I Hate To Keep Bringing This Shit Up

The International Court Of Justice has looked at Japan's whale harvest and ruled it illegal. Japan had been taking whales for research only, hundreds of them, and studying them hard. With chopsticks. Anyway, they're done with it now. This is a big victory for Greenpeace, and just goes to show that a few people willing to sacrifice themselves can indeed make a difference; can, in fact, with great effort and courage, and thirty years, cause a great wrong to be righted that should have been righted thirty years earlier.

It always seemed like having more whales around was a laudable thing in itself, them being fabulous and all, but as usual, it's even more complicated than that. And we're still finding out new stuff. Stuff we might like to take into account before we start messing around. The thing about our species is we like to tinker with things as though we're polishing the good china with a backhoe. It's possible we could have kept things in balance by just killing and eating as many whales as we could manage to bag from a canoe using our biceps and a stout spear. But instead we just sort of methodically removed them in huge quantities. Entire species of whales have gone extinct, and almost half have been critically endangered.

But that should be good news for the penguins, who are in trouble now. We'd thought it was because of human-caused climate change and the melting of the sea ice, but also because the mean old whales were eating up all their krill. Never mind that much larger populations of whales had been coexisting with penguins for an awfully long time.

So here's an oddity. There are a lot of krill in the ocean--they're herds of miniature lobsters, basically. They're an essential part of the whole ocean food chain. You know, the food chain that's in the process of collapsing. And you'd think that if the whale numbers were to pick up, now that Japan isn't studying them on their plates, they'd hoover up most of the krill, because that's what they like to eat. But instead, it turns out the krill population tanked when the whales were nearly polished off in the 1960s. Their fortunes wax and wane with the whales'. And nobody knew why, until recently.

Krill need iron to grow and reproduce. But most of the iron is at the bottom of the ocean. And the krill

are at the top. There's no getting the iron to the top unless a whale dives way down and gets it for them, by eating something iron-rich like squid. There's too much pressure at the bottom of the ocean to allow whales to poop, so they have to hold it until they come up for air, and then they let fly, and do so abundantly. Now there's a crapload of iron at the surface. And the krill go nuts. It's krill enough for everybody. Without whale poop, they're screwed. Everybody's screwed. So we're back to just the climate change problem with the penguins.

Here's another oddity. There used to be plenty of free iron in the ocean. But when the first photosynthetic plants devised themselves, way back when, they pooped out oxygen. The oxygen attached itself to all the iron in the ocean and the resulting rust sank to the bottom until the iron was all used up. Pretty much all the iron we ever mine today comes from that original band of iron oxide on the ocean floor, from that first photosynthesis event. And when the rust settled, the free oxygen had no place to go but the atmosphere. That was called the Great Oxygenation Catastrophe because almost all the nascent life that had burgeoned in the absence of oxygen failed in its presence. It was a major extinction event--wiped out almost everything. That's what happens when something causes conditions to change drastically.

Here's another oddity. We're right in the middle of another major extinction event right now. Damn the luck, huh?

Thanks to Joan Campbell for pointing me in this direction.

A Hole In The Sky

Spring fever is upon us, when otherwise sober people see holes everywhere and feel compelled to stick things in them. Holes in the garden. Most of the time what appears to be a bare spot really isn't. But whatever is in there isn't planning to show up until later, once you've given it something fresh and new to strangle. Sometimes it actually is a bare spot, because something you'd loved for years has been murdered over the winter, but if you're old, you have enough perspective to take that sort of thing in stride, or else you don't remember what the thing was.

I've been doing this a while so I have a good grip on the planting details. They don't necessarily give you all the particulars in the little tag hanging off the plant, so allow me to elucidate. Carefully remove plant from pot. The roots will have gone around and around inside the pot counterclockwise (in the northern hemisphere) until they're as tangled up as a nightie on a restless sleeper. So the whole ball should shlorp right out like canned cranberry sauce. Take a moment to poke at the root ball with your fingers as though you were going to tease out all the little root hairs and give them some air; then, after a minute, just begin ripping at it in a haphazard fashion until it looks a little cowlicky all over.

