Last May my wife Connie and I were lucky enough to take part in a tour of archaeological sites at Vandenberg Air Force Base here in Santa Barbara County, California. The tour was set up by Santa Barbara County Archaeological Society and guided by Larry Spanne, Chief of Cultural Resources at VAFB and I want …
Prehistoric Passenger Pigeons 2
The genesis of my idea that passenger pigeons as Europeans knew them– Aldo Leopold’s “biological storm”– were a post glacial phenomenon erupting into a new niche came to me as I discussed pre- Columbian America with our little Pigeon Forum– what Dr. John Burchard calls “pigeons for polymaths”. I bounced some of the details off …
REALLY ugly dog!
Several people have sent me various links to this… dog (it is alleged to be a dog). Myself, I think it is more akin to H. P. Lovecraft’s witch familiar “Brown Jenkin”.
Mole Martyr?
Sir Terence Clark in England sent me a story fom the UK Shooting Times that bears repeating here. There is no link to the story per se, but it is worth reprinting as a tale of what happens when law trumps common sense. What you need to know is that you cannot hunt a mammal …
Eco- Burial
I had to do a bit of thinking about this story on “ecologically correct” burial– in, wouldn’t you know it, Marin County. Some of the description is beyond parody: “He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus. “Here, …
Prehistoric Passenger Pigeons – A Mystery
Over the weekend I picked up a copy of 1491 by Charles Mann. This is a fascinating book for those interested in New World archaeology and natural history. Its basic message is that the environment encountered by Europeans at initial contact was not an edenic natural paradise but was an anthropogenic construct. In other words, …
Strange Ads and Evo- Crit
I assume the blogads track words in text–? I see that some promoting “creation science” are up right now–??? WHAT? Whatever this blog’s sympathy to matters spiritual we are firmly reality based and have no truck with creationism or “Intelligent Design”– I was educated as an evolution and populations biologist. To banish them, let us …
Urban Life
Reid Farmer’s browsing of the L.A. Times finds this report of a lost South American reptile at large in the suburbs. The animal is believed to be a spectacled caiman, estimated at 6 to 8 feet and possibly 200 pounds, which must be a big one if the caiman I knew from Panama are any …
Poison Frogs…
… are one of Annie Davidson’s passions, and cool evolution one of our Querencia’s favorite subjects. Here is alink to a story on two widely separated groups of these beautiful, deadly, and inoffensive creatures. It seems that not only do they extract their toxins from their food, in this case ants; two unrelated groups have …
Bookaholism 2
Reid sends this link from the LA times on in- house libraries. “For the bibliophile, what to do with the books is life’s central decorating issue, an ongoing discourse, a debate, and often an outright décor war, between aesthetics, the practicalities of storage and the consuming mindlessness of passion”. Some, who are not book lovers, …