We spent a few days in Calanques National Park just outside Marseilles. A few travel notes:

0. Orly Airport is much more efficient than De Gaulle. You only have to walk ~5 miles with your suitcase, backpacks, child car seat, and tired totally awesome (my daughter’s edit) kids, not 10+. But in both airports, most of mileage and wasted time are completely avoidable – it’s just that nobody bothers to optimize the way things work. People who bash US airports for being “3^rd World” have never been to Europe. Not to mention that many 3^rd World airports are actually perfectly efficient.

1. I finally got to see one of those incredible starling megaflocks that Western Europe is increasingly famous for, in perfect sunset light, with the Rhone River and Avignon’s Palais des Papes in the background. But the view lasted for just a few seconds because we were traveling by high-speed rail, as people do in civilized countries where infrastructure development is not paralyzed by powerless central government and religious cult of private property.

2. Driving in Marseilles was fun. In the US I usually feel like all other divers are victims of a sleeping sickness pandemic and I’m the only one immune. In Marseilles the overall driving tempo is more natural to me. Navigation was an entertaining challenge because GPS doesn’t work in tunnels, but after a couple wrong turns I figured it all out. The city reminded me of Naples and Palermo – poor, chaotic, but very functional and often beautiful. The replica Cosquer Cave was particularly cool (the original has submarine entrance and is famous for its Late Paleolithic rock art, including depictions of giant auks) – I can’t imagine the amount of work required to build it. Within 5-min walking distance from it are a few other nice museums, of which Musee de L’Illusion was the kids’ choice.

3. The calanques are beautiful fjord-like coves surrounded by tall limestone cliffs. The sea was stormy when we were there, but the water was still crystal-clear. Should be wonderful to explore them by swimming and snorkeling in summer. The view from Belvedere de Sugiton is one of the best in Europe – totally worth the (easy) hike.

4. Mammals (other than bats, rabbits and foxes) and particularly herps (other than geckos) were a bit difficult to find, but it had rained heavily a few times just before our arrival, so there were plenty of wildflowers and many birds were singing. I knew I would have little time for proper birding, so I didn’t expect to see much except blackbirds, serins, chaffinches, and wood pigeons. As it happened, I didn’t see a single blackbird or serin at Calanques. However, there was plenty of other birds, even though we never made it to Camargue. Open slopes at Vallon de la Gineste had a lot of Curruca warblers, red-legged partridges, and other scrubland species. At the calanques there were rock thrushes, crag martins, and wallcreepers. Pine woods were full of titmice, scops owls, and treecreepers. But the best place was a huge oak outside our window. For some reason it was an absolute magnet for various leaf warblers: I saw perhaps a couple hundred in four days, including two rare visitors from Siberia (assuming I identified them right). On the last two days the weather changed again, and the warblers were joined by an even more intense wave of robins.

5. One night I made a quick dash to a couple of very different nature reserves on the other side of Marseilles. Coussouls de Crau is a gravel plain covered with steppe-like vegetation. It has a lot of interesting fauna (particularly birds, which I mostly missed because night), but what impressed me the most were huge circles (up to 10 m in diameter) of large mushrooms, covering vast swaths of the plain. I caught a mole at the edge of the reserve, and to my surprise it was the recently split Aquitanian mole, much rarer in Provence than the more widespread European mole. The mole bit me between the thumb and the index finger, and the bite was ridiculously painful for such a small creature – I wonder if it’s because of neurotoxin in the saliva, known to paralyze earthworms. (Stings by prey-paralyzing solitary wasps are usually more painful than those of social wasps of the same size.)  On the access road I saw a genet carrying two wood mice – how did it manage to catch them both? The other reserve was a nearby limestone range called Les Alpilles. Its rocky spires and crags are very scenic; I didn’t see them well up close (because, again, night), but caught a distant glimpse from the train. Les Alpilles also have a lot of interesting wildlife, which is mostly diurnal so I missed all of it except an eagle owl and a very shy fat dormouse (in a habitat that to me seemed to be much better for garden dormice). This range was probably the best place to see thar and Caucasian ibex when they were still common in Provence in Pleistocene.

