This shit is lit.

Reading material and toilets have a special relationship. Stacks of magazines are as common a fixture of many washrooms as toilet paper, toothpaste, or towels. The porcelain-throne-as-reading-nook trope is so famous that Barnes and Noble once created a list of the five best “books to read in the bathroom,” ideal for tackling in “two- to 10-minute increments.”

Books had a place in some 18th-century bathrooms, too, but they weren’t always for reading. Occasionally, they were just highbrow camouflage.

Sometimes, this concealment was luxurious. The sun-drenched, library-themed lavatory inside the Hofkamer, an structure within the Den Wolsack complex in Antwerp, Belgium, offers the illusion of actually going to the bathroom on a pile of books. With the input of the architect Engelbert Baets, the building’s 18th-century owner, Adrien van den Bogaert, designed a washroom lined with faux “bookshelves” fashioned from leather and wood, all the way down to a handsome stack of "books" on the floor, with a hole cut in the top. The Boekentoilet, or "book toilet," conceals a more traditional bowl, and can be seen on tours of the building, available each year from June to September. But there’s no using these bookish facilities. That will have to be done in a modern toilet, before or after the tour.

Other book toilets could be much more humble and portable, and a little sillier. One made in France around 1750, and currently for sale though Daniel Crouch Rare Books, appears to be a plain old folio—but unclasp it, and you’ll find a folded stool with a space for a secreted chamber pot.

This particular object is even bawdier that it first appears. The spine reads Histoire des Pays Bas, which translates to “History of the Netherlands”—a winking reference to the user’s own nether regions. “It’s an entertainment for stupid boys,” says Mindell Dubansky, a book conservator and author of the book, Blook: The Art of Books That Aren’t. “You just don’t think of pooping on books.”

She adds that it’s not entirely clear whether book toilets would have been made out of pieces of real books, or rather from faux book covers or binders’ extras. Then again, squatting on something literary may not have seemed as much of a desecration as it would today. “We would now think of them as precious objects, but the books didn’t have the value then that they have now,” Dubansky says. Into the 19th century, French booksellers regularly sliced and diced older books in order to make souvenirs such as tea caddies or book safes (which were typically intended for mementos or valuables, of course, not urine and feces).

However silly these book toilets were, they might have seen some action. Suzanne Karr Schmidt, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry library in Chicago, encountered the 17-by-13-inch Histoire des Pays Bas at a book fair, and concluded that “the scale seemed large enough for it to be perfectly functional.” She wasn’t able to get close enough to examine it for any “tell-tale stains,” she says—but their presence or absence wouldn't necessarily prove anything, she adds, because the object may have been well-cleaned. In the years before flush toilets became bathroom mainstays in Europe and beyond, people routinely used chamber pots, and it’s conceivable, Dubansky says, that they might have used portable book toilets as a way to hide and haul their chamber pots while traveling.

Whether they were gag gifts, showy architectural elements, or handy additions to someone’s luggage, book toilets are a reminder that scatalogical humor has a long history. “This sort of joke is universal and has always been,” Schmidt says. “It may be disgusting at times, but it remains deeply, dare I say, gut-wrenchingly funny.”

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“They’re nature’s hilarious accidents."

On April 1, 1994, Paul Butcher, then the director of Colorado Springs parks department, received a chilling phone call from a frantic staff member. She told him that Balanced Rock—a 290-million-year-old red sandstone boulder naturally perched on a sloped ledge in Garden of the Gods Park—had fallen. Butcher panicked, his thoughts roiling with how disappointed and outraged both locals and visitors would be with the loss of the beloved, iconic landmark. He imagined the 700-ton boulder rolling downhill, with nothing to stop its tumble onto the nearby U.S. Highway 24, like a monstrously dense tumbleweed. Then he remembered the calendar, and realized it was a prank. “I never laughed,” Butcher, who is now retired, told Out There Colorado. “It’s not a great joke.”

In a way, the mere existence of Balanced Rock also seems like a prank, either geological or cosmic. The enormous boulder looks like it had been photoshopped onto the landscape, or photographed mid-roll, or carefully placed by aliens. But it’s no hoax and there’s no sorcery to it. Rather it is a prime example of a whole category of geologic formations called “precariously balanced rocks”—PBRs, for short. They’re exactly what you might expect. “It’s a rock balanced on top of another rock,” says Mark Stirling, who studies PBRs at the University of Otago in New Zealand. And if you think Colorado Springs’ landmark ought to have a more imaginative name, see also: Balanced Rock in Grand Junction, Balanced Rock in Rocky Mountain National Park, and Balanced Rock at the Rampart Range. And that’s just Colorado.

PBRs are more than just unusual geologic features—they’re a source of valuable scientific insight. They’re what are called "reverse seismometers" because their mere existence makes it possible to measure earthquakes that didn’t happen. If they’re still balanced, then the earth hasn’t moved enough to knock them over, at least in the last few thousand years, according to geologists David E. Haddad and J. Ramón Arrowsmith in their seminal 2011 report Geologic and Geomorphic Characterization of Precariously Balanced Rocks. So scientists study them to understand a region’s seismic history and, subsequently, predict what might come in the future. “They’re nature’s hilarious accidents,” says Amir Allam, a geologist at the University of Utah.

PBRs are a subset of a larger category called “fragile geologic features,” Stirling says. This includes any kind of rock that doesn’t meet the precise standard of a detached boulder balancing on another boulder, such as hoodoos (a mushrooming rock attached to a tall spire pedestal) and glacial erratics (boulders transported by ancient glaciers to new resting places), which are also considered PBRs when they land on another, curved rock—or a few of them, like in the case of Balanced Rock in New York's Hudson Valley. Fragile geologic features also include other landforms, such as the Punta Ventana arch in Puerto Rico that recently collapsed as a result of a series of earthquakes. Though they don’t fit neatly into PBR researchers’ equations, they can be used in the same way to assess past and future earthquakes, Stirling says.

PBRs often start their journeys deep underground. Large chunks of rock develop spidery fractures, expanded by percolating water, until they become multiple smaller chunks, Allam says. As erosion lowers the ground level, over many thousands of years, the rocks come to the surface, often stacked atop each other. “You need the right kind of climate conditions to create PBRs, and you need the right climate to make them last,” he says. “The American West is the perfect storm for this.”

The whole PBR-science idea started in the 1990s with James Brune, a geologist at the California Institute of Technology. “Brune was an old school genius,” Allam says. “He wore suspenders to all his presentations and wrote all his notes by hand.” Brune was assessing earthquake risk in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, to evaluate its future as a possible nuclear-waste storage site, when he noticed a handful of boulders balanced—rather precariously—on other stones, according to American Scientist. The boulders were all coated with desert varnish—a dark sheathe of clay, manganese, and iron oxides—indicating they had been exposed for millions of years. Brune realized the rocks offered a kind of record of the area’s seismic history, or lack thereof. So, by running PBRs through computer models that replicate earthquakes, Brune figured he could determine what level and type of shaking it would take to topple a particular rock, and then therefore rule that shaking out of its recent history.

When Brune first introduced this idea, it ruffled more than a few feathers. “Twenty-five years ago, the whole topic of PBRs was a fringe area of seismology,” Stirling says. “We were too edgy, too out of the mainstream.” Back then, he says, seismologists studied earthquakes, paleoseismologists studied prehistoric earthquakes, and engineering seismologists studied ground motion. Brune’s approach to PBRs straddled all these fields, and that kind of triple-dipping in science often leads to skepticism, Stirling says. Other early PBR enthusiasts also struggled to get funding and resources for their work. But a good idea is a good idea and they persisted, Stirling says, with Brune leading the charge. By the early 2010s, PBR science had respect within the field and funding from sources such as PG&E and other energy companies, who wanted to understand the earthquake risk for their plants.

Allam studies Utah’s seismic history, and colleagues even call him "the PBR guy." His chaotic website includes a tab for them—“PBR!”—and a quote from Japanese writer Haruki Murakami that carries extra meaning for seismologists: “My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year.” Allam is particularly enamored with shaking boulders enough to knock them over—only not in real life. “It’s also because they’re really cool,” he admits.

Allam has made it his mission to map every PBR—and the forces required to topple them—in Utah. He’s compiled at least 40 so far, but the trickiest thing about studying PBRs remains finding them in the first place. Allam has a whole team of undergrads who are, rather understandably, also pretty into PBRs. “I tell them to go on Google Earth, look for rocky outcrops, and then go drive out and check it out,” he says. He also goes hiking with his students, to show them PBRs he’s already identified and rely on their fresh eyes to spot more.

Once he finds a new PBR, Allam covers it with strips of tape to prepare it for photogrammetry, in which he merges photographs of the rock to construct a 3-D digital counterpart. To assess how long the rock has been precarious, Allam measures the concentrations of cosmogenic radionuclides on the underside of the rock, which offer a history of how long a rock has been exposed. The PBRs he studies tend to be approximately 30,000 years old. “Big earthquakes happen every 150 to 1,000 years, so 30,000 years is a statistically reliable data point,” he says.

Once Allam has the model, he shakes it in a computerized earthquake simulation. He starts off small, with a peak horizontal ground acceleration of 0.2 g (that is, g-forces, or the acceleration due to gravity). If that doesn’t do it, he goes to 0.25 g, and then maybe a little bit more until it comes tumbling down. No one wants to be in the way of a real falling rock, but he’s not after a rock’s threat level. “PBRs rarely fall and hurt people,” Allam says, because most are so remote. “The earthquake itself is much more dangerous.”

The geology of Utah makes it a great place for PBRs, but they can be found throughout the world. In Lacrouzette, France, an oak and chestnut forest cloaks a large rock that bears a famously uncanny resemblance to a goose. Mount Desert, Maine, has Bubble Rock; Mahabalipuram, India, has Krishna’s Butter Ball; and Ruokolahti, Finland, has Kummakivi. In Myanmar’s Thaton District, Kyaiktiyo, a 25-foot-tall boulder perched on the edge of a cliff wears a small pagoda like a hat. (Rocky towers along the Hudson River between New Jersey and New York are actually manmade, by artist Uliks Gryka.)

Allam’s shaking has to take place inside a lab because there is one cardinal rule of researching—or even just visiting—PBRs: Do not knock them over. All PBRs will eventually fall down, their bases worn down by erosion, their weight distribution changed by time, and the occasional earthquake, large or small. The chance of this happening to any particular PBR in a human lifetime is almost zilch, Allam says, but there is one other way that PBRs can come down.

Take 2012, when a scandal rocked the Utah Boy Scouts. Glenn Taylor, a scout leader, was filmed pushing over a hoodoo (what locals call a goblin) in Goblin Valley State Park, by a friend, David Hall. In the video, Taylor wedged himself against the boulder and heaved his weight into it. Nothing happened at first, but then the rock thudded to the ground, and Taylor high-fived his large adult son.

“It was an appalling act of vandalism,” Stirling says. Taylor and Hall were sentenced to a year of probation, after pleading guilty to criminal mischief, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

This specter does loom over some PBRs. All it takes is a moment. “Some of the huge ones could be easily dislodged with a couple of guys and a crowbar,” Allam says. “Something the size of a watermelon, well, you could push over yourself.” Once, during one of his PBR surveys, Allam spoke with a shepherding family who say knocking over precarious rocks is a family tradition that runs back generations. “They said, ‘Our favorite thing is to roll boulders down a mountain,” he says. “Which makes sense, if you’re bored and surrounded by nothing but sheep.”

Felled PBRs—dropped by causes natural or unnatural, can be almost indistinguishable from ordinary boulders, unless you know what you’re looking for. If you see some smaller boulders scattered around an area with still-balanced PBRs, there’s a good chance you’re looking at their former neighbors, perhaps grounded by human hands. In the future, Stirling says, he hopes that fragile rock formations will be treated with the same reverence as archaeological sites.

“Once it’s toppled,” Allam says, “there’s no getting back to the past.”

If you're the lone caretaker of Brooks Island, not going crazy is job one.

Matt Allen is sitting on the dock of the bay with his three-year-old pit bull, Honey, by his side, his fishing line bobbing in the cold, glittering water. Another fisher, an osprey, swoops overhead, and curious harbor seals occasionally surface. On this sunny afternoon, Allen is hoping to reel in some striper, jacksmelt, or halibut.

Despite the incredible panoramic views and abundant wildlife sightings, there’s no competition at this scenic spot. That’s because Allen is the lone human resident of Brooks Island, a 373-acre parcel of land and water in the San Francisco Bay about a half-mile offshore from the city of Richmond.

Allen, a youthful 47-year-old with a ruddy complexion and arms adorned with tattoos, is dressed in his standard uniform of crisp white T-shirt, faded blue jeans, thick black leather boots, and a baseball cap to shield his eyes from the bright sun.

After serving as an avionics specialist for four years in the U.S. Navy, he worked a variety of technical jobs and was repairing Ducati motorcycles—his favorite type to ride—when he was injured on the job and had to consider his next move. He hadn’t imagined it would be to his own personal island—at least not until an old Burning Man pal told him about the island-caretaker job ad nearly a decade ago.

Allen, who grew up nearby, took a two-hour tour of Brooks Island, which is shaped a bit like an elongated comma. “I’d been sailing around the island most of my life, but I’d never been on it,” he says.

After considering its 159-foot green chert peak and 360-degree views of the Bay Area, he agreed to move onto the tiny landmass—an islet the public can access only on trips led by naturalists with the East Bay Regional Park District, which owns and manages it.

When Allen first moved to Brooks Island nine years ago, everyone he met at the parks district had the same advice, delivered in the form of a warning: Don’t go crazy. That had happened to previous caretakers. At least two had to be forcibly removed by law enforcement at the end of their tenure. One was airlifted away by helicopter when he refused to leave the island.

But Allen has something that minimizes the risk of rock fever: close ties to the shore. Many friends and family members, including parents and grandparents, live in the area. Loved ones get dispensation to visit the island any time they want, and many do. Allen’s seven-year-old nephew has spent every Monday since he was an infant out on Brooks Island with his uncle.

The islet boasts about two-and-a-half miles of hiking trail and only a few other resident non-mammal populations, including Western garter snakes, alligator lizards, and anise swallowtail butterflies. There are no large animals on Brooks, but there is an invasive vole species—a favorite of the local raptors and owls, which can easily spot the voles’ ultraviolet urine tracks from high above. Six of the rodents were released in a 1950s population study on Bird Island, a tiny, barren outcropping on the northwestern side of Brooks. The study went awry, and at some point in the ensuing decades the voles crossed over to Brooks during low tide. They continue to thrive here today.

The island is perhaps best known for its colony of Caspian terns, which nest on a low-lying sand spit. “If you get too close to them they will dive-bomb you,” Allen warns. “I’ve had them attack my hat! No other bird here—not even the geese—will do that. They’ll all just fly away.”

Eighteen other bird species roost on Brooks, and over a hundred migrating ones—including brown pelicans, double-breasted cormorants, and black oystercatchers—use it as a resting stop.

