Riding my bike this morning, I came across a man with a hawk. I stopped to ask. (How many times do you see a man out taking his hawk for a walk?) It was a Harris’s hawk, bred in captivity, a native of the southern deserts a little far north of its normal range. He …
Over at Goodreads, Dave gave Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” three stars (out of a possible five): The depth of his research is incredible. Jen was not so kind: I was amazed at how much Darwin simply wanted to believe in the evolutionary process.
The Sheffield et al drought paper in Nature that I blogged quickly about a couple of days ago has triggered all kinds of fascinating discussion among folks in the southwestern US “drought community” (yes, there is such a thing). In brief, Sheffield and colleagues argue that a careful application of the Palmer Drought Severity Index suggests …
Continue reading ‘So what exactly do we mean by “drought”?’ »
Canada geese seems especially fond of Albuquerque’s country club and the neighborhood around it. So it also seems likely, according to research into urban coyotes, that the skinny little dog-wolves are in this urban ecosystem mix: Though urban coyotes do occasionally attack cats and dogs, far more often they avoid them. (Coyote attacks on people …
Continue reading ‘Coyotes and geese – the trajectories of our newly forming urban ecosystems’ »
From the morning paper, a look at the wet bits and the dry bits at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge during a drought, and the challenge of mimicking nature: Some years, like this one, drought comes to the refuge in a way that matches what we would have seen in a drought year …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Engineering nature at the Bosque del Apache’ »
On a quick weekend dash to Ogden earlier this month, I squeezed an hour out of my return trip to the Salt Lake City airport to make the drive out the causeway across the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. When G.K. Gilbert, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, was trying to sort out …
Continue reading ‘Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability’ »
As Sandy converges on our stark, inevitable fate, people outside the weather nerd community are being again confronted by our dark, uncomfortable question – why do the official forecasts always make it seem like they’re shouting? Why do the forecasters always write in all caps? There are times when this feels right: FLOOD WATCH FOR …
Forgot to blog earlier in the week, a frustratingly inconclusive newspaper piece on the reasons behind the rising cost of refurbishing the US stockpile of B61 bombs: Is Sandia National Laboratories to blame for cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar effort to refurbish the U.S. arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs? A December 2011 evaluation by the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on the B61’ »
Intriguing paper by Pierson and colleagues, looking at a big demographic survey of the great saguaro cactus: Averaged across the region, saguaro regeneration rates were highest from 1780 to 1860, coincident with wet conditions and high Pinus ponderosa recruitment in the highlands. Milder and wetter winters and protection from livestock grazing likely promoted late 20th …
Continue reading ‘Saguaro, Ponderosa and regional climate’ »
We love to predict things – and we aren’t very good at it. Nate Silver, in The Signal and the Noise.