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The latest issue of the London Review of Books contains a long essay by Judith Butler attacking Trump’s Executive Orders, particularly 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”  You can read her piece by clicking on the title below:

 

The piece constitutes good news, bad news, and mixed news.  The good news is that Butler’s prose is, for once, comprehensible (usually she writes in such dense academic jargon that you can barely work out her meaning). The mixed news is that she does say some stuff I agree with: stuff about the rights of those who are gender nonconformists. And she also calls out Trump for allowing the snatching up of visa- and green-card holders who get deported simply for saying things (mostly pro-Palestinian) that the government doesn’t like. I oppose that. No deportations without through legal investigation and, I think, a court hearing!

The bad news is that Butler falls prey to common misconceptions about sex. One is her opposition to the biological definition of sex using gametes, a definition to which I adhere. This, says, Butler, is wrong, and that definition was promulgated by Trump simply as a way to erase trans and nonbinary people. She justifies her opposition by referring to the “tri-societies” letter published on the Society for the Study of Evolution‘s webpage, a letter that many of us criticized heavily for denying the binary nature of sex and asserting that sex was nonbinary in all species. Here’s how she characterizes that letter:

There are two significant problems with using gametes to define sex. First, no one checks gametes at the moment of sex assignment, let alone at conception (when they don’t yet exist). They are not observable. To base sex assignment on gametes is therefore to rely on an imperceptible dimension of sex when observation remains the principal way sex is assigned. Second, most biologists agree that neither biological determinism nor biological reductionism provides an adequate account of sex determination and development. As the Society for the Study of Evolution explains in a letter published on 5 February, the ‘scientific consensus’ defines sex in humans as a ‘biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex.’

Let’s first get out of the way the canard that the sex of babies is not determined by using gametes, so gametes are irrelevant to defining sex. Here she conflates “determination” with “definition”, a bad move for someone as smart as Butler. (But of course she has an agenda.) Yes, babies’ sex is written down at birth nearly always by looking at their genitals, but genitals are imperfectly correlated with the reproductive apparatus that is used to define sex: whether one has the apparatus to make sperm or eggs. One may well find out later that genitals, particularly if they’re abnormal, are not an indicator of one’s biological sex.

Worse, though is that Butler is seemingly unaware of the controversy engendered by the tri-societies announcement. No, we do not know that the definition above is the “consensus” definition of sex, for none of the three Societies canvassed its members. And of course the Societies got themselves into the weeds by arguing that sex in humans is “a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics.” Is that so? Then how do we determine what sex any animal or plant is, given that in some cases chromosomes are irrelevant to determining biological sex, and “hormonal balance” doesn’t work so well in plants?

Seriously, the three societies should either take down that letter, which was never sent, or revise it. And if they’re claiming that it represents a consensus of the members of the societies, then they should poll their members. They did tell us that their letter is moot and needs to be rewritten. In fact, the ASN President admitted that the letter was problematic, hadn’t been sent, and needed revision.  Butler says none of this. Again, she distorts data that could easily have been found had she looked. But again, she has an agenda.Three societies: take down that letter!

Further, Butler buys into the discredited claims of Anne Fausto-Sterling that 1.7% of the American population is intersex and that there were actually five sexes. Fausto-Sterling later admitted that she was writing this “tongue in cheek,” and she and a colleague later revised that figure down to 0.4%. But even later work shows that, using the biological definition of sex and how clinicians themselves define intersex, the true figure is probably between 0.018% and 0.005%.

Now the proportion of intersex people in the population says nothing about how they should be treated, or justifies ignoring them as people. Rather, this shows that Butler is playing fast and loose with the data, and uses the data that supports her own views. That is intellectually dishonest.

Now it is entirely possible—I think likely—that the agenda of Trump’s EO involved more than just clarifying the biological definition of sex and saying sex is binary. His agenda likely involves the Republican distaste for gender-nonconforming people.  I don’t share that distaste, but I do agree with the EO’s definition of sex, which I hear was made with the input of biologists.  And the biological definition of sex, as I’ve said repeatedly, does not target trans or gender-nonconforming people with the intend of erasing them or, as Butler says, “effacing the reality of another group.”

Finally, Butler fails to realize that defining biological sex does have implications for people’s rights, which we can see very clearly when the “rights” of two groups clash, as in sports participation, incarceration, or allowing women to rely on biological women as rape counselors if they request it.  Among all the rights that we enjoy or are supposed to have, the clashed don’t involve many of them. But those clashes are still meaningful, and resolving, say, the sports issue by prohibiting biological men who identify as women to compete in women’s sports in no way “erases” trans-identifying men.  To me does not appear to deprive them of dignity; rather, failing to adhere to this restriction deprives biological women of opportunity. Butler seems impervious to the issue of clashing rights around the definition of sex. The part in bold below (my bolding) is correct–so long as there is no clash of rights between groups:

Although the order here opposes those who would ‘eradicate the biological reality of sex’, it also defines what women’s interests are, what trust in government requires and what is at stake for ‘the entire American system’. Thus, the regulation of sex assignment and the eradication of trans, intersex and non-binary legal existence is a matter of national concern: the ‘entire American system’ is at stake. Of course, the dignity, safety and well-being of women should be secured, but if we value these principles, then it makes no sense to secure one group’s dignity, safety and well-being by depriving another group of dignity, safety and well-being. Indeed, the order effectively consigns trans people to radical indignity and unsafety, if not non-existence. Women – including trans women – and trans, intersexed and non-binary people all deserve to be free of attacks on their dignity, safety and well-being, not only because the principle applies to all of them, but because these categories of person overlap. These are not always distinct populations.

The issues of sports participation, incarceration, and so on, must be adjudicated, and they are being so now. But no resolution deprives gender-nonconforming people of “dignity, safety, and well-being”  (Safety issues do arise, for example, when trans-identified males are put in women’s prisons.)  But of these few instances in which rights clash, there are solutions: “open” sports leagues, for example, or giving women who have been raped a choice between having a biological male or biological female rape counselor.

I don’t want to run on, but I have to say that there are places where I do agree with what Butler says, for instance striving to treat trans or gender-nonconforming people in a way that preserves their dignity, or, with respect to deporting people for free speech, this:

On 8 March, Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident of the US with a green card who participated last year in protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Trump posted online that ‘this is the first arrest of many to come.’ It may seem that the targeting of people protesting in support of Palestinian freedom has nothing to do with objections to ‘gender ideology’ and the government’s efforts to strip rights from trans people. The link appears, however, when we consider who, or what, is being figured as a threat to American society. Educational institutions and non-profit organisations, especially progressive ones, are at risk of losing their federal tax breaks if they collaborate on projects concerned with Palestine or fail to expel students who engage in spontaneous or ‘unauthorised’ protest. If the Heritage Foundation’s plans become official policy, institutions or organisations that fund work critical of the state of Israel – or, more precisely, work that could be construed as critical – will be deemed antisemitic and supportive of terrorism. If they fund work on race and gender, they will not merely be guilty of ‘wokism’ but regarded as antagonistic to the social order that now defines the United States – in other words, a threat to the nation.

Although I don’t agree with Butler about the close connection with trans rights and deporting dissenters, I do agree that criticism of the government should not be punished with deportation, and that such behavior is indeed a “threat to the nation.”

But there’s a lot more in the article, and you can read it for free by clicking on the link above. In the meantime, though, Butler should have done her homework.

Recently, Columbia University caved into the Trump administration’s demands that unless the University reformed itself (mostly doing things to dispel the anti-Semitic climate), they would lose $400 million in federal funding. While most of the changes demanded were good ones, I object to the administration using science funding as a club to bludgeon Columbia into compliance. (On the other hand, Columbia wasn’t doing much, but why should science be the field to take the brunt?)  And Columbia’s caving led to the forced resignation of the interim President, Katrina Armstrong.

