The Penguin

Eras of Life, from PosterPlus (Sorry I don't know who the artist is) I always loved the "Prehistoric Life" picture books for kids, with their huge two-page spreads of each geological era. I used to lay on the floor, propped on my elbows as I read and re-read my favorites: the Cretaceous, of course, when dinosaurs really got down to the business of being gigantic war-lizards; the Pleistocene, with its ice ages and giant twisty-horned/tusked/toothed shag-carpeted megabeasts; Oligocene South America, which warranted its own page due to the weirdness of its fantastic critters: bus-sized sloths, giant killer chickens, "camels" with elephant trunks and unpronounceable names, sabertooth cats that were actually marsupials but not really. The Progression of Life was very simple, like a chapterbook - first came the rather boring Precambrian (jellyfish and sea-pens, yadda yadda...) then the CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION! followed swiftly by the Ages of Fish, Amphibians, Mammal-Like R...

Asian Carp on the Mississippi. From the Illinois Extension website Yeah, that title's a Dr. Strangelove  reference... Every day we hear about a new "apocalypse species" taking over our backyards, usually brought in on ships and planes from faraway lands: Burmese pythons taking over the Everglades; giant Asian "murder hornets" slaughtering honeybees in Washington; Asian carp (several species!) conquering the Mississippi River and threatening the Great Lakes; jumping worms making cheesecake out of our beloved American soil. The list of invasive species to appear just in the last twenty or thirty years is absolutely enormous, and covers basically every Kingdom in the tree of life. And much as we worry about imports from Europe and Asia, our own exports - bullfrogs, for example, or boxelder trees - are running amok in other vulnerable environments of the world. Even as we continue to wring our hands, we simply cannot stop transporting these creatures all over the wo...

Eastern Milksnake ( Lampropeltis triangulatum ) from Wikipedia When I was younger - much younger - I was always befuddled by tale-tellers. There was the classmate who claimed his dad could "Reverse time by blowing up watches". The fellow Boy Scout who told a younger troopmate, "When I was a baby the government switched my organs." And then, oh Lord, there were those fucking History Channel specials - "Are Aliens/Ghosts/Demons Real?" It wasn't that I didn't know the difference between reality and fantasy; it was simply the earnestness with which these stories were conveyed. How could anyone be so convinced of something that wasn't true? Reality, it turned out, was more porous than I wanted it to be. "Impressionable" is the polite word for my state of mind. I had to develop a strict Bullshit sense very early on to protect myself from being taken in. Even so, I avoided the Metaphysical section in the library, since those Time Life: Myste...

"These are a few of my favorite trees..." Oak  ( Quercus  sp.) Any old oaks are amazing to me. The first time you realize a large oak may be over a hundred years old, the resilience and vast age of these trees will change the way you look at them forever. Oaks are renowned for their strength and longevity. Whole cultures have been built around sacred oak trees; in a similar way, whole ecosystems revolve around single huge oak trees - oaks support more species than any other tree in North America. While people are familiar with white oak (rounded lobes) and red oak (pointed lobes), there are many different varieties of oaks: bur oak, pin oak, bear oak, turkey oak, live oak, and swamp oak, just to name a few. Because of crossbreeding, it can be really difficult to tell oaks apart - as an ecology graduate once told me, "Oaks like to have a lot of sex". This is why I don't sweat the classification much. I'd rather admire an individual oak tree than try to parse ...