Native scrub makes the island an area of interest for researchers, including members of the California Native Plant Society, who visit every spring. The sensitive, protected biodiversity—which includes soap plant, bunch grass, and wild lilac—is another reason why this is a permit-only destination. A few buckeye trees thrive here thanks to the two freshwater springs that make human life possible on Brooks Island. In Allen’s case, they provide water for cooking, bathing, and basically everything but drinking (the water he uses for that comes from the mainland).

But due to the island’s location, Allen says, a windward-facing stretch of sandy beach along the spit acts as a “trash can for the Bay.” The western shoreline is a magnet for items large and small: tennis balls, shoes, huge pieces of urban infrastructure. Inland from the beach, a small field of full-size utility poles marks a high-tide line. Most of Allen’s 75-foot boat dock is made from pieces of other piers that washed in over the past several years.

One recent afternoon, shore debris included a television, an onion, and the kind of heavy plastic sphere used for a patio umbrella base. Allen says that in his first months managing the island, the body of a canoeist washed up several days after a tragic incident at nearby Treasure Island.

Dead marine mammals also wash ashore. Last year, Allen helped with a necropsy on a 30-feet female gray whale. “She seemed totally healthy,” he says, shaking his head.

If the contents of its shoreline are occasionally grim or mysterious, the island has a history that's a bit less opaque. Based on the presence of two shell mounds, it’s believed that some 2,000–3,000 years ago, California Ohlone Indians lived—or at least fished and hunted—on the island. By the 1890s, Brooks was quarried to add fill beneath the Bay Bridge and at San Quentin penitentiary. In the 1960s, crooner Bing Crosby and “Trader Vic” Bergeron—perhaps best known for creating the mai tai cocktail—leased the parcel for sport. Members of The Sheep Island Gun Club could sail over from the mainland and shoot pheasants that its proprietors set loose.

In 1968 the parks district took over the plat, and in 1988 canceled the shooting club’s lease. Since 1991, it’s offered size-restricted group boating and kayaking tours a few times a year, between March and October.

Other unwelcome visitors to the island—that is, all humans without permission to come ashore—are kindly asked to leave by Allen. But every so often, trespassers are impolite. “When they want to argue,” Allen says with a friendly smile, “I tell them, ‘I’m the next step before you see a guy with a badge and a gun.’”

Each year he ends up rescuing paddlers and boaters who run ashore on the spit or get caught near the island in a storm. Boaters often turn up here without knowing exactly where they are, let alone how to get back into deeper, navigable waters. In a typical year, Allen might help out 40 or 50 individuals or groups. This past year it was closer to 60.

“That isn’t part of my official job,” he says. “But I’m a mariner, so I do it.” The same principle is applied when kite-surfing friends suddenly lose their wind and need a place to wait until it picks up.

Staying engaged with the public is another big part of keeping island fever at bay. Allen has his own personal fleet—six crafts, including a kayak and a boat docked at the Richmond marina, where his truck is parked. “I can even go to the Richmond Costco without my truck,” he says, explaining the ease of boating to shore and walking over to do his shopping.

Allen mostly keeps his own schedule—at least, when nature allows. “The tide is the No. 1 thing I deal with,” he says. The San Francisco Bay has a twice-daily tide that shifts about 45 minutes every day. The height fluctuates; so does the speed with which the tide rises and falls.

The tides also determine when Allen can come and go from his home. If he leaves the mainland too late, he’ll get stuck in the mud around the island. “The first year living out here, without planning to, I ended up sleeping in my truck in the marina maybe eight or nine times,” he says of not being able to get home. He doesn’t let that happen anymore, especially with his beloved Honey waiting for him back on the island.

“After nine years,” Allen says with a grin, gesturing at the bay waters around his island home, “this is all normal for me.”

An unloved invader has found its way onto menus across the region.

Ever since it was introduced to Virginia's waters for sport in the 1970s, the blue catfish has eaten the Chesapeake alive. “You cut one open and you’d see six blue crabs in their stomach,” says ecologist Dr. Howard Townsend. “The problem is they eat everything.” When they eat enough—and they often do—they can grow to well over 100 pounds.

Lacking any known local predators, an estimated 100 million of these hulking invaders now comprise up to 75 percent of the total fish biomass of some Chesapeake rivers, and recent years' rainfall has only expanded the freshwater species’ stomping grounds. In response, residents of the Chesapeake are trying to eat their way out of the problem.

The region’s call to arms—or rather the dinner table—is only the latest attempt to turn appetites toward solving an ecological problem. After pelters unleashed hordes of furry South American rodents on the American South in the 1930s, the animals overbred and collapsed their own market. Attempts to promote “nutria” as delicious have largely stalled; swamp-rat meat evades simple rebranding.

In the Southeast, invasive lionfish, which were likely released from personal aquariums, are ravaging native species along the coast. They’re tasty enough, but can only be caught one at a time by speargun—a process far too inefficient to sustain a market. “Invasivorism” has a long, well-intentioned, but mostly unsuccessful history.

Two characteristics of blue catfish, however, make this standoff different. This invasive species is changing the way an entire region eats.

For one, this species of catfish is undeniably good eating. “It’s an amazing product,” says John Shields, proprietor chef of Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen. He proudly claims to be the first restaurant in Baltimore to serve blue catfish. “And we’ve been pretty successful with it. We’ve changed so many people’s perception of it.”

Unlike native bottom-feeding catfish, its invasive counterpart came to dominate the entire height of the water column. This threatens the bay’s sensitive stocks of shad, sturgeon, and herring, but swimming and eating closer to the surface also means they make for more palatable meat.

“My grandmother had to soak catfish in milk for 24 hours to take out that muddy flavor, but now I don’t have to do that," says Shields. "It has a much cleaner taste with a lovely, firm, yet flakey texture.” The self-described “cheerleader for invasive eating” pan sears blue catfish with creole shrimp and coconut rice at his Baltimore restaurant.

They’re also a laughably easy catch. In fact, scientists once caught 6,000 in just an hour. Their greatest enemy, however, may be the Wide Net Project. “You have environmental issues, you have food access issues, this is a really good solution for both,” says co-founder and director Wendy Stuart. The non-profit is working to create a marketplace for the invasive species while donating fish and subsidizing sales to hunger-relief organizations and schools. “It wasn’t until the women who started Wide Net Project brought it to the forefront that all of our local purveyors started carrying blue catfish,” says Shields.

Together with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Stuart and her co-founder secured a green rating of sustainability from the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch in 2015, earning blue catfish a spot in retail fridges from Whole Foods to Mom’s Organic Grocers (a regional chain). The Wide Net Project now distributes fish throughout Maryland and Virginia, and as far north as Philadelphia, blanketing the mid-Atlantic’s universities, restaurants, and baseball stadiums in tasty fillets of invasive seafood. If harvests are any indication, the people of the Chesapeake are developing a taste for the ecological threat: The 400,000 pounds of blue catfish extracted from the bay in 2014 jumped to 5 million pounds by 2017.

Twenty years ago, chefs would have scoffed at the idea of selling catfish in their restaurants. Today, blue catfish dot menus from D.C. to Baltimore. “No one I’ve suggested eating it hasn’t liked it,” says John Shields. At Ida B’s Table in Baltimore, Chef David Thomas’s customers eat 100 pounds a week. “People don’t think of catfish as something you can have a glass of wine with—this is the complete opposite. It’s like any great fish out there,” he told Remsberg Studios. Almost any restaurant serving fish in the D.C. area, says Stuart, reserves a place for blue catfish.

Whether the tireless work of area chefs and scientists is paying off remains to be seen. I pressed Maryland Department of Natural Resources Fish Ecologist Dr. Joseph Love for an accurate tally of today’s blue catfish population. “I love that word, ‘accurate,’ and I have to tell you, we don’t have one,” he says. Tracking millions of fish across several states and jurisdictions is an uphill, underwater battle. The fish may be having more of an impact on the lives of the Chesapeake region’s human inhabitants than the other way around.

Dr. Love’s report from December 2019 titled “Save the Bay: Eat Invasive!” encourages readers to “Fish and eat; then repeat.” “We’re just trying to make the best of a bad situation," he says. "Because the next introduction might not be a food fish, you know what I’m saying?”

The only certainty is that the fish are here to stay. “Eradication is out of the question at this point,” says Townsend. The only hope to preserve the biodiversity of the Chesapeake of tomorrow is to maintain the trend in recent decades of eating invasive. “It’s part of the Chesapeake infrastructure now,” says John Shields. “It has no natural predators at all—we’re it. We can do an environmental deed with our knife and fork on this one.”

An otherworldly look at a familiar sight.

Dark, sinuous lines float in a blue sky. It seems straight out of sci-fi or fantasy—a fantastical spacecraft transitioning into its cloaking shield, or a mythical beast in flight. In reality, it is cranes at Gallocanta Lake in Spain, dozens of them, traveling between where they feed in the fields and where they sleep in the water. It is many frames, compressed to a single moment. Catalan photographer Xavi Bou is fascinated with birds and the challenge of making their flight patterns visible. He has combined his passions for nature, art, and technology to create these images which he calls “ornitography,” from the Greek ornitho- ("bird") and graphe ("drawing").

The photographer learned to appreciate nature from childhood walks with his grandfather in the town Prat del Llobregat, where Bou grew up. It is located in the Llobregat Delta, one of the most important wetland zones in the region around Barcelona, and a key spot along bird migration routes. “He made me look at how to differentiate them [the birds],” Bou writes, about his grandfather, in an email, “how they were not the same throughout the year.”

An an adult, “One day I wondered what types of trails the birds would leave in the sky if that were possible,” he says. “That is when I imagined those lines that would appear in the sky. I thought it might be interesting to make them visible.” He made his first test images in 2012, and the project has changed his life so much that he stopped his professional work as a postproduction artist and has dedicated himself exclusively to his ornitography work for the last five years.

Creating these images is a slow process. He might spend a couple of days at a site recording video footage. Then it can take a week to 10 days to process the images in low resolution, and then another week to create a high-resolution final image. “To be able to show a period of time in a single image and not do it through a long exposure,” he says, “what I discovered is that I had to take many images per second and merge them into one. I shoot between 30 and 120 frames per second, so I use high-resolution movie cameras and shoot most of the time in slow motion ... Then I merge the sequence into a single image.”

Initially, Bou focused on the flight of a single bird , against the background of a colorful landscape. Over time he’s been drawn to groups of birds against the flat backdrop of the sky. “It is a more abstract result,” he says, “but for me, it is much more powerful…. It goes beyond the simple ‘beauty.’” In some cases they can resemble Asian calligraphy (Ornitography #123) or frantic knots of scribbles (Ornitography #169).

A particular favorite subject of Bou’s is starling flocks, because of their unpredictable flight patterns. One image (Ornitography #130) shows beautifully soft and amorphic abstract shapes—but depicts a life-and-death drama of hunter with prey. According to Bou, the voids in the middle of the image were produced by hawks attacking the flock. “I am passionate about the idea of how a sculptor, the hawk, shapes the shapes of starling clouds,” he says.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of Xavi Bou’s images, which are on view at the University of Rennes in France until January 15, 2020.

A coal fortune is fueling the revival of a cuisine it nearly destroyed.

The late-August sun blazes overhead as Travis Milton enters the gated two-acre vegetable garden just steps from Taste, his new brews-and-bistro-style pub. Some 200 yards away, an accompanying fine-dining spot, Hickory, is being built. He walks along a row of heavy, two-foot-long Candy Roaster winter squashes that, when sliced, reveal delicate pink-orange flesh. Elsewhere, ears of Bloody Butcher corn as red as a mountain sunset grow alongside Cherokee White Eagle Corn, which contrast, in turn, with licorice-colored Black Nebula carrots.

The experience feels like touring a high-end botanical garden, but Milton describes it as more of a living-history museum, one that recreates gardens like his great-grandparents’, before it was strip-mined for coal. Most of the more than 100 rare and obscure varieties, he says, were standardized a century ago by homesteaders in Appalachian coal country. All were once regional staples—Milton collected many of the seeds from mountain-country old-timers.

“The diversity of fruits, vegetables, and livestock being cultivated on homesteads in this region was simply astonishing,” says Milton. It was amplified by a tradition of foraging American chestnuts, dandelion leaves, and other wild foods. “If you could’ve brought everything together on one property, you would’ve had one of the largest and most unique region-specific collections of ingredients in the world.”

This, of course, is what Milton is creating now: a farm, garden, drink venue, and restaurant that restore and showcase Appalachia’s world-class food culture. To do it, he’s partnered with Kevin Nicewonder, the scion of one of Appalachia’s oldest and wealthiest coal families. Taste and the farm are now open, and are meant to preview the 28-room Nicewonder Inn and 130-seat Hickory, which will open around June 2020.

With the coal industry disappearing and leaving a gulf of economic disparity, says Nicewonder, “We have to define what this region is going to be moving forward.” He sees the project with Milton as a way to set the bar for future development. “Here, the idea is to tell the story of the land through its food, but with an eye toward healing old wounds.” Rather than doomed efforts to bring back coal, he wants to pursue projects “that will bring positive and sustainable results.”

Milton is from coal country. But to become successful—a star chef, in his case—he left, even shedding his accent. Countless Appalachians have done the same, creating a kind of diaspora, a brain drain. Milton and Nicewonder hope to reverse that, to redefine a region known for poverty, branded as hick, and defined by its dying coal industry as a thriving culinary destination. In truth, though, Milton says, it’s not so much a redefinition as a return to a past that went unappreciated and is almost lost.

“We want to build a beacon that tells people that left the region, or those that’re thinking about leaving: ‘Things are changing. You can put your talents to work here,’” Milton says.

With his great-grandparents’ seeds, and a culture that was nearly strip-mined out of existence, he wants to sow a new future for Appalachia.

Milton was born some 20 miles from the site of Hickory and Taste, in the 2,000-person town of Castlewood. His parents couldn’t afford childcare, so he spent days with grandparents and great-grandparents. His mom’s side ran a diner; his dad’s, a cattle farm. Both kept home gardens and orchards.

“My first memories are being in the kitchen of my grandparents’ restaurant,” says Milton. “It’s my Grandma teaching me to make scratch biscuits, peel potatoes, mix egg batter.” He also rounded up Hereford cattle, shucked green beans on front porches, canned tomatoes, baked vinegar pies, pickled peaches, pruned apples trees, foraged for berries, made preserves, and tended gardens.

“To me, this was just normal stuff,” says Milton. “Everybody’s grandparents kept gardens.”

But when Milton’s parents moved to Richmond, the contrast was glaring. His mountain drawl was a lightning rod for cruelty. He was labeled a bumpkin and teased relentlessly.

“It was like I’d been uprooted and thrown into this hostile, alien place,” says Milton. “To survive, I rewrote who I was.”

