What I learned on Facebook on President’s Day 2011!

(The stuff you hear on Facebook is enough to make your ears burn.)

All quotes were copied and pasted from Facebook exactly as they were written.

Daphne C.-H. told us that she “Just participated in the Free Preview of "Flabulous to Fabulous in Fifteen" With The Fitness Angel Free Online Class ...IT WAS GREAT”  

I love alliteration as much as the next guy, but the flabulous to fabulous thingie is a little off-putting.  I suggest this Fitness Angel change her slogan.  What about “Tonnage to Funnage in Ten”?

Peter G. describes his whereabouts by the nano-second, when he says “it is a spectacular day here in los angeles. out on the boat in marina del rey. the ocean is glistening and santa monica bay has never looked better. off to speak tonight in thousand oaks. tomorrow in redondo beach and tuesday in pasadena. and then...to new york for cbs. hope everyone is having a great and well deserved weekend”  

I think we get it; you’re in California.  Man, this guy should be a Travel Correspondent.  Oh, he is.

 

Marwa W. El-F. stated that: نطالب المجلس الأعلى للقوات المسلحة المصرية التدخل الان قبل غدا لحماية الجالية المصرية في ليبيا من بطش شديد من النظام الدموي الليبي .. لقد سمعنا جميعا التحريض السافر في خطاب نجل العقيد القذافي علي المصريين المتواجدين في ليبيا .. نكرر الوضع خطير ويجب التدخل الان قبل غدا، حفاظا علي ارواح اكثر من مليون ونصف
مواطن مصري
منقول - برجاء النشر

Aside from the misspelled words and poor grammar in Marwa W. El-F.’s statement, I refuse to marry a woman who whines incessantly about needing a man.  (P.S. There is no way anyone will know who this woman is, given the way I abbreviated her last name.)

 

Paula O. sent me and 76 other friends this one: 

“A new fortune cookie has been delivered to you.

Click the cookie to find out what it says!

Read your fortune: Click here”

Thanks Paula O.  But if you don’t mind, I am going to save this and not open it until I have dinner at the Peking House on Friday.

Lorraine D. informs all of us who never took an astronomy course: “However long the night, the dawn will break.” African proverb

 

Carol D. brags that “my ferrets have run of the house. also have a very big walk in run and living quarters. they are totally loved and cuddled.”  

I’m not impressed.  For 30 years, the mice from the forest surrounding our house have had the run of our house, and I don’t have to take the time to love and cuddle them.

 

Narine H.  advises “Always act as you are waring (sic) an invisible crown.”  

I tried this yesterday, and it worked.  The pawn broker looked at me like I was crazy, and refused to give me any money for the diamond-studded thing I told him I had on my head.

 

Wesley S., a former student of mine, announced “Hi all I went to a party at 7pm and I am still drunk please comment when you see this.”   

Given that it was only 7:05pm when Wesley S. posted this, it must have been one hell of a party.  And what comment could I possibly offer?  Drink slower!

 

Ruth S. puts all men on notice with “Whatever u give a woman she will make it greater. Give her sperm, she will give u a baby. Give her a house, she will give u a home. Give her groceries, she will give u a meal. Give her a smile and she will give u her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what she is given. So if u give her crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit. Hope 2 see every girl on my friend list repost this :)”  

But I’m not sure this system Ruth S. describes is all that fair.  I have given my wife sperm thousands of times, and she has given me only three babies.

Cathy K. and 6 others like this.

Article first published as "What I learned from Facebook on President’s Day 2011!" on Technorati.

What I learned on Facebook the weekend of 2/19/11!!

 (Facebook.   You gotta love the banter.)

All quotes were copied and pasted from Facebook exactly as they were written.

Kelly Z. had Edward Abbey over for dinner, but I wasn’t invited.  Besides, I thought that guy died a couple of decades ago along with the rest of the Monkey Wrench gang.  Bon appétit.

Patricia H. told everyone “Good night…..xoxo”.  

I love getting kisses from strangers, as long as the tests don’t come back positive.

The Toronto Raptors reports that “DeMar DeRozan put down two impressive dunks in the 2011 Sprite Slam Dunk Contest on Saturday, but it wasn't enough to the finals, where Blake Griffin took the crown.”  

I had been wondering about this event for months, wrote it in my appointment book, but then forgot to watch it.  Nice reporting Raptors.

 

Sherry C. R. told us that “Marie Antoinette was beheaded for less….” in response to a political outrage by another FB poster.  That poor French girl’s head has been used in this way for 200 years.  I suggest we let the poor thing rest in peace and not use her “la tête” for a while.

 

Darcie G. warns her friends “who so kindly insist on setting me up with their dear friends: I will make it easy. Think Denzel Washington, Luis Miguel, Adam Rodriguez and Mof Def all wrapped into one. Ready, set go ... ; )”  

I had to google Mof Def to find out who he is.  But then I learned that Darcie G. misspelled his first name.  It is Mos Def, but I still didn’t know who he was.  Here is the scoop: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Def.  Darcie G., you will not get fixed up with a cool guy if you can’t remember his first name.  Guys are funny that way.

 

“DO NOT COPY or download to your computer without prior written permission from Jack R. B.”  

This guy had a nice photo of a male Hooded Merganser, but I can’t show it to you, due to his warning.

 

David A. warns Sean:  “Sean, look at what the GOP House is passing. This is what they'll do if they win the Presidency and Senate. These aren't cosmetic differences. They're the difference between neoliberal (admittedly bad) and batshit insane.”  

Now, I’ve been a mammalogist for about 40 years, but I knew nothing about bat shit making you insane.  Exactly how does that work?

 

Mark L. asks “Anyone remember what this green stuff underneath the snow is called?” 

Mark L., you must be a student who never sees any money, but you were lucky enough to find a $20 bill.  Way to go buddy.

 

The Ottawa Senators tells us: “Just a reminder to bring a pack of diapers to tonight's game against the Bruins & win great prizes! Check out this amazing cause by learning more at: http://huggies.nhl.com/.”  

Are you kidding me?  I quit carrying diapers around more than 25 years ago, and I’m not starting up again now.  This is why I never attend hockey games.  They are as insane as batshit.

 

Susan S., Margaret H., and 77 others like this!

Is the behavior of sports fans explainable?

 (Aaron Rodgers, quarterback of the world champion Green Bay Packers.  Hang out with this guy to really enhance your status.)

I warned you in my first blog about 18 months ago that we would eventually get to some gritty topics about human behavior.  Up to now, we have been mostly just messing around with the humorous aspects of the human condition.  But I want to tackle some fascinating elements of our species (at least they are fascinating to me, and this is my blog, and you are not the boss of me).  And although I am not a professional card-carrying behavioral ecologist, or sociobiologist, or evolutionary psychologist, I have followed this literature for nearly 40 years.  It is about the most interesting non-fiction reading there is, in my opinion.

My closest colleague at Cornell, Paul Sherman, does carry a valid card of the type listed above, and I have been strongly influenced by his thinking.  He proved to me that asking questions about animal behavior (humans are animals) and then posing possible answers by thinking about how natural selection works can be productive and stimulating.  I think it is a fun type of thought experiment.

I have been in wonderment for decades about the motivation of those who so passionately root for and idolize their favorite football or baseball team.  I just don't get it.  Sure, I supported my teams in high school, and hoped they would win the regional or state tournaments.  I wanted the football team to win rather than lose when I attended Ohio State University.  But as those years passed, I found that I couldn't care less if any particular team won or lost and, in fact, I got to the point where I can't stand to watch any sports on tv.  So I am naturally curious about this conspicuous human behavior displayed by tens of millions of people worldwide, and which enables a relative handful of star athletes to become famous and fabulously wealthy.

