The richest Americans saw their net worth soar 120 percent between 2017 and 2025, a New York Times analysis showed (paywalled). The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now control $55.8 trillion in assets — more than the gross domestic product of the United States and China combined. To a considerable extent, that’s a consequence of the…
Vultures and their cousins, while necessary to a healthy ecology, aren’t very many birders’ favorite birds among the Accipitridae. Carrion eaters, messy diners and evolved for their diet with bare heads, wicked bills and thinly feathered necks, they are very efficient at a gruesome lifestyle we don’t like to think about. Here’s a small galley…
Chris Bullard is a retired judge living in Philadelphia. This poem appeared in the March 2026 issue of Scientific American. Boulders at Hickory Run — Chris Bullard We describe to the kids how tremendous ice sheets rose as high as a tsunami and pummeled mountains into the debris of a thousand rocks. Then, someone corrects…
Alaska’s got a Denali-sized problem with denialism, specifically denial of anthropogenic climate change, “global warming.” It’s not just the still incomplete bridge across the Pretty Rocks rock glacier in Denali National Park, which is currently at a projected cost of $150 million (originally it was $91 million), with the park road not reopening until later…
As WC noted last week, we’ve exhausted WC’s inventory of parrot photos, so it’s time to move on to a different family of birds, something even more charismatic than parrots, the Ramphastidae, the Toucans, Toucanettes, Mountain-Toucans and Aracaris. And among all those Ramphastidae, we’ll start with biggest of the big bills, the Toucans. Specifically, the…
In response to a recent post on the Yellow-eared Parrot, a long-time Wickersham’s Conscience reader asked recently, “What’s the rarest species you’ve photographed?” That’s a hard question answer for several reasons. The first problem is with the definition of “rarest”? Does it mean the one with the smallest known population? Or one classified as in…
In World War I, some 66 million gas shells were fired on the fields of Europe. The shells collectively contained an estimated 125 million tons of war gases. Approximately 30% of those fired between 1914 and 1918 did not detonate. Most of them remain buried in the ground there today. Most of the old gas…
WC has lumped several families of raptors into this post in the interests of not having this series run forever. They all have in common that they are aerial-hunting raptors, mostly found in the savvanahs of East Africa. As usual, you can click on an image for a larger view. A few notes follow the…
One of WC’s classmates at the University of Oregon successfully avoided being drafted into the Vietnam War by literally shooting himself in the foot. Let’s call the classmate “John.” John’s effort was “successful” in the sense that he didn’t get drafted. Of course, he was pretty crippled up by the permanent damage to his foot,…
Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) is nearly forgotten today, or if remembered at all, pilloried for his racism and unthinking white supremacy. But he was widely admired back in the day and no less an authority than William Butler Yeats praised Lindsay’s efforts to bring “song” – the Greek oral traditions, in particular – to modern English…
The title track from John Prine’s fifth album, “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow),” is now 50 years old. There’s a live version of it at the end of this post, one of Prine’s first live performances of the tune (he didn’t even have a name for the song yet), and it’s a little ragged, and…
WC’s photos of the Yellow-eared Parrot aren’t very good, but because this species is so seriously at risk of extinction, WC will proceed, shabby photos or not. The Yellow-eared Parrot has lost most of its habitat. The species is critically dependent on Wax Palms for food, roosting and nesting sites. Wax Palms are cut down…
Well, for a given definition of “new.” It’s actually 407 million years old. Prototaxites fossils been known to science – specifically, paleontologists – for more than a hundred fifty years. But the fossils were mystifying and there was a kind of general understanding they were probably some kind of fungus that hadn’t been figured out…
The Roadless Rule was created in 2001 to identify and protect some of the wildest, least disturbed parts of the national forest system. These places are called Inventoried Roadless Areas – a formal designation the U.S. Forest Service uses for large tracts of land, usually 5,000 acres or more, that have no permanent roads and remain largely…
WC is a few days late getting the end of the month post up. It could be WC’s wretched time management skills, but instead we’ll blame the famously short month of February. After all, if February had a decent number of days – like January, for example – this post would be timely. But whatever…
WC has written about his adventures with varicella zoster virus (VZV) before. The short version is that because WC had chicken pox as a kid, he was at risk for shingles in his old age. And developed shingles in 2019 while on the wait list for the Shingrix™ vaccine. Ironically, when WC finally rose to…
Fascism: I sometimes fear… — Michael Rosen I sometimes fear that people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean…
Among African raptors, there is little consistency between common names and taxonomics. Sparrowhawks, for example, are actually falcons and not hawks, and goshawks are actually Accipiters, not Buteos, the traditional hawks. But for purposes of photos of African raptors, at least, WC will ignore taxonomics and make today’s post African birds that are called “hawks,”…
