Hello my dear friends. Here's a quick update with some things I've been doing recently.
WSKI appearance
I grew up snowboarding at Sugarloaf Mountain in Maine, and spent mornings there watching the tiny local TV station, WSKI. It's a delightful channel, footloose and unserious and joyous in all the best ways that a ski mountain vibe can be. I'm honored to now have been asked onto the channel a few times in the past year to talk about birds in the area. My latest appearance was last weekend, and as always I enjoyed the back-and-forth with host Greg Powers.
Generative A.I. is the stupidest thing. I hate it, but it wasn't until it started getting personal that I took to Slate to complain to a wider audience.
The AOS Bird Name Change in Slate
I am really excited about the AOS' decision to rename eponymic bird names. It's going to be fun, but it's also going to be hard to settle on a name. I wrote about that challenge for Slate.
Rare Bird Stakeout Etiquette for National Audubon
Showing up to a rare bird stakeout is one of the most anxiety-inducing aspects of birding. You never know whether the bird will be there until you arrive, and it's easy to get frustrated if it doesn't show up. It helps to help each other, and so I wrote a quick Dos and Don'ts piece for Audubon about how to make the most of your time with a rare bird.
Finally, I'm quoted in this really interesting piece from Lewis Gordon writing for Atmos called From Pixels to Politics: How Video Games Can Inspire a Green New World. "As manufactured as it was, that sensation of abundance, the ‘everyday-ness’ of nature, the ever-presence of nature, is not something we feel in the same way anymore. Red Dead Redemption 2 gave me what felt like a glimpse of that.”
