Orange Mushrooms

The top two are Jack O’Lanterns (Omphalotus

illudens), but the bottom two are … what?  They seem too orange for chanterelles, but there are quite a few types of chanterelles as well as other mushrooms in the Omphalotus genus.  🤔🤷‍♂️. Not eating anything in any case.

Local Killer

A Very Expensive Boy’s Club

Antlers represent an enormous food and energy expense.

It would be one thing if they were grown just once, like a leg bone, but instead they are grown and shed and grown again. 

Every year it's just more expense, and always-bigger antlers. 

Amazing.

These two bucks were sparring in downtown Frederick, Maryland, a short walk from one of my coffee spots.

Locally, early bow season for deer starts today.

Cleaning Up, Three Years Ago

Cleaning up after the big storm three years ago. Some massive trees came down, and it was 6 days of work with *BIG* machines cutting, grinding, and loading.

Never Forgetting

Never Forget 9-11?

Not forgotten.

Never forget the 400 years of systemic racism and sexism in the US? 

Not forgotten.  

Never forget that Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with 9-11? 

Not forgotten. 

Never forget that Barack Obama was the fellow who gathered the intelligence, made the tough decision, and got Osama killed? Not forgotten.

I could go on forever not forgetting. 

Never forget the 1,000,000 people dead from the Trump virus? 

Not forgotten. 

Never forget the hundred treaties the US Government made and then unilaterally broke in order to steal land from the native people?

Not forgotten.

Never forget the children ripped from their parents and thrown into cages so Trump could terrorize immigrants already fleeing for their lives? 

Not forgotten.

Never forget America’s wounded warriors and dead soldiers that have been openly mocked by our draft-dodging, tax-cheating, pussy-grabbing adulterer of a President? 

Not forgotten.

Never forget the Japanese Americans whose property was stolen and who were thrown into concentration camps in the US?

Not forgotten.

Never forget that Trump has been credibly accused of rape or sexual assault by 30 women, has a long association with multiple pedophiles, and raw-dogged a porn star? 

Not forgotten. 

Never forget that Trump has defended Saudi murderers of American citizens? 

Not forgotten.

I could go on forever not forgetting.

The Count In Your Family

What was global population when your grandparent were born?

Your parents?

Humans alone represent about 33 percent of all the biomass of land-based mammal. The next most common primate, crab-eating macaques with a population of about 2.5 million, is not even close in terms of numbers.

Livestock, excluding chickens and other poultry, represent 65 percent of land-based mammal biomass. Of this livestock there are an estimated 1.5 billion cattle, 1 billion sheep, and 1 billion pigs.

What about wild animals?

Wild animals represent only 2 percent — TWO PERCENT — of mammal biomass. White-tailed deer are the most common large wild mammal species, with a population of about 35 million. What about rats, mice, and squirrels? The numbers here are unknown, but are clearly in the scores of billions.

Of the carnivora, domestic cats and dogs are far and away the most populous, with populations of 600 million and 900 million, respectively.

What about birds?

It’s estimated there are about 90 billion adult birds in the world, with the population of domesticated chickens at about 24 billion, which makes them far and away the most common bird in the world. The most common wild bird is the sparrow-sized Red-billed Quelea, a type of African weaver bird, with an estimated population of about 1.5 billion.

What about fish?

There are a lot of fish in the ocean. How many is difficult to say, but the most common fish, far and away, are the 32 species of minnow-sized deep water bristlemouths, of which there are estimated to be several quadrillion (one quadrillion is one million billion). The Cyclothone genus of bristlemouths is the most abundant vertebrate on Earth, with an estimated one quadrillion individuals in that 13-species genera alone.

What about insects?

It’s been estimated that there 1.4 billion insects for each human on the planet — over 3,000 pounds of insects for every person.

Read that last sentence again. Wow!

Ants alone are estimated to have a population of 20 quadrillion (20 million billion) and to represent more stored carbon than all wild birds and mammals combined.

I will leave out microbes even though they exist in jaw dropping numbers and weights -- 39 trillion bacteria, viruses, and fungi inside every human being alone.

All of these numbers are, of course, little more than rough estimates. Animal populations rise and fall with season, disease, food stocks, and harvest.

So are we close to the edge?  

Most assuredly.

Humans As Locusts on the Land

“Before I was six years old, my grandparents and my mother had taught me that if all the green things that grow were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the four-legged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the winged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all our relatives who crawl and swim and live within the earth were taken away, there could be no life. But if all the human beings were taken away, life on earth would flourish. That is how insignificant we are.” — Russell Means, Oglala Lakota Nation (November 10, 1939 – October 22, 2012)

John Denver :: Bet on the Blues

A Tom Paxton song that's new to me.

Raccoon Likely Inside

Native Beggar Tick, An Annual

Union Busting for Corporate Profit

Greed:  The reason U.S. corporations spend $1.7 billion on union busting each year.  Productivity goes up, and less and less profit goes to workers.