Now. Prepare a hole at least twice the diameter of the pot, or (in dry, rocky, clay, or annoying soil, or if it's hot out) just big enough to slide the sucker in. Position the plant, attempt to refluff the fudgy dirt you've excavated, and stuff it all back in the hole. Put some dark compost on top so that the neighbors think you did a good job. Water, if you think of it.

When it comes to perennials and shrubs, remember: it's sleep, creep, and leap. The first year it's just barely hanging on. The second year it seems to show some signs of life. The third year it goes nuts and makes you very proud. Fourth and fifth years it gets big and tall and does every damn thing it said it would do on the little tag. It blooms! It smells like shampoo! It dances the merengue in the summer breeze! Hummingbirds drape tinsel on it for Christmas! You have now achieved the coveted Architectural look, characterized by hard-won Vertical Interest. Congratulations!

Year six, look for new growth in spring, look again in late spring, crease the wood with your fingernail

to look for signs of green in June, and dig up the whole lifeless skeleton in late August. You are allowed a day or two to be morose, but do not trouble yourself looking for answers. Horticulturally speaking, your ace plant has succumbed to Just Because. This is gardening. Don't be a sissy.

If you want something you can count on, you need to quit cramming things into the top of the planet and hoping for miracles and grace. Instead, you need to look to the heavens. There's dust and gases and rocks and things up there and most importantly the whole sky is chock full of math. There's so much math up there that we can plot out what to get excited about years in advance. For instance, we can count on total lunar eclipses, such as the one that just popped by on April 14th. That one was, as our local weatherman would have it, "the first of four consecutive lunar eclipses," which is a relief--we hate when they come all out of order.

T - 15 minutes to fog bank

The lunar eclipse happens when the moon is full, which, naturally, it always is, but since it spends most of the month turning a shoulder to us, you have to wait until it quits pouting. Additionally, you have to wait until the moon is completely in the earth's shadow. This circumstance is called "syzygy" and is characterized by the perfect alignment of astrologers, crackpots, and spooky predictions in the social media. They called this one a Blood Moon, which sounds morbid, but all it means is it gets kind of a reddish color to it from all the sunsets and sunrises happening at once and smacking into each other. And count on it--the whole thing, the totally eclipsed Blood Moon, is visible from half the earth, except for a little strip in western Oregon, where a bank of fog is penciled in for that night.

Count on it.

Mwah!

It's spring, and as usual, I am obsessing about the new-chickadee production line. Every year I am privileged to witness a pair of chickadees setting up house in a nesting box mounted a foot outside my writing window. (That might seem close, but it's not hard to live right next door to a writer. They're real quiet and most of the time they don't even move much.) Anyway, with the chickadees, there is nothing to distinguish one bird from the other until an egg drops out of one of them, and that probably takes them by surprise, too.

It is said that one way to determine the sex of a chickadee during nesting season is to notice its behavior. If it is fluffing and flapping like a baby bird and demanding to be fed, it's probably a female. If it falls for it, it's probably a male.

There are other ways of telling a male chickadee from a female, if he's got spring fever, but no polite ways. Both birds have a cloaca, or a hole they pee and poop through, and unless an egg happens to be shooting out of one of them at the time, they look pretty much the same. Supposedly the cloaca on the aroused male chickadee is a little swollen, although, as always, that's the kind of claim that can be prone to exaggeration.

Anyway, you'd have to grab the bird and flip it upside down and blow on its belly feathers to tell, and I wasn't raised that way. We were Lutherans. Every one of us was conceived in chastity and dedicated to the proposition that all men procreated politely and with only as much fuss as is necessary, and no more. We're not really even supposed to think about the cloacal region.