It’s no surprise, then, that the next target of the administration is that bastion of Lefty Communist Woke Socialism, Harvard University.  Yep, they’re being bludgeoned, too, and also about anti-Semitism. As the NYT reports (article archived here):

The Trump administration said on Monday that it was reviewing roughly $9 billion in federal grants and contracts awarded to Harvard, claiming that the university had allowed antisemitism to run unchecked on its campus.

In a statement on Monday, the administration said that it was examining about $256 million in contracts, as well as an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.”

The announcement of the investigation suggested that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus but was vague about what the university could do to satisfy the Trump administration.

“While Harvard’s recent actions to curb institutionalized antisemitism — though long overdue — are welcome, there is much more that the university must do to retain the privilege of receiving federal taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,” Josh Gruenbaum, a senior official at the General Services Administration, said in a statement.

“This administration has proven that we will take swift action to hold institutions accountable if they allow antisemitism to fester,” he added. “We will not hesitate to act if Harvard fails to do so.”

I didn’t know that, though, when I woke up this morning and found this email from the President Alan Garber, who was also an interim President after Claudine Gay’s resignation but now will be serving as a regular President until 2027.  Read what I got and you tell me: is Harvard about to cave, too? I have bolded the parts that suggest that Harvard will do what the administration wants. Again, Harvard did, I think, need to change to get rid of its antisemitic climate, but I would prefer that it do so voluntarily rather than be forced to.

I’ve bolded the parts below suggesting that Harvard is about to cut a deal with the administration:

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

Earlier today, the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism issued a letter putting at risk almost $9 billion in support of research at Harvard and other institutions, including hospitals in our community. If this funding is stopped, it will halt life-saving research and imperil important scientific research and innovation.

The government has informed us that they are considering this action because they are concerned that the University has not fulfilled its obligations to curb and combat antisemitic harassment. We fully embrace the important goal of combatting antisemitism, one of the most insidious forms of bigotry. Urgent action and deep resolve are needed to address this serious problem that is growing across America and around the world. It is present on our campus. I have experienced antisemitism directly, even while serving as president, and I know how damaging it can be to a student who has come to learn and make friends at a college or university.

For the past fifteen months, we have devoted considerable effort to addressing antisemitism. We have strengthened our rules and our approach to disciplining those who violate them. We have enhanced training and education on antisemitism across our campus and introduced measures to support our Jewish community and ensure student safety and security. We have launched programs to promote civil dialogue and respectful disagreement inside and outside the classroom. We have adopted many other reforms, and we will continue to combat antisemitism and to foster a campus culture that includes and supports every member of our community.

We still have much work to do. We will engage with members of the federal government’s task force to combat antisemitism to ensure that they have a full account of the work we have done and the actions we will take going forward to combat antisemitism. We resolve to take the measures that will move Harvard and its vital mission forward while protecting our community and its academic freedom. By doing so, we combat bias and intolerance as we create the conditions that foster the excellence in teaching and research that is at the core of our mission.

Much is at stake here. In longstanding partnership with the federal government, we have launched and nurtured pathbreaking research that has made countless people healthier and safer, more curious and more knowledgeable, improving their lives, their communities, and our world. But we are not perfect. Antisemitism is a critical problem that we must and will continue to address. As an institution and as a community, we acknowledge our shortcomings, pursue needed change, and build stronger bonds that enable all to thrive. Our commitment to these ends—and to the teaching and research at the heart of our University—will not waver.

Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber

I cannot interpret this other than as Harvard capitulating to the administration’s demands. Neither the administration nor Harvard are specific here, and Harvard does admit that it still has a “serious problem” of “antisemitic harassment” (I’m not sure how pervasive the problem still is.)  Indeed, Garber says that he himself has been a victim of antisemitism.  How did that happen? The NYT suggests one explanation:

He may have been referring to a poster showing him with horns and a tail that was displayed by a student group during Harvard’s encampment last year.

There’s a lot more in the NYT piece, so have a look if you’re following the Siege of the Universities.  This is only the beginning!

It’s SHARK DAY!  Today’s shark photos come from Owen Jones, Professor of Law AND Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. Owen’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

In February 2025, a friend and I joined a week-long live-aboard trip to a patch of Atlantic Ocean about 20 miles north of the Bahamas.  The purpose was to scuba dive among Tiger Sharks (Galeocerdo cuvier), so named because of they typically have dark stripes down the body.  Because the dive guides were bringing the sharks in close with chum, our main task was to neither act like nor look like dead fish.  (Which is why our bare skin, except around the lips, was all covered in dark neoprene – and also why we would actively turn to confront incoming sharks, as a display of vitality and all around non-dead-edness.)

Tiger Sharks, which can grow to approximately 17 feet, and weigh up to 2,000 pounds, have the widest diet of all sharks.  And their especially saw-capable teeth enable them to cut through sea turtles in a way that other sharks can’t.

On one hand, Tiger Sharks are #2, after only Great White Sharks, in recorded fatal attacks on humans.  On the other hand, the absolute number of attacks is quite small.  And Tiger Sharks only rarely attack divers.

At a different location, we had the hoped-for pleasure of seeing Great Hammerheads (Sphyrna mokarran).  They grow to approximately 14 feet and 1200 pounds.  They are the largest of the hammerhead species, and are considered critically endangered.  They are generally shy, and are not considered a major threat to humans.

Your correspondent is on the right in these last two shots.

Sharks like these are absolutely magnificent creatures.  Powerful, nimble, and well-adapted (at least to a world before industrial-scale shark-finning).

Someone sent me this tweet a few days ago, and I was unsure about whether this was any kind of violation of University policy.  As far as I gather, this was posted on the inside of a chemistry professor’s office, facing outwards.

University of Chicago – Outside a chemistry professor’s classroom, a sign filled with propaganda reads, “DEPORT ISRAELIS.”

This is blatant antisemitism and xenophobia which is completely unacceptable, @UChicago. An investigation is needed. pic.twitter.com/wGer8vjX9f

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) March 28, 2025

 

Here’s a photo from that tweet, but all I can make out in it is “Israel murdered 18,000 children” (Hamas’s figures, and probably grossly untrue) as well as “Israel must pay for the murders and destruction” and “DEPORT ISRAELIS.” If you can read more of it, please decipher in the comments. 

Anyway, I sent the tweet around to our local free speech group and asked if this was a violation of University rules.  This morning someone said that this kind of thing is indeed allowed, though you’re not allowed to display flags in your office (some wonky rule). A watermelon, though, does nicely as a substitute for the Palestinian flag. At any rate. I saw the tweet below this morning, indicating that the University of Chicago itself had apologized for the sign, which was “voluntarily” taken down, and said that it is being investigated as a possible violation of the “University’s non-discrimination policy.”

We sent a letter to the President of the University of Chicago. We’re working closely with students on the ground. This is the statement the University released today.

Let’s be clear: pressure works. Community matters. And transparency is everything.

We appreciate that the… pic.twitter.com/cGXW6iUqE4

— ChicagoJewishAlliance (@ChiJewishAllies) March 30, 2025

 

The statement:

If this is indeed allowed behavior, then putting a sign like this inside your office, facing out, is not a violation of free speech, which is part of the Chicago Principles. On the other hand, one could argue that such a sign creates a climate of harassment towards Jewish students, which is a Title VI violation. Now that Trump is threatening to withhold money from universities for condoning anti-semitic behavior, I can see where this kind of publicity could scare our university.

I don’t know if I’ll learn any more about this, but if I do I’ll impart it below.  All I can say is that IF displaying this kind of sign is permitted by University regulations, then it’s not kosher to investigate the person who posted it (that’s chilling of speech) or to make a public statement about it. All of this hangs on the “time, place, and manner” restrictions of speech at the University here, and people aren’t sure what the policy is.

Anyway, weigh in below with your opinion.

 

UPDATE: Although I swore I wouldn’t read the comments on my piece, I couldn’t resist. In fact, I’m having a high old time reading them, and even answering some of them. Some are good, but there are tons of them that grossly misunderstand or mischaracterize religion. As of 11:30 a.m. today, there were 436 comments.

