The morning after

When I planned out the schedule for my fall semester graduate statistics course back in August, I remember pausing, for a moment, over today’s date. Did I want to plan for a regular meeting the day after this election? In many of the best-case scenarios, the students and I would be thinking more about an ongoing vote count than whatever topic I slotted in for the day. But I had hope, and only so many days for the class, and I figured I could always make a call based on what actually happened.

It turns out my hope was misplaced, and we knew it before I finally went to bed last night.

So this morning, before I could bring myself to eat breakfast, I composed an email to the class. It’s turned out to be most of what I have to say this morning, so I’m posting it here for posterity, or maybe for other faculty who are still trying to figure out how to say some of this:

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The week Chase let go

(Flickr, Michael Levine-Clark)

May, here in the Upper Midwest, is when spring finally starts. The trees are budding out all over Median Lake, crocuses are poking up from flowerbeds, and that pile of snow in the parking lot behind City Hall is melted down to its stubborn, pyramidal core of gravel and ice. Gardeners have been putting in all the tomatoes they started on their kitchen windowsills back in April — Mother’s Day weekend, that’s the date to get them in the ground, and spend the next two months dreaming of big, juicy slices of heirloom beefsteaks for caprese and BLTs, brilliant red Romas to can for sauce.

It’s also time for Median Lake Pride, second to last weekend of May. Yes, Pride is traditionally in June. But when you’re planning Pride in a town midway between Des Moines and Minneapolis, and within road-trip distance of Milwaukee and Chicago, you have to make some accommodation. We know better than to try to compete with the big cities, even if we do know how to put on a show in Median Lake.

And, honey, it has not been a quiet Pride Week in Median Lake.

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Oh, hon, let me tell you. It has not been a quiet week in Median Lake

(jby)

Median Lake got another foot of snow this week. The sun came out and warmed us up above freezing for maybe an hour, at high noon on Tuesday. That mostly served to re-establish the glaze of ice on the sidewalks — best we can do in February, on the prairie.

In weather like this, I expect you think we spend all our time huddled indoors. And you’d be right! But diners are indoors. Church fellowship halls are indoors. Coffee shops are indoors. The Rainbow Garland Tavern, the only gay bar between Des Moines and the Twin Cities, just a block off of Main Street on Third Avenue, by the Larsson Brothers Hardware? That’s as indoors as you get. And whatever else you might say about folks getting together in diners and fellowship halls and coffee shops and bars, it usually doesn’t make for a quiet week.

Steven Kramer, who tends bar at the Garland most nights? Well, he’s more or less the only person in town you might call an events promoter, and he’s been running ragged.

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2023 in sights seen

C in the waves at Second Beach, Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge, Washington. (jby)

To bring this photographic retrospective to a close, we come to images I took of the landscapes in which I found birds, plants, mammals, and other critters. These include lots of mountains and forest trails, but the most dramatic ones might be views from Second Beach at Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge. The beach is shadowed by rocky prominences that loom dramatically out of the tidal spray, some big enough to host patches of coastal forest.

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2023 in invertebrates

Boisduval’s blue butterfly on a weedy geranium, on Santa Cruz Island. (jby)

As a final taxonomic catch-all for my 2023 nature photography, let’s go with … invertebrates? If I’m not taking a photo of a plant, a bird, or a mammal, it’s most likely an insect visiting a flower. I do love a good plant-pollinator interaction. And while larger animals are a challenge to manage well with my 150mm lens, I can frequently catch some nice close images of butterflies nectaring, like the blue above, or the Clodius parnassian below.

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2023 in mammals

Santa Cruz Island fox, at the Scorpion campground. (jby)

My last year of photography had broader taxonomic scope than birds and flowering plants, of course. I got some good images of mammals across the range of habitats I hiked and toured. Top billing has to go to the miniature foxes of Santa Cruz Island, above, which have fully taken over the campground where we spent two nights, napping yards away from occupied campsites and always on the lookout for unguarded snacks. It was like camping in a cat cafe, if the cats were a protected species.

