A white-crowned sparrow in Sacramento, California, in January 2017. Photo by ADJ82.
Researchers studying white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys) in the San Francisco area this past spring during California’s coronavirus shutdown found that the males had changed their song, presumably because it was easier for them to make themselves heard on account of the drop in human-caused noise. The birds no longer had to trill high and loud to pierce through the cacophony. The researchers noted that the calmer, quieter environment allowed the males to use a wider range of sounds in their calls, increasing their chances of mating success since the females find the wider range, with more low frequency notes, more appealing. The white-crowned sparrows in the Bay Area benefited from the reduction in human activity, and there have been similar stories from around the world this past year of animals enjoying a world less in conflict with people.
Eaux Claires is a social activist group in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that also hosts an annual music festival. This video of the singer, Feist, covering the Yusuf/Cat Stevens song “Trouble”, was filmed on November 1, 2020, as part of the group’s efforts to encourage people – particularly young people – to vote in the November 3rd election.
The political events of the past week in the United States herald a calmer, quieter environment to come, one in which everyone can be heard, not just those who tweet the loudest in ALL CAPS on social media, sowing hatred and tumult. Through the majority of their votes, Americans elected to step back from the brink of authoritarianism. While a disturbing number of their fellow citizens voted their support for climate destruction, white supremacy, and a sneering contempt for the rights of women and minorities, thankfully a greater number turned out to vote in favor of progress down the road of reason and empathy, not continuing on a death march. Those voters, many of them young people voting for the first time, have given all of us another chance to sing a new song.
“Oh Very Young”, a 1974 song by Yusuf/Cat Stevens. The haunting backup vocal was performed by Suzanne Lynch.
Yusuf Islam/Cat Stevens performs “Oh Very Young” in December 2008.
— Izzy
Song of the white-crowned sparrow as recorded by Jonathan Jongsma for the Xeno-canto Foundation in April 2012 in the Palo Alto Baylands Nature Preserve, California.
Wait! Don’t throw that Halloween pumpkin in the trash!There are any number of ways to keep that pumpkin out of a landfill and instead put it to good use. Before putting it to good use, however, it’s a good idea to clean up any wax or decorative bits from the pumpkin, restoring it to a state of pumpkin grace in nature, the way it had grown peacefully in some farmer’s field all summer before it became a holiday symbol for a few brief autumn days.
Compost your pumpkin! If you can’t compost it yourself, give it to someone who can. If your pumpkin is still wholesomely edible, you can of course eat it, or give it to some person or creature who will. An animal sanctuary operating on a skimpy budget dependent on the kindness of members of the community will almost certainly welcome the donation of edible pumpkins, free of any toxic byproducts, as a treat for the animals under their guardianship. Don’t forget to save the seeds when hollowing out a pumpkin prior to using it as a decoration: either eat the seeds yourself, or set them out for the birds (don’t salt the seeds if they’re meant for the birds).
A pair of Golden Guernsey goats eating a pumpkin in November 2011. Photo by Flickr user Rebecca. If these goats could talk, they might bleat a “Thank you!”
You will do a good deed by turning a symbol of the fall harvest, which has unfortunately also become a symbol of enormous food waste, into a positive boon for someone or some creature in some way, at least for a few days. Better than putting it in a landfill, where it will help no one. In two months it will be time to consider how to keep Christmas trees out of the landfill, and that will be a little trickier because hardly anyone wants to eat them, although goats might nibble the more tender parts. — Izzy
There are many respectable plants bearing the word “weed” in their common name, such as Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa), Joe Pye Weed (Eutrochium spp.), and Jewelweed (Impatiens capensis). Some are easily available at garden centers, some are available only by mail order, while still others will show up in the garden on their own. All demonstrate a propensity for spreading easily if conditions are right, and that is perhaps the reason for the designation “weed” in their common names. Latin names typically are not prejudiced against these less formal plants that straddle both the garden and the wilds.
Monarch butterfly on a Butterfly Weed at Cape May National Wildlife Refuge in New Jersey. Photo by Laura Perlick for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).
Some gardeners do not look beyond the word “weed” in a name before they reach for their hoe or a chemical plant killer. Such gardeners are not independent thinkers, but ones who are locked into a binary view of the natural world, viewing everything as either good or bad. Try to explain to them that the inclusion of “weed” in a plant’s name can be merely a case of poor public relations. It’s worthwhile to get overly judgmental gardeners to stay their hand regarding these plants because they are often beneficial to butterflies, birds, and other wildlife, more so than a hybrid rose bush.
Other weeds, of course, do not have the word included in their name but have acquired it as a general type by reputation. For those weeds, gardeners and farmers have less tolerance and are apt to destroy them whenever encountered, though even those exist on a sliding scale. People are divided into several camps about Dandelions (Taraxacum spp.), for example, while they nearly universally abhor Palmer’s Pigweed (Amaranthus palmeri) and Lamb’s Quarters (Chenopodium berlandieri). Even those last two plants offer the feature of edibility, making them attractive on however limited a basis to at least some people and animals.
