Raptor Week I

Cooper’s Hawk. Accipiter cooperii. William C. Cooper’s hawk. The species was named in his honor by Charles Lucien Bonaparte. Cooper was a conchologist and founder of what became the New York Academy of Sciences. Bonaparte was a Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor, and an ornithologist who explored the U.S. in the 1820s. You can’t name a life-form after yourself… you can’t name them at all, really, but it’s a convenient fiction.
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Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here’s his “Letter from A Birmingham Jail.” In it King defends the non-violent strategy of resistance to segregation and racism in response to some white clergy who complained that he was breaking the law.