What Does the Owlet Say?

… time a parent returns to the nest carrying a mouse or vole, only a single offspring is fed. This adds an element of competition to the nightly feedings: for any given meal, you’d better put your shrieks into overdrive—the screechiest owlet tends to get rewarded—or you’ll lose out.
But a fair …

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The Nightmare of the Iguana

… good for bears. And it’s definitely not good for iguanas.
Unfortunately, tourists visiting the 120-mile-long Exuma Island chain in the Bahamas have taken to feeding endangered Northern Bahamian rock iguanas “atypical or inappropriate food items,” according to research published in the journal Conservation Physiology. The 22-pound lizards are normally herbivorous, says …

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Homeless in the City

… the church groups and other charities are doing something more than providing the occasional pair of socks, a thin blanket, a sack lunch, or the rare public feedings where the lines can grow into the hundreds when there’s hot food being served. But they’re not handling the problem. People’s compassion becomes just …

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Our Farm, My Inspiration

… he suggested cyanide bombs. Inevitably, “Woodchucks” became the title of a poem that opens,

Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but …

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The After-War

… years as the Army’s vice chief of staff. From this position near the top of the Pentagon hierarchy, Chiarelli was, as he once told me, in charge of “the care and feeding of the Army.” Finkel sympathetically describes some of Chiarelli’s efforts. The general tried to check the alarming spike in soldier suicides.

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Letter from Benghazi: After the Revolution

… spit out with a scowl.
Benghazi’s air vibrated with a new energy, the sudden freedom to mock the “Leader,” openly, in front of God and everybody, feeding a kind of revolutionary high. The Libyans had 42 years’ worth of stories to tell, they would say, and words tumbled from their mouths too fast for …

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Eric Rohmer and Me

… woman will be his wife.
Nothing could sound more prescient or more deluded. But, once again, the braiding of foresight and delusion is typical of Rohmer. One feeds the other. Their collusion is not insignificant. The stars are aligned to our wishes or to what is best for us—but never as we thought.
Outside …

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Citizen Cow-Pat Project

… known as a “dumbledore.” Dor beetles removed dung twice as fast as earthworms and smaller dung beetles. The service they provide is invaluable, say the researchers: by feeding and breeding on dung, they help recycle nutrients, spread seeds, control parasites, and aerate the soil.
Also worthy was the service of the citizen scientists, whose contributions …

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One Word: Plastics

… debris can form an artificial “microbial reef” or community of microbes that investigators have dubbed the “plastisphere.”

Microbial ecologist Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and her colleagues collected plastic marine debris from multiple locations in the North Atlantic and discovered a zoo of microbes living—and feeding off—the

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Oslo Remembered

… fundamentalists with whom the Jewish right had made its pact—we’re just like you. (And not like them.) And so it feeds another myth: that Israel’s interests coincide, by definition, with those of the United States. Our leaders have apparently been gifted with prophetic powers. Not only have the countries’ interests always …

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