Real Science Hurts Brains: Crow Edition

Didja know real life is ridiculously complicated?  Even simple things involve a lot, if your observation runs close enough – one classic example of baking a pie from scratch requiring the creation of a universe.  Causes are often multifactorial, because how could they not be?  The pie example runs through the ingredients, the cultivation of apples and wheat and cows to make butter etc., but that pie also needs a human to put it together, who must be educated from societies that had to evolve all the way up from monkey grunting, besides the hundreds of millions of years since we diverged from our last common ancestor with apples, and the billions of years of natural selection running to the two minutes after the Hadean magma cooled.

So I say that if you’re genuinely trying to arrive at the truth of a given thing, you need to wrack your brain for all the considerations, contingencies, and possibilities.  If you wants tha Real Science, you gots ta be willing to come up with a lot more than a single hypothesis.  Yes, to test, you have to narrow things down to the ideas you’re going to test, but to make that test as rigorous as possible, you should really try to think of every possible factor that could confound the results.  Stretch that brain.  Presumably that’s why you went into science, right?  To feel smart?

But no.  It’s easier to feel smart if you blithely whistle past all the ways you could be wrong, like evopsych assholes and scientific racists (how much overlap those fields possess).  One hypothesis.  A few cheesy tests.  Maybe squint and look at the data sideways, and by jove, you’ve cracked it!  Now go get as many women pregnant as possible, to share your genetic genius with the world.

Over here in the real world, you could be like me, and know just enough to be sure you’ll never fully understand anything.  Don’t throw your hands up and veg out watching George Michaels videos on yewchoob until you die.  Stay wondering.  Be frustrated forever by the fact real science hurts, and take your cold solace in the awareness at least you aren’t an evopsych fucko, or qanon, or moon landing truther, etc etc.

Here I come to the actual point of the article.  Does anyone know why crow populations are skyrocketing in the Pacific Northwest?  I could be wrong about this, but to my slightly-less-than-casual observation, they may have doubled or tripled in population within the last few years.  This was well after a documented boom they had back in the late twentieth century.

A possible point of failure in this question:  observational bias.  Most of my travels in a given week range from Auburn to Federal Way and back – up and down the west side of one little valley.  Maybe there are more crows here than elsewhere.  Maybe I had poorer observation of their numbers in previous years because I wasn’t paying as close of attention.  Maybe my mind is exaggerating, and they always gathered by the hundreds on the edge of the mall, sunning themselves in the morning light, in preparation for the daily hustle.  Maybe if I’d been driven down the west end of Main Street before, at the right time of day, I would have already seen them dotting the little lawns and parking lots and rooftops and trees, in groups ranging from dozens to hundreds, block after block.  Maybe they would always gather in megaflocks in the south of Auburn somewhere, making a cacophony that can be heard a mile away.

Sounded like I was trying to convince myself my observations were accurate toward the end of that paragraph, but I absolutely do recognize this perception could be flawed.  It literally could be a matter that I was never in the right place or time of day or time of year to see these crow convocations before.  In which case, there’s no phenomenon to wonder about.  But assuming there is a phenomenon, what’s causing it..?

Here’s where the range of possibilities starts to hurt the brain.  If I was a shit scientist instead of a vexed layperson, I would just cook up one hypothesis and a single test to run for it, then congratulate myself in print and get quoted in popular science magazines.  Instead, I sit here realizing how complex this can be – maybe even unknowable.  Some things I’ve considered:

Food explosion.  I learned from Abe Oceanoxia that invasive European earthworms have taken over the USA in huge numbers, and crows happily eat a lot of worms, whatever their proclivity for french fries.  Maybe earthworms are having a population explosion for reasons I can’t even begin to guess at.  Or maybe they’re just more available, because long years of drought seem to have ended here, and rain drives them to the surfaces of lawns and sidewalks.  Any given rainy day, you’ll see robins and crows both going for the wriggly pink smorgasbord, crows most of all.

Or maybe there’s another food altogether that has increased.  As covid and the ascent of global fascism have fostered a sense of doom in the younger generations, increasing deaths from despair, it has certainly increased the amount of litter.  Is the food explosion mostly human trash?

Predator decline.  I’ve heard that owls are the most prolific predators of crows.  I imagine cats and dogs take their share as well.  Well, we’ve no shortage of cats and dogs, but maybe the species of owl that eats crows has taken a population hit – or altered their behavior based on availability of a different prey animal or animals.

Or maybe a competing predator of the food they eat has experienced a decline, like worms becoming overpopulated due to a mole plague.