Black Walnuts and Pawpaws

You don’t have to walk too far in these woods to find a meal.  I introduced a few new Americans to Pawpaws — our largest native forest fruit.  One cup of chopped black walnut meats is over 720 calories.

Deficits and Mass Firings at the Royal Kennel Club

The Royal Kennel Club has fired the entire Kennel Gazette editorial panel, will cease publication of the paper publication, and has contracted out some sort of future electronic version to a third party.  

This follows the Kennel Club no longer extending four free tickets to Crufts ahead of this year’s show.

The Royal Kennel Club reported a financial loss of £4.29 million for 2024 amid a year-on-year decline in breed registrations.

The Royal Kennel Club reported an anticipated financial deficit of around £2.4 million for the year ending December 2025, driven by a continuous year-on-year decline in breed and puppy registrations.

One Third of UK Retail Raw Is Toxic

A 2026 nationwide Food Standards Agency (FSA) survey revealed that 35% of raw dog and cat food products on retail sale in the UK contained harmful and pathogenic bacteria.

▪️KEY FINDINGS:

➡️ Pathogen Prevalence: Testing of 380 samples (277 raw dog food and 103 raw cat food products) across 50 brands between March 2023 and February 2024 identified Salmonella in 21% of samples, Campylobacter in 14%, and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) in 12%. 

➡️ Legal Compliance Failures: “29% failed to meet UK legal safety standards.”

➡️ Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR): Some detected bacteria exhibited resistance to critical antibiotics, including colistin-resistant E. coli found in 1% of samples alongside penicillin- and cephalosporin-resistant strains.

➡️ The Food Standards Agency (FSA) emphasizes that handling raw pet food carries potential cross-contamination risks for humans, especially vulnerable groups like the elderly or immunocompromised. Pet owners are advised to maintain strict hygiene standards— including thoroughly washing hands, disinfecting utensils, and properly storing and defrosting products away from human food. 

▪️FULL REPORT >> https://science.food.gov.uk/article/155340-a-survey-of-microbiological-and-antimicrobial-resistance-amr-contamination-found-in-raw-dog-and-cat-food-on-retail-sale-in-the-uk

James Baldwin on America’s Mythical Ancestors

“What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors. It’s astounding to me, for example, that so many people really appear to believe that the country was founded by a band of heroes who wanted to be free. That happens not to be true. What happened was that some people left Europe because they couldn’t stay there any longer and had to go someplace else to make it. That’s all. They were hungry, they were poor, they were convicts. Those who were making it in England, for example, did not get on the Mayflower. That’s how the country was settled. Not by Gary Cooper. Yet we have a whole race of people, a whole republic, who believe the myths to the point where even today they select political representatives, as far as I can tell, by how closely they resemble Gary Cooper. Now this is dangerously infantile, and it shows in every level of national life.” -- James Baldwin in a Talk to Teachers working in the New York Public School System on October 16, 1963 discussing the American Identity

A Fungus Among Us

Blue Heron on the Canal

The Time of Your Life

The average age of conception over the past 250,000 years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. 

Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. 

At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 

200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5,000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further.

1,000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? 

Why does it feel so unfair  that even that first 100 years — that small family dinner of four — is out of your grasp?

Note:  most of the text in this post was lifted 

from a Threads post and it, in turn, seems to 

be leaned heavily on AI/Google.

Everything Eats Everything

Moss and mushrooms eat wood, beetles and slugs eat mushrooms, and everything is stardust headed for a black hole. 

We are within the black hole’s event horizon, the boundary of no escape which fools us all because it produces no locally detectable change. We have always been within the event horizon.

Frederick Douglas Escapes to Freedom

On this day in 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland to New York City. He disguised himself as a sailor and obtained freedom papers from a freed Black sailor. Douglass then boarded a train and reached New York City the next morning, where he reached freedom.

Coming Down and Coming Up

Rain and wind, with mushrooms coming up, and a few branches coming down.

Richard Stratton Has Died at Age 94

Richard Stratton was a lover of Pit Bulls and — arguably — knew more about the type than anyone alive.

Writing in the December 2010 edition of “The Sporting Dog Journal,” Stratton note of two Peter Paul Rubens paintings shown here:

“Locked fast on the back of a large wild boar is a dog that could win a modern ADBA show!”

Yes indeed.

Stratton asks:

“Why did depictions of dogs doing the same type of thing for which our dogs are so renowned look just like our modern-day dogs?”

And how could that be when there were no terrier breeds at all 400 years ago?

Stratton notes that in Elizabethan England “terriers” were not a canine taxonomic category, but a canine TAX category:

“It is important to understand that the term terriers was not well defined in the writings about dogs of the 19th century. In general, the dogs that went after vermin in the ground were called terriers. These were generally the dogs of the lower classes. In Elizabethan times, there was something of a caste system. Generally, it was the people of royalty who owned land, and they were the only ones. Other people lived on the land, but as game became more scarce with the increase in human population, desirable game, such as deer and wild boar, were not supposed to be hunted by the general population, as these animals belonged to the king (or some other royal person), and the peasants were forbidden to hunt them. Often, they” were even forbidden to own hunting dogs. However, they could own terriers, as these dogs were useful in keeping the rat population down or in hunting less desirable game.