He changed the way he dressed and stopped listening to Bill Monroe in favor of David Bowie. He practiced reading aloud to subdue his accent. He took up literature and became a high-school English teacher. But after a year, he took a job as a cook in an upscale Italian restaurant.

“That first night, a light went on,” says Milton. “I said to myself, ‘Okay, so this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’”

Milton rose fast. Within a year he’d been promoted to sous and soon to head chef. The position led to better posts, and he used vacations to apprentice at top restaurants and become a certified butcher and sommelier.

By the late 2000s, though, Milton’s thoughts increasingly returned to Castlewood.

“The more I learned about the restaurant business, the more I appreciated the food culture I’d grown up in,” he says. “My great-grandparents were always tinkering with vegetables and fruit trees, trying to create new varieties that would bring different tastes and textures. I started dreaming of a restaurant that would capture and celebrate that lifestyle, allow me to explore where it came from.”

His idea was not well received by other chefs.

“I’d say ‘Appalachian Cuisine,’ and they’d hit me with a shit-eating sneer,” says Milton. He tells this story in the garden, pausing along a row of trellised vines hung with what appear to be glossy, oversized green beans. “They’d start cracking jokes about toothless rednecks frying up possums and squirrels, or trailer-park trash eating SPAM out the can.”

The beans behind him, Milton explains, are known as Greasy Grits. Hybridized in Appalachian gardens more than 120 years ago, they were prized for making a dried staple known as leather britches. Rehydrated and served in their pods, they bring an unrivaled silky texture punctuated by a sweet and nutty pop.

In 2010, at a New York restaurant, Milton was part of a group planning dishes that would “tell about who we are.” He wondered aloud about sourcing greasies for leather britches.

The following afternoon, the head chef slapped a copy of White Trash Cooking onto Milton’s station. “He got in my face,” says Milton, “and started barking, ‘If this is what you wanna do in my kitchen then you can get the fuck out!’”

Having White Trash Cooking slammed in his face was a turning point. To overcome the stereotypes, Milton realized, he’d need to be able to tell the story of Appalachian food, and give people a taste. But writing on the region’s cuisine was mostly scholarly, focused on single mothers dressing up SPAM in a sugary sauce and other relatively recent ways that plucky Appalachian cooks had responded to the poverty that is, for many, coal’s legacy in Appalachia. And while a few chefs served Appalachian-inspired entrées or appetizers, nobody was doing a full-blown cuisine.

So, in 2010, Milton hit the books. Late at night after shifts, he read online articles, obscure cookbooks, and histories. They led him to chefs, food-writers, farmers, seed purveyors, food-studies professors, and heads of preservation organizations. He wrote emails, made phone calls, paid visits.

Above all, Milton learned that Appalachia was the New World’s first true culinary melting pot. In the 1700s, Germans and Scotch-Irish arrived in what for them was a wild frontier, followed by numbers of English, enslaved people, and freedmen. Settling in small groups for safety and sustenance, mostly in valleys, meadows, and hollows, they found areas inhabited by indigenous groups such as the Cherokee.

The region’s isolation, challenging terrain, short growing seasons, and hard winters broke down traditional social barriers, and forced newcomers from different backgrounds to work together to survive. Subsequently, they adopted each other’s foodways. Though many were infringing on Cherokee lands—and sometimes used violence to secure them, with the U.S. government eventually warring with and forcibly removing the Cherokee—the tendency is most apparent in how the region embraced Native American food.

Appalachian terrain is extremely varied. Small valleys give way to steep slopes and peaks as high as 6,000 feet—many topped with balds and meadows. Europeans typically cultivated single crops in large flatland plots.

“But that method was useless in Appalachia,” says food writer and historian Ronni Lundy, whose 2016 book, Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, offers an experiential history of the region’s cuisine. Though Europeans throughout the Americas learned from indigenous groups, here the effect was amplified.

Lundy says Appalachian settlers adopted Cherokee methods almost wholesale. They hunted wild game, including bison, deer, turtles, and possum. They seasoned meals with herbs such as wild ginger, sumac, and spicebush, and foraged for wild greens, nuts, and berries. Wherever possible, they planted small gardens of beans, corn, and squash using the Three Sisters method.

Lundy calls the Native American’s famous three-crop system “deceptively diverse.” Though statistics are fuzzy, Cherokee gardens are known to have contained dozens of locally adapted varieties of beans. Ditto for corn, pumpkins, tomatoes, and squash. In Victuals, Lundy points to archaeological finds of crops such as goosefoot (a relative of quinoa) as well.

Europeans added their own crops and traditions to the medley. “You had all these incredible ingredients and culinary traditions coming together in one place and combining in new and exciting ways,” says Lundy. Which is why Milton, as a youth in his great-grandparents’ gardens, walked among both beans and squashes from the Americas and Old World fruits and vegetables, picking them to prepare dishes, such as a speckled butter bean cassoulet with rabbit confit, that, in terms of ingredients and cookware, more closely resembled Native potroasts than its French namesake.

Appalachia’s landscape determined its culinary destiny, Milton found, in another important way: The region produced renowned livestock, but a cuisine that did not center around meat.

With its abundant chestnuts, acorns, berries, and alpine sweetgrasses, the mountain wilderness yielded world-class meats (and cheeses) on the cheap. Appalachians let their animals range freely, keeping prized breeds adapted to the landscape. Settlers raised pigs on acorns, berries, and chestnuts, which produced a uniquely flavorful and succulent meat, and helped establish what would become known as the Ham Belt of Tennessee and Kentucky. Meanwhile, says Lundy, German immigrants turned sheep and pigs that roamed at 4,000 feet into delicious sausage. Italians arrived later, bringing their own swine-related techniques and traditions.

“Appalachian livestock and meat products subsequently developed a reputation of superiority and came to be coveted throughout the plantation South,” says Lundy.

But because livestock was so valuable and pasture space so limited, vegetables remained the stars in Appalachia’s kitchens. “Meats were seen more as a flavoring agent or a compliment,” says Milton.

A thriving restaurant scene developed along early-19th century drovers’ roads that connected isolated villages and homesteads to Southern market towns. Most kitchens were run by enslaved people or indentured freedmen and women. The cooks introduced Appalachians to Southern foods such as Hoppin John and African vegetables and herbs including red peas, black sesame seeds, and okra.

Though the Civil War decimated the meat trade—and its related restaurants—the Appalachian ethos of self-subsistence continued. While the rest of the United States specialized and industrialized, linked by growing ports and railroad tracks, using their growing incomes to buy mass-produced ingredients and more and more meat, residents of isolated, largely ignored Appalachia held tight to their gardening traditions.

They were incredible at it. Appalachians crossed Old World apples with indigenous crab-apples to invent now world-famous takes on English-style hard ciders and brandies. Other hybrids—some orange-hued and big as miniature pumpkins, others purple as eggplants—were developed for baking pies, animal fodder, eating, or crafting apple butter. The region subsequently became home to thousands of unique apple varieties.

And that’s just one fruit. Appalachians hybridized varieties of squash, tomatoes, collard greens, you name it.

“These weren’t casual gardeners; they weren’t buying fancy seeds from catalogues and planting them for fun,” says Virginia Tech agricultural extension agent Scott Jerrel. Appalachian gardens were laboratories dedicated to creating new tastes and useful characteristics, like later-maturing squash that grew sweeter with time and kept into the winter. With limited access to sugar, specialty corns were bred to be sweet enough to make delicious cornmeal.

“The approach is very different than [that of most modern] university research programs,” says Jerrel. Most of the time “our primary concern is maximizing yield … [and] shortening maturation times, thereby maximizing profitability for farmers. These people? What they cared about most was taste.”

People like Milton’s great-grandfather took pride in creating specialty varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruits. A plate of multicolored fingerling potatoes topped with blue, purple, yellow, bright and dark-green rehydrated leather britches, a sprinkling of equally variegated beans, chopped black garlic, and a bright-scarlet dusting of smoked paprika brought fantastic flavors and bragging rights. Many varieties in Milton’s garden have names like Bertie’s Best Greasy Beans.

But the arrival of the coal industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s led to the demise of Applachia’s foodways.

Lured by the money economy, men took jobs in coal mines, moving with their families to mining camps and towns. Though their families kept home gardens to avoid overpriced goods from commissaries, it was a big step away from subsistence. Over time, higher wages combined with better roads made buying from grocers more attractive. The gardens began to vanish.

Though Milton’s maternal great-grandfather turned to agriculture to make money, he didn’t escape the impact of coal. He ran a commercial orchard in Wise County, Virginia, with his brothers from 1911 to 1950. Economic hardships led the family to sell the property to a coal company around 1950, and, like thousands of others, it was eventually strip-mined.

For Milton, visiting the site is a source of painful inspiration.

“It looks like a bombed-out battlefield; it’s impossible to imagine somebody ever grew food there,” he says. “When people talk about bringing back coal, they don’t understand the costs. But I can look at the pictures and see the before-and-after. [Coal] took this amazing orchard and turned it into a barren wasteland.”

But the loss had more than just personal significance. The event coincided with a perilous shift in Appalachian foodways: The region’s amazing culinary history was being buried by historical shifts.

“The rise of big agriculture and the super market economy of the 1950s paired with the collapse of the coal industry to fuel a diaspora,” says Milton. The former had divested younger generations of their capacity to live off the land. Faced with poverty, young families fled to cities looking for work. “The older Appalachian foodways came under pressure.”

As the Depression-era generation began to pass, no one was there to take them up. The foodways were in danger of being lost entirely.

In 2011, Milton assumed the mantle at Richmond’s hip New Southern eatery, Comfort, and made a name for himself with a menu that incorporated traditional Appalachian ingredients.

The farm-to-table revolution was exploding, and interest in Southern cuisine was high. Milton parlayed the attention to feature foods he’d grown up with in southwest Virginia.

“But Comfort had a strong customer-base, so I had to keep it pretty lowkey,” he says. Patrons expected traditional staples such as fried green tomatoes and chicken and dumplings. “The idea was to challenge eaters, but do it gently.”

For example, a stack of fried green tomatoes might bring a medley of mountain heirlooms breaded with Bloody Butcher cornbread instead of flour and a topping of strawberry-rhubarb relish. A collard greens dish might include heritage varieties such as Champion and Alabama Blue, and be paired with leather britches made from Pink Tip Greasy Beans, cubes of grilled Candy Roaster Melon Squash, and bacon crumbles from a West Virginia Tamworth pig.

The response was cult-like. Area food critics crowned Milton one of the city’s top chefs.

In 2015 he shocked the culinary world by accepting an offer to develop Comfort-esque eateries at two new boutique hotels in the heart of southwest Virginia coal country. The collaboration led to an eponymous restaurant in the hip and offbeat Western Front Hotel in the 1,000-person town of St. Paul, which was devastated by the near-total loss of regional coal jobs in the early 2000s. Situated deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Clinch River, the hotel and eatery is at the center of the town’s effort to overhaul its economy around outdoor tourism.

For Milton, the move was all about location—it wasn’t enough to be sprinkling Appalachian touches on the menu of a restaurant in the state capital. “Travis understands that you can’t extract the cuisine from the culture,” said John Fleer, chef-owner of Rhubarb in Asheville, North Carolina, to the Washington Post in 2016. Revitalizing Appalachian cuisine required relocating to the region.

But the projects had other goals too. They marked the first step of Milton’s plan to bring culinary-based economic development to a region decimated by the loss of coal jobs.

“Restaurants hire and train workers and, if they source local, support area farmers and food artisans,” says Milton. Visitors bring dollars that drive tourism-related businesses—including pick-your-own berry farms, ATV tour companies, fly-fishing and canoe outfitters, farmer’s markets, breweries, cideries, distilleries, and additional restaurants.

“There are so many talented people out there that, like me, grew up here, miss this place, and would love to find a way to come back,” says Milton. Hiring for sous chefs at Western Front brought about 150 resumes; 75 percent came from Appalachian expats living in cities such as New York and San Francisco. “My hope is that these projects will convince some of them to bring their [real and creative capital] back to Appalachia.”

Nearly 70 years after his great-grandparents’ garden and orchard was strip-mined, Milton decided to partner with Kevin Nicewonder, the coal-family scion, to do that in an even bigger way.

Milton calls his project with Nicewonder the spearpoint of a crusade to spread awareness about and revitalize Appalachia’s endangered historic foodways. In addition to the garden and two restaurants, heritage breed sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys will roam forest-lined pastures throughout the 800-acre property. He plans to add berries, fruit, and nut trees as well.

“Kevin has provided the space and resources I need to create a flagship venue that goes well beyond the scope of a traditional restaurant,” says Milton, drawing comparisons to Tennessee’s famous culinary destination Blackberry Farm. “We want to teach eaters about [Appalachia’s] history and story, and let them experience it through taste.”

Milton calls the symbolism of the partnership with Nicewonder fundamental.

“The coal fields drove the region’s economy for a long, long time,” says Milton. But the environmental and social costs were disastrously high. “To me, this is a demonstrative effort to heal and move forward. I’m not calling it reparations, because it’s not. But it is a statement. This project is saying, ‘Look, that was the old way. And this is the new way, this is the future.”

Once again, Milton likens the project to a beacon for the region. He sees Taste, Hickory, the garden, and farm as a training ground for high-end waitstaff, mixologists, chefs, and small-scale farmers who will go on to work at and with other Appalachian-themed restaurants—or even better, open businesses of their own.

“This isn’t easy work,” says Milton. Training waitstaff to explain the cultural heritage of hundreds of obscure vegetables is challenging in a region where poverty rates hover around 25 percent. “But I love this place and I’m passionate about it,” Milton asserts. “I dream of a future where young people are coming back to take over their grandparents’ farms and plant apple trees on strip-mined mountaintops. And we’re starting to see that happen.”

Because with each addition, says Milton, the beacon shines a little brighter.

Signs of recovery for the so-called "puppies of the sea."

By any account, the Nassau grouper is intimidating. The fish can grow as long as a yard and weigh up to 55 pounds. They feed by opening their thick, grumpy lips and inhaling helpless prey. Any unsuspecting diver or greenhorn marine biologist would be wise to be wary, if it weren’t for the groupers’ fatal flaw. “They’re kind of like puppy dogs,” says Brice Semmens, an ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. “They’ll swim right up to you and you can pet them.” And if you don’t, the fish, like any wheedling dog, will find a way to make you. “They’ll tuck themselves under your arm when you’re trying to set up cameras for scientific purposes,” Semmens says. “You literally have to swat them away.”