In particular, it is curious how a person can become so emotionally vested in a team on which you have never been a player, or excited about the outcome of a team from a school you never attended, or remain overtly loyal to a team from a city in which you have never even lived.  To a behavioral ecologist, this is all extremely interesting.  (Realize that this little essay is not about the person who loves the game of baseball or football or basketball so much that they could watch any two teams play and love every minute of it, and not even care who wins.)

I don't have a lot of data on which to build a little theory about this fascinating behavior of humans, but there are some observations about which we can probably all agree.  Here they are:

1.  the majority of fans that follow most teams are men; most of the most passionate fans are men

2.  the most avid male fans are of prime reproductive age (15-50)

3.  the passion is so elevated that in many (or most ??) cases, fans of one team literally hate other teams and/or hate the fans of opposing teams, hurl incredibly insulting epithets at them, etc. (for spine-chilling evidence of this, check out the numerous Facebook fan pages of sports teams, but don't let your young children read them)

4.  in many (or most ???) cases, fans advertise their commitment to their favorite team by wearing jerseys, jackets, ball caps, or belt buckles, and put team bumper stickers on their car

This behavior is interesting, because we ecologists are always analyzing what organisms do in terms of cost-benefit analysis.  So in this case, how do fans benefit from supporting their favorite team?  They must get more than it costs them in terms of time and money, or it seems unlikely they would continue their support?  Aside from the fan who bets money on the outcome of a game, most fans stand to receive no immediate material benefit from their team doing well.  So where is the reward?

Now, most of you are not students of natural selection, I assume.  So, you are probably saying that people follow their teams because "it feels good", "it is enjoyable", or "I feel a sense of pride when my team does well". But the behaviorist wants to know why it feels good.  If it is enjoyable, then it almost certainly serves some other purpose biologically.  Why do we like sugar?  Because it is sweet.  But biologists then ask why does it taste sweet?  The biological answer is that it tastes good to us (and probably to most mammals) so that we will seek it out and ingest certain foods that contribute to our nutritional well-being and, thus, our survival.  The same kind of answer follows the question about why sex feels good.  If sex were painful, humans would have intercourse less often and, presumably, have fewer children on average compared to a group of humans where the act was pleasurable.  I am simply asking the same question about why so many humans follow their favorite sports teams so passionately.

At this point, I need to introduce the concept of "status", which has a special meaning in biology.  There are many factors that can contribute to an elevated status in humans: wealth, notoriety, physical beauty, intellectual acumen, physical prowess.  Status is important, especially for males, because females are attracted to men with high status.  High status males have more mates during their life, copulate more, and leave more children (or at least they did before the era of easy access to contraceptives in developed societies), which is the all-important currency that drives evolution.  Thousands of scientific studies show this relationship for non-human animals.  The data for humans are more difficult to obtain, but if you search Google for scientific studies by P.W. Turke and L.L. Betzig 1985 (Those who can do: Wealth, status, and reproductive success on Ifaluk), E.A. Smith 2004 (Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success?), or R.L. Hopcroft 2006 (Sex, status and reproductive success in contemporary United States), you will find convincing evidence that status matters a great deal to humans.  But you already know that status is important to humans, and that we try to raise ours all the time.  This is true of humans in every culture and society everywhere in the world.  And if I asked you why we seek status, you would probably say something like "because it feels good".

There is little doubt that professional athletes have high status.  The Super Bowl that I watched Sunday exhibited some of the elements that contribute to the status of the participants, aside from the obvious financial payoff.  The President of the United States watched the game at home, and a former President was in attendance at the game along with numerous high-status movie stars.  Then, there is the presence of the U.S. military, which I have never understood.  Regardless of how that association ever got started, the military pageantry just before the game, the singing of the National Anthem, the military fly-over, and the segues to our soldiers in Iraq who watched the game lend credence to this football game as an important event in America.  That is, the Super Bowl is a really big deal, watched by more than 100 million viewers.  As Michael Douglas stated in that somewhat emotional segment before the kickoff, "This is so much bigger than just a football game."  If you think that the "head man" or chief of a Paleolithic village of a couple hundred people had high status among his villagers, then the status of the quarterback of the winning Super Bowl team must be off the charts.

What then about the fans?  I have long thought that the idolization of celebrities that is so common among humans is a status-enhancing behavior.  Or, at least it is a behavior that is a vestige of an age-old desire to be close to the source of power, wisdom, or wealth.  Perquisites that enhanced survival and/or reproductive success must have flowed to those who were confidants of the clan or tribe's chief throughout most of human history.  Today, if I were a close friend of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or the Queen of England, I would likely obtain some tangible benefits.

And so we are strongly attracted to famous, wealthy, and powerful people, even if it is from afar.  We celebrate them, idolize them, dream about being with them or at least seen with them-------of somehow having our lives and our fortunes touched by theirs.  To help prove this point, imagine that you flew from New York to LA, and you happened to sit next to Angelina Jolie on the plane.  I will bet you my next three Social Security checks that the first words out of your mouth when you joined your spouse or friend at the terminal would be: "Guess who I sat next to on the plane?"  It would probably be the most significant event that happens to you all month, and you would talk about it with whomever would listen.  Importantly, your status would be enhanced, at least for a little while, because of this experience you had with the famous celebrity.

We may not be conscious of the possible enhancements to our well-being if we were to be befriended by one of these high-profile people, but that lack of awareness does not lessen the potential benefits of such an association.  Anyone with higher status than ours is a person with whom it is worth fraternizing, so in a global world the number of such people is extremely high.

It should be obvious by now that my hypothesis is that our tendency to follow a sports team, and to advertise that fact to others, is just another example of attempting to enhance one's social status.  It is a cheap and easy tactic to use; being a sports fan is the poor man's approach to bettering your position.  But there are certainly other explanations for this behavior.  For example, maybe people (essentially men) become a visible fan of a team because nearly everyone else in their social group or community is already a fan.  By NOT being on board, you could be viewed as a weirdo and, of course, your status would suffer accordingly.  But that is essentially the same idea; namely, maybe your status will not soar because you became a fan, but it might decline if you do not.

I have not discussed how we might test this idea or other predictions we could make based on it, but this blog is already too long.  Another time. I could be dead wrong about all of this, and I strongly invite your alternative explanations.  However, as I have long believed, the wrong hypothesis is better than no hypothesis at all.

Not the Super Bowl again!

(Maybe the Super Bowl frenzy is all about the snacks you get to eat while watching.)

This year I am trying to get pumped up for the big football game.  I guess the Steelers and the Packers are involved. 

You see, I hate football and I just can’t watch it on tv.  I tried to watch a couple of Super Bowl games over the years, but I never seem to make it past the first quarter.  I think I have watched maybe two football games in their entirety in the past 40 years. 

I know there must be something wrong with me, and I am seeing a specialist about this.  But she just doesn’t know what to prescribe as an antidote.  So I have taken treatment into my own hands, before I go so far as to check myself into the Mayo Clinic to find out what is wrong with me. 

My wife and I are ready.  I cleaned the tv screen with Windex to make the image as inviting as possible.  I vacuumed the carpet in the living room so I am not distracted by lint on the floor as I sit there during kickoff.  And I went to the grocery store yesterday and bought some great snacks.  We are going to have shrimp cocktail, one of my favorites.  I wonder if this is how most people make it through a game---they just buy lots of comfort foods and gorge themselves for three hours until the final gun.