So, as usual, I don't know the specifics about my chickadee pair. They could be two boys for all I know. Not that I'm judging. That's as good an arrangement as any, and they can always adopt. Although they'd have to settle for a cowbird.

Assuming it's new baby chickadees we're after, though, basically what needs to happen is an encounter between boy and girl cloacas sufficient to transfer genetic material. Nothing is being inserted into anything. And since the cloaca is being used to poop through, it must be admitted that in their case it is pretty much possible to get knocked up by sitting on a toilet seat. The encounter is called a "cloacal kiss." It can't be easy. They're kind of round down there. They don't bend much.

Nevertheless, I suspect they have been successful in previous years. I can't prove it. All I can tell for certain is that the birds took an empty box and put peeping sounds in it. Weeks later, there was more than the usual number of identical chickadees hanging around the tree. I could draw quick conclusions from these two observations, but the science-ist in me must acknowledge that there could be alternative explanations. For instance, with the peeping, it could be that my tinnitus might have become temporarily adorable. And, there could have been a chickadee convention booked in my tree. So I don't

know if my birds made new birds, but I would consider it supporting evidence if I were to witness an actual cloacal kiss.

And then, this year, I did! I was alerted to the activity by an audible onslaught of chickadee sweet-nothings. It's not real clear to an onlooker when the deed has been accomplished. It didn't take long. Did they make contact? Hard to say. There was a flurry of feathers, but if an eight-ball and an eleven-ball rolled around together, only time will tell if the numbers ever matched up.

Let it be said that even during the moment of passion both birds fluffed and flapped and begged and twittered like babies in an identical fashion. They still don't know who's who. But I don't think they need to.

And When I Roll A Log, I Put It Back

Y'all can park your asses on a warm beach in Mexico if you want to, but I'm going to vacation in West Virginia. I'm going to the New River Birding And Nature Festival for the third time, and the birds are plenty compelling--particularly there, where I will be surrounded by people who will point them out for me and hang little name tags on them--but I'm in it for the Nature part too. Especially the salamanders. I stand second to no one in my admiration for salamanders (a.k.a. the crown of Creation). I will be the one rolling logs while everyone else is looking up. There is no place on earth with a greater diversity of salamanders than the southern Appalachians. There's a reason for that.

These mountains have been in the works for a very long time. They started to rise up 480 million years ago and really hit their stride when Africa plowed into the eastern shore of North America, which, as you might imagine, wrinkled things up something fierce. Everything got folded up and pleated and shoved around, and then eroded, so that now you can find wildly different kinds of deep, rich soil in close proximity: sandstone ridges proud with pines right next to limestone soils sprouting the finest

hardwood forests anywhere, everything imaginable growing side by each.

It's just an accident of plate tectonics that the whole series of ridges and valleys runs north-south. Shitty arrangement if you're an American pioneer with your heart set on going west and displacing natives, but terrific if you're a northern species trying to contend with the ice ages. If an ice sheet is bearing down on you, it's an easy slide south down the valleys. If it retreats, you can go back, or you could just pop up-mountain and hang out in the coolth. By the time the ice ages petered out, all kinds of plants and animals had migrated to the southern Appalachians and found a home somewhere in the rumpled landscape.

The festival is in the New River Gorge area. Our pioneers named the river New because it just sort of showed up without being formally introduced on any of their maps, but it is not only not new, it's, like, the third oldest river in the world. There's a crazy amount of water in these hills. Bright, fresh water. Pure treasure.

One of the draws of this place for a birder is the fact that a whole sparkle-box of warblers wants to come here for Spring Break to get lucky. They're all dressed up in their finest and they're singing their fuzzy little hearts out and they're horny and they don't care who's watching, evidently. They've flown their tiny fannies all the way here from south or central America, hundreds of miles, and in many cases they have flown directly to the same tree they were in last year. Sometimes the tree isn't there. Sometimes the forest isn't there.