If you’ve read here in the last few months, you’ll know about my kerfuffle with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which you can find described in various posts on this website. In short, Kat Grant, at the time a fellow at the FFRF, wrote an essay on the Freethought Now! website explaining their problems with defining sex (the author uses they/them pronouns). Grant finally came up with this unsatisfactory psychological definition: “A woman is whoever she says she is.”

I wanted to respond, and wrote FFRF co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor for permission to publish a short response (I was on the Honorary Board of Directors). She said “okay,” and after a few back-and-forths involving editing, it was published as a short piece called “Biology is not bigotry” (it’s now archived here and has been reprinted in other places).  The point of the title was, of course, that the biological definition of the sexes, based on the gamete type potentially produced (sperm or eggs), says almost nothing about how gender-nonconforming people should be treated or whether their rights should be curtailed (answer: almost never, though sports participation is one of the few exceptions).

The day after my piece went up, the FFRF took it down (Kat Grant’s piece is still online but is also archived here). Why? My best guess is that the young people at the FFRF raised a ruckus, but the FFRF also explained that my views were harmful and didn’t reflect the FFRF’s views (that was the point of the criticism, of course). Publishing my piece was, they said, “a mistake.”  No, it was censorship, pure and simple.

All this is explained in an op-ed I wrote that was published last night in the Wall Street Journal. If you click on the screenshot below, it should take you to a free version, or you can find it archived here.

I have to say that I didn’t choose the title (for I have not lost my atheism!), and the article was heavily edited. Yes, I do know that Gnosticism was not part of Catholicism, but I also know that Gnosticism also was a form of religion and superstition.

At any rate, I asked the WSJ to add the links to two assertions I made in the text, but they didn’t add those links. I’ve put them in the two paragraphs below taken from the WSJ piece, just so you can check up on how I quoted others:

The FFRF’s road to quasireligious views was a long one, paved by secular philosophers and the movements they spawned. It includes, for one thing, the Gnostic view that one’s true identity goes well beyond the physical body. As a Catholic website comparing Gnosticism with transgenderism notes, “The underlying concept is the same, that who we ‘really’ are is not our bodies, but rather some sort of interior ‘ego,’ or ‘I’ that constitutes our true self. It is incumbent that the body must conform to that true self.”

Some forms of feminism have made their contribution, with constructivists like Judith Butler arguing that sex is a social construct, not “a bodily given on which the construct of gender is artificially imposed, but . . . a cultural norm which governs the materialization of bodies.” This is a denial of evolution.

That’s pretty much all I have to say except to once again exculpate myself from transphobia. The purpose of “Biology is not bigotry” was to show that adhering to the gametic definition of “biological sex” used by many biologists does not make you someone who hates or wishes to erase trans people.  I do think that there are a few instances in which their “rights” clash with the “rights” of other groups (women athletes or women prisoners, for instance), but that doesn’t mean you’re a hater—only someone trying to adjudicate for yourself an important difference of opinion.

The only remaining question is this: why is Honorary Board of FFRF still up on the Internet when Religion News Service Reporter Yonat Shimron told me (and published) that Annie Laurie Gaylor assured Shimron that that Board had been dissolved?

As I’ve recounted before, reader Robert Lang‘s home and studio burned down in the Los Angeles-area wildfires earlier this year. Not only that, but he and his wife Diane had a new home under construction a block or so away in Altadena, and that burned down, too (the older house hadn’t yet been sold).  The New Yorker did an article on the disaster (Robert lost nearly every item in his personal origami collection), which you can read here if you subscribe. Robert and Diane are now living in a rented house nearby, and I have to say that, having had dinner with them when I was in L.A., they have a remarkably sanguine attitude towards it, which I much admire. They will of course rebuild the home and studio as soon as the city permits.

Robert sent in some photos of the damage, along with a narrative, that I’ll put below. His words are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

RWP: Death and Life in Altadena

As readers of this website may know, on January 7–8, the Los Angeles area town of Altadena was destroyed by the Eaton Fire, which was driven by 60–100 mph Santa Ana winds. (It was one of several fires that day—another big one, the Palisades Fire, laid similar waste to the town of Pacific Palisades). The Eaton Fire began near the boundary of suburb and wildland, but the winds drove it both miles into Altadena and miles across the front range of the San Gabriel mountains. Across the mountains, it turned the dense but dry chapparal-covered ridges and canyons into bare dirt and rock studded with tiny blackened stumps of the formerly lush vegetation.

The San Gabriels (and, for that matter, most areas of Southern California) are lands of extremes; just a month later, on February 13, an atmospheric river barreled into town, dropping in some places 12 inches of rain in 24 hours (one of those places being the rain gauge of my neighbor, one of the lucky few who survived the fire). The downpour sent black torrents of water and debris flows roaring down the now denuded canyons and carved channels through fans of debris that poured down the mountainsides (*), damaging—and in many places, completely erasing—the network of hiking trails that were used by tens of thousands of hikers each week, including myself. My (now former) studio backed up to the Angeles National Forest and I had gone hiking almost every day; photos from my hikes and from my trail cams at and near my studio have been occasional RWP entries in recent years.

The Forest Service has closed a large portion of the Angeles National Forest, the burned area and then some. Alas, we’re not allowed to see, or even go repair, any of the damage in the ANF for at least a year. However, one of the organizations that I volunteer with, the Arroyo Foothills Conservancy, has their own inholding in the ANF, and our trail maintenance team recently did a reconnaissance of their property and trails. There was devastation; but there was also new life, welcome signs of both resilience and recovery.

The start of the trail—if you can call it that. This hillside had been covered with a dense thicket of laurel sumac (Malosma laurina), California buckwheat (Eriogonum fasciculatum), black sage (Salvia mellifera), California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), and much else. Not much left. Once the vegetation is gone, there is nothing to stop the downpours from cutting deeply into the dirt that is left. That gully to the left used to be a road that the trail ran along:

Last year, an Eagle Scout project posted old-fashioned metal signs at all the trail junctions. The metal is still there. The trail is visible here and goes to the left of the burned tree where debris has restored the original slope. But there’s a dusting of greenery; after the rains, the plants immediately start to come back:

A Whipple yucca (Hesperoyucca whipplei ), resprouting. All of the leaves had been burned off, so the green you see is all new growth:

Looking up the hillside. There’s a trail weaving back and forth under all that deeply gullied loose gravel:

We were the first people to try to follow the trail since the fire and rain, but someone, or rather, something, had been there ahead of us; these are hoofprints of the California mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus californicus). The deer were already hard at work recreating their own trails. Of course, many of the original hiking trails had followed trails made by the indigenous Tongva—who had, in turn, initially followed animal trails long ago.

California sagebrush (Artemisia californica), coming back:

The denuded hills. You can see some of the surviving trails as light lines on the hills:

There are several species of live oak in California (I don’t know which one this is). They evolved with fire and even with their leaves and small branches toasted, they resprout almost immediately. A large oak in the San Gabriels has likely been through many fires. Sadly, the one way that fire can kill even a large oak is when it’s coming from a house next to the tree; many of the hundred-year-old oaks in the neighborhoods of Altadena will be lost because of the hot and long-burning torches of the houses that were next to them:

Another “oak”—which is not at all an oak—is Poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), a shrub, vine, or bush that is highly variable in form, widespread in the San Gabriels, and the bane of hikers due to the incredibly itchy rash it induces in most people who have the misfortune to brush against it. Its leaves turn bright red in the fall, but the new shoots are also brilliant, as seen here. Yes, it’s an irritant (at least to primates), but the deer love to eat it, and it’s an important source of browse for them:

New lush grass is springing up all over this hillside. Unfortunately, it’s a noxious invasive. Fountain grass (Cenchrus setaceum), an escapee from landscaping, outcompetes the local natives and is also fire-adapted; sadly, once established, it is close to impossible to eradicate. It will quickly dominate this hillside:

I like how the branching of the gullies mirrors the branching of the dead bushes, probably laurel sumac (Malosma laurina). Laurel sumac is incredibly resilient; I had several in the meadow behind my studio. I cut them down to the ground every spring for fire abatement, and by the next spring they’re four feet tall again. They’re just now burned off, but they, like the ones you see here, will be dense bushes again within a year:

Many animals died in the fires, but many survived; the herbivores are dining on the fresh young shoots, and the carnivores are dining on the herbivores. Our neighborhood trail cams have picked up coyote, bobcat, and even a mountain lion since the fire. We saw plenty of deer sign on our reconnaissance, and at the end, saw the source of some of the prints. This was shot with an iPhone at a distance, so it’s not particularly high resolution, but it is a nice reminder that Nature recovers and provides some inspiration for the rest of us Altadenans to go and do likewise:

(*) For an excellent overview of the cycle of fire and flood in L.A., see John McPhee’s New Yorker article “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” collected in his 1989 book, The Control of Nature.

