You may have read that the Department of the Interior has recently removed the Grizzly Bear population in Yellowstone National Park from the Endangered Species list. There are now about 750 Grizzlies (a North American subspecies of Brown Bear) in Yellowstone, and this is thought to be enough. It probably is, especially if you are planning to camp out at altitude. 

As an innocent high school student camping in Yellowstone with three ignorant friends and protected only by summer weight sleeping bags, my companions and I were trod upon by a family of black bears. With a weight range from the size of a large dog up to 500 pounds, compared to the Grizzly sometimes up to 1,500, the black bear intrusion was nevertheless sufficiently terrifying. Three of us spent the rest of the night in the back of a 1950 Chevy station wagon. The third survived by ignoring the danger, no doubt comforted by National Park Service posters then showing friendly families feeding treats to black bears from the windows of their Oldsmobiles and Desotos.

So I do understand some ambivalence among those few who live in proximity to Grizzlies.  Lewis (or was it Clark) referred to them as “fear inspiring,” and they were at one time named as Ursus Horriblis. Over the past 20 years the North American rate of deaths by Grizzly has been a little more than one per annum --  a bit less than death by shark in American waters. Most were innocent hikers and campers, one a filmmaker whose attacker had an important role in his movies.

Grizzlies came to North America from Asia about 35,000 years before Homo Sapiens and spread into the future 48 contiguous states at about the time that homo sapiens did.  In time they occupied most of what are now the 48, reaching as far as the Western borders of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They inhabited most of Texas, even a bit of Arkansas, and took a big bite out of the map of Mexico.

The problem now is that while Yellowstone is a friendly island for Grizzlies, right outside of Yellowstone’s boundaries things are otherwise. The State of Wyoming is considering allowing the “trophy hunting” of the fuzzy, and -- at a distance -- loveable species. If Grizzly populations were spread around more evenly, and if you could live with the guilt of executing one of these beautiful creatures for fun or in pursuit of the demands of narcissism, limiting their numbers might be acceptable. But the numbers are discouraging. 750 Grizzlies represent nearly half of the total population of Grizzlies in the 48 states, down from 50,000.

So I am rooting for the return of the grizzlies to a National Park near you.

Yours from the field,
Andy

Grizzly Bears and all of their bear friends and relations can be found on our forthcoming app, the Fieldstone Guide to Mammals, which will be released next month. Join our mailing list and we will let you know when it's available. (We will never sell or share your information.)

Tonight, shortly after midnight, the sun may be said to stop on its northward travel, hesitate a moment (hence the meaning of solstice – “sun stop”) and start its return journey south, where it will be headed for the next six months. Well, that’s the way it looks from here. But if you believe, as Copernicus did, that the sun rather than the earth is at the center of the universe, you might think the earth is wobbling back and forth causing the apparent back and forth travel of the sun. Happily for us, it is not wobbling much. (By the way, though I don’t fault him, Copernicus was wrong. There is no center. Wherever you are, nearly all of the universe, excepting only nearby stuff, is rushing away from you in the aftermath of the big bang, so you are as much at the center of the universe and anyone else.)

When the earth was formed, its axis was perpendicular to the plane of the sun’s orbit (and the plane of the sun’s equator) and was without seasons. The earth then famously collided with a Mars-like object only a few million years after the solar system was formed, knocking us sideways, giving us seasons, and forming our critically important moon.

The earth spins pretty consistently, although slowing gradually over time, and to our great good fortune, it spins around an at an angle of approximately 23.4 degree relative to the plane of the sun’s equator. Thanks to the moon’s stabilizing effect (unique in this solar system) this angle is pretty steady. If there were no such angle, there would be no solstice, no seasons, and much larger parts of the earth would be far too hot or too cold to be habitable. Also, without the stabilizing effect of the moon, the angle of the earth’s axis would not be consistent, and the sun would shine all over the place, appearing to move from time to time almost directly above the north and south poles, variously scalding and freezing most of the earth and making it unlikely that large life forms would have developed on this planet.

A final note — the earth does wobble a little, up to about 1.3 degrees; it is one of the reasons for ice ages and extended periods of warming. But these wobbles are slow and are not related to the climate changes created by the billions of us turning long buried plants and animals into gasses that our oceans and plants are not able to metabolize at a rate sufficient to keep things the way they were.

Yours from the field,
​Andy

I promised last week to reveal why June Bugs are willing to crash into your porch light all night long until dying of exhaustion.

In fact, my own opinion is that the June Bug is neither willing nor unwilling. Every one of them now living has been pre-programmed by genetic experiments experienced and/or passed along by hundreds of millions of generations of successful unbroken parentage. June Bugs have no choice; they do what the message from their ancestors requires.

Two such requirements appear to explain the June Bug’s error when confronted with a porch light or any artificial or even natural local source of steady illumination.

The first, and in my opinion most compelling requirement, is that the June Bug, like moths and others with the porch light problem, must find a way through a complex world without wasting time and energy in fruitless detours. Time is precious when your life is short, and you may have only a few days during which to successfully pass to your children the hard won genetic wisdom of your forbearers. So effective navigation is important, and both the sun and the moon are the best clues to direction. At night, of course, it must be the moon. Keep the moon over your left shoulder, or in front of you, says the gene, and you will go more or less in the same direction for a fairly extended period of time, avoiding pointless distractions. However, if you keep the porch light over your left shoulder (or directly in front of you as June Bugs seem to prefer) you will never get away from it. You will navigate yourself into an endless, if irregular, orbit, or a perpetual headlong argument with the porch light, and it is likely that you will loose.

The second message from your predecessors is that if you can see light ahead of you (lets say an opening between leaves), there is nothing in your way, so you can move efficiently to the next source of food or affection. Of course, if you are a June Bug, the porch light, unfortunately, is not what it seems.

Our friends the June Bugs will join their insect friends and relatives in our forthcoming app, the Fieldstone Guide to Insects and Spiders, coming out this summer. Be among the first to know by joining our mailing list. (We will never share your name elsewhere.)

Yours from the field,
Andy

A few days ago, my wife Shyla reminded me that we had just entered the month of the June Bug. Indeed they do arrive in Vermont in the month of June and have just shown up.  But science is not that simple, and as it turns out most entomologists consider June Bugs to be to be May beetles, which, as the globe warms, they will certainly be.

There are about 200 species of them in North America, and billions of the members of some of these species are invasive creatures more than an inch long with some unpleasant habits. The worst is that they can do some nasty work on leaves of plants.  Less worrisome is that while in clumsy flight they frequently stumble into people, and their impressive size, hard armor and persistence suggests a hostile personality.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  The poor creatures must endure three years as grubs below the soil surface feeding on roots before magically pupating, only to emerge to bang their heads against the porch light until dying of exhaustion at dawn.  Porch lights were not a factor in the evolution of June Bugs, so why are they willing to sacrifice themselves to this unnatural object, the recent work of homo sapiens? I will attempt to address this perplexing problem next week.

Our friends the June Bugs will join their insect friends and relatives in our forthcoming app, the Fieldstone Guide to Insects and Spiders, coming out this summer. Be among the first to know by joining our mailing list. (We will never share your name elsewhere.)

Yours from the field,
Andy