The New Dawn rose, Plant Patent 1 Photo: 1971Markus; Wikimedia Commons One of the things I love about working at the Linda Hall Library is the frequency of which I'm exposed, often unexpectedly, to really cool books. One book, or rather a series of books, is the collection of United States plant patents from the... Continue Reading →
The Hoatzin: Celebrating one of Nature’s Oddities
Photo: Aaron Pomerantz For my last post of 2023, I’m paying tribute to one of my favorite birds: the Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin). Along the verdant waterways of the Amazon, a bird that redefines the term 'living fossil' flaps its ungainly way through the foliage. The Hoatzin, the scruffy Goth of the avian world, is a... Continue Reading →
All Hail the Pumpkin King: The Spellbinding Saga of the World’s Favorite Squash
The pumpkin, cultivated since ancient times, has become a cultural icon, symbolizing fall, Halloween, culinary tradition and modern commerce.
International Bat Appreciation Day
In case you missed it, International Bat Appreciation Day was April 17. It's easy to overlook, crammed up against Earth Day on April 22 (today, in fact). The bat appreciation celebration was founded by Bat Conservation International (BCI) in 1982 to recognize the importance of protecting them. And they truly do deserve our appreciation. Far... Continue Reading →
Wild Love: A Valentine’s Day Natural History
Valentine’s Day is almost upon us. But we’ve had warning - the decorations started going up in stores the day after Christmas. As a holiday, though, it almost keeps pace with Christmas. The first incarnation of the celebration may go back to Ancient Roman times, with the fertility festival of Lupercalia. St. Valentine himself could... Continue Reading →
This Is Not My Blog Post. Or, Why the Giraffe Has Two Necks.
What you are about to read is not my writing, not all of it, anyway. It’s been generated by an AI bot with prompts from me. I’m using "frase" technology, because I'm too impatient to wait to be let into the ChatGPT website. So, you get onto frase and scroll down (way down) to the... Continue Reading →
A Little World Within Itself: My First Voyage to the The Galápagos
In 1835, Charles Darwin wrote these worlds in the Voyage of the Beagle: “The archipelago is a little world within itself, or rather a satellite attached to America, whence it has derived a few stray colonists, and has received the general character of its indigenous population.” Chapter XVII: "Galapagos Archipelago" (second edition, 1845), entry for... Continue Reading →
Jackson Wild, CITES & UNDP – Raising the Profile of Wildlife in Peril
Mother and baby lion-tailed macaque. Image: Nagaraj Papanna 2017 A mother lion-tailed macaque cradles her baby against her, undisturbed by the camera crew in close proximity. Polar bears trudge across sludgy ice floes to find ringed seals in winter. A herd of pronghorn antelope bounds across the screen and condors fly high over herds of... Continue Reading →
The Chicken that Plays Puccini: A Question of Animal Awareness
The other day, while looking for something to watch on YouTube, I was offered up in the side-bar a series of videos of a chicken playing the piano. Intrigued, I clicked on the link and was treated to two minutes and one second of a chicken at an electric piano playing "O mio babbino caro"... Continue Reading →
Pandemics: Our Complex Relationship with Animals
Just a couple of weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, which was meant to engage the world in "a billion acts of green," saw us focusing instead on a global Coronavirus pandemic catalyzed, it would seem, by eating wild animals (most likely bats) from so-called "wet markets" in Wuhan (if you follow the... Continue Reading →