But I am simply tired of being left out of conversations in public places.  This next week, everyone will be talking about the fumbles, the TDs (I just googled TD and found out that this is short for “touchdown”), the interceptions, and the half-time show. 

And anyone who did not see all those highly-touted commercials that cost $3,000,000 is considered un-American.  During WWII the Allies would ask an intruder who won the World Series.  If they didn’t know, then they were assumed to be a German soldier.  I have always worried that I might be stopped by some authority who would ask me to describe the Bud Light commercial on last year’s Super Bowl.  But because I would not know, I would be arrested as a subversive terrorist from Yemen.

So I have my snacks and my cleaning supplies at the ready.  I also have a little cheat-sheet with the names of the two teams and their colors written down to avoid confusion when the two lines of players run together and get all mixed up.  But as a backup plan in case I run out of snacks, I am checking HBO to see what movies might be showing Sunday evening.

Article first published as Not the Super Bowl Again! on Technorati.

Sleep-talking, the fun I have after dark

(After dark is when my fun really begins.)

I have always been able to find ways to entertain myself.  When I was a kid, I collected things: baseball cards, soda bottle caps, coins, stamps.  I played baseball, cowboys and Indians, and pretended I was Peter Pan saving Elaine, the cute little girl next door, from something bad.

More recently, with the children grown and gone, I play hide 'n seek with our black lab in the house, kibitz with people I don't know on Facebook, read a couple of books a week, and stroll through the forest around my house as though I were a Cayuga Indian stalking a deer with a bow.  I've never actually met a Cayuga Indian, if any still exist, but I pretend that I'm walking stealthily around on dry leaves as I assume they must have done in this very location.

Mostly, I love to tease my wife and play my own brand of games with her, something which she often sees coming, but which she understands is a part of our relationship.  For example, she always wants to read in bed at night, and I don't.  So before she gets to bed, I often hide her book somewhere in the room, and pretend that I am asleep.  But she knows that one too well.  "Tom, where did you hide my book?  I know you are not asleep."  Or, I will unscrew the light bulb in the bedside lamp so that when she tries to turn it on to read---well, you get the picture.  Or, when she is ready to go to sleep, she insists that I turn over and face the wall nearest my side of the bed so she can cuddle for a while.  But instead of turning 180 degrees to establish the position she wants, I actually turn 360 degrees to end up in exactly the position I was in originally.  So, in pitch black dark, I'm excited with anticipation when she discovers that her face is not near the back of my head, but it is actually touching my face.  I get giddy just before she lets out a little scream of surprise when she realizes her nose is unexpectedly touching another nose.  I love that one.

But on occasion, I also have another opportunity for entertainment because my wife has this interesting ability to talk in her sleep.  In the middle of the night, she will utter a perfectly coherent, complete sentence that wakes me from sleep.  I awake quickly enough that I hear and understand every word she says.  I wish I had written all these down over the years, because by now I would have enough material for a book titled "A Sleep Talker's Guide to the Universe".

It is also obvious that her utterances are a direct manifestation of what she is dreaming or thinking about.  Last week, our 2-year old grandson had tubes put in his ears to reduce the incidence of ear infections to which he is prone.  Two nights ago, Management spouted off the following sentence: "There should be a shine off the tympanic membrane." Realize that my wife used to be a Registered Nurse, so she must have been dreaming about ear anatomy and its characteristics, although I don't know if the tympanum ever shines.

But the best utterance was years ago when my wife still worked as a R.N. in the Emergency Department at the local hospital.  She was always bringing the stories of her work home with her---the amputated arm of the day, the broken bone protruding through the leg, and the usual heart attacks, kidney failures, and drug overdoses.  After 20 years of that, I felt I had learned so much about the medical profession that I almost went into private practice to treat trauma patients.  Follow that up with watching the tv series ER for about five years, and I could have taught medicine at a university.  One night while we were sleeping, the sleep talker went into action.  "Give him .5 of epi (meaning 0.5cc of epinephrine), STAT!", I heard her say with obvious panic in her voice.  This time, I thought I would try to talk back to her to see if she registered my response.  So I said, "No, make that 10cc of epinephrine, STAT!".  She definitely heard me.  She became immediately agitated, started moving her arms and legs like she was trying to stop the lethal injection about to be given by this new doc in the ER who looked a little like her husband, and she repeatedly said "No. No."  It was great.

I realized then that I had unleashed the power.  So for many years since then, when my wife starts her monologue, I whisper into her ear something like "Cheese omelette with mushrooms", and the next morning she asks me if I would like an omelette for breakfast.  "Oh sure, that sounds nice", I say naively.  Or, "A Porter-Cable rotating sander for my birthday".  When she presents me with my birthday gift a week later, I act totally surprised.  "Wow, I've been wanting one of these." And, "You probably have as great a husband as anyone you know."  For the next couple of days she keeps telling me how lucky she is to have a guy like me, and that I'm so special, although she can not remember exactly why.

Last night when we went to bed, she announced that she was going to read before turning off the light.  And then, "Tom, did you hide my glasses?"  Of course I did.  That was entertaining, but the real fun begins AFTER she goes to sleep.

Article first published as Sleep-talking, the fun I have after dark on Technorati.

The Odd Couple goes West

(DrTom and Paul Sherman could have played the parts of Oscar and Felix naturally, and did.)

Paul Sherman and I were colleagues at Cornell University.  For several years, Paul and I drove the 2,200 miles from Ithaca, NY to the OX Ranch in western Idaho to conduct research on Idaho ground squirrels. We lived there for two months a year for most of the 1990s. Have you ever spent four days in a truck with Paul Sherman, followed by two months in a bunkhouse 30 miles from the nearest town (pop., about 600), followed by another four days in the truck to get home? Of course not, because your mama didn't raise no fool. Apparently, mine did.

On the trip out, Paul enjoyed working mentally on evolutionary problems---aloud.  Why do opossums play dead?  Why do humans nearly everywhere believe in some kind of a god?  Why do humans keep pets?  Paul liked to listen to Linda Ronstadt tapes in the truck; I liked to hear Jon Secada. He drove 55 mph; I drove 65. He liked to eat at McDonald's; I hated the place. I smoked; he hated that. He is fastidious, organized and neat; I'm not so much that way. He has a Type A personality, if you know what I mean; my type is yet undefined, but it can't be higher than a C.  And Sherm worried a lot more than I did about what other people thought.

When we arrived at the bunkhouse at the OX in March of the first year, I threw my jacket on the chair near the front door as we entered the old clapboard structure. Paul asked me if I was going to do something with that. I told him I intended to leave it there until May when we packed up to go back to New York.  And so it went for the next 55 days, and for the next eight years---Sherman as Felix Unger and I as Oscar Madison of the old tv series, The Odd Couple.

When friends or biologists visited our squirrel project, they invariably asked if we bickered like this all the time. No, we've cleaned up our act quite a bit for your visit. You should have heard us yesterday arguing about whether the kitchen floor needed mopping yet. And the day before that it was whether ketchup really needs to be kept in a refrigerator. Of course not, I said. But I repeatedly found it in there getting all cold as soon as I turned my back.  And Tony Randall worried whenever I left the Crock-Pot on all day. "Paul, it is a crock-pot. That's what it does. You cook slowly with it on ALL DAY." And tomorrow, we have to decide who drives the 30 miles to town to get groceries. And whose turn is it to call the ranch foreman and invite him and his wife for dinner?  "Tom, isn't that firewood a little close to the wood stove?" I started going to bed at 8pm so I could get some peace and quiet.  "Tom, did you brush your teeth before you went to bed?"  Judas Priest!!!!