Sometimes the mountain isn't there.

Sometimes the whole damn range is gone. Sadly, some of the bits that got folded up in the mountains are fossilized peat bogs--coal--and the easiest way to get at it, in order to burn it all up, is to blow up the mountains and shove their carcasses into their own valleys. Sure, it's like doing neurosurgery with a broadaxe, but it's weirdly efficient, if you don't give a damn about water, or plants, or animals, or life in general. Or the future.

Charleston citizens were rightfully incensed early this year when a chemical used in coal processing ruined their drinking water. Where, they demanded, was the government entity responsible for keeping their water safe? Many of those same people have spent years fighting those same government entities because if they were truly allowed to safeguard the environment, there wouldn't be any mountaintop removal coal mining at all. And folks here want those jobs. They're justifiably proud of the generations of miners who have all worked a hell of a lot harder than any of those hippies trying to shut them down. And for all the natural treasure surrounding them, they don't have a Plan B. Coal mining is it.

Could be there won't be much more mountaintop removal in Appalachia, but  it won't be because the EPA finally did their job. It will be because the coal companies have figured out they can get the stuff out cheaper in Wyoming. And they don't give a damn about the miners left stranded. They never have. Not any more than they care about the salamanders, or their own grandchildren.

Somebunny To Love

Sweetest folks came by while I was out shoveling a load of shit the other day--holy seventh-and/or latter-day witness rollers or something. Whoever they are, they always come in sets of two, and half of them does all the talking and the other half nods. This set was inviting me to a big celebration of Jesus's murder on Monday, or it might have been Tuesday. I'm not sure which, because it didn't make it on to my calendar, but whichever it was, it was a big deal to my visitors. If you're going to celebrate an execution, you don't want to get the day wrong, lest you seem forgetful, or overeager.

As the talking half explained it, it was essential to commemorate the occasion at the proper time, and that time had something to do with the Passover seder. And that is supposed to happen on the fifteenth day of some month that most people don't even use anymore. She was awfully dismissive of the notion of Easter always falling on a Sunday, although that must happen some of the time, I suppose. I get being a stickler.  I'm old enough to remember when our holidays didn't always fall on a Monday, and it seems to me something important got lost, there. But I would struggle in a religion that required such precision from me. Most of the time, since I retired, I'm not even sure what day it is.

My new friends believed in this date business very strongly, and that's all right with me. I think people should believe anything they want to believe. That's because I don't believe in anything very strongly. It's the people who do believe in things strongly who believe I should believe what they believe.

Here at our house, Easter is celebrated with a veritable shitload of chocolate, plus dinner. Traditionally, it's a lamb dinner, but not this year. The Lamb of God may be alive and well--I'm not the one to ask--but the Lamb of Fred Meyer One-Stop Shopping was sold out. So, pork it is. Also, Sunday it is. We're not particular.

At any rate, my visitors got me thinking about how much else we're getting wrong. When the Easter Bunny shows up on a Sunday at our house, is he endangering our souls? Should we even believe in him? I never actually see the Easter Bunny, but believing in things you can't see has a pretty stout religious precedent.

Well. The Easter Bunny himself turns out not to be biblical after all. In fact, he first turned up in the 1600s in Germany.  Newly minted Lutherans had just cast off a bunch of Catholic pomp and circumstance and they needed new pomp to replace it with, and that's where we've gotten many of our finer traditions--your Christmas tree, some of your better carols, and the Easter Bunny, who was really a hare, if you want to be orthodox about it. He was a bit of a judgmental dude to start with, stern of countenance, and was said to be able to tell if any given little boy or girl deserved to be given eggs. As the years went by the Bunny softened up and flang out eggs to just anyone.