I’ve been busy at the pond watching the ducks and giving a bit of a nosh to Mordecai and Esther, who are doing well. They look fat and happy, though I saw another drake at the pond today and the trio flew off together. (Yes, the males create a “rape culture” (the technical term is “forced copulation”) for the hens, who must constantly avoid ministrations of males other than their mate.) But now they are only two, and I check on them three times a day. Lots of people come by the pond and ask about the ducks, and when I tell them what I know (they like the names) they say that they can’t wait for the ducklings to appear.  But Esther hasn’t nested yet, though she’s preparing to, and once she does and sits on all the eggs she lays, it’ll be 28 days till the babies hatch.

First, the stars of the show. Look at this beautiful hen! Esther’s speculum (the blue feathers) are bright and beautiful.

And her mate (for the moment, at least), Mordecai, with his iridescent green head. A friend of mine— the advisor to Team Duck—guesses that both ducks are two years old au maximum. 

A video of Esther giving voice. She is one of the noisiest hens I’ve ever heard in the pond (remember, only females make the characteristic “quack,” while males make soft, low quacks). Here she is, loud and proud:

More quacking. I often think of having a wine-and-cheese party next to the pond, calling it “Cheese and Quackers.”

Esther is also busy “window shopping,” checking out the windowsills in adjacent buildings where she’ll build her next.  So far she seems to have settled on the second floor of Erman Hall, part of our department. She hasn’t yet chosen the right window yet, as she appears in various windows. She seems to be favoring the second floor. One of our new faculty members has most of the second floor, and when I told her about the window-shopping, she was excited that Esther might nest on her lab window. (She likes ducks and the pond.)

Here’s Esther scoping out a second-floor window in Erman (she’s at the end of the arrow). Although wild mallards are ground-nesters, for some reason even young hens at Botany Pond start scoping out windowsills to avoid predators and pesky drakes.  How they figure this out is a mystery to me, as they certainly can’t have the genes for nesting so high, and I doubt they learn it from watching other hens. One of my colleagues thinks that a window ledge is a “superliminal stimulus.” That is, mallard hens are known to nest on wooden platforms low to the ground or on bent-over tussocks of grass that are a foot or so from the ground. This protects them somewhat from predators like raccoons or possume. It could be that, like our evolved love of sweets and fats that now drives many us to a diet full of sugary foods, hens have an evolved preference for nesting a bit high, and that goes into overdrive when they see a safe windowsill with vines to anchor a nest.

More of Esther at Erman:

Here her head is tilted, a hen’s cutest pose:

After a nosh, both ducks like to preen, clean themselves by grooming and dunking underwater, and making big aplashes for futher cleaning. Here’s Esther doing all that. Note that her bill opens as if she’s quacking, but no sound comes out. I’m told that this is common in hens. When she rubs her head over her feathers, she’s oiling them.

Another loud bout of postprandial quacking and activity:

Ducks, like many birds, oil their feathers using the uropygial gland at the feathers near their tail.  Wikipedia says this about it:

It is a holocrine gland enclosed in a connective tissue capsule made up of glandular acini that deposit their oil secretion into a common collector tube ending in a variable number of pores (openings), most typically two. Each lobe has a central cavity that collects the secretion from tubules arranged radially around the cavity. The gland secretion is conveyed to the surface via ducts that, in most species, open at the top of a papilla (nipple-like structure).

More from VCA Animal Hospitals:

The uropygial gland is located on top of the tail base, on the lower back, just in front of the base of the tail feather quills. This area is generally featherless except for a tuft of feathers at the tip called the uropygial wick. The gland is bi-lobed, with two similar-sized sections.

The uropygial gland secretes a thick, transparent, complex oil (preening oil) that consists of diester waxes (uropygiols), fats, and fatty acids. Each lobe of the gland secretes oil through small papilla (nipple-like projections).

The oil secreted by the uropygial gland performs many functions, including waterproofing and maintaining the suppleness of the skin, feathers, and beak. The oil may have an antibacterial function.

During preening, a bird transfers this oil to its feathers by rubbing its head and beak against the oil gland and then spreading the oil over the rest of its feathers.

The uropygial gland is not normally visible unless the feathers are parted in this area or there is a problem with the gland.

Here you can see Esther rubbing her head and bill on the gland and then spreading it over her feathers.  They mostly use their beak, but also dive and splash because mixing the oils with water helps spread it through the feathers, giving the duck essential waterproofing. They also use their heads and flexible necks to spread the oils, so there’s no part of her body (save her “chin,” perhaps) that she can’t reach:

Here’s a thorough cleaning and oiling of her wings.  They don’t miss a feather! Ducks are immaculate, constantly grooming.

The drakes have to preen too, of course, as all mallards need to be waterproof and clean. Note Esther go for her gland at about 18 seconds in. Both ducks also engage in diving:

One more video of Esther preening. Notice how she goes for the uropygeal glands and uses her flexible neck to spread oils from her head and beak.

After bath time it’s nap time.  They like to lie on the grass and cement on the pond edge in the afternoon, warmed by the sun to their west.

Notice how cryptic Esther is compared to Mordecai. His visibility is the price he pays for attracting a mate, but the females’ color and pattern help then hide from predators (and horny drakes). You can see her hunkered down to the right, looking like a clump of brown grass.

Here’s a cartoon map of the campus from 1932, labeled as ” Elizabeth Moore (“Betty”) Fisher’s (PhB’22) 1932 cartoon campus map. (University of Chicago Special Collections).”  You can see the whole thing enlarged here (map below, click to enlarge):

and, enlarging Botany Pond, you see a lone duck (I added the arrow in the second picture below). Botany Pond was built in 1899 as part of the biology group’s research facilities, and you can see some early photos here.  The pond and surroundings were designed by the landscape architects John Charles and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., two brothers whose firm designed many notable spaces.

More than 100 years of ducks!

The pond has been under renovation for two years, as cracks in the walls, and an accumulation of schmutz, called for a ton of renovation. During that time the pond was empty and we were bereft from the lack of ducks (many also greatly miss the turtles and fish, which will be put back into the pond). During this slow period, I tended the squirrels, giving them high-class nuts like pecans and hazelnuts:

Fingers crossed for a good summer and a healthy crop of ducklings!

Yes. they say that age is “just a number,” but it isn’t in one sense: the bigger the number, the closer we are to taking The Big Nap. But in the birthday/anniversary sense, yes, it’s significant—though only because humans evolved with ten digits. And Eric Clapton has one of these anniversaries: he was born on March, 30, 1945, and so turns eighty today.

I’m speaking subjectively, of course, but I consider Clapton the greatest rock guitarist of all time (Rolling Stone ranks him at #2, after Jimi Hendrix, who has a credible claim to the top spot). Further, Clapton was coauthor and performer of what I see as the greatest rock song of all time: “Layla” (note that it was recorded in 1970, when Clapton was only 25).

“Layla” is a two-part song, as you’ll hear below, with the rocking seven-note intro that identifies it immediately. Later it segues into a slow part with piano, and I usually stop listening at that point. So I guess I can say that the best rock song in history is the FIRST part of “Layla.”

