Meet the Amazing Sierra Newt

...e’s the best part–he was breathing through his skin. The gills he had as a baby are long gone, traded for fledgling lungs when he left his birth pool. But once back in the water, he dispenses with those clumsy organs altogether and draws oxygen out of the water straight through his skin, in a process called diffusion. That’s right. This handsome orange show-off breathes in three different ways over the course of his life: by gills, by lungs and, c...

Read…

The Sound of Fast Food

...ickly coming to a close. There was a day when cellphones, cordless phones, baby monitors and all kinds of other radio transmissions were accessible to anyone with a cheap scanner. Even police and fire departments are starting to encrypt transmissions. This particular In and Out got so popular that they switched to having an employee in the parking lot with a tablet to take orders which brought an end to our office fun. I invite any musicians in th...

Read…

Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

...ies, and are hard to fool. Some notes on hemlock: I’ve always been wary of baby hemlock. It likes to grow where chickweed grows, so its easy to pull up a few hemlock sprouts along with young chickweed, and it doesn’t take much fresh hemlock in your salad to make you very sick. The main poison in hemlock coniine, which is similar to nicotine in both its chemical structure and pharmacological properties. It takes about 100 mg of coniine to kill an a...

Read…

Bird’s Nest

.... Anyone have any guesses about what kind of bird made this nest? The bowl is about 3 inches (7.5 cm) across. ETA: I’ve been looking at this great page of bird nests–it’s heaven for the bird nest enthusiast. So many types of nests! Wee little eggs! Baby birds! One bird even made its nest in a sweatshirt hanging on a laundry line. (That’ll teach you to bring in your laundry promptly): http://www.thebirdersreport.com/egg-and-nest-identification And...

Read…

Campfire Cooking: Fish in Clay (& Vegetarian Options!)

...nce the process is the same. You can dress sturdy veggies like carrots and baby potatoes with fat and herbs, wrap them with leaves, cover that with clay and throw it on the coals. Pascal also recommended trying fruit, like pears. He likes pears with native California black sage. Better still, you can skip the clay and use grass instead, which is much easier for impromptu cooking. Grass is good insulator, maybe not good enough for a delicate trout,...

Read…