A redesigned museum hopes to grapple with the thorny legacy of the “convict period.”

Somewhere in Darug Country, Australia, much of which is now greater Sydney, a forest is under attack. A path cuts through the densely wooded area like a scar, and freshly felled trees wait to be loaded onto a wagon nearby. A group of incarcerated men scrape and hack at the remaining trunks. Beyond the grove, at a distance, a group of Aboriginal Darug men watch, helpless. The scene is a microcosm of the island’s colonial period—literally. You will probably have to squint to see it all.

“Timber-Getters” is a miniature model of Australia’s history, at 1:100 scale, one of nine scenes built for the newly redesigned Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. The historic compound opened in 1819 to house incarcerated men during Australia’s “convict period,” and is now managed by Sydney Living Museums (SLM). This makeover, two years in the making and wrapping up in February 2020, is meant to communicate a fuller, more inclusive history of the early colonization of Sydney, including its impact on Aboriginal people; the barracks themselves are built on traditional Gadigal land. For all their modern perspective, the models are charmingly retro. “That model [“Timber-Getters”] alone gets across the story of the colonial process and the devastation it wreaks on the country and its people,” says Gary Crockett, a curator at SLM. “Sometimes something cartoonish can capture a really large issue and boil it down into something that is immediately graspable.”

Britain began banishing its imprisoned people overseas in the early 17th century, primarily to the North American colonies. The infractions involved were largely petty affairs, as more serious crimes were punishable by death. The Revolutionary War shifted the focus to New South Wales, Australia, in 1788. In the early years, the sentenced people were not imprisoned exactly, but were forced to do labor for much of the day. “They worked until three or four in the afternoon and then were free to do their own work,” Crockett says. “In the early years, that level of freedom was quite extraordinary.”

But that changed when British officer Lachlan Macquarie commissioned incarcerated architect Francis Greenway to design barracks for 600 men, in the hope that living there would improve their moral character. (Macquarie was so impressed with Greenway’s work that he pardoned him.) “The barracks were all about control,” Crockett says. “It was a system of difficulty, punishment, and cruelty.” The barracks opened in 1819, and were copied in other British penal colonies.

The system was even crueler to the local Aboriginal people, thanks in part to the incarcerated labor force. “Convicts were at the forefront of growth and expansion of an ever-moving frontier—clearing lands, building roads and settling new farms,” Peter White, a Gamilaroi Murri man and the former head of indigenous strategy and engagement at SLM, writes on the museum site. “They played a pivotal role in the subjugation of the country and the many nations of people who were connected to that country.”

Condensing all this history into plastic models—comprehensible at a glance—was a dizzying task. Crockett and a team of SLM curators selected the nine scenes—five from the laborers’ perspective and four from an Aboriginal perspective. “We wanted to speak to the impacts that forced labor had not just on the colony, but what it meant for these Aboriginal communities who were on the receiving end of wave after wave of convict labor,” says Beth Hise, the head of content and strategic projects at SLM. “It’s an interesting process. It included everything from what size and shape should a wheelbarrow be, to how do we depict a cultural landscape and what do we need to include in it?”

Crockett and other curators prepared briefs for each scene, drawing on historical images and texts, then artists from Sydney Modelcraft took over. They consulted more historical images and descriptions, and carved each landscape out of foam, Matt Scott, director of Modelcraft, writes in an email. For one scene that depicts oyster collecting in Sydney Harbour, at a site that exists today, the modelers used modern photos and satellite views.

Then came the buildings, wildlife, trees, shrubs, trains, ladders, and wheelbarrows. For the people, they used commercially available figurines, such as those used in model train sets, and hand-painted them. “The whole thing had to be choreographed like a giant opera,” Crockett say. “Every character had to be plausibly different, from the tree cutter on the stone by the lighthouse, to the cook, to the boy running with the bucket of water, to the lazy soldier.”

Crockett wanted each scene to tell a story. For example, the oyster-gathering scene depicts how many of Sydney’s early buildings were built using ground-up shells as mortar. “We couldn’t just put 60 convicts on the beach,” he says. Instead, the figures were arranged in small scenes at each stage of the process: plucking the oysters from the rock, loading them into baskets, and preparing to load them to a ship offshore. The often-brutal reality of incarcerated life also makes appearances. One scene, which depicts a stone quarry labor gang, features an incarcerated man crushed to death under a boulder, and another bleeding and unconscious.

Developing the scenes spotlighting the Aboriginal experience was a lengthier, more complex process. The content of these scenes grew out the curators’ conversations with indigenous communities and consultants, which took more than a year. An Aboriginal curator joined the museum’s team on contract to assist. “We worked in equal partnership with Aboriginal communities,” Hise says. “And we ended up with a blended interpretation combining both historic record and cultural knowledge from the community.”

The four Aboriginal scenes, which all take place in Darug Country, depict the tree-clearing; the Blacktown Native Institution Site, a residential school for Aboriginal children; a peaceful Aboriginal community that is being ambushed by white settlers with swords; and a group of warriors led by the Wiradjuri resistance leader Windradyne attacking a settlement of incarcerated laborers. “It represents a retelling of these stories from an indigenous perspective rather than a curated colonial approach,” Scott says, adding that certain stories were removed from the models after the Aboriginal community deemed them to be inaccurate. More violent interactions—such as the massacre at Myall Creek Station, in which dozens of Aboriginal people were murdered by a white vigilante group, including laborers from the Hyde Park Barracks—are not depicted in the models.

For the tree-clearing scene, Aboriginal consultants arranged the trees and creeks certain ways and recommended models of specific animals that hold cultural importance, such as possums in hollow-bearing trees, Hise says. “A possum is so tiny at 1:100 scale but it’s incredibly important that we include them to convey what is happening when trees are torn down,” she says. “It’s not just a loss of trees, but a loss of animals and their homes.”

While the white laborers could be easily fashioned out of existing figurines, there were no existing models for Aboriginal people. Museum curators collected historic photographs and imagery in partnership with the Aboriginal community and asked an artist to 3D print original models, each under an inch tall. The model-makers consulted Aboriginal elders to get the right body shape, type, and skin tone. “It was amazing to see how an accurate 3D representation could be made from a single grainy historical photograph,” Scott says.

When the Hyde Park Barracks reopen on February 21, 2020, the models will each be displayed within a black structure with openings through which visitors can peek, Hise says. “It’s combined with an audio experience with the voices of people and characters from the past who introduce you to their world as they lived it,” she says.

Though the models tell a grand story at a small scale, each contains details that reward the careful viewer. “A visitor will have fun trying to find several birds in the trees of the native forest,” Scott says, kangaroos, long-necked turtles, and even fish. “I have it from a reliable source that there are three snakes to be found on every model."

A historical head-scratcher inspired the world's worst jelly bean flavor.

Every October, around 200,000 people gather in Kentucky for Court Days, the largest outdoor event in the state. Ever since 1794, locals have bought, traded, or sold various goods at the festival, held in the city of Mount Sterling. But in one of the strangest offerings in Court Days history, Kurt Gohde, professor of art at Transylvania University, handed out meat-flavored jelly beans in 2007 to anyone who would eat them.

Some people said the flavor of the dark red jelly beans reminded them of raw bacon. Another pair agreed with each other that they tasted like “strawberry pork chop.” Gohde, who commissioned the jelly beans with their specific flavor profile, describes them as tasting like “a heavily sugared bacon, with a metal aftertaste.”

The jelly beans were flavored like the 1876 meat shower, a mysterious event where chunks of flesh rained down over nearby Olympia Springs, one early March day. Gohde had hoped that meat connoisseurs at Court Days might help him determine the true identity of the mysterious substance.

Gohde, likely the foremost expert on meat rain, first learned about the incident in a book about strange weather phenomena over 20 years ago. He had just moved to Kentucky from upstate New York, and was keen on asking his students more details about the unusual event. To his surprise, none of them knew what he was talking about.

Gohde, an artist often drawn to the strange and obscure, was fascinated by the meat shower. “I have a tremendous appetite for wonder,” he says. “I believe people need wonder in their lives. I know I do.” Eager to learn more, he trawled Google Books, old newspaper clippings, and research papers for mentions of the incident.

One article, dated March 9, 1876 and reprinted the next day in the New York Times, described a Mrs. Crouch who was in her yard making soap when flecks of meat began to fall down around her. “The sky was perfectly clear at the time, and she said it felt like large snowflakes,” read the article. “One piece fell near her which was three or four inches square.” Two men that tasted the raw meat thought that it might be mutton or venison, and the Crouch family cat gorged on the fortuitous feast.

Theories regarding the origin of the meat shower abounded. One early idea was that the meat was actually nostoc, a type of bacteria that swells to look like a clump of seaweed when exposed to moisture. However, lab tests confirmed the meat shower was actually bits of muscle, lung, and cartilage, dashing that idea.

Another disconcertingly violent theory Gohde discovered proposed that two brothers had gotten into a knife fight, and a twister picked up the gory carnage and deposited it over the residents of Olympia Springs.

Gohde’s favorite theory, however, is one proposed by humorist William Livingston Alden. “The obvious conclusion is that the Kentucky shower of meat was really a meteoric shower,” wrote Alden in a New York Times article published on March 11, 1876. The article explains that since “meteoric stones'' constantly revolve around the sun, it would also stand to reason that “there revolves about the sun a belt of venison, mutton, and other meats, divided into small fragments which are precipitated about the earth.”

Alden continues to explain that previously, scientists had theorized that meteors were the result of exploded planets, so the meat shower must be “inhabitants who formerly occupied the wrecked planet”—essentially, that the meat was exploded alien livestock.

The article even goes so far as to suggest that scientists needed finer technology so that they would be able to predict meat rain like the weather. The writer indulges in a full Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs fantasy, writing that “light showers of beefsteak may be looked for in the New England and Middle States during the morning, followed by a heavy rain of mutton in the afternoon.”

But a definitive explanation of the meat shower never reached the residents of Olympia Springs. “In 1876, the idea of solving every riddle just didn’t exist yet, so people were largely okay with a relatively plausible solution. And then they would just move on,” says Gohde.

But Gohde didn’t. Fascinated with the meat shower to begin with, a serendipitous find in 2004 stoked his ardor even further. He was clearing out storage closets at Transylvania University when he stumbled upon an old glass jar sealed with a cork stopper. It contained a chunk of white, fatty-looking meat, suspended in a pale yellow liquid. The label was faded, but the words Olympia Springs could still be made out. Gohde was thrilled.

Determined to try and pinpoint what mystery animal rained down over Olympia Springs, Gohde worked with a colleague in the biology department to have the sample genetically tested. Unfortunately, the sample was too old and contaminated to give any conclusive results.

Then Gohde got creative. Much of his artwork involves community engagement, so he had a taste lab based in Cincinnati analyze flavor compounds of the meat sample and reconstruct the taste in a jelly bean. Gohde wanted to educate local Kentuckians about the curious climatic event, and if anything, jelly beans would be a great conversation starter.

“I was fascinated with the idea that people would just eat it and then declare what it tasted like,” he says.

Gohde drove to Cincinnati and picked up over a thousand of the meat shower jelly beans, packed in small metal tins. Gohde waited till he got home to try them. Parked in his driveway, he popped one in his mouth.

“The taste, frankly, is so vile,” Gohde says with a chuckle. “I remember thinking it was really strong. The first one I ate tasted like chemicals and sugar.”

Accounts from 1876 described the meat shower as tasting like mutton, although Gohde thinks the jelly beans lack the distinct muttony flavor. He thought the Kentucky Court Days would be a good place to talk to locals and gather opinions on what the meat could be. Feedback varied, but ultimately Gohde didn’t arrive at a definitive consensus.

Alas, Gohde found the most likely explanation for the meat shower—and its contents—in articles published in Louisville Medical News and The American Journal of Microscopy in 1876. Several scientists believed that the meat shower was a result of vomiting vultures, a theory first proposed by an unnamed Ohio farmer.

Kentucky is home to turkey vultures that gorge themselves on carrion, limiting their ability to fly. If spooked, the birds need to immediately take flight, and lighten their load by regurgitating their last meal. As it turns out, the unlucky Mrs. Crouch was likely rained on by a buzzard barf blizzard.

One of the articles also posits that it’s possible that the vultures feasted on sheep treated with strychnine, a poison used to target coyotes. The vultures may have vomited in response to feeding on poisoned meat.

Now, Gohde wants to take his fascination with the meat shower even further. He’s in the early stages of conceptualizing a collaborative community art project that would recreate the events of March 3, 1876 by dropping meat from the sky over Olympia Springs. He hopes that by sharing the story of the meat shower through his art, more Kentuckians will take interest in this strange chapter of state history.

As for his jelly beans, he still has a few tins tucked away at his studio. No one has ever wanted to try them twice.

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The lucrative stockfish trade dates back to the Viking days.

It’s 11 o'clock on a dim, cold, blustery morning in February, with a feeble arctic sun barely peeping over the horizon, and the harbor at Røstlandet is a hive of activity. Three boats are tied up to the wharf, delivering their bounties of fresh caught cod, while the skipper of another boat nestles his craft into a slot freshly vacated by a fourth. Ropes are cast, and cranes swing into operation. Through the open doors of a fish factory, forklifts can be seen shunting around the concrete floor, bearing huge plastic tubs filled with cod, cod livers, and salted cod roe.

Back on the dock, sales are made and deals are struck with a handshake, in an atmosphere of hard, cheery camaraderie. Some of these men have known each other since they were schoolboys together, watching their fathers and grandfathers doing these very same things.

It's cod season once again in the far north of Norway, and Røst—a remote scatter of rocky islets off the outermost tip of Norway's Lofoten Islands—is once more the honeypot for fishermen seeking jackpot paychecks in the lucrative dried cod trade, Norway's oldest export industry, dating back to the Viking days.

Every winter, for more than a thousand years, Norwegian fishermen have flocked to these parts to scoop up the bounty of big, meaty migrating cod that come streaming down by the millions from the Barents Sea to breed among the reefs and shoals around the Lofoten Islands, and most especially here around Røst.

