Make Your Own

There’s this song by Triple Six Mafia called Bin Laden Weed.  It’s actually got some emotional heft to it, for a rap song.  Usual content warnings for rap: misogyny, violence, self-harm, drug abuse, homophobia, some of those worse than others.  Anyway, I listened to this like a thousand times before I realized the recipe is right there in the chorus.  You too can make your own Bin Laden weed!

It’s “three types of weed grown all together,” and those types are “hydro … light green … bobby brown.”  How do you grow them together?  Just the same soil?  Grafting?  If you graft, what precise arrangement mingles their properties to produce this stuff?  We don’t have specifics, but we do have ingredients.  And I think at least one guy from this band is still alive, so maybe he can let us know.

Let us know!

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Igon and the Joy of Overacting

There’s a guy in the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree named Igon, who is just deeply hilarious.  The first time you become aware of him, he’s yelling and moaning in the distance.  As you approach, you find a crippled guy laying in a heap, alternating between over-wrought sobs and wailing about his agony, and thunderous self-righteous rage at the enemy who has laid him low.  CURSE YOU BAYLE!  oh, take mercy upon my broken body, do not savage me so.

Overacting is really good for a laugh.  Maybe I’d feel differently if I was drowning in it; I only see it occasionally.  This clip from the old cartoon Home Movies illustrates:

What can I say?  Me like funny voice.

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Life List: Wilson’s Warbler

You know how they have birding apps where you can record bird calls, and have them identified?  Great.  And how people would play recordings of calls off their phones to attract birds and get a better look at them?  Not cool.  Scientists have said “stop doin’ that.”  I knew of these things.  But still…

One day I got “Merlin” from Cornell Labs on my phone and used it to ID all the birds I couldn’t see at West Hylebos Wetlands Park.  Some of those birds I have, to this day, never seen – only heard.  There were at least three species of warbler alone that showed in the recordings, plus all sorts of other beasties.

Warblers are tiny passerine / perching birds, which mostly come in combos of yellow black and white, with some green made by combining black and yellow, grey from combining black and white.  The yellowest warbler is just straight yellow, and wilson’s adds to this a jaunty little black cap.  The black cap of a black-capped chickadee doesn’t look very cap-like because it attaches to and mirrors the black on their chins.  The black cap on wilson’s warbler looks very cap-like, or maybe like a little hairdo, because the rest of the bird’s head is very bright yellow.

Warblers have a more “hunched” look than chickadees, almost like they’re shading toward the body language of trunk-climbing birds – creepers and nuthatches – but they’re not all the way there yet.  They’re shy enough I’ve almost never seen them, hiding in summer foliage of bushes and short trees.

On the occasion of first getting Merlin and seeing it recognize all the calls, I was quite excited.  Also frustrated that I couldn’t see any of the birds, but pleased to know they were out there.  When it IDs a bird, you can click a little information profile on them.  That profile includes a few pictures, and also some sample calls you can play back.  I didn’t even think about it before pressing play, and a wilson’s warbler appeared in the trees nearby.

The sun was shining in the fresh green leaves, making them appear yellow.  The bird was just about the same size as the leaves, and you wouldn’t think bright yellow good camouflage, but it was.  Only the movement and song caught my eye.  Was it looking for a lover or flexing on a rival?  I don’t know, but I do know I was wasting its precious calories.  But damn, that’s a cute little bird.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist.  I tried to summon some other species by playing their songs, to no avail.  I’m naughty, but at least I had the decency to not play the wilson’s song again.  Give ’em a break.  And since that day, I have not done that again.

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Life List: White Pelican?

My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

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Life List: Eurasian Collared Dove

I tend to be lumpy on some of these bird posts.  Taxonomy is the practice and study of putting names to things in nature that do not truly have hard boundaries – deciding what does and doesn’t constitute a genus, species, etc.  Because law is involved in conservation and law requires extremely specific language, how one practices taxonomy can make a big difference in the survival of a given population of organisms.

This is worsened by the triage mode for ecology, that the interests of all life on earth are secondary to human greed, so we have to decide what are acceptable losses to that greed.  Feels like a trolley thing.  Trolley will eat everybody and everything, but if you define this one creature as being special enough that the trolley will allow it to exist as an inbred population in petting zoos, it may be spared.  Maybe we’re extremely past due to dismantle trolleys.