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2023 in plant life

A western Joshua tree in bloom near Mojave, California. (jby)

Following on from my post of 2023 bird photography highlights, here’s some of my favorite flowering plant images I captured in 2023. Flowers are, of course, easier photography subjects, but I’m still learning how to balance lighting and depth of field to really capture details with the most aesthetic interest and botanic value.

Above, the example with the greatest professional value: Joshua trees in flower this spring, after record-breaking winter rainfall across a lot of the Mojave Desert.

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2023 in birds

White-crowned sparrow at Asilomar State Beach, California. (jby)

It’s been more than a year since I decided to return to photography beyond what I can do with the (deceptively good) camera built into a smartphone. In 2023, I took quite a lot of photos with my entry-level mirrorless Olympus digital, almost all with a 150mm lens that achieves good enough optical zoom to go beyond anything I’ve done with any camera I’ve owned. So this was my first full year carrying a camera that can in principle capture images of wildlife — though not yet the strongest skill set using it. Or, indeed, as much lens as I really ought to have for images of anything that can run or fly away from an aspiring paparazzo. Nevertheless, I’m pretty happy with some of the images I got, including enough birds to merit a personal retrospective, in this post. Many more are on Flickr, tagged appropriately.

Up top: one of the white-crowned sparrows I saw on the dunes at Asilomar, in between sessions at the first in-person meeting of the American Society of Naturalists I’ve attended since 2020.

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The biology behind a superb superbloom, in the Los Angeles Times

California poppies, fiddlenecks, lupines, and other wildflowers at the California Poppy Preserve back in early April. (jby)

Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times has an article that goes into some of the biology behind this spring’s “superbloom” in California — plants all over the state responding to an exceptionally cool, wet spring with profuse flowering. Corinne Purtill, the author, called up some rando to enthuse about all that spring greenery:

Those 31 atmospheric rivers delivered steady, nourishing rainfall from October to March. Regional temperatures remained moderate as well, without any sudden early-spring heat waves to kill off fragile baby plants.

The combination of those two factors has produced “an absolutely glorious spring,” one that has been more vibrantly colorful for longer than any in recent memory, said Jeremy Yoder, a Cal State Northridge biologist.

As the headline says, everything is blooming everywhere all at once, and it reflects how the life histories of plants in many California natural communities are adapted to periodic drought. Check out the whole piece for more from me and my fellow plant nerds on the science behind a spring bloom that has us all agog.

Natural history apps introduce people to the biodiversity around them — even if they don’t know quite what to look for

The Washington Post “climate advice” columnist, Michael Coren, has a great article up today about his experience trying out apps that identify plants and wildlife [gift link] from smartphone images or audio recordings, like iNaturalist or Merlin. It’s clear from Coren’s description that being able to put names to the living things in his neighborhood gave him a new connection to that urban biodiversity

I’m not a master naturalist, but I have one in my pocket. Thanks to artificial intelligence trained on millions of observations, anyone with a smartphone can snap a picture or record a sound to identify tens of thousands of species, from field bluebells to native bumblebees.

If I’m honest, it’s the kind of thing I would normally miss while walking or pedaling to work. Birdsong might be gorgeous but I’d barely hear it. I’d note “pine tree” as a catchall for conifers.

That has changed. I’m now on a first-name basis with most of my wild neighbors. It has reconnected me to a natural world I love, yet never studied deeply enough to know all its characters and settings.

This is very much the experience I hope students have in my undergraduate plant systematics course, and I’m delighted that smartphone apps are making it more accessible. (This year I actually started providing my plant systematics class with explicit guidance in using iNaturalist as one resource for plant identification, in concert with formal botanical keys like the Jepson manual.) But Coren also illustrates the article with images of plants he’d identified using apps and … they’re not very good?

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