August 2025 – The Wandering Rook
1 post published by Zack Metcalfe during August 2025| The Wandering Rook
1 post published by Zack Metcalfe during August 2025| The Wandering Rook
In May of 2023, biologist Chelsea Greer was bent over a camera trap, one of several dozen scattered over 200 km2 of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland. This particular trap hugged a river known for …| The Wandering Rook
Since spring of 2023, over 7,000 Albertan homes have gotten their power from a shed north of Medicine Hat. Inside this shed are 38 shipping containers stacked on a dirt floor, and inside these are …| The Wandering Rook
We’re not exactly sure why Humpbacks sing, and 50 years of earnest research has eliminated more theories than it’s championed. “It seems the more we learn, the less likely our early ideas are correct,” said Jim Darling, a zoologist studying song across the North Pacific, particularly in the waters off Maui where Humpbacks breed through […]| The Wandering Rook
In 1976, mammologist Roger Powell watched a fisher kill a porcupine. Confronted with most predators – wolf, coyote, lynx, bobcat – the porcupine is unassailable. It needs only turn its back, allowing a rosette of 30,000 quills to protect its vulnerable face, and if the predator persists, it can tuck that face into any nook […]| The Wandering Rook
It was a little like chasing ghosts. Every trail was pulverized with fresh hoofprints, peppered with fresh dung and plastered with fresh mats of fur, as if a stampede had roared through only seconds before. I could even hear them at times, grunting methodically as they tore at grass somewhere within earshot, or moved in […]| The Wandering Rook
Sphagnum moss is an ecosystem engineer like any other. Well, maybe not exactly like any other. It doesn’t build dams like beavers or underwater forests like kelp. Instead it builds bogs. When certain species of sphagnum come together in open wetlands, they constrict the flow of water to a trickle, then rapidly and relentlessly metabolize […]| The Wandering Rook
The Upper Robson Valley, in BC’s eastern Interior, is where the Rocky and Columbia mountains meet, locking eyes from either side of the Upper Fraser River. It extends from Prince George in the northwest to McBride in the southeast, a half million hectares peppered with cutblocks and provincial parks. This is logging country, grizzly country, […]| The Wandering Rook
European Fallow deer have walked Sidney Island, BC, since at least the 1960s, ferried over – best we can tell – by people keen to hunt them. This is not an original story. Fallow deer have been world travellers since the Roman Empire, plucked from their native range in the Mediterranean and set down as […]| The Wandering Rook
In 1879, botanist William Beal undertook a simple experiment. In each of 20 bottles, he placed 50 seeds from 21 New England weed species (1,050 seeds per bottle) and buried them under what became the campus of Michigan State University. The question Beal hoped to answer was a simple one – if farmers cleansed their […]| The Wandering Rook
The commercial release of the Honeycrisp apple in 1997 marked the end of an era. Up until that point, the development of new apple varieties followed a largely open source model. When something new…| The Wandering Rook
By 2030, all 500 or so light duty vehicles owned and operated by the Halifax Regional Municipality – everything from police cruisers to pickup trucks – will be electric. At least, that’s the plan. …| The Wandering Rook
