The Last Word On Nothing | "Science says the first word on everything, and the last word on nothing" - Victor Hugo

Boobies Behaving Badly

By: Erik Vance | September 8, 2015

In my last post I made the case for why we are not, in fact, slaves to nature and our genes. Today allow me to do the opposite.

First let me set the stage. You are on a tiny island – maybe the size of a few city blocks – looking out to sea. You could almost see the west coast of Mexico from the rocky shores, were it just a few miles closer. The only people here are a few fishermen and the occasional Mexican navy boat passing by. But you are not alone, not by a long shot.

Around you are thousands of terns, frigate birds, and every seabird you can imagine. It’s a cacophony of posturing, bickering, and breeding. Life, death, and the struggle for survival, laid bare for all to see. And at the center of it all are the boobies. No, not that kind of booby (Jesus, people, what kind of a blog do you think this is?), the ones with blue feet and freakishly long wings.

A few months ago, I published a story for Hakai magazine about a researcher in Mexico named Hugh Drummond, who has dedicated his entire life to studying booby behavior. Normally, the angle for such a story would be a sloppy version of “hey, look at this crazy guy who studies this crazy thing that will never be of use to anyone!” But that wasn’t my angle because it’s not true.

In fact, Drummond’s work is some of the most profound and enlightening science I have ever come across. And in this post I’ll attempt to show you a glimpse of why that is. Continue reading →

Headwind

By: Cameron Walker | September 7, 2015

53022804_df0fc845df_z When I was six I had my very own windmill. At least that’s what my dad told me. We were driving to camp through Altamont Pass, which held one of the first wind farms in the country. He squinted up at the golden hills and pointed. “There,” he said. “That’s the one.”

Later, he explained that he’d bought some stock in the company that owned the wind farm, which required more explanation still. But I did understand that while there probably wasn’t a single windmill with my name on it, that somehow, we were tied to those things that spun around in the wind. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: Jennifer S. Holland | September 5, 2015

August 31—September 4

Here at LWON it has been a week of fond farewells—to a season, to a beloved scientist—and of gratitude toward Nature for carrying us forward.

Guest poster Judith Lewis Mernit forgives the harvester ant for the agonizing pain of its bite, coming to appreciate its own fight for survival.

With all their senses on alert, Craig Childs and his son hunt for signs of Nature’s restlessness (including wild-animal sex) as summer hands off to fall.

Guest poster Niki Wilson grips tightly to the final week of summer vacation—wanting her son to stay muddy and carefree up until the last.

Recalling a great and giving scientist, author, and neuro-explorer, guest writer Ben Goldfarb shares his appreciation of the late Oliver Sacks, who taught him how to ride the emotional turbulence of injury all the way to healing.

And LWONer Helen Fields joins her father before sunrise to plod (her word) up up up a beloved Rocky Mountain, thankful for its now-100 years as protected ground.

Photo: Shutterstock

Plodding With My Father

By: Helen Fields | September 4, 2015

The rising sun really does turn things pink.

The Milky Way hung overhead. The lights from the far-off plains made a faint glow in the eastern sky. I made one last visit to the pit toilet at the edge of the parking lot, put on my day pack, and began to plod.

I was setting out to climb a mountain with my dad. The mountain was Flattop, a 12,324-footer in Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado.

My dad claims Rocky Mountain is the best place in the world for day hikes. Now, I happen to think he is right. For one thing, he’s been a lot of places. And his argument makes sense: The park has a long list of trails that offer a short walk to a dramatic cliff face with a gorgeous lake at its foot. He has tested most of these trails personally. His first visit to the park was as a toddler in the mid-1940s. My great-grandfather was a dentist in Kansas who started going out to Colorado for long trips in the 1930s or so and was spending whole summers in Estes Park, just outside the eastern border of the park, by the 1950s.

Continue reading →

I’ll Miss You Summer

By: Niki Wilson | September 3, 2015

My son’s new school supplies shine too brightly in the corner of my office. It’s the standard fare: glue sticks, soon to be dried out felt pens, a rainbow of highlighters, a cheap pencil sharpener made in China. The exercise books lay crisp and waiting to be filled with vocabulary tests and paragraphs about summer vacation. It’s kinda depressing.

Summer holiday is the best time of year for me as a writer. No more having to get up and trade PJs for pants to drop my son at the school. When I need to work until 2:00am on a feature, no problem. I just sleep in the next day until my ten-year-old boy gets up, which is thankfully around 10:00am. Time is elastic. Breakfast is late, and lunch is later. Eggs for dinner? Sounds good.

More importantly, I like to think it’s a good time for my son, too. He spends the summer dirty. His nails are jagged, and too-long with unknown substances jammed underneath. Sticks that double as guns and swords are stacked up against the stairs leading to our front door. His neck and legs are chewed from black fly bites, and his shins are bruised from falling out of the crabapple tree (I probably should have been paying a little more attention that day). It feels to me that this disheveled, feral animal is doing exactly what he should be.

