Backyard and Beyond

What do we know about dinosaurs now and, perhaps more interestingly, how do we know these things? Michael J. Benton lays it out in Dinosaurs Rediscovered: The Scientific Revolution in Paleontology . Origins, taxonomy, intelligence, reproduction, diet, locomotion, and, of course, the cause(s) of extinction are topics covered here.

Surely the most notable and surprising thing in our understanding of dinosaurs in the last couple of decades has been the discovery of dinosaur feathers. Colored feathers! (Good gravy, there were ginger dinosaurs!) With the added brain-expander that these feathered creatures were not fliers. They were using feathers for insulation and/or sexual attraction before feathers for flight.

Those scaly toes, those beaks! Most of the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago. But not all of them.
Birds in Winter: Surviving the Most Challenging Season by Roger F. Pasquier is a compendium of research. From migration to toughing it out, our feathered dinosaurs are no slouches when it comes to the cold. (The absence of cold, on the other hand, is already telling in our warming planet, especially for sea birds who depend on cold currents that enrich the seas at the base of their food chain.) There is no no one size fits all to this, by the way. The great takeaway from this relentless collection of natural history observations —there are thirty pages of bibliography — is that variety is all.

Just one example: American Kestrels cache food throughout the year. In the non-breeding season, they’ll often store food for later in the day, and sometimes even the next day. Vertebrate prey can obviously hold up longer in the cold. Our breeding pair seemed to store food overnight. I’ve seen no winter caching myself. Research suggests that the birds will eat before the long cold night.
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And this just in: colorful bird eggs, not something seen in reptiles, are another inheritance from dinosaurs.

I’m just catching up to the Swift Guide to Butterflies of North America by Jeffrey Glassberg. Glassberg is an old butterfly hand, who’s written a couple of other guidebooks to the subject. (Never enough guidebooks!) He takes a firm stand against amateur netters and collectors (i.e. killers), commercially raised butterflies, and butterfly releases at weddings (I didn’t know this was a thing). This is a photo-based guide with a lot of rarities who show up in the LRGV (took me a second to track this down: Lower Rio Grande Valley, which is, of course, essentially Mexico). A lot of the very similar species are next to each other, which is of course helpful. I’d rank it pretty darn good, so let’s see if the next butterfly season presents me some puzzlers to solve with this book.

Princeton University Press has really gone in hard for the field guide market. A brand new addition is the Field Guide to the Flower Flies of Northeastern North America. They profile over 400 fly species, mostly using museum specimens with some photos of live insects in situ. This is a case where drawings might have worked better, but that would have taken a monumental effort. As in many examples of the varied world of Insecta, some species can’t be identified beyond genus level without the body in hand. Still, a valuable addition to the shelf, not least for telling us how many fly species are out there doing pollination.

Fraud in the Lab by Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, translated by Nicholas Elliot, is quite important. This should be read by everybody, but especially people in the science communication business, whose job it is to translate scientific discoveries from the arcana of the literature to every-day language. Media hype over scientific discoveries that may be powered by ambition, prestige, and/or plain old greed are an awful combo. Was interested to see that Charles Baggage’s 1830 Reflections on the Decline of Science in England had a taxonomy of scientific fraud that still holds up.

On the to-do list:

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby Dick by Richard J. King. King’s two other books suggest this one will be fun.

Tarka The Otter, by Henry Williamson, coming in April. First published in 1927 and never made into Disney codswallop because it makes Watership Down look like a bunny story. It’s really a re-telling of the First World War with an otter and a hunting dog for veteran Henry Williamson and the Hun. Just add a T to Hun and you get hunt: otter hunting used to be a thing in the UK. From 1900-1950, some 200 a year were killed in sanctioned hunts; as these are official numbers, this is probably an undercount. The population was halved during the 1960s. Only about 8 a year were hunted into the early 1970s, before the wretched practice was banned. Fox hunting, meanwhile, that other orgy of upper class sadism, was finally banned in 2002 (Scotland) and 2004 (England and Wales); it’s still legal in Northern Ireland, evidently.

What’s on your natural history to-read list?

All my book notices and/or reviews are found here.

Based on DNA evidence, the Great Auk was in no danger of extinction before humans started slaughtering them. How very Megafaunal.

Our week of books continues with Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King.

This is a collective biography of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Ella Deloria, who took on the “scientific” racists, eugenicists, ethnocentrists, and anti-immigrant forces of a century ago. It is a fascinating story. They helped to transform how we think about race and sex, but they didn’t kill the reigning monsters off. This has been made all too clear in the excrement-personality, elected by a minority of America, to the Presidency. Trump has expressed eugenicist thinking, supported white nationalists and nazis, and is a misogynist of the first rank.