Inconvenience aside, Semmens feels grateful whenever he’s prodded by the attention-seeking fish. The Nassau grouper is critically endangered, having almost disappeared from their home waters in the Caribbean over the past few decades due to overfishing. All Nassau grouper populations have dropped by more than 60 percent since 1980, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). It’s almost like the fish are swimming up to fishermen and begging to be caught—and in a way, they have been. But from 2003 to 2015, the population of Nassau groupers living around Little Cayman Island has more than tripled, thanks to a conservation collaboration between researchers, conservation organizations, and the Cayman Islands government, according to a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

When the grouper was abundant in the Caribbean, their annual breeding aggregations were dizzying in scale. The large fish are territorial, but each year, right after the full moon in early winter, they gather in huge numbers to breed. In 1971, researchers estimated one crowd by Cat Cay in the Bahamas contained anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 individuals. In 1975, Jacques Cousteau captured a massive Nassau grouper spawning event in Belize. But in the 1980s, the groupers became harder and harder to find, and local fishermen went to the Cayman Islands government seeking answers, writes Croy McCoy, a research officer in the government who coauthored the paper, in an email. By the 1990s, the fishery had collapsed across all three Cayman Islands.

When Nassau groupers gather to breed, the fish hang out, in eerie suspension, until the sun begins to set, Semmens says. As soon as the light begins to fade, the females begin to dart upward and release a burst of eggs, clear orbs the size of pinheads. The males, catching on, then rush to spurt a splash of sperm in the water. “Once the spawning starts, after 10 minutes or so, the visibility at that aggregation site can drop to zero,” Waterhouse says, quickly clarifying, “because there’s so much sperm in the water.” Grouper sperm, released in enormously optimistic plumes, turns the water so cloudy that researchers can barely make out their hands, let alone how many groupers are around them.

The fish, which can live up to 20 years, return to the exact same sites every year to breed. Once fishermen keyed in on these places and the right time to be there, it was a simple matter of returning each year to pick off the would-be lovers. In 2001, fishermen stumbled upon an aggregation off Little Cayman of approximately 7,000 fish. “They had just a couple of boats and line-fishing, but they managed to take out more than half the population,” Semmens says. Even as their populations dropped, the groupers kept returning to their old breeding spots. And with fewer fish, they began linger longer. “It’s a jeopardy problem,” Semmens says. “It offered more and more access to the few remaining fish at the site.”

When McCoy worked as a divemaster at a site called Three Fathom Wall off Little Cayman in the 1980s, he regularly saw one Nassau grouper with distinct markings. “This fish knew me like a dog knows his master,” McCoy says. “He followed me around until I would cuddle him gently and stroke his head.” McCoy left to earn his PhD at Bangor University in Wales, but when he returned in 2000, it was like not a day had passed. “When I got into the water, he would somehow recognize me after all those years and leave the aggregation,” McCoy says. “He’d still come to me looking for his hug.” McCoy stopped seeing the fish over the next few years, and he suspects it was among the unlucky ones caught in the 2001 raid.

After the government learned of the devastating 2001 fishing expedition, it realized the need for action. The Grouper Moon Project, a collaboration between the government, the citizen science group Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF), Scripps Oceanography, and Oregon State University, was born. REEF started sending teams to the western tip of Little Cayman to monitor the spawnings. In 2003, the government closed off large sections of the grouper’s habitat from wintertime fishing. In 2016, Little Cayman introduced size and catch limits and broadened the fishing ban to a seasonal closure, from December through April. The researchers believe this swift, varied conservation plan is the reason behind the grouper’s recent rebound there.

But the results weren’t visible overnight. Groupers live a long time and don’t reach sexual maturity until four to seven years of age, according to Lynn Waterhouse, lead author of the study and a research biologist at Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium. The researchers saw almost no change for years, but now the population off Little Cayman has reached the same estimated size as the population discovered in 2001. It took 15 years.

Grouper Moon continues to keep a watchful eye over the population, using tags and, eventually they hope, an image recognition algorithm that can recognize their distinctive patterns. The researchers hope their methods can inform species conservation at other sites. Grouper Moon has also developed a curriculum to be taught at schools in the Cayman Islands. “They are the ones who will replace me and others and our plight to see this particular species thrive on Cayman reefs,” McCoy says.

Though Grouper Moon represents a collaboration with researchers from around the world, McCoy recognizes that the project started within the Cayman Islands community, way back in the 1980s. “I would like to [give a] heartfelt thanks to the local fishermen who gave up a deep-rooted tradition to make this all happen,” he says, adding that now, during open season, he often gets grateful calls from fishers who boast of catching a Nassau grouper from the shoreline. “I do hope that I can see in my lifetime the larger island of Grand Cayman follow suit,” he says. “That jury is out.”

Their individual voices help them as a herd.

At Wolverton Farm in New South Wales, Australia, 18 cows leaned into a microphone and testified. The herd, all Holstein-Friesian heifers (a Central European breed), were studied over a five-month period, and their testimony was recorded by acoustic biologists trying to understand how cows communicate—specifically, how their individual voices change depending on the situation at hand.

Now the research, published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, has confirmed that each cow has a unique moo, and provided the first evidence that they maintain it in a variety of social contexts.

“In the dairy industry, we’re seeing increasing herd sizes,” but less attention being paid to individual animals, says Alexandra Green, a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney and lead author of the paper. “We need to think of novel ways to look at their welfare.”

While animal vocalizations have been studied for decades, livestock are a relatively new subject. The vocal relationship between mother cows and their calves has been fairly well documented, but the unique voice of each animal in a herd—and how those voices function in a social setting—hasn’t received much study till now.

Green’s work looked at cow communication in five different contexts: when the heifers were in heat, when they were excited to eat, when they were denied food, when they were isolated from the herd but could see the other cows, and when they were isolated but couldn’t see the others.

“We found that their voices are individually distinct,” Green says. “But further to that, they’re able to maintain these individual characteristics across the contexts.”

If farmers can better understand the moods of their herd by translating individual moos, it may help them keep their charges happy and healthy. Cows only low when there’s a biological imperative to be heard—a nearby predator, for instance—but are otherwise “pretty stoic,” says Green. Knowing a cow’s motivation when it sounds off could give farmers the ability to detect what’s upsetting or exciting the cattle, and thereby better provide for them.

Armed with a shotgun microphone, Green recorded the herd over five months, becoming increasingly familiar with its members in the process. The work took as long as it did because Green was working in a free-range pasture that’s subject to the elements.

At first, the cows were wary of the new presence in their midst. In time, though, they warmed up to her. By the end of her tenure in the paddock, Green says, the cows were actually licking the microphone.

Green says the study could have taken even longer if she’d been working with adults.

“Heifers are virgin cows,” she says. “They’re sort of the teenagers of the cow world, so we can’t get milk from them yet. It adds a lot more difficulty to the study if you have to take them for milking twice a day.”

The paintings once dazzled and enlightened mid-century planetarium-goers.

One day in the 1950s, Thomas Voter pulled a mask over his nose and mouth, reached for an airbrush, and attempted to make the aurora borealis dance across a darkened sky. The particular paint he was using contained ingredients that would fluoresce under ultraviolet light, also known as black light. These lights near the mural would be designed to sweep across the image, making the aurora shimmy, quiver, and astound.

Along with his team, Voter, an artist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, was finalizing 14 astronomical murals for the first floor of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium. Long before scientists could use reams of data to digitally reconstruct planetary surfaces or send someone virtually soaring through a distant constellation, these paintings were mainly based on photographs, drawings, and written reports. They depicted, among other things, Mars, Saturn, the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, the Horsehead Nebula, and a solar eclipse, Sky and Telescope reported in May 1953. The murals’ designer, Joseph M. Guerry, told the magazine that the fluorescent-paint technique was “like painting with fire.”

The Hayden’s black-light gallery debuted in the '50s, “before the hippies figured out they had something to get stoned to,” says Carter Emmart, now the museum's director of astrovisualization. A space nerd since a toddler-age trip to the futuristic 1964 World’s Fair, Emmart began taking classes at the planetarium at age 10, by which time rock bands and poster-makers had embraced the black-light aesthetic, leading to its long association with psychedelics. The young Emmart found himself especially mesmerized by the lyrical mural of the Horsehead Nebula, which sits on the belt of the constellation Orion. “I lusted after getting a black light, but mainly I was interested in astronomy," he says. "I wanted to have my own black-light hall in my room at home.”

It was the heyday of black-light galleries in planetariums across America. The space race was heating up, and the time saw a boom in “space art.” In her book Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and the Final Frontier, University of Miami historian Catherine Newell traces the work of Chesley Bonestell, a godfather of modern space art, back to the longer tradition of swoon-worthy-but-relatively-accurate landscape art. Bonestell’s paintings have the feel futuristic versions of New Deal–era posters of America’s National Parks, with sweeping vistas and craggy rock formations. Bonestell’s work “sells a vision of outer space not necessarily as utopic, but a the natural next step humanity was going to take,” Newell says. Newell sees obvious traces of Bonestell’s artistic DNA in the black-light paintings that appeared in the Hayden and beyond—they all encouraged viewers to get excited about discovery, exploration, and a future among the stars.

There’s no formal tally of how many planetariums once had these fluorescent illustrations, says Mike Smail, director of theaters and digital experience at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium (which didn’t have one). Even without an official roster, he adds, it’s clear that they weren’t uncommon. Black-light murals were “a weird little niche,” Smail says, “and big and small places started doing it.” They decorated planetarium walls from New York to Texas to Florida. “There’s always a lot of cross-pollination of ideas,” he says, and it’s likely that these displays were mentioned and discussed at conferences for the planetarium community. Staff from across the country may have swapped tips, or even artists; a decade after Voter painted the scenes at the Hayden, he also signed his name on the ones at the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.

For planetariums, which traffic in education, hard data, and slack-jawed awe, black-light galleries “just made sense,” Emmart says. Nebulae and galaxies, in particular, practically begged to be painted this way, massive and bright, immersive and attention-snaring. And, Emmart adds, they were a little bit magical.

These galleries also often served a practical purpose. Planetariums have to be dark, and black-light galleries gave guests something to look at while they wandered through “light-lock corridors,” the spaces between the bright light outside and the darkened dome of the planetarium itself. At the time, star projectors were dimmer, says John French, the production coordinator at the Abrams Planetarium, and it could take visitors’ eyes 15 or 20 minutes to adjust enough that they could fully appreciate the details they were about to see.

Black-light murals also took a cue from the panoramas that provide the backgrounds to many of the animal dioramas in natural history museums. The painters of those murals sometimes journeyed to the locations they were depicting to be sure they were faithfully capturing the setting and the quality of light. The artists working on space murals weren't trekking to Mars, but they were similarly “sensitive to the details,” Emmart says. The painting of the Horsehead Nebula, for example, included the subtle gradations in the colors of the clouds of hydrogen gas and dust.

The image of the Horsehead Nebula, like the rest of the Hayden’s black-light murals, came off display in the late 1990s, when the planetarium was renovated and modernized. The Hayden is now inside the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which opened in 2000, and the paintings are in storage. While they were on view, though, they were transportive.

The black-light murals that have been preserved—mostly in photographs, though some survive—are time capsules of the state of scientific knowledge at the time they were made. In the 1950s, scientists could only see Mars through telescopes, says Emmart, and that meant that Earth’s atmosphere was always in the way. “It’s sort of like looking down a road on a hot day,” Emmart says. “Air is in motion, so you have a mirage or a distortion.” The planet’s polar ice caps were discernible, so those made it into Hayden’s mural, but many other fine-grain details that we know today hadn’t yet come into view.

Sometimes the murals needed to be revised, too. Between 2010 and 2012, when she was a senior planetarium educator and staff artist at the Edwin Clark Schouweiler Memorial Planetarium at the University of St. Francis in Illinois, Jackie Baughman “fixed some anatomy issues” on the mural depicting the constellations of the zodiac. Scorpio looked more like a crayfish, and Pisces had some issues, too. The orange liquid spewing from the fishes’ mouths was supposed to be water, but “every child who walked by thought they were puking,” she says. Changes sometimes followed space missions. After the Voyager spacecraft approached Jupiter and Saturn in the 1970s and '80s, “we had much better ideas of what they looked like, and repainted those planets to give them more of an updated look,” says French, of the Abrams Planetarium. And the rocks were scaled back in the Saturn mural to provide a clearer view of the rings.

Broadly speaking, black-light murals “were popular until the late ‘90s, and then digital technology took over,” Smail says. Planetarium projectors grew brighter, so visitors didn’t have as much time to kill while they waited for their eyes to adjust, and some planetarium staffers were probably happy to trade nostalgia, which sometimes veered toward the charmingly gaudy, for more cutting-edge stuff. Now there are fewer murals and more screens, and the images on them are generated by precise data. “Robots have sent back so much data that we can effectively create Mars in front of you in motion, and move about it,” Emmart says. Smail adds that it’s much easier to update a database or computer program than it is to repaint a mural: “We can add a new comet or planet to our system and have it up on our dome in a matter of hours.”

As a result, many black-light galleries have vanished. Some of the paintings have been discarded, or donated to other institutions. The mural Baughman worked on was lost a few years back, when the building was demolished. Still others went into storage, like the Hayden’s. But a few other planetariums, such as the Ho Tung Visualization Lab at Colgate University, are relatively new to the black-light game. Their mural has only been around for a little over a decade. The Abrams Planetarium in Michigan still displays its examples, and a few years ago even repainted the faded black walls to make the murals pop once again. Though black-light paintings aren’t as alien as they once were when Emmart first saw them, they still have the capacity to amaze.

French gets a front-row seat to the wonder when he runs the planetarium Show at the Abrams. Before he does his velvet-voiced spiel—sometimes accompanying himself on the ukulele—he takes tickets at the door, where he can see people mosey around the gallery. “Younger kids, you hear them ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh,’ just fascinated by it,” he says. “It’s just a different visual experience than most people now are used to.”

Standing in that dark gallery, it is easy to imagine, for a moment, that one is perched on an alien landscape—the rim of an asteroid crater, maybe, or another planet’s moon—with looming celestial neighbors and stars all around.

Henri Langlois rescued thousands of rare reels, but was "famously bad" at caring for them.

In 2014, an archivist at the Paris-based Cinémathèque Française opened a box labeled “Sherlock Holmes.” Inside, she found three different films. One of them turned out to be a long-lost treasure: a late 19th-century American silent film starring an actor named William Gilette, who also played Holmes on stage over three decades. Posters for the film had endured and made it something of a legend among Sherlock devotees, but no copies were thought to have survived.

The Cinematheque restored the footage in partnership with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and it was released on DVD the following year.

Discoveries like these have been happening since staff of the Cinémathèque began the process of re-cataloguing its collection in 1992. Because aging film can warp and crumple over time, especially in less-than-ideal preservation conditions, staff open every box and film canister, confirm what’s inside, and note its state of preservation.

“I think we’ll finish perhaps in 10 years,” said lead conservator Céline Ruivo in June of 2019, a full 27 years after the project began.

The Cinémathèque Française, the now-massive audiovisual archive, began under the bed of a very young French film enthusiast named Henry Langlois.

In the mid-1930s, as talking pictures grew more popular, Langlois began acquiring—you could say rescuing—silent films.