How did the Germans come up with an Easter Hare bearing eggs? Rabbits don't lay eggs. Rabbits don't even lay each other, or so it was widely believed in the 17th century. Every spring there were billions of new baby bunnies that seemed to come out of nowhere; no one ever observed rabbit sex. That's because people are easily distracted and rabbits are quick about it. So people concluded that the billions of little bunnies were conceived immaculately, which they approved of. Christians in general have always been a little sensitive about things getting nailed.

There were problems involved with the cultural export of the Bunny. The Swedes had trouble understanding the German word for Easter Hare and thought they'd said Easter Wizard, so that's who's in charge of their holiday.

Similarly, in parts of Africa, because of confusion over the umlaut, it is the Easter Rhino that thunders into town bearing something like eggs for all good children. They look a little like human testicles. Or so I would like to believe.

And Here Is My Point

I have always been sensitive to punctuation.  It sets the pace for the prose and tells it when to gallop or stop or just pull up slightly and peer over the fence. I'm very deliberate about where I put my punctuation marks. People might disagree with me over some of it but there's nothing haphazard about it. I have preferences. For instance, sometimes, I use fewer commas than my English teachers would have liked, because, sometimes, I want to charge ahead. I even use comma splices, where a semi-colon is usually called for, because I want the prose to just pop a little shrug, and not actually pause with its chin in its hand.

My father, who was a fine slinger of verbiage, was a huge fan of the semi-colon. He could not not use it. I picked that up from him, initially, but now I really try to fend it off. Instead I use a long dash--it has the same effect, but it feels different. The dash is a gentle hand on your arm. The semi-colon is dusting off its tweed sleeve and puffing at its pipe before it continues. Dad used to use so many semi-colons that his paragraphs developed a predictable, hypnotic rhythm. He'd send me a typewritten letter once a week and by the end of it my eyelids were sliding shut.

Punctuation shouldn't have the ability to make me sleepy, but I'm delicately wired that way. I don't read very fast, and I follow directions. I gallop and whoa when I'm told to. You present me with a name like "U'Neek" or "La'Shawna" and I will read a hiccup into it. I have a few friends who use ellipses. A lot. They're just in there as spacers for their thoughts. It makes all their thoughts equally important, or unimportant. "Hi...saw June the other day at the market...she says hi...doing pretty well since that monkey ate off her face...don't know if you heard about that...maybe we can get together sometime soon...okay gotta run..." When I read something like this, I actually feel myself nodding off at every ellipse. And in my mind's ear, I hear it in the same annoying intonation that is so prevalent these days: a sort of lazy, I-don't-care dip at the end of every phrase in which the vocal cords just sort of give up, and speech crumbles into rubble at the back of the throat. The speaker sounds bored as hell. Even NPR commentators do it. I want to poke at them with a sharp stick. It's possible I'm too delicately wired about some things.

So when I first saw text messaging, as practiced by the younger set, I read it the same way. There was no punctuation. No capital letters. Everything just drifted off into some neutral, apathetic space. The message felt like just one "what-ever" after another. Act like you care! I thought. Give it some voice! And sometimes, if I was feeling especially peevish, get a damn job!

Naturally, when I first started texting, I capitalized where I was supposed to and went to the trouble of inserting punctuation. I had to. It was a pain in the ass, but I didn't want it to seem like I didn't care. I still do it. But right away I could see why people didn't bother. It's a lot to ask of the thumbs. It's not necessary. It isn't a novel. It's a whole new way of communicating.

And as such, it's made its own rules. For one thing, you really shouldn't use periods at all. Instead you just start a new line. If you use a period, which requires a whole new thumb-stroke, people have to assume you went to the trouble because you were done with the conversation, and maybe not too pleased with their end of it. If you text someone "are you going to the party tonight" and she writes back "no" you have your information. If she writes back "No." you know she's definitely not going, and she's irritated about something. And it might be you. It could be that thing you did at the last party that you hoped everyone had forgotten about. Why else would she put such a final note on the conversation? If you leave off the period, everyone knows you're still available to chat.

