How Did I Not Know About the Hippo Bill?

By: | June 22, 2018

Louisiana wetlands, as many places, are the inadvertent home to some ecosystem-altering invasive species, like fast-spreading aquatic plants called water hyacinth and giant salvinia. But hippos, no. There aren’t any hippos down there.

Oh, what might have been.

I’m not sure how I didn’t discover this earlier, considering how much I’ve been writing about invasive species of late—things like zebra mussels and sea lamprey in the Great Lakes and snakes on Guam and cheat grass in the American West, to name a diverse few. But miss it I did, until recently. Now I know that some people, partly in the name of invasive-species control, once considered bringing hippopotamuses from Africa to Louisiana and setting them free.

It was the early 20th century and it was going to be a great thing, because hippos would offer a tasty new resource for a meat-hungry and fast-growing nation and, bonus, they’d help control those pesky aquatic greens that were swallowing up swaths of wetland that normally support young fish, ducks, and a lot of other desirable creatures. A win-win.

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Easy on the Eyes

By: | June 21, 2018

A while back I took my toddler for a walk in his stroller to the local café in my old neighborhood. I loved it there because I always felt like a rock star. Everyone would be happy to see me and say nice things to me and want to pinch my cheeks. Okay, so, I guess most of that was aimed at the kid but I was with him and so I was still kinda cool. Like an assistant to a rock star or something.

And like a rock star, he was especially popular with young women. And also like a rock star he can sometimes be kind of a jerk about it.

Take the day in question. Three young women came over and started cooing over him and pinching his cheeks. (This being Mexico, nobody thought to ask me if cheek-pinching was okay. Or really anything.) I smiled and told him to fist bump all the nice ladies, as that’s his preferred greeting. He looked up at the first and punched it out while everyone laughed. Then the second woman offered her fist and he blithely obliged, like he was signing an autograph. But when the third put out her fist, he went back to the first woman with fist outstretch and a blank, expectant look.

“He’s just shy,” I said. Moronically, since he obviously wasn’t. “C’mon buddy, say hi to the nice lady. Chocalas,” which is Spanish for “high five” or “hit it.”

But the kid wasn’t having it. He didn’t like the third woman, he liked the first. I could be wrong but the third woman looked genuinely insulted by my child, which seemed appropriate, considering he was being a jerk. I tried to get him to acknowledge her and realized the harder I tried the weirder the situation got. Mercifully, my order was called and I stuffed a croissant in his fat little fingers before he did anything else to embarrass me. Continue reading →

Silence of the Sands

By: | June 20, 2018

On the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao, near the center of the capital city of Willemstad, stands the oldest continuously active synagogue in the Americas. The chunky, high-ceilinged yellow building, which opened its doors in 1732, was built by a congregation of Spanish and Portuguese Jews that was already almost a century old. Many of its earliest members were conversos, who escaped the Spanish Inquisition by practicing their faith in secret until they were able to emigrate—to the Netherlands, in their case, and then to its Caribbean colonies. Though the island’s Jewish community once numbered more than two thousand, the congregation now has barely two hundred members, with the empty seats at services occasionally filled by cruise-ship tourists.

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The Wolverine That Wasn’t

By: | June 19, 2018

Sorting through photos from our motion-triggered game camera reminds me a lot of field work. For every target animal you’re seeking, you end up looking at a lot of deer. So when I recently discovered a creature that I couldn’t immediately identify in our roll of game cam photos, I was thrilled. Continue reading →

In praise of my tent

By: | June 18, 2018

I’ve been lucky to travel to some beautiful and fascinating places while reporting on the complex human relationship with the rest of nature. In May 2014, I bought an REI Half Dome Plus tent for $175.19 to use for field reporting. The first trip I took it on was an excursion hosted by Oregon Wild to look for wolves in Eastern Oregon. I stopped overnight near Bend for the night and camped solo and I remember how incredibly cozy it felt to be tucked inside. It was small enough to feel womblike and large enough not to trigger claustrophobia. I felt at home.

Since then I have carried by tent around the world several times. I’ve camped in my Half Dome:

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The Last Word

By: | June 16, 2018

The first thing you need to do right now is read Ann’s meditation on vulnerability. She has stitched together three disparate parts of the world no one else would put together, and created something that will make you hate people, love them again, and finally remember that we are all on a different part of our trajectory.

Rose is pissed off about the World Cup, not just about the way the US team kicked themselves out of it, but also because it kicks off the world cup of thoughtless announcer quips that are just a little bit racist! You too can play along with the inevitable using her custom bingo card.

Craig has an intriguing visitor, someone who remembers what it was like in the west before the roads were paved. They share stories of road trips with their fathers and now with their children.

Sarah went to an island off the coast of Alaska expecting to count the rising bird population. Instead she sat watch with a heavy heart as nest after nest failed.

Christie finished out the week with an elegy for the dying print newspaper, whose functions are less easily replaced online than you think they are. The knowledge and perspective implicit in editorial decisions to place some stories up front and others in the back, for example. But mostly she is nostalgic for their anchoring us all to a shared reality. 

Redux: Newsprint is dead. Long live newsprint!

By: | June 15, 2018

men walk on moon

I died a little inside when I heard about the recent Today Show interview in which Jeff Bezos said, “I think printed newspapers on actual paper may be a luxury item. It’s sort of like, you know, people still have horses, but it’s not their primary way of commuting to the office.” As founder of Amazon.com and the new owner of The Washington Post, Bezos’s opinion on this matters. (Disclosure: I write a health column for the Post.)

I’m no luddite. I read Bezos’s comment on Twitter. I own two Kindles, and more than once, I’ve pulled up an electronic book on my iPhone while standing in line at the grocery store. I understand the convenience of reading news electronically — the news arrives instantly, snow or shine, it fits in your pocket, and there are no recyclables piling up on the kitchen table.

Like most of my peers, I read news online, but I still have three newspapers delivered to my house — the local daily, the weekly paper covering my rural county, and the Sunday Denver Post, which I read daily until they stopped delivery in my part of the state a few years ago.

Reading the newspaper has been my morning ritual since I could read, and online news has yet to replicate the experience in a satisfying way. I know what all you 20-somethings are thinking — oh, another curmudgeonly rant about new technology —  tl;dr. And it’s true that I’m nostalgic for a way of delivering news that’s probably hopelessly impractical in the digital age.

A story in newsprint has a genuine quality to it — a paper’s signature columns and font make the words seem weighty and bona fide. It exists in the physical world, not just the cloud. Continue reading →

World Cup Bad Announcer Bingo

By: | June 14, 2018

The 2018 FIFA World Cup begins today (or, has already begun, depending on which time zone you’re in and when you’re reading this). This time around, the American team didn’t qualify. It’s embarrassing, to be frank, that we managed to miss the World Cup. You can read more about how it all happened here. Yes, I’m still mad. No, I don’t want to talk about it right now. Instead I want to talk about awful announcing.  Continue reading →