Poetry Sunday: July by Susan Hartley Swett

Yes, it is still July but not for long. Enjoy it while you may. 

July

by Susan Hartley Swett

When the scarlet cardinal tells
   Her dream to the dragon fly,
And the lazy breeze makes a nest in the trees,
   And murmurs a lullaby,
                It is July.

When the tangled cobweb pulls
The cornflower's cap awry,
And the lilies tall lean over the wall
To bow to the butterfly,
It is July.

When the heat like a mist veil floats,
And poppies flame in the rye,
And the silver note in the streamlet's throat
Has softened almost to a sigh,
It is July.

When the hours are so still that time
Forgets them, and lets them lie
'Neath petals pink till the night stars wink
At the sunset in the sky,
It is July.

When each finger-post by the way
Says that Slumbertown is nigh;
When the grass is tall, and the roses fall,
And nobody wonders why,
It is July.

This week in birds - #594

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Baby Burrowing Owls trying to make sense of the world. I know just how they feel.

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Canada is burning. Hundreds of people have been evacuated in the westernmost province of British Columbia where many blazes are out of control.

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And firefighters must attempt to do their jobs on some of the hottest days on record. The planet broke its all-time heat record two days in a row.

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In red-hot Texas, a number of people have died after Hurricane Beryl left them without power for an extended period. (Which calls to mind the question of how humans lived here before air conditioning was available.) 

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It should not be a surprise that humans and chimpanzees share fundamental features of communication that date back as far as their ancient common ancestor. 

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Scientists studying Jurassic Age small mammals have found that those critters lived slow and died old unlike many of their descendants today. 

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The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it will provide funding for twenty-five new projects proposed by states, tribes, local governments, and territories to fight climate change.

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Wolverines are having a moment and Colorado will now participate in that moment by reintroducing the endangered species to the state.

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Brazil will be the host country for the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2025, but to do so they will be carving up an Amazonian reserve.

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The International Botanical Congress has voted to change the names of more than two hundred plants, algae, and fungi species, removing a racial slur that was a part of the names.

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The black market trade in wildlife is threatening bats. Add this to the threats of climate change and habitat loss.

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It's not just Canada that is burning; California, too, is fighting some of the biggest wildfires of the year.  

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The ethereal and graceful Red-tailed Tropicbird, a bird native to Hawaii and other oceanic islands and coral atolls throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans, is the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week.

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The Audubon Society has suggestions for the best plants to grow to attract and shelter birds.

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A new study by Brazilian scientists has determined that wild sharks in the seas off the coast of the country have tested positive for cocaine, astonishing proof of how illegal drug consumption by humans is harming wildlife. How the cocaine actually made its way into the sharks' system is unknown.

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It seems that humans share some cognitive abilities with fruit bats.

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Life on Mars? Maybe.

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Komodo dragons are astonishing creatures and one of their amazing features is that their teeth are iron-coated which helps to keep them sharp and resistant to wear.

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Here's a look at another extraordinary creature - an arthropod that lived half a billion years ago.

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Giraffes as peace ambassadors? Well, stranger things have happened.

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My favorite picture from this week - July's full moon, variously known as the Buck Moon or Thunder Moon. It calls to mind the poem I loved as a child, The Wind and the Moon by George Macdonald.

Another blast from the past

I've been looking back through my blog history recently contemplating some of the topics I've covered, book reviews that I've written, and how the blog has evolved over the years. While scrolling through posts, I came upon this one which reminded me of the book that was published in 2018 and how much I enjoyed it. 

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Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

September 17, 2018

Lee Child did not steer me wrong. I read his glowing review of Randy Kennedy's first novel in the Times and knew that I had to read that book. 

He did not exaggerate. Presidio is a terrific example of Texas noir, with an engaging and somewhat unexpected main character who is a professional car thief.

The novel is set in the Staked Plains and borderlands of West Texas in the early 1970s. Among the best things about the book - among a wide choice of very good things - were the photograph-like descriptions of that arid and spare but beautiful landscape of flat plains rolling into mountains, and country roads where you can see for miles and miles. It's a landscape marked by the occasional nodding pump jack, long before the coming of the wind farms that dot the area today. The 1970s were another country; a country without the internet and cell phones and being constantly connected to the outside world; a country where the border between Texas and Mexico is an amiable line of traffic over a wooden bridge where people come and go more or less at will to work or to buy and sell. It's a country that Cormac McCarthy and Larry McMurtry have traversed successfully in many books. Now, Randy Kennedy adds his name to that list.