The fish are cleaned and gutted and hung by their tails, in pairs, to dry in the traditional manner, on slatted wooden frames that can be seen all over the island. Then the catch is rendered into stockfish—the nutritious cod jerky that once sustained the Vikings on their long sea voyages and, today, is a highly prized delicacy in Italy, where it’s a key ingredient in traditional regional dishes from Venice, Naples, Genoa, and Calabria.

"Stockfish isn't an Italian product, but sometimes you could almost imagine that it was," says Olaf Pedersen, a former CEO of Glea Sjømat, one of Røst's main stockfish companies, founded by his grandfather in 1936. "Over the centuries it has become deeply ingrained into their culinary and cultural traditions."

Indeed, the Ligurian town of Badalucco holds a stockfish festival every year to commemorate the time, back in the Middle Ages, when the townspeople survived a siege by Moorish invaders by eating only stockfish. And over near Venice, on the opposite side of the country, the town of Sandrigo hosts the world's largest stockfish festival—the Festa del Bacalà, held every September in celebration of the famed regional dish Baccalà alla Vicentina.

So important is the Italian market to Norway's stockfish producers that Pedersen recently moved from Røst to Milan, where he now looks after the interests of a collective of 22 stockfish producers. Lofoten stockfish was recently awarded Denomination of Origin status, meaning it enjoys the same legal protections as Parma ham and French champagne.

Any way you want to measure it, it's a long way from the warm Mediterranean sunshine to the moody skies over Røst, whose 365 islets and skerries are home to a few hundred hardy Norwegians and about a million seabirds. Yet the links between these two very different places go back nearly 600 years, to the shipwreck in 1432 of a Venetian merchant trader named Pietro Quirini. After his boat sank, he spent three enjoyable months with the islanders, and on his return to Italy, presented an account of his adventures to the Venetian senate.

He also brought back some stockfish. The rich, nutritious, intensely flavored cod jerky proved an instant culinary hit, finding its way into regional dishes all over the country. An improbable new trade route was born, linking the Renaissance city states then comprising Italy with the lonely windswept isles of Røst.

It’s a trade route that’s helped make the islanders rich: Røst has the highest per capita number of millionaires in Norway. And the Italian historical connection persists. Take a stroll through Røst today and you'll come upon places with names like the Quirini Cafe and Quirini Park. In 2012, an opera based on Quirini's shipwreck premiered on Røst—a first for the tiny island—and was so popular with locals and visitors that it was brought back for a repeat performance two years later.

The islanders owe their good fortune to their unique location. Not only does Nature deliver countless millions of migrating cod to their doorstep every winter. Thanks to the modifying effects of the Gulf Stream, they also enjoy exceptionally mild winters, given their latitude. Although the island sits well above the Arctic Circle, at nearly 68º north, winter temperatures here seldom fall much below freezing, or rise much above it.

"We have the perfect climate for making stockfish," says Pedersen. "It's a fine line. Even a couple of degrees can make all the difference. If the temperature were to fall to, say, minus-3 [degrees Celsius, or 26 degrees Fahrenheit], the freezing action breaks down the cells in the flesh, and you end up with something that's yellowish and rubbery and unpalatable. On the other hand, if the temperature rises too high, you'll just get a slow rot."

Whether Røst’s delicately balanced climate stays perfect for making stockfish is an open question. So is the effect warmer waters might have on cod migration routes. One change that has already been noticed in a warming world is that fishing villages elsewhere in Lofoten that were previously too cold for curing stockfish are now able to do so. “Røst doesn’t have it all to itself quite so much any more,” says Pedersen.

Stockfish—the name derives from “stick fish,” because of the wooden frames on which it’s dried—is cured in the open air over several weeks, typically from February, when the season opens, to April. Then, to keep the spring rains from spoiling it, it’s brought indoors to finish drying. By midsummer it’s fully cured, and ready to be graded and sold.

"Stockfish is like fine cognac," says Ansgar Pedersen, a veteran cod grader at Glea Sjømat who has been in the business all his life. Now nearly 70 years old, he has no plans to retire anytime soon. “I’ll retire when I’m 80,” he says with a laugh. He loves his job, which is just as well, as it requires him to examine each of the 400,000 or so dried cod the company sells each year, holding the fish up to the light, looking for subtleties in color, texture, and scent before deciding which of the 20 different grades to assign it.

Once or twice a year he’ll travel to Italy to meet with buyers and discuss their needs. "The people in Naples tend to want larger, meatier cod than those in Genoa or Calabria," he says. "It all depends on how they are preparing. Each region has their own specialty."

If stockfish has insinuated itself into Italian culture and cuisine, it's the very warp and weft of Norwegian. "There is a taste of cod in all my music," Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg once claimed. It's a coda that can be said to run through the rest of Norway’s culture and history as well, with the iconic fish appearing on crests and coats of arms in cities and villages up and down the coast.

The earliest literary reference to the dried-cod trade comes in an almost operatic scene in Egil’s Saga, a Viking yarn set in the ninth century. In it, a young Norse raider named Thorolf Kvendulfsson sets off for England in a brilliantly painted, dragon-prowed vessel, its blue- and red-striped sail filling with the summer breeze, its thwarts piled high with the fortune in furs and dried cod he and his men had accumulated during the previous winter.

The cargo fetches a fancy price in England, and Thorolf returns to Norway a wealthy man, only to fall afoul of the king, who feels that Thorolf has been getting a little too rich, a little too cocky, and not paying his taxes. Their subsequent falling out—and Thorolf’s murder—sets up an intergenerational feud that forms the narrative thread of one of the greatest of the Old Norse sagas.

By the time 13th-century scribes got around to committing the tale to parchment, the stockfish trade in which Thorolf had been dabbling had become the economic engine for the whole of Norway, accounting for more than 80 percent of the country’s exports, and a source of immense wealth. With medieval Europe’s population rapidly growing and urbanizing, there was an increasing demand for tradable foodstuffs.

Stockfish was the ideal commodity. Lightweight, durable, and highly nutritious, it could last for years without spoiling and be reconstituted quickly by soaking in water. Demand soared. Bergen, a picturesque seaport founded on the cod trade, became Norway's capital and an important seat in the Hanseatic League, a medieval merchant-trader confederation, with over 2,000 resident members exporting thousands of tons of stockfish each year to Germany, Holland, and England.

While it was the prosperous burghers in town who made most of the profits, the tough peasant fishermen did well too. A man with a boat had his own business, free and clear, with all the lucrative upside that might entail. Reveling in their freedom and spurred by the possibilities of jackpot wealth, these fishermen braved hardships and dangers, sailing north to Lofoten’s cod banks each winter as though it were a gold rush—Norway’s own annual Klondike.

By the turn of the 20th century, more than 30,000 fishermen were flocking to these islands each winter. Grainy black-and-white photographs show Røst’s harbors so jammed with boats that it was possible to walk from one side to the other without getting your feet wet.

“This was Lofoten,” Norwegian author Jan Bojer wrote in his 1921 coming-of-age classic, The Last Viking. "A land in the Arctic Ocean that all the boys along the coast dreamed of visiting someday, a land where exploits were performed, fortunes were made, and where fishermen sailed in a race with Death. Through hundreds of years they had migrated thither, and many of them had lost their lives on the sea. A few returned home with well-filled pockets, but the greater number sailed to the end of life in poverty. Yet they went up again and again, year after year, generation after generation. It was their fairy land of fortune. They had to go.”

Times have changed. In a world alive with 21st-century opportunities, young Norwegians no longer daydream about scooping fortunes in cod out of icy midwinter seas. Their aspirations lie elsewhere—in safe, comfortable jobs in distant cities. In recent years they’ve been leaving their picturesque fishing villages in droves—not just on Røst or Lofoten, but all over Norway.

Even if they wanted to take up fishing, few could afford it. Buying a cod quota—essentially a commercial license to catch cod—can cost as much as half a million dollars. And then you have to buy your boat and equipment, and hire a crew.

It was always a risky proposition, all the more so in an age of changing climates. “Banks are not keen to lend that kind of money to young people just starting out,” says Pedersen.

Fishing in Norway is increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few old families or companies with deep pockets, while jobs in the fish factories, or hanging the thousands of cod on wooden frames, are increasingly filled by migrants who flock north, much as in the stories of old.

“The face of the stockfish trade has changed a lot over the past few years,” says Olaf Pedersen. “And it will continue to change and evolve. But at the same time, it is still the same business it always was—drying fresh caught cod in the open air.”

By midnight the day's catch is hanging on the wooden frames. And under the eerie glow of the Northern Lights begins the age-old curing process that will render it into stockfish.

Gypsum is common, but this specimen is remarkable.

Somewhere inside the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., a piece of gypsum appears to have sprouted a snake. Like many of the museum’s specimens, this mineral is bewitching and bizarre enough that some visitors can’t believe it was plucked from a cave in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. “One of the biggest misconceptions we get is that people see these beautiful specimens and think someone created it,” says Gabriela Farfan, the museum’s curator of gems and minerals.

Gypsum is a common mineral—"it's found around the world," Farfan says, in places that are sufficiently rich in calcium, sulfur, and water. And though it’s often enlisted for mundane work, for example in fertilizer or plaster, the mineral looks striking in its natural state. Nearly 1,000 feet underground, in a limestone cave in Naica, Mexico, gypsum grows in massive spears around 40 feet long. The subterranean landscape boasts the “Cave of Swords,” which is studded with stubby gypsum “daggers,” and the milky-white “Cave of Crystals,” which looks like the jagged, luminous Fortress of Solitude and was dubbed the “Sistine Chapel of crystals” by the researcher Juan Manuel García-Ruíz. (Farfan couldn’t say precisely which cave once harbored the sinuous specimen.)

According to the museum, this particular specimen’s appearance is a result of some crystal strands growing more quickly than others. Different crystals grow at different rates: Some materialize in hours, days, or months, and some in much, much longer. (In 2011, a team of scientists, including García-Ruíz, gauged growth rate at the Naica mine by submerging gypsum samples in water from the cave, and estimated that, at a constant temperature of about 131 degrees Fahrenheit, a spear with a three-foot diameter would have taken about a million years to grow.) As this specimen shows, the rate can vary even in a single environment, where the pressure, temperature, and ingredients are about the same.

And why the serpentine curling? Some researchers have found that when two separate minerals, with two separate structures and possibly different chemistries, grow together at the same time, they can form a layered structure that curls, Farfan says. But that isn’t necessarily what went on here. The snake-like mineral remains a bit of a mystery. “The whole field of crystal growth is a huge question in mineralogy,” she says. “It’s surprising how many questions we still have.”

Sotol could bring Texans and Mexicans together, or divide them.

Brent Looby of Desert Door Distillery wants to share sotol with the world. “It’s a gateway to West Texas,” he writes, “that tastes unquestionably of the Texas land.” The spirit is distilled from dasylirion, a spiky succulent that dots the arid terrain of the Chihuahuan Desert, which spans the U.S.–Mexico border. Desert Door is the first commercial sotol distillery in the United States.

The venture has some detractors.

“It’s an appropriation that should be dealt with,” says Jacob Jacquez, the sixth-generation sotolero, or sotol distiller, behind Sotol Don Celso in Janos, Mexico. The company is named for his late father, a sotolero and politician who defended the niche spirit which, for much of the 1900s, was outlawed and violently suppressed. “I think they should take a step back and respect the families that were persecuted, that fought for that word: 'sotol.’”

This transnational debate within the craft community now has advocates in the U.S. and Mexican governments. The USMCA, a trade deal signed by President Trump last week to replace NAFTA, includes a provision that may classify sotol as distinctively Mexican. In other words, Texan sotol distillers like Looby could be—like Californians who must make “sparkling wine” rather than champagne—barred from using the word.

On a deeply fraught border, a storied spirit stands to either bridge the divide or deepen it.

Long before European contact, Rarámuri tribes of the Chihuahuan Desert fermented juice from sotol into something of a low-alcohol beer. But in the 1500s, Spanish distillation techniques presented new possibilities for the desert shrub.

“It’s a transparent plant,” says Ricardo Pico, founder of Sotol Clande, a cooperative of five vinatas, or sotol distilleries, throughout Chihuahua. “It tastes like where it comes from.” The plant’s acute terroir made it a staple of rural life among the people of Coahuila, Durango, and Chihuahua, an enduring link between Mexicans and Mexico itself—the land made liquid. “In dry areas, it’s like rain on the dessert: some earthiness, a peppery finish. In the forest region, there’s moss, eucalyptus, menthol—just like going to the forest,” says Pico.

Looby claims that the earliest known traces of human consumption of sotol, however, are found in Texas. “Indigenous people have been cooking and consuming sotol [here] for 10,000 years.” To boot, he adds, sotol was first commercially distilled in El Paso, in 1907, because it was illegal to distill sotol in Mexico until 1994.

There's certainly some truth to that claim. Throughout the mid 1900s, Mexican police implemented a broad ban on sotol. Experts disagree on the reason—it may have been tequila producers stifling competition, or simply the Mexican government’s puritanical approach to DIY distillation (sotol was often produced in the home). Still others claim it was the Mafia clearing the market for corn whiskey during U.S. Prohibition. Whatever the reason, while sotol led a quiet life in West Texas, Mexican police made a burnt, bloody scene of it south of the border.

During American Prohibition, Mexican police sought to rid the country's northern fringes of sotoleros and their vinatas. “My great-grandfather was kidnapped by the state police,” says Jacquez. For him, the perceived role of the United States isn’t easily forgotten. “My people were persecuted during your Prohibition because of the drink,” he says.

Branded as outlaws, sotoleros mobilized their distilleries by latching their copper stills to donkeys. “They couldn’t catch them all red-handed,” says Juan Pablo Carvajal, co-founder of Los Magos Sotol. “Someone would always tip them off.” Police burned down vinatas and riddled heirloom copper stills with bullets, arresting and even killing sotoleros. Jacquez says most of his uncles became teachers, farmers, or carpenters. “You couldn’t make sotol; you might get shot.” Even after Prohibition ended, the Mexican government smeared the spirit as field-worker swill fit for bandits and low-lives.