6. We were in France, so I’ll not write about food to avoid cruelly teasing my readers. But I’m glad my kids will grow up knowing what a real éclair is like.

7. A year of learning French on Duolingo was not in wain! I should get back to it.

I am reading How to Behave Badly in Elizabethan England by Ruth Goodman. Turns out, the pathetic scarcity of insulting words in modern English is a recent phenomenon. There used to be a huge variety! One I particularly regret being lost is “canting knave”, meaning a person who loudly and arrogantly forces on everyone his opinions on things he knows nothing about. Seems applicable to at least half of the people on the internet.

I’m raising two human children. Being a zoologist, I am constantly impressed by their total lack of anti-predator defenses. Or, to phrase it less scientifically, by them being a perfect predator bait.

Human children are small, soft, slow, clueless, and extremely noisy. Not just noisy, but impossible to keep quiet (we seem to be the only primates with no innate alarm call our offspring would automatically obey). Children are also impossible to prevent from running too far from the adults all the time. They lack the adults’ rudimentary chemical defenses. (There are observations suggesting that mammalian predators, particularly wild canids, find the odor of adult humans repulsive and would sometimes refuse to eat humans even after killing them. That explains why our armpits secret a kind of sweat that seems to have evolved as a perfect growing medium for odor-generating bacteria). Human children’s only method of defense is to raise alarm by crying loudly, but that comes too late to save them from being killed by a wolf, a hyena, or a bear, not to mention a large felid, reptile, or bird of prey.

How could human children survive in the Pleistocene, surrounded by sabertooth cats, dholes, hyenas, dire wolves, short-faced bears, terrestrial crocodiles, cave lions, teratorns and megalanias?

It is, of course, possible that Pleistocene children were different from modern ones, but I doubt it. Maasai children growing up in places where lions, leopards, hyenas, and martial eagles are still common, still behave like all other children around the world – at least in the first few years of their life.

The only way human children could have any chance was by staying within enclosed, well-defended compounds, such as large caves with blocked entrances (available in relatively few areas) or fenced bomas (like the ones still used in parts of Africa). When their hunter-gatherer parents traveled (and most of them traveled a lot, eventually getting from Africa to Australia, the Arctic and Patagonia), they could only do so in large groups, carrying enough spears to defend the creche of children walking in the middle from any attack.

So when you see paleoartists’ paintings of ancient humans traveling as single nuclear families, don’t take them seriously. Children traveling like that wouldn’t survive the first night out on Beringian mammoth steppe or Sahul savanna. Even after the domestication of dogs, it likely took thousands of years to turn dogs into good guardians, and even with guard dogs, two parents would be unable to defend their children from a determined bear, a pride of lions, a large pack of hyenas, or even a python hiding near the camp and waiting for the kids to start running around while the parents are still asleep after a long walk.

What made our species capable of conquering the world was not the fire, the bow, or the language. It was the invention of fence.

I’m freaking tired of writing to Biden, but someone has to.

Dear Mr. President,
As your long-time supporter, I am gravely worried about your legacy. One issue is threatening to undermine all your hard work: your policy towards Russia.

I grew up in Russia before moving to the US in 1997. Russia is a society built on lies and hate, and united only by its deep, visceral hatred of the United States and everything we stand for: freedom, democracy, and justice. Some of your advisors don’t seem to get that. They believe that backchannel diplomacy, self-restraint, and “escalation avoidance” can somehow magically transform a predatory mafia state into our ally.

Nothing could be more wrong. Russia sees backchannel diplomacy as appreciation of its criminal nature, self-restraint as cowardice, and “escalation avoidance” as weakness. The only way to resolve our foreign policy crisis is to help Ukraine destroy the Russian Empire – something we failed to do in 1991 due to gross incompetence of our policymakers.

It is absolutely imperative that we lift all restrictions on Ukrainian use of our weapons on Russian territory. This is not just morally right but smart and efficient. If there’s one thing to learn from the recent events, it is that “realpolitik” doesn’t work: sacrificing moral values for perceived profit costs you both your values and your profit. But, as you know, Benjamin Franklin already understood that.