Troy Falconer is Kennedy's protagonist. He is a vagabond who has been on the road for many years, earning his way as a thief. Specifically, as a car thief. He steals cars, usually from motel guests, often taking their belongings from the motel room as well. He has perfected his technique over several years and has never been caught. He never keeps any car for long, swapping each one for a different vehicle at his first opportunity.

As we meet Troy, he is returning to the rural West Texas town where he grew up to help his younger brother, Harlan. Harlan's wife had recently absconded with all of the money that he had. Not much to be sure, but he wants it - if not her - back. Troy is there to help him find the wife and get the money. 

When they head out on the trail of the wife, Harlan's old truck doesn't get them far and Troy's skills as a car thief are immediately pressed into service. He steals a station wagon at a convenience store and the two men head south. What they don't realize at first is that there is a third person in the station wagon. Ten-year-old Martha Zacharias, a Mennonite girl from Mexico, currently living in Texas with her aunt, whose car it was, was lying down on the back seat of the vehicle when it was stolen. She stays quiet and they don't realize she is there until one night, while the men are sleeping outside, she attempts to drive the station wagon away. When they discover her, she demands that they take her to El Paso where she can meet her father. They compromise on taking her as far as Presidio and buying her a bus ticket to El Paso.

The narrative of their trip south is interspersed with the narrative that introduces Martha's family and background and a remarkable set of notes that Troy has written and leaves in the glove compartments of the vehicles he drives. The notes are styled as "Notes for the police" and they consist of a kind of journal of his explanation of what he has done and how he came to be the person that he is. (The first line of the book is: "Later, in the glove box, the police found a binder of notes.") These notes also include some darkly humorous stories of his time on the road and some of the people he has encountered along the way. It is through the notes that we get to know Troy and Harlan and their now dead father and we learn what happened to their mother.

The propulsion of the plot is the brothers' flight to the border with their accidental kidnap victim, looking over their shoulders all the way, expecting to see the police. The plot moves almost organically and those pages keep turning almost by themselves as everything converges at Presidio for the final denouement.

It's hard to believe this is Kennedy's first novel. It is a very accomplished effort with characters that seem real enough that one could reach out and touch them, a landscape with an aridity that one can taste on the tongue, and a plot filled with a comedy of errors that somehow doesn't seem fanciful at all. 

All of which brings to mind a line from Troy's "notes": "Just because a story isn't real doesn't mean it isn't true."

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

Poetry Sunday: To a Butterfly by William Wordsworth

I spent much of Saturday afternoon in my backyard watching butterflies come and go. Gulf Fritillaries, Yellow Sulphurs, Giant Swallowtails, Black Swallowtails, the occasional Monarchs... So many different kinds and all of them beautiful. Then I went inside to search for a poem to feature in this post and what should catch my eye but this poem? Serendipity, you are my friend and ally!  

To a Butterfly 

by William Wordsworth

I’ve watched you now a full half-hour,
Self-poised upon that yellow flower;
And, little Butterfly! Indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! – not frozen seas
More motionless! And then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!

This plot of orchard-ground is ours;
My trees they are, my Sister’s flowers.
Here rest your wings when they are weary;
Here lodge as in a sanctuary!
Come often to us, fear no wrong;
Sit near us on the bough!
We’ll talk of sunshine and of song,
And summer days when we were young;
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.

This week in birds - #593

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

Typical Barn Cliff Swallow nests under a bridge.

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Most birds seek to avoid hurricanes but one seabird actually flies straight into them.

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Maryland is trying a unique method for getting rid of invasive fish; it is encouraging people to eat them!

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A carcass of the world's rarest whale has washed up on a New Zealand, affording scientists a golden opportunity to dissect and study it.

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A sea-level rise has driven the Key Largo tree cactus to extinction.

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The Xerces blue butterfly went extinct in San Francisco in the 1940s but now scientists are releasing a closely related species in the area in an effort to establish it there.