“That’s what we’re bouncing back from now,” says Jacquez. In the 1980s, sotoleros, including, prominently, Jacquez’s late father, petitioned local and state governments to earn their rights back. In 1994, the Mexican government officially issued licenses to distill sotol, and, in the early 2000s, the spirit earned protected status under a Denomination of Origin. “It was a victory, because we were finally on the map amongst Mexicans, at least,” says Jacquez. Today, sotol is following the path to global recognition paved by tequila and mezcal.

Twenty-seven countries recognize sotol’s protected status. The United States is not one of them.

The United States’ first sotol distillery started when Looby and his co-founders, Judson Kauffman and Ryan Campbell, were tasked with designing a business during a “Venture Creation Course” at the University of Texas at Austin. “When Judson was young, his uncle talked about sotol being moonshined out in west Texas where he grew up,” Looby writes. “We are attempting to tell another side of the story that has been overlooked for some time.” Their theoretical distillery won first place in a class competition, and in 2017, they founded Desert Door Distillery. Today, they employ 40 people across six U.S. cities.

With access to 75,000 acres of West Texan property littered with desert spoon, the Texans can afford to experiment. They age a portion of their sotol in oak barrels, leaving the product tasting similar to a cognac or bourbon. They partnered with a local brewery to craft the world’s first sotol-aged beer. You can buy branded beanies, totes, and keychains on their website.

While Desert Door has faced criticism, they remain confident in their mission. “We’re a huge state with a lot of pride,” Kauffman told The Statesman. “We should have something to call our own.”

Texas’s second distillery took a different tack. Morgan Weber and other co-founders from Marfa Spirits crossed the border to learn from sotoleros before launching their business. “I figured if I just go into this blind, I stand a strong chance of pissing somebody off without knowing it,” he told me. He consulted with producers and distributors, and attended a sotol conference in Chihuahua hosted by sotoleros. Despite them being the only three non-Spanish speakers, their hosts hired a translator to keep them up to speed. “We all want to pay homage to the spirit,” says Weber, though he understands the backlash among hard-line never-Texans. “They’re completely in the right to feel that way, but I hope that they keep an open mind.”

South of the border, news of American sotol distilleries is met with mixed reviews, at best. Carvajal sees acceptance falling along generational lines: “All the new people who are coming into the industry see this as an opportunity to grow, but most of the old-school sotoleros don’t want the U.S. to be making sotol.

For some, it’s the role the U.S. may have played that grates. “I see producers calling it ‘Texas sotol,’’' says Jacquez. “I think they should change the name. Play a fair game.”

“Would I make sparkling white wine in Chihuahua and call it ‘champagne?'" says Pico. “It’s not my thing, not my heritage, not my tradition.” He suggests Texans use the name “desert spoon spirit.” “It’s not a bad name.”

With the passage of a new North American trade deal, it’s a name Texas distillers may have to learn to love. A minor provision commits the U.S. to consider classifying sotol as distinctively Mexican. Despite its vague wording, the measure found some fans in Mexico.

“It’s a good call,” says Pico. “You can’t put plans that have just been made in the same jar as hundreds of years of tradition. We’re not talking about the same thing.” He and others feel the recognition is not only a symbolic victory, but one that will bolster a regional economy and a tradition long suppressed.

Desert Door’s founders are not losing sleep. “The USMCA is under no obligation to reach a particular conclusion,” writes Looby. In short order, the company amassed a bipartisan group of 20 lawmakers willing to fight for sotol’s binational identity. Texas Senator John Cornyn raised the issue in a Senate Finance Committee hearing last month, along with a rave review. “For those members of the committee who’ve never consumed sotol, I would recommend it,” he said.

Carvajal appreciates the symbolism of the trade deal, but worries about missing an opportunity to broaden the sotol market. “I think the Mexican government wants to protect the citizens in this industry,” he says. “But it would grow stronger if we allowed other people to join in on the tradition, if the land that they live on allows it.”

Through its violent history, and its dogged plod into modernity, Carvajal sees, more than anything, a shot at reconciliation. What if there were a regional Chihuahuan Desert denomination of origin? “It would be a great statement to show that we share a common land,” he says, “that we share some traditions, and some ideas of what we can do with that land.”

The eco-friendly approach reflects Taiwan's shifting funerary practices.

Twice a year, the Chen brothers Boris and Po-An hop onto the latter’s motorcycle and make their way up the mountainous district of Wenshan in Taipei. It’s a scenic journey that will take them past the leafy grounds of a solar farm that sits on a restored former landfill called the Fudekeng Environmental Restoration Park. The Taiwanese government implemented this urban rehabilitation project in 2003 to protect vestigial green space in the capital, hoping to repair damage caused by unfettered urban expansion through the 1980s.

The Chens continue driving until they arrive at a beautiful arboretum that was parceled off from the same area as the solar farm. It defies belief that this verdant sanctuary was once covered in waste. Here, the brothers set their cans of chilled coffee down underneath a grove of cinnamon trees. “Our mother’s ashes are buried there,” Boris says, pointing to a spot under the trees, about three feet away from him. No physical markers point to the presence of human remains. Aside from the Chens, there are four other people taking a stroll around the park. “The weather is not ideal today,” says Po-An, “or there might be more people.”

Welcome to Yong’ai Garden, an area of land stretching across 1.2 hectares and one of two public parks in Taipei where tree burials have been taking place since 2007. The concept of a tree burial is simple: family members place the ashes of the deceased into a biodegradable container, and take it to the garden. They then choose from 13 clusters of almost 8,000 trees: cherry blossoms, osmanthus, magnolia, and camphor are some of the more popular options. The caretakers of Yong’ai Garden provide the family with shovels and direct them to the burial area they have chosen. They are careful not to disturb specific sites, marked by small iron rods, where another tree burial has taken place recently. The family digs a hole in the ground that is approximately half a meter deep (1’8”), places the ashes into the hole and covers it with soil and stones. The entire process is completely free of charge. In an innovative turn on traditional Chinese funerary beliefs, the bereaved are also encouraged to set up online memorial tablets for their loved ones, in place of physical gravestones.

Taiwan has the lowest birth rate in the world, faces the looming threat of almost half its population being elderly by 2065, and is constantly battling the problem of land scarcity. For these reasons, tree burials and other types of eco-friendly internment are becoming an increasingly popular and space-efficient way of dealing with the dead. Over the last two decades, large public columbaria, which enable the storage of urns holding human remains, have stalled the need for the development of more burial sites. These columbaria essentially serve as apartment blocks that house the dead. But as occupancy across columbaria fills up, the Taiwanese—especially those in densely populated cities like Taipei—must reckon with alternative methods of addressing death. The draw of tree burials is particularly strong because it is free, as compared to having to purchase a niche at a columbarium, which according to funeral industry experts cited by Quartz could cost upwards of NT 200,000 ($6,500)—a hefty sum, considering that the average monthly salary in Taiwan was NT 49,989 ($1,700) in 2018.

The Ministry of the Interior reported a record high percentage of cremations in 2017, comprising 96.3 percent of all deaths. One in every 20 people opted for an eco-friendly burial in the same year—a substantial spike from just 0.47 percent of all deaths in 2008. Cheng Ying-hung, deputy head of the ministry’s Department of Civil Affairs, also urged people to pay their respects to the deceased in more environmentally friendly ways, such as through ceremonial offerings of fruit, rather than the burning of paper money, which is commonplace.

The Chen brothers say their mother read about Yong’ai Garden in the newspapers before her death in 2012. They were surprised when she made it clear to her children that she wanted her ashes to be buried there. “It’s quite atypical of other Taiwanese her age, and there are probably a fair number of people who would still hesitate to opt for a tree burial,” says Boris. “Ancestral worship is very important to Chinese culture, and there is a fear that not having a grave has an adverse impact on their way out of the earthly realm.” Taiwan remains firmly anchored to Confucian beliefs, including filial piety. As such, tending faithfully to the graves of one’s ancestors, especially on Tomb Sweeping Day in April every year, is an important aspect of fulfilling one’s duty in life. In fact, Yong’ai is part of the Fude Public Cemetery, which also manages a columbarium as well as thousands of other conventional graves in the vicinity.

Wu Hsi-he, a driver I encountered on the hike up to Yong’ai, objects to tree burials because he believes that they will gradually erode collective memory of Chinese funerary practices, which are often elaborate in nature. “We are already starting to forget many of our traditions,” he laments, “and a people who don’t have a history can’t navigate the future wisely.” Still, he enjoys going to Yong’ai on the weekends with his family. “I like showing my grandchildren the different types of trees here, and sometimes I play the dizi (a type of Chinese flute) with my friends.” Yong’ai’s popularity has not gone unnoticed by the Taipei City government, and in 2017 another garden adjacent to Yong’ai was created from the former landfill, and transformed into a tree burial site for pets.

To some, the idea of a public park that also serves as a cemetery seems macabre, but neither Boris nor Po-An shares that sentiment. “It’s peaceful here without being overly somber, and we can take time to catch up in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a noisier setting,” Po-An says. The brothers visit Yong’ai on Tomb Sweeping Day, when they say the park is thronging with families, and in December, which is the month when their mother passed seven years ago. I ask them how their mother’s choice to have a tree burial has changed the way they think about death. Boris thinks it reaffirmed his decision to have a tree burial. “It’s just much easier for my descendants in the future, and besides, like my mother, I’m not afraid of not having a marked grave or an ancestral altar. I believe it is more important to be loved in life, than to be concerned with the ways people choose to remember you when you’re gone.”

North America's largest-known Mexican cookbook collection inspires both tears and restaurant dishes.

The story of Mexican food is usually told as a happy merging of indigenous ingredients and techniques with those brought by the Spanish in the 1500s, as if the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was just a means to a better burrito. In fact, what we now know as Mexican cuisine is the result of centuries of shifting borders and tastes.

"When it came to culinary cultural exchange in the colonial period, the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo referred to corn dishes as the 'misery of maize cakes,'" says Stephanie Noell, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). "On the other side, Indians were not impressed by the Spaniards’ wheat bread, describing it as 'famine food.’” The eventual confluence of native and European ingredients and traditions is, of course, what defines North American cuisine to this day.

A rough timeline of this transformation exists in the UTSA's Mexican cookbook collection, the largest-known trove of Mexican and Mexican-American cookbooks in North America. It started with a donation of nearly 550 books from San Antonio resident Laurie Gruenbeck in 2001, amassed during her decades of travel throughout Mexico. It now has more than 2,000 books, including some of renowned chef and scholar Diana Kennedy's rarest books, as well as her personal papers. It has the oldest cookbooks published in Mexico (from 1831), elaborate vegetarian cookbooks from 1915 and 1920, corporate and community cookbooks, and much more.

The earliest book in the collection is from 1789, making it one of the oldest Mexican cookbooks in existence. This so-called "manuscript cookbook"—written by “Doña Ignacita,” who Noell believes was the kitchen manager of a well-off family—is a handwritten recipe collection in a notebook, complete with liquid stains, doodles, and pages that naturally fall open to the most-loved recipes. These manuscript cookbooks, never intended for public scrutiny, provide essential insight on how real households cooked on a regular basis. Though the UTSA only has about 100 manuscript cookbooks, they are impossibly rare documents that form the heart of the collection.

Written in flowery scripts and stained with the cooks’ DNA, these recipe-packed tomes feel like living histories that inform our present as much as they illuminate the past. “I've had students in tears going through these, because it's so powerful to see that connection with how their family makes certain dishes and where they originated,” says Noell.

Anyone can visit the collection, but, Noell says, "I want anybody with an internet connection to be able to see these works." Toward that end, the UTSA has stepped up digitization efforts to get the majority of their older books—in particular the fragile, one-of-a-kind manuscript cookbooks—not just scanned but transcribed, so the contents are searchable. About half of the approximately 100 manuscript cookbooks have been digitized so far. While anyone can visit the collection, this global availability is a game-changer for not just students and scholars, but anyone interested in the development of Mexican and Mexican-American cuisine.

“Aside from the treasure of the recipes, many of these [manuscript cookbooks] read like stories themselves,” says Rico Torres, chef and co-owner of San Antonio’s Mixtli, one of the country’s most acclaimed restaurants dedicated to progressive Mexican cuisine. “Often there’s a hint of longing for a dish from a faraway place. There was a recipe I came across that was an interesting take on paella, substituting saffron with poblano chile, and Spanish chorizo with local varieties from Puebla.”

Deciphering these densely written books is worth the effort for Mexican gastronomy obsessives. A close read of cookbooks from the late 18th and early 19th centuries shows vino de Parras appearing over and over again. It’s a reference to wine from the city of Parras in the state of Coahuila, the center of Mexican wine production even after winemaking was forbidden for everyone except clergy in 1699. The wine is offered as an alternative to both white and red wine (presumably imported from Spain) for cooking. It shows that this "forbidden" red wine was extremely common outside the church, and, as historical hearsay suggests, that it was light enough to stand in for wine of either color.

In the 1789 book, most of the "fancy" meat dishes include ingredients such as almonds, sesame seeds, raisins, cloves, and cinnamon, which—from our modern-day standpoint—seem like obvious precursors to the the flavorings added to mole. In the first published Mexican cookbooks of the 1830s, the same items are ground with dried chiles in recipes that read much like today's mole recipes from Oaxaca and Puebla, but with names like mole gallego (Galician, of northwest Spain) and castellano (Castilian, of central Spain). The language used lends weight to the idea that mole sauces were intentional fusions of native and Spanish tastes, and that some of these luxury ingredients still weren't considered Mexican, even 300 years post-Conquest.

Many of the dishes at Mixtli, from several of their mole sauces to a recent dish of pickled mussels, were inspired by the university’s collection. "Having the UTSA Mexican Cookbook collection as one of our resources has been incredibly valuable to the message of our restaurant; to preserve, protect, and promote Mexican gastronomy,” says Torres.