It was the feature song of the only album made by one of Clapton’s groups: Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, featuring Derek and the Dominoes. Here’s that group below: (L–R: Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, Bobby Whitlock, Eric Clapton).

Atco Records, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Another reason I love “Layla” is the backstory, which every rock aficionado knows. It’s the heartfelt cry of a man in love with a woman who’s already married. She was Patti Boyd, who was married to George Harrison when Clapton fell in love with her. (Harrison and Boyd divorced two years after the song, and Clapton married her in 1979. It wasn’t the love of a lifetime, for they divorced a decade later.

This is one song where every word tells the story of that unrequited love.  Here’s a great live version (there are several), performed at Madison Square Garden in 1999, when Clapton was 54.  He hasn’t lost a lick, and the fantastic solo begins at 2:56, when he makes the guitar scream and wail, playing out his pain.

You can stop listening at 4:05, when the slow part begins, though I know some readers will find it as good as (and inseparable from) the first part.

Yes, I know that Clapton has a bit of a dark side. He’s known for bizarre behavior, including racist and anti-vaccine rants.  But long after he’s taken the Big Nap, people will still be listening to and marveling at his music. Nobody has ever played the axe better.

Clapton had tons of good songs. Some of my favorites are “Lay Down Sally” (1977), “Promises” (a ringer from 1978), and one more I’ll show below, “Badge,” (1969), co-written with George Harrison, who plays on the recorded track by Cream.  I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Badge,” which came out when I was in college; I was mesmerized by the solo.  Here it is live from 2001, with an extended solo in the middle and then another long one (not on the recording) at the end.

And so it’s a happy birthday to Slowhand!

Feel free to give your favorite Clapton song in the comments, or take issue with my ranking “Layla” as the best rock song ever (but you have to name your choice).

This being Sunday, we have a dollop of John Avise‘s photos of North American butterflies. John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 16 

This week continues my 18-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  The following is an anecdote rather than a controlled observation, but I wonder whether other WEIT readers have a similar impression:  Twenty years ago, butterflies of many species seem to me to have been far more abundant than they are today.

Silvery Blue (Glaucopsyche lygdamus), male:

Silvery Blue, male underwing:

Silvery Blue, female:

Silvery Checkerspot (Chlosyne nycteis):

Silvery Checkerspot, underwing:

Sleepy Duskywing (Erynnis brizo):

Sonoran Skipper (Polites sonora), upperwing:

Sonoran Skipper, underwing:

Spicebush Swallowtail (Papilio troilus):

Spring Azure (Celastrina laden):

Sylvan Hairstreak (Satyrium sylvinus):

Tailed Copper (Lycaena arota), upperwing:

Tailed Copper, underwing:

Bill Maher’s latest news-and-comedy shtick (8½ minutes) deals with “Trump Devotion Syndrome”:  the sycophancy that imbues the cowards of America who don’t want to offend the Orange Man.  Lots of Presidential rump osculation here! Putting his image on Mount Rushmore and on American currency? But of course!

Oh, and there’s the “transgender mice” he mentioned.  (“We were splicing their genes, not making them compete in women’s sports.”) All in all, this bit is what the kids say is a “sick burn” for MAGA.  And Maher is peeved!

John McWhorter and journalist Rikki Schlott are there, too.

This is a good one; don’t miss it.

Here you go: the 18 celebrity ailurophiles featured, including photos and videos of their moggies. They include Taylor Swift (of course), Drew Barrymore, Ricky Gervais, Kate Beckinsale, Katy Perry, Martha Stewart, Nicole Kidman, Ellen DeGeneres, Ed Sheeran, Mark Ruffalo, Russell Brand, Robert Downey, Jr., Miley Cyrus, Kat Dennings, James Franco, Jesse Eisenberg (he was on Team Cat when we debated at the New Yorker Festival), Mayim Bialik, and Cameron Diaz.

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From FB; a video of cats going down stairs, most of them awkwardly.. I like “Slinky Kitty”.

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Did you know that there is an American Museum of the House Cat in Sylva, North Carolina? I discovered it when Facebook foisted a short video on me. Here’s where Sylva is, and it’s not far from Asheville (birthplace and burial site of Thomas Wolfe) or Pigeon Forge (home of “Dollywood”).

Some information from the site:

The American Museum of the House Cat is dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and interpretation of art, artifacts, and literature of the HouseCat for the purposes of education, historical perspective, aesthetic enjoyment, and for the significance of the unique five million year relationship between man and the domesticated feline.

The Museum was closed for several years, but opened up again in 2023, and is still active. Admission for adults is $10, and $5 for children. Here’s a ten-minute video of a visit to the Museum by “Cashew Paul”.  This looks like a MUST for all cat lovers.

I have two Chessie System playing cards: rarities (see 5:30). You need to know who Chessie is, along with her kittens Nip and Tuck and their father Peek (doesn’t he look proud?). Note also the medieval “petrified cat”, a signed Warhol cat, and a ton of cat art, clocks, ceramics, pendants, stuffed toys, and so on.  And a display of FELIX, my favorite cartoon cat.

And there’s a movie about the curator, Dr. Harold Sims, which I found on YouTube (see below). The blurb on the site:

Little Works of Art, a documentary by Kim Best, is the story of our Curator, Dr, Harold Sims.  Serving as an introduction to our American Museum of the House Cat, this short film details the love and passion Dr, Sims feels for the Cat.  The Cary Theater featured Little Works of Art for their Local Premiers Series in November of 2017.  Little Works of Art then debuted at the 1st Annual New York Cat Film Festival in December of 2017 with the awarded honor of being chosen as the title feature for the Program Two and has been touring the country throughout 2018 with stops in cities and towns from the West Coast to the East Coast delighting cat lovers everywhere.  In 2018 Little Works of Art was one of the films officially selected for the LongLeaf Film Festival held at the North Carolina Museum of History.

Voilà: “Little works of art.”  Don’t miss Dr. Sims’s passion for cats, and what he wants done with his body after he dies. And you get to see more stuff from the Cat Museum.

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Lagniappe: I saw this photo on the FB site Meow, and I needed to find out the details. I found them, of course, on YouTube, on a news report in the video below:

Meet Suki and her staff, Francesca Bourdier.  After Suki attended all the Zoom classes that Bourdier watched, Suki got her own cap and own, but not really a diploma. That’s okay, though.

We have two new videos from Tara Tanaka in Florida, featuring Wood Storks mating and Great Egrets proffering sticks.  The mating looks like an ungainly act!

Tara’s captions are indented; her Vimeo site is here and her Flickr site is here).

During spring and early summer the sound of male Wood Storks clacking their beaks against the female’s beak as they mate is can be heard frequently from our yard, but we rarely see them. I videoed a pair last week, as their nest-neighbors looked on. If the male had arms, I think he would be really good at patting his head and rubbing his stomach at the same time. The light was hitting their wings in a way that you can see the beautiful iridescent green in their wing feathers that usually just look black. Click to start the videos (there’s also an arrow at lower left): My heart is so full from all of your kind comments on the Great Egret photo and the Wood Storks mating that I wanted to share a video that I shot of the male Great Egret bringing a stick to the nest. I usually shoot video at 60 fps, but switched to 120 fps so I could slow it down and you could see how beautiful his plumes are and how graceful he is as he lands. Hard to believe that many herons and egrets were almost hunted to extinction to provide feathers for women’s hats.

Enjoy this very short, slow-motion video!:

Between reading science stuff that I’m going to write about elsewhere, and my pleasure reading of a mammoth book (not one about the woolly mammoth!), I don’t have many books to report on. In fact, I’m about to be at a loss for books to read, and thus will tell you what I’ve read as a way of extracting suggestions from readers.

