The Last Word

By: | August 6, 2016

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A nice mix this week, to keep LWON readers properly entertained and educated while weary crickets and long shadows announce summer’s closing act.

In our Redux for the week, some excellent late-summer advice from Christie:  Sit down in those underused deck chairs and breathe.

Erik shares a powerful immigration story, with a twist.

In the Yukon River, Craig meets bear and considers our ingrained fight or flight response. (He neither fights nor flees.)

Ann ponders the probability of life on other planets, taking a moment to believe the ETs are out there.

And, having swum with marine iguanas in the Galapagos, I determine they’re oddly lovable even if they don’t love us back.

 

Marine Iguanas Don’t Want to Cuddle With You

By: | August 5, 2016

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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).

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A Concatenation of Extraterrestrials

By: | August 4, 2016

8201665610_b72e333023_cThe past few days have been a cosmic convergence of opinions about extraterrestrial life.  First, I’ve been interviewing scientists and engineers who think that funding searches for planets that might support life isn’t unreasonable.  Second, a neighbor told me he’d read in the New York Times that extraterrestrial life almost certainly had evolved somewhere, some time in the past.  Third, I just got a press release from Harvard saying that extraterrestrial life was actually more likely to evolve in the future.  Fourth, I read a Nature story about the signatures that extraterrestrial life might impose on a telescopic view of an extraterrestrial planet.  Clearly, the cosmos was converging these opinions in hopes that I would write a blog post. Continue reading →

A Brush with the Bear

By: | August 3, 2016

shutterstock_418069753In the part of your mind that is still animal, still wild, you remember fight or flight; the possibility of paws holding you down, and the hinge of jaws upon you. The thought no longer goes through our minds the way it must have long ago. Sometimes, though, the memory returns.

I was considering such a scenario years ago as I watched a black bear swimming toward a small, treeless island in the middle of the Yukon River where a friend and I had just pulled up a canoe and had unloaded gear. The bear was angling across a swift summer current. I’d guessed it about 300-pounds, and it had walked up and down the riverbank opposite us before plunging in and swimming our direction. We must have looked like a mobile feast in the full-sun of a fine subacrtic evening. We had 30 days of supplies left, mostly cheese, sausages, dried fruit, honey, jam, flour. What else could a bear want? As we watched it plot its way across a hundred yards of current, I reasoned that it might be after our camp and not us. I also reasoned that northern black bears tend to be more directly predacious on humans than their larger grizzly and brown bear counterparts, so it had meal options. None of these were logical thoughts as we both stared in a silence becoming more uncomfortable by the second. Continue reading →

Stranger in a Foreign Land

By: | August 2, 2016

shutterstock_325992425 (1)I know this guy. He’s a good guy – hard working, wants to do right by his wife and kid – but somehow he’s found himself in an unusual position in the debate over US/Mexico immigration.

This fellow adores his home country but also has a healthy sense of wanderlust. Yes he loves his countrymen and his family but also wants to see the world and take on new challenges. So a few years ago he crossed the US/Mexico border in a less-than-legal way.

He could have stayed home, he made enough money to support a meager existence there, but he sensed there were more opportunities if he crossed the border. A better life – more money, better living conditions – and adventure to boot! Imagine the things he would see and the stories he could tell when he got home. He’d be a man of the world.

So he did it. He didn’t have paperwork but he had a plan and he managed to pull it off. And he was right. This new country was everything he’d hoped for – work, adventure, opportunity. Finally he could afford to raise his family and live the life he wanted. He worked hard while socking money away with an eye towards buying a house back home someday – all the while trying desperately to not insult the people around him. Continue reading →

Redux: Go Occupy Those Forlorn Chairs

By: | August 1, 2016

This post first ran on July 16, 2015, but it’s good advice for any summer day.

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It’s summer, and I’ve been thinking of what poet Billy Collins called those, “forlorn chairs/though at one time it must have seemed/a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.” Even situated, as they usually are, to take in the view, it’s hard for those chairs to compete with the attention-grabbing distractions found on our glowing screens.

If you’re not careful, you can spend hours looking at moving pictures and not reading things on your magical device. You start on a favorite news site, clicking through the headlines. Maybe you even open a story or two and read a couple of paragraphs. Then you leave those open tabs to visit a social media site, which sends you on another long string of click and skim. And these on-screen attractions are merely a distraction from your work and there are also the chores of daily life, and before you know it, the day is done and the chairs have sat empty once again.

If ever there’s a season to occupy those lonely chairs, this is it, and here at our farm, my husband and I (and our near-constant stream of summer visitors) are doing our part. Compared to all the shiny things beckoning from our screens, sitting on our front porch and watching the sun move across the sky might seem a little boring. Sure, we’ve got spectacular views of jagged mountains and deep canyons. But sunsets unfold slowly, and sitting still and paying attention requires a kind of patience that’s rarely called upon in the digital age. Which is why it feels so important to practice the art of just being — savoring the moment, for its ephemeral quality.

A few weeks ago, I went mountain biking with a friend along a high ridge near Aspen. Near the end of the ride, just before we dropped back down into the valley, we paused to take in the view. My friend pointed to some massive houses perched along the hillside below us. “I did landscaping work at some of those mansions one summer,” he told me. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | July 30, 2016

20130919-DSC_4157LWON came out of its redux mode this week with a crop of fresh posts.

A mourning dove laid an egg in Cameron’s house while she was away. The LWON commenters confirm it: mourning doves will lay their eggs anywhere and may need a little more attention from Mother Evolution.

Craig returns to the Grand Canyon with his children, mapless and in tribute to a mathematician who picked his way over these very rocks in the same way he traced routes through mathematical proofs.

Helen watched an entirely solar-powered plane land in Switzerland. The Solar Impulse II then flew all the way around the world, using only photons.

The human vagina is an under-studied organ. Rose finds some preliminary anatomical research, but she can’t even find a gynecologist who cares.

Traditional knowledge in Northern Canada points biologists toward subspecies of caribou that differ based on behaviour, rather than appearance. The genetics check out, says Michelle.

Image: Young Dene hunters walk through the boreal forest of the Mackenzie Mountains to find caribou that have come down to the valley bottoms during the annual Fall Hunt. By Jean Polfus

How to Name a Caribou

By: | July 29, 2016

20130919-DSC_4198Few species are more frustrating to taxonomists than the North American caribou. Ranging from the Canadian Arctic to the Great Lakes, caribou vary enormously in size, color, antler shape, habitat, and behavior. Some aren’t much bigger than domestic dogs; others are almost big enough to rub shoulders with a moose. For more than two centuries, scientists have argued over the identities and distributions of caribou subspecies and populations, and while they now generally agree on the existence of four North American subspecies, naming criteria remains controversial and, in some places, wildly inconsistent. The confusion has consequences not only for science but also for the caribou themselves: Because some subspecies are protected by Canadian and U.S. endangered-species laws and others are not, names can determine destiny.

In 2012, a conservation biologist named Jean Polfus, a doctoral student at the University of Manitoba, arrived in the Sahtú region of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Polfus hoped to help ease the confusion over caribou by pairing a population genetics study with the hundreds of years of observations and knowledge accumulated by the region’s Dene and Métis people. But collaborations between Western scientists and local residents are often fraught: some Dene oppose scientists’ use of radio-collars in wildlife studies, and while visiting researchers often talk about including traditional knowledge into their work, only a few pay it more than lip service.

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