Noell also stresses that "this collection is an attempt to preserve the culinary heritage of all of these different regions of Mexico and also of Mexican-Americans." It traces the period when Mexico was New Spain and idealized European dishes, to the era after the second Mexican Revolution, when pride in native dishes took center stage. Earlier books have multi-day recipes, while later books prioritize convenience, including packaged and frozen foods. And throughout the centuries, the books are dessert-heavy.

Given that most of the southeastern U.S. was part of Mexico for centuries, the collection brings to life local culinary history as well. “Today we identify Tex-Mex with large goblets of margaritas and nachos, but the gastronomy of the Texas Mexican terroir predates political and national boundaries,” says Torres, noting that many of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbooks, such as maize, chiles, and nopal, are eaten on both sides of the border. As both a culinary resource and historical record, the UTSA Mexican cookbook collection shows how intertwined Mexico and the U.S. have always been, and continue to be.

“Tribes have local, place-based cultures and their cultural survival depends on the land."

Temperatures in Idaho’s Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers were so warm in 2015 that they cooked millions of salmon and steelhead to death. As climate change leads to consistently warmer temperatures and lower river flows, researchers expect that fish kills like this will become much more common. Tribal members living on the Nez Perce Reservation are preparing for this new normal.

“The biggest and most poignant impact for Nez Perce tribal members has been the loss of fishing and fish,” says Stefanie Krantz, the climate change coordinator for the tribe. “For tribal peoples, they are absolutely essential for survival.”

After the 2015 fish kills, the tribe decided to hire Krantz to work full-time to assess the many ways that a warming planet threatens their way of life. The tribe has about 3,500 enrolled members, and its reservation spans 750,000 acres. For the last three years, Krantz has been conducting a vulnerability assessment and working on a new climate adaptation plan. The tribal government is expected to formally adopt Krantz’s plan after it has been finalized.

As other North American tribes have begun to experience the effects of climate change over the past decade, they too have started to adopt climate resilience and adaptation plans. According to a database maintained by the University of Oregon, at least 50 tribes across the U.S. have assessed climate risks and developed plans to tackle them. With more than 570 federally recognized tribes controlling 50 million combined acres, these adaptation plans could prove a crucial element in building resilient communities that can thrive despite weather-related catastrophes and changes to the natural environment.

“Tribes, because they are a separate sovereign, have a unique capacity to give us a lot of guidance,” says Elizabeth Kronk Warner, dean of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. Federally-recognized tribes are sovereign governments and therefore can set climate policies independently of federal or state governments. The laws passed and programs adopted by tribes have the potential to significantly improve their resilience in the face of climate risks.

Warner has been researching the effects of climate change on indigenous peoples for about a decade and has noticed a “big, big increase” in the number of climate adaptation plans developed over the past five years in particular. “Increasingly, we’re seeing the impacts of climate change in Indian country,” she says. “As more tribes get into the field and are able to look at what other tribes have done, it increases the likelihood of proliferation.”

The process often begins with a community assessment to estimate the natural and cultural resources at risk from climate hazards. Following the assessment, consultants or in-house tribal staff can develop a specific plan to protect these resources. Tribes have conducted studies to understand how climate hazards—such as shoreline erosion from sea level rise and more frequent wildfires—might affect them, physically moved to higher ground to avoid being inundated by floods, and begun testing shellfish to ensure they are not poisonous due to phytoplankton growth caused by warmer temperatures.

The assessments vary widely from tribe to tribe, depending largely on geography and local environmental factors. Tribes in Western states, for instance, are particularly vulnerable to the impact of rising temperatures and its effect on water availability. Coastal reservations, such as the Swinomish on Washington state’s Fidalgo Island, are more concerned with adapting to rising seas.

Krantz, the climate change coordinator for the Nez Perce tribe, says that tribal members in particular are vulnerable to climate change because of their close ties to the land. Nez Perce tribal members, for example, pick berries, roots, and medicinal plants. As a result, they have a uniquely deep knowledge of the timing of ecological processes, such as the flowering of plants and migratory patterns of birds, she says.

“But those things are all changing,” says Krantz, and seasonal shifts are causing plants to move north and upslope. “Tribes have local, place-based cultures and their cultural survival depends on the land and the plants and animals.”

Indigenous ecological knowledge is a key component of many adaptation plans, and conversations with tribal elders and other community members often inform the assessments. After Yurok elders advised their tribe to “follow the water” in the wake of a massive fish kill on California’s Klamath River in 2002, the Yurok Tribe focused its attention and resources on aquatic habitats, drinking water, and the different species of fish that they rely on for sustenance.

The tribe has since developed a fish monitoring program that can detect diseases early. Since some diseases are worsened by higher temperatures and low water flows, the tribe relays information about the disease to the Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages dams on the Klamath River. The agency, which makes decisions about the amount of water released from behind the dam, may ultimately help decrease the spread of fish diseases. The tribe also lights controlled fires to reduce water use by thirsty plants on river banks and has been fighting to remove four dams from the Klamath by 2020.

The University of Utah’s Warner, who is a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, also pointed out that tribal adaptation plans differ from state and local governments’ plans because they often examine the effect of climate risks on the community as a whole. “Usually [state plans] focus on the impact to the individual,” she says.

For instance, the Jamestown S’klallam tribe’s 2013 climate adaptation plan discusses the loss of salmon as both a nutrient-rich and culturally important species, unlike state plans which tend to focus on their economic benefits. Salmon not only provides a cultural connection with other tribes in the Pacific Northwest—it also provides a source of good fatty acids and protein that can counter diabetes and heart disease. In order to combat the spread of invasive species that threaten salmon habitat in the Dungeness River, the tribe has been mapping the presence of weeds and tracking the effectiveness of herbicides.

Tribes are innovators in this area, and local and federal governments can learn from their community-based approaches and use of traditional ecological knowledge, Warner says. Including community members early in the planning and implementation process, for instance, can increase buy-in and reduce costs through volunteer networks.

“Typically, we have a tendency to think of tribes as learning from the federal government, but this is definitely a situation where other sovereigns can learn from tribes,” she says.

Sometimes they're buddies. Sometimes it's strictly business.

When he saw the video of the coyote and badger, Neal Sharma was speechless. “The playful body language of the coyote first got my attention,” he says. “But when the badger snout entered the frame, it blew me away.”

Sharma is the wildlife linkages program manager at the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) , the organization that recently released a short video shot under a highway near the southern part of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. In it, a coyote dances playfully at the entrance to a culvert (a tunnel beneath a roadway), appearing to wait for the badger that follows. The pair then travel into the tunnel together. Nature-video gold.

They may seem an unlikely duo, but coyotes and badgers have a long-recognized relationship as occasional hunting partners—a phenomenon known to Native Americans and early settlers (and described in an 1884 paper in American Naturalist).

Out on the prairie, both species go after animals such as ground squirrels, but in different ways: Coyotes search, stalk, chase, and pounce, while badgers “are basically backhoes,” excavating tunnels and digging up animals hiding underground, says evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder. While shared prey makes them competitors, joining their skill sets turns out to be mutually beneficial.

Specifically, scientists have shown that a coyote’s hunting area increases significantly when the canid hunts with a badger, and that pairing up saves the coyote energy, and probably search time as well. With a badger working the scene, a coyote can mostly wait in the brush, then scramble at the last minute to capture the fleeing rodent flushed out by the badger.

While a little harder to assess, badgers also appear to save time and energy by hunting with coyotes, spending more time underground eating their quarry than aboveground searching for and digging after it. And when squirrels sense a coyote’s presence and stay put in their burrows, the badger can go after them—the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

But the two species aren’t always so friendly. Back in 1980, Bekoff and his colleagues observed coyotes working together to kill badgers. “We don’t know how often this occurs—badgers are really nasty to approach,” he says. But it does happen.

Also, he points to a coyote pack he studied in Grand Teton National Park that didn’t associate at all with the local badgers. “They were not friends or partners,” he says. “They clearly avoided each other.”

Importantly, the animals that do pair up aren’t then sitting down and eating together, notes evolutionary ecologist Emily Latch of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. “Badgers often take the meal underground,” she says. “But coyotes will absolutely swipe it if they have the chance. It’s a hunting association, not a food-sharing one.”

While biologists consider these associations to be temporary and hunting-related, back in 2016, Kimberly Fraser of the National Black-Footed Ferret Conservation Center in Colorado observed a coyote and badger that simply seemed “happy to be together. They’d rush forward to greet each other, sun themselves right next to each other, explore, and travel side by side.”

Between September and late November that year, she observed the pair outside her window many times. Sometimes they’d investigate a spot where the badger had been digging, she says, “but I never saw them actively hunting. They were simply together.”

“It just shows how flexible these animals can be,” says Bekoff. “And it shows that they have different personalities, different moods.” Each relationship is its own case, he says, affected by the age of the animals, their past experiences, and their current circumstances. “We can’t make generalizations about how animals get along.”

Cases in point are the many observations of interspecies “friendships” recorded around the globe, often between animals in captivity but sometimes in the wild—even between predator and prey. With animals there are exceptions to virtually every rule.

The now-famous coyote-badger footage actually includes a round-trip crossing (going north, the badger leads the coyote). “This is, to my knowledge, the first report of these two species using a human-made crossing structure together,” says POST’s Sharma.

The clip is from one of more than 50 remote cameras set up between the Santa Cruz Mountains and neighboring ranges—part of a POST study, in partnership with Pathways for Wildlife, that’s taking a biological inventory of the area and looking at how wildlife interacts with major roadways in the region. Even when not built specifically for the animals, bridges and tunnels, Sharma points out, can have significant conservation value as habitat becomes more and more fragmented by roads and other development.

As for the behavior on camera, “the coyote doing that little play bow—it looks like it’s saying, ‘Come on, come on,’” says Latch. “And in a sense, that’s what going on. Coyotes do encourage badgers to move and search for prey by scrambling around, leading, and play bowing.”

She also notes that the badger’s posture suggests ease: “With that tail up, trotting away, that means the animal is pretty comfortable, pretty content.”

Wildlife ecologist Stanley Gehrt of Ohio State University, who has studied both species, agrees. “As scientists, we've seen this relationship for quite a while,” he says. “But the value of this video is that it conveys pure companionship, happiness, a camaraderie. They seemed happy to be with each other.”

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But it's not clear whether future generations will keep the tradition alive.

When on dry land, expert fisherman John Warwick goes by his legal name. But when he’s standing chest-deep in the Solway Firth, negotiating the capricious tide, he’s known as Young Slogger. His father, Slogger, fished the firth before him, and the nickname identifies Warwick as part of a line of succession—not just a fisherman, but a haaf net fisherman, and therefore a guardian of tradition.

The Vikings were the first haaf netters. Many centuries ago, when they arrived in this narrow passage of the Irish Sea, the Nordic mariners developed a new method of fishing better suited to the local tides. Rather than cast lines from the comfort of a boat or shore, they stood in the water with a 16-foot-long beam affixed to a net and bisected by a 6.5-foot-tall pole. By digging the pole into the sand and holding the beam above water, haafers created a soccer goal-like structure that could trap unsuspecting salmon or trout riding the tide. The residents of Annan, a town in southwestern Scotland that hugs the Solway Firth, have been haafing ever since, braving quicksand and currents for the occasional catch and, more consistently, the camaraderie.

“I was brought up in a fishing family,” says Warwick. “My father haaf netted, and his father before him.”

For centuries, most people carrying the beams came from long-running fishing families like Warwick’s. Today, however, the tradition is on the verge of disappearing, with only a small and shrinking number of enthusiasts still practicing the ancient trade (and now, due to recent regulations, only for sport). As the start of the next haafing season approaches, the stakes couldn’t be higher. If the next generation doesn’t take up the mantle, says John’s cousin Allan Warwick, “the Solway will [soon] be abandoned landscape.”

Though the Vikings decided that the erratic Solway required its own specific fishing method, no one quite knows why they landed on haafing. In truth, modern-day netters admit, it’s not particularly efficient or effective. Warwick and his peers stand upright for hours as cold water laps at their extremities and fish swim head-first into their legs from all directions. When Warwick is lucky enough to net a fish, he quickly lifts the net out of the water to secure the catch. It’s a much smaller window of opportunity than he would have while angling, when a hook can keep a fish secured. In fact, a haafer might briefly net a fish without even realizing it, if the fish glides in and out of the net without grazing the fibers.

It’s the anticipation, and the long odds, that give haafing its thrill. “The tug is the drug,” says George Renwick, who has pursued haaf netting faithfully since a colleague introduced him to the sport in 2000. You feel “a little shudder,” or “a big thing rubbing across your legs,” and all the hassle and strain are instantly submerged.

Though it can be easy to lose track of time between successive tugs and shots of adrenaline, one of haafing's key skills is knowing when to call it a day. Sudden tidal shifts, for example, can push Renwick and Warwick into deeper water. On one of his first outings, Warwick, who doesn’t swim, had to use his beam as a flotation device as he fought his way back to the shallows. Tidal shifts can also change the texture of the sand, locking netters in place. “The sand is like goo,” says Tony Turner, and at some point “everyone’s been stuck in the mud.” (Twice, if you’re George Renwick.)

But the allure of haaf netting extends beyond the physical challenge. Allan Warwick describes the Solway Firth as a setting both epic and ethereal, populated by seals and porpoises and glistening from resplendent sunrises and sunsets. He’s seen deer swim across the border—from the Scottish side to the English side of the firth—as if he were inside a children’s storybook. The sights and sounds all conjure the haaf nets’ long history and what Warwick calls “the link to the past,” which, above all else, compels him to remain an active netter. The word “haaf” means “channel” or “sea” in Old Norse, and legend suggests that the beams are 16 feet long because the Vikings’ oars were as well. A boulder known as the “Altar Stone” digs into the shallow sands, where it’s been used as a place-marker and reference point since the medieval era.

“I missed the chance to fish with my dad,” says Warwick, whose father (a haafer nicknamed “Fad”) passed away when Allan was young. But both of their names are now etched into the Altar Stone, the same one viewed by the Vikings.