Wait, I was going to explain lumpy.  Lumping is deciding two populations of an organism are not distinct enough to be categorized as separate species.  Splitting is deciding that a given population of organisms has sub-groups distinct enough they should be regarded as separate species.  This happens at other –more obsolete– Linnaean ranks as well.  Where it applies to my posts is that I’m tending to mention more than one species in a go, and as we see with my last post, this can group them by species in a way the animals don’t necessarily deserve.  I named my post for glaucous-winged gulls, but will olympic and western gulls get an equal treatment at any point?  Unlikely.

Today I split, and let a related species stand apart.  I gave feral domestic pigeons a post; now I bring you a wild cousin of theirs that has also become an invasive species in North America – the eurasian collared dove.  As part of the human-induced global biotic interchange, they are surely a problem for some precious local species they out-compete.  I don’t know enough to say who that is, but they don’t seem very numerous, and they’re shy around humans.  I hear them far more than I see them, and I don’t hear them very often.

Eurasian collared doves look and sound similar to mourning doves, but don’t have spots, and they have a black semi-collar around the back of the neck.  They even have white tail feather tips accentuated by a band of black, just like mourning doves.  We don’t get mourning on this side of the state, so it’s nice to get something similar.  In my experience, they spend most of their time very high up in trees, coming down to the ground or low bushes to feed, when nobody is paying too close of attention.  They sing like the world’s most pathetic incels, and the sad cooing has a remarkable ability to carry over distance, and penetrate the weatherproofing of my condo – reach me while I’m washing dishes.  I love the sound.

I first saw them at my workplace’s old location, in the beautiful suburban fields with sparse tall trees.  They were pretty close, but I didn’t get a very good look before they fled to the treetops.  Since then, I’ve tracked their call to the tallest trees near my home.  They’re around.

Honestly, I don’t have much to say about them, for lack of direct experience with them.  They’re new to me.  Feel free to drop your hot ECD goss in the comments.

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Life List: Glaucous-Winged Gull

I’ve been reminded recently that glaucous-winged and western seagulls hybridize in my region so heavily there’s a common name for the hybrid swarm – olympic gulls.  But I’m relatively sure the most populous seagulls in my ol’ stompin’ grounds of Federal Way are pure glaucous-winged.  Their wingtips look straight-up white, and they are pale as ghosts, gliding through the treetops.  Or chilling in the parking lot of the mall.

The gullish mallrats are nice-looking.  I like the sound of their calls.  I think they nest at the largely abandoned park & ride behind the mall, and when traffic clears out in the evening around the mall itself, they like to sit right on the ground.  Not sure what they get out of the concrete beach, but it’s cool to see wildlife that close up.

Other times I’ve seen seagulls in the past, they’ve probably been the hybrids, or western gulls, or I don’t even know.  Seagulls are notoriously difficult to tell apart, save for the species that have the most extreme differences.  Hybridization doesn’t help the issue, so mostly I don’t even bother trying to get a positive ID.  Don’t care enough.

I will continue to like seagulls until the day one shits on me, and may that day never come.  They are pretty and their sound is iconic.  It’s the music of a place like Puget Sound.  I wanna grab one under my arm and give it a hug.  Bitches can steal my ice cream any time.  I just hope I get a good look at them.

I heard most of the seagulls in Australia are tiny things.  Around here they are mighty big.  When I was a small child and saw some flying in front of cathedral’s stained glass windows, I fancied they were so huge that they must be albatrosses.  No, odds are that I have never seen an albatross.  Seagulls here tho.  Big ‘uns.

Seagulls fly by “dynamic soaring,” where they rely less on broad wings catching all of the air than on long narrow wings making the best use of whatever air they can get.  The result is that they fly in pretty distinctive ways.  Usually, it looks something like a hawk’s flight, but lower altitude and much faster.

Like many prolific wild animals, it’s easy to see tragedy in their lives, all over the place.  Injury, death, illness.  I’ve seen a juvenile wandering around a parking garage in SoDo with no parent in sight, unable or unwilling to fly away.  Come here, birdy.  I pick you up like a football and take you home…  No, I’ll never do that.  But they make me want to.