One year we decided to take a more northerly route back to Ithaca.  We went through Montana.  At the end of a long day of traveling, we were ready to stop for the night.  We were both exhausted from a day of negotiating about the best route to take, which octane gas we should buy, and who gets to read the Missoulian first while the other drove.  I detected the unmistakable smell of testosterone as we hit the city limits of Bozeman; a few minutes later we discovered why.  We noticed that there were few vacancies at motels as we proceeded down the main drag.  We stopped at the only place that did not have a "No Vacancy" sign flashing.  That was the good news.  There was a rodeo in town, and nearly every room in town was taken.  The only room they had left was the honeymoon suite, the bad news.  I kid you not!  The friggin honeymoon suite.

The middle-aged woman behind the counter snickered and told me with as straight a face as she could summon that she would give us a discount.   The lobby was full of cowboys in western shirts, huge metal belt buckles with bighorn sheep and other animal heads on them, wide-brimmed hats curved up at the edges just right, and the obligatory boots with stiletto toes.  There was probably more testosterone per cubic foot in that motel at that moment than any place on earth.  "Lady, please keep your voice down.  We're considering this because we are dead tired, but let's not let this develop into a group decision between the university profs who study squirrels and have New York license plates and all these hombres who just rode in here on wild mustangs they only roped this morning on the open range."  Agreed.  But as we were walking away from the check-in desk she shouted: "Do you want flowers sent to the room?"  

Sherman and I accepted the deal, but we took a circuitous route to get to the room, and then waited until the hall cleared before we unlocked the door and slipped inside faster than a Google search can bring up the results for "lynch mob". The room was much nicer than the room my wife and I had stayed in on our wedding night 40 years earlier; there must be some kind of moral or life lesson in that fact, but I can't begin to figure out what it is.  The Bozeman room was so feminine, so flowery, so over-the-top nuptial that I blurred the memory of the place almost as soon as we checked out.  I do remember that there was a heart-shaped bed on a raised platform in the middle of the room and a pull-out couch.  Sherman and I flipped to see who got the bed.  He won the toss, or lost the toss, depending on your point of view.  We both agreed not to discuss the incident for at least 10 years.

Back in Ithaca, Sherman and I rarely spent any social time together.  An occasional email or phone call where the words "dickhead" and "whacko" were flung about was the extent of it.  Living together for two months a year pretty much exhausted what we had to say to one another.  During those years, we discussed every topic known to man, and we pretty much solved all the world's problems.  Professors in biology are often loners, so to live and work together closely for a significant period of time, far removed from your families and routine concerns, fosters a mutual dependency.  When it was all said and done, we were both wiser for the rare opportunity that comes with two adults jointly seeking answers to questions on a daily basis.  It takes a compromising spirit, but in the end it was all good, and life-long memories were made.  I still think that ketchup should be kept at room temperature, however.

The incredible cinnamon buns of Frank the cowboy

(Frank Anderson, my favorite cowboy and pastry chef, on his favorite quarter horse, Magic.)

Frank Anderson is a cowboy.  I mean, he is a real cowboy.  Frank and his family used to run cattle in the wide open landscape of eastern Oregon.  They were out on the range for weeks at a time, ate from a chuck wagon, punched cattle from horseback---the whole nine yards.  Years later, when his kids attended a proper school for the first time in their lives in Eugene, the teacher called Frank and his wife in for a conference.  She told them that their kids were great.  So what's the problem?  Well, they tell these unbelievable stories about living on the range like the cowboys of old.  The teacher quipped: "No one has lived like that for 100 years."  But Frank snapped back: "Mam.  That is exactly how we lived."

I got to know Frank while he was working for the OX Ranch near Council, Idaho.  For many years during the 1990s, Paul Sherman and I drove from Cornell to the OX where we conducted research on Idaho ground squirrels for two months every spring.  The OX was an operating cattle ranch with only a couple of full-time cowboys; with the well-trained cattle dogs they used, you just didn't need many men to keep those cattle from misbehaving.  Frank was in his 60s then, but he still mounted a horse early in the morning and didn't get off until evening.  Sometimes he had to sleep on the ground in the early spring cold, rather than take the time to come back to the house, if the herd was far away.  In the morning after those nights, he didn't walk completely upright.

Frank is built like most men would like to be built who were 40 years his junior.  Probably about 5'10" tall, 200 pounds, not an ounce of fat.  He sports a huge handlebar moustache, bushy eyebrows that he can raise so high they knock off his cowboy hat, and a flattop haircut.  He could easily pass for a Marine Corps drill instructor at Parris Island.  He is a horse whisperer and a dog whisperer.  He owns a team of four Belgians that he used to pull a wagon.  It is no small feat to control 8,000 pounds of horse with four independent brains, but Frank used to enter competitions with his "boys" where you did just that.  His son actually "breaks" horses for a living.  Once when Frank was driving fence posts into the ground he lost the tip of his index finger to the first joint.  He politely produced the severed finger from his pocket to the doctor when he finally got to the medical office.

But on Sundays, Frank transforms into something else.  He is usually home that day, and he bakes.  He made fantastic pies when we worked on the ranch.  One Sunday, I entered Frank's kitchen to find a plate of the most delicious-looking cinnamon buns you ever saw.  They were huge, tipping the scales at about half a pound each, oozing with cinnamon-flavored gooeyness, and warm.  In my entire pastry-consuming life, I never tasted a cinnamon bun that was that good, and I consider myself a cinnamon bun aficionado.  I was astonished at Frank's accomplishment, I ranted and raved about the creation, and I praised the cowboy profusely.  He nodded with pride and modest self-satisfaction.

My son Matt, who was working with me at the time, whispered to me that we need to trap squirrels in the location of Frank's house every Sunday, especially on the side of the house where Frank can see us through a large picture window, and that we should look hungry and in need of hot coffee.  We agreed that we would rehearse the forlorn look of a hungry squirrel biologist that very night back at our bunkhouse.  After a few Sundays, Sherman began to see the pattern, and accused us of planning our research schedule around the activities of the cowboy's kitchen.

When we returned to Ithaca, I told everyone about the cowboy's buns.  I bragged to my wife, I exclaimed to my department chairman, and I repeated the story of the Most Excellent Cinnamon Buns to my students and to anyone who would listen.  The following year we went back to the OX to study the wily ground squirrel.  On Sundays, I trapped near Frank's house.  I was hoping to score again.  Apple pie was good, but those buns.................  Had it all been just a wonderful dream?

And then one Sunday it happened.  Frank had cinnamon buns!  But wait.  They were good, but not great.  Was Frank slipping?  Had he lost the original recipe?  Had he changed ovens or mixers?  Was he using a metal spoon now instead of a wooden one?  And the following year, it was the same.  Good buns, but not great buns.