So I get it. Text messaging has its own punctuation. It's either none, or it's a whole bunch of exclamation points or question marks to indicate sincerity or incredulity, which are not otherwise obvious in microcommunication. I'm fine with it, I really am [rogue comma splice]. I'm still going to have to capitalize and put in punctuation. I'm retired--I've got all day. And I know that my contemporaries won't be put off, and younger folk will smile indulgently and say "it's just Murr. She can't help it." Consider my text message punctuation the wistful, charming freight from a bygone era. It's the lilac scent wafting from an elderly aunt's stationery.

Pikas Down The Pike

Just a warning. I keep a pretty decent pace when I'm hiking up a mountain, but any time we pass a nice boulder field, I'm going to pull up short and go meeeep. There's nothing you need to do about it. I'm just sending out a little hey-there to one of my favorite critters. Sometimes one meeeeps back.

We loved pikas even before we spent a delightful few minutes in Glacier Park watching one totally punk our dog. Boomer was an optimistic mutt by nature and was much energized by the prospect of nailing a rodent even though she went seventeen years without ever getting close. Bless her fuzzy little heart, she's always thought today was the day. We could all use an attitude like that, and it's not like there was ever a chance she'd do any lasting harm. We didn't even bother explaining to  her that pikas were lagomorphs and not rodents--she was not a detail dog. Meeeep! went the pika, and Boomer scampered after it, and it ducked into a hidey hole in the rocks followed by Boomer's head. The pika would reappear a few feet away, turn to the dog's avid, quivering tail, go meeeep again, Boomer would snap her head up so fast she beaned herself on the rock, and tear after the pika again. The pika had things to do so we didn't let this go on too long, but I can't help but think it was enjoying itself. I think it had a little grin.

So when Dave and I had the opportunity to go to a lecture on pikas downtown, we did. That's when we learned that if it was a grin on the pika, it was a shit-eating one. Pikas are among the animals that are big on eating leftovers, after running the original meal through the system once.  It's one way to contend with a vegetarian diet, because plant cellulose is hard to digest; chewing the cud is another. Eating one's own shit works fine for the bunny family because, conveniently enough, they are incapable of throwing up. Still, the whole business is another mark in the plus column for being a baconivore.

The pika spends most of its time in higher-altitude rock piles. He eats plants (twice) and gathers more to make hay for the winter. By the time it gets really cold the pika should have a pretty good hay pile going from which he will eat all winter. He does not hibernate. He'd rather eat dried-up old flowers (twice) than take a nice nap. Tastes differ. However it is a remarkable thing that he knows to make his hay pile. Personally, I don't anticipate anything vividly enough to be that prepared. If I'm warm when I leave the house, I won't take a sweater with me even if the temperature is sure to drop, because I can't imagine being cold. (I have evolved to accompany a man who will give me his jacket.) But I'm not a pika. Also, I eat bacon.

They're particular about their location. They like things cool. If for some reason the world should be getting warmer, they don't have a ton of options. They can go higher up the mountain, but they're not really set up to migrate. As a result the pika appears to be in decline. People who study them are looking carefully at the margins of their habitat. The edges of their range represent the conditions that are just tolerable for them, so if they begin to disappear along the margins, it's pretty clear their habitable range is shrinking.

No one's gotten anywhere with trying to get the pika listed as endangered. Because then we'd be legally obligated to protect them, and the only thing we could do for them is try to halt climate change, and that means we have to start doing a lot of things differently, so--it's sayonara, pika.

Meanwhile, the same techniques can be applied to humans to see if we're in trouble: check conditions along the margins. Not those poor saps in the little island nations that are being submerged--we consider them marginal people to begin with. Trouble is, we don't recognize our own margins anymore. We blast the air conditioner. We jack up the thermostat. We think water comes in bottles from Nestle. By the time we figure out there's no more mountain to climb up, it's too late. There'll be nothing left to do but eat shit and die.