A Substack newsletter I’m enjoying:
Steady by Dan Rather. Smart, caring, some politics, but not all the time.
Some Local Wildlife I’ve Been Seeing:
Yesterday I saw a monarch on some pansies at a local plant store and stopped to take a picture. How amazingly beautiful they are. Blows me away ever time. I also don’t think I had noticed before how spotted their actual bodies are.
A very placid deer from a mini birding hike I did a couple of weeks ago. They always surprise me in how quiet they are up close, and how large, but also how gentle. This one wasn’t bothered by me at all. Also deer are significantly easier to photograph than warblers, it turns out.
And finally, this guy. You might not be able to tell from this photo, but this is a large insect. I had no idea what it was, so I googled ‘orange and black ant’ and sure enough, up he popped. It’s actually a wingless wasp called a red velvet ant, also known as the ‘cow killer’ because its sting apparently hurts so much that it can bring down a cow. Hoping he was on his way out of the backyard range of my curious puppies. The orange ‘warning’ color is not a bluff with this one! Pretty though. He’s also sort of fluffy.
Excellent Espresso:
An article on using mathematical models to brew the perfect cup of coffee. Now we’re finally applying the full potential of science to answer life’s most important questions. Finally.
Raccoon Research (My career advisors never mentioned you could study raccoons for a living! How fun would that be?!)
Having not grown up in America, I had no idea whether the raccoons I routinely ran into outside my shared student house in western Massachusetts were likely to be friendly or mean.
One dark evening when I was walking back from campus, one fat raccoon ambled out from under a shrub and looked at me as if to say “what you got? Any snacks in that backpack?”. In the two seconds it took for me to decide to slowly back up a little, basically ignore the raccoon and continue on my way, my brain had a number of questions about how aggressive raccoons could be, what rabies might look like, how fast raccoons run, do they run?!….and the like.
I’m still a bit scared of skunks to be honest, but I’m now very comfy with all sorts of ‘Murican critters, including the many bears I’ve had the honor of witnessing around my mountain homes.
But it turns out that we all have more to learn about some of our most common backyard creatures. Some new research on raccoons is rather fascinating. It seems as though the more docile ones are better at figuring out little puzzles, which might mean that they’re better at adapting to a variety of environments, including ours. The researchers are also looking at whether cognitive traits (like figuring out that we tend to leave old french fries in our delicious trash) or behavioral traits (like docility) might be better predictors of how and whether certain animals became domesticated. I don’t think even a pet raccoon could have been naughtier than our puppy, Betty Biscuit, though.
I love that we’re still learning and asking questions about our most common wildlife.