I’m a pretty close student of that era, but I was surprised to discover that the Married Women’s Act of 1922 stripped citizenship from American women who married non-white foreign men. Paging Stephen Miller, who, of course, would not have been considered white in the 1920s because he’s Jewish. (One imagines the nazis clustering around him as he tries to get credit for concentration camps, baby-kidnapping, and walls at the border: “Guys, we did it!” “What do you mean ‘we,’ Stevie?”)

As King reminds us, the original Nazis were careful observers of the American system of authoritarian apartheid. They modeled their race laws on America, substituting Jews for African Americans. The best-selling eugenicist Madison Grant, the originator of the “Great Replacement” myth in The Passing of A Great Race, and the man who exhibited an African at the Bronx Zoo’s earlier incarnation, was one of Hitler’s heroes. (See also Henry Ford.) The Germans made sure to catch up on the eugenics congresses hosted by Grant’s institutional base, the American Museum of Natural History, whose president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was another leading eugenicist, and one of Boas’s detractors.

The American program of sterilizing “morons,” sanctified by a 1927 Supreme Court decision based on lies about the women at the heart of the case, was another model for the Nazis. Lies and bogus science were, in fact the basis of all this horror.

There used to be an attic at AMNH filled with the shelves of busts of the dozens of supposed “races” of humans, taking Johann Blumenbach’s 1777 notion of five races — American (i.e Arctic), Caucasian, Ethiopian, Malay, and Mongolian — to even more outlandish levels of absurdity. “Caucasian” is the only one of Blumebbach’s terms to have survived. Grant, by the way, changed the name of his top race from “Teutons” to “Nordics” once the U.S was in WWI: we couldn’t have the best race raping Belgians, now, could we?

The cranky, crusty Boas died in 1942. His reputation went south as successive generations of anthropologists took him to task for various things. The “critical studies” crew has been even more critical in the post-modernist, post-colonial era. The academy, after all, works best by eating its antecedents. (King’s second epigraph is from Max Planck, who said science progresses because the opponents of the new eventually die off.) But King makes a very good argument that Boas and Co. are worth revisiting in our ugly times.

Meanwhile, don’t take any b.s. from racist old Uncle Joe at the Thanksgiving table tonight. Happy holidays to you!

Oh, the French! Everybody knows Gérard de Nerval had a pet lobster, but who knew Henri Toulouse-Lautrec had a trained cormorant he would walk on a leash? “Tom” “supposedly” drank absinthe but met his (it’s hard to sex them) demise when a hunter shot him. Hunters being hunters…

Richard King’s The Devil’s Cormorant: A Natural History examines the cormorant, or rather multiple species of them. One species, the Spectacled, has been extinct since the 19th century, with only a few skins and bones left over; there was no image of it from life. The Chatham Shag is critically endangered. The Bank Cormorant and Pitt Shag are endangered. Ten more species are vulnerable. Four are threatened.

In the West, they birds are generally disparaged, especially by sports fishers and aquaculture industries, who can not abide competition, nor hearing about their own culpability in depleting fish stocks. They will sometimes illegally slaughter the birds to show who is boss. But mostly they depend on the feds and the states to manage, that is, kill, cormorants. It’s a little know fact that even before Trump’s thugs came in, the federal Wildlife Services program existed to kill wildlife for special interests, including recreational fishing. King cites estimates that 15-31% of the Double-crested Cormorant population had been killed legally in the seven years before his book was published (2013). Even nature advocacy groups get in on it, bemoaning the power of cormorant guano to threaten habitat for prettier birds on isolated rookeries. In Mississippi, the farmed catfish industry built ponds in the middle of the cormorant migration route, so now they blame the birds for depredating “their” fish.

Cormorants have a black reputation that goes way back: they are evil, gluttonous beasts, sea ravens. No charismatic cuteness here, but snake-like necks, Gothic wings spread. Milton called Satan a cormorant. In the 19th century, a “cormorancy” was another name for plutocracy. It’s true, these birds can be quite visible when they swallow large fish, and we hominids are particularly liable to be by influenced, even made hysterical, by spectacle. (And also by color-coding?)

In the East, cormorants, much like dragons, aren’t considered evil. But they were for a long time exploited as fishers, with rings around their necks so they couldn’t swallow their catches. In Japan, the state subsidizes this traditional fishery as kind of heritage show.

This is a good, deep look at the interface of humans and animals. As usual, the animals — as if we weren’t animals ourselves — get the short end.