One important group of plants has acquired the name “weed”, and they are in the genus Cannabis, also known as Marijuana. Growers and users of the plant have called it “weed” and many other names besides for reasons of its outlaw, rebel status, as well as its diverse nature in checking off boxes from good to bad. Marijuana plants can spread readily on their own; mismanaged large scale cultivation, as opposed to the former practice of clandestinely maintaining relatively small plots, can have a negative impact on the environment; and for people the plant can range in usefulness from good to bad depending on the inclinations and prejudices of the person beholding it.
Paul Reubens as Pee-wee Herman performs “Surfin’ Bird”, a hit song for The Trashmen in 1963, in the 1987 movieBack to the Beach, with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
The word “weed” embraces many meanings, and means different things to different people depending on their tolerance level. To hear “weed” in a plant’s name and automatically seek to eradicate it from the garden is arbitrary and foolish. Better to take a more nuanced approach regarding the plants that don’t threaten to choke out every other plant in a garden plot. Some can be seen as friendlier than others regardless of being handicapped with a bad name. As for that other kind of “weed”, the kind some folks like to smoke, legally it’s gaining more widespread favor despite its outlaw name.
— Izzy
It’s May and the sweet, citrusy smell of honeysuckle blossoms fills the air. For many people around the country the honeysuckle smells are emanating from invasive Asian and European species that have come to dominate the native honeysuckles in the landscape in the past century and more. The honeysuckle genus, Lonicera, encompasses more than 180 species from around the world, of which about 20 are native to North America. The primary reason any of this matters to American gardeners is how the invasive species, once a welcome addition to the landscape, will overwhelm other plants given even a little leeway.
Besides the bush honeysuckles which dominate the understory in woodlands and arch their branches into the space of neighbors in the garden, there are the twining vines of the Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica), which make their way into absolutely everything, whether along the ground or into the canopies of trees, robbing their hosts of sunlight, water, and nutrients. Once the blooms are done, red or purple berries follow, which birds love to eat, making sure the plants spread everywhere the birds go. Honeysuckle bushes and vines can also readily spread by layering, which is to say that parts of them touching soil develop roots, creating a leapfrog effect of new plants. Cut one section down to the ground, and likely as not another new plant has already started a few feet away.
A ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) sips nectar from a North American trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens). Photo by jeffreyw.
There are a number of other aggressive plants which have less to recommend them than the honeysuckles. English ivy (Hedera helix), for instance, offers no sweet fragrance or much in the way of bird food. Misguided people encourage it to grow on buildings, when what they would be better off planting is Boston ivy (Parthenicissus tricuspidata), a better behaved climber which won’t invade the mortar on brick structures, corroding it and pulling it out. Wild grape (Vitis spp.) has only found cultivated use in contributing genetic material to vineyard varieties. No one plants wild grape itself. It is mostly found in woodlands and has no ornamental value, though of course that is in the eye of the beholder.
Japanese honeysuckle blooming along Franklin Farm Road in the Franklin Farm section of Oak Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia. Photo by Famartin. The blooms turn from white when they first open to yellow as they age.
Japanese honeysuckle and the bush honeysuckles are here to stay – there’s no eradicating such successful invaders who are popular with the native fauna, if not flora – and coping with them therefore becomes a state of mind as much as physical labor. Step outside in May and inhale the intoxicating scent of their flowers and observe butterflies and hummingbirds helping themselves to the nectar, and in summer take your ease in the shade or indoors while the berries form, knowing birds are noting their ripening until fall when they will descend on the plants and devour the berries, spreading new plants far and wide. It’s too hot and bothersome in summer to get after the honeysuckle with implements of destruction, but in winter when it’s cool and memories of their pleasant attributes are far away, get after those suckers and yank ’em out root and branch. Don’t worry – you’ll likely never get rid of them altogether, and come spring there will be a new birth of honeysuckle and with it a wonderfully sweet scent in the May air.
— Izzy
Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark recently discovered arsenic in the green pigment used on the covers of some Renaissance manuscripts, which means they are unreadable without special handling. The pigment was not put there by the original writers or printers, but by Victorian preservationists who were most likely trying to prevent insect damage. The pigment, known as Parisian Green, was known at the time to ward off insects, but the link to arsenic was little known at the time. Production of Parisian Green has since been discontinued, joining a list of other toxic pigments whose drawbacks became known over time.
