Coming back on bike ride along lagoon a few days ago, water like a mirror — first seagull I’ve ever seen with a wake…

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Got Doug to shoot this because I want to see if I can improve my form.

Any suggestions from swimmers?

Getting into a beautiful body of water like this makes me want to reverse the aquatic-to-terrestrial transition from water to land of 300 million years ago and go back to living in the water.

• From @lloyd.kahn’s Instagram

Photograph by Christopher Michel

The Truth About Antarctica

by Allegra Rosenberg

The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the imperial superego to the conspiratorial id.

At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was still largely unknown. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard observed in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey in the World (1922): “Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation.” But despite the hundred-plus years of exploration, habitation, and documentation since then, Antarctica remains utterly Other. It’s far away, it’s unlike anywhere else on the planet, and most people will never go there. They’ll only see pictures, and watch classic films like The Thing (01982) which project an image of peril and isolation onto the public consciousness.…

longnow.org/ideas/the-truth-about-antarctica

From Fran

A large soaring adult California condor / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

The entire population of California condors was down to 22 in 1982, and none of them flew free in the wild. Since then, though, the California Condor Recovery Program (CCRP), overseen by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), has led the repopulation of condors through the successful collaboration among dozens of organizations, including zoos, NGOs, international partners, and local, state, and federal agencies. The condor population has gradually grown to 537, as of the last official count in December 2021. Of them, 334 are free-flying.

As the population expands, the biologists add new release sites, and slowly the giant birds have expanded from Southern California to Central California, Arizona, and Baja California. The historical condor range had stretched as far north as British Columbia, and once included the Klamath Basin and all the ancestral and modern-day lands of the Yurok. In 2003, tribal elders leading an effort to identify cultural and natural resource restoration needs determined that the condor was the most important land-based animal to return to Yurok lands.…

www.baynature.org/2022/06/09/the-reintroduction-odyssey-of-the-yurok-condors