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Goings On: Goings On
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week.
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Tables for Two: Scarr’s Pizza
35 Orchard St.
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Migrations: Eagles
Every fall in recent years, the densest concentration of bald eagles in the lower forty-eight states has been found by the banks of McDonald Creek, near the village of Apgar, in Glacier National Park, Montana. Not long ago, so were we. New weather from the Gulf of Alaska had moved in the night before we got there, and the sky was soaped over with clouds, like the windows of a drive-in closed for the season. U.S. Highway 2 along the southern edge of the park was bare and wet between mounds of snow beginning their six-month residence. The bar signs were turned on by one-thirty in the afternoon. In the parking lot of a bar called Packers Roost was a pickup truck that had a flashlight, a Montana license plate,…
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Field Notes: One by One
If people, viewed from a great height, look like ants, do ants, viewed at close range, look like people? Of course not. Ants have six legs, compound eyes, no lungs, and impossibly narrow waists, and they tend to hang around with aphids and mealybugs. Still, behavioral similarities make them excellent analogues. Ants, like humans, are into career specialization, livestock herding, engineering, climate control, in-flight sex, and war; for them, as for us, free will may or may not be an illusion. As for whether ants look to humans for insight into themselves, science has no answer.
A few years ago, Marko Pecarevic, a Croatian graduate student studying conservation biology at Columbia University, met with his adviser, the urban ecologist James Danoff-Burg, to come up with a subject for his master’s thesis.…
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Reflections: Butterflies
The childhood of a lepidopterist.
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New York Journal: Harboring Rats
Vermin of the waterfront and beyond.
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Our Local Correspondents: Pets Allowed
Why are so many animals now in places where they shouldn’t be?
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A Reporter at Large: The Squid Hunter
Can Steve O’Shea capture the sea’s most elusive creature?
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The Sporting Scene
When homing pigeons leave home.
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Fiction: The Elephant Vanishes
When the elephant disappeared from our town’s elephant house, I read about it in the newspaper. My alarm clock woke me that day, as always, at six-thirteen. I went to the kitchen, made coffee and toast, turned on the radio, spread the paper out on the kitchen table, and proceeded to munch and read. I’m one of those people who read the paper from beginning to end, in order, so it took me a while to get to the article about the vanishing elephant. The front page was filled with stories on S.D.I. and the trade friction with America, after which I plowed through the national news, international politics, economics, letters to the editor, book reviews, real-estate ads, sports reports, and finally the regional news.
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Books: Bark
Do dogs have history?
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Books: Farm to Fable
George Orwell’s animal allegory.
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The Theatre: Animal Magnetism
Disney takes the high road to profit.
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Puzzles & Games Dept.: The Crossword
A moderately challenging puzzle.