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Houston is called the Bayou City and when hurricanes pass through it sometimes becomes more bayou than city.

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Climate change affects insects in myriad ways, including their colors and their sex lives. 

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Even Afghanistan's Taliban who reject so much of science have to admit the reality of climate change.

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The Guadalupe Murrelet is the rarest of all the Alcids. It is also the American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week.

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Insects - especially ants - are some of the most amazing creatures on Earth.

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Nevada is the driest state and it is testing a pilot program that will encourage farmers to conserve the precious water resource.

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This is a Sumatran orangutan named Tua and her baby who was born recently at the Philadelphia Zoo. Both mother and baby are doing well according to zoo officials.

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And here is another recent birth, a Siamese crocodile, one of sixty born in the wild last month. This is notable because the Siamese crocodile was listed as virtually extinct in the wild in the 1990s.

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Asian honeybees have some impressive weapons with which to defend their hives from invaders such as ants.

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Paint Rock in Central Texas was an ancient ceremonial site for Native Americans and it contains more than 1,500 individual images that were painted by them over many centuries.

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Mysterious fossils from 310 million years ago may have finally been deciphered by paleontologists.

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Forests that are being restored in Borneo are proving to help not only the creatures of those forests but the people who live there as well. 

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4,000 ancient skeletons unearthed in Berlin are being reinterred with honor, after having been studied by scientists for years.

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Melting ice sheets are making Earth bulkier causing it to rotate more slowly and having the effect of making our days longer.

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China has long been the world's biggest source of greenhouse gases but that era may be coming to an end.

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A new study has postulated that Pompeii was actually hit by a double whammy - not only the well-known volcano but also an earthquake that happened about the same time as the eruption.

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A wildfire destroyed Lahaina in the Hawaiian Islands but it is now being rebuilt as a wetland.

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A new book, Women in the Valley of the Kings, details the history of 19th-century women archaeologists who explored the region. 

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Courtship among frogs can be a deadly enterprise for the males. 

Homeland Elegies reconsidered

I was reading an article in The New York Times today regarding the best books of the 21st century and one of the book critics quoted there referred to Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. It sparked my own memory of reading that book and my appreciation of it. The book did not make the NYT list, but I gave it a rare 5-star rating. Here is my review.

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January 19, 2021

 

This book had not been on my radar at all until I read President Barack Obama's annual list of the best books of the year. This title appeared as one of his favorites. That was a sufficient recommendation for me and I put it on my list. As I started reading it though I found myself very confused. I had understood that it was a novel and yet it read exactly like an autobiography/memoir. Had I been mistaken? But there it is right on the cover - "a novel." I looked at Goodreads and discovered that I was not alone in my confusion. A number of other readers had thought they were reading a memoir.

The book, in fact, reads like a series of personal essays. The essays illustrate different aspects of the narrator's personality and background, a background many parts of which he shares with the author. Both are American-born writers, playwrights who have won a Pulitzer Prize. Both identify as part of the Muslim world and culture, even though neither is devoutly religious.

The narrator who had labored in relative obscurity, always on the edge of penury, had suddenly become a part of the cultural elite upon winning the Pulitzer Prize, and just as suddenly he is presented with extraordinary financial and sexual opportunities. He is swept off his feet by all these opportunities and eager to partake in the fullest, as he rubs elbows with celebrities and billionaires. He is made rich himself by a sudden windfall from a shady investment, which only increases his access to the sexual buffet. Consuming from that buffet ultimately gave him a case of syphilis.

But before all that, the narrator is the child of Pakistani immigrants and his view of America was formed by his childhood in Milwaukee and by his liberal arts education. His father, who is one of the most interestingly drawn characters in the novel, is almost jingoistic in his Americanism. He is a famous cardiologist and in the 1980s he is called in to treat a New York billionaire named Donald Trump. Trump charms the doctor and involves him in some of his real estate deals. He gets The Art of the Deal and keeps it in his living room, but like many blinded by its author's fame, he loses money on those real estate deals. His family's fortunes fall but even so, years later, when Trump runs for president, the cardiologist is a rabidly devoted supporter. After Trump becomes president, it is only slowly and with reluctance his former cardiologist admits what he is and disowns his support of him.