A few years after this, when our squirrel project was over, Frank visited my wife and I in Ithaca.  And then the truth came out.  The old cowboy confessed.  The wonderful cinnamon buns that I remembered were not Frank's.  He had purchased them at a local church bake sale a few days before.  When Matt and I went bonkers over how good they were, and how amazed we were that the cattle-puncher could produce such a thing, Frank took the credit.  The whole story took on a life of its own.  Frank heard us tell his foreman what great buns his employee made.  His culinary reputation throughout western Idaho was growing far and wide, as well as through the halls of the Ivy League back East.  Frank let the acclaim get the better of him, his head swelled to the size of a 10-gallon hat.  After that inaugural bun year, Frank knew that we would be expecting those pastries, so he learned how to make cinnamon buns in an attempt to create a seamless bun history.  The "good" buns were his.  The "great" buns came from the bake sale.  And he hoped we would not know the difference.  OMG!

After his confession, I thought I would never trust any cowboy I met again.  To be honest, I have not met another cowboy in the 15 years since this incident, but if I ever meet one, he will have to prove himself to me.  But then, I cogitated the facts of this case a bit longer and I realized something.  Frank knew we were counting on having cinnamon buns at his house on Sunday.  So he took the time to learn how to make them.  He realized he now had a bun reputation to uphold, and a man's reputation was worth fighting over.  In fact, where Frank comes from, men used to shoot each other over such things not so long ago.  So in the end, I thought--bravo Frank.  Well done.  May the memory of your buns live forever.

P.S.  Sadly, Frank passed away in 2015.  My sons and I will miss him forever.

Tanya, the Cujo of Rice Avenue

(Cujo, of Stephen King fame.  We lived with a dog about like this one.)

I have had dogs all my life.  I would estimate that I am currently on number 9 or 10.  My first dog was some black mutt named Tag, which we had when I was four or five years old.  My parents had to get rid of him because he refused to stop chasing Mrs. Mumaugh’s chickens.  Mumaugh was a neighbor lady who was a Native American.  We have taken enough away from them over the past three centuries, so the dog went.  My first and only poem (circa 1952) was written about this dog:

I once had a dog named Tag,

And when I would call him his tail would wag.

If any of you proceed to publish that poem, please send me the royalties when they start pouring in.

The most memorable dog we had was a Border Collie mix named Tanya.  My mother acquired this one when we lived on Rice Avenue sometime after my father died, and we had the dog through my high school and college days.  Everything went smoothly for the first few years.  Tanya wagged her tail; we petted her, fed her, and watered her.  We tossed a ball; she fetched it.  She slept, she ate, she urinated and defecated, and she occasionally barked.  We provided food and shelter; she provided some company.  How complicated a contract do we need to devise? 

But then the problem started.  My mother always fed Gaines-Burgers to Tanya, which was a dog food that looked like a raw hamburger and came wrapped in individual plastic packages.  The production of this dog food ceased in the 1990s.  At first, Tanya would gobble up the burger as soon as she was given one.  But as she got older, she carried the meaty disc to a corner of the living room where she laid down with the prize like it was her baby, and she would threaten anyone who entered her personal space.  She actually bared her teeth and growled menacingly, and if you got even closer, she would snap at you.  I never wrote a poem about this dog, so maybe that omission planted some seed of insecurity in that puny Collie brain.

One day we hit a tipping point.  You see, Tanya would guard her burger for a couple of hours and look around the room to see if anyone was even watching her.  If you were, she bared her fangs.  (It was similar to my younger brother Jack, who hated it if you looked at him over the breakfast table in the morning while he ate his cereal.  He actually uttered a sort of a growl and bared his teeth, before he developed the habit of lining up all the cereal boxes in a semi-circle in front of him so he could not be seen at all.  Recently, Jack told me he was simply lining up those boxes so he could read the nutritional information.  Right!  I'm sure he couldn't even pronounce "riboflavin" at that age.)

But on one occasion, I got so angry about Tanya hoarding her food and holding the family hostage until she finished, that I got right in her face, pointed my finger at her, and screamed “Tanya, eat it!”  She snapped.  Tanya sprang to her feet and came at me with jaws and saliva flying and a growl that gives me cold sweats to this day.  I thought she was going to rip my JC Penney’s Towncraft briefs right off my body.  (It must have been a Saturday, because my brothers and I always spent the morning watching tv in our underwear.  In the weeks that followed this incident, we actually sat on the couch under a heavy blanket to protect us in case Tanya decided to attack.  We refused to give up the Saturday underwear thingie.)

Tanya’s weirdness provided my brothers and I with entertainment, however.  Whenever a new friend came over to the house, and they asked about the dog, we would tell them what Tanya liked the best.  “Just point your finger at her and say eat it.”  The reaction of the dog and the guest were quite amazing.  Many of these friends never returned.

I hated coming home to visit after I went off to Ohio State, because my mother would beg me to take Tanya to the vet for one thing or another.  No one else could even get her in the car without being attacked.  I think I may have suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) years later, and it wasn't from my military service. One time, I took her to a husband and wife vet office in a nearby town to get Tanya’s nails clipped.  I think we had become persona non grata with all the local vets.  Somehow I got her into the office on her leash, and explained to the naïve vets what we needed.  I told them to be really careful with this dog; they would probably have to put her to sleep to do anything with her, I advised.  Advice not taken, apparently.  The next day when I returned to fetch the dog, the husband vet had his right arm wrapped in a fresh bandage, and his wife had her left arm wrapped in a matching arrangement.  “Yep, she got us both”, he volunteered.

There was one other personality in the mix---my blind grandmother.  My grandma had lived with us for years, and she was totally without sight.  The interesting thing was that Tanya often lay at her feet with one of those damn burgers, unbeknown to my grandmother.  When she moved her feet or began to rock in the chair, Tanya would start to bare her teeth and look threatening.  But Tanya never took it any further than that with the old woman who always thought that the snarky dog was as sweet as sugar.  Sometimes, what you don’t know, or can’t see, can’t hurt you.

Why my mother kept this menace so long after the dog went quirky is a mystery to me.  Perhaps it had something to do with wanting life to remain the same as it had been.  It was changing in our house.  I had left home already, and my brothers were not far behind.  Soon, our mother would be left alone with her invalid mother.  And Tanya would at least be there to keep them company, flaws and all.

A memorable New Year’s Eve in Mexico

(Folklorico dancers in Mexico.   What a party.)

About 20 years ago, my wife and I and our 8-year old son decided to spend the holidays in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.  We did most of the usual things one does there.  We visited the Mayan ruins at Uxmal, went skin-diving in the Caribbean, sun-bathed on the beaches at Cancun, and spent a couple of days on Cozumel Island. 

But on New Year’s Eve we found ourselves in the provincial capital, Merida.  We stayed in an old hotel, the name of which has now passed into the mist like the smell of tequila after a festive occasion.  When we checked in, we realized that they were setting up for their New Year’s Eve party later that night.  We asked if we could attend, and the desk clerk uttered a chipper “seguro”.  All he needed to know was the kind of alcohol we wanted at the table, so I said tequila and my wife said rum.

When we were escorted to our table later that night, we found an entire bottle of rum and a bottle of tequila on the table, as we had apparently ordered.  Ay, caramba!  Our 8-year old might have to help us with this, because I refuse to leave food or drink behind at the end of an evening out.

The festivities that night resulted in the most memorable New Year’s Eve we have ever experienced in 42 years of marriage.  There were choruses of dancing girls in colorful dresses performing a folklórico, there were bands of several styles, and a buffet of food the likes of which I have never seen.  And it went on and on and on.  Our son found young friends to hang out with around the swimming pool, so he was occupied, and we were happy, and getting “happier” by the hour.

