Snapshot: Farewell, Stump Mountain

By: | November 22, 2024

Last month I wrote about maps and dog walks and grief and stuff, and I illustrated it with a photo of a majestic stump in my partner’s neighborhood.

I guess life needed to give me a lesson about impermanence, because that stump is now half gone. I imagine the city plans to plant a new tree there or something, which will be nice, but gosh that stump spoke to my imagination. And it hosted so many lovely mushrooms and hopeful tree sprouts.

So please enjoy this picture of Eliot the dog atop what’s left of the stump and contemplate its bygone majesty.

photo: Helen Fields, obviously

Snapshot: The Penguins at Twilight

By: | November 20, 2024

For the past month or so I have been in Argentina at Punta Tombo, a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Punta Tombo is not without its pleasures–how could one fail to enjoy spending hours a day with penguins?–but hanging over everything we do is the grim fact that the colony is declining. Since 1987, when researchers started to keep track, the number of active nests has decreased by about 60%.

It might be tempting then to think the Magellanic penguin is doomed. In fact it is not, or does not seem to be. Colonies north of Punta Tombo are growing at astonishing rates. Colonies south of Punta Tombo appear to be stable. It is just Punta Tombo and a few nearby smaller colonies–Punta Clara, Cabo Dos Bahias, others–that are experiencing such steady drops. The working hypothesis for these drops is that when penguins started to breed at Punta Tombo in the early 1900s, they were close to fish at a crucial time of year, when they have to feed their chicks. Now, owing to climate change or human fisheries or some combination of those factors or something else, the fish are no longer quite so close to Punta Tombo.

Sometimes when I walk back to our field house at the end of the day, I wonder why the penguins here don’t just leave and go to one of those colonies that is doing better. It’s not like they would have to travel so very far; and they’re quite good at swimming.

I was on one such walk when I came upon this fellow standing outside his nest. He happened to have a flipper band, so I know a little more about him than I do about the average penguin. I know, for instance, that he is twenty-one years of age. I know he hatched at Punta Tombo and came back to breed when he was four years of age. (Penguins have a high degree of site fidelity.) I know he had a mate for a few years and raised some chicks with her, but then she moved on or died. I know that since then he has been alone. Given how male-biased the sex ratio is at Punta Tombo, I know he will most likely never have a mate again.

I dropped down to my knees and took a few pictures of him. He opened his eyes a touch and gave me the once over before closing them again. The wind blew and he rocked a little. He looked perfectly contented, while all around him other penguins carried on. I left him to it. No matter the vagaries and uncertainties of the world, every year he comes back to his little patch of earth. This is his home place. This is what he knows, and for him it is enough.

What Happens in the Wild

By: | November 18, 2024

I’ve been setting up wildlife cameras at natural pinch points and along trackways to see what’s going on when I’m not looking. I’ll admit, it feels invasive. Candid moments of animals are caught without permission, my cameras quiet enough that subjects don’t glance up even for the second or third shot, a black bear strolling past, a fox at a trot, a bobcat on its way somewhere. You never know what you’re going to get.

There’s a rising wave of nature surveillance where “critter cams” reveal hidden lives, becoming part of the scientific toolkit for biological fieldwork. For a researcher or anyone using these cameras recreationally, it’s exciting to return home with memory cards and sit at the screen to see what showed up. Thousands of images will be grass and boughs triggering my devices in the wind, and then a mule deer appears on its daily rounds, or a cottontail rabbit returns to its preferred nightly hide, eyes glowing bright.

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The Canadian Canoe Museum

By: | November 15, 2024

My father and I spent many of my childhood summers canoeing Ontario’s lake systems, counting moose and camping under the stars. Then I got into my teenage years and he saw my brain go into risk-seeking mode; We switched to whitewater. We paddled Northern rivers in areas where there were so many mosquitoes that, statistically, they could not all land at once. We saw caribou and muskoxen and the sorbet-coloured Smoking Hills. We wrapped our canoe around rocks and paddled to the Arctic Ocean.