By 9/11/01, the narrator is living in New York and experiences the attack on the city in a personal way. Like thousands of others, he queues up to give blood as a way of showing his support. As he waits in line, he is unmercifully harassed by an Islamophobic man and to his utter shame, he wets himself in terror. Afterward, in order to protect himself from further attacks, he steals a crucifix pendant at a Salvation Army store and he wears it for several months. Years later when he confesses that to his Pakistani-American girlfriend, she is shocked. She could never wear a cross, she says. Instead, her family bought flags.

In 2008, the narrator and his father travel to Abbottabad in Pakistan to visit relatives. At the home of his uncle, the uncle lectures him about the "tactical genius" of the 9/11 attacks. He speaks of a Muslim philosophy that is based on the principles espoused by the Prophet Muhammad. It is one that integrates its military and political aspirations. The narrator disagrees with his uncle, but as a guest in his home, he finds it prudent to hold his tongue. His father is appalled by his brother's view and afterward, he harangues his son about how different and, in his words, how terrible the son's life would have been if his father had not emigrated to America. It is, of course, in that same Abbottabad three years later that Osama bin Laden was killed by American Special Forces. 

It is almost impossible for me to sum up this book in any meaningful or coherent way. It is a series of anecdotes that, in the end, create a vision for us of what it is like to grow up Muslim, to live as Muslim in America, especially in post 9/11 America. The wound inflicted on the Muslim community by that event has been deep and long-lasting. These are people for whom America was their home and who only aspired to be good citizens and live in peace. Suddenly their lives were thrown into turmoil and their dreams of belonging were tarnished in some cases for good.

As I finished reading the book, the confusion that I had felt at the beginning had dissolved. I could not imagine the story having been told in any other way. It is a very moving narrative and offers us a clear-eyed view of the stressful contradictions that are a part of American Muslim life. I came away from it with, I think, a much better appreciation of the pressures and anxieties endemic to those lives. Thank you, Ayad Akhtar.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

Remembering the hillbilly

So the Orange One has spoken and his Chosen One for running mate is J.D. Vance. Vance wrote a memoir a few years ago called Hillbilly Elegy and I read it and reviewed it here. In honor of his new status, here is that review.

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Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance: A review

February 27, 2019

I have resisted reading this book. It wasn't really hard. I don't usually read memoirs or biographies, so I wasn't particularly tempted. Plus, I wrote my own (metaphorical) hillbilly elegy long ago and wasn't really interested in reading somebody else's.

Yes, I grew up as a hillbilly, too. But my "hills" were several hundred miles south of the ones in Kentucky/Ohio that J.D. Vance called home. My heritage, though, is much the same Scots-Irish ancestry and culture as his.

Moreover, the rural community where I grew up was poor as Vance says his was. However, based on his descriptions of his family's holdings and income, they would likely have been considered middle-class where I lived. But perhaps poverty, at least to some extent, is in the eye of the beholder or in the perception of the one who experiences it.

At any rate, Vance's memoir of himself and his family and the poverty they experienced and how they pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps stayed on the best-seller list month after month after month, taunting me it seemed. And finally, after recently reading and enjoying Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, I felt that perhaps I was ready for another. So, somewhat reluctantly, I picked up Hillbilly Elegy.

What I found was a mesmerizing story of what appeared on the outside to be a dysfunctional family that still managed to function and care for its members on some level. The memoir part of Vance's tale was compelling, particularly his portraits of the grandparents who were the center of the family and who were his anchor and salvation as his mother descended into drug addiction and went through a long series of thoroughly hapless men, only one or two of whom actually took an interest in and tried to relate to her two children. His father had long since been absent.

His family, including his grandparents, were violent; their main claim to fame and a source of pride was their connection to the famous Hatfields of the Hatfield and McCoy Feud. Both the grandparents carried guns and Vance repeatedly refers to his grandmother, the chief influence in his life, as a pistol-packing lunatic who promised to kill anyone who dared harm him. He believed her and loved her for it. 