The reality of the school year is a little different. Sadly, I must get dressed first thing in the morning, poor me. The boy must be roused from a coma. Snacks must be packed, volunteer hours signed up for, and cupcakes made. Extracurricular activities are chosen and paid for. The beautifully elastic pace of summer snaps back onto a schedule faster than kids on a bag of chips, and the dirty, carefree boy of summer disappears into new skinny jeans and a pile of homework. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Walking With Oliver

By: Ben Goldfarb | September 2, 2015

In 1974, the neurologist Oliver Sacks was hiking alone on a Norwegian mountain when, coming around a boulder, he stumbled upon a bull sprawled across the trail. The bull didn’t react, but Sacks, no stranger to hallucinations, somehow imagined the animal as “first a monster, and now the Devil.” As he fled downhill in a deluded panic, he slipped, dislocating his patella, tearing his quadriceps from the knee, and rendering his leg “limp and flail… [it] gave way beneath me like a piece of spaghetti.” Unable to walk, he nearly perished of exposure before kindly reindeer hunters discovered him and toted him down the mountain.

Though Sacks survived, the worst trial was yet to come. In the wake of knee surgery, he struggled to see his unresponsive, “sepulchral” leg as his own: It “felt like wax — finely molded, inorganic and ghostly.” A phantom limb, all the creepier for still being attached. The experience unnerved Sacks, a vigorous young doctor forced into the passive role of patient. He had diagnosed the man who mistook his wife for a hat; now Sacks had become the neurologist who mistook his leg for a block of marble. “For what was disconnected,” he fretted, “was not merely nerve and muscle but… the natural and innate unity of body and mind.”

The book Sacks wrote about his bizarre and arduous recovery is called A Leg to Stand On. It’s a spare, self-contained account, not generally granted an exalted place in his pantheon. Many of his casual fans — the ones who know him as the avuncular Brit who often popped up on RadioLab to chat about face-blindness — likely don’t realize it exists. Yet Leg is his most personal book, the work in which Sacks himself confronts the same bewildered terror as his patients:

Had ever I faced a more paradoxical situation? How could I stand, without a leg to stand on? How could I walk, when I lacked legs to walk with? How could I act, when the instrument of action had been reduced to an inert, immobile, lifeless, white thing?

Continue reading →

Animals in their Seasons

By: Craig Childs | September 1, 2015

Bowhunting season in Western Colorado opened yesterday, which means the rut is underway, the next season coming into view. By the time you see this, I will be sitting in the quiet of the woods with my 12 year old boy listening for bugling elk, their haunting, whale-like calls rising through dusk aspens and sea-green conifers.

Sex is happening out there, animals congregating and interacting at the beginning of their autumn mating ritual. It is the time of year that ungulates begin prancing, snorting and bugling. Soon males with their tongues hanging out will be boxing females into the trees. Antlers will be clattering (among deer it sounds like a fencing match between pool cues, while elk sound more like a battle with oaken staffs). As the rut winds up later in the fall, animals will begin their migration to lower country, impregnated and readying for winter.

One thing I should mention, my son and I will not be hunting while we’re out. Not with weapons at least. We are different kinds of hunters, paying attention to storms, sniffing the fresh animal tracks, and focusing beyond prey. I’d gladly take the meat, but we will be working with journals instead. Carrying backpacks off trail and moving our camp day by day, we won’t be under any auspices, no empirical research performed or recorded as we slip into draws and across mountain shoulders. We will be there out of personal curiosity, the way people flock to horseshoe crab spawnings or eclipses. We want to see a significant act of nature.

After a long and indolent summer, the forest will feel restless. This is when ungulate communication tightens up. Males whistle into the woods to hear if another male whistles back. The air will smell like rut, summer rains and late growth sending out raspberries and service berries while the first high mountain leaves begin to yellow. You can smell this first color. The party is just beginning. Continue reading →

Guest Post: When The Ants Win

By: Judith Lewis Mernit | August 31, 2015

It wasn’t just the initial intensity of the pain — a hot, vibrant shard plunging into my metatarsus and radiating up my shinbone — but its duration. From approximately 10 o’clock in the morning, when I stepped barefoot onto a reddish-brown ant in my San Fernando Valley backyard, until well after sunset, the agony defeated Benadryl (oral and topical), ibuprofen, even the one-half of an expired Vicodin I downed with a shot of vodka. Baking soda didn’t draw it out, nor vinegar, nor did calamine lotion calm it down. Ice was my only friend; a series of three Arctic Ice Tundra series packs that I kept in constant rotation from freezer to foot, wrapped in a thin towel and secured with a scarf, numbed the bite. A few seconds without one and I’d curl my toes and twist my face into a muffled scream.

The consensus on my Facebook page, where I’d cast a bid for sympathy, was that I’d been nailed by a red fire ant. A red imported fire ant to be more specific, or RIFA, an invasive destroyer that showed up in California nearly 20 years ago, having traveled up from South America through the southern states in potted plants. RIFAs are bad news; they crowd out native ants, bees and lizards; they kill songbirds, bunnies and toads; they’ve even been known to take down a pig. I would have been entirely justified in my early plan to bomb the colony with vinegar and baking soda once I was mobile again, even if that particular extermination method proved to be less effective than morbidly fun.

Continue reading →