Destroying Russia has its risks, but consider the benefits: many oppressive regimes around the world, from Venezuela and Cuba to Myanmar and Syria, will crumble without Russian support; 90% of all malware and right-wing propaganda on the internet will disappear; China and the G.O.P. will lose their most important and reliable ally; NATO will be able to fully focus on containing the increasingly imperialistic China.

Please lift those restrictions and let Ukraine win quickly and decisively. It would be terrible if ten years from now you’ll be remembered only by one terrible mistake.

Sincerely,
Vladimir Dinets, dinets.info

We just spent 12 days in Costa Rica, divided between Guanacaste coast and Monteverde, with short side trips to Rincon de la Vieja, Palo Verde and Carara National Parks.

It was my fourth trip to the country since 1995. During that time, Costa Rica’s forest cover increased from 35% to 52% (it was 75% a century ago, and almost 100% before Columbus), roads didn’t get any better, howler monkeys invaded many towns, prices went up something like tenfold, scarlet macaws, once critically endangered, became roadside birds, poverty declined substantially (I saw only one beggar this time, compared to dozens in 1995), and the number of animals you see on night drives increased dramatically (the best ones this time were a spotted skunk and two small-eared shrews; the latter are normally among the most difficult neotropical mammals to see, but seemed to have a bumper year in Monteverde area).

In Monteverde we stayed in a pricey but very nice hotel, with burrows of a rare gopher under our window and lots of semi-tame mammals and birds on the grounds (I think I saw more euphonias and chlorophonias in one fruiting tree there than I had seen in all my previous life). Young, curled-up banana leaves had 50% disc-footed bat occupancy – looking from the outside through my thermal scope, I could see warm spots where these incredibly tiny, soft, delicate creatures were cuddling inside. One such banana tree was felled by a storm, so I got two bats out (my kids totally fell in love with them) and put them into another leaf, where, to my surprise, they happily stayed for the following days (normally they move to a new leaf every night). Rescuing animals is something my kids particularly enjoy doing, and on this trip we also rescued a motmot and a nectar-feeding bat stunned by cars, a few crabs, spiders and toads crossing busy highways, and many gorgeous moths trapped in bright-lit rooms.

I love rainy season in the tropics! Dry forests were anything but, grasslands were brilliant-green, black-bellied whistling ducks (now common suburban birds in Costa Rica) were surrounded by creches of up to 20 tiny chicks, cloud forests were full of blooming orchids, and, surprisingly, mosquitoes weren’t bad at all. Only one hike was rained out. And one time when I was waiting out a brief shower in my car, a handsome long-tailed weasel appeared on the opposite roadside and ran under the car.

But the trip wasn’t all fun. One night we were walking along a forest trail and I spotted a large, beautiful katydid on a branch. I took her off and put her on the ground to let the family have a better look, but she turned around and attacked me, chasing my hand and eventually leaving a deep gash in my finger. I’ve never seen such vengeful viciousness in an invertebrate, except maybe in some ants.

On another night I almost had a heart attack. I was walking fast along a downhill trail, it made a sharp turn, and I ran into a huge jaguar crouching on the ground, teeth bared, just about to pounce on me. It took me a full second to realize that it was made of plastic. That trail is often used by school groups on guided tours, so that thing was probably supposed to be a teaching prompt, but I wonder how many kids were traumatized for life by it.

One thing I missed was ghost bats roosting at Carara National Park – I spent 4 hours driving there and back, searched dozens of palm trees where they normally roost, but couldn’t find any. Another painful miss was velvet worms: I had a tip about a particularly beautiful species occurring in a greenhouse near Monteverde, but it turned out they are only there in winter months (which are actually warmer as it’s the dry season).

Of course, the tropics are worth any trouble anyway, and I enjoyed that micro-expedition tremendously. Cherry on the cake, my daughter and I probably saw Costa Rica’s rarest and most mysterious mammal. But I am not sure about the identification, and I didn’t get a photo, so according to my new policy I am not telling anyone except a few people who study those particular animals and might check the place out when they work in the area. Would be great to get a confirmation.