This portrait of a family and its rise out of poverty is paired with a good bit of right-wing political polemic which I found less mesmerizing. He writes about the country's descent into what he sees as a nanny state, with generous government benefits that suck all of the initiative from their recipients. While his family is hard-working and always striving to better themselves, he sees his neighbors as lazy and shiftless. He complains about "welfare queens" and food stamp recipients shopping at the grocery store, walking through the check-out line while talking on their expensive cell phones and paying for their T-bone steaks with food stamps. Alternatively, he complains of food stamp recipients buying nothing but sugary drinks and snacks with their benefits. He is very condescending toward these people who somehow missed the boat when the Scots-Irish stubborn pride was being distributed. He never considers that their challenges might even be greater than his and that they, too, are trying to better themselves and the lives of their children. Empathy seems a concept foreign to him. 

Having worked as a social worker and supervisor of social work for more than thirty years, I have quite another view of the poor. Sure, there are those that are lazy and lack initiative, but most are struggling for a better life. Many work two and even three jobs to try to support their families. If they receive government benefits, they are a supplement to their own efforts.

In describing his hard work to achieve his middle-class status, Vance elides over the part that government benefits played in his own rise; namely, his four years as a Marine gave him discipline and leadership skills and his service subsequently helped to pay for his education. 

In addition, he got lucky with his friends and his contacts who helped him along the way. Not everyone manages to have such luck.

This book came out in the middle of the presidential election year of 2016 and it fed into the stereotypes propounded by one of those campaigns - the undeserving poor who constantly make bad choices and are to blame for their own poverty. It's wasteful and useless to spend taxpayer money on them. Conservatives ate it up.

In an afterword written later, Vance wants us to know that although he admired some things about the Republican presidential candidate such as his "outsider" status and his scorn for the "elites" (This from a graduate of Yale Law School!), he did not vote for him. No, he kept his honor and voted for the third-party candidate.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Love Song, 31st July by Richard Osmond

It's not quite July 31 yet but some queen ants and their lovers are on the move. And anyway, "it's flying ant day in my heart if nowhere else."

Love Song, 31st July

by Richard Osmond

Today the queen ant and her lovers
took their nuptial flight, scattering
upwards like a handful of cracked
black peppercorns thrown in the face
of a bear, the bear being in this case
a simile for the population of Lewisham
and Hither Green.

There is an increasingly common assertion
online that the winged of every ant nest
in Britain take off on the same bright
morning. This says less about ants than it does
about the state of media in which we place
ourselves: connected enough to hear
and repeat all claims and verify some,
yet prone to confirmation bias
owing to algorithms which favour
new expressions of that which we already
hold to be true.

Myth moves in step with commerce.
When merchant ships arrived
once per season from the Orient
they brought silk and saffron and stories
of dog-sized ants which mined gold
and took to the sky only to defend
their treasure from camel-riding
thieves. Now we receive the exotic
via fibre optics as a stream of
high frequency trades.

My love, I can’t speak with authority
on commodity futures, the wonders of the east
and the behaviour of insects in Liverpool
and Tunbridge Wells or any city
outside my directly observable reality,
but it’s flying ant day in my heart
if nowhere else.

This week in birds - #592

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment: 

Step into my backyard these days and you will hear a chorus of the "song" of these guys - cicadas. They are everywhere in the trees around our yard. This one decided to rest for a bit on the ground under a tree.

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The big stories this week have mostly involved the record hot temperatures that have occurred right around the world. 

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The heat in the Las Vegas area broke records and stunned even the forecasters there. 

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In fact, the average global temperature has now warmed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial records for twelve months in a row. 

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Here in the Houston area, we've had the added problems caused by Hurricane Beryl which left thousands without electricity during the sweltering heat. (Personal note: Our power came back relatively quickly. Some are still without. As one born and raised in the South, I can take the heat; it's when the power goes off in winter when the temperatures are in the teens that I suffer.)

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 And apparently heatwave tourism is now a thing. 

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On a more pleasant note, here are pictures of the week in wildlife which includes a blue frog.

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Burials from as long as 2,000 years ago indicate that the First Australians may have kept dingos as pets.

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Can planting more trees in urban areas help shield residents there from heat waves and storms?

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The story of seventy young Mojave Desert tortoises hatched and reared in captivity and then released into the wild has captured the attention of the public.

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A new study indicates that global migratory freshwater fish populations have plummeted by as much as 81% between 1970 and 2020.