There are a lot of good internet videos of seagulls being funny.  Probably no small amount of cruel videos as well; tread carefully.  One of my faves is a smaller gull in the UK using the cat door to run into this little cottage and eat cat food.  Also winning, the little steppy dance some do to raise edible creatures from the sand.  Check ’em out.

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Jimmy Carter

it’s time.  electric six, the cheesy sex jokester band of early millennium, was moved by bush II to write a few political songs.  the spirit feels more appropriate than ever, of course.  clown band song for clown world.

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Life List: House Finch

House finches are a very common bird in urban and suburban areas here.  As befits the name house finch.  I suppose they may breed in rafters; I wouldn’t know.  I do know they don’t belong here.  There are closely related indigenous finches that are surely being hedged out by them.  House finches are boring LBBs.  Some are streaky (females? juveniles?), some are just beige, but they have a kind of red that magically appears when the sun comes out.  Sometimes kinda pretty.  More noteworthy is their elaborate song, which is nice to hear, since the other common perching bird in their territory is the much less musical house sparrow.

Let’s talk about places.

Mexico?  Some animals that are out of balance with nature spread naturally with the increase of human populations, like coyotes and anna’s hummingbirds and opossums.  Some are actively imported, like house sparrows and starlings were to the US.  I feel like I’ve read that house finches in america were descended from pet bird trade, but I think they’re from Mexico?  So they could’ve just gradually moved north, being better adapted to city life than their cousins.

Seattle.  The first place I took note of these birds was in downtown Seattle, near the Cornish* campus on the edge of the South Lake Union neighborhood.  I saw and mostly heard a flock in the little trees down there, making the world sound a little nicer.

Federal Way.  We tried feeding birds on our balcony for a while.  The house finches had an interesting behavior that set them apart from the rest.  Whenever my husband sneezed, even from indoors on the other side of a pane of glass, they’d get scared into flying off.  They’d come right back, but it was a level of caution that even smaller birds like chickadees didn’t bother with.

Auburn.  My current employer used to have a cool building in Auburn, not far from the railroad tracks, surrounded by big fields, edged with some nice tall trees.  Goodbye wildlife, they moved.  On the old campus, there were some disused buildings that served as nesting grounds for a lot of birds, and I think primarily for house finches.  For the moment, the current owners of those buildings haven’t torn them down, and I suspect that when you see house finches at the mall, they were born and bred next to my old call center.

They’re a common bird where I live now, though I think they don’t come down to the ground level in my cul-de-sac as much as others.  I usually just hear the song or see them fly between trees.  I don’t think much about them, but they’re fine.  Bird it up, homies.

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*Cornish College of the Arts has waxed and waned over the years.  Early this millennium, they worked hard to get accreditation, and build up their program.  But they’ve always been primarily a dumping ground for the rich kids that were too indolent to be business majors, and the bullshit student body conspired with the bullshit administration and the bullshit rich donors to squander that work, the graduating class dwindling from dozens to a handful, in the space of ten years, the classes going from at least half-assed intellectual fare down to “finger-painting, if you feel like it today.”  They were recently acquired by a better university, and they fucking deserved it.

Life List: Squirrel?

I’ve mentioned before that when I hear a bird call I don’t recognize, it often turns out to be an american robin.  They don’t get enough credit for the variety of their vocalizations, I think.  Other times, an unfamiliar call will turn out to be a damn squirrel.

American grey squirrels have gone invasive in Europe.  Sorry about that.  Prehistorically, as continents have come together and pulled apart and come together again, there have been “biotic interchanges,” which initially result in massive reductions of biodiversity.  That is to say, many native organisms go extinct in the face of invasion.  I don’t remember the mechanism for it – why some alien species become overly successful – but it’s a sad affair, for people who like to see the world populated with unique and interesting creatures.  Right now?  Humanity has created the biggest biotic interchange since Pangaea, in addition to all the other ways we’re causing an extinction level event.

So Death to Squirrels?  I don’t know.  Ecology is all triage now, in an endless war, with no support from anybody with the resources or authority to make a real difference.  Fascist amxrika just voted “fuck it, burn the world to ashes,” so we’re left with the usual acting locally, but thinking globally?  All I’m thinking is this:  If nothing is ever done about any of this ever, what will nature do about it?  Because something will live through it all, especially if we don’t…

Eh, that was totally not what I meant to be talking about.  Squirrels, amirite?  They’re remarkable creatures.  So powerful, so well-adapted, so cute.  They live fast, they die young, but while they’re around?  Squeakin and sneakin and shriekin.  They get that nut, whether you want them to or not.

