rhettrhett

What is the end game of the protests?

Are hong kongers looking for independence from China, or continued autonomy, or something else?

Might be hard to tell, but is there support amongst the general population on the mainland for Hong Kong or democracy?

Sometimes it doesn't at all!

When I was 16, I decided I wanted to find the Ivory Billed Woodpecker. There's a really good book, Ivorybill Hunters, written by an ornithologist at Auburn that convinced me they were still extant in a remote swamp in the Florida Panhandle.

I went out and spent weeks in the swamp, and, though I heard some distinctive sounds, and found what are most likely nest cavities made by ivorybills, I never found the bird.

I'm now leaning towards thinking it's extinct in the region, despite the contrary evidence, because of something interesting I noticed when I tried to film inside the nest cavities.

Behind the openings (which were too large to have been made by anything else really), the trees were hollow!

That would never do for a woodpecker nest, so here's my theory: The trees are cypresses, and they're ANCIENT. Upwards to a thousand years old. I think the birds carved out those holes before they were hollow, maybe centuries ago, and this small footprint on nature still lives on in their absence today.

I couldn't contain myself.

The coolest thing about Kakapos is that they may have the world's absolutely least effective mating call.

The males dig out a large bowl in the ground, sort of like a shallow amphitheater, to amplify their call, a low pitched BOOM.

The only problem is that it's so low pitched, the females (who only lay about one egg every two years at best) have trouble telling which way it's coming from, and may even run in the wrong direction!

Kinda reminds me of guys who have really loud subwoofers in their cars, actually.

BUT, a cool animal that does is the Hero Shrew, a tiny rodent from Central Africa that has a spine strong enough to withstand the weight of a full grow human!

One day!