Snark Week: Evil Has a New Name – and Buck Teeth

By: | August 11, 2014
Myocastor_coypus_swimming

The sun hangs low over the bayou, wavering in the humid evening horizon. Sweat pours off your face as you struggle see into the underbrush. And suddenly you hear it. A rustling in the bushes that turns your veins to ice. “Please, sweet Jesus,” you whisper, “be something else. Please, not here. Not now.”

But it’s too late. You know you’re trapped and your simpering prayers can’t help you. That scene from The Princess Bride – the one in the Fire Swamp – keeps running through your brain as if on a loop. And just then, from the bushes it walks into the clearing. You find yourself face to face with a creature of children’s nightmares.

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Introducing Snark Week, Vol. 2

By: | August 11, 2014

Snark Week 2 copy

Welcome to LWON’s second annual Snark Week! In celebration of the responsible and informative shark documentaries on basic cable this week, we have decided to offer five counter stories that will frighten you even more than a great white shark that’s been artificially driven into a frenzy by cameramen chumming the water. Remember, just because something is fluffy and adorable doesn’t mean it’s not secretly plotting to kill you in terrible and gruesome ways.

The Last Word

By: | August 9, 2014

trout finAugust 4 – 8, 2014

Richard and Ann disagree informatively about the nature of a science writer’s duty toward truth and its embellishments. There is a glimmer of hope when Richard strikes on the thought that science writers share subjective truths, whereas scientists have a duty to be objective. Ann disagrees. The debate rages on in our virtual LWON offices.

Some collect flag badges on their backpacks. Helen collects bird species, instead, to tell her where she’s been. Still other people have strong feelings and associations with odd and even numbers, as Cameron’s family schedule demonstrates, in all of its adorable oddness.

Michelle has found that in some instances, fish population numbers and haul volumes tell you more about human quality of life than other economic indicators. Speaking of fish, I test my dad’s theory about the baby fish he buys from hatcheries and pours into lakes to fend for themselves.

Image: Shutterstock

Fish of a feather

By: | August 8, 2014

troutThe teetering, hundred-year-old collection of wooden buildings that form my father’s fishing club in backwoods Quebec is arranged in a row like a Wild West town, where mosquitoes are the hostile locals. To reach his favourite fishing spots, Dad sometimes has to stop his motorized quad in front of downed trees and change into Kevlar trousers to chainsaw his way through.

Nearby lakes without large fish are often stocked with trout for sport – a practice which, after careful study, Dad has adopted on behalf of the club. When I visited a couple of weeks ago – for my son’s fishing initiation – he described his stocking process. He gets to the lake with the juveniles from the hatchery and looks for a spot near the shore where schools of minnows congregate. Then he puts his little bitty lake trout, or what have you, into the water next to the tiny adult fish.

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Follow the Fish

By: | August 7, 2014

79431587_8c0f1f5d83_bFor a landlubber, I’ve been spending a lot of time around fish. Not long ago, I plunged my hands into paddlefish guts for a story about caviar poaching in the Ozarks; last year, I spent several weeks in very fishy places on and around the Mekong River, researching an ongoing project about hydropower development on the Mekong. And last month, I wrote a story about a Berkeley biologist whose work shows how declining fisheries are leading to all manner of social horrors—from terrorism to slavery—in many of the poorest places of the world.

These stories have made me think about the limits of the famous (but apocryphal) advice Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they pursued the Watergate scandal: Follow the money. Of course journalists should always ask who’s paying, and who’s benefiting—those are key questions in any story. But money isn’t the only currency that matters. In many parts of the world, it’s important not only to follow the money but also to follow the fish.

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Days Are Numbered

By: | August 6, 2014

Feb1712Around here, we do some things by the numbers. On odd days, the older boy sits on the prime outside seat of the kitchen island and has bedtime stories from his dad; on even days, his younger brother gets these things. On even days, no one has to wash his hair.

But then we run into a problem at the end of the month: sometimes there are two odd days in a row. Continue reading →

On the Trail of the Great Tinamou

By: | August 5, 2014

great tinamou in the amazon

Three years ago, I spent a while in the rainforest of Panama, for a story. It’s one of those swashbuckling freelancer stories, except—like so many of those—it’s not all that swashbuckling when you get down to the details. I was an hour’s drive (on good roads) from an international airport. I was staying in a comfortable B&B in the town of Gamboa, which was carved out of the rainforest to house the Panama Canal’s dredging division. But the rainforest is still right there; you have the sense that if anyone left their house empty for too long, moss would grow, vines would come in the windows, and monkeys would set up housekeeping.

I was there to hang around with a biologist who studies frog reproduction. I combined the work with a family vacation; my parents came along for some sightseeing and nature before I started my reporting. On our first full day in Gamboa, we went out with a local guide who had a spotting scope and much experience with visiting birders. We saw dozens of species–green birds, red birds, yellow birds, black birds. The red-legged honeycreeper. The slaty-tailed trogon.

As we walked back toward the car, our guide stopped abruptly. Against the background of singing insects and chirps from the treetops, a haunting whistle rose. Its long, warm notes came through the dense growth at the edge of the road. He told us its name: the great tinamou. Continue reading →

Facts? Sure. Truth? Hmm.

By: | August 4, 2014

3284013391_d77d65f633_bRichard:  A few months ago, Ann wrote a post about beauty and truth in science writing. I object to neither. But she seemed to take exception to a “literary nonfiction” approach to science, and I wondered what in particular her objections were. So I thought I’d ask her. Hey, Ann, what gives? 

Ann:   Literary nonfiction is writing about the real world in a literary way, that is, a way that uses the literary techniques of fiction.  I wrote that if a science writer has to choose between literary techniques (or beauty) and reality (or truth), that writer should choose truth.  And if the writer wants both, that writer should find the beauty in truth.  Is that blindingly obvious?  Continue reading →