Meeting for a Drink in the Northwest Passage

Zak Smith is a lawyer working for the Natural Resources Defense Council on marine mammal protection.  And–go figure–he knows how to write clearly.  Smith posts a weekly roundup of whale news, and here’s his latest:

Lots of news in the world of whales this week (or close to this week):

• “Nice to meet you, we haven’t seen your family in these parts in 10,000 years.”  This may have been the conversation when a male bowhead whale from the Greenland side of the Arctic mingled with a male bowhead whale from the Alaska side after they met north of the Canadian mainland in the fabled “Northwest Passage.”  The meeting was possible following

Edward Lear and his Birds

Early this year I wrote a piece for the New York Times about the close connection between nineteenth century nonsense verse and the story of global exploration and species discovery.

I wrote particularly about how Edward Lear, author of The Jumblies and other favorite children’s books, got his start as an ornithological illustrator. So I am pleased to see this material on Lear from the web site BibliOdyssey.  The author is a self-effacing Australian (a phrase that sounds as unlikely as self-effacing Texan) who is basically anonymous.  He goes by the name Paul or Peacay, and thinks the attention should go to the work, by other people, that he is celebrating.  Click through to savor some of Lear’s lovely illustrations:

Lear’s Parrots – The Prequel

Edward Lear Sketches of Parrots Relating to ‘Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots’ (1832), ca. 1830 (MS Typ 55.9). Houghton Library, Harvard University.

A selection of plates from Lear’s published book can be seen in the following post from 2008: The Parrots.

That book is definitely one of my all-time favourite natural history publications; so I was particularly happy to discover Harvard’s intriguing collection of preliminary sketches and practice lithographs by Lear.

To quote myself:

“The balance of critical opinion regards Lear’s book on parrots to be the finest ever published on that bird family and among the greatest ornithological works ever produced.

It’s not just because such an audacious project was successfully completed by so young a character, or that the subject matter was drawn so sensitively and with great scientific accuracy and naturalistic detail, but because the exceptional quality of Lear’s plates – drawn, wherever possible, from living specimens – would significantly influence the work of two contemporary artists, John James Audubon and John Gould, perhaps the greatest ornithological illustrators of all time.

Both Audubon and Gould would employ Lear during the 1830s to assist in their projects and it was only failing eyesight that foreshortened Lear’s bird illustrating career.”

Note: Edward Lear was TWENTY YEARS OLD when his Parrot book was published!!

Two small green birds : hand-coloured lithograph

Rhino Madness in Missouri

Black rhinos (by Dana Allen for Wilderness Safaris)

It’s World Rhino Day, one of those meaningless designations that clutter our calendars.  But in this case, we’re in the middle of a crazy new war on rhinos.  My report from South Africa doesn’t come out in Smithsonian Magazine for another month or so.  So in the meantime, here’s a report from the current Atlantic about how a price of more than $100,000 for the horns of a single rhino has brought the madness even to such unlikely destinations as Moberly, Mississippi.  The writer is Malcolm Gay:

BY THE TIME I pulled in at the Super 8 in Moberly, Missouri, the parking lot was thick with muddy trucks. In fact, the young clerk told me, the motel was full—she’d just rented her last room to a lady with a sloth.

“It’s the auction,” the girl said, pointing me in the direction of the closest available bed—some 35 miles south. “We’ve got people in from all over.”

Four times a year, in nearby Macon, Lolli Bros. Livestock Market holds one of the country’s biggest exotic-animal auctions and taxidermy sales. When I arrived last spring, preteen girls roamed the halls with marmosets on their shoulders. Amish families looked sternly on as men in camouflage jackets vied for zebras and Bactrian camels. Nearby, a blond woman in a sweatshirt bottle-nursed a baby orangutan wearing a diaper, while a white buffalo calf wandered past a stuffed polar bear.

But what turned out to be one of the auction’s most valuable objects was also one of its smallest, residing behind a glass case in the taxidermy room:

Something Special in the Air? Oh My God, it’s a Snail.

The passenger in seat 43B

Traveling from one continent to another inside a bird’s digestive tract sounds a lot like flying coach.  I mean the meals especially.  But, hey, hey, no TSA!  No full body scans!

Here’s an account of this really cool snail behavior, from Discovery Magazine (I think the writer is Ed Yong, but their web site seems to be awfully stingy with bylines):

Imagine you’re living off the coast of California, and you want to get to sunny Florida. That sounds easy enough, but there are three big problems in this imaginary scenario. First, you are a snail, so crossing even a small distance takes a lot of time. Second, there is a continent in the way. Third, you are a sea snail so you are not adapted to crawling on land.

These problems seem insurmountable and yet snails have made the journey. Osamu Miura from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has found that  horn snails crossed from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean around 750,000 years ago, while other individuals made the opposite journey around 72,000 years ago. And they probably flew on bird airlines.

Earlier this year, Shinichiro Wada showed that one species of snail can indeed survive a trip through the guts of a bird, and uses this unorthodox carrier to hop

Momofuku’s Swamp Yankee

Strusinski on the prowl. (Photograph by Andrew Hetherington)

This is a story I wrote about edible biodiversity for the October issue of Outside Magazine.