For centuries, haaf netting’s significance has been primarily symbolic, tied not only to the Vikings, but to Scottish nationalism. Because of its proximity to England, Annan has been revered as a kind of bulwark against “our ancient enemies,” as King James V of Scotland called his southern neighbors in a 1538 charter. That charter granted “the citizens of the Burgh of Annan the right to fish the river and the Solway” as thanks for their sacrifices in military struggles against the English. (There is, in fact, a similar and shrinking haaf netting tradition on the English side of the Solway as well.) Those rights were renewed in a 1612 charter, granted by James VI. For John Warwick, there is a particular irony in watching haaf netting decline at this moment, with the Scottish independence movement reenergized by a major 2014 referendum and again by Brexit.

A bevy of recent challenges has made it difficult to sustain the proud tradition. Citing environmental concerns, the Scottish government now restricts haafers to catch-and-release fishing, which deters some of the less committed fishermen. Those who’ve carried on acknowledge that the Solway is different now, with new arrivals such as bass and mullet replacing herring and cucumber fish—a development they blame on fish farms.

Other obstacles are generational. In an increasingly globalized world, fewer people born in Annan, or other towns like it, feel compelled to stay. John Warwick cites his son, who lives in Spain and “works with computers,” as an example. A new exhibit at the local Devil’s Porridge Museum aims to document and publicize the tradition, and Warwick is planning some outreach programs for younger people once fishing season begins in May. But he knows he’s fighting the tide. Haafing came from the Vikings, but it’s a “living tradition,” says Warwick. It’s not meant to be remembered “just as something that happened in the past.”

The discovery, in a city famed for its Roman ruins, may mark the site of England’s first coronation.

Characterized by its overcast skies and frequent precipitation (as memorialized in many a Gothic novel), Britain's gloom is warmed by at least one balmy gem: the perpetually heated geothermal springs of Bath. Founded as a spa by the Romans, Bath’s elegance was revived centuries later by King George I, II, and III of England, who injected the city with a healthy dose of Palladian and, yes, Georgian architecture.

But long before Bath became a project of those Hanoverian royals, it was the site of England’s first coronation—of King Edgar the Peaceful, in 943. Until now, however, no one knew exactly where that ceremony took place. The specific site of the crowning was lost in the steady tick of Bath construction and resettlement.

Now, archaeologists have uncovered the first Anglo-Saxon structural remains in Bath, in the shadow of the city’s famous abbey. And they may have been where England's enthroning tradition began.

By using charcoal found at the site, the excavation team was able to radiocarbon date the remains to sometime between the years 600 and 1000—the thick of the Middle Ages. The structure of the remains, which form distinct apsidal (semi-circular) shapes, clearly suggests a religious building.

“We know that the structures we uncovered are within the monastic precinct and immediately south of an extensive Saxon cemetery, which was also excavated as part of the project,” says Cai Maison, a senior project officer at Wessex Archaeology. “Now [that] we have the radiocarbon dates, we can be confident that these are monastic buildings in the broad sense.”

In the 18th and 19th centuries, archaeologists working in Bath were pretty focused on finding and cataloguing Roman remains. That meant that much of what they found in the layers above those remains—namely, Norman and Saxon relics—was paid little mind. That began to change only somewhat recently.

“Late 20th-century archaeologists were far more careful,” says Bruce Eaton, a project manager at Wessex Archaeology. “But by [that time], most of the post-Roman archaeology within the Baths complex had been removed.”

The recent discovery was part of the city’s $25 million Footprint project, an initiative to restore the Bath Abbey’s collapsing floor, among other goals. But digging around the abbey’s foundation has also turned up that which was long ago trampled—including what seems to have been a coronation site over 1,000 years ago.

In Edgar the Peaceful’s time, Bath sat between two kingdoms: Mercia and Wessex. King Offa of Mercia had significantly renovated Bath’s religious buildings a century prior, making the city a uniquely poised outpost. Following Offa’s work, King Alfred the Great primped up the town a bit more, annexing it for Wessex.

“Bath has a strong connection with both these preeminent kingdoms, which Edgar want[ed] to unite into one English state,” Maison says.

While England had of course had kings before, none had had a coronation ceremony to mark his tenure. (In Edgar’s case, coronation did not occur at the time of ascension, but toward the culmination of his reign.) All coronations of English monarchs since have been based on that initial event in Bath, whose exact location was obfuscated by sparse record-keeping and poor archaeological practices. The current work seeks to avoid previous missteps, and to take a more holistic approach to peering at the past.

“The archaeological work associated with the Footprint Project has highlighted how, far from being a ruined shell, Bath continued to function as an important settlement throughout the Saxon and medieval periods,” Eaton says. “[It] has highlighted how there is so much more to the city's history than its famous Roman remains and Georgian buildings.”

And the hub of a world-spanning market for champion raptors.

In 1839, a 22-year-old aspiring diplomat and amateur archaeologist named Austen Henry Layard quit his job as a clerk in his uncle’s London law office and set out on what would become a decade-long journey across the Middle East. Arriving six years later at the Tigris River near Mosul in what is now Iraq, Layard excavated the ruins of Dur-Sharrukin, an Assyrian capital built between 720 and 700 B.C. There—amid temples emblazoned with cuneiform writings celebrating King Sargon II, the conqueror of Babylon, and giant statues of lamassus (winged creatures with the head of a man and body of a lion or a bull)—Layard unearthed a bas-relief that showed, he wrote, “a falconer bearing a hawk on his wrist.” The bearded hunter holds thin straps made of leather, known as jesses, or sbuq in Arabic, between his thumb and index finger, with the ends tied around the raptor’s feet. Layard’s discovery, the earliest known representation of falconry, made a strong case that the sport had originated in the Arab world at least 2,500 years before.

In its early days, long before the arrival of Islam in the Middle East, falconry served as a means of survival. Bedouins in the Arabian Desert trapped peregrines during the raptors’ autumn migration from Europe or Central Asia to Africa. The nomads trained the birds to kill and return to the gauntlet worn on their human’s fist, and to hunt hares or houbara bustards (large terrestrial birds) to supplement the Bedouins’ meager diet of milk and dates and rice. It was an efficient way of putting food on the table, and it established a unique relationship between man and bird. “For the Bedouin the [falcon’s] victory over its quarry was a feat of courage and strength in which they felt able to share,” wrote Mark Allen, a noted Arabist and the onetime director of MI6’s counterterrorism unit, in his 1980 book Falconry in Arabia. “In the [falcon’s] graceful restraint at rest and her grim hardness in the field, the Bedouin saw qualities which were for him among the criteria for honor in a tribal society.”

Arab traders likely introduced falconry to the West before the fall of the Roman Empire: In Eucharisticos, a confessional meditation written by the Macedonian Christian poet Paulinus of Pella in 458, the author recalls his adolescent wish to possess “a swift dog and a splendid hawk.” But in medieval Europe, falconry was practiced differently than in the early Bedouin hunts: training and housing birds of prey was beyond the means of most manor-bound peasants, and forests were the protected domains of the nobility, so “hawking,” as the sport also was known, became a leisure pursuit of monarchs and nobles, who organized lavish hunting parties on their estates. The aristocracy even established a pecking order, laid out in the Book of Saint Albans in 1486, for who could hunt with what. Only the king was entitled to a gyrfalcon, the world’s most exotic raptor, brought by traders from frozen Nordic cliffs. A prince could use a “falcon gentle,” or female peregrine, while a knight would have to make do with the slower but often equally agile saker. To a lady went a merlin, a small and sturdy falcon with a blocklike head. Lesser birds were designated for those common folk who did have the resources to hunt; these included the sparrow hawk for a priest, and the lowly kestrel for the “knave or servant” of a lord. Kings built elaborate mews on palace grounds, and lavished privileges on master falconers. The Laws of the Court under Hywel the Good, a 10th-century Welsh prince, stipulated that the royal falconer “is to have his horse in attendance, and his clothing three times in the year, his woolen clothing from the king, and his linen clothing from the queen, and his land free.”

During falconry’s boom times in the Middle Ages, relationships between Eastern and Western falconers flourished. In 1228 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, the Holy Roman Emperor, hunted in the desert with Malik al-Kamil, the fourth Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, for three months during a lull in the Sixth Crusade. Twenty years later Emperor Frederick relied on the knowledge imparted to him by Syrian falconers whom he had brought back to Europe to write his classic work De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (On the Art of Hunting With Birds). By the 17th century, however, the proliferation of guns and, in England, the enclosure of land, rendered falconers an anachronism. No more than a few hundred falconers were left on the entire continent after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars swept away the aristocracy.

And yet, as Austen Henry Layard made his way through the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys in 1845, he found that there, falconry was still appreciated as a form of art. In a caravansary (roadside inn) by the Euphrates, the archaeologist encountered Timour Mirza, an exiled Persian prince and the region’s most famed falconer. Reclining on carpets spread on a platform, Mirza “was surrounded by hawks of various kinds standing on perches fixed into the ground,” Layard wrote in his 1853 memoir Discoveries Among the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, “and by numerous attendants, each bearing a falcon on his wrist.” Layard noted the pageantry surrounding falconry and the esteem accorded the finest participants—and their birds. He admired such accoutrements as the raptor’s hood, which temporarily blinded the bird, protecting its delicate optic nerves from a blitz of sensations and soothing its high-strung disposition. The hood “is generally made of colored leather, with . . . gold and variegated thread,” Layard observed. “Tassels and ornaments are added, and the great chiefs frequently adorn a favourite bird with pearls and precious stones.”

The bird that had come to command the greatest respect among falconers was the shahin, or peregrine falcon, a term derived from the Middle Persian word šāhēn (literally “majestic” or “kingly”). “Although the smallest in size,” Layard explained to his readers, “it is esteemed for its courage and daring, and is constantly the theme of Persian verse.” This raptor “strikes its quarry in the air and may be taught to attack even the largest eagle, which it will boldly seize, and, checking its flight, fall with it to the ground.”

No consensus has ever been reached about the maximum speed of a peregrine as it stoops, or plummets, toward its prey. A BBC documentary pitted a peregrine named Lady against a free-falling skydiver equipped with a speedometer and a lure. The skydiver clocked in at 158 miles per hour. Lady, who hurtled past him, may have surpassed 180.

Perhaps the best accounts of falcons’ hunting behavior come from British writer J.A. Baker in his classic work The Peregrine. Baker, a nearsighted and arthritic clerk from Essex, tracked peregrines in the winter landscapes of his native East Anglia between 1954 and 1962. His observations are infused with a sense of the fragility of nature (the DDT poisonings were at their height), the beauty of the English countryside, and appreciation for the raptor’s grace in flight. But over and over he returns in his writings to the stoop and the kill. “The peregrine swoops down toward his prey,” he writes in The Peregrine. “As he descends, his legs are extended forward till the feet are underneath his breast . . . His extended toe . . . gashes into the back or breast of the bird, like a knife—If the prey is cleanly hit—and it’s usually hit hard or missed altogether—it dies at once, either from shock or from the perforation of some vital organ.” He describes with grisly admiration the raptor’s “tomial tooth”—a sharp projection on the upper mandible that lets the bird snap the vertebrae of any prey that isn’t killed instantly on the stoop. “The hawk breaks its neck with his bill, either while he is carrying it or immediately [when] he alights,” he observed. “No flesh-eating creature is more efficient, or more merciful, than the peregrine.”

To accomplish that—to target and then dive-bomb a wood pigeon or a grouse from 5,000 feet at nearly 200 miles an hour, and strike it dead with a single swipe of the foot—requires extraordinary physical abilities. The bird’s large, well-developed chest muscles, connected to a broad breastbone and nourished by oxygen drawn in continuously by nine air sacs throughout the body, power its wings through high-speed flight. This hyperefficient respiratory and circulatory system also keeps the air flowing and the blood pumping as the peregrine descends at velocities that would render any other species unconscious. Light and hollow bones, long and stiff flight feathers, and streamlined wings keep air resistance to a minimum, while the extra-wide tail base supports powerful musculature to turn and brake while in hot pursuit. All this allows the bird to maximize its speed and flexibility. The bird’s optic nerves, meanwhile, relay images to its brain 10 times faster than those of a human, “so events in time that we perceive as a blur,” Helen Macdonald, best known for her memoir H Is for Hawk, noted in an earlier study, Falcon, “like a dragonfly zipping past our eyes, are much slower to them.”

Above all, peregrine falcons perceive the world with a vividness and depth that human beings can hardly appreciate. Photoreceptor cells cram into the falcon’s fovea, the tiny pit located in the retina that handles the most important visual tasks. A human has about 30,000 color-sensitive cones in the retina; a falcon has one million. With two foveae in each eye, one for depth and one for lateral perception, the falcon’s eye functions simultaneously as both a macro lens and a zoom lens. Falcons can also perceive ultraviolet light, making colors stand out even more vividly and enabling the falcon to identify the shape and texture of plumage from as far as a mile away. Macdonald quoted Andy Bennett, a researcher in the field of avian vision, as saying that the difference between the eyesight of a human and that of a falcon is like the difference “between black-and-white and color television.”

On October 16, 1931, south of the desert mountain known as Jebel Dukhan (Mountain of Smoke) in the island kingdom of Bahrain, the first oil spouted from a well drilled by the Bahrain Petroleum Company, a firm established two years earlier by Standard Oil of California. The well, which was soon pumping 9,600 barrels a day, was the first to produce oil on the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf. Others quickly followed—in Qatar in 1935, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1938, Abu Dhabi in 1958, and Oman in 1964.

The flood of petrodollars over the next decades turned Gulf societies upside down. The oil industry covered vast swaths of desert with wells, pipelines, refineries, access roads, and other infrastructure, creating a new urban population and erasing much of Bedouin society. Yet despite the upheaval, falconry remains fundamental to the culture of that part of the world. Falcons appear on corporate logos, banknotes, and the national emblem of the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven Gulf sheikhdoms, the largest of which are Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The most extravagant new real estate project in Dubai is “Falconcity of Wonders,” a 107-square-mile conglomeration of opulent hotels and residences, all laid out in the shape of a peregrine. And the sheikhs there have managed to retain fragments of a mostly vanished way of life. Wealthy falconers stock private reserves with prey such as captive-bred houbara bustards—having hunted the wild ones out of existence decades ago—and pack their falcons onto 747s and fly to leased hunting grounds in Central Asia and North Africa.

