"It’s easy to assume that we sit at the pinnacle of human knowledge and achievement. Zettabytes of information are just a click away..."

"... we jet halfway across the world in hours; we talk to anyone, anywhere, all while satellites circle the globe, DNA is sequenced and spliced and small packets of electrochemical energy hum with power at our disposal. And yet archaeology consistently turns up hints of ancient accomplishments, buried for centuries. Just this year, researchers have discovered poisons used by early Homo sapiens, wooden tools carved by early hominins, well-engineered Maya plazas, terraces and other architectural feats and a centuries-old board game...."

From "How Did Greek Fire Work? And 6 Other Lost Inventions" (NYT)(a gift link, like all NYT links now).

I think I'm seeing "zettabytes" for the first time. What is a zettabyte?

The heron at dawn.

We see this heron every morning — lately — at a place I call the AVP (alternative vantage point). Now, we feel he knows us and waits for us. Before, he'd been standing rooted to one spot quite near the shore, undisturbed by our approach. There was an aura of mutual respect and trust. But this morning, as we walked up to where we would first see him, he flew up and crossed right in front of us. It was glorious! Then he landed right over there, where you see him in the photo, and he remained rooted there, posing for all our pictures.

Here's Meade's video:

Wednesday sunrise, the heron is back it his spot, holding firm.

He does not fly away.

Sunrise — with birds on a misty lake.

Coots:

Heron:

Ducks:

The heron at 6:59 a.m. — in reverse chronological order.

Sunrise.

Sunrise on a very windy day.

The blue heron flies at dawn.

Video by Meade.

Post title inspired by vaguely familiar Hollywood spyspeak... or perhaps by that Jack Benny movie that only I remember.

"Do hawks and falcons look so fantastic rising and falling because they have the sky as background or would they look equally good flying through mud or a piece of corduroy."

Writes Anne Carson — who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature — in "Lecture on the History of Skywriting" (a chapter of the collection called "Wrong Norma" (commission earned)).

A Paris Review interviewer asked her, "Tell me about the 'wrongness' in the title of Wrong Norma." She answered: 

The coots are back and the ducks will have to deal with it.

Video by me.

Which side were you on?

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ADDED:

“Kelly Clarkson has put us all in danger” might be the most unintentionally funny sentence in the history of mankind.

— smootoshi (@adamsmoot) October 13, 2026

AND: Here's the bird that started it all:

 

I’ve been to Art of Play many times for magic shows, and Molly the purely mechanical bird is really cool. Here’s a video I shot last year. I can see why Kelly Clarkson would want to buy it. But also, Kelly Clarkson + Art of Play’s Molly is so random a collision that I’m upgrading my belief in the simulation hypothesis

— Eugene Wei (@eugenewei) October 12, 2026

Crane rise.

Photo by me, at the boat launch:

Video by Meade at the UW Marching Band practice field:

Crane rise.

IN THE COMMENTS: Everyone's saying heron.

Recent birds.

Caught by Meade. On Monday, a great blue heron made good use of its long skinny legs:

 

Yesterday, there was a turkey vulture on the path:

"In the mid-eighteen-hundreds, amid the advent of photography, the Victorians shot still-life arrangements of lizards crawling over fruit and dead game birds hanging from a nail..."

"... capturing with their new technology the savagery of hunger, the oneness between natural decay and human appetite. For much of the following century, food photography functioned as a sort of ethnographic art, a form of restrained realism preoccupied with light and shadow, shape and symbolism. But, in the nineteen-thirties, the introduction of color printing to advertising changed how food was shot on camera, and thus conceived of culturally. Dishes were now a thing to be drooled over and sold, products that emphasized the sensual, the luscious, the beautiful.... The surreality of commercial food photography and its later evolution into food porn may have been an artificial and sensationalist representation of the things we ate, but it at least managed to seduce.... Restaurants choosing to showcase computer-generated approximations of the dishes they serve inspire neither gluttony nor lust...."

Writes Brady Brickner-Wood, in "The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop/Why does it feel so unsettling when restaurants use generative A.I. to create their menus and promotional materials?" in The New Yorker.

