familiar and yet not quite—lava fields still sharp and freshly black or dotted with hopeful plant life, colossal rocks turned to sculpture by water and wind, animals that are recognizable except acting strangely (birds that swim instead of fly, seals that bask under cacti, giant lizards that glom onto coral and munch algae—under water).

It’s that last one, the marine iguana—endemic to the Galapagos, as many animals there are—that I’ll focus on here. I fell in love with these weird little dudes, warts and all. Visitors encounter plenty of the reptiles on land—where they’re just a bit speedier than tortoises, when moving at all. Mostly, they just lie still, spread out and basking. Where old lava meets the sea they’re all over the place, sometimes packed together for warmth (especially the young ones). There are brown ones, but most are ashy gray or black, some with white markings, even wholly white tails, that help turn them invisible on the bird-poop-streaked rocks. (I don’t know if bird poop actually drove this patchy coloration, but it hides them well.) Apparently, during mating time, their skin may turn rosy, as if blushing. I guess when lizard love is in the air, never mind camouflage.

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Better Science Writing Through Improv

By: | September 12, 2017

Those of us who try to communicate complicated things for a living are usually told, early on by some wiser person, to know our audiences. To know our readers, in my case. I’ve always taken this pretty seriously—which is to say, I take all of you seriously. I don’t know your names (except for Mom—hi, Mom) but I think a lot about what you might find interesting, and what you might already know, and how you might be persuaded to read stories that, after all, you’re under no obligation to finish. I think of us, you and me, as being in this mess together, companions in the struggle to understand the world.

What I practice, and what I imagine most science journalists and other science communicators practice, is a kind of cognitive empathy with our audiences—we think about you. Alan Alda’s new book about science communication—the charmingly titled If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?—argues that thinking isn’t enough.

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Guest Post: The Weight of the Eclipse

By: | September 10, 2017

crescent-suns

2017 was the year of the Great American Eclipse, and I live in its path. I also write about the Earth, moon, and sun for a living. So I was determined to not only cover the eclipse, but own it. Like many creative people, I am happiest when I am doing work for myself, and much of my job satisfaction comes from convincing (or trying to convince) other people to care about my interests as much as I do. So the eclipse was both something I wanted to experience, and something I ardently wanted Americans to experience together. But when you invest great meaning in your work, even creative work can weigh on you like freight.

I immersed myself in eclipse ephemera for months. I talked to countless people who study them and travel the world to witness them, for science and pleasure. But as the Earth turned toward the summer solstice, I realized I burdened the eclipse — and, I’ll be honest, myself — with an almost unfairly massive load. By mid-July, I worried, What if this is dull? What if my work is dull?

As eclipse day neared, I prepared to be disappointed. I thought we might miss it. The day before the eclipse, the National Weather Service called for clouds over St. Louis, where I live with my family. We decided to get up early and drive east. I slept maybe 2 hours that night. I knew I would be rising well before the sun did, and piling everyone into the car to flee for a cloudless sky. I was consumed with dread and near-certainty that it would not be worth it. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 9, 2017

Well, folks, we’ve just completed Corvid Redux Week, and you know what that means. Or maybe you don’t. It means we had a whole week of posts about the antics of some noisy and spooky looking but truly amazing birds. Our offerings went like this:

Sarah celebrated “scatter hoarding,” a wonderful seed-saving thing that smaller corvids (particularly jays and nutcrackers–did you know they were corvids?) do that is good for the ecosystem. They loan their wings to trees, Sarah tells us. Her lovely drawings accompany her text, so go back and enjoy.

Then Ann wrote that even though “they look like flying shreds of a medieval hell,” crows are actually pretty awesome, especially on the social front. (She doesn’t use the word “awesome.” She uses better words.) She backs up her opinion with both prose and verse.

Jessa impresses with many fabulous facts about ravens, cousins of crows. You should know she gathered this information well before we’d ever heard of the Three-Eyed Raven and long before Jon Snow trusted a Raven to fly speedily across many Kingdoms of mountains and oceans in crappy weather to tell Daenerys to hurry up already with the fire-breathing dragons. So, really, Jessa was ahead of us all on the Raven thing.