In 2002, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, son and heir of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the billionaire ruler of Dubai, introduced a new sport to the Arab world: falcon racing. While the crown prince had the luxury of hawking in his own private hunting grounds and on royal expeditions, he recognized that such opportunities were out of reach for the average Gulf citizen. Racing was Sheikh Hamdan’s ambitious attempt to keep Emiratis connected to their heritage. The populist move also turned falconry into a multimillion-dollar global enterprise.

At the first falcon race organized by the crown prince in January 2002, several thousand participants—ranging from royal family members with an aviary full of falcons to ordinary citizens with a single bird—gathered beside a field of sand in Dubai to time their birds with stopwatches over a 400-meter course. The falcons flew sequentially, to avoid catastrophic midair collisions, coaxed into action by a man positioned at the far end of the field swinging a telwah—a lure fashioned from a pair of bustard wings. A younger brother of Dubai’s ruler trounced all other competitors with a peregrine that flew the course in 16 seconds, or 50 miles an hour.

The races quickly caught on—and spawned a cottage industry. Royal families dispatched high-paid agents to purchase promising racers from breeders domestically and abroad, and set up desert training grounds where elite coaches could teach their falcons to fly in straight lines and stay low to the ground, even using light aircraft to drag feathered lures ahead of the birds at high speeds. Dieticians maintained the birds at racing weight, while veterinarians kept their feathers in perfect condition; a frayed or broken quill could be a significant disadvantage in a sport where a few tenths of a second can separate the top contestants in a heat. A champion falcon can compete for only three or four years before losing its edge, at which point the best are often retired to stud. (Rumors have persisted, but have never been proven, that older falcons are destroyed once they’ve passed their racing prime.) One of the greatest studs in racing history, Fast Lad, a 16-year-old gyrfalcon owned by Bryn Close—a breeder in Northern England for various Emirati royal families—has sired hundreds of winners in a dozen years.

Five years after bringing racing to Dubai, Crown Prince Hamdan introduced the Fazza (“Victory”) Championships, a two-week competition with $8 million in prizes provided by his family. An Italian-designed system of laser beams that sensed exactly when a peregrine crossed the starting and finish lines ensured precision timing to the hundredth of a second. The crown prince created separate racing categories for sheikhs, professional falconers, and the public, with distinct heats for juvenile and adult birds, hybrids and purebreds, and males and females. In 2014 Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi and the fourth wealthiest monarch in the world, with a fortune estimated at $15 billion, created a tournament with even greater rewards. The President Cup, held each January at the Abu Dhabi Falconers Club and paid for by the Al Nahyan clan, offers a purse of $11 million. The prizes include 60 Nissan Patrol SUVs, dozens of cash awards of up to 25,000 dirhams ($6,800), and—most important to status-obsessed royals—engraved golden trophies for the winners in the six championship events.

The President Cup is an exquisitely organized affair. In the huge spectators’ tent at the edge of the desert racecourse, sheikhs and their entourages, draped in white gowns and keffiyehs, relax on ornate sofas and wing chairs, plucking grapes, apples, and oranges from porcelain bowls while observing the races through floor-to-ceiling windows or on closed-circuit television screens. Boys in white turbans circulate among the guests—mostly Emiratis, but also breeders from across the globe—pouring shots of bitter Arabic coffee from brass urns into white ceramic cups. Dozens of hooded falcons of different hues and sizes wait on wooden perches to be carried down a red carpet one by one to the starting gate, where an announcer whips up excitement with vehement exhortations and pleas to God. Dehooded and released from the trainer’s wrist at a signal, most falcons hug the ground and fly on a straight trajectory across the 400-meter-long field, but a few rise up as if preparing for the stoop, and, when I visited the President Cup in January 2018, one gyrfalcon belonging to Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, veered off toward a distant line of sand dunes, to the dismay of her supporters, before finding her way back to the course. She crossed the finish line with a time four seconds slower than the next-to-last bird.

The competition between the Al Maktoum and the Al Nahyan families, and to a lesser extent the ruling clans of other Gulf States, has fueled a quest for the fastest, hardiest, and most beautiful falcons in the world. The falcon market was “on a downward spiral before the races— breeders all around the world were struggling,” Zimbabwean breeder Howard Waller told Arabian Business for a 2015 article entitled “Sheikh Hamdan’s Bid to Revive the Glorious Arab Sport of Falconry.” Now, he said, “it’s become an international business opportunity—everybody’s trying to get in.” Waller quoted the top price for a captive-bred female peregrine from the United Kingdom as £70,000, up from just £1,500 a few years earlier. In 2013 a pure white gyrfalcon, the largest and most powerful species of the Falconidae family, had been sold to a royal in Doha, the capital of Qatar, for 1,000,000 dirhams, or $272,000, “drawing gasps from breeders,” according to the magazine. Crown Prince Hamdan matched that price four years later, a well-placed source in Abu Dhabi told me, for a captive-bred gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrid that had just swept to victory in four consecutive races in the President Cup. “Any strong falcon the Crown Prince hears about he buys,” the source said. “For him, it is all about prestige.”

By the 20th century, Europeans had come to revile peregrines as pests and vermin. In June 1940 Great Britain’s Air Ministry declared the peregrine a menace to the carrier pigeons that Royal Air Force pilots were releasing from cockpits to dispatch messages to contacts in Nazi-occupied Europe. The government authorized the shooting of hundreds of adult and juvenile birds and the killing of thousands of chicks and eggs in the nests.

The environmental consciousness that spread across Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s helped revive an appreciation for birds of prey. These days some 5,000 Americans and 25,000 Britons participate in falconry, triple the number from five decades ago. The birders range from urban enthusiasts such as Helen Macdonald, who trained a goshawk named Mabel in her home in Cambridge, to wealthy landowners who stage hunts on horseback each summer in the Northumberland countryside. One English writer called the revival a “back-to-nature quest,” stemming from “a postindustrial society’s hunger to reconnect with ancient traditions.”

Near the Welsh village of Carmarthen, an English biologist, sportsman, and entrepreneur named Nick Fox has bred falcons for 30 years for Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, an Anglophile who first traveled to the United Kingdom in 1966 to study English in Cambridge. In recent years Fox has been joined by other registered breeders in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany, the United States, and South Africa who now compete for shares of the fantastically lucrative Arab market; today, the majority of the 12,000 captive-bred raptors exported from the West are destined for the United Arab Emirates. Fox also sells the richest Arabs a falconry flight-training device called the Robara, a remote-controlled machine, shaped like a houbara bustard, that can match the cruising speeds of falcons and act as the bait. In Dubai a venture partly owned by the Al Maktoum family takes Western tourists in hot-air balloons over the Arabian Desert to watch trained falcons fly and dive at 5,000 feet.

This money-fueled globalization also has an underside: a thriving black market for wild birds of prey, driven by wealthy Middle Eastern enthusiasts who believe that falcons stolen from nests are superior to those bred in captivity, and who are willing to break the law to get them. Investigations by conservation groups and information provided by commercial breeders had disclosed that the richest aficionados were spending huge sums, up to $400,000 for a single bird, to acquire raptors from the wild. The thieves used pigeons and other lures to take fledglings in mid-flight, or, on occasion, scaled cliffs and trees and seized chicks from nests.

Expensive paramilitary-style expeditions to the Kamchatka Peninsula, Siberia, Mongolia, the Indian subcontinent, Greenland, Patagonia, and other wildernesses were said to be disturbing the ecological balance of pristine regions by threatening the survival of the world’s most endangered species. In the first two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example, raptor “trappers” had nearly wiped out saker falcons—a migratory species, slower than the peregrine, that breeds from Central Europe across Asia to Manchuria. Mark Jeter, a former assistant chief of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, described the black market trade succinctly: “I always say, if there is a $50,000 bill lying around, someone is going to try to catch it.”

Then, in May 2010, a man named Jeffrey Lendrum attempted to pull off an ingenious variation of this scheme. British Counter Terrorism agents, alerted by a suspicious janitor, detained Lendrum while he waited in the business class lounge at Birmingham Airport to board a flight to Dubai. They strip-searched him, and discovered that he was carrying, taped to his body, 14 live peregrine falcon eggs stolen from cliffs in southern Wales and apparently destined for hunters and racers in the United Arab Emirates. Smugglers, the police quickly realized, could be running eggs between Europe and the Arab world in a far-reaching conspiracy to defy international wildlife laws and damage the environment, financed by some of the richest and most powerful men on Earth.

The story of Lendrum and the detective who tracked him continues in The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird.

The images, by artist and professor Dornith Doherty, are ethereal and oddly comforting.

Nature photographers often zip on warm coats before lugging their cameras into the wintry outdoors. Dornith Doherty, an artist and professor at the University of North Texas, bundles up to photograph nature indoors—and sometimes in suspended animation. Doherty documents the vaults and research hubs that store seeds for any number of uncertain futures.

These archives are sometimes known as “arks of the apocalypse.” Inside, seeds are dried, stored, and safeguarded, often at subzero temperatures. The facilities are insurance against pests, disease, and other forms of destruction that could strike a species. Each seed bank is a botanical backup plan: The hope is that humans can draw on these reserves to save plant populations on the brink.

Since 2008, Doherty has visited these collections to photograph their operations and contents. She has traveled to Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and Brazil, as well as around the United States. She has documented the Desert Legume Program in Tucson and Yuma, Arizona, and the National Collection of Genetic Resources for Pecans and Hickories, in Texas. Doherty visited Svalbard, the snow-flanked vault on a Norwegian archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, and Sussex, England, to step inside the Millennium Seed Bank, which stores more than 2.3 billion seeds spanning more than 40,000 species. Arranged in rows of glass jars on shelves, they look like pantry staples, such as decanted beans, oats, or rice—but with much higher stakes.

The results are photos of the spaces themselves, and x-rays of the seeds and tissue specimens housed there. Doherty sometimes arrays these in ethereal, gossamer collages that evoke Anna Atkins’s pioneering, 19th-century cyanotypes of British algae. More than a decade on, the project is still in progress. "I think it will continue indefinitely," Doherty says. "There are over 1,700 seed banks worldwide." She corresponded with Atlas Obscura about cold vaults in a warming world.

What does it feel like to be inside a seed bank?

Stepping into a seed vault still takes my breath away. They are always bitterly cold and filled with the sound of forced air roaring through the shelves. They are so cold that to enter them, you have to wear arctic parkas and gloves. It is awe-inspiring to be surrounded by fertile and diverse seeds resting in a state of suspended animation, preserved for a distant and unknowable future.

How did you take make these images?

I used table-top x-ray machines that were usually employed for statistical analysis of the seed collections. (For example, they would x-ray to see the percentage of viable seeds in specific seed accessions.) The seed banks do not store plants, but many of the large national banks have research labs associated with them. They grow seeds and clones for research purposes.

What were the biggest differences between the banks you visited?

They differ based on how their specific location ties into the richness of the global distribution of plant life, and the resources they are able to bring to this important effort. Their missions vary. Some banks focus on only economically important plants, and others try to preserve both wild and cultivated plants.

What do you hope a viewer thinks or feels when they look at these images?

Many times the scope of climate change problems makes it seems like individual actions do not make a difference. Although the gravity of climate change and political instability has created a need for an inaccessible vault near the North Pole, the efforts of the individual scientists in the banks around the world have successfully preserved the biodiversity of the plants that have been archived in the vault. I find this gives me hope.

Did being inside the vaults make you feel anxious about the future, or safer, or something else?

Spending time in the seed banks was profound. When you enter a seed bank, you are in one of the most biodiverse locations on the planet. However, the global situation is definitely bleak.

In traditional tango, men lead and women follow. Queer tango is creating a new paradigm.

Two decades ago, when Mariana Docampo was in her twenties, she went looking for somewhere she could dance tango with another woman. Buenos Aires, where she lived, was a dance capital and the home of countless milongas, or gatherings of Argentinian tango dancers. But as she learned to dance the leading role, she realized that she was looking for something that didn’t exist. “I had loved tango from the first time I discovered it, but milongas were a place you could go only if you played a certain role and certain identity,” she says. “That was the beginning.”

For many, the word “tango” comes with certain expectations: charming men dancing with women in high heels, tables ordered around a dimly-lit dance floor, wine bottles over here, candles over there. That classic milonga, which developed around the turn of the 20th century, has not changed much in a hundred years. But in recent years, queer milongas have slowly transformed the roles and dress codes of traditional tango.

In 2001, a group of German dancers organized a Queer Tango Festival in Hamburg, and Argentina was quick to follow. In Buenos Aires, Augusto Balizano founded the first gay milonga, La Marshàll. In 2005, Docampo opened Argentina’s first permanent lesbian milonga: Tango Queer. These milongas aimed to serve specific communities, but were open to people of all genders, and have broadened their aims over time.

In the years that followed, the Argentinian government passed laws that enshrined the civil rights of LGBTQ people, from marriage equality to gender expression. "Queer dancing was a social need,” says Balizano, an internationally known tango dancer who has performed in Germany, France, Denmark and even Russia, which is not known for LGBTQ rights. “When La Marshàll started, it was revolutionary, and existed long before those laws, so I think the fact spaces like ours existed was a big contribution." Together, Docampo and Balizano founded the International Queer Tango Festival, an annual event that is now in its 14th year, and that attracts dancers from all over the world.

Sofìa Ceccioni, a sociologist at the University of Buenos Aires, has researched how queer tango is challenging old power structures. In a 2009 paper called “Tango Queer: Territory and Performances,” Ceccioni argued that classic tango conceived "the masculine as the active, the dynamic," while the feminine "was associated with the passive and sacrificed." The leading role reserved for men, the author went on, expresses a "socially passive position" for women. Queer tango has the power to move past this binary framework.