Even in these films’ heyday, reels were often dumped unceremoniously after their runs in theaters. With little commercial value, reels of silent films were melted down wholesale for their raw ingredients and to become consumer products, from combs to nail polish.

By the time young Langlois acquired his first film (the German silent horror flick The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), nearly all of Paris’s 200-plus movie theaters had been outfitted for sound, according to film historian Eric Smoodin. The destruction of silent films accelerated, to Langlois and other silent film buffs’ dismay.

Fledgling cinema preservation movements emerged in parallel in several European countries, the United States and Australia. Significant early archives were formed by MoMA in the United States, and the British Film Institute (BFI) in the United Kingdom.

In France, Langlois and friends took on this less-than-glamorous work, rescuing reels of film from recycling facilities, financially strapped distribution houses, and even flea markets. Stacks of the extremely flammable nitrate-based film stock eventually filled his parents’ apartment. With Georges Franju, Langlois founded La Cinémathèque Française in 1936, to continue saving films and, equally importantly, continue screening them.

“He used to say films have to breathe, so if you don't project them regularly, they will die,” says Jan Christopher Horak, former director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. But by running the film through a projector “without checking if there was a negative or a backup print of a film … you were putting them at a significant danger.”

During the German Occupation of World War II, Langloise continued his preservation efforts opportunistically, taking funding from the collaborationist Vichy government while also subverting German censorship.

The Vichy granted the Cinémathèque administrative space in a building shared with the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, which oversaw the implementation of the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic policies. Langlois used his relationships to protect and grow his collection. When an SS officer asked for a military history film, Langlois bartered with him for the original negative of the 1930 film, The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich.

The Germans had an outright ban on British and American films by 1942, as well as a list of French films considered to have subversive anti-German messaging. Langlois set out to conceal films the Germans wanted destroyed and smuggle others overseas. At his request, Langlois’ allies hid film canisters in their homes and gardens. His colleague, Jewish-German emigre and film historian Lotte Eisner, spent time in hiding with a cache of films, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, in the dungeons of a chateau in the Unoccupied Zone of southern France.

In Paris, Langlois also organized secret showings of Soviet and American movies the Germans had outlawed, including at the Cinémathèque’s theater housed in a museum called the Musee de l’Homme.

Jean Rouch, then an engineering student, wrote that “In this empty Paris of the German occupation, in 1940-41, the Musee de l'Homme was the only open door to the rest of the world.” Rouch would later become a filmmaker.

“All this contributed to the mythological status of the Cinémathèque,” says Ruivo. After the war, Langlois held marathon film screenings. Attendees included directors who would go on to create French New Wave cinema, including Jean-Luc Godard, director of Breathless, and François Truffaut, creator of The 400 Blows.

Langlois had “incredible influence [on the] post-war generation of filmmakers,” says Horak, “who literally took their seats for weeks at a time in the Cinémathèque Française, watching film after film after film.”

Langlois became a larger-than-life figure, eclipsing his international peers and collaborators, such as Franju and Eisner. Described as rail-thin in his youth and elephant-like in his old age, Langlois chain-smoked and seemed to work incessantly. He appeared frequently in the media as a charismatic and often disheveled visionary.

In a 1971 profile of Langlois in LIFE Magazine, Rudolph Chelminski wrote of the collector’s “omnivorous appetite.”

“He collects everything, absolutely everything. If someone offered him a training film on brick-laying he would accept it with thanks and stick it off somewhere in one of the innumerable subterranean vaults that hold his treasures like so many bottles of vintage Bordeaux,” Chelminski marveled.

Langlois came to see film as a part of the historical record, and discouraged predictions for what would turn out to be of value.

“Judging, like criticism is a game,” Langlois told Chelminski. “It is gambling with the future. So, I take all films.”

“He didn’t define cinema as simply narrative fiction + documentary + avant-garde/experimental,” Rick Prelinger wrote of Langlois in an email.

The founder of the Prelinger archives of commercial, educational and other extra-canonical historical films held that Langlois “collected widely and without prejudice, and in so doing enabled expanded senses of viewing, research and appreciation that would last long beyond his own life.”

“[Langlois] is without a doubt,” says Horak, “the most famous film archivist on the planet.”

However, the scale of Langlois’ ambitions for the Cinémathèque were often at odds with his characteristic, improvisational style. With few resources, Langlois pinballed between carrying out restorations himself, organizing viewings, and creating a museum of cinema artifacts.

For decades, the Cinémathèquee had no comprehensive film catalogue. Many fragile reels were stored in conditions that hastened their decay. In 1959, 5,000 films nitrate left outside on a hot July day under a glass canopy awaiting transport caught fire and were completely destroyed.

“His methods are sort of famously bad,” says Smoodin. Langlois “was not really a modern archivist because his practices were so ad hoc and haphazard.”

“Procedures were not adequately respected,” acknowledges the Cinémathèque’s present-day conservator, Ruivo, “but mostly because of a lack of means.”

In 1968, the Cinémathèque’s board, with the support of French culture minister André Malraux, who had clashed with Langlois over the disorganization of the archives, removed him from the top of the institution. Street protests drew New Wave directors including Truffaut and Godard, finally leading to Langlois’ reinstatement. He received an Academy Award for his efforts on behalf of cinema just a few years before his death in 1977.

“There is a great deal of nostalgia for the Cinémathèque as it was in the '50s and '60s” under Langlois, says Smoodin. “Malraux is still seen as the bad guy in all this even though it’s understood Langlois' methods are terrible.”

Today though, at least organizationally, says Ruivo, the “Cinémathèque of Langlois is no more.”

After losses sustained in another fire in 1997, the government invested in rehabilitating the institution. Its library, museum, and screening rooms moved to a Frank Gehry-designed building in eastern Paris.

The organization now holds more than 44,000 films, not to mention documents and ephemera, costumes, and a sizable collection of vintage cameras. For now, tens of thousands of films reside in the stone Fort de Saint-Cyr outside Paris; others made from early and unstable cellulose nitrate stock share space with the younger Centre National du Cinéma (CNC) archive. Planning is underway for a new facility that will unite the entire archive.

Ruivo now manages a team of archivists. As cataloguing moves forward, they can only speculate about whether a film discovered in a box with a completely different title was mislabeled by an overtaxed Langlois or deliberately hidden from the occupying Germans.

Entire lost films turn up maybe once or twice a year. More often, conservators discover salvageable fragments, which can be recombined with pieces held in other archives to recreate a damaged work.

“The really positive and beautiful side of the archives is rediscovery,” says Ruivo. “When we rediscover titles we’re also changing the history of cinema in a certain way, which is often written as a function of the films that were accessible at the time.”

Langlois’ legacy is also undergoing a process of revision, says Horak. The Cinémathèque holds its own institutional archives, which upon review seem to reveal a larger role for Lotte Eisner—the Jewish employee who hid with the banned films in the French chateau during the war—in organizing the acquisitions that allowed the Cinematheque to continue to grow.

“She worked for the Cinémathèque Française for decades,” Horak says, “even though she never got credit for anything.”

Horak fondly evokes a famous line from the 1962 Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to sum up Langlois’ legacy. It is originally delivered by a newspaperman about the movie’s villain, played by John Wayne.

“If you had a choice between printing the truth and the legend,” Horak loosely quotes the reporter, “print the legend.”

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The artist, Gilberto Guzman, once wanted to restore the painting. But state officials say it’s too unstable.

This year, 40-year-old mural called “Multi-Cultural” will likely be destroyed to make way for a new branch of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, called Vladem Contemporary. The sprawling painting, created in 1980 by Gilberto Guzman and a diverse group of artists, depicts a corn goddess holding a microscope and flask, flanked by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Rio Grande Gorge, writes Alicia Inez Guzmán (no relation to the artist) in Southwest Contemporary. Elsewhere in the mural, men and women dance around the Santa Fe Plaza, a bull grins above Spanish armor, and vendors sell Native American frybread. It’s currently on the corner of Montezuma Avenue and Guadalupe Street.

As local legend has it, Guzman, who is now 88 and retired, sold his van to buy paint to start working on the mural, writes Alicia Inez Guzmán. He designed the mural with a German-born artist, Zara Kriegstein, and painted it with numerous collaborators, including David Bradley, Linda Lomahaftewa, Cassandra Mains, John Sandford, Rosemary Stearns, and Frederico Vigil, who studied under Diego Rivera. By the time it was completed, the artist had embroiled himself in enough disagreements with collaborators that he did not appear at the mural’s dedication.

Lomahaftewa, who is Hopi and Choctaw, painted the grove of nopales on the right side of the mural. “I worked on a very little portion of that mural,” Lomahaftewa says, adding that Guzman wanted painters from other cultures to be involved. “But I always glance at it when I go by Guadalupe.”

“Multi-Cultural” was not Guzman’s first mural. In the 1970s, he belonged to the Chicano muralist group Los Artes Guadalupaños de Aztlan. Though several of the group’s murals have been painted over or fallen into disrepair, many are digitized in the Stanford University Library. Guzman’s own murals can still be spotted elsewhere in Santa Fe, such as the Bataan Memorial Building and the New Mexico State Library, Alicia Inez Guzmán writes.

In 2018, the Vladem Contemporary, named for a couple that donated $4 million to the $12.5 million project, stirred controversy with its modern, angular design, which will stand out among the adobe buildings in the city’s historic railyard district, according to the Albuquerque Journal. In recent years, Santa Fe, which is majority Latinx and famous for its art scene, has experienced waves of gentrification that have displaced many residents, according to the Santa Fe Reporter.

In December, the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs approved the final design for the Vladem, and with it, declared the mural too unstable to be restored. “No treatment is currently possible that can fully address the integrity of either the original image or the artist’s aesthetic intent,” the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs’ statement read, adding that the mural has been digitally photographed. Groundbreaking for the Vladem Contemporary begins this year, though it is unclear when the mural will be broken down. “I find it sad that they need to destroy a mural to create a museum,” Gregorio Luke, an expert on Mexican-American art, writes in an email. “Why can't they keep both?”

On January 8, Guzman himself broke his silence, claiming in a statement to the Santa Fe Reporter that the Department of Cultural Affairs has “not disclosed that the muralist has an existing state contract to redo the mural.” In 1980, Guzman signed an agreement with the New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration’s Property Control Division that he would have access to the mural for “its natural life.” According to his statement, Guzman maintained the mural over the years and repainted it in 1990. In its own statement, the Department of Cultural Affairs argued that the mural has reached the end of its life, and suggested that it could live on as a digital projection inside the museum, or as digitally printed panels.

In 2016, Guzman said on his Facebook page that he planned to restore “Multi-Cultural.” But this month, he seemed to accept that its fate may be out of his hands. "I am retired,” Guzman told the Santa Fe Reporter in his statement. “Whatever happens to it, I don't care. I did it once and twice, and I enjoyed the hell out of it."

The 14-page speech is now the world’s most expensive piece of sports memorabilia.

When Pierre de Coubertin stepped up to deliver his keynote address at the 1892 meeting of the Union of French Athletic Sports Societies in Paris, he likely had no idea how popular, contentious, and lucrative his idea would become. He was about to propose the return of the Olympic Games, after a 1,500-year hiatus.

Last month, de Coubertin’s speech outlining the competition was sold at a Sotheby’s auction, to an anonymous buyer, for $8.8 million, making the document the most valuable piece of sports memorabilia in the world. The manifesto bests the previous record holder, a Babe Ruth Yankees jersey, by over $3 million.

De Coubertin’s 14-page speech preceded the first modern Olympics by four years, but it encoded the DNA of the Games. “For all the vast changes that have accrued to the Games since their first celebration in 1896,” writes John MacAloon, an Olympics historian at the University of Chicago, “they still bear indelibly—from their flag to their official ideology—the stamp of Pierre de Coubertin.”

Born a baron in Paris, Pierre de Coubertin grew up wealthy. When he was seven years old, Prussian soldiers packed de Coubertin’s croquet box with explosives and destroyed a bridge linking Paris to Le Havre, according to the International Olympic Committee.

De Coubertin grew up to be a fierce patriot who sought to reform the French education system by introducing sports into the curriculum. He “was a product of his time,” says Randy Roberts, a sports historian at Purdue University. “The worst thing for him was the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. He felt sports were a way to revive French masculinity.”

When he was 31, he found himself—through a combination of good luck and diplomatic finesse—at the helm of the French athletics sports union, where he outlined his grand plan. The meandering speech he gave stresses the importance of exercise around the world, offering particular praise to the British education system, in which de Coubertin was educated, for prioritizing physical education. The address culminates in his vision for the “grandiose and beneficent” work of reviving the ancient competition, which had last been waged in the year 393.

“[The event in] 1896 was an ad hoc type of thing, an old boy’s club," Roberts says. "But then it started to attach itself to the World’s Fairs, because nobody was going to see the Olympics.”

By linking de Coubertin’s sporting sideshow to the well-attended world expositions, the Olympics began to grow in popularity. But faltering finances and world events—most significantly World War I—stalled the competition’s ascent.

After the war, however, things began to look up. The event was held with increasing success through the 1920s, and its viewership skyrocketed for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, when it was first televised. When De Coubertin, the event’s chief advocate and imperator, died a year later, his heart was entombed in a monument on the site of ancient Olympia, Greece.

In its 123-year history, the Olympics have seen their fair share of crises, scandals, acts of activism and goodwill, and more. They are a quadrennial exercise in culture and politics, told through the gossamer guise of athletics and competition. Though very different today than they were in 1896, perhaps it’s just as well that they keep reminding us who we are, and how we’ve changed.

“When de Coubertin started, he didn’t have any of this idea of the flag salute, playing national anthems,” Roberts says. “He wanted to move away from these strident nationalisms. And now that sort of nationalism has sort of taken over.”

She's the only woman veteran honored with a monument at West Point. But where was she buried?

In 2016, five days after Thanksgiving, Margaret Corbin’s grave was dug up for the second time since her death in 1800. It began by accident. Contractors were working on a retaining wall near the West Point Cemetery, at the U.S. Military Academy, when a hydraulic excavator got too close and chewed through the grave.

As soon as they noticed bones spilling from the soil, they alerted the military police. The plot was quickly cordoned off, her monument was wrapped in tarp, and rumors started to spread about Corbin’s resting place—that is, if it even was her resting place. When forensic archaeologists arrived at the scene, they were perplexed: The bones seemed oddly large.

The monument to Margaret Corbin is West Point’s only monument to a woman veteran, and it greets visitors near the main gate, just feet from a neoclassical chapel. It faces Washington Road, where the Academy’s top brass live, and depicts Corbin in a long dress, operating a cannon as her long hair and cape fly in the wind. She wears a powder horn and holds a rammer to load cannonballs; the rest of the rather cramped cemetery sprawls out behind her. The monument portrays the moments before Corbin became a prisoner of war.