Needless to say, the following morning my wife and I were moving and thinking very slowly.  The desk clerk kept asking me for “la llave” as I was checking out and, for the life of me, I could not understand what he was saying.  My wife acted embarrassed and yelled indignantly “The key.  He wants the key!”  Oh, of course.  I handed the young guy the key and sheepishly scooted out of the lobby to the waiting taxi.

As we meandered down the narrow streets in the cab, my wife perused the signs on the buildings as we passed.  My head hurt too much to look out into the bright light of day.  As we passed one respectable looking edifice, and because my Spanish was normally better than hers, she asked me what “Y—M—C—A” spelled.  I looked as superior as I could muster, stared her squarely in the face, and told her it spelled YMCA.  Touché! 

Several morals to this story, but here is the take-home message for me.  Drink bottled water, and don’t mix alcohol and the alphabet when traveling in Mexico.

 Article first published as A Memorable New Year's Eve in Mexico on Technorati.

I'm rooting for the deer hunters, again

(White-tailed deer congregated in a feeding yard.  The number of deer here suggests a high density of deer in the area.)

I am a wildlife biologist, so I like all forms of wild animals and plants.  I don’t think there is an organism that I don’t appreciate biologically, including mosquitoes and deer ticks that cause Lyme disease.  I also love white-tailed deer; after all, I conducted my Ph.D. research on this species in the 1970s. But enough is enough.

Whitetails are probably about 10 times more abundant in the Northeast now than they were before whites arrived here.  Long story, but humans have inadvertently created fantastic deer habitat by breaking up the original forest, which is not good deer habitat, into a mosaic of cropland, fields, and forests of several age classes, which is great deer habitat.

The result of the high deer density is that they exert tremendous browsing pressure on native plants in the forests. The species composition of future forests is being determined by the selective removal of certain kinds of trees by deer that is occurring today.

In addition, damage to vegetable gardens and ornamental shrubbery by deer results in a significant cost to homeowners; New York State residents in two areas of the state paid $200-$500 per year to replace lost trees and shrubs due to deer. Deer browsing is a general frustration to hobby horticulturists throughout much of the country.

I could hunt deer to help contribute to herd reduction, which I used to do. But after chasing deer around with a dart gun every day for two years during my research days, chasing them around with a rifle is simply too much like work. Besides, my wife doesn’t even like venison, so what is the point?

We live on 12 acres of mostly wooded land in upstate New York. When the deer season opens, deer tend to congregate on my little “refuge” to escape hunters. So I chase them off and into the surrounding “killing fields” in hopes of seeing a reduction in the herd overall. But, of course, this is all like spitting in the ocean.

White-tailed deer have been a part of my life for 40 years. It is truly a species I love to hate and hate to love. I guess I am just hoping we find a balance. You know, not too hot, not too cold; not too hard, not too soft; not too many, not too few.

Article first published as I'm Rooting for the Deer Hunters, Again on Technorati.

Bristol Palin and the muddled American viewer

(Bristol, the dancer?  There is more going on in this competition than just dance.)

I was forced to watch Dancing With The Stars this year against my better judgment. I couldn’t stand to hear my wife screaming from the living room as Bristol Palin, who was absolutely terrible at the beginning, made it through each subsequent week. My wife has a bit of a heart condition, so I thought I needed to be by her side to keep her calm. But as I watched, I began to worry about my heart, which is perfectly fine.

Sarah Palin’s daughter displayed no rhythm, clumsy footwork, and a tendency to walk through steps that should have been danced, if you know what I mean. There is no doubt that she got better, as almost anyone would with intense training for weeks by a dance expert. But she should have been eliminated weeks ago, before Brandy and at least one other contestant were voted out. I’m no dance expert, but after having spent the past 25 years in latin dance clubs in four countries, I can see who has the moves and who doesn’t.

How do we explain this interesting result? There are only two explanations that I can imagine. First, the American public does not have the ability in general to judge dance or almost anything else critically. The plethora of really bad movies, tv shows, books, websites, and music of the past two decades would argue for this explanation. It may just be that there are too many people with too much money to spend on entertainment to allow natural selection to do its job efficiently. As my mother used to say about certain people, “their taste is all in their mouth.”

The second possible explanation is that politics was at work in the Bristol Palin case. Right wingers, or tea partyers, or whoever voted for her to show their political support indirectly for Bristol’s mother by usurping a popular tv program that is supposed to be about dance. Of course, none of this is Bristol’s fault; she is mostly just a clueless kid from Alaska.

Either explanation is disappointing to me. Come on America. Put on your crap detector and think straight. Let’s give credit where credit is due. If something is lousy, let’s call it lousy. If something is good, let’s call it good. It’s simple, really.

Article first published as Bristol Palin and the muddled American viewer on Technorati.

The milkman's son

(The milkman, a sight that most Americans have never seen.)

My father was a milkman. He drove a panel truck for Meadow Gold Dairy in northwestern Ohio to deliver dairy products to his customers, a job he held from the time he left the Navy after WWII until his death in 1961. You don’t see this kind of thing much anymore, but until the second half of the 20th century, delivery men were a common sight in America. There were men who delivered bread, tea and coffee, and ice before refrigerators were common. In addition, we had a guy who showed up regularly to pick up junk, like old metal, and another man who often stopped by to pick up old rags. There were others who sold crayons, brushes, vacuum cleaners, and encyclopedias. My dad delivered milk.

My father’s truck did not just contain one product. It was a veritable mobile dairy store. There was whole milk with the cream that settled at the top of the glass bottle in that “bubble” at the top of the container, skim milk, chocolate milk, cream, orange and grape drink, cottage cheese, butter, and even eggs. And during the summer months, he also sold ice cream, ice cream bars, fudgesicles, and drumsticks (now called nutty buddy). A couple of times a year, Meadow Gold cleaned out their freezers at the plant and my father would bring home dozens of these ice cream products. The weeks following a big score like that were full of happy days (usually after dinner) visiting our old chest freezer to see what sugary gem my brothers and I could find.

My father had a predetermined route that was his. He visited his customers several times per week, delivering whatever they ordered or needed. He knew each customer personally, by name, and he knew their families. Most of the time, he simply put what they had ordered in an insulated box on their front porch or inside their front door. At other times, the customer was home, and my father would spend several minutes talking to them about the affairs of the day, or how their children were doing in school, or about the weather. In those cases, he usually brought the product into their house and inserted it right into their refrigerator.

Our house was in town but, of course, we also had a Meadow Gold delivery man who brought our milk. His name was Elmer. Until the late 1950s, the in-town men used a horse-drawn wagon to carry the milk. The kids in my neighborhood loved to visit Elmer’s horse when we heard it clomping up our street. The horse knew exactly where each customer’s house was, and so it stopped in front of each, just as it had done thousands of times before. Elmer stepped out of the wagon with his metal cases of glass bottles while the wagon was still coming to a stop. The clacking of glass against metal and of horses’ hooves on the pavement are synchronous sounds I can still hear when I close my eyes. But even in those days, this system of horse-drawn milk delivery was considered an anachronism. Other dairy companies had long since phased this out. On occasion, our father would take us to the Meadow Gold horse barns downtown to see the entire collection of neighing relics that had no idea their working days would soon be up. I always loved that trip.

