Last week you met your first Guan, the Black Guan. This week it’s a close cousin, the Crested Guan, another arboreal Cracid. Crested Guan, Costa Rica The Crested Guan is much larger than the Black, and is one of the largest of its genus, coming in at more than two kilograms. The bright red dewlap, red legs, black body, white-scalloped chest feathers and brownish tail make it another very distinctive species. And noisiest: not only does it have a loud, repetitive honking call, when it flies from tree to tree its landing sounds like a train wreck. For a species…

Amid the flurry of political ads this fall – mostly for Alaska’s hotly-contested federal races – one really stands out for anyone who’s more than an election season quarterback. And it is this: “Don Young was recently rated the most effective member of Congress.” Sorry if I made you spit your coffee. So, how does one achieve this coveted “most effective” rating when, like Don Young, one has not even passed one single bill last session, and barely managed to squeak one by in only the House? Good question. Apparently the measuring stick for this phony rating is that you…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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,…