When she first stepped into tango, the singer Fifí Real did not expect to find a fully accepting space for her music. After the passage of Argentina’s civil rights laws, she exercised her right to affirm her gender identity on her government ID card. Since then, she has performed across the city, in spaces such as Tango Queer and the Maipo, one of the most glamorous theaters in the city. “For maricas, it was necessary to access traditional and popular music and tell our stories and realities there,” explains the 32-year-old artist, using a Spanish word for “queer” that was once derogatory, but has been reclaimed by LGBTQ communities. “I understood we could enter our popular music through tango, and that was critical for us.”

Milongas are always about more than just dance, and queer milongas are no different. “Many couples were formed here, many broke up,” Balizano says. “I found a partner in La Marshàll, and we broke up because of La Marshàll too! Our anniversaries are very touching.” The dance floor of Tango Queer was also a setting for romance. “We have had a lot of couples that ended in marriages,” Docampo says. “Some even came to marry at the milonga! There was a guy who asked for the other’s hand in front of all the people.”

Tango first emerged on the outskirts of the city, as the perfect poetic and musical medium for the outcast and marginalized to tell their stories. With this in mind, perhaps queer tango is just a new way of living up to the dance’s traditional roots. “The fact that we had shown we existed made many people understand: Tango cannot be conceived in a single way,” says Balizano. “In my opinion, this is the last great revolution made by tango.”

Recently, a 27-year-old tango lover named Martina Berardi tried to explain what the queer milonga La Furiosa means for her. “There’s no other place where I can feel what I feel when I dance here. It is like being myself, but being it in such a beautiful way,” she says. “Tango is a passion you could only understand when dancing, and dancing it in full freedom is a way of reaching the best expression of myself."

In the Great Lakes region, what some consider a weed is actually a sacred seed.

James Whetung is willing to go to jail for wild rice. When he was a child, he helped his uncles harvest it in the Kawartha Lakes area, northeast of Toronto. As a Christmas treat, he ate wild rice pudding. His family members were among the last rice gatherers in his Curve Lake First Nations community.

“80 years ago, most of Kawartha Lakes had lots of wild rice in them,” says Whetung. “It used to be the rice bowl of North America.” One rice bed mentioned in Curve Lake oral history measured 17 miles long by a mile wide. “Used to,” Whetung says. “It’s gone now.” He blames the construction of the Trent Severn Canal, built in 1833, for much of that disappearance. Once an important shipping route, the waterway is now a National Historic Site operated by Parks Canada and a popular recreation area.

Today, there’s a tense, decades-old standoff between Whetung and recreational users of the lakes. That’s because he’s been reseeding wild rice in this area for the past 30 years. Boating, fishing, and swimming are difficult where the thick rice beds are flourishing once again. Cottage owners claim their property values are dropping as a result. Whetung has become a lightning rod for anger and frustration. His opponents created a group called “Save Pigeon Lake” to thwart Whetung’s efforts. So dramatic and protracted is this battle that the well-known Canadian author Drew Hayden Taylor, himself from Curve Lake First Nations, wrote a play about it, called Cottagers and Indians.

“I don’t care,” Whetung says after telling me about the opposition to his activities. “I would go to jail for it.”

The revival of wild rice in the Kawarthas began in 1986, when Whetung attended a conference led by Dr. Peter Lee of Lakehead University, a biologist who specializes in wetland ecology. Now retired, Lee says the conference had a dual purpose: to bring wild rice research to the community, and to encourage people to grow it. The conference took place at Minaki Lodge on the Winnipeg River, where 40,000 acres of rice grew as late as the 1970s. “As far as you could see, there was wild rice,” says Lee. Today, he estimates the beds are reduced to less than a quarter of their original size.

That conference and a call to action from other First Nations communities started Whetung down the path of what he calls a “food security uprising.” His yard and home double as Black Duck Wild Rice, the company he named for his father’s clan. Whetung himself is a slim, fit middle-aged man. The sides of his head are shaved, and his black Mohawk-style hair is combed back behind a pair of sunglasses propped on his head. A mischievous smile flits about his mouth as he shows me a furnace oil barrel fitted with a rusty chimney at one end and a wooden barrel at the other. This is his rice roaster. Scattered about the property are earlier generations of wild rice-processing machinery.

Processing wild rice is labor-intensive. Whetung cures and roasts the rice beneath a sugar maple wood fire, giving it a smoky flavor. To separate the chaff or husk from each grain, the rice is placed in a hide or blanket over a hole in the ground so someone can dance on it. To speed up the work, Whetung built what he calls a ‘dancing machine,’ with rubber paddles to remove the chaff. Traditionally, the rice and loosened chaff was tossed in the air using a blanket so the breeze could carry the non-edible chaff away. Whetung’s modern solution is a winnowing machine fashioned from an old furnace blower.

For Whetung, the stakes couldn’t be higher. He calls wild rice the gift of the creator. In the Ojibwe language of the Great Lakes Anishinaabeg peoples, wild rice is manoomin, which translates literally as “good seed” or “spirit food.” The return of manoomin means nothing short of survival, Whetung says. “Our people are so sick. We’ve been suffering pretty bad, confined to this reserve. Wild rice is one way to keep our people healthy.”

Wild rice is rich in protein, fiber, B vitamins, and minerals, making it nutritionally superior to white rice, oats, barley, and wheat. Whetung’s hope is that wild rice will once again become a plentiful source of food for Curve Lake and other First Nations. “A couple days of gathering, a week or two of other work, and a family could have a hundred pounds of rice,” he says.

As in Canada, Barb Barton says that many people who live next to lakes in Michigan consider wild rice a weed. “They don’t want it growing on their lake or around their dock, so they apply for permits to put chemicals in the water that kill it,” she says.

Barton is a member of the State of Michigan’s wild rice working group, an endangered species biologist, and the author of Manoomin: The Story of Wild Rice in Michigan. In 2009, Michigan State University honored Barton with the Extension Diversity Award for her work with Michigan tribes on manoomin.

The first thing to know is that manoomin isn’t a rice at all. Zizania palustris, Zizania aquatic, and Zizania texana (found only in Texas) are grasses native to North America, where they prefer to grow in gently flowing waterways with muddy bottoms. While Zizania grows mostly in the center of the continent, it’s listed as present in over 30 states and all but one of Canada’s 10 provinces. It’s so important to Indigenous people that the word manoomin has contributed to more place names than any other plant in North America.

Barton says that by the early 20th century, the plant was lost from much of its original range. She blames logging, dredging, and the draining of wetlands. “There was even draining because of the malaria epidemic in the mid-1800s,” she says. Mills, railways, farms, and settlements were built on the banks of rivers and lakes where rice beds once flourished.

Manoomin was particularly hard hit by dam construction. One such dam, built in the late 19th century at Lac Vieux Desert—the headwaters of the Wisconsin River—changed the lives of the Lake Superior Chippewa tribe. “By raising the water level, it drowned the rice,” Barton says. “A lot of people used to sell rice, so they lost a big source of income. Many folks moved away from the lake and into town. Manoomin is extremely important to the tribal people.”

Renee Wasson Dillard serves on the Natural Resources Commission of her Little Traverse Bay Band of Odawa Indians in Michigan. She says that manoomin is rooted in their history. “We were once living on the east side of the United States,” she explains. “As we started to migrate, we were following symbols we were told to look for along the way. We would know that we were home once we came to the place where food grows on water. We came to understand that this was rice.”

“Now, it’s a part of our ceremonial feast,” she continues. “You cannot have a ceremonial feast without wild rice.” Until recently, the Little Traverse Bay Band had to purchase their wild rice, but recently band members have been able to harvest their own, thanks to the work of band members and people like Barb Barton. “It’s a very small amount, perhaps half a burlap bag,” says Dillard. “But at least we can do it ceremoniously.” This past year was particularly special, because the community built a birch bark canoe to harvest rice traditionally. She says the canoe helps decolonize the process. “We make our prayers and honor the rice,” she says, “to show it how much we appreciate it.”

Appreciation for the rice goes a long way, given how hard this band and others are working for its preservation. But new threats are lurking. Dillard says Asian carp and a tall invasive grass called Phragmites are taking over rice beds. Barton also notes that climate change has added new stresses. With increased temperatures, there’s a fungus now affecting the plants, and water levels are fluctuating wildly.

But there are hopeful signs too. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota recently adopted the “Rights of Manoomin” law. It’s the first of its kind, securing the rights of wild rice to exist, as well as the clean water and habitat it requires to flourish, both on- and off-reserve.

“It’s unfortunate we have to have a law,” says Barton. “But I think it helps bring the worldview of the tribal peoples to the general public.”

Dr. Lee agrees. “Wild rice provided nourishment for Indigenous people long before first contact with Europeans, and is a very important part of their heritage that needs to be respected.” He says he’s glad that Whetung is bringing back rice awareness in his community. Today, Whetung shares that responsibility with his daughter Daemin, ensuring that the battle to save wild rice in the Kawarthas will carry on.

As a mysterious disease sweeps across the region, dry land might be the last best hope for survival.

Long ago, according to the Bible, an ark saved all land animals from extinction as the world was engulfed by a punishing flood. Today, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a new ark is aiming to give Noah’s a run for its money. Sure, the oceans are rising, but this ark is more concerned with denizens of the sea than those on land: 22 species of stony corals, which take on a menagerie of shapes, from squat and bulbous to plant-like and branching. The Coral Rescue Project’s ark, operated by Nova Southeastern University (NSU), is part of a much larger project to save Caribbean corals from a mysterious disease that turns lush reefs into bleach-white skeletons.

Passengers on one of the berg-like cruise ships docked in Fort Lauderdale might look inland and see what appears to be just another flashy South Florida condo, but the modern building they’re seeing is actually NSU’s glossy new Oceanographic Center. “It’s nice here now,” says Abby Renegar, who manages coral conservation at the center. “But in the summer, we call it ‘Hell’s front porch.’”

Inside the center—all seafoam walls peppered with vivid paintings of sea life, including one of a sawfish slicing through a school of jacks above the security desk. The art is by Guy Harvey, wildlife artist and conservationist-cum-philanthropist whose name is emblazoned on the building’s exterior in bright blue paint. Renegar and I stop at her lab, where we pick up Kyle Pisano, a graduate student and NSU’s self-described “coral nanny.” He gathers his rolling cart of caretaking supplies—some tubing, tanks, and pipettes—and we head out back.

The ark, well, arks, are a series of table-sized tanks with pitched roofs, resembling a line of longhouses, each elevated above an extensively engineered filtration system. I ask Pisano if the salt water in the tanks comes from the ocean—an inlet is just yards away—and he laughs. It’s way too dirty from ship traffic, so he makes his own seawater in the temperature-controlled tanks. Each tank represents corals collected at a specific place and specific time, so no healthy corals get infected by newcomers that might carry the mysterious disease that is causing the bleaching.

“We don’t actually know when the disease started,” says Lisa Gregg, coleader of the Coral Rescue Project and a program coordinator for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Stony coral tissue loss disease, it’s called, first appeared off Virginia Key in Miami-Dade County in 2014, when divers noticed patches of white skeleton peeking out from among coral polyps. In the waters off Hollywood, Florida, a colony of mountainous star coral older than the United States and nicknamed “Big Momma” died within three or four months of contracting the disease, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which manages the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Over the next few years, the disease crept north to Pompano Beach, Palm Beach County, as far as the St. Lucie Inlet, as well as south, into the Florida Keys, and then out, from Belize across the Caribbean to St. Thomas. As of this winter, the disease has been reported in St. John, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas. “There’s no rhyme or reason that we can discern right now,” Gregg says. “We thought warm waters would increase the spread of the disease, but it hasn’t happened that way.”

Even before the disease hit, Florida’s reefs were in bad shape, battered by things as mundane as wayward anchors and the bleaching caused by climate change. So NOAA, the National Park Service, and the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Department of Environmental Protection joined to assemble nine teams—each tackling a different angle of the coral crisis. One team, the Coral Rescue Project, began collecting healthy specimens from parts of the reef with no sign of disease. Divers carved out pieces of corals with hammer and chisel and then took them back to the ark at NSU, where each received a dip in an antibiotic solution before going into their designated tanks.

The project has collected 1,747 colonies since 2018, focusing on 22 species—16 high priority and six medium priority—that are most severely affected by the disease. Among these are the spectacular, endangered staghorn and elkhorn corals. “We’re gene-banking the corals,” Gregg says, adding that the team aims to collect corals across a wide geographical range to ensure genetic diversity. “We’re trying to collect everything ahead of the disease front, but we’re running out of space.”

Though NSU’s ark offers these individual colonies safe haven, it doesn’t represent a permanent home. The goal is to eventually return these colonies to the reef, once scientists have developed a way to combat the tissue loss disease. But no one knows how long that will take, and NSU’s facility isn’t on the scale of the Biblical ark (about half the length of Titanic, according to the Old Testament). In November 2018, the Coral Rescue Project approached the nonprofit Association of Zoos & Aquariums (AZA) to see if their institutions might provide more coral lodging space. Within a month the AZA had hired a full-time employee to oversee its end of the project.

“It was a no-brainer when they asked us to partner with them,” says Beth Firchau, the Florida Reef Tract Rescue coordinator for the AZA. Firchau left a job at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans to join the coral rescue effort.“Public aquariums and zoos have been doing conservation for hundreds of years,” she says. “It’s all about cracking the nut of what it takes to keep these particular species, which are already in trouble, healthy and happy.” Currently, 18 zoos and aquariums from across the country are holding Florida corals, and Firchau expects that number to grow.

Even facilities with a history of taking care of coral faced a steep learning curve with the Florida colonies, which have historically been underrepresented in many aquariums. “They’re not the corals we normally keep,” says Barrett Christie, the director of husbandry at the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Connecticut. This is, aesthetically speaking, Florida corals’ own fault. “We tend to gravitate toward Indo-Pacific corals, which come in every color of the rainbow,” he says. “Florida corals are very beautiful but not as striking. They mostly come in blue, green, and yellow.”

The Maritime Aquarium’s Florida corals, which inhabit a tank that used to belong to a rescued sea turtle, are relatively high maintenance. Christie says the colonial animals are more sensitive to light than other kinds of corals, and also have certain, unprecedented demands. “We had no idea how much these corals can eat, and the size of the shrimp these corals can pack away,” he says, adding that he had to revise the team’s 2020 food budgets based on how much they were consuming. Christie even hand-feeds them. “We use a very highly technical device,” he says. “It’s called a turkey baster.”

