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Roots and Rhizomes

I know now that you aren’t born a parent. But you are born with inherited traits and proclivities that you end up either nurturing or starving out. Life, in my experience, requires a lot of deadheading. I’m glad my father taught me how to do it at such a young age.

Driftless

Mike had grown up in a conservative rural town, and most of his family still lived in that area. His relatives tended to be more liberal than their neighbors, but there were differences between us. Some had told Mike they supported peaceful protesting, but not the rioting in Chicago and other cities, nor the looting that sometimes happened when groups of people marched through the city declaring that Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t like I supported rioting or looting either. That summer, I had shed silent tears the first time I’d ridden my bike down Milwaukee Avenue, one of Chicago’s busiest streets, past all the stores whose owners had preemptively boarded up their windows in case the protests turned violent. But I understood the protesters’ rage, because it was also mine. Sometimes, to make myself feel better, I fantasized about grabbing a baseball bat and ramming it through a window, any window, over and over and over again.

Shimmer

We don’t have all the facts—the social worker closed her eyes, her head dipping almost imperceptibly—but she did tell us that before he was moved into the foster system, at night, after his biological mother had passed out, this one impossibly small boy would tuck his younger siblings into bed and, in case his father somehow found his way home, sit in a kitchen chair across from the front door, an old air rifle pumped and butted up against the slender wing of his shoulder.

Dear Old Dad

What would Young Dad think about Old Dad? Young Dad: professional Alpine ski racer, multi–Emmy Award–winning sports cameraman, and documentary filmmaker—handsome, tan, rugged, jovial. Young Dad, steering the outboard motorboat to Sandpiper Island in Maine, zipping around town in his burgundy Saab, flying around the world for work. Young Dad, skillfully extracting our splinters, icing our bruises, reassuring us about hurricanes and heartbreak.

If Young Dad met Old Dad—hunched, plodding along the beach in water shoes and a straw sun hat, arguing in favor of gluing a live snail onto an art project—Young Dad would have been nice to the old guy. He would have gone out of his way for a chat. But if he discovered the old guy was him, I know exactly what he would have said: You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Bird’s-Eye View

Jennifer Ackerman on How Birds Adapt, Survive, and Think

Leviton: How do we evaluate their intelligence without viewing them as feathered versions of ourselves?

Ackerman: Anthropomorphism is a real sticking point in the field. I think that’s changing because a lot of behaviors in birds are in fact similar to human behaviors. But any scientist will tell you it’s not easy to probe the mind of another animal, especially when they have kinds of intelligence that differ from our own. We know how to measure things that we’re good at, like solving physical problems. Scientists may give a bird food in a container that it has to figure out how to open in order to eat. The scientists observe how long it takes the bird to solve the problem and whether it’s showing “behavioral flexibility.” In other words: Can it shift its strategies? Can it innovate when confronted with new challenges? That’s pretty easy for us to measure, but birds also have social intelligence, musical intelligence, and other kinds of intelligence that are harder to measure. For example, we’re still trying to figure out how birds know where they’re going. Humans don’t have the innate capacity to navigate using the earth’s magnetic fields and other information sources.

A Thousand Words

A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.

Sunbeams

When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.

Kyo Maclear

Glimpses

This is how we say I love you in my family:
“I stopped the truck to move two toads off the driveway last night.”
“The walking iris has three blooms on it today.”
“On my way to work, a fox crossed the road with a mallard in its mouth.”