For a while I was on a Holocaust kick, and (as I think I mentioned earlier) I read The End of the Holocaust, by Alvin Rosenfeld, which you can get from Amazon by clicking below. His thesis is that the true horror of the Holocaust has been lessened by everyone using the word to mean “any bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” The book is especially concerned with Anne Frank, who, he says, was just one of a number of young victims who wrote about their situation, and somehow the attention devoted to her alone lessens the experience of other victims. Well, you can argue about that, but I think the book is worth reading now that words like “genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “Holocaust” are being thrown around willy nilly in a way that distorts their original meaning.

After that I read another short but very famous book about the Holocaust, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Click below to see the Amazon link:

Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew, was taken to the camps with his family when he was young, and managed to survive two of them, writing several books about his experiences (this one, like the others, is either partly fictional or completely fictional but Night is mostly true). Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they did not survive (they were probably gassed). Throughout the book he tries to stay with his father and keep him alive, but the father finally expires on a forced, foodless march through the snow as the prisoners are marched to another camp by the Germans as the Russians approach. Wiesel survived, but just barely.

After the war, Wiesel dedicated himself to writing and lecturing about the Holocaust, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Night is one of the best books about the Holocaust, at least in conveying its horrors, and was recommended by Rosenfeld in the book above. I too recommend it highly, and, at 120 pages, it’s a short read.

Here’s a photo of Buchenwald five days after its liberation by the Red Army, showing the arrangement of bunks and the skeletal nature of those still alive. Wiesel is in the photo; I’ve circled him next to one bed post. What better proof can you have that you really did experience what you wrote about?

Buchenwald concentration camp, photo taken April 16, 1945, five days after liberation of the camp. Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the bunk post. From Wikimedia Commons

And below is the behemoth I just finished, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Circle Award in 2009. Click the cover to go to the Amazon site.

Several people recommended this book highly, and while I think the 730-page monster was very good, I didn’t find it a world classic. It recounts the life of Thomas Cromwell, who started life as the son of a blacksmith but worked his way up to being the head minister of Henry VIII. It deals largely with the intrigues and relationships of Henry’s court, which reminds me of Trump’s America.  Henry was sometimes amiable, but would ruthlessly order the death of those who crossed him, including Anne Boleyn, who met her end simply because she couldn’t provide Henry with a son that could be his heir.  Sir Thomas More is a prominent character, and he too meets his end for refusing to affirm that Anne Boleyn was the lawful queen. Everyone tiptoes around in constant fear of the KIng.

The book is quite involved, and has a big list of characters which are listed on the first page and to which one must constantly refer. It is the convoluted plot and surfeit of characters that made the book hard for me to read. Perhaps I’m getting old and my concentration is waning.  But the dialogue is fascinating, and parts of the book are quite lyrical, with the prose style changing quickly from conversational to rhapsodic. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Mantel’s writing of the book, and the effort shows.

Mantel said she spent five years researching and writing the book, trying to match her fiction to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history she created a card catalogue, organised alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes indicating where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. “You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can’t have him in London if he’s supposed to be somewhere else,” she explained.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mantel stated her aim to place the reader in “that time and that place, putting you into Henry’s entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It’s to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”

The book (part of a trilogy) was made into a mini-series for t.v., and here’s the trailer. It feature Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. Has anyone seen it?

So that’s my reading. Now I ask readers to recommend books for me—and other readers. They can be fiction or nonfiction, so long as they’re absorbing.  I’m not sure I’m yet ready now for another 700-page novel (Amazon’s version says only 600-odd pages, but I have an older edition).  Please put your recommendations, as well as the subject of the book, in the comments.

Reader James Blilie has returned with some recent photos of California. James’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the pictures by clicking on them. The road he traveled down is my favorite one in the U.S., and, I think, the most scenic. I used to travel it when I went from Davis, CA. to Death Valley to collect flies.

Here is a set from our trip to the southern California desert in January 2025.

We again traveled down US 395 through eastern California to the Palm Desert area for some warmth and sunlight to break up the Pacific Northwest winter.  We returned up I-5 through California to Weed, California where we turned off onto US Hwy 97 through eastern Oregon.

These are mostly landscape photos, which is my thing.  As you can tell from the photos, we were lucky with the weather.

Descending to Mono Lake from Conway Summit:

Moonrise over the White Mountains from the Owens River valley, near Bishop, California:

Mount Whitney range from near Lone Pine, California (also in the Owens Valley):

A shot from hiking in the Andreas Canyon, near Palm Springs, California.  The canyons in the San Jacinto range above Palm Springs have flowing rivers and are full of life:

Next are two shots from a hike in Joshua Tree National Park.  Mojave Yucca (Yucca schidigera) and Teddy Bear Cholla (Cylindropuntia bigelovii).  Both of them shouting at you:  “don’t touch!”:

Next are two shots from the Thousand Palms Oasis.  An overview of the site, which has thousands of California Fan Palms (Washingtonia filifera) and then a show of the palm foliage:

Then a few shots from our homeward journey.

At a rest area on northbound I-5 in the Central Valley of California, we found olive trees growing with lots of fallen fruit underneath them.  (Olea europaea):

Mount McLoughlin and Upper Klamath Lake at dawn (Oregon):

Equipment:

Olympus OM-D E-M5 (micro 4/3 camera, crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35mm, f/2.8 ASPH.  (24mm-70mm equivalent)
LUMIX 35-100mm  f/2.8 G Vario  (70-200mm equivalent)
LUMIX G VARIO 7-14mm f/4.0 ASPH

Okay, my oil is changed, I have new wiper blades, car is lubed, all fluids checked, and my car is in pretty good shape for a 2000 Honda (still haven’t reached 90,000 miles). But I have stuff to do, and so you can enjoy this ZeFrank video (an old one): true facts about the duck. The most exciting part of the movie is, of course, the drake’s corkscrew penis.  This is an early ZeFrank video, so it’s short and there’s a dearth of science.

Meanwhile, Mordecai and Esther are doing well, and Esther is investigating windows for her nest. We think she’s picked one out now, and there is plenty of quacking, splashing, and diving. Tomorrow a Chicago Maroon writer will interview me about the ducks, and I hope they do a good article. I want the campus to learn about Esther and Mordecai so they are taken care of as a University asset. Students are already stopping frequently to gawk at and photograph our mallards.

Mary Rasmussen lives in Chicago, but has photographed plenty of wildlife. Her photos are below, with her captions and IDs indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

My Backyard on the Chicago River

My little yard in a lively neighborhood of Chicago backs up to a branch of the Chicago River. This is not the coveted motor-navigable part of the river. This part of the river is channelized, often clogged with debris, and across the river are canyons of apartment buildings. As a kid we rode our bikes to the river but were warned to stay out of it. It was considered pretty much an open sewer. That is changing.

From GROK: “Fish species that vanished from the river—like largemouth bass, bluegill, and even otters—have returned, with biodiversity surveys noting over 70 species now present, up from just a handful decades ago. The river’s still not pristine (urban runoff and legacy pollutants like PCBs linger), but it’s clean enough that people kayak, fish, and even swim in it—things unthinkable a generation ago.

So, yeah, it’s gotten a lot cleaner—less a sewer, more a living river. Still a work in progress, though.”

It is a hopeful sign of spring when the shopping carts are thawing from the ice.

Coyotes (Canis latrans) are pretty common here and they can make some real racket howling. This fellow is checking for spilled birdseed.

When there are no birds at the feeders and the yard is quiet I check for hawks. Cooper’s hawks (Astur cooperii) are frequent visitors. Sometimes they perch on the backs of our lawn chairs.

Lots of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) too. I saw this young deer a little after dawn eating my violets. They can easily leap over the chain link fences and go from yard to yard:

Eastern cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus floridanus) eat almost everything. It’s good they’re so cute.

There is a family of raccoons (Procyon lotor) that lives in a hollow branch of a Cottonwood tree along the river. The branch overhangs our yard and makes for lots of entertainment.

