Nesting in Montana; the Field Naturalist and the Great Swarm of Bees

After two summers of climatic cruelty--2011 flood, 2012 drought--and a winter threatening a dry forever, an ordinary Montana spring has set in: rain machine-gunning the metal roof all night, wind lashing the house like Paul Bunyan's ox-whip, low gray days when the mercury struggles toward fifty degrees and gives up, nights like last night from which the Crazies awake blinding white with fresh snow down to timberline and past it, under blue-defining blue.

Cat Isabel, not yet two years old--wherever that puts her in terms of maturity (youth, I can say that much)--after two and a half days enduring without complaint confinement in her kennel in the thrumming M3 and two nights in motel rooms (Elko, then Bozeman) reeking of chemical solvents and artificial fabrics, is as happy as that sky is blue.  We play Race to the Face, in which I place my chin on the corner post of the pole fence while she trots as fast as she can from the farther corner to touch her cold nose to mine.  She charges up cottonwoods to about ten feet of altitude, just for the feel of it in her claws and for the challenge of balancing on fragile little branches and finding her way down.  (Before long she'll go farther up and have to be serious about descending.)  She sproings across the lawn and into the higher grass beyond in pursuit of phantom prey.  She sits regally erect on the porch and surveys her demesne.  When I return from the creek, she bounds toward me with her front legs spread wide with each bound in what looks like a gesture of embrace--much like the gesture she used to make when she was a kitten that said, Pick me up--and when she arrives at my feet, in fact, she curls and curvets in her more mature way of suggesting the same.  Then we walk in the driveway together and she grovels in the gravel--Graveling, I call it--rubbing herself till she's thoroughly dusty, grainy, her white feet tan, in what's actually a kind of bath.

On the prairie the long-billed curlews and marbled godwits are nesting, and dive-bomb the intruder with shrieks of annoyance.  The curlews' alarm call is a relatively melodious frederique, frederique, and their warning flights are long graceful circles that often end with the funny-looking creature (what a schnoz!) in profile not far away giving one the eyeball--the whole routine lovely and comical (not to the bird, presumably).  The godwits take everything more seriously.  Sometimes they will fly straight at you, which can be rather unsettling until you know that they always do veer away.  Their call is harsh and unmistakably upset.  Neither of them ever gives a clue to the location of their nests, and I've never seen one.

I walked out as far as a flooding irrigation ditch and was still city-prissy enough that I didn't want to get my feet wet, so I was about to turn around when I heard a monumental buzzing, inconceivably loud.  It must have been a hundred thousand bees, I thought, maybe a million, maybe ten million, some sort of epochal swarm.  At first I said to myself, Well, turning around is a good idea anyhow, do I want to get caught up in the thing and stung to death?  And then I thought, Oh, hell, something like this has got to be once in a lifetime, I bet they don't pay attention to you at all, I've got to see it.  So I waded on across, and suddenly the immense sound was all behind me.  How could that be?  It made no sense.  Well, duh.  It turns out that the hundred thousand or ten million were in fact about two hundred, and they were all zooming around a patch of half-drowned crummy little mustard plants, the kind that grow in the beat-uppest, stomped-onnest dirt road beds, except that these were half under water so that only their flowers were showing, and these little bees, sweat bees was what we used to call them when I was growing up in Memphis, were going totally apeshit over them and making the most amazing amount of noise while doing so.  I waded right through them and they paid absolutely no attention to me.

A wondrous Yellowstone mystery [alas, now removed]

Apparently it's okay to just lift somebody's stuff from the web.  This one can't possibly be copyrighted--the person who posted it didn't even give his last name.  So thank you, Max.  WRONG-O: SEE BELOW.

Showdown: Fox Defends the Den Against a Badger

Dear Readers, please note: The photographs and text I posted were in fact copyrighted by Max Waugh, and it was wrong of me to use them without his permission.  I guess I'm still naive about copy protection on the internet--something I need to know about for my own sake as well.  I hadn't even been able to find Max's full name on his original post (maybe I didn't look well enough), but I'm now removing his pictures, and I here publicly apology, most sincerely, to Max Waugh.

Of course I didn't win.

Big, handsome, ever-smiling, famous Marcus Samuelsson won the James Beard award for best food book of the year.  He's on television all the time, he's got a couple of booming, very good restaurants in New York and all the food people in New York know who he is.  He has an amazing life story--born in Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, bootstraps-to-glory in Manhattan.  Nice guy too.  Naturally I hate him.

JAMES BEARD AWARD? MAYBE

CALLOO CALLAY: THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT has been nominated for a James Beard award...and eater.com has picked it likeliest to win.  Come May 3, we shall see.

PAPERBACK IS OUT TODAY!

“A big juicy dish bubbling with scandals and rivalries, thickened with oft-told secrets, chock full of random bits as if a boxful of mementos had been upended into the stew. Dig in.”
— The Washington Post

“There are few people more revered in the food world than Craig Claiborne....Thomas McNamee has done his homework here, offering up a full portrait of Claiborne, whose life was not all crème fraîche.”
— USA Today

“Craig Claiborne was the greatest influence of my professional life. . . . Claiborne’s impact on the culinary revolution of the last forty years cannot be ignored or overstated.”
—Jacques Pépin

“McNamee’s book is extraordinary. This is a fascinating book, true progenitor that [Claiborne] was in what appears to be a genuine American food revolution. It’s impossible to think of his as a happy life but he certainly got his work done, which matters a great deal. I would recommend this book to anyone even vaguely interested in food.”
—Jim Harrison

FRACK YOU, CHIP GROAT!

So.  Here's this energy expert, Charles "Chip" Groat, lead author of a prestigious study that gives hydraulic fracturing--better known as fracking--a clean bill of health.  No evidence of groundwater contamination.  Safe.  Clean.

Prof. Groat has impeccable credentials.  He has served on more than a dozen earth science boards.  He was executive director of the American Geological Institute.  He was chief of the U.S. Geological Survey--as clean an agency as the federal government has, in my view--under both presidents Clinton and Bush.  At the time of the study he was interim dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin as well as Director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at U.T.  The study was reported as conclusive in one of the scientific world's most authoritative journals, Nature.

Oh, but.  Turns out there's one little detail ol' Chip didn't mention.  It seems that he sits on the board of a little old company called Plains Exploration & Production Company of Houston, which describes itself as "primarily engaged in the activities of acquiring, developing, exploring and producing oil and gas."  He owns 40,000 shares in the company, and in 2011 they paid Charles "Chip" Groat some $400,000.

Caught red-handed by a nonprofit watchdog group, the Public Accountability Initiative, ol' Chip declared that disclosing his relationship with that company "would not have served any meaningful purpose relevant to this study."

He hadn't told the University of Texas, either, and they commissioned an outside investigation of the matter, which culminated, in November 2012, in Prof. Groat's resignation.  He's still on the PXP board, and the study, though riddled with flaws, has never been withdrawn.

THE WONDROUS PRIVATE LIFE OF A TOP MODEL

This is Daphne Groeneveld, who, according to models.com, is the ninth-highest-ranked model in the world .

This is Daphne's"public" blog on tumblr, her public presence on the internet: http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/daphne%20groeneveld  A glance at two or three pages of this should suffice.

Much more interesting, and worth a longer tour, is her "private" tumblr blog, which of course is not private at all: http://o-h-lala.tumblr.com/

What a life!