Smoke from forest fires was thick over the city last week, something becoming increasingly common in our summers. Above, the sunrise from last Friday.

If you’ve not read it, I highly recommend John Vaillant’s Fire Weather, a haunting look into the future we’re heedlessly speeding toward. He’s a gifted writer, and I have no qualms recommending his previous books The Golden Spruce and The Tiger.

With the nest monitoring now over, I realized I need something else to spur me to write a weekly post.

I’ll post a few photos and a few links to what I’ve read or watched in the previous week that I found particularly interesting.

The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall. – E. O. Wilson

As evidenced by the lack of updates, my gull nest monitoring has come to a close for the summer.  This season was rough – I didn’t find any injured or dead gulls as in previous years, but I was worn down by hours surrounded by concrete, glass, ambulances, and fine particulates.

August morning sunlight filters through a hazy sky – is it smoke from distant forest fires, or only the smog of industry hanging low, keeping close.

My monitoring is almost at an end. Many of the nests are empty, the chicks having fledged. Many others are close to leaving, and only a handful of younger chicks remain at late nests.

My schedule is changing as fall shines on the horizon, and this may be my last weekend on my route.

Square Nest

One of the three younger chicks, with some feral Rock Pigeons in the background to give you a sense of scale.