I don’t know a lot about them, but here are a few things…

Douglas’s Squirrel:  There’s a smaller species of squirrel that tends to stay in more densely forested places than your greys.  They have a dark stripe on the side and a less prodigious tail, charcoal on top, apricot orange underneath, but otherwise look very similar to a grey.  I don’t know much about them, didn’t even imagine we had all that many squirrel species locally, until I saw these ones in the West Hylebos Wetlands Park in Federal Way.  My husband thought he was seeing baby squirrels in the trees, but when we got a better look, they were clearly small-size adults.  One got pissed off at us and yelled from the walkway railing.

Flying Squirrels:  Supposedly we have flying squirrels here, ghostly colored things with huge dark eyes, capable of gliding really long distances between trees.  I’m guessing they’re high canopy adapted and might not live outside of old growth forests, but if they were around?  I’d never see one unless it fell out of a tree dead and I happened to see it in the moment before any number of beasts gobbled it up.

Black Squirrels?:  Driving from where I live up toward Canada, right as you get close to the border, you’ll see more black squirrels in people’s yards.  A morph of grey squirrels, or of a different species?  I think I’ve seen the answer before, but not curious enough to look it up again.  Just noteworthy to me because 99% of the squirrels we see are very samey here.

Chipmunks:  One reason I pushed for a honeymoon in the Olympic National Park was a childhood memory of going there with YMCA summer camp and seeing a chipmunk.  Only time I’d seen one in my life, in a quiet moment when all the other kids were off hootin’ and hollerin’ somewhere else.  Chipmunks are just another squirrel, but the stripes are cool.  The Olympic Peninsula has its own species.  We did see some, up on Hurricane Ridge, but I suspect these were not the unique local boys.  I dunno.

Cracked-out Squirrels:  There’s a tiny urban park in Seattle, near the homeless shelters and such, near the junction of Pioneer Square, the International District, and Downtown.  Last I saw it, there’d be a hundred plus homeless people resting there at all hours of the day.  My husband used to work across the street from it, and one time, passing through on the way to a bus, he had a squirrel charge him like it was going to attack.  On squirrel crack?  We don’t know.

Squirrels vs. Woodpeckers:  Northern flickers are the most common woodpecker in squirrel territory, and we’ve seen them squabble.  It’s mostly verbal, and the squeaky barking of the squirrels is what led ultimately to this post.

Dead in a gutter:  One time my home boy Bad-Moustache-Having Guy had a big-ass iguana that got out all the time.  It liked to climb trees.  One time it went missing for months, before it turned up dead in a neighbor’s rain gutter.  I didn’t see it, but I have to imagine it was sun-bleached and mummified.  One time my husband saw a squirrel sprawled out, utterly inert, near the gutter on a rooftop.  The squirrel remained there for hours, presumably sad and dead.  Then it randomly got up and took off.  Funny to imagine one having a lazy sunday, basking on a rooftop, but apparently this is a thing.  On some cold days you can see them resting on tree branches near the trunk, tail curled over their back.

Anyway, as noteworthy inhabitants of the predominantly birdy realm, they get a bird post.

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Life List: Caspian Tern

I can’t say a lot about terns because I’ve almost never seen them.  This will be a short one.  Remember when I saw a great blue heron take a dump in breathtaking detail at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge?  On the same trip, I had a shitty long-distance view of what I took for seagulls – but they were weird.  Imagine a seagull with a raspy screeching cry and a bright carrot-orange beak, still flying in the usual seagull way, over the water.  Now imagine those weird seagulls would occasionally dive for fish, like an osprey or kingfisher.  Fucked up, right?

Those were caspian terns.  I was too far away to see the black cap on their heads, but based on where and when we were, it had to be them.  Some years later – 2024 in fact – I heard their call while visiting the rose garden at Point Defiance, and glimpsed a small group of them flying through the treetops.  More recently, they were one of the short list of suspects for a bird sighting I’ve never been able to get solid about.

That’s all you get, because that’s all I got.  Share tern stories below?

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