Cute and Small and Ready to Brawl

Coastal Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus), family Ambystomatidae, NW United States

Bttm photos - adult, top photos - larva/tadpole

This large salamander can reach a length of up to 34 cm (13 inches) total length.

Bornean Crested Fireback (Lophura ignita), male, family Phasianidae, order Galliformes, Sabah, Borneo

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

Intensive farming has all but destroyed England’s ancient woodlands and freshwater wetlands. On a farm in Lincolnshire a radical aristocrat hopes to show there’s money in protecting nature.

In the silent countryside south of Grantham, three vast steel barns rattled in the breeze. Gathered in a loose circle beside them were 15 landowners, land agents and a couple of young investors; all expensively dressed men, many with a sceptical mien. It was June 2022, and Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet, was explaining how the purchase of 1,525 bleak acres (617 hectares) of prairie fields of wheat and beans could revolutionise farming and nature conservation, not just in South Lincolnshire but across Britain and beyond...

Yucatán Box Turtle (Terrapene yucatana), female, family Emydidae, endemic to Yucatán, Mexico

unbothered.

moisturized.

happy.

in her lane.

focused.

flourishing

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

morning glory

Rooftop solar on private homes has taken off in Pakistan at an unprecedented rate. Huge swings in energy prices and an unreliable grid, combined with plunging solar panel prices, made the investment of rooftop solar an easy choice.

⭐️✨ Loomah Crossing! 🏝️✨