It was over 90 degrees on this day and there were at least 3 or 4 raccoons in that branch. It must have been stifling:

American Crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) are often in the trees or on the power lines in the backyard. One day they were making such a fuss I went out to see what was happening. It was fledging season and I thought they could be upset about a neighbor’s cat moving through the yard:

The animal was moving so slowly through the grass that I went inside, grabbed my camera, and realized that it was not a cat. It went under the fence, turned around and stared at me. Not afraid. I checked the photo and realized it’s an American mink! (Neogale vison) They are making a comeback along the river. I’ve seen them twice in my yard since then:

This female wood duck (Aix sponsa)came last year to check for spilled seed under the feeders. I hope to see her and her mate this year:

Per Grok: “Urban wildlife diversity often surpasses that of farmland because cities, despite their challenges, are heterogeneous landscapes. They offer a mosaic of habitats—gardens, vacant lots, forest fragments, and even business parks—that can support a range of species, from songbirds to small mammals like foxes. Research from the last decade shows that urban areas can have higher or comparable mammal diversity to wild spaces, especially when green spaces are preserved.”

For fun I also asked Grok (X’s A.I. app) to create an image of my spirit animal. Grok checks the internet and creates an animal based on what it finds or information that I give it about myself. This is what it gave me. I’m not sure about the hat, but an owl is better than I expected. This was done with Grok 2. Grok 3 seems to generate less personal images:

I use a Nikon D500 camera with a NIKKOR 200-500mm lens.

Sometimes oceanic islands—islands formed de novo from beneath the sea, as with volcanic and coral islands—harbor endemic species that don’t seem like their ancestors could have gotten there. Birds, insects, and plants can easily disperse to distant islands from continents, but reptiles, amphibians, and mammals have a harder time, for they have no easy way to cross big expanses of salt water. The absence of the last three groups on oceanic islands, as compared to continental islands like Britain and Sri Lanka, was first noticed by Darwin, who used it as evidence for evolution in The Origin.

But sometimes you do find reptiles, amphibians, and mammals on isolated oceanic islands. The Galápagos Islands, for example, are famous for their marine and land iguanas, as well as other lizards that are found nowhere else. And although Madagascar was once connected to Africa, primates got there long after this separation had occurred, crossing the expanse of sea between the continent and the island. The geographic split occurred about 160 million years ago.  But after that, about 50 mya, a primate made it to the island and radiated into the many species of lemurs found nowhere else. How did this primate (and it must have been either one pregnant female or two or more individuals of different sex) get there? The likely explanation is “rafting”, explained in Wikipedia:

Once part of the supercontinent Gondwana, the island of Madagascar has been isolated since it broke away from eastern Africa (~160 mya), Antarctica (~80–130 mya), and India (~80–90 mya).  Since ancestral lemurs are thought to have originated in Africa around 62 to 65 mya, they must have crossed the Mozambique Channel, a deep channel between Africa and Madagascar with a minimum width of about 560 km (350 mi). In 1915, paleontologist William Diller Matthew noted that the mammalian biodiversity on Madagascar (including lemurs) can only be accounted for by random rafting events, where very small populations rafted from nearby Africa on tangled mats of vegetation, which get flushed out to sea from major rivers.

There can also be smaller rafts, like individual trees or small masses of plant material, and these can carry things like small amphibians or invertebrates.  But the new PNAS paper below documents what is now the longest known rafting event among all terrestrial vertebrates: the dispersal of a land iguana from North America to Fiji. That’s a distance of over 8,000 km, or about 5,000 miles. Click the screenshot below to read the paper, and you can find the pdf here.

There are four species of the large iguana Brachylophus on the Pacific islands composing Fiji, where they’re endemic (Tonga also had a giant iguana that’s now extinct).  Here is one of the species studied in this paper, Brachylophus bulabula (this is a male):

JSutton93, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

How did these reptiles get there and where did they come from? And when did this dispersal event take place? The first thing we need to know to answer this is what is the closest living (or fossil) relative to the Fijian species. It turns out that using DNA to gauge relationships also gives us an estimate of dispersal time using the calibrated “molecular clock,” in which DNA divergence, often calibrated with fossil data, can give us both genealogical relationships and divergence times.

The authors used more than 4,000 genes in each of 14 species of iguanas from eight of the nine known genera. It turned out, as the iguana family tree shows below, that the closest related genus to Brachylophus is the genus Dipsosaurus, which contains two living species, both found in North America:

• The Desert iguana Dipsosaurus dorsalis, found in Baja California and SW North America,
• Catalina desert iguana, Dipsosaurus catalinensis, found on Santa Catalina Island in the gulf between Mexico and Baja California.

Here’s the Desert Iguana:

Wilson44691, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

And here’s the DNA-based family tree. The two genera at the top) are clearly more closely related than Brachylophus is to any other species, and they branched off from other genera of iguanas early during the divergence of the entire group (click all figures to enlarge them):

(from the paper): Phylogenomic timetree of iguanas based on StarBeast3 analysis of 150 loci (50 AHE, UCE, RELEC) and three fossil calibrations (for brevity, only two calibrations labeled and outgroups removed), and time-stratified DEC+J analysis from BioGeoBEARS using areas allowed and manual dispersal matrices, and additional areas added to accommodate all alternative hypotheses for the origin of Fijian iguanas. Pie charts indicate the relative probability of the possible ancestral geographic ranges at nodes and at splits immediately after the corresponding cladogenetic event, and tip boxes indicate extant species ranges. Stars at nodes indicate fossil calibrations. The globe inset shows a representation of the transoceanic dispersal of iguanas from North America to Fiji that occurred at the divergence between Dipsosaurus and Brachylophus or along the Brachylophus branch.

Note that both of the North American regions are dry and these iguanas are adapted to a hot, low-water ecosystem.  The relationship between these two genera as sister taxa is very strong, and the divergence time between the two genera is estimated at about 34 million years. That fits nicely with the time that Fiji was created by volcanic activity—about 39 million years ago.  It is likely, given this tree, that the Fiji iguanas came from a North American ancestor, and that would mean rafting 8000 km.

Could it have come from somewhere else? Other hypotheses are possible.  Early biogeographers posited huge land bridges between Pacific islands and the continents, but there is no evidence that such bridges existed. They could have island-hopped from SE Asia or traveled from Gondwana before it broke up.  Other models are possible, but these can be tested using various models, and also looking to see if there are fossil iguanas in other places that are more related to Brachylophus.  Here’s a figure showing some of the models tested, but only one, with the lizard icon on it, was supported by the data. That’s a long trip, and given the size of these animals, it must have involved a fairly substantial raft.

 

But could an iguana really survive floating on a raft of vegetation over that immense distance? Well, for one thing there are currents that go that way, which would speed up the voyage, estimated by the authors to have taken between 80-120 days.

Can an iguana live that long without fresh water (there may have been food on the “raft”)?  The answer is “probably,” because during cold weather many lizards undergo a period of metabolic and activity dormancy called brumation, during which they do not eat (though they need water). Here’s what the authors say:

 Herbivorous iguanids forgo food for months at a time during brumation, and extant Dipsosaurus brumate from October–March. However, floating vegetation mats are a known substrate for oceanic dispersal, so iguanas rafting from North America to Fiji could have had a food source during their journey. Additionally, some iguanas have other traits that may augment their capacity to survive overwater dispersal, including resistance to heat and dehydration. For example, Dipsosaurus have the highest voluntary thermal maximum temperature among lizards and largely inhabit areas without permanent freshwater.

The only thing that concerns me with this hypothesis is this: where did the rafting iguanas get fresh water? The authors don’t really address this, but do mention iguanas’ resistance to dehydration. Also, there’s rain in the ocean, and any rain falling on a raft could be sucked up by the lizards aboard.

The best hypothesis, then, seems to be rafting, and the authors concatenate all the evidence supporting it:

The combination of evidence supporting oceanic rafting from North America to Fiji is 1) phylogenomic analyses that support a sister taxon relationship between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus, 2) the distribution of fossil iguanids, extant Dipsosaurus, and most other extant iguanids in North America, 3) statistical biogeographic analyses that favor long-distance dispersal from North America over alternative hypotheses, including dispersal via Eurasia, South America, Antarctica, and/or Oceania, and 4) the late Paleogene divergence time between Brachylophus and Dipsosaurus.