The late nineteenth century Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh may have succumbed to lead poisoning, dying at 37 of a self-inflicted gunshot after one of his many fits of delirium. This is one of many speculations about van Gogh’s troubled mental life. Van Gogh was extraordinarily prolific in his short career, producing over two thousand paintings in the course of ten years. He left behind many letters describing his technique and materials, and from those historians have speculated van Gogh’s high productivity exposed him to the lead in his oil paints more than what other artists of the period experienced.
Enclosed Wheat Field with Peasant / Landscape at Saint-Rémy, an 1889 painting Vincent van Gogh produced while staying at an asylum in southern France.
There is another aspect of van Gogh’s use of certain pigments which has come to light in recent years, and that is the susceptibility of some of them, mainly the yellows he mixed with white in order to lighten them, to fade to a dull brown after prolonged exposure to sunlight. Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers are particularly vulnerable to losing their unique quality on account of this unfortunate chemical reaction. Ironic that an artist who delighted in the strong sunlight of southern France and attempted to bring out its shining brightness in the strong yellows of his paintings should have his efforts diluted by the effects of sunlight.
Homo sapiens have some of the best color vision in the animal kingdom. Only birds have better color vision overall, as evidenced by the wide range of color displays in their plumage. Humans don’t have colorful plumage, of course, but there are many other ways we make use of our excellent color vision, and one of them is our zealous pursuit of pigments and dyes to reproduce the colors we see in the world. Our desire to display the colors we see in the world and express to others our own imaginative vision manifests not so much with our own bodies, which are limited canvases, but in art and design, in paintings and fabrics since antiquity, and in film and electronics over the last hundred or more years.
A video tribute to Vincent van Gogh set to Don McLean’s 1971 song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)”.
Vincent van Gogh, driven as he was to recreate in his paintings the life he saw not only with his eyes, but with his mind’s eye, may have gone on even knowing the health risks of some of the pigments he was using because the colors he sought could be achieved no other way at the time, though he may have reconsidered using some others had he known of their eventual degradation of his vision. It’s also possible that for him the painting was the thing, capturing what he saw and felt at the moment, and letting the future be what it will.
— Vita
For decades now, when gardeners needed a windbreak or a privacy screen they have resorted to planting hedgerow monocultures of a few relatively fast growing evergreen species, among them the Leyland cypress. For some who prefer a more formal, planned look, that plan has sufficed, but others might look at such a hedgerow as boring and as a lost opportunity to bring more wildlife into their gardens. Planting with wildlife in mind takes a generous spirit, particularly for the gardener who is also trying to raise fruits and vegetables for their own consumption. There are trade offs and compromises involved.
One of the problems with a hedgerow monoculture occurs when one or more of the plants dies, creating a gap that must then be filled with the same kind of plant, sometimes at considerable expense if the new plant is not to be too conspicuous by its smaller size. The gardener can feel trapped, and the trap can get more enveloping and add even more expense if the reason for a plant’s death is a disease or pest, engaging the gardener in an endless battle. Sometimes it can be a blessing when a disease or pest spreads quickly from one plant in the monoculture to the next, ending the battle with its consequent frustrations and expenses and presenting the gardener with a blank slate after a tree removal company has carted away the battlefield fallen.
This colonnade of Leyland cypresses in England is presumably a windbreak for the greenhouses behind. Photo by Ben Gamble.
Instead of persisting in folly and boring landscaping, a gardener might decide it is wiser and more interesting to plant rows or clumps of a diverse assortment of trees and shrubs, more closely imitating nature. The gardener might look for evergreen trees for year round screening for the gardener and cover for wildlife; deciduous trees which with their tall, rounded crowns fill visual gaps between the conical forms of the evergreens, and add nuts and acorns for wildlife food; shrubs and small trees both evergreen and deciduous which give fruits and berries in different seasons; and finally a water source, preferably running rather than stagnant. That’s a privacy screen for the gardener and a home for wildlife, and it isn’t only for large properties, since there are almost always dwarf or semi-dwarf forms of trees available.
Inviting wildlife into the garden this way means being willing to compromise on the amount of produce left for the gardener, and also means protecting vulnerable young plants from the very same wildlife. This is a microcosm and an imitation of nature, after all, and not truly nature. In nature the loss of a few sapling trees here and there to deer browsing is not necessarily a catastrophe since there may be as many more that will survive to maturity. But for the gardener who may have space to plant only a few trees, the loss of even one young tree is important. An example would be the gardener who joins in the effort to restore the American chestnut to the landscape and helps the cause by buying and planting a few saplings at home. Unless that gardener cages the chestnut saplings for the first two or three years of their growth, deer will come along and browse the foliage and rub velvet off their antlers using the trunks of the saplings, debarking them. Caging is the only truly effective way to get deer to leave the chestnut saplings alone until they are big and strong enough to withstand their attentions.