I’ll eventually post some photos on my Instagram but it will take a while.

Sardinia, where I am on a criminally brief trip, has a lot of interesting wildlife. The most famous are endemic cave salamaders, but I am also enjoying observing local Curruca warblers. There are 5 of them here, and interactions between them are fascinating. They all have different, but overlapping, habitat preferences, and all can be found in shrubland that covers much of the island. That type of vegetation is very common in places with Mediterranean climate; it is called macchia in Italy, maquis in France, and chapparal in Spain and California. They are also difficult to observe because they are adept at hiding from view in their dense shrubs. During the mating season they sing a lot and some perform display flights, but now they are done breeding or are feeding fledglings, so seeing them all took me some effort.

The most common here is Sardinian warbler (C. melanocephala). Almost every patch of large shrubs has a pair. Large and aggressive, these warblers respond to playbacks of all other Curruca species, and not to huddle with them. It looks like all other Curruca have adapted by living in places that Sardinian warblers find suboptimal.

Common whitethroat (C. communis) lives in isolated shrub patches surrounded by open fields or forest. Spectacled warbler (C. conspicillata) hides in small shrubs scattered on particularly dry slopes and salt flats. Marmora’s warbler (C. sarda) also nests in small shrubs, mostly on tops of limestone cliffs or at higher elevations. Dartford warbler (C. undata) breeds in very dense groves of tall shrubs and small trees, mostly along streams. And all four can occasionally be found in “classical” macchia, with tall, well-spaced shrubs, but there they have to survive the persecution by Sardinian warblers.

On the Italian mainland, where Sardinian warblers are not found, all four smaller species are much easier to see. I wonder what prevents Sardinian warblers from expanding there.

June 7

We are going to Denmark tomorrow. I read up a bit about that horrible country, and now I am absolutely terrified.

For example: just today their prime minister was shoved aside by some man while she was walking down a city street. It tells me that:

1. Denmark is a backwards country. In developed countries like ours nobody hits prime-ministers because everybody and his brother carries an AR-15, and if you forgot yours at home, you can buy another at the corner for the price of car oil change;

2. Denmark is uncivilized. Prime ministers of civilized countries don’t wade into streets without like 50 bodyguards around them and snipers on roofs. In truly civilized countries like Russia, they also make sure all people within 1-km radius are replaced by fake pedestrians from security services.

3. Denmark is a dangerous place. Because they have a female prime minister, and women are too emotional to be trusted with important jobs. They might even hit or shove someone.

June 11

We survived our first day in Denmark. A few notes:

1. There isn’t much traffic in Copenhagen because everybody rides a bicycle. Haven’t seen so many cyclists since my first trip to China back in 1993.

2. Serving sizes in local restaurants are larger (and on average taste better) than in New York, yet very few people are obese. I can’t think of any possible explanation.

3. For the last 30 years I’ve been watching the Great Replacement unfold all over Europe. In Copenhagen it’s nearly complete: wood pigeons outnumber rock pigeons at least 100 to 1.

4. The last EU elections have shown that many Europeans are paranoid about immigration. But on Copenhagen streets half of all adults look like they are coming home from auditioning for the Vikings TV series. The real historical Vikings were probably more multicultural than Copenhagen today.

5. Late last night I took my jetlagged son spotlighting. Found my first ever natterjack toad, two common toads, a lot of roe deer, hares and mice, some huge snails and slugs, and finally showed the kid a live hedgehog. The nature here has a lot more northern feel than I expected, still there’s plenty of biodiversity.

6. Copenhagen is a bit like the city in Frozen. Charming, quiet and livable. Coming from New York area, I have to re-learn to drive like a nice, mentally healthy person. I am one, but it still takes some effort.

June 12

We have now survived in Denmark for almost 3 days. The place is, indeed, lawless (I haven’t seen a single police officer the whole time) and dangerous (twice we narrowly escaped being run over by cyclists). But 21 hour of daylight is great.