In those days, my grandmother, who was a severe diabetic and totally blind, lived with us. During the day, she was the only one at home. On milk delivery day, Elmer brought the milk up to the house, opened the front door, which was never locked, and put the milk in the kitchen fridge. But the verbal exchange usually went something like this: “Hi Mom”, says Elmer. “Hi Elmer, how are you?”, my grandmother would repeat, while sitting in her rocking chair in front of the radio, where she listened to Paul Harvey about this time every day. They would talk for a few minutes. “It seems cold today. Be careful out there Elmer”, she would say. “I will Mom”, and off he went. It was taken for granted by us then, but my mother relied on Elmer to be an additional check on her invalid mother during the day when my mother had to work. It takes a village to raise our seniors or, at least, it used to.

The best part of my father’s job for me was the day he would let me go with him on his appointed rounds. This did not happen very often, and in later years the company forbade this practice. But on certain summer mornings when I was 7 or 8, my father returned to our house in his truck after having loaded it at 4am while I slept. It was exciting to check out the inventory in the back of the truck before we embarked. Then, my mother sent me off, and for the rest of the day I was Bob Gavin’s boy, the milkman’s son.

I remember speeding from house to house down country roads traveling 50 mph. I stood in the passenger-side doorway, which was completely open, and my father either stood or sat in a swivel chair as he drove. Seat belts did not exist then. Sounds crazy dangerous, but I remember how exciting it was to watch the ground fly by as I stood in that open door, holding on for dear life. When we got to a house, I went with my father and helped carry a quart or two, unless he warned me to stay in the truck because of an unfriendly dog. He had a variety of techniques for fending off the meanies. On occasion, we raced each other back to the truck. How can it be that these races always ended in a tie?

In general, I felt useful, and I got to see first-hand how much people genuinely liked my father. I believe this is an extremely important attribute of parenting. When a child sees that other adults like and respect their parents, the child is even more likely to believe that the parental instructions they receive daily are sound.

And then we had lunch. My mother packed her artery-clogging bologna sandwich (we now know); I always had mayo but my father only used mustard. I got to pick any drink I wanted from the back of the truck. Orange or grape drink or chocolate milk. What kind of a mood am I in? My father and I drank straight from the same bottle. We were working men, and real men don’t need cups. But the very best of all, and that which I remember to this day, was the way the cottage cheese tasted. It came in cardboard cartons with a pull-top cardboard lid. I never seemed to have a spoon, so my father showed me how to fold the lid into a scoop and to dip out the goodness with that homemade implement. Once again, I don’t know if this is a romantic memory, or a fading memory, or actual fact, but cottage cheese has never tasted as good to me to this day.

By mid-afternoon, we had finished the route and my father dropped me off at home. He returned to the plant to empty the truck and turn it in, then to do paperwork. My father worked about 14 hours a day, six days a week. I have never been able to comprehend how he was able to do that, week after week. I do remember how common it was to watch him napping on the living room couch in the evening.

Years later when my wife and I were living in Tucson, Arizona, I came home from the university to what my wife thought would be a pleasant surprise. She had flagged down the local milkman and signed us up for home delivery. I got a huge smile on my face until she showed me the bill. It was much more expensive than what we could buy dairy products for from the store, so I made her cancel the arrangement. All across America, people were making this same decision, which led to the extinction of delivery men of nearly every stripe. I was being practical, and I felt sick about it.

I was always proud of my father and the work that he did. I didn’t learn until I was a teenager that he held a job that most would consider to be low-status. When I was young, it seemed important and it was a job the value of which anyone could understand. My father promptly delivered a commodity that you needed, to your house, with a smile and with good humor. And what could be more genuine than that? At any rate, for me, the memory of it all will always remain as pure as the sight of cold, white milk in a clear, glass bottle.

Biodiversity trade-offs

(A large Chinook salmon found dead after spawning in a stream in California.)

Sometimes the decisions we have to make to conserve biodiversity are not pleasant.  I remember a news article that came to my attention last year titled “Appeals court stays execution of sea lions: Killing was set to start Thursday to save salmon in Columbia River”.  The title pretty much sums up the dilemma.  Salmon in the Pacific Northwest have been in trouble for years, due primarily to overharvesting by humans and the dams on rivers that “frustrate” their upstream migration to spawn.  In the case at hand, it is the spring run of the Chinook salmon that is imperiled, which is made worse by hungry sea lions that are camped out at the base of the Bonneville Dam.

The necessity to control one species of native plant or animal to help out another is much less common than controlling a non-native species to benefit one that is indigenous.  But there are many examples of this unpleasant trade-off when attempting to conserve native biodiversity.  Predators are sometimes controlled in an area where biologists are attempting to reestablish a species that could be taken as prey by the predators.  Snow geese are having a decimating effect through their grazing on areas of the Arctic tundra ecosystem and white-tailed deer suppress many species of woody and herbaceous plants in the eastern U.S.  Although there are not control programs for these two species as far as I know, agencies rely on the public hunting season to reduce populations of these popular game species in the hopes that the legal “take” will alleviate the problem.  Those harvests barely make a dent in the problem, however.  So the damage continues, while the public is clueless and the ecologists lament.

Good people are usually trying to do the right thing, but it is often a lose-lose situation in the eyes of the public.  “Don’t let the salmon run be extirpated, but don’t harm the sea lions.”  The public often replies that wildlife managers should just move the offending or overabundant animals.  Trapping and moving the sea lions, or any large mammal, is time-consuming, dangerous to the animal being trapped, and sometimes dangerous for the trapper.  It is expensive and it seldom seems cost-effective to me, given that conservation dollars are always scarce.  Money spent trapping and transferring animals that are neither rare nor threatened is money that could be spent to buy habitat or protection for a suite of species that is in greater need. 

As I see it, the problem is really a paradox.  Biologists are willing to sacrifice some, even many, individuals of abundant species A to help out endangered species B.  Most biologists care about individual animals just as much as animal lovers do.  But biologists are even more concerned about the genetic and demographic viability of the populations of which those individuals are a part.  Without that viability, the population goes extinct and there are no individuals to worry about.  So sacrificing individuals in a common species is a relative no-brainer if that sacrifice helps ensure the survival of another population or species that is in real trouble.  As I see it, biologists and the public are usually talking past one another on this issue.  Perhaps the public understands the trade-off perfectly, but their emotions demand that we not harm some individuals in one species now in the hope of saving all the individuals of another species later.

In the seal-salmon example at hand, the Humane Society brought the case to court, which ruled that no sea lions can be killed now, but a few can be trapped and removed.  Once again, the concern for some “individuals” by the Humane Society puts an entire “population” of another species at risk.  Any real solution will have to wait until next year’s run, so Nero continues to fiddle.

The stress that university students endure

(University students are under stress that is more or less constant, but so much of it is self-imposed.)

The pattern was the same nearly every year that I taught.  Classes started in late August, students were full of vim and vigor, and mostly tan.  The honeymoon lasted about two weeks, and then the work load began to take its toll.  My field biology course was not difficult, but it included a hell of a lot of material, weekend field trips, tons of memorization, an outside research project, and keeping a field notebook of every walk in the outdoor environment the student took.   By late September, students were noticeably fatigued, as they stayed up later and later to do the work from all their courses.  Less sleep, colder and rainier weather, more stress from getting behind, even less sleep to try to catch up, and then the viruses.  By mid-October, my class looked and sounded like a tuberculosis ward of the 1920s---sneezing, coughing, hacking, tissues everywhere.  I could almost see the germs in the air.  Most years, at least one student contracted mononucleosis at this time, missed two weeks of class, and found themselves in one heck of a hole.  Some missed so much school that they had to drop out and lose the entire semester.