Natural selection.  Maybe a disease that had been killing crows had winnowed the population to those crows with a resistance, and those crows in turn had a big population boom?  Maybe crows had only bred at certain times of year to avoid competing with themselves but that was an obsolete limitation and year-long breeding finally won out majority expression in the population?  Maybe something crows eat had an evolutionary breakthrough and exploded.

Cultural selection.  Maybe crows figured out a cool trick they hadn’t done before.  I was once impressed by watching a crow use a tool, but since then have seen it again several times.  What’s interesting is the tool is the same – a short straight stick, just a few inches.  Was the technique of crafting this tool communicated, or were they all learning to go for the same source for the tool, or have I just seen one crow who packs its tool everywhere it goes, and gets around?

I haven’t seen this so often that it could make that big a population difference, but maybe there is some other behavioral trait they’ve increased.  Maybe they mob raptors and ravens so often now that they are being preyed upon less often, or are competing less for food.  Maybe they’ve increased the frequency of the food call.  There’s a tension in crow instincts between the desire to have food all to oneself and the desire to call a bunch of crows in to share.  If they’re all doing the food call more often, they’re eating food before any competing species can get to it.

My husband saw a yewchoob vid where some weirdos left a mound of peanut butter in the woods and crows ate almost all of it, beating out bears and coyotes and raccoons and more, strictly because of this instinct to call in your friends.  Well, that and having less hesitation about strange food sources.  The coyote missed out because he was too scared of the blob to eat it.  Maybe the hesitation recently reduced even more.

Commensalism.  Human population in the region has also exploded.  The town I live in has three times as many people as it did when I first moved here as a child.  More people, more lawns with worms, more fast food places and restaurants producing food waste, more rats and mice and pigeons and starlings to eat.  I’ve seen them eat pigeons and starlings before.  Hell, an increase in predatory behavior could drive population, or even cause an evolutionary split between crows with different feeding habits.

Niche partitioning.  Maybe that last one is it.  Maybe there’s been an invisible split along behavioral lines in food gleaning, which is the beginning of a speciation event that may or may not ever reach completion before it collapses back in on itself due to climate change or other human issues.

Some or all of the above.  The cause is multifactorial after all.

None of the above.  Phenomenon isn’t real.  I’m tripping and all this thought is for nothing.

Hell, all this thought assuredly is for nothing because I will never know the answer, whether it’s knowable or not.  And yet the thoughts still happen.  At least it shows I’m smarter than an evopsych dick.  That’s nice.

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The Discourse Continues

You could call this a pro-AI post because it’s just a reblobbed conversation with the LLM known as Claude.  Haters do not interact please.

I began this conversation with Claude because HJ had an article up that was annoying me.  You can see the beginning of it in my comment section.  I randomly came back for more discourse, and was kinda impressed by how the ol’ bot is performing.  This seemed like it might be edifying for other humans to witness, so I post it here…
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Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Stayin’ Alive.

The blog network is getting a concussion, but we keep keeping on.  Most importantly, am I still in the sidebar?  This post should ensure I remain there a bit longer, whether it adds anything of value to the world or not.  Hey, google just informed me we still have a Bee Gee too.

Mano suggested PZ get cute little grippy booties to prevent further damage to his frail corpus.  What are you doing to stay alive in this benighted era?  I’m trying to keep my husband’s gothery within acceptable limits, while scheming on achieving a sense of creative fulfillment in the not too distant.  Will probably start posting some prose around here again, within a month or so.

I’m trying to think of a way to inflate the word count on this post.  Um… survival.  When I was a child, I took passing interest in the things one boyoid is meant to take interest in.  I got a book on survival called, like, Survival, from the library.  How to remove leeches and camouflage your bodkin whilst you sleep in enemy territory.  Shit like that.  It was a product of cultural Ollie North militarism, which makes me wonder how much bullshit it contained.  Feeding into the idea one could be that GI Joe who lives long enough to rack up a spartanesque kill count on the faceless hordes, recruiting kids more foolish and more physically adroit than myself to enlist.

For a few months I played more “realistically” with my GI Joes before I stopped playing with them in favor of TTRPGs.  Later, in high school, I had a friend who liked to amuse us all with his creative writing during lunch breaks, the future Bad Moustache Having Guy.  I’m suddenly reminded he did a few stories modeled off that Hamburger Hill type Vietnam vet foolery, guys surviving by duct-taping their guts in or stapling their heads back on.  I don’t remember any particular lines, just the raw idea.  Thanks, BMHG.  I hope your eldritch ladywife appreciates your literature as much as we did.