Copenhagen is completely overrun by jackdaws; there are also lots of magpies and even a few rooks in the suburbs, but remarkably few crows. The crows stay invisible until a few jackdaws and magpies gather at some piece of edible trash – than crows appear out of nowhere and take over the food source, like king vultures in the Amazon or lapped-faced vultures in Africa,

That was all my wildlife watching today. I mostly spend the time touring children’s playgrounds, almost as numerous in the city as corvids.

June 15

We are safely out of Denmark. A few more travel notes:

1. I drove around rural areas near Copenhagen for hours but never saw a piece of paper or plastic on the roadside. The obvious explanation is that people live in such extreme poverty that they hoard every bit of trash to burn in their stoves during those brutal European winters.

2. There are excellent nature reserves all over the place. This failure to develop the country thoroughly is typical for primitive peoples.

3. According to the official history of Denmark (in early years written mostly by monks), once the Vikings converted to Christianity they turned into peaceful hippies and never bothered anyone again. The truth is much more nefarious. Apparently, the conversion was a sham. In the middle of Copenhagen, I found this Pagan idol covered with offerings. I didn’t look inside the bags but wouldn’t be surprised if human sacrifices take place there.

Anyway, we all loved Denmark. Great country, great people, beautiful nature.

Last night I spent something like half an hour watching two Canada lynxes in courtship/mating. They were all into it, started about 200 m away and ended up nearly bumping into me. I was so still that I almost got my fingers and face frostbitten; they only walked away after becoming suspicious of the clicks of my thermal scope self-calibrating every minute. I never turned the light on – that would instantly end the magic. Just the starlit shadows on the snow , the colorful images on the scope screen, and the unforgettable sounds. Was a bit surprised, too: normally their mating season ends in late March. But the place was just below the timberline, near Vermillion Pass on Alberta/BC border.

One of my hobbies is inventing fringe science theories. Here’s one of them.

There is a shrew called Eurasian least shrew (Sorex minutissimus). It weighs around 2 g (0.07 ounces). In Yakutia it lives in places where winter temperatures drop below -60C, there’s only a couple inches of snow on the ground, and immediately underneath the snow is a layer of permafrost half a mile thick. The shrew has short fur and naked snout and paws, yet remains active all winter, maintaining body temperature of 39C, which can be 100+ degrees above the ambient. This would be absolutely impossible to achieve by chemical metabolism (Hanski, 1984) even if food was abundant, which it isn’t. Sorex shrews actually decrease their metabolism and spend little time foraging in winter (Aitchison, 1987), and their metabolic rates at lower temperatures are inconsistent with chemical heat production (Schaeffer et al., 2020).

Obviously, the shrews utilize some unknown energy source. I strongly suspect cold fusion along some unknown pathway. We know that (1) nuclear fusion usually ends with iron production because iron is the first element that can’t be fused further without consuming energy rather than producing it, and (2) Sorex shrews deposit excessive iron in their teeth, hence their common name “brown-toothed shrews”. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the shrews actually run fusion all the way to iron: they could be fusing deuterium atoms on some kind of iron substrate, or maybe inside carbon-iron nanospheres.

This would explain why Sorex shrews living in coldest areas evolve to be the tiniest: the smaller you are, the easier it is for high-energy particles and gamma rays – dangerous byproducts of nuclear fusion – to escape your body without causing tissue damage. It also explains why Sorex shrews famously shrink their brains and other radiation-sensitive organs in winter (Dehnel, 1949) and switch from lipid to glucose metabolism (Thomas et al., 2023) apparently to be able to stop cell division to prevent radiation sickness. But the protection is not complete: Sorex shrews seem to have high mutation rates and some speces have numerous chromosomal races due to high chromosome instability (Zima et al. 1996).

This theory would be easy to test by catching a Sorex shrew in Alaska or Siberia in winter and checking it for isotopic anomalies and radioactivity, but this has never been done as far as I know. And if my theory is proven wrong, perhaps some studio would be interested in making a horror movie based on it?