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It seems that there were several waves of early humans migrating out of Africa and that the earliest of these came much sooner than had previously been believed.

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Scientists have extracted DNA that retained its original structure from a woolly mammoth that lived some 52,000 years ago, a feat never before accomplished.

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Cargo ships off the coast of California are reducing their speed in order to protect the whales that frequent those waters.

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A population collapse of humans during the Neolithic Age may have been precipitated by an outbreak of the plague.

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Give "weeds" their due; they are not all bad guys. In fact, many of them are quite useful.

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Even in war-torn Syria, conservationists are at work trying to save the environment and especially one particular river.

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It is important to help Indigenous peoples protect forests and other shared resources in order to fight against climate change and other environmental threats.

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One of my fondest memories of summer nights when I was a child is the fireflies that twinkled and lit up the yard around our house. Like so many other species, they are now imperiled but one Malaysian conservationist has made it her life's work to protect and preserve them.

We're okay!

Just a quick post for those who have expressed concerns about our safety regarding  Hurricane Beryl. We are safe and suffered no serious property damage, just rain and wind. Things are getting back to normal and I'm hoping to get back to my regular posts soon. Thank you for your concern.

Poetry Sunday: Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Mary Elizabeth Frye, an American housewife and florist, wrote this twelve-line poem in 1932. She was inspired to write it because of a young Jewish girl who was staying with her household at the time and was unable to visit her dying mother in Germany because of the anti-Semitic unrest there. It is a heartfelt work that, according to the story, was originally written on a brown paper bag. 

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep

by Mary Elizabeth Frye 

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

This week in birds - #591

 A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week is one of the most handsome of the heron/egret family in my opinion. It is the Black-crowned Night Heron, a bird found in wetlands all over North America.

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There have been shark attacks on humans along the southern coast from Florida to Texas recently.

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My favorite visit to the Houston Museum of Natural Science was when we went to see Lucy, the ancient hominin discovered in Ethiopia fifty years ago, when she was on her world tour. Lucy remains one of the most notable discoveries in human paleontology.

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Homosexuality is not something that exists only in humans; it has been widely observed in animal behavior as well.

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Cave paintings found in Indonesia have been dated to 51,200 years ago, making them the oldest known such paintings.

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Flying hippos? Yes, that is really a thing!

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In order to protect endangered Northern Spotted Owls, California is planning to kill Barred Owls that compete with them.

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A Bronze Age shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea offers clues about life and trade in that era.

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Dugongs are endangered everywhere they exist and that includes around the South Pacific islands.

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California's Jurupa Oak is 13,000 years old and may be facing its greatest peril from modern-day business and housing development.

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The Biden Administration has denied access to a portion of the Alaska wilderness for the purpose of mining and drilling.

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Neuston is the name given to sea creatures that make their home on the ocean's surface and we need to know more about them in order to preserve and protect them. 

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Global warming is a well-known phenomenon but it seems that we are also cooling the planet and that needs to be better understood.

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The fossil of a giant salamander that predates the age of dinosaurs has been found in Namibia.

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Carpenter ants have been observed performing amputations on their wounded members in order to save their lives.

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Burrowing Owls, the only North American raptor that lives underground, are coming in conflict with humans over their housing.

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Orphaned elephants are being returned to a Kenyan sanctuary after being raised by humans.

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Gulls as big as turkeys? Apparently Britain has them. 

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The nonprofit Skydog Ranch and Sanctuary adopts wild mustangs and reunites them with their herds.

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Coastline lights are a danger to small fish, luring them to shallow coastal waters and making them easy targets for predators. 

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Researchers have found that Egyptian scribes suffered work-related injuries.

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Yes, there are veterinarians that specialize in diseases of aquarium fish.

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A fossil bed in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco is yielding new insights into arthropods that lived a half-billion years ago.

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Our Supreme Court in its present makeup has proved itself not a friend of the environment.

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There is evidence that Anglo-Saxon warriors traveled very far afield to fight with other armies.

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Protecting the Peregrine Falcons of Scotland can be a hazardous job.

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Cat tours? In Minneapolis that is a yearly event!

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In California, Diesel the donkey is living his best life with a herd of elk.

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Here are The Guardian's pictures of the week in wildlife.