natural history

From 2001, Douglas Adams speaks on "Parrots, the Universe, and Everything".

Douglas Adams was the best-selling British author and satirist who created The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In this talk at UCSB recorded shortly before his death, Adams shares hilarious accounts of some of the apparently absurd lifestyles of the world's creatures, and gleans from them extraordinary perceptions about the future of humanity.

Via TED.com "Best of the Web."

Blind river dolphins, reclusive lemurs, a parrot as fearless as it is lovelorn ... Douglas Adams' close encounters with these rare and unusual animals reveal that evolution, ever ingenious, can be fickle too -- in a University of California talk that sparkles with his trademark satiric wit.

Biologist Robert Full studies the amazing gecko, with its supersticky feet and tenacious climbing skill. But high-speed footage reveals that the gecko's tail harbors perhaps the most surprising talents of all.

Full talks about a concept he calls "biomutualism," a back-and-forth process of contribution between disciplines that tends to contribute in surprising ways. In the video, it's biologists and engineers. Fascinating talk.

I have to get out on a trail, even if it's only a few miles -- I'm starting to get twitchy. :)

Meanwhile, Alex McInturff is off on a real adventure.

"Stanford grad student walking 320 miles in John Muir's footsteps"

Alex McInturff, a 23-year-old earth sciences student, finds that much has changed as he retraces the conservationist's trek from San Francisco to Yosemite Valley in 1868.

McInturff, walking through Central California, says his spirits began to lift once he hit the Sierra foothills. The mountain range that changed Muir’s life 141 years ago hasn’t lost its magic. “Returning to the forest today, I rediscovered the freedom I love about walking, which was lost a little in the San Joaquin,” McInturff wrote on his blog.

Not sure how they managed to mangle his blog California Transect's URL so badly in the online version of the article, but it should be muirwalk.blogspot.com. Alex describes himself and his journey thusly:

On April 6, Alex McInturff is setting off to retrace Muir's path across California. Alex is a master's student in the Earth Systems Program in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University. He has been researching the history of and current state of conservation in California in conjunction with the Bill Lane Center for the American West and our collaborator iMapData. Alex envisions his own walk as a way to examine the history, current state, and future prospects of a wide range of conservation efforts on public and private lands, across a telling transect of California, from urban areas, through suburbs and parks, across the large parks and ranches of the Coast Range, the irrigated industrial agriculture of the Central Valley, Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, up the Merced River, across the Don Pedro Reservoir and Lake McClure, through historical mining towns, and national forests to Yosemite National Park.

I'll definitely be adding his blog to my RSS reader.

Headline: "Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A.". First thought: "Ah, they found the Friars Club!" (rimshot). But, no, this is actually a cool thing. In the LA Times:

The largest known deposit of fossils from the last ice age has been found in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places -- under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.'s tony [sic] Miracle Mile shopping district.

Researchers from the George C. Page Museum at the La Brea tar pits have barely begun extracting the fossils from the sandy, tarry matrix of soil, but they expect the find to double the size of the museum's collection from the period, already the largest in the world.

(And yes, the Friars Club of Beverly Hills turned into the 9900 Club, then closed. So there.)

There's an article in the LA Times today talking about early North Americans being forced to change their diet to incorporate more plant life when the woolly mammoth and other megafauna began dying off. "When the woolly mammoth ran out, early man turned to roasted vegetables":

Long before early humans in North America grew corn and beans, they were harvesting and cooking the bulbs of lilies, wild onions and other plants, roasting them for days over hot rocks, according to a Texas archaeologist.[...]

Meadowlands and forest edges were filled with lilies, wild onions and perhaps two dozen other wild plants ready for the harvesting. The bulbs of these plants are about as nutritious as sweet potatoes, but their energy is locked up in a dense, indigestible carbohydrate called inulin. The only way to make the bulbs digestible is to roast them for two days or longer.

Via Daily Dish

Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine travel to some of the most remote places on earth in search of animals on the edge of extinction. Follow the journey online through exclusive video and blogs.

BBC Last Chance to See - About

BBC Last Chance to See - Blog

I would feel obligated to link to these sites even if the names weren't too perfect not to -- the photographs are very cool, and both sites have a natural history bent to them.

First is Fahrenheit minus 459, "Absolute Zero where all motions stopped - Freeze frame - images through my looking glass."

And then the companion site, Celsius -273, "A sequel to Fahrenheit -459. Both are references to the same temperature point - ABSOLUTE ZERO."

So, quite a bit colder than Celsius1414, but worth a look nonetheless.