Governor, Senator, & Republicans Caught in the Act
YOU DON’T WANNA BE LIKE MIKE It’s one thing when the “I wanna be like Trump” Governor decides (hours after telling Alaskans to mask up and keep their social bubble small) to show up at a swanky cocktail party fundraiser on the Anchorage Hillside. But it’s another level of irony to be outed by the bumbling ineptitude of your own propagandist. Dunleavy’s blogger, Suzanne Downing/Must Read Alaska, begins this weird video foray into the underground world of unsanitary Republican fundraisers by looking at the sunset and musing, “An orange, orange view for an orange president… although he looked a little…
Return of Bird of the Week: Black Guan
While there are many other species of Curassow, WC hasn’t been able to photograph them, so we’ll switch to another clade of Cracidae, the Guans. And we’ll start with the Black Guan. It’s not a bird you’re likely to confuse with any other: black body, blue nares, bright red legs and bright red eye, it’s an arboreal cracid (WC likes that description and worked to find a way to get it into the blog post). It’s considerably smaller than the Curassows; just 69 centimeters long and weights a little over a kilogram. It’s less vocal than other guans, it’s unusual…
Meet Your Republican Candidates, & Bring the Popcorn
It’s hard to know where to begin these days, but let’s start with something nasty that’s brewing which will directly affect the policy positions of Republican candidates, and tells us exactly what to expect if Republicans manage to take back the majority in the State House this November. HINT: It’s going to look a lot like the horrific beginning of last session only there won’t be anyone to stop it. WHAT AR THEY DUIN? A strained pun is about the best you can get out of the absolute fiscal disaster the Republican Party is cooking up. Remember when Tuckerman Babcock,…
Return of Bird of the Week: Bare-faced Curassow
This is a smaller relative of last week’s Great Curassow, found in the Amazon basin and down into Paraguay and Argentina. It’s also sexually dimorphic. The males is black, with a white belly, extensive bare, black skin around the eye and a bi-colored, black and yellow bill. The crest is tightly curled black feathers. The female is a beautiful bird, with a rufous belly, barred back and tail and a splendid crest. This is a crepuscular species, usually out only in the predawn and evening twilight. It usually emerges from the forest into clearings to foage, as these two birds…
Return of Bird of the Week: Great Curassow
As promised, we’ll leave the obscure Puffbird family behind and shift the focus to the much larger, but even more obscure family Cracidae. These are the Curassows, Guans and Chachalacas of Neotropical forests. Prized by Native Americans as game birds, they have developed a healthy wariness of humankind. Those that weren’t wary became dinner, after all. There are 54 species of Cracidae; WC has photographed only a bare handful of them. To say they are secretive doesn’t begin to describe it. Birds in this family look somewhat like turkeys or pheasants, but those are distant relatives. We’ll start with the…
Alaska Politicians Exposed – Stooges, Shills & Shenanigans
TALL TALES from Juneau and the DC Debacle AND IT’S ALLLL ON TAPE Sometimes you know things, but it’s nice to have them proven right out loud, through dramatic and surreptitious means. Such is the case with the immediately infamous “Pebble tapes.” If you haven’t heard them, make yourself a beverage and get ready to be a fly on the wall as your beautiful state and all its salmon get sold down the river (not the beautiful blue Nushagak of today – the contaminated, cyanide-filled Nushagak of tomorrow). We now know what our elected Republican leadership thinks of us,…
Return of Bird of the Week: Barred Puffbird
Here’s a final Puffbird to wrap up this family of birds. It may seem like WC has been writing about Puffbirds for months, but in reality WC has photographed only a tiny fraction of the 36 members of this family. So many birds; so little time. The Barred Puffbird has a pretty restricted range, from eastern Panama to Ecuador. It’s apparently most common in Columbia, where WC has never been. And despite being present in a chunk of Ecuador, WC has never seen it there, despite four birding trips to that excellent country. It’s rare, as well as difficult to…
Return of Bird of the Week: Collared Puffbird
The Collared Puffbird is found in Amazonia, the Amazon River basin, including the lower eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains in Ecuador and Peru. WC was lucky enough to see and photograph – admittedly poorly – the species in Peru, where it is comparatively rare. In fact, eBird reports less than 300 sightings for Peru. The bright orange bill, cinnamon head and distinct black collar makes this a very easy bird to identify in the field. Its call, given generally before dawn, is a classic jungle sound, a loud: “awww awwAWW-chaw awwAWW-chaw awwAWW-chaw”, repeated up to six times. This species…
Don Young is Getting Desperate
It’s standard fare for Republicans to come out with glossy election-season “scare mailers” showing Democratic candidates in red monochrome, juxtaposed next to distorted pictures of [Obama/Pelosi/Schumer/AOC] or whomever is the boogeyman du jour. This usually happens 2 or 3 weeks before Election Day, and it reminds us that Republicans don’t really run FOR anything, they just like to scare their base into voting against something – and that something usually ends in “ism” and doesn’t exist. But this year is different. Congressman Don Young, facing his toughest opponent in decades (he’s been around since 1973), is starting the smears in…
Return of Bird of the Week: White-eared Puffbird
Remember WC cautioned readers that some of the Puffbird photos were pretty sketchy. Here’s another. The White-eared Puffbird is found from eastern Peru and central Brazil south to Paraguay and northeastern Argentina. It prefers the middle levels of jungle forest and the gallery forests of the lowlands. Like other Puffbirds, it still-hunts from mid-level perches in trees and shrubs, and will take a wide range of prey, from insects to reptiles to crabs. White-eared Puffbirds have one of the most southerly distributions of any species of puffbird; there is some evidence that the southernmost populations of White-eared Puffbird are migratory, moving north in the austral…