The White-eyed Parakeet is a medium-sized, reasonably conspicuous green parrot widespread in the lowlands of northern and central South America. It resembles the other twelve Psittacara parakeets in being largely green with a white orbital eye ring, red under the wrists and a variable amount of red on its head. In this species the red on the…
As legend has it, two high ministers in ancient China’s Tang Dynasty were strolling in the Imperial Gardens. One asked the other, “Would you betray the Emperor for ten million coin?” The other, younger minister paused and said, “Ten million coin is a lot of money. I would be sorely tempted, yes.” The first asked,…
As several readers have pointed out in emails and comments, it’s pretty hard to limit Dunleavy’s idiot actions to just five instances. Certainly WC could devote an entire blog to Big Mike’s Boners. That’s not going to happen. If you think WC has missed an egregious one, put it in a comment. This is the…
During the heighth of the COVID-19 pandemic, global emissions of nitrogen dioxide fell to near pre-industrial level. Nitorgen dixoide (NO2) is mostly a by-product of internal combusion engines. It’s familiar as the stuff that contributes to smog. Water and ultraviolet light breaks down atmorpheric NO2 creating, among other things, a powerful oxidizer, the hydroxyl radical…
In this chapter, we’ll show how to retain dictatorial power by eliminating those who might remove you, while preserving the appearance of democracy. . . . . . If the country you rule has a tradition of elections, it’s dangerous to simply end that tradition to retain your dictatorial power. It’s safer and simpler to…
Advice from an Estuary — Wendy Erd Look ordinaryDon’t ask for much.Travel to your edge, then go furtherEmpty out.Let the moon refill you.Embrace opposites easily.Host travelers without borders.Listen to the distance in their songs.Nurture the invisible, harbor their young.Digest insults. Reframe and cleanse them.Adopt silence while others speak all around you.Measure change calmly.Mirror the sky.At…
Once again, WC will show his age by whinging about the modern world, not just because it gets harder to keep up with change as you get older, but also at the incredible stupidity of some of those changes. Let’s talk first about Fisker. In May 2023, the California auto brand marketed its new electric…
The Monk Parakeet is the best studied and most widely distributed of the Psittacidae, the Parrot family. The primary reason for that is the pet trade: more than a million Monk Parrots have been trapped and shipped from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, the species’ native range. As a result, there are breeding populations off…
As several readers have pointed out in emails and comments, it’s pretty hard to limit Dunleavy’s idiot actions to just five instances. Certainly WC could devote an entire blog to Big Mike’s Boners. That’s not going to happen. If you think WC has missed an egregious one, put it in a comment. WC has already…
The open source software community is in a dither as software coding AI agents increase in sophisticaton, if not in quality coding. There’s a lot of recent virtual ink devoted to MJ Rathbun, which turns out not to be a natural person at all, but rather an AI bot created through a platform called OpenCLAW.…
There are two families of raptors: Accipitridae and Falcons. The separation into two families – more distantly related than you might have thought – is relatively recent. The Accipters are the Hawks, Eagles, Kites and Vultures. There are some 250 Accipitridae species in all, scattered across 74 (!) genera. WC will break the East African…
The Felon, in his presidential campaign and since, has promised there would be retribution against his enemies. To WC’s knowledge, in 250 years of American history, he was the first major presidential candidate and first person elected who campaigned on a promise of revenge. So how successful has he been in getting his sworn revenge?…
Emily Dickinson, poet and recluse, dutiful daughter and profilic correspondent. Only ten of her more than 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime, and a complete, un-bowdlerized edition of her poems and letters wasn’t published until 1955, some 70 years after her death. She was as enigmatic as any person in American literature. Here’s a…
This chunk of stupid involved inaction as well as action, but it’s still stupid. Anyone with the brains of a planarium has been able to see since at least the early 2000s that Alaska needed additional revenue, that revenues from oil were not going to recover, that the state could not budget cut itself to…
Yes, yet another parrot species – there are about 163 species, worldwide – this one found in central South America, mostly in Brazil and Argentina. It is very popular in the cage-bird trade, and as a consequence escaped birds are common in unexpected places, including Dade County, Florida, where these birds were photographed. Turquoise-fronted Amazon…
At the February 4, 2026 meeting of the Matanuska-Susitna School Board, Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani blasted the Galena City School District. Dr. Trani reported the tiny (population 456) city school district had just completed a $31 million new high school, which included a swimming pool, and would be hosting a national water polo tournament. Funding…
Of course WC admires LaMonte McLemore. In one single artist you can find a masterful singer, a gifted photogtrapher and a pretty decent baseball player. That’s three of WC’s personal interests squeezed into one individual. What’s not to admire? McLemore passed away on February 3, 2026. It helps that he was also funny, generous and…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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