The story goes that Corbin joined her husband, John, to fight in the American Revolution. At the time, many women followed their husbands to war, where they were commonly known as “camp followers.” Typically, they foraged for food, cooked, and did laundry. Before Martha Washington was the United States’ first first lady, she was also a camp follower. In fact, she and Margaret were with the same company—though the two experienced different lives, since George was a general, and John manned a cannon.

At the Battle of Fort Washington, on November 16, 1776, in what is now Washington Heights, the British and Hessians advanced far enough to make the Continental Army’s position untenable. George Washington retreated with his forces to White Plains; John Corbin was shot dead at his cannon. But Margaret was there to jump into John’s position and help fire the cannon. During the battle, her jaw and shoulder were seriously injured, and grapeshot tore off part of her breast. Despite the Continental Army’s efforts, the fort was soon surrendered, and Corbin was captured along with approximately 2,837 soldiers.

The British may have been unsure what to do with an injured woman, because she was released fairly soon after the battle. The ordeal was one of many traumas in her life: According to records collected by the historian Stella Bailey, Margaret was only five years old when her father was killed in a conflict with Native Americans in Pennsylvania, where they lived. Her mother was kidnapped, and Margaret and her brother moved in with an uncle. They never saw her again.

After Corbin’s return, she joined the Corps of Invalids, a group of wounded soldiers that were still able to contribute to the war effort. They were stationed at West Point, New York, where Corbin became known as a cantankerous woman who had a tough time making a home for herself in the neighboring village of Highland Falls. She moved between various local families who tried to care for her. Having witnessed her husband’s death and sustaining wounds, she was probably in constant mental and physical pain.

When Margaret Corbin died in 1800, she was buried in a pauper’s cemetery in Highland Falls, just three miles from West Point. But in 1926, the national society of women known as the Daughters of the American Revolution saw to it that Corbin would earn her vaunted cemetery plot. The society, which is made up of women who can trace their lineage to participants in the American Revolution, was celebrating the sesquicentennial of American independence, and saw Corbin as the consummate symbol of both their organization and the Revolution. A year-long effort convinced the U.S. Military Academy to help them exhume and transport the remains to the prestigious cemetery, to be reburied with a military funeral.

Exhumation was not a simple task: By the time the DAR began their campaign to move Corbin, the location of her exact burial was known only by word-of-mouth, passed down through generations. In collaboration with West Point, the Daughters found the great-grandson of the man who supposedly dug Corbin’s original grave, a steamboat captain by the name of Farout. Her burial site was apparently marked by the stump of a cedar tree; during the exhumation process, the gravedigger accidentally drove the shovel through the skull. Still, the Army Surgeon reported injuries to the skeleton that were consistent with grapeshot. The remains were given a new, flag-draped casket and delivered to West Point by horse-drawn hearse.

Every year since then, the Daughters have gathered at Corbin’s monument for Margaret Corbin Day. On the first Tuesday of May, the Daughters fill the chapel, share Corbin’s story, sing hymns, and stand at the grave while soldiers perform a 21-gun salute.

After the U.S. Military Academy unintentionally reopened the grave beneath Corbin’s monument in 2016, they decided to conduct an emergency forensic archaeological excavation. They enlisted the help of Elizabeth A. DiGangi, an anthropology professor at Binghamton University, and Michael K. Trimble, an archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers. Almost immediately, the pair noticed that the size of the bones didn’t match Corbin’s description. Corbin was reportedly a stout woman. “One of the first bones I saw when I was on site was the humerus, or upper arm bone,” DiGangi says. “It was very large, which is not what you would expect with an arm bone from a woman.”

DiGangi took the remains to her laboratory at Binghamton University to do a full analysis. Some worried that other remains were mixed up with Corbin’s. (In the past, West Point has discovered unknown remains when they’ve broken new ground for construction.) Ultimately, DiGangi’s analysis revealed something even more shocking: The remains in Corbin’s grave actually came from an adult male. DiGangi determined that it was a large man, who could’ve been anywhere from five-foot-seven to six and a half feet tall. The remains of Margaret Corbin were not in Margaret Corbin’s grave.

Once the archaeological excavation teams completed their reports, the Army National Cemeteries contacted the Daughters of the American Revolution. They wanted a meeting at DAR headquarters in Washington, DC.

Jennifer Minus, the head of the New York chapter of the DAR, was among those present at the meeting. Minus, a graduate of West Point and a former member of the Corbin Forum, a club for cadet women, knew her Corbin history better than most. She asked how it could’ve been a man in the grave, if in 1926 the Army surgeon said that grapeshot injuries were present. In her report, DiGangi explains that what the surgeon considered a grapeshot injury was, in fact, post-mortem damage to the remains.

So where is Margaret Corbin? Since the attempted reburial of Corbin’s remains, in 1926, her original gravesite in Highland Falls has been lost to time. Sometime in the 1970s, the town dropped a sewage plant where many believe it was once located. Yet Minus remains optimistic that Corbin’s remains will one day be found.

As upsetting as it was to learn that her remains were missing, the Daughters also tried to see the discovery as an opportunity to spread Margaret’s story. It’s as though they picked up right where the 1926 DAR members left off. Minus formed an unofficial Margaret Corbin Task Force, drawing on the strengths of DAR members: One was a genealogist, and another was a Navy veteran who had worked on locating the remains of American soldiers overseas.

On April 30, 2019, Minus combed the woods of Highland Falls, looking for the original gravesite. They tried to match up the old photographs with newer ones, but this proved difficult, because most of the trees in the photographs were saplings at the time. They looked for flat areas that would have been suitable for burials: It was common at the time to bury people in elevated areas, to avoid rising water tables that could push the caskets back up to the surface.

The next day, the Daughters gathered again around Corbin’s monument, dressed in large hats and sashes. The ground looked as though it had never been disturbed. A casual viewer would’ve never known that Corbin wasn’t under their feet.

It was an important day for the Daughters, but especially for Minus, who joined the DAR in part because of Corbin. Once, before she graduated from West Point, she told her grandparents about a lunch honoring Margaret Corbin. Her grandmother told her that her heritage made her eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, and a few years later, when she returned from a post in Germany, her grandma prepared the necessary papers.

Minus is hopeful that they’ll find Corbin near the river, not far from the grave that the Daughters dug up in 1926. “When they started digging, they found bones. So, they didn’t make, like, 10 different holes over a field. They got it on their first attempt and found bones. What I’m hoping is that they just had to do a 180, and she would’ve been five feet over.”

The man they found in Corbin’s grave has since come back to the West Point cemetery, to be reinterred with the other unidentified remains found in the area. No one yet knows who the man could be. Some theorize it’s Corbin’s second husband—but there’s no proof that she remarried. Others believe it was a Native American. It’s possible that the unknown man might be dug up a third time, should the proper clues demand his participation. Corbin’s original gravesite did not turn up in 2018, but the search continues.

On Corbin Day in 2019, after the 21-gun salute, the Daughters hold another luncheon. This time, the Margaret Corbin Task Force has something special on display: a machine that looks like a souped-up lawn mower. Many Daughters file into the room and ask what it is. “Just wait,” Minus answers. Then Lieutenant Colonel Mindy Kimball, an environmental science professor at West Point, holds a demonstration. It’s a ground-penetrating radar machine, which shoots electromagnetic waves into the ground and sends information back up to the antennae, to identify underground disturbances that could reveal human remains.

Whether or not Corbin is ever located, just sharing her story helps to immortalize her. Minus is fascinated by the many identities that Corbin came to inhabit. “She’s an army spouse, and then an army widow, and then she was a soldier, and then she was a wounded soldier, and then she was a prisoner of war, and then she was a veteran,” she says. Corbin was also the first woman to receive a military pension from the government, and is mentioned by name in the Congressional Record. “I really think of her as that building block for women in the military.”

Stella Bailey, the town historian of Highland Falls, has been researching Margaret Corbin for decades. She’s pored over old maps, trying to pinpoint exactly where Corbin might have been buried in 1800. She even gets emails from people who think they might be related to Corbin.

Sitting in her office, overlooking Main Street in Highland Falls, Bailey sighs. “We know she was real. West Point’s records acknowledge her existence,” she says. But she can list discrepancies in Corbin’s story. Some say her husband was shot in the head; some say he was shot in the heart. Others say Corbin dressed as a man to fight in the war. Sometimes she wonders whether she will ever find answers. Perhaps these conflicting stories are just a part of Corbin’s mystique. “The more I research, the less I know,” Bailey says.

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In the Lowcountry, the unique shade is both protective talisman and source of unspeakable suffering.

Beaufort County, South Carolina, a marshy world of low-lying coastal islands, is awash in blue. The cerulean of the skies that darken to shades of cobalt in storm-kissed summers. The blue-gray of the churning Atlantic. The sapphire waters of the rivers and saline estuaries that account for almost 40 percent of the county’s 923 square miles.

But while the color blue dominates Lowcountry skies and waters, for centuries it was nearly impossible for human hands to reproduce. Only indigo—a leggy green plant that emerges from the soil in bushy, tangled clumps—can generate the elusive jewel tones.

In Beaufort County and elsewhere in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, blue had the power to protect enslaved Africans and their descendants, known as the Gullah Geechee, from evil spirits. But the color was also the source of incomparable suffering. Indigo helped spur the 18th-century transatlantic trade, resulting in the enslavement of thousands.

The town of Beaufort, the county seat of the eponymous Lowcountry district, is accented in blue. The elegant riverside town was one of the South’s wealthiest before the Civil War, and one of the few left standing by the Union Army, which set up a base of operations here after its residents skipped town in the Great Skedaddle of 1861.

Dozens of antebellum mansions still line the streets, restored to the opulence of their plantation days. The ceilings of their broad summer porches are painted almost universally in just one color: a soft, robin’s egg blue.

This “haint blue,” first derived from the dye produced on Lowcountry indigo plantations, was originally used by enslaved Africans, and later by the Gullah Geechee, to combat “haints” and “boo hags”—evil spirits who escaped their human forms at night to paralyze, injure, ride (the way a person might ride a horse), or even kill innocent victims. The color was said to trick haints into believing that they’ve stumbled into water (which they cannot cross) or sky (which will lead them farther from the victims they seek). Blue glass bottles were also hung in trees to trap the malevolent marauders.

While “haint blue” has taken on a life of its own outside the Gullah Geechee tradition—it’s currently sold by major paint companies like Sherwin-Williams, and marketed to well-to-do Southerners as a pretty color for a proper porch ceiling—the significance of the color to the descendents of the Lowcountry’s enslaved people still remains.

In Rantowles, a hamlet 14 miles south of Charleston, Gullah families like Alphonso Brown’s painted their homes in haint blue not just because it is customary, but because they fear the havoc that evil spirits might wreak if they abandoned the tradition.

Yet not all Gullah Geechee identify with the color’s use. Oral histories recorded as late as the 1930s and ’40s mention haint blue, but a lot was lost when the community became less isolated and more spread out during the mid-20th century.

“Haint blue was never mentioned in my family on Hilton Head Island,” says Louise Miller Cohen, founder of the island’s Gullah Museum. “People are saying that we paint our houses blue to ward off the evil spirits. If that was true, all the houses on the island would be painted blue.” Nevertheless, the museum—once the home where her father lived—is painted blue.

“Indigo dye is deeply rooted in African culture,” says Heather Hodges, executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor National Heritage Area. So “is the symbolic use of the color blue to ward off ‘evil spirits.”

In her book Red, White, and Black Make Blue, Andrea Feeser describes West African spiritual traditions that included wearing blue beads or clothing for protection. “Fetishes,” powerful amulets made out of everyday objects, also often contained blue materials.

In some cultures, indigo itself has spiritual significance. In Blue Alchemy, director and producer Mary Lance’s film about indigo around the world, women at a Nigerian workshop are documented delivering a prayer to the Yoruba indigo deity Iyamapo.

Haints and boo hags, too, stem from African spiritual traditions—a spirituality in which conjure and color symbolism are essential, according to Rituals of Resistance, Jason R. Young’s book on African-Atlantic religion. Root workers, practitioners of these rituals who often go by the title Dr. Buzzard, were among those forced across the ocean in bondage.

Almost 300 years after their arrival, there aren’t many Dr. Buzzards left in South Carolina and Georgia. (There are a few, however, including a root worker in Atlanta whose grandparents chose him to train in their spiritual traditions. “I went to live with them when I was a year-and-a-half [old],” he says. “I was 16 when I quit school to do voodoo full time.”)

Yet within recent memory, Lowcountry root workers weren’t so hard to find. In the 1940s, Dr. Buzzard (aka Stepney Robinson) was a fixture at the Beaufort County Courthouse, where he sat at trials “chewing the root” to sway a judge’s ruling. In the 1980s, another Dr. Buzzard (aka Ernest Bratton) shot to fame with his video “Voo Doo, Hoo Doo, You Do,” appearing on Late Night with David Letterman and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Root workers may have mostly moved on from Beaufort County, but HooDoo beliefs still remain. So does the significance of indigo and the color blue in shaping the Gullah Geechee community. Among their ancestors were over 70,000 men, women, and children brought from West and Central Africa to provide the labor required for the South’s roughly 40-year foray into the plant’s growth and production of indigo dye, according to Young’s book.

Indigo was first planted in South Carolina in 1739. Less than 30 years later, the colony was annually exporting a million pounds of indigo dyestuffs. Today they would be worth more than $30 million a year. At least some of the knowledge for processing indigo dye came from the enslaved themselves: Indigo traditions in West and Central Africa are at least five centuries old.

At the Nigerian workshop Lance features in her documentary, the plant is pounded with sticks that remove and crush the leaves, which are then formed into balls. The balls are sprinkled with wood ash, then left to dry for seven days before being combined with water in dye pits. In Kano, Nigeria, pits dating back to 1498 are still in use today.

South Carolina’s indigo production came to an abrupt halt at the end of the Revolutionary War. “The people in South Carolina were producing indigo exclusively for the British market,” says Lance. “So when [the United States] was no longer a British colony, they no longer had that market anymore.”

By the mid-19th century, when synthetic blue dye became available, indigo almost disappeared from Beaufort County and the rest of the Lowcountry. Almost. Now a Gullah Geechee movement to reclaim indigo and the blue dye it produces is afoot.

As a child, Cohen played among the remnant indigo planted by her enslaved ancestors. In 2016, she planted her first seeds at the museum.

“The species that we grow have a peach-color flower,” she explains. Her hope is to grow enough of the plants to be able to process and produce dye to use in local workshops, strengthening her community’s connection to their ancestral past. “I’m interested in learning all I can about the crops that caused my people [the] loss of their freedom,” she says.

Cohen’s sentiment has blossomed elsewhere in the Lowcountry too. Though there aren’t many artisans around who know how to dye with indigo, Hodges says that the color “is widely used by Gullah Geechee visual artists and filmmakers as a way of expressing their shared Gullah Geechee heritage and history with indigo cultivation.” The film Daughters of the Dust; the novel Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo [sic] by Ntozake Shange; and the artwork of Diane Britton Dunham all feature indigo or the color blue.