Michelle, then, convinces us, by way of real scientific experiments that included people wearing creepy masks, that crows have super memories for human faces—probably an adaptation to our taking over their world—and will hold a grudge against you and your stupid face if you wrong them.

Finally, Rose. Rose, whose first word as an baby was “bird,” hates birds. Corvids are birds, and she hates them most of all. They’re “conniving, ruthless, manipulative, and terrifying.” I think she’s kind of impressed by them, but that’s just my read.

Happy Weekend to All!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Corvid Week: Against Birds

By: | September 8, 2017

My grandparents live on a farm in central California, in a small ranch house surrounded by rolling hills. The house is shaped like an L, with a long hallway stretching one way, and a short stubby kitchen and living room not-quite-stretching the other way.

In the long hallway there are paintings and photographs on the walls. Now, most of them are of grandchildren, but before those grandchildren existed the walls were covered in nature scenes. Including a painting of flock of birds.

I did not like to be held as a baby (which is a story for another time) and if I was going to tolerate being in anybody’s arms, that person had better be walking and talking and pointing and distracting me with things. And so when my grandparents wanted to hold me, the only way to keep the situation from devolving into a full meltdown was to walk up and down the hall way and point at the paintings. “Look, horses!” “Look, a farm!” “Do you see the doggy?” And at the end of the hallway, “wow! look at all those birds!”

This, according to my family at least, was where I pointed my stubby little finger and spoke my first word: “bird.” Continue reading →

Corvid Redux Week: The Crow Knows Your Nose

By: | September 7, 2017

Crow diving at a masked researcher in Seattle. Photo by Keith Brust.

Like Ann, I’m a recent convert to the charm of crows. This has led to a running joke with my husband’s cousin, Roger. At family reunions, I tell him how much I like crows. He tells me how much he likes to shoot them.

Hilarious, right? Here’s the satisfying part: Crows remember Roger. They don’t just remember Roger’s suburban Seattle home and his BB gun. They also seem to remember his face. When he leaves his house, the crows mob him, diving and screeching around his head. (They leave other family members alone.) When this harassment — or retaliation — began, Roger took his campaign into a second-floor bedroom, where he crouched below a windowsill and poked his BB gun through a slit in the screen. But the crows have never forgotten his mug. Years after his last open attack on the noisy neighborhood flocks, he’s still Corvid Enemy Number One. Continue reading →

Corvid Redux Week: Corvid Cousins

By: | September 6, 2017

Ann, I see your crows and raise you ravens.

With a beak like a Swiss army knife and an intellect to match, the raven is an icon, mascot and pest, as mysterious as it is ubiquitous. For me, as for most people up North, these winged scavengers hover just below my conscious radar. They steal balls from our grass-free golf course, mistaking them for eggs.

The common raven is one of the most prevalent birds in the world, found on every continent except South America and Australia, with four million in North America alone. Corvus corax, from the Greek for “croaker,” has been a North American resident for two million years. When humans came over the Bering land bridge, ravens were already waiting for them. Archeologists have found fossilized ravens in the earliest known human encampments in Canada, dating back 10,000 years.

They have a good deal in common with us. We’re both gregarious and family oriented. We both rely on acute sight and vocal nuance, and we recognize individuals of our species, leaning on memory and mental maps for our survival. Far from picky eaters, we both feed from many links of the food chain – hence the term “ravenous.” And perhaps our spookiest shared behaviour is our walk: like us, the raven perambulates with a lordly strut that conveys pride, purpose and curiosity. Continue reading →

Corvid Redux Week: An Argument About Crows

By: | September 5, 2017

This first ran March 9, 2011.  I haven’t changed my mind.  Crows take care of each other, talk constantly, have their enemies lists, are smart, are wicked, and remind me a lot of the rest of us.“Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.”  MacBeth is talking, telling his wife it’s a good night to murder the king.  Even a century earlier, the collective noun was “a murder of crows.”  Three centuries later, a poet watches a horse that’s been shot: “gorged crows rise ragged in the wind.  The day/ After death I had gone for farewell, and the eyes/ Were already gone – that/ the beneficent work of crows.”  A year ago I watched a crow kill and eat a nestling robin.  Nobody likes crows.  I think it’s because they’re so black – black feathers, black legs, black bills, black eyes.  They look like flying shreds of a medieval hell. Continue reading →