On a small lot in particular a gardener should not expect to get very many fruits and berries for their own consumption. Birds love eating the same things, and they are outside all day every day, watching for ripeness, and when it comes the birds get to the fruits and berries very soon. Netting is a nasty business that tangles up birds and other critters, killing them, and it has no place in a garden planted for wildlife. Either be content with gleaning a few fruits and berries here and there, or build a small greenhouse to grow a few protected plants. Gardeners with large plots of land have more options, both for the wildlife and for themselves. Plant native plants when possible, because they are better adapted to coexist with native wildlife. Once there are birds and frogs and other insect eaters living nearby, the gardener may actually find fewer pest and disease problems in the rest of the garden, and that alone makes it worth the trouble of devising a landscape scheme more varied and interesting than a soldier row of Leyland cypresses.
— Izzy
As if the lack of trust hadn’t sunk low enough between internet users, advertisers, and the websites which host advertisements, along comes cryptojacking, a method for either honestly or dishonestly using the computing power and electricity of internet users to mine cryptocurrency. Last week, users of YouTube in some countries noticed that their antivirus and antimalware programs were alerting them to code hidden in ads on YouTube which were enlisting their computers for cryptomining without their permission. Google, which administers YouTube, claims to have fixed the problem. Unfortunately, there are many small websites that don’t have Google’s Information Technology (IT) resources and may have been hacked and had cryptojacking code installed without their knowledge.
Cryptojacking sounds like it should be illegal, but oddly enough it is not. There can be repercussions such as blacklisting for hiding code in ads, and of course this sort of activity serves to push more people toward the use of ad blockers, which deplete the revenue of honest websites as well as dishonest ones. There are now outfits on the web,Coinhive being the most notable, which promote to website owners the idea of replacing ads altogether with a bit of JavaScript code on the website itself that will enlist the computers of visitors in mining Monero, a type of cryptocurrency that, unlike Bitcoin, doesn’t require high end equipment. Coinhive takes 30% of the resulting mining revenue, and the website owner gets 70%. Coinhive rather dubiously promotes this as a fair business model for the website owner in a time of declining revenue from ads, while not mentioning its relative fairness for the website visitor.
A mining farm of Genesis Mining in Iceland. These are mainly Zeus scrypt miners. 2014 photo by Marco Krohn. No subterfuge involved in this cryptocurrency mining operation. Note that because the calculations required to create the currency generate a lot of heat, there are fans at the ends of all the units.
As originally set up by Coinhive, the JavaScript ran without the internet user’s knowledge or permission. If an internet user visited a website running Coinhive‘s JavaScript code, and the user’s security software did not alert the user or block the code from running, the only indication the user had of being legally cryptojacked was how unusually busy their computer was and, when the electric bill arrived, how unusually high it was. Savvy computer users might also check running processes monitored by the task manager on their computer. But it’s a good bet that most computer users have no idea about task manager or where to find it on their computer. Some users don’t run any security software at all, or if they do, they misuse it. Running Coinhive software without the knowledge or permission of website visitors is sneaky at best, and more likely just plain unethical, and any arguments from Coinhive or anyone else that it is a fair replacement for ads is mere sophistry.
After some amount of pushing from internet users, Coinhive started offering an above board, opt-in type of cryptomining code so that website visitors knew what was being asked of them. Naturally that version has not proved popular with the website owners who partner with Coinhive because advising visitors of cryptomining activity only leads to the great majority of them declining to participate. People who are not computer savvy, when confronted with an option which will in all likelihood confuse and frighten them, will resort to the safest option and just say no. More computer savvy visitors will likely decide it’s not worth their while to have their computer slowed down to a crawl and their electricity bill hiked by a few dollars a month just to visit a website. Only the most indispensable websites could get away with it, and they are apt to have access to many other less complicated sources of revenue. Coinhive, meanwhile, continues offering the original, surreptitious version of its software.
Naturalist David Attenborough discusses brood parasitism among birds in this BBC wildlife segment.
The arms race between website owners and advertisers on one side, and website visitors on the other side, began when internet service was incredibly slow and most consumers had data caps. Ads, particularly Flash ads that jumped up and down to attract the visitor’s attention, slowed down internet service even more and sucked up the visitor’s limited data. Enter ad blockers. The thing about ad blockers, however, is that even though most of them offer users the ability to whitelist websites, most users are either unaware of that option or don’t bother to use it unless prompted by the website. Ad blockers often act effectively as blunt instruments then, punishing honest websites which display discreet, reputable ads in an above board manner, along with dishonest or careless websites which display gaudy ads that may or may not harbor malicious code. Like many other areas of life, on the internet a few bad actors can spoil the honest efforts of the majority of website owners. The answer to declining revenue from the arms race between advertisers and advertising blockers is not for website owners to get sneaky, however, which erodes trust, but to develop trust with their visitors and exercise restraint on their advertisers.
— Techly