Hodges’ organization is in the midst of a year of events that introduce community members to the craft. The reintroduction of natural indigo dyes, she says, has sparked a lot of enthusiasm.

“Many of the West African techniques involve wax, starch, and stitch-resist techniques, sometimes using stamps,” says Hodges. “That can be difficult to teach. [But] we just did a popular workshop that encouraged people to dye African head wraps and scarves as a way of incorporating African cultural expressions.”

But as indigo undergoes a resurgence in the Lowcountry, along with other traditions including the Gullah language and foodways, the community hasn’t forgotten the inhumane conditions that led to their arrival and early life in the South.

“If repatriation was attached to indigo,” says Cohen, meaning if indigo were part of the discussion regarding what the Gullah Geechee are owed for the horrors their ancestors endured, “they would do everything possible to keep the word from ever being mentioned.”

The current crisis has pushed the country to consider cultural burning.

There is a scar across Australia’s Western Desert. For millennia—no one is sure how many, though evidence of Aboriginal people’s presence in Australia stretches back 50,000 years—the Martu people used fire to hunt in the scraggly bush. In a practice called cultural burning, they set low blazes patient enough for small animals such as bettongs and wallabies to flee their burrows before the fire reached them. Years of cultural burning cleared underbrush, creating a patchy habitat preferred by the small animals Martu people most liked to hunt, while simultaneously preventing massive lightning fires from consuming the land.

For the Martu, these fires were so vital that they were a means of maintaining life itself. “They would say, ‘If we weren’t out here burning, things won’t exist,’” says Rebecca Bliege Bird, a Pennsylvania State anthropologist who has worked with the Martu for decades.

But when, in the 1960s, the Australian government pushed Martu people into towns, in order to test missiles on their land, the life-giving burns stopped. Lightning fires—large, hot, unscrupulous—took their place. In the 20 years it took the Martu to regain access to their homeland, the entire ecosystem was knocked off balance. The lightning burns disrupted plant and animal habitats. An influx of invasive cats helped drive 10 species of small mammal to extinction. The land bears the memory of this imbalance: From the air, areas the Martu have burned are stubbly and patchwork, an intricate barbershop coiffure. In contrast, wide swathes of lightning-burned country are raw as a skinned knee.

This pattern is typical of much of Australia’s landscape, where, in many regions of the country, Aboriginal people have used fire to hunt and maintain ecosystems for millennia. Centuries of Euro-Australian suppression of Aboriginal people, and of cultural burning, have exacerbated ecosystem degradation, leaving the contemporary landscape “really sick,” says Oliver Costello, a member of the Bundjalung Aboriginal community from New South Wales, who co-founded Firesticks, a cultural burning organization.

In the past few years, researchers such as Bliege Bird have published evidence affirming what Aboriginal people already knew. In recent studies, Bliege Bird and her co-researchers, Stefani Crabtree and Douglas Bird, drew on years of interviews and experience with Martu hunters in order to model and measure the effect of their exile on the area's food web. They found that the Martu people's burning reduced the intensity of lightning fires and, thanks to the creation of patchy habitats, boosted the populations of monitor lizards, dingoes, and kangaroos—all animals pursued by Martu hunters.

The findings affirm a newer thread in the anthropology of North America and Australia, which reevaluates the assumption that non-farming indigenous people have little impact on the landscape. Instead, these anthropologists argue that indigenous people have long altered landscapes on a vast scale and to productive ends: They created America’s rolling prairies and the bumper crops of bison they fostered, and turned Western Australia into a patchwork quilt of burn zones with thriving small-animal populations. On both continents, fire was their primary tool.

As wildfires grow increasingly destructive—California’s 2018 Camp Fire destroyed 11,000 homes, and an estimated one billion animals have died in Australian wildfires since late 2019—environmentalists and government authorities have turned to these practices for a potential solution. For the past several centuries, the Australian government, like its U.S. counterpart, has pursued a policy of fire suppression, eliminating small periodic fires caused by human intervention and lightning. But these milder fires clear the land of brush and other fuel. Without the fires, parched, kindling-littered terrains are more likely to erupt in wider-scale, destructive blazes. So researchers and fire officials are looking to the original stewards of the land for inspiration: indigenous practitioners of cultural burning.

For Costello, the renewed interest in cultural burning is welcome, but late. “Traditional custodians all over Australia have been saying this for hundreds of years,” says Costello. “It’s only the last few weeks that people have been calling me.” That’s because fire suppression has been part of European colonialism since the first settlements.

Europeans encountered fire as soon as they reached Australia. When Captain James Cook first sailed along the continent’s coast in 1770, his crew spotted smoke, recording the finding in their ship’s log as proof that the continent was inhabited. Early settlers viewed fire as a threat. They were farmers, factory laborers, and seafarers, unused to the continent’s broad blue skies and arid, smoke-crisp landscape. Unwilling or unable to perceive cultural burning as a landscape-management practice, they argued that Australian land was not being put to productive use, and thus was ripe for the taking—a legal justification for settler colonialism that Australian courts upheld as recently as 1982.

From 1794 to at least 1920, Australian colonists displaced, dispossessed, and murdered tens of thousands of Aboriginal people in state-sanctioned massacres. They turned collectively owned Aboriginal land into livestock enclosures, and forbade cultural burning. It wasn’t until 1992 that the first Aboriginal Australians regained rights to heritage lands. By that time, many traditional ecosystems had long since been disrupted.

The scars of that trauma are still burned into Australia’s land, in the bare swathes exposed by devastating lightning fires. And they are burned into the psyches of Aboriginal people, who, as a result of centuries of violence, have more than triple the unemployment rate, double the suicide rate, and a 10-year-lower life expectancy than non-Aboriginal Australians—glaring inequality in a country that has one of the highest human development rankings in the world. This material marginality goes hand in hand with the spiritual trauma of being separated from traditional lands and ways of life. “I try to stay happy,” Costello says. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t see what’s happening and don’t feel the pain.”

For Costello, healing came through fire. He first experienced cultural burning as a young person in the Blue Mountains. But it wasn’t until Costello met Victor Steffensen, a long-time advocate of the practice, that his passion really ignited. Steffensen talked about land stewardship, about fire as a community-led practice, and a chance for Aboriginal people to reconnect with their country and each other. Lightning struck. “‘Oh, wow!’” Costello thought. He’s been burning the land, and passing on his knowledge, ever since.

When Costello talks about fire, you soon realize his relationship to it is fundamentally different from that of most urban people. For most non-indigenous, urban, and even agricultural people, fire is a destructive force, anti-civilizational and apocalyptic. The history of famous Western fires is, after all, a catalogue of destruction: London in 1666; San Francisco in 1906; hell itself.

But when Costello talks about cultural burning, it is with gentleness, the way you might talk about a bubbling brook. Burning the landscape first requires knowing it, he says; a good cultural burner will understand the land’s history, its humidity, its colonies of kangaroos and birds. Unlike fire department-conducted hazard-reduction burns, which are pre-planned and involve burning wide swathes of land simultaneously, practitioners light cultural fires in small areas on foot, with matches or, traditionally, with fire sticks, two fibrous sticks rubbed together to spark and hold flame. The flame begins slowly, almost sweetly.

“The fire will trickle around the grass and the leaves,” says Costello. “It’ll be this nice, white smoke in the air.” It won’t touch the tree canopy, allowing leaf coverage to remain constant, and it hisses across the ground slowly enough that animals have time to escape.

Aboriginal groups use fire in different ways. For many, including the Martu, cultural burning is a traditional part of hunting. Martu hunters set fire to clear patches of land, revealing animals’ burrows. The patchy landscape left by repeated burns creates diverse habitats perfect for local creatures, and the burns maintain a relationship between humans and other species.

In these lands, fire is a language that outsiders rarely speak. When she first moved to Martu country, says Bliege Bird, burned earth irked her. It looked sandpaper-rough as a bad haircut. After a few years with Martu people, however, those patches began looking different. “Look at the burn area,” Bliege Bird found herself thinking. “It’s so safe and clean.”

It’s a shift in consciousness many Australians are now experiencing. Since the fires started in December, Costello has found himself at the receiving end of a tidal wave of calls. Homeowners ask how they can protect their land; locals request workshops; international media send interview requests. With so much life already lost, the attention has Costello feeling both rueful and giddy. Neither Aboriginal people, nor their country, would be in this situation if Europeans had respected Aboriginal people in the first place.

Still, there is hope in this moment of reckoning. Costello cites Bliege Bird’s research as proof that science is catching up to traditional knowledge. Meanwhile, fire departments are unveiling programs that integrate cultural burning. While the legacy of European violence still aches, Costello is adamant that cultural burning is a team effort. “I’ve only learned a drop in the ocean,” says Costello. “But when you put all the people together, there’s buckets and buckets of knowledge.” That knowledge can build into a stream—or, perhaps, a tongue of fire, satisfying the land’s thirst to burn.

It's a classic good wasp/bad wasp situation.

In the summertime on Maui, the best place to see the sunrise is a chunk of ranchland in Kanaio, right off the side of the road. There, the sun doesn’t dwell in the sky, but in the forest, where hundreds of native wiliwili trees, also called Erythrina sandwicensis, erupt into bloom, with flame-orange petals unfurling from the tips of gnarled branches. But in 2005, this terrestrial sunrise began to fail. The wiliwilis were unable to bloom, their leaves forming strange cysts and their branches sprouting misshapen tumors.

Scientists soon identified a culprit, the erythrina gall wasp, Quadrastichus erythrinae, an incredibly tiny, incredibly invasive critter just a third the size of a mosquito. In 2008, after several years of testing, the Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA) approved the release of a biocontrol agent, Eurytoma erythrinae. (Spoiler: It’s another wasp.) Researchers hoped the new wasp would feed on the larvae of the havoc-wreaking gall wasps. They performed their duty admirably, and soon the wiliwilis began to show signs of recovery. But Eurytoma had a serious blindspot: It only targeted the biggest gall wasp larvae, leaving behind the smaller ones to continue infesting the trees’ seed pods, flowers, and seedlings. The adult wiliwilis had regained their health, but were producing infested, sterile seeds, dooming future generations. Luckily, the HDOA noticed this trend soon after the release and has a new solution. Spoiler: It’s another wasp. The agency’s new biological control plan is open for comments until January 22, according to Maui News.

It seems impossible for a wasp as small as a mote of dust to fell a tree, but the gall wasp has a trick up its sleeve. The insects inject their eggs into the wiliwili’s tissue. As the larvae feed, the tree’s leaves crinkle and deform, or the flowers shrivel, or the seeds stay green and sickly. These deformations, called galls, act as cocoons for the larvae, and when they stunt the leaves, they also prevent the tree from taking in light or releasing water. “The trees release water through their leaves, so if they can’t produce leaves, they can’t release water,” says Lissa Strohecker, a specialist with the Maui Invasive Species Committee. “And the [trees] would grow so heavy, they would rot from the inside.” Fourteen days later, the larvae hatch and the cycle begins again.

It is a mystery how the gall wasp got from East Africa to Hawaiʻi, but scientists suspect it was a stowaway, with a stopover in Taiwan, according to Darcy Oishi, a biological control section chief with HDOA. The question of how the wasp wound up on the islands was far less pressing than finding a way to control it. To accomplish that, for an insect almost too small to see, the HDOA needed a helper of similar stature.

For Hawaiian scientists, biocontrol begins on Google. “It starts with a lot of internet-based sleuthing and going through museum records to generate a real rough sketch of what we want to do,” says Oishi, who was involved with the first control wasp release. “Then we complete the picture by going out into the field.” The HDOA pinpointed East Africa, which has Erythrina trees related to the wiliwili. The logic was that if there are Erythrina trees there, there are gall wasps, and if there are gall wasps, there are things that eat gall wasps. The department sent exploratory entomologist Mohsen Ramadan and a team from the University of Hawaiʻi to several countries in East Africa to find this natural enemy.

In Africa, the researchers met with local entomologists, pored over insect collections, and ventured into the field, Oishi says. Luckily, it wasn’t a wild wasp chase. In Tanzania, Ramadan very few leaves with obvious galls, according to a 2006 story in the Honolulu Advertiser. There were gall wasps there, but something was keeping them from truly infesting the trees, and that something could help Hawaiʻi protect its own.

Ramadan collected what gall leaves he could find, with the idea that they likely also held whatever species was preying on the gall wasp larvae. The researchers brought them back to the United States in an inconspicuous carry-on, Oishi says. The infested, tumored leaves went into a cloth bag, and then into a screened plastic container, then into a larger bag, then into a styrofoam cooler, then into a box, and then a larger box—around the size of an end table. “We do a better job of packing than Amazon,” Oishi says. If you flew some leg of the route from Tanzania to Oahu in 2006, you might have shared a commercial jet with dozens of wasp larvae.

In Oahu, the leaves were taken to a quarantine facility, where researchers waited to see what emerged. “If you dissect them, you can see the larvae and confirm the leaf is being parasitized,” Oishi says, “but once you break open the gall, you can’t recover the insects.” Sure enough, wasps emerged—27 females and 17 males. After photographing the insects with a scanning electron microscope, the researchers saw that they were not gall wasps, but a new species of Eurytoma that apparently parasitizes the larvae of gall wasps. The adult wasps were taken to a nearby facility. “We needed to create a wasp factory to get the thousands of wasps we would need for the environment,” Oishi says.

Amid a bacchanal of wasp copulation, the researchers began exhaustive tests to see how the Eurytoma wasp interacted with native species. It would be a shame to control the gall wasp, only to encounter unintended consequences. The newcomer raised no red flags, and in two years—a split second in the world of biocontrol bureaucracy—Eurytoma was approved for release in Hawaiʻi. The first release took place in the Liliuokalani Botanical Gardens in Honolulu, where 500 lab-bred specimens swarmed a gall-covered wiliwili. State biologists released more than 8,000 individuals in total, on Oahu, Maui, Kauai, Molokai, and Hawaiʻi. Within months the wiliwilis showed signs of recovery, according to Maui News. In 2010, two years after the initial release, 60 percent of young wiliwili shoots were free of damage. By 2011, 90 percent of the targeted wiliwilis had regained their full, leafy glory. “The wasp is so tiny, you don’t see them, but you see their effects,” Strohecker says.

But all was not well. The leaves looked better, but the trees’ flowers, seed pods, and seedlings were still infected. Studies revealed that 54 percent of wiliwili seeds were not viable due to a gall affliction, according to Maui News. The scientists saw how Eurytoma, for all its diligence, preferred larger galls and left smaller ones untouched. Following the line of reasoning that got them that far, they figured they needed an even smaller wasp.

Eurytoma is already pretty small—just 2 millimeters—but then there’s Aprostocetus nitens, at just 1.1 to 1.7 millimeters. This was another species that flew commercial from Tanzania to Oahu in 2006, but its testing lagged behind, Oishi says. It’s potential to target smaller, seed-bound galls is great. It’s also resilient, with a lifespan of 101 days (compared to Eurytoma’s 40). And it can survive without food for four days and reproduce without a male. The HDOA has just finished testing its interactions with native species as well. “We’re confident that there won’t be nontargeted effects,” Oishi says.