Alright, that will do.  Stay alive, y’all.

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Back to School or Else

I don’t know if other people have this dream or it’s just people like me who did not graduate high school, but last night I had to go get my diploma at near fifty years old.  I didn’t actually get through the doors of the institution in this dream, however.  This dream changed its natural course before I got there, and turned into a species of frustration dream.

Originally it was going to be my brother and I going back to high school, and down in San Francisco, so we were going to fly there.  But I couldn’t find the plane tickets at the last minute, couldn’t find my brother, and went rampaging around looking for them.  Gradually it became clear the reason I couldn’t find anything was that this was a dream, and I had never needed to go back to school, or go anywhere.

Was it a dream though?  I didn’t know I was dreaming at the time, only knew that the element where I had to go back to school was false.  Competing theories filled my head.  Was it a dream I had taken for real, or a delusion?  Was I becoming prematurely demented?  This was very upsetting, changing things into a nightmare.

At that point it shifted focus into gathering books and papers that had accidentally been left out in the parking lot, not having enough hands, all that kind of shit.  But the larger problem remained; I had no idea why I had thought I needed to go back to school, and it tore me up.

As I woke up, I had to pass through a hypnopompic state where the dream still felt real, so I was very focused on figuring out what’s real, like I could reason my way through it instead of just finishing waking up and letting the whole crisis melt away on its own.  At least it was much less emotionally intense by that point.

After that I fell asleep again, for a dream where i had a job with nebulous duties and a malevolent boss, which involved a little bit of actual cat herding.

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Brinkman Rides Again

I said I’d review William Brinkman’s new book – Revenge of the Phantom Press – before it comes out and missed that goal, so here we are on release day the day after release day two days after release!  You can buy that thang, even as you read this!  William Brinkman is the Bolingbrook Babbler man in the sidebar, with his long running tabloid universe.  How does an old school movement skeptic end up writing a series where aliens and lake monsters are real?  Maybe reading all his babblerverse novels will provide a hint.  The first one, The Rift, was torn from the atheoskeptic headlines Law&Order style, recreating Elevatorgate with fictional characters, plus weredeer and time travel.

Increasingly, especially in the self-publishing sphere, you find that the language of storytelling has been broken.  Everyone from Mary Shelley to Dan Brown learned to write in a continuum with Shakespeare.  They knew how to weave a tale that works.  Exposition, conflict, escalating stakes, payoff.  Too many kids these days came up in fanfic spaces where all of these things are optional.  This isn’t to say that a sufficiently advanced author couldn’t break with convention for artistic ends, but the lack of fundamental skills on display nowadays is appalling.  William Brinkman learned to write before the turn of the millennium and it shows.  I don’t want to damn with faint praise, just to express my satisfaction with reading a complete story.  It’s the difference between eating breath mints and eating food.  RotPP is food.

I’m going to just throw out some general observations and wrap with my opinion of the book’s merits.  I’m not going to discuss the plot to avoid spoilers, and because the summary on the jacket is good enough.

I know that Brinkman took pains to make the story stand alone, so that a person can read it without having read the previous Babbler stories.  It’s hard for me to tell objectively how well that worked, having read The Rift and a few others, but my guess is that some elements of these characters and this setting are not going to work for some readers, because they do call for an amount of outside familiarity.  On the other hand, I do think most readers can just deal with those bits enough to keep going, because he does very successfully minimize the sense of being interrupted for info dumps – even more than in the previous book.

At the outset of the book and a few times throughout, the hero is humbled in the presence of women in a way that might feel off, to people with only a little of the backstory.  Even having read The Rift, I kinda felt like he was excessively kicked around.  Our hero Tom is a reformed villain, so alright, makes sense, but if I was friends or coworkers with someone who had recovered from heel status, I wouldn’t want to trigger the sense of shame that had driven him to villainy in the first place, right?  I’d be at least a bit nicer to him.  This is a quibble though, and doesn’t detract overly from the story.

The way the story was constructed ended up having a lot of back and forth travel.  I’m sure there are lots of good stories that do, but it’s kinda funny how much it’s like, go there, no get out, no go back, no get out again.  Still, different enough things happen on each foray that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

I have low-key problems with memorizing white people names, worsened by characters with minimal description, but this wasn’t as difficult for me this time around as it was in The Rift.  Two hundred pages in I had to wonder who “Jenna” was, but I gathered her