No 19th century photographs at that link, so I found 2 for you: "The First of September" (1855)(showing 2 dead game birds hanging from a nail) and  William Louis Henry Skeen, "Still Life of Exotic Fruits & Lizard from Ceylon" (c. 1880)(with, of course, lizards crawling over fruit).

Those 2 old photographs are not as exciting as I'd leapt to imagine they were. I should have noticed the promise of dreariness in those words "ethnographic art" and "restrained realism."

My imagination was fueled with images of old still-life paintings like this:

Accepting accolades.

Patience rewarded.

If you had to argue that birds are right wing or left wing, what side would you take and how would you support your position?

That's a prompt I used on Grok this morning after seeing the typo — speako, really — I'd made in a prompt earlier this morning when I used AI to identify a bird. It was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I'd said: 

"It's got black and white on top and white on the bottom and there's some right orange patches."

"right" = bright, of course.

Meade said, "Yeah, 'right' orange patches sounds nazi." Hence, my new prompt.

Do not click for more if you don't want to read AI-written material, but I do think this one is at least worth scanning. It's a crisp outline. Grok takes the position that birds are right wing:

Why did the bird cross the road? For dark and unknowable reasons?

Yesterday, we were talking about Arthur Miller's aphorism: "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another."

My reaction: "Birds don't have dark reasons." You might have read that as if I were saying, birds are, in fact, thoroughly virtuous. I should have allowed for darkness, at least, in some birds. What about Poe's "Raven" or the albatross in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? But it was more a matter of choosing to talk only about the possible dark side of birds, because that's all Miller brought up.

If the Glamour bird's motivations are unknowable, how does Miller know they are dark? Maybe Miller thought of that question and threw "largely" into the sentence as a quick fix. I don't know much about the mind of Miller, but I read it to think: I don't know much about the mind of the bird, but I do know this: The one called Glamour has dark reasons.

In the comments tcrosse said, "Why did the chicken cross the road? For some dark reason?"

We thought that was a very funny line and laughed about it before we went out for the sunrise. Driving home in the sun, we saw an odd bird standing in the road, then 2 birds. The light side of birds was demanding attention. Baby sandhill cranes just had to cross the road.

Why? No reasons at all. Never any reason. 

"Arthur Miller described the voluptuous yet fragile woman he wed as 'a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.'"

"When Miller left out his journal open to a page saying that she had embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers and Marilyn read it, she wrote, 'I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.' Like everyone else, Miller was mesmerized by his wife’s power of enchantment. 'Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another,' he once wrote...."

From Maureen Dowd's new column, "Norma Jeane’s Still Got It!" (NYT).

You know what's embarrassing? 1. Writing down that your wife is embarrassing — can't you just remember it and squirm silently in your dark and unknowable mind? — and leaving your journal open to the page where she'll see it, 2. Writing "Glamour is a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch rather than another." Birds don't have dark reasons.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd provides this:

"A friggin' bird will swoop down from a bough and peck your eyes out as you lie helpless and half frozen in the snow without ever having felt sorry for you." 

— Thought to be an early, rough draft of 'Self-Pity' scribbled in the margin of A Field Guide to the Dark Thoughts of North American Birds found in D.H. Lawrence's library after his death.

BY THE WAY: When I was writing this post, I wanted an illustration and asked Grok to give me an image of "a bird that for dark and largely unknowable reasons decides to light on this branch." I didn't say Arthur Miller wrote those words.

Grok gave me an image that was too dull to use, but it also added this ridiculous caption: "A solitary bird, wings half-folded in that decisive instant of landing, perches on a gnarled, ancient branch silhouetted against a brooding twilight sky. The air feels heavy with unspoken intent—shadows pool beneath the feathers like secrets, and the bird’s eye catches a glint of something ancient and unknowable. Dark pines loom in the distance, mist curls low, and the branch itself seems to have been waiting for this exact, inscrutable visitor."

So I was all: "Yeah it's purple prose isn't it? I got it from Arthur Miller."