So when The Canadian Canoe Museum announced it had opened a grand new facility, that little three-and-a-half hour drive from Ottawa to Peterborough, Ontario wasn’t going to get in our way. It was enough advertising for us to hear that you can walk in the front of the museum and canoe out the back.

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What Could Go Wrong?

By: | November 13, 2024
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This post first appeared in 2016, but I started thinking about it today while I was watching “Young Woman and the Sea,” a Disney movie based on the book by Glenn Stout. In it, Trudy Ederle encounters a bloom of jellyfish while she’s swimming the English Channel–and the filmmakers manage to make the experience look both gorgeous and painful. Swimmers today would likely have to contend with even more stings; the Marine Conservation Society reported a 32% increase in jellyfish in UK waters and on beaches between 2022 and 2023 alone.

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My kids are really into this cartoon called The Octonauts. It’s about a group of undersea rescuers and researchers (there’s a penguin medic, a sea otter marine biologist, a polar bear captain, among others, plus a group of squeaky-voiced creatures called vegimals.) In one of their (and my) favorite episodes, one of the crew members stays out all night to observe shy garden eels. Others wonder if he’ll be OK all alone out there, but the captain says it looks like it will be a quiet night: “Nothing out there but one little jellyfish. What could go wrong?”

But of course, everything does. When the crew wakes the next morning, sea nettle jellyfish have descended like so many snowflakes, and hijinks ensue.

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A Brief Tribute to Karsten Heuer

By: | November 11, 2024

One October morning in 2013, I walked into the Canmore offices of an organization called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, to speak with its reluctant leader. I was at the outset of my career in journalism, fresh out of graduate school and loose on the land in the Northern Rockies. With my then-girlfriend (now wife), Elise, I was spending two months traveling the length of Y2Y, perhaps the world’s longest wildlife corridor and certainly its most famous. Y2Y was both an abstract concept and an environmental nonprofit, the latter run by a biologist and adventurer named Karsten Heuer, who years earlier had hiked the length of the corridor I was now driving. Heuer was already something of a legend in the conservation world, and I was eager to speak with hm — and, truth be told, a bit cowed to meet a man whose epic journeys on foot made my own exploring feel so shallow and motorized.

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Conversation: Richard & the Pillars of Creation

By: | November 8, 2024

ANN:  Richard Panek has just published a book called The Pillars of Creation.  It’s about the James Webb Space Telescope — which I call JWST and Richard calls Webb, and there’s a story behind that difference but it’s not relevant here — and how it got built and what it’s finding.  And Richard, this is SUCH a big subject, the whole multi-year, multi-field enormous expensive telescope. I can imagine ponderous tomes on the politics and construction alone.  How did you decide which steps of the JWST’s construction process to include and which to leave out?

RICHARD: First, Ann, I’d like to thank you for inviting me back to LWON. I joined LWON at your invitation all the way back in 2010. For several years I was a regular contributor, and then for a few years I was an irregular contributor—and I leave the punchline to you. 

ANN:  An irregular contributor? Like, those astronomers who study astronomical transients are transient astronomers? “Irregular” like you’re a little zigzaggy, you slip the leash every now and then?

RICHARD: Kudos for avoiding the constipation interpretation. But I’ve missed coming into the office, and now that I’m here, I have to say I’m glad to see the rolltop desk hasn’t budged and that the red-and-black ribbons in the typewriters are fresh. Some of the inkwells, alas, are dry, but I guess that’s the price of progress.

ANN:  You’re quite right about the rolltop and the typewriters — LWON sometimes feels like kind of a throwback.  I mean, do people do blogs any more? At LWON, We still Write Whatever The Fuck We Want (WWWTFWW), the motto you first elucidated, Richard–so the dry inkwells I have to take umbrage over.  I feel the inkwells are quite wet, juicy even.  Now, rather than have this conversation devolve into identities and analogies, shall we just change the subject?

RICHARD: Ah, you asked a question about how I made manageable the scope of Webb’s decades-long lead-up to the launchpad. 

ANN:  You’re quite right, thank you, I did.

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