“But what were terriers? Normally, they were just small dogs with a strong prey drive.”

Stratton notes that because bulldogs were taxed and regulated as hounds (and prohibited from ownership by commoners), calling a smaller bulldog a terrier was a common dodge.

The Slave Catcher’s Dog

The Pit Bull is a dog with a known history.  It started as a stock catching and fighting dog in Britain, whose antecedents go back to the fighting and war dogs of the Romans.

Molloser dogs, called “Alaunts “ were brought to the New World by Columbus, who had to stand trial in Spain for feeding live native women and babies to his beasts.

The descendants of these dogs and their progeny became the famed “Cuban Bloodhound” made famous by slave catchers in Cuba, Brazil, and the southern US.

These catch dogs saw a regular infusion of canine blood from Europe, as Irish and other immigrants came to the US.  While some catch dogs were used to round up feral hogs and cattle, and others became farm and house guardians, the dog we know today as the American Pit Bull always had another career, as a fighing dog and a slave-catchers dog.

A common line of nonsense from the Pit Bull community is that these dogs werd bred to be “dog aggressive but not people aggressive”.

It is, in fact, bunk. 

These were slave-catchers dogs, and their history here is well-documented in law, journal, and even the Congressional Record.  No putative “ breed” of dog in the U.S. maims and kills people more than the Pit Bull.

See >> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heidi-Nast/publication/284170655_Pit_bulls_slavery_and_whiteness_in_the_mid-_to_late-nineteenth-century_US/links/564dbeb308ae1ef9296acaa0/Pit-bulls-slavery-and-whiteness-in-the-mid-to-late-nineteenth-century-US.pdf?

Milo and Leo and Golden Gate Bridge

Tracy Chapman :: Stand By Me

Daughter, Grandkids and Son-in-Law

The Math Checks Out

You Have a Right to Be An Asshole

Dolly Parton :: Shine

Wee Wolves With Bee Hives and Amanita

Avoid Private Equity Veterinarians

See the searchable map and database. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

https://privateequityvet.org

“Private equity is an ever increasing presence in US veterinary care. In 2024, it was reported that over 30% of general veterinary practices are under corporate ownership up from 8% just over 10 years earlier. When it comes to specialty care which includes vets that provide 24/7 emergency care it is estimated that over 75% of practices are now under corporate ownership.

“Our disastrous experience with a recently acquired private equity owned practice in Berkeley, California where our beloved dog ended up paying the ultimate price led us to researching more about this growing trend. We built this site to help draw further attention to this growing industry trend….”

The Circle Unbroken

“Of course Black Lives Matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter?” — Dolly Parton

 Dolly Parton was that rarest of things. I mourn her passing, and yet the baton has been passed. We lost John Prine, but gained Jesse Welles. We lost Tony Rice, but gained Billy Strings. And now we have lost Dolly Parton, but we have gained Taylor Swift. May the circle be unbroken. ❤️

—————————

Over on Facebook, this missive resulted in a host of know-nothings riding in to bash Taylor Swift.  Here’s what they missed, and why the comparison is poignant:

▪️Taylor, age 36, has won 14 Grammy Awards (out of 58 nominations), and is the only artist in history to have won Album of the Year four times.  

▪️Taylor has won 12 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards out of 28 total nominations, and has won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award twice.  

▪️Taylor has also earned at least 70 top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, which is the second-most of any artist in chart history.

▪️Taylor Swift's Eras Tour shattered global entertainment milestones, becoming the first music tour in history to surpass $2 billion in ticket sales, drawing over 10.1 million attendees across 149 shows, and setting the all-time record for the highest-grossing concert film.

▪️ Taylor Swift has donated over $100 million to charity.  See >> https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swifts-charity-donations-gifts-timeline/

▪️Taylor Swift has refused to allow Trump to use her music in any form, and her lawyers are all teeth.  As Wikipedia notes, “Swift is pro-choice, an advocate of gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights and gun control, and a vocal critic of racism, white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, and police brutality. She condemned Trump's presidency, accusing it of racism and fostering violence during the George Floyd protests, criticized the policies of the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn and the overruling of Roe v. Wade, and supported the Equality Act, the creation of Juneteenth as a national holiday and the removal of Confederate statues. She endorsed the Democratic tickets of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 United States presidential election, and Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 election.”  See >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_impact_of_Taylor_Swift

The Big Grift

Illegal to Help: The Veterinary Lobby’s Invisible Hand

“A pharmacy technician can give your child a flu shot in all fifty states. In Texas, a trained animal shelter worker who gives your dog a rabies shot is breaking the law unless a veterinarian is standing on the premises. Rules like that were not an accident. NAVEC’s fifth research report reads fifty years of bills, campaign filings, court records, and the associations’ own publications, and names the machine that wrote them.”

Read the whole report from the North American Veterinary Ethics Council.

August Shadow

Keeping Mice Out of the Tractor

The Grandkids Are Getting Big!