“We are shooting the coal mine canary. We are poisoning the messenger. We are taking a pickax to the tip of the iceberg because this is easiest to reach,” writes King. Not the over-fishing by humans, the pollution, the habitat destruction, the dams on rivers, the climate change. King notes that he doesn’t quote many coastal fishermen in his book: they look for the birds, who tell them where the fish are. Lots of birds equal lots of fish. “It’s not smart to shoot your indicators,” says one.

Double-crested, the main species around here, showing the double crests of breeding plumage finery. And, of course, those eyes!
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For those still wondering what the impeachment is all about, Walter Schaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, explains.

Does the stereotypical boastfulness of Americans — da biggest & da bestest, by jimminy! — stem from a deep insecurity?

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, by Lee Alan Dugatkin, is about the mammoth chip on the shoulder of the early European Americans. Their betters in France told them they were degenerate, puny, and sickly, because of North America itself. The cold and the damp here shrunk everything, animals wild and domestic, people native and come-ashores.

The world’s most renown naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon said so, over and over again in the dozens of volumes of his 36 volume Histoire Naturelle. The theory of New World degeneracy was spread further by the nasty Prussian clergyman Cornelius de Pauw, shilling for the Prussian ban on out-migration. Back in France, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, often referred to as the Abbe Raynal although he was always getting in hot water with the church, piled on. Even after Franklin had the Americans and Frenchmen at dinner together stand up, proving the Frogs were shrimps in comparison. Raynal was at that dinner.

The Englishman William Robertson’s monumental History of America (1777) ventured “the principal of life there seems to have been less active and vigorous.” Kant, Hegel, John Keats, even young Charles Darwin all followed Buffon’s lead. Meanwhile, on the side of evidence were Humboldt, Byron, and Mazzei, who wrote 14 volumes in defense of the New World after having introduced viniculture to Virginia.

Neither Buffon, de Pauw, or Raynal had ever seen North American in person. Buffon believed the reasons for American biological inferiority were climatological. The cold and damp made the natives childish and the Creoles, meaning Europeans born in the New World, degenerate to the same level. (Other than this wildly influential but baseless crotchet, Buffon was an impressive naturalist for his day; he accepted the fact of extinction, something Jefferson didn’t. Raynal was vocal in his anti-slavery sentiments. History is complicated.)

Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia is a sustained argument against Buffon’s theory of degeneracy. He also thought a large moose who show Buffon up. But it would take more than that: most of the 19th century was about Americans trying to get over their inferiority complex in regard to Europe.

One of the most galling European charges about the Americas is that the birds here did not sing. Yes, you heard that right.

The all-singing all-dancing Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist Papers, put the only footnote in that whole corpus: taking de Pauw to task for claiming the dogs in America were mute.

All this Euro-trash nonsense may have made Americans overcompensate. The boosterism, ignorant jingoism, and fundamentalist bellicosity of “God’s country” now boils down to grunts of “We’re number one” — in the face of much statistical evidence to the contrary.

Our week of books continues.

“We’re not just losing the wild world. We’re forgetting it. We’re no longer noticing it. We’ve lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing. We’re beginning to think it’s not really our business. We’re beginning to act as if it’s not there any more.”

I am preaching, as they say, to the converted. But we all know there are many out there who could use the good word. Simon Barnes’s Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible in Our Lives is for them. it is short and to the point of breaking the terrible trend he describes (quote above) in his introduction.

While his dependence on the spells and magic metaphors tried my patience, I skipped his chapter epigraphs from C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. (If that’s what you have to do to hook the young ones, then “ok millennial.”)

Basically, Barnes has lessons for paying attention. One of his “spells” is getting some waterproof pants. It is an English book, after all, but his point about getting out there and watching, and sitting on your bum in the mizzle, is well taken.

We have the senses enough already, but we’ve muffled them. I’ve been leading dawn chorus listening tours for years now to encourage people to open up their city-shuttered ears. His chapter on peripheral vision is after my heart. Many of us are tunnel-visioned into our screens all day long. (As I began that last sentence, I glanced outside and saw a small flock of birds out one window, then the accipiter they were crowding.) Catching movement at the peripheries is nine-tenths of nature observation.

Writes Barnes, “Nature will be with you always. I remember being baffled by a survey that asked how often I went birdwatching. I don’t go birdwatching. I am birdwatching.”

Which reminds me of a better translation of Descartes famous cognito: not “I think, therefore I am,” but “I am thinking, therefore I am.”
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“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

A month before the big gift-giving holiday, so I’m inaugurating a week of posts on books. Please don’t use Amazon; the obscenely profitable company looks like its escaped from paying even a single $ in federal taxes again this year. Even if he’s incontinent, Jeff Bezos does not need another (the 26th?) bathroom in his DC mansion. Try Indiebound if you don’t have a local bookstore.