If everything goes off without a hitch, Oishi predicts Aprostocetus might be seen (though not by any human eye) buzzing around wiliwilis in two years. But, he cautions, biocontrol never has a strict timeline, as the process reshapes ecosystems to, hopefully, establish a new balance of order. “Once we release it into the environment, there’s no going back,” he says. “Almost like Thanos snapping his fingers with the Infinity Gauntlet.” According to Strohecker, locals have been alarmed when they hear that the government is releasing a wasp (perhaps not realizing just how small and non-stingy they are). “But it only goes after its target," she says. "That’s the rule."

The goal for any introduced biocontrol agent is to limit its target, not eradicate it. “There’s a common thought that when we release a biocontrol agent it will kill off the host, and it doesn’t,” Oishi says, adding that when the population of gall wasps drops, the population of released wasps will, too. Sometimes, Oishi wonders about what these engineered ecosystems will look like in the future. “A million years from now, these natural enemies will have evolved, but they will have evolved together,” he says.

Until the great wasp hope buzzes onto the scene, the wiliwilis will be under tight watch by conservationists. Only three percent of Maui’s original dryland forest, the wiliwili’s sole natural habitat, survives. The wiliwili also holds great cultural importance for Native Hawaiians, who harvested its wood for surfboards and outriggers, and its seeds for leis, according to the Bishop Museum. And the flowers were traditionally used to treat venereal disease. On Maui, the largest populations of wiliwili are scattered around, but the easiest place to see them, Strohecker says, is the road by Kanaio, where the adult trees have mostly recovered and are bursting into fiery bloom once again. Hopefully, the seeds will follow them out of the dark night of wasp infestation—thanks to two other wasps, of course.

Even marauding Norsemen can be guilty of entrepreneurial overreach.

When Erik the Red landed on Greenland in the year 985, he was probably astounded by the residents of his new neighborhood. Heavy-set, gray-skinned, and ivory-tusked, walruses crowded the shores of the world’s largest island.

Erik and his Viking compatriots got right to work, killing the animals in droves and shipping off their precious tusks to mainland Europe. But a few hundred years later, in the 15th century, the Viking colony in Greenland collapsed.

Now, a study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews suggests that the insatiable Norse demand for ivory is what may have done the Greenland Vikings in. In a classic tale of devil-may-care capitalism, these Vikings seem to have overplayed their entrepreneurial hand, by selling (and hunting down) so much of their stock that it directly affected their product.

“Measurements of the tusk sockets showed that walruses hunted later in the life of the Norse colony tended to be smaller, a classic sign of over-exploitation,” says James Barrett, an archaeologist at Cambridge University and lead author of the paper, in an email.

Combined with genetic evidence geolocating the walrus remains and artifacts suggesting a Norse presence on Inuit sites to the north, it appears that the Vikings were forced farther afield in their quest for ivory.

“Putting it all together,” says Barrett, “we inferred resource depletion and longer and longer voyages to hunt walruses further and further north in Greenland.”

The ivory trade was a lucrative endeavor for the Vikings while it lasted. During the Middle Ages, the alabaster material was in heavy demand in Europe, for everything from inlays on fancy jewelry boxes to chess and hnefatafl game pieces.

To determine that the animals were overhunted by the Norse, Barrett’s team analyzed walrus remains from across Europe, dating from the 11th century to the 17th. In doing so, they discovered evidence that the earliest walruses found in Europe were from Greenland.

“The walrus hunt was a big reason for the Norse Greenland colony to be set up,” says Thomas McGovern, a zooarchaeologist at Hunter College in New York City, in an email. “[A]nd the hunt was clearly both really important economically and (probably) ideologically.”

For the Vikings, a new market abroad complicated matters further.

“We think the unit value of walrus ivory dropped when elephant ivory was introduced to Europe on a large scale in the 1200s,” says Barrett. “This meant the Greenland Norse had to hunt more to maintain their balance of trade with Europe. The result may have been resource depletion and increasingly untenable long voyages to the High Arctic”—a problem compounded by the short summer and the reduced time for walrus-hunting it offered.

With the ivory market’s gaze turned south toward the much larger tusks of land-based mammals, and the Norse strained by the reduced range of their quarry, things became difficult. The increasingly cold temperatures of the impending Little Ice Age didn’t help matters either.

“Combined with climate change, the colonies must have become less attractive places to live, and perhaps even less viable,” Barett says. “[The Vikings’] resilience was undermined.”

The snarl of economic and climatological problems proved too much for the Norse seafarers, and the Viking settlements of Greenland eventually disappeared, leaving abandoned churches and a slew of archaeological material. The walruses—at least the little ones that were left—breathed a mustached sigh of relief.

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Dr. Howard Conyers is preserving a community tradition.

Making whole hog barbecue is not an easy undertaking. It’s time- and labor-intensive, and each step requires precision. Chop wood. Dig a pit. Build supports for the hog. Start a fire. Clean and season the hog. Roast the hog on a spit above wood coals. Then, cook low and slow for approximately nine hours.

This procedure means more than a meal to be enjoyed. It represents a long legacy of African-American pitmasters, one that is in danger of disappearing. Rocket scientist and pitmaster Dr. Howard Conyers is trying to change that.

Conyers grew up in South Carolina, five miles from where his family was enslaved prior to the Civil War. Living on land that his family had owned for generations, he enjoyed how whole hog barbecue brought his family together at occasions throughout the year. But Conyers, growing up with the custom, “took it for granted” that it would always be around. "My whole life was whole hog,” he says.

But barbecue didn’t become Conyers’s only calling. He currently works at Stennis Space Center, on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana. There, he tests rocket engines for NASA. He’s also a whole hog pitmaster, and until recently, the host of the PBS Digital Studios show Nourish, where he talked to everyone from Leah Chase, the late Queen of Creole cooking, to historian David Shields, who is dedicated to bringing back Southern heirloom foods such as the Bradford watermelon.

On the surface, it may appear there isn’t a correlation between rocket science and cooking, especially barbecue. But to Conyers, the parallels are obvious. “It’s just like testing rockets,” he says. Rockets and pits both have to be thought out, designed, and built. Ultimately, the test is if the rocket works and if the hog is cooked well.

Conyers became interested in math and science while growing up on the farm. “When we sprayed nitrogen, which is fertilizer, to the corn and it turned green, you could tell there was a cause and effect," he says. "When we dissected animals in school, it wasn’t that different from slaughtering animals on the farm.”

Yet the scenes of Conyers’s childhood are fading away. “I realized, in my community back home, the number of black people cooking whole hog has decreased,” Conyers says. “The people who did this are getting older. And just like farming, whole hog in my community was disappearing.”

At the same time, barbecue became one of the trendiest foods in America. But as culinary historian Michael Twitty writes in The Guardian, “It was enslaved men and their descendants, not the Bubbas of today’s Barbecue Pitmasters, that innovated and refined regional barbecue traditions.”

Whole hog barbecue is different from other styles of barbecue. The hog is cooked in one piece, versus cooking it in parts. It’s considered the oldest form of barbecue in the United States, with roots in the cooking styles of the indigenous peoples of North America. However, the process gained traction in the American South, where enslaved people would cook whole hogs on plantations for celebrations and political gatherings.

In the past, the arduous work of preparing barbecue outside for 12 to 24 hours at a time was given to African-American men and women, both enslaved and free. One of the most renowned was John Dabney, who after purchasing his freedom, became a caterer and opened several restaurants in Virginia after the Civil War.

According to Conyers, the face of barbecue has changed, partly due to the food media focus on competition barbecue. Barriers to entry are high, with costly entrance fees and the requirement to travel throughout the United States in order to participate. Plus, competition barbecue is judged on four specific meats and cuts—chicken, pork (specifically pork shoulder), baby back ribs or spare ribs, and brisket. As of this year, there are only three African-American pitmasters in the Barbecue Hall of Fame, and each award was given posthumously. In contrast, white celebrity chefs such as Guy Fieri have received the award.

Conyers wants to redefine the barbecue narrative through his work, by telling the stories of the African-Americans “who decided to stay down south, and the strength and courage they exhibited.” A few years ago, Conyers realized his father wasn’t cooking hogs anymore. Instead, he was told, it was “up to the next generation to pick up and keep it going,” which kickstarted his own desire to continue the tradition.

“When I cooked in the ground in 2017 ... it was the first time that anyone in my community had done that in 40 years,” he says. “If I don’t recreate that, then it would be lost. I wasn’t going through a WPA narrative to recreate it.” [WPA stands for the Works Progress Administration, a government program that documented local life from 1939-1943.] Instead, he says, “I asked my dad to recreate it. If it hadn’t been done, then I wouldn’t know first-hand.”

Conyers wants people to know that barbecue is more than brisket. Recently, he’s prepared whole hog demonstrations at events and fundraisers such as Hogs for the Cause in order to amplify that African-Americans created what we know as barbecue. As for the time-consuming, laborious process of learning how to cook whole hogs, “I did it for the love of the craft and the people who did it before me,” he says. Looking forward, Conyers wants to write a book on the contributions of African-Americans to barbecue. In it, he plans to “show the black hand, from the farm to the pot or the pit.”

Some ash particles will blow or wash away, but others will sealed into the sedimentary record.

Over the past few days, the area around the crater of the Taal volcano, which sits south of Manila on the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, has become a more monochromatic world. The volcano belched ash—very fine fragments of volcanic rock, made up of glass and crystals—more than half a mile into the air, CNN reported. When the ash drifted to the ground, it carpeted the usually lush landscape with thick, wet layers of sand-colored or silvery gray powder. The heavy ash fatally submerged horses and cows; it covered roofs and coated statues. It dusted a pineapple farm so thoroughly that the fruit looked spray-painted.

Volcanic ash can spread far and wide. “The higher it goes, the greater extent to which it’s going to travel,” says Michael Manga, a volcanologist and chair of Earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley. The height depends on several factors, including how much energy an eruption has. “More energy is usually caused by more gas and stickier, thicker magma,” says Tracy Gregg, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. (Magma, or molten rock, always holds gas, but in an especially gloopy, thick matrix, pressure builds up and eruptions can be particularly powerful.)

The distribution of ash also depends on wind speed and strength, says Kristi Wallace, a geologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory—but under certain conditions, it’s nearly boundless. “The biggest volcanic eruptions will distribute material globally,” Manga says. When Mount Pinatubo—another volcano on Luzon—erupted in 1991, the spewing sulfur dioxide reached the stratosphere and dispersed across the planet, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Small ash particles soar higher than fountains of lava, Manga says—and wherever they land, they can stay put for ages. Much of the ash will eventually dry out and be blown away by wind, or perhaps washed out by rain. But some will remain. At first, ash may suffocate what it lands on—but over time, the iron and other nutrients inside it will make for nourishing soil, Manga says. “It’s one reason volcanoes are so great for agriculture,” he adds.

The immediate future for Taal isn’t so clear—there’s still a risk that it could erupt even more intensely, if more water from nearby lakes infiltrates the hydrothermal system. When magma mixes with water, “those tend to be very explosive eruptions,” Manga says. Given the potential for a massive eruption and the proximity to water, a tsunami isn’t out of the question, either, Scientific American reported. But whatever happens over the next few days, a record of this eruption will already be preserved in the ground. The lingering ash that isn’t blown away or eroded will eventually be buried and sealed into the sedimentary record. “If you were to dig a hole underneath you, you’d find deposits,” Manga says. “It sticks around pretty much forever.”

Even at $209 a pound, it’s expected to sell out shortly.

Most of the cheddar you’ve eaten was sold in the first few months after it was produced. Some sharper varieties may have aged a year or so. On the market now, however, is one nearly old enough to buy you a drink at the bar. One Wisconsin cheesemaker’s 20-year aged cheddar is now available for online presale.

Too sharp, you say? Cheese-aging pioneer Tony Hook says cheddar hits peak bitterness at three to five years. "After that, it starts smoothing out, like a fine wine.”

He and his wife Julie are the intrepid cheesemakers behind the rare batch, and owners of Hook’s Cheese Company. It’s not exactly their first rodeo: A 450-pound batch of their 20-year cheddar that hit the market in 2015 sold out within days. It cost $209 a pound, as will the new one.

Ken Monteleone is the owner of Madison cheese-shop Fromagination, a longtime carrier of Hook’s Cheese. Like most cheese-keen Wisconsinite, he expected Hook’s 2015 batch of super-aged cheddar to be too bitter, too strong. “It was actually very smooth and buttery,” he says, “with all these layers of flavor and these calcium crystals you’d typically only see with parmigiano reggiano.” He’s now fielding orders from all over the country for Hook’s new batch.

Monteleone insists that Hook’s is one of the best aged-cheddar makers in the country: “They’re the people everyone looks up to in Wisconsin for cheddar.” And while Tony Hook is downright demure, this 20-year batch is a milestone in more ways than one. With its maturation, he’ll have been quietly making cheese for 50 years.

Tony started working in cheese right out of high school. “Worked there while I went to college, once I got my degree, it was the only business I knew,” he says. “By that point it was also a business I loved.” It was at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1970s that he met his wife, Julie. He pulled her into the cheesemakers life, though she didn’t need much hand-holding. Her 1982 Colby won “Finest Cheese in the World” at the 1982 World Cheese Championship. She was the first woman to do so.

When the Hooks bought their own factory in 1987, they decided to experiment with the facility’s underground cold storage. At that time, no one was aging their cheddars past three or four years. “We decided we’d expand to at least five years, because nobody in the U.S. was going that old,” says Hook. “It was uncharted territory.”

Alone against the unrecorded mysteries of super-aging cheddar, Tony followed his tongue. Having sourced from the same dairy farm for decades, he became uncannily familiar with his ingredients over the years. He then learned to forecast flavor through the aging process, testing each batch and selling off wheels he knew wouldn’t make it to his target age. “It’s still a very good cheese, I can just tell when it’s not meant to age much longer,” he says. This time, 500 pounds of cheddar, which the Hooks squirreled away when the Soviet Union was still intact, made it to the 20-year mark.

Dale Curley, owner of Larry’s Market in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, calls Hook’s 20-year cheese simply “spectacular.” What struck him most, however, was Hook’s ability to develop the cheese in the first place. “There’s just so much that can go wrong. Tony’s a master at this.” The 90 pounds that Hook’s allocated to Curley’s retail market sold out in 48 hours online.

If the price tag startles you, know that half of the proceeds will fund dairy research at the couple’s alma mater. While the pre-sale is on now, the cheese won't arrive until Memorial Day Weekend this year. If it sells out before you splurge, Tony urges patience: “I’m not going to give out any dates—they may not even come out until I’m retired. But there will be more.”