This process is probably repeated across the country at universities and colleges everywhere.  Generally, students inherently want to do well, and there is often tremendous social pressure, real or imagined, on them to succeed.  Their families are paying a huge sum of money to send them to the school and they have worked hard to get there.  Students believe that their entire future depends on their academic accomplishments; in short, they believe that life will be miserable if success is not attained in the hallowed classrooms of America's institutions of higher learning.

The following paragraph is an email message, reproduced here verbatim, sent to one of my Teaching Assistants near the end of the fall semester a few years ago.   The student was taking my field biology course, and the Monday deadline was due for handing in their field notebook, which was worth 15% of their entire grade for the course.  To get the full effect and tone of the message, you have to read it as though you were this student: female, slight Puerto Rican accent, high-pitched voice, and read extremely rapidly:

"Hi Viviana,
I recently emailed Emily and Florian about this but didn't get a reply.  I'm really freaking out right now because I woke up at 10pm tonight....I got back to Ithaca around 4am Monday and started doing work the minute I got back because I have a lot due this week, and then I decided to take a quick nap before field bio.  I don't know how I did this but I must have been so tired that I turned the alarm off in my sleep and just woke up at 10pm Monday night.  Needless to say, I am freaking out about the field notebook.  I've been trying to get in touch with a TA to see if I can hand it to one of you tomorrow morning/tomorrow sometime.  I will seriously walk over to your place tomorrow anytime or whatever it takes even if you live in the boonies---I'm just freaking out and Gavin's going to kill me.   And I worked so hard on this thing--it took so long to put together.  I don't have the species accounts from the project since those were collected with out project but I think you graded my project, so perhaps you have them already.  I understand if I lose points on the journal because it's technically late by several hours, but I don't want to lose 150 points!  Omg, let me know what I should do...Thanks so much."

Although this is a somewhat humorous message, you can hear the panic in this student's voice.  She must have been exhausted, because the "quick nap" turned out to be 10-12 hours long.  Needless to say, I was reasonably lenient on her missed deadline, and this student is now in vet school at Cornell.

I have told the following anecdote many times before, but it is worth repeating, in brief, because it is relevant to this blog  I was an undergrad at Ohio State University in the 1960s during the Vietnam War.  If you were not in college, you were almost certainly drafted into the military by Uncle Sam, barring some kind of serious physical affliction.  In those years, the probability was very high that you would be sent to Vietnam, where there was risk of death or serious injury.  Also, state universities like OSU actually flunked out students who did not maintain the published minimum GPA.  I believe that nearly 1/3 of all freshmen left the university due to poor grades in those days.  I can distinctly remember going into a final exam with males whose GPA was on the borderline.  If they got a D on the final exam of that particular course, their GPA would fall below the minimum needed to stay in school, they would be drafted into the Army, sent to the war, and possibly killed.  In other words, for some students, their performance on a test was literally a matter of life or death.  Can you even imagine that kind of pressure?

I used to repeat this story to my field bio class every year, about the time I thought the stress was getting thick.  I asked them what is the worst thing that could happen to you IF you were not successful at this place?  You would be embarrassed?  Your parents would be disappointed? You would be physically separated from your boy friend or girl friend?  You would no longer get to play on the basketball team?  Or, you would never get a good-paying job and, therefore, not live happily ever after?  All of those things may be true, but compare that to having your arm or leg blown off, or being a parapalegic, or having mental trauma that lasts the rest of your life. I'm not a psychologist or a guidance counselor, although I often played one at the university.  But it is apparent that each of us tends to let our current fears and concerns become as large as all outdoors.  They can consume us as though we were the only human on earth who was feeling stressed.  But it is all relative, and a modicum of stress is probably adaptive.  Stress keeps us somewhat sharp, alert, and ready.  It is just a matter of balance, I suppose.

So, if you are a university student reading this, and you tend to let the work and the expectations get you down, ask yourself this question.  What is the worst that could happen?  An even more interesting question is this.  What is the best that could happen, even if I left school?  Remember that Steve Jobs dropped out of college during his freshman year, and he seems to know a thing or two about success.

On mowing the lawn

(I doubt these guys are saving any gas.)

I've been mowing lawns since I was about 7 years old.  We would never let our young kids use dangerous power equipment like that today, but that was a different time.  The yard had to be mowed, my father worked long hours away from home, and my mother was busy with two younger siblings.  I've mowed lawns of houses in which I have lived in Ohio, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Oklahoma, and New York, so I have given the activity a great deal of thought.  In fact, thinking is mostly what one does while mowing the lawn.

I mow about a half acre here in Ithaca.  Until 5 years ago, I used a walk-behind mower and it took 3-3 1/2 hours to complete the job; after I got a riding mower, the job was reduced to a third the time, so it gave me less time to think than doing it the old way.  Now I feel rushed.  I have to cover a lot of mental ground in only an hour or so.  I used to have time to outline my classroom lectures in my head while on the mower.  Now, I can barely enumerate the names of my kids and grandkids before I am finished.  When we rented a farm in Monteverde, Costa Rica years ago, the peon who worked the place mowed our lawn by hand, with a machete.  Wow!  He must have gotten a lot of thinking done.  He always seemed like he had life pretty well figured out, and the abundant time he had cutting grass probably contributed to that.  We modern North Americans can cut the grass lickety-split with our fancy machines, and we are clueless about almost everything.  See the correlation?

One of the first issues in mowing is exactly how you are going to do the cutting.  What pattern will you adopt?  Most of us mowers probably go around in a square, shooting the cut grass to the outside of the mowed area.  That means you are going counter-clockwise, because the outlet on the mower is on the right side.  I have seen some mowers simply go back and forth, first shooting the grass to the outside, and then shooting it to the inside of the mowed area.  That seems bipolar to me.  Some of the vegetation gets cut once, some gets cut twice.  Some aficionados have recommended that I mow my lawn using swaths that are diagonal within the yard, rather than horizontal or vertical.  Pretty fancy, so it would look good from a Google Earth photo.  But I stick with the counter-clockwise square, so I can easily determine that the geometric shape remaining to cut is diminishing in size as I go.  I need that positive reinforcement.

I have learned a great deal of ecology while mowing lawns for five decades in half a dozen states.  I apply no chemical spray to my lawn, so it is a bit rough with all sorts of herbaceous biodiversity that tell me something about what is under my feet.  One learns where the wet areas and the dry areas in the yard are located.  This often comes in handy later if you want to plant flowers or trees in the yard.  I learn where the yellow jackets have their hole in the ground, after they find me first.  I know where the pickerel frogs, which like wet meadows, live in my yard.  I enjoy the beautiful orange hawkweed blooms, just before I whack their little heads off, and I have followed the health of the same patch of buttercups for years.  I am aware of when crickets hatch in August, and I then anticipate the female turkeys that bring their brood through the yard to feed on the abundant insects.  I see deer droppings, and dog poop, and the occasional raccoon pile.  I know where moles like to dig their tunnels, and I know where they never dare to try.  And I see the non-sentient seedlings of white ash trees that are forever trying to find a home in a yard that is cut to the ground repeatedly.

So I think and I examine and I reduce the height of the vegetation. I accomplish mental work, I learn some ecology, and I make the yard look better simultaneously.  It's multi-tasking, the manly way.  When the mower is put away in October for the winter, I feel like I have closed up my mobile office or my lab for the season, and I truly look forward to all the mental stimulation that next May will bring.  Next time you have this chore to do, focus on nature's classroom that is all around you, and try to enjoy the relative solitude the job provides.  And remember, don't drink and drive, or try to send text messages as you negotiate that counter-clockwise square.