ONE DAY IN MAY, in a venerable old cemetery somewhere in northwestern Connecticut, a trio of food professionals clusters around a handsome pitch pine tree delicately infused with essence of dead New England farmer. The three of them are greedily plucking pale green buds and stuffing them alternately into plastic baggies and into their mouths. “These are fucking good,” says a test-kitchen chef from the Momofuku restaurant empire. “Great texture!” a colleague agrees.

Evan Strusinski, who makes his living foraging wild foods, steps back and sizes up the tree as if he means to collect the whole damn thing. He eyes the car in which they arrived and asks, “Does this Prius have a roof rack?” Then he eats a few more pine buds and his voice pitches up like Regina Spektor singing about tangerines: “Oh! They’re so poppy! So juicy! They inspire me to nibble.”

“Put it in light syrup, focus on the texture,” the Momofuku guy riffs. “Pine poppers! Serve ’em on ice cream.” Later they notice the lemony-tasting sheep sorrel on a hilltop nearby, and all of them drop to their knees as though in worship.

A certain lunatic enthusiasm for wild foods tends to infect people who go foraging with Strusinski, especially when he is in his usual hunting grounds, in the mountains of Vermont or on the coast of Maine. It’s contagious: Strusinski, a boyish 39-year-old with curly, uncombed hair and a now-and-then beard, will be digging edible roots with his bare hands and suddenly whoop, “I feel like a wild pig foraging for truffles!” Or he’ll push back his battered fedora and start to sing as he works his scissors deftly through the perfect threadlike scapes in a sloping field of ramps—“I’m going to be rich”—and then speculate on how many scapes it will take to procure the 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser of his dreams. (The idea is not entirely far-fetched: he recently

Eating Less Meat

Sunday’s (UK) Guardian has an article on the environmental benefits of eating less meat.  It turns out, instead, to be largely a pitch for eating a fungus-derived protein with the very ill-conceived name quorn.

It also contains this unintentionally laughable tidbit:

Meat-reducing, as the marketers have branded it, may just have acquired fresh momentum. Self-confessed king carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has switched from meat to vegetables as his latest celebrity cause.

But maybe I am just too far across The Atlantic to have experienced the cultural tsunami that is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Even so, these paragraphs in the article are of interest:

The two most pressing reasons for cutting back on meat today are climate change and global population growth. The post-war years have seen an explosion in the numbers of animals intensively reared for meat and milk. This livestock revolution, and the change in land use that has gone with it, however, now contribute nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.

The UN predicts that the number of farm animals will double by 2050. Except, of course,

What Would Don Draper Do?

NPR interviewed me early this week about nation branding ups-and-downs.  What would Don Draper do for Latvia?  Why Kazakhstan needed nation-branding after Borat.

You can go directly to the audio here.

Going Green But Getting Nowhere

Economist Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund has an interesting essay in today’s New York Times, on the failure of individual sacrifice as a solution to dire environmental challenges, and the need for society-wide action:

YOU reduce, reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper. You avoid out-of-season grapes. You do all the right things.

Good.

Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond the reach of individual action.

You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a carbon-emitting trip home.

Say you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become no-impact man. You would, in fact, have

California Acts to Ban Shark Fin Soup

A few months back, I was annoyed by an NPR show that seemed to be turning a proposed ban on shark fin soup into an attack on the Chinese community.  Never mind that the bill was being sponsored and backed by people of Chinese ethnicity.  And never mind that it was about the highly destructive practice of cutting the fins off living sharks and tossing them back in the water to die.

Now California has done the right thing and passed the ban–meaning a slight but significant reduction in pressure on seriously threatened shark populations.

Here’s the press release:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. Sept. 6, 2011 — Yesterday, the California Senate passed Bill 376, which would ban the sale and trade of shark fin in the state of California. The Center for Oceanic Awareness, Research, and Education (COARE), applauds the California State Senate for joining them in actively addressing shark conservation issues, and playing a major role in reducing shark fin consumption in the U.S. and worldwide.

Assembly Bill (AB) 376 was introduced to the California State Assembly on 14 February 2011 by Assemblymembers Paul Fong (D-Cupertino) and Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), and subsequently passed the Assembly on 23 May 2011 with a vote of 65-8.  Yesterday the bill passed the Senate with a vote of 25-9, and the bill now moves on to the governor for action.

California is now one step closer to helping the West Coast of the United States enact a full ban on the trade of shark fins, which will help reduce pressure on rapidly declining shark populations.  California’s proposed ban complements similar legislation recently signed into law in Washington State and Oregon, and is also preceded by legislative bans adopted by the State of Hawai’i, Guam, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI).

California is one of the largest sources of demand for shark fin outside Asia and is a major entry for shark fin distribution in the United States.  This legislation represents a significant step towards

Tools for Smartphone Naturalists

Conservation Magazine has just published my essay “Natural History Upgrade,” and they included this  sidebar about useful apps for understanding the natural world in our smartphone-loving era: