By Zachary Brown She stood in the roiling crowd, amid clean-cut college kids and potbellied dudes in cowboy hats and media men dashing this way and that. Her stringy blonde hair, her dark eyeliner, her sneakers and the flannel tied round her waist, all gave a picture of punk defiance. How ironic, I thought, given the suit-wearing merchants of the status quo she represents. They chose someone small and thin as a garter snake for their enormous, dreadful task. Meet Naomi Seibt: the anti-Greta. The GOP needed an answer to Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has gained astonishing traction…

Among birders’ favorite hummingbirds has to be the Violet-bellied. Not only is the male’s coloration spectacular; this species favors the flowers of the understory, making it more accessible than most hummingbirds. And it is sometimes attracted to feeders. It’s a handsome bird from this angle, but when it catches the light right, well. It can make your eyes water when you see it through your binoculars. This is a small hummingbird, about 7.5 cm – just under three inches – long, weighing just 3.4 grams. But it certainly has the most flash per gram of any bird in the Western…

TALL TALES from Juneau Eyes on the Dunleavy Disaster   A WORLD-FAMOUS ALASKAN! No, not Jewel or Tom Bodett or Jack London – not an Alaskan famous for talent and ability. No, just the Representative from Kenai, now famous for writing a bunch of ignorant stuff about the Holocaust and hitting “send.” In case you missed it this week – first in the Alaska Landmine, and afterwards in media outletsaround the world – Rep. Carpenter email blasted all his colleagues comparing the coronavirus screening at the doors of the Capitol building this week, and the stickers that indicated you’d done…

There are eight species of Brilliants; WC has photos of four of them. If anything, this species iseven more territorial and belligerent than its Fawn-breasted cousin. This male is making a threat display against a rival or another hummingbird. WC has more than two dozen photos of this hummingbird reacting in this way. So, yeah, territorial. This is a largish hummingbird with a comparatively short, stout bill. The male is metallic green over all with an iridescent green head and a bluish-purple spot on the throat. There’s a strong white spot behind the eye, called a post-ocular spot. The species…

Another clade of hummingbirds that aren’t called “hummingbirds” are the Brilliants, which you will likely agree is a terrific name for a kind of hummingbird. One of the nine or so species of Brilliants is the Fawn-breasted Brilliant. The Fawn-breasted Brilliant is a medium-large humming bird, averaging 11.2 centimeters (4.4 inches) in length, with a stout, slightly decurved bill. Both sexes have chests that are decorated with delicate green scalloping against a fawn-colored background. The female’s coloration is less vivid than the male’s. And the female lacks the male’s brilliant pink iridescence on his throat. This is a mountain bird,…

At about 5.5 inches long, this species’ name is nearly as big as the bird itself. A resident of the cloud forests of Columbia, Ecuador and northern Peru, you can see where the buff-winged part of the name comes from. When the bird turns, in the right light, you can see why it’s a starfrontlet. The thing to understand about photographing hummingbirds without flash in the cloud forest is that the light is very low. And hummingbirds rarely hold still. These photos were taken in 2009, with WC’s then state-of-the-art Olympus E-3 DSLR. Its performance in low light left a…

This is a remarkably beautiful species that really, really doesn’t want WC to photograph it. This photo illustrates what WC means: You can get an idea how handsome this male is, but the bill and part of the tail are partially obscured by the leaves and, in a recurrence of WC’s long-standing bird photography curse, the bird is banded. This species prefers low elevations and spends most of its time in shrubs under the jungle canopy and on the edges of cleared areas. That’s the second challenge for this little hummingbird: it’s dark under there, and with an active hummingbird that…

Not since the old days when Mayor Sarah Palin of Wasilla tried to ban Howard Bess’  Pastor, I’m Gay from the Wasilla Public Library has the Mat-Su been embroiled in a book banning kerfuffle. Now, it’s the School Board. BANNING BOOKS Pandemic, science denial, the erosion of our democratic pillars of government, civil unrest, rising authoritarianism… seems like the perfect time to add book banning into the mix. We’re still a step away from outright burning, but the Mat-Su School Board just voted 5-2 to BAN from high school curricula the following five books, and The New York Times’ teacher…