At the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium in Dubuque, Iowa, the coral caretakers grappled with another unexpected obstacle: certain corals were bullying each other. “Some corals are kind of crazy and have tentacles that can sting,” says Marisa Foster, who cares for the museum’s Florida corals. One species in particular, Meandrina meandrites, also known as maze coral, boasts tentacles that can reach out as far as six inches—and sting other species nearby. It’s how some corals have adapted to protect themselves and stake out territory. “They’ll have chemical warfare trying to poison other corals,” she says. “We had to house them appropriately so they aren’t just picking on each other.”

The Coral Rescue Project’s original goal was to collect 5,000 colonies, but with the disease advancing relentlessly throughout the Caribbean, it might already be too late. In waters by St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, researchers have begun removing diseased corals in an attempt to save the reefs, according to Reuters. “We’re running out of areas to collect from, and at some point we’re going to have to start thinking about doing collections from the corals in the endemic zone,” or the areas where the infection has begun to take hold, Gregg says. The colonies currently housed NSU’s ark probably represent the last batch of certifiably healthy Florida corals, Pisano says. As they’re shipped out to new, temporary homes across the country, Gregg and Pisano will begin to replace them with corals taken from less-healthy sections of reef—and the scientists may have no choice but to watch them die in the tanks. But with an entire ecosystem at risk of collapse, they might have to, in the hope that they can provide refuge to a few more healthy colonies.

They're thriving, pooping, and fouling up the water around the drug lord's former estate.

Pablo Escobar, the late Colombian drug lord who founded the notoriously violent Medellín Cartel, had a thing for hippos. He once installed a quartet of them on his extravagant Colombian estate, Hacienda Nápoles, where they joined a lavish menagerie. When Escobar was killed in 1993, the other creatures were schlepped off to zoos, but the huge hippos were deemed too unruly to wrangle. Free to roam, the four multiplied into dozens that have been ambling around the Magdalena River Basin ever since. They’ve been spotted more than 90 miles from Escobar’s estate, leaving prodigious droppings all the way.

The hippopotamus is native to sub-Saharan Africa and grazes on land but spends most of its life in water, and treats rivers and lakes as big toilets. Each year, a single hippo can dump more than 1,650 pounds of carbon and other nutrients into the water—and it does so mainly by pooping, says Jonathan Shurin, an ecologist at the University of California, San Diego.

A few years ago, Shurin started wondering what all that poop was doing to a smattering of small lakes on Escobar’s old estate in northwestern Colombia. To figure it out, he and his collaborators needed to get close. The poop doesn’t stink up the air, Shurin says, and “the lakes are all pretty green and soupy” to begin with.

In 2017 and 2018, Shurin and seven collaborators sampled water from 14 humble lakes dotting Hacienda Nápoles. Some were known to harbor hippos. The researchers assessed water quality, oxygen levels, and signatures of stable isotopes. They found that hippos were hauling a lot of carbon into the water, and that, in the lakes where the ungulates wallow, the amount of dissolved oxygen sometimes dipped below the level that fish can handle. In hippo-studded lakes, researchers also detected larger quantities of cyanobacteria, which can cause stinky, harmful algae blooms. “Our results suggest that ongoing population growth and range expansion by hippos may use a threat to the quality of water resources in the Magdalena Basin,” Shurin and the other researchers write in a new paper in the journal Ecology.

Bowel movements aside, hippos also change the environment when they tromp along. They sometimes wind up making channels or compacting sediment, which can give water more places to pool. That can make life harder for plants and animals that have adapted to an ecosystem without the big, toothy mammals. “The lakes are mostly quite small, so a small number of hippos makes a big difference,” Shurin says.

Many more could be on the way. The herbivores have plenty to munch on in Colombia, where people are their only predators. They can live for several decades and welcome a calf every 18 months, once females reach reproductive age. Because things are going swimmingly for the hungry, hungry hippos, there could be between 400 and 800 individuals pooping up a storm by 2050, according to research published in the journal Oryx in December, and led Amanda Subalusky, now a biologist at the University of Florida. (If their population growth rate were to reach 11 percent, a scenario Subalusky and company describe as “not unrealistic,” the authors estimate that there could be closer to 5,000 hippos.)

So how do you manage an introduced species that is thriving in its new home, and has the feces to prove it? “The only choices are sterilizing them, catching them and sending them somewhere, or killing them,” Shurin says. “The last one is unpopular with the public, and the first two are expensive and dangerous,” he says. (It cost 15 million pesos, around $4,500 USD, to relocate a single juvenile hippo to a Colombian zoo in 2018, National Geographic reported.) The hippos have also become a tourist draw. “There is no easy option,” Shurin says. As the population continues to balloon, Subalusky and her collaborators call for closer attention to the current and future population size, as well as research into the borders of its range and the local species most affected by a proliferation of poop. In the meantime, the current gaggle will keep on fouling the place up.

Started in 1997, Šediváčkův Long is one of Europe's toughest winter events.

Their eyes stare with intense focus on the extremely cold, rugged terrain. Soon they will swoosh through the snow with a team of similarly determined canines, pulling the weight of a sled and rider.

These hearty dogs are a familiar sight in Alaska, home of the Iditarod, the most famous dogsled race in North America, and at the Finnmarkslopet, the longest dog race in Europe, established by the Norwegians. Another among those epic dog-human events is Šediváčkův Long, considered one of the hardest races in Europe. The four-day event is indeed long—186 miles or 124 miles (depending on the category)—but is especially notable for its grueling cumulative elevation gain of over 24,500 feet as the course winds through the Czechia’s Orlické Mountains, near the Polish border.

Humans have used dogs to pull sleds beginning as early as 9,000 years ago. Possibly the oldest depiction of man’s best friend in a harness is in a 2,000-year-old knife handle from the Siberian Arctic. But the tradition of “mushing”—the sporting version of the activity—nearly died out when snowmobiles became the preferred means of snowtop transportation in the 1960s. Mushing was revitalized as a recreational sport in the 1970s when the Iditarod grew in popularity.

It wasn’t until 1997 that some local mushers in Czechia, captivated with the picturesque and tough landscape of the Orlické Mountains, organized a race of their own. The event was named after the organizer’s dog Šedivák, who wandered off on the eve of the inaugural race and was shot and killed in a nearby village.

In the 2020 race, some of the course was adjusted due to lack of snow, yet some 700 dogs and 77 drivers from 10 countries took up the challenge. The sense of community has grown strong over the years, as the Šediváčkův Long evolved from a small local race to an international event. The most recent winner Roman Habasko said to the Associated Press, "You do feel the joy when you are on the top among the winners, but a lot of people have come here only to enjoy themselves, to take part in this race and they don't seem to care too much about the final ranking."

Luckily you don't have to brave the wintry mountains to get a close look at the event and the doggos that make it go.

After pausing production of the 737 MAX, Boeing will get help evicting its resident birds of prey.

For two years, a rumor flew through Seattle’s small community of raptor enthusiasts: An unusual pair of birds had taken over a Boeing airplane assembly plant. No one was allowed inside the plant, so the rumor remained a rumor. “An occasional birder would say something about it, that they heard thirdhand from a Boeing worker, but we never got any confirmation,” says Ed Deal, the president of the Urban Raptor Conservancy. “Until this summer.”

The birds were a nesting pair of peregrine falcons, which are approximately the size of crows, and are the fastest birds in the world. The Seattle Times reports that the pair apparently lived in the plant for four years, taking refuge in a nest they wedged on top of a metal girder. Deal estimates that it was more than 60 feet off the floor. The birds feasted on pigeons and starlings that would flutter into the hangar, minding their own business, and they left streaks of poop the color of alabaster. “This is a fairly unusual situation,” CJ Nothum, a Boeing spokesperson, writes in an email.

The Boeing factory, located in the Seattle suburb of Renton, is the final assembly point of the Boeing 737 MAX, which was involved in crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people. “When the 737 assembly line is in full swing, they’re producing one finished airplane a day,” Deal says. “The doors open at least once a day for a plane to go out, letting the birds come in.” The plant shut down indefinitely in January, according to The Seattle Times, which means its doors will open far less often than usual, Deal says.

Though the plant’s daily exhalation welcomed the falcons, it also invited in a host of other birds, such as pigeons, gulls, and starlings. These smaller, gentler birds are frequent occupants of airport terminals and hangars, as the rafters offer a spot to roost that’s often free from predators, according to the company BirdBarrier.com, whose website has three main sections: “About Birds,” “Where They Perch,” and “How to Stop Them.”

The trouble started in June of 2019, when the falcons had chicks. The tiny peregrine falcons leaped from the nest in early, decidedly unsuccessful attempts at flying. “They very often leave the nest too soon,” Deal says.

Wild chicks often make the leap from a cliff ledge, Deal says. “On a natural cliff, there are thermal updrafts that can help a poor flier gain elevation,” he explains. “But in a place like an airplane hangar, they just land on the floor.” The lucky chicks, unable to get back to the nest, would wander around the factory floor. The unluckiest chicks fractured bones, and were whisked away to a local rehabilitation facility.

Finally, Boeing invited Deal to take a look. He toured the assembly plant twice, once in the summer of 2019 and again in January 2020. “It was quite the intricate assembly line,” he says. The workers he met didn’t seem to mind the birds’ presence—some even welcomed the diversion—except when they pooped, or dropped their leftovers. “Pigeon heads,” Deal says. “They’ll take the whole head off while they’re eating and drop the body parts and feathers.” The falcons would often eat at the same time as the factory workers, meaning that falling scraps would sometimes interrupt an otherwise pleasant lunch. “They didn’t really care for it,” Deal says of the Boeing the employees. Boeing hired a service to clean up what Nothum calls “bird debris.”

If Boeing gets clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly the 737 MAX again, assembly on the planes likely wouldn’t start back up for five or six months, a supply-chain expert told The Seattle Times. In the meantime, Boeing, the Urban Raptor Conservancy, and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have hatched a plan to relocate the falcons. “We’re trying to put some nest boxes outside the building, on the roof,” Deal says. “The shutdown for Boeing could be a blessing in disguise.” He says the falcons will eventually grow hungry and will have to leave the hangar to hunt, and hopefully find a new nest before they start their spring courtship. “We’re just waiting to hear back from Boeing,” Deal says. “They’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

Nothing like getting surprise hate mail from a would-be lover on February 14.

In the 1840s, hopeful American and British lovers sent lacy valentines with cursive flourishes and lofty poems by the thousands. But what to do if you didn’t love the person who had set their eyes on you?

In the Victorian era, there was no better way to let someone know they were unwanted than with the ultimate insult: the vinegar valentine. Also called “comic valentines,”* these unwelcome notes were sometimes crass and always a bit emotionally damaging in the anti-spirit of Valentine’s Day.

Vinegar valentines were commercially bought postcards that were less beautiful than their love-filled counterparts, and contained an insulting poem and illustration. They were sent anonymously, so the receiver had to guess who hated him or her; as if this weren’t bruising enough, the recipient paid the postage on delivery. In Civil War Humor, Cameron C. Nickels wrote that vinegar valentines were “tasteless, even vulgar,” and were sent to “drunks, shrews, bachelors, old maids, dandies, flirts, and penny pinchers, and the like.” He added that in 1847, sales between love-minded valentines and these sour notes were split at a major New York valentine publisher.

Some vinegar valentines were playful or sarcastic, and sold as comic valentines to soldiers—but many could really sting. “Lady Shoppers” and salesmen were sent or handed vinegar valentines admonishing their values; some vinegar valentines called physicians names like “Doctor Sure-Death” (a character who ran expensive bills), and others chided the “stupid postman” who was sending the note. One vinegar valentine titled “Old Maid” and reprinted by Orange Coast magazine in 1984, is more than a little harsh:

“’Tis all in vain your simpering looks,
You never can incline,
With all your bustles, stays and curls,
To find a Valentine.”

The women's suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th century brought another class of vinegar valentines, targeting women who fought for the right to vote. While only a small percentage of mean-spirited cards were devoted to suffragists, Kenneth Florey argues in American Woman Suffrage Postcards that “it is clear from their context that an interest in women’s rights was an inherent part of one’s distorted personality.” These cards depicted such women as ugly abusers. It isn’t known whether these were sent directly to troll women’s rights activists or if they were sent to like-minded friends who disagreed with the movement.

Suffragists did have their own pro-women’s rights valentines to pass around on February 14. Florey wrote that one threw shade on anti-suffragists with the phrase “no vote, no kiss.” But, in light of the supposed unattractiveness of suffragists (according to men), many 19th-century women enticed their would-be lovers by sending cards that denied support of the women’s rights cause. One of these cards, quoted by Florey, depicted a pretty woman surrounded by hearts, with a plain appeal: “In these wild days of suffragette drays, I’m sure you’d ne’er overlook a girl who can’t be militant, but simply loves to cook.”

Many vinegar valentines from the late 19th century were drawn by Charles Howard, who put ridiculous caricatures of the sorry recipient in full color. An issue of Kindergarten Primary Magazine from 1895 worried about the moral implications of these cards for children; a teacher from Iowa wrote that she staved off the “desire to send vulgar valentines” by telling students stories from St. Valentine’s treacherous life. The magazine said that teachers must do what they could to help “make it a day for kind remembrance than a day for wrecking revenge.”

Valentines and vinegar valentines alike were once a booming business; in 1905 San Francisco, 25,000 valentines were delayed because of overworked clerks. The more surly cards weren’t always welcomed by postmasters, however—another 25,000 valentines were held in a Chicago post office for being unfit to send, due to the many rude and vinegar valentines in the haul.

As valentines declined in lieu of expensive dinners or gifts, the vinegar valentine became less popular, though in some locations in the 1970s, they were still selling well. While some might mourn the romantic February 14 of the past with its long poems and declarations of love, it’s also much less likely we’ll get a nasty note in the mail as a Valentine’s surprise.

This story first published on February 8, 2017.