Finally, just for fun, here’s are two bar graphs from the paper showing the greatest distances between islands harboring iguanids and the nearest mainland (first graph) and the same graph for diofferent groups of terrestrial vertebrates.  The captions for the two graphs include this: “A) Distances between island and mainland for extant iguanid lizards and (B) distances for other proposed long-distance, overwater dispersal events in terrestrial vertebrates.”

Among iguanas, Brachylophus is The King, by far!:

Looking at all vertebrates, Brachylophuis still the king!

The asterisks in this graph indicate that stepping-stone dispersal is possible, with the distances for that scenario given by the white line across the two bars. The second longest dispersal, leaving out the asterisked animals involve Cadeidae, otherwise known as Cuban keel-headed worm lizards. They are found on Cuba but are said to have dispersed some 6000 km. This genus comprises two Cuban species and is enigmatic, but is thought to have rafted from the Mediterranean!

And so we have many instances of “founder-event speciation”: ancestors making it to distant islands and forming new species (in this case, four) after they land on islands or archipelagos.  Note that this differs from the old and largely discredited theory of “founder-EFFECT speciation,” which posited that weird genetic stuff happens on small founding populations that speeds up formation of new groups. That theory was promoted by, among others, Stephen Jay Gould.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “whip,” came with the note, “You shouldn’t flip tables, Jesus.” It’s about as scathing an indictment of Islamism that I’ve seen in this strip. Mo, of course, is as clueless as ever.

Reader Mark Otten sent in some lovely photos taken by his wife Dianne. Mark’s (or Dianne’s) IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These photos were taken by Dianne over the last 3 years in various locations in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio area.

Great blue heron (Ardea herodias) in a rock divide between two constructed ponds.

Female northern flicker (Colaptes auratus) showing the brightly-colored underside of the tail feathers typical of the eastern “yellow-shafted” form:

Spotted sandpiper (Actitis macularius):

Yellow-billed cuckoo (Coccyzus americanus):

In July, 2023 a limpkin (Aramus guarauna), normally resident in Florida, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, showed up at a county park in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati.  It stayed around for about 2 weeks causing quite a stir among local birders.  Limpkins feed mostly on freshwater snails and mussels:

This female killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) and her mate used an existing ring of rocks along the margin of a walking path to make their nest.  Her four eggs are visible directly below her:

A killdeer chick a few days after hatching:

Male American kestrel (Falco sparverius):

The same kestrel a few minutes later with a grasshopper meal:

In 1979 there were only 4 confirmed nesting pairs of bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) in Ohio, all of them along Lake Erie. Eagles have since become a familiar sight in many locations.  A 2020 survey by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources recorded more than 700 eagle nests throughout the state.  This one, and its mate, have been nesting in a county park (about 11 miles north of downtown Cincinnati) for the last several years:

A family of red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) denned under the porch of a nearby church in 2022.  We were able to observe and photograph the adults and pups over several evenings.

One of the adult foxes with a light snack.  I’m not sure of the species, maybe a mockingbird:

There were at least 4 pups.  These 3 were playing in the lawn in front of the church:

We first observed this piebald white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) fawn in June, 2023 but were not able to get a good photo until late July.  The fawn was observed off and on until November, 2023.  We have not seen it since:

Piebald white-tailed deer fawn and (presumably) its sibling”

Here’s an archived link to an ad for a consultant oral maxillofacial surgeon at Dunedin Hospital. The curious thing—well, not so curious given that it’s New Zealand,—is the list of required qualifications. Click to read (a New Zealand dollar is worth about 57¢ in U.S. currency):

Some of the details:

About the role

In this newly created role that will be hospital based, we are seeking an Oral Maxillofacial Surgeon for a fulltime, permanent position at Dunedin Public Hospital. We would also welcome candidates with sub-specialty interests.

The successful applicant will be expected to provide the full scope of general Oral and Maxillofacial surgery including but not limited to the management of  facial trauma, pathology, infections and orthognathic surgery.  Duties includes active participation in inpatient and outpatient clinics, clinical audit, quality, clinical guidelines/pathways, professional development, appraisal and risk management.

Given the catchment area Te Whatu Ora Southern services, you will be able to take on cases that are diverse and complex; providing you with a rewarding role. There will be an on-call roster in place, this is set at 1:3. Our links with the University of Otago and affiliation with the Faculty of Dentistry means that you may be involved in the teaching of Dental and Medical Students.

Mōu ake | About you

• Eligibility for vocational registration with the Dental Council of New Zealand
• We would also welcome applications from advanced trainees.
• FRACDS (OMS) or equivalent board certification
• Excellent communication and time management skills

Here’s the part that stamps it as “from New Zealand”. I’ve added links and the translation from Māori, the latter in brackets:

You will also need:

• • Competency with te ao Māori [the Māori worldview], tikanga [the “right way to doing things” according to the Māori], and te reo Māori [the Māori language] or a commitment to starting your journey and taking ownership of your learning and growth
  • Experience in projects / initiatives which give effect to Te Tiriti [the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi] principals [sic] and frameworks, and the application of Mātauranga Māori [Māori “ways of knowing”] and Kaupapa Māori  [“Māori customary practices”] approaches, particularly as they apply in healthcare settings.

In other words, you need to know a great deal about Māori culture and also speak or be learning the language (however, out of 978,000 Māori in NZ, only 55% say they have “some knowledge” of the language and only about 5% say they can speak the language well.  This doesn’t say how many Māori understand English, but it’s surely close to 100%. The requirement that you either know the language or are learning it is, then, largely superfluous; in this way the ad is looking for people who can signal their virtue.

Finally, we have the ubiquitous but ambiguous requirement that the applicant have engaged in “projects/initiatives” that “give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi,” another completely superfluous requirement. “Te Tiriti,” as it’s called, has nothing to do with surgery; it simply specified in 1840 that the Māori would surrender sovereignty to England, but would keep and rule over their lands and villages, and would also acquire all the rights of a British citizen.  If you can tell me which “Te Tiriti-themed” projects are essential to have engaged in for this surgeon’s job, and why those projects are necessarily, I’d be glad to hear it.

The is once again an example of how indigenous people leverage their supposed modern oppression to get more “stuff,” how New Zealand has surrendered to that “victimhood” approach, and, above all, how merit is given at least equal priority to indigeneity. (If you’re a great surgeon but know squat about Te Tiriti and can’t speak Māori, I doubt you’d even be considered for the job.)

Over at Point of Order, which is consistently critical of this kind of stuff, Yvonne van Dongen takes the ad apart. Click below to read her snarky but accurate critique:

An excerpt:

If you had impacted wisdom teeth requiring surgery, would it comfort you to know the consultant surgeon was competent in te ao Māori?

Or, say, if you needed oral cancer surgery, is it a bonus if the person operating on your mouth has had experience in projects and initiatives which give effect to Te Tiriti principles?

How about if you had to go under the knife for facial trauma – does it ease your anxiety knowing that the consultant surgeon is steeped in the application of Mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori approaches, particularly as they apply in healthcare settings?

Southern Health thinks the answer is yes to all the above.

This week an advertisement on their careers website for a consultant oral maxillofacial surgeon at Dunedin Hospital stated that competency in te ao Māori, tikanga, and te reo Māori was a requirement. Or at the very least “a commitment to starting your journey and taking ownership of your learning and growth.”

As well, they asked for

“Experience in projects / initiatives which give effect to Te Tiriti principals (sic) and frameworks, and the application of Mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori approaches, particularly as they apply in healthcare settings.”

Apart from spelling principles incorrectly, Southern Health clearly thinks they know what the principles of the Treaty are, even though this is a topic hotly debated thanks to Act’s Treaty Principles Bill.

Apparently, after inquiries from the press, New Zealand Health is reassessing these requirements, and pondering that wondering whether, after all, just merit and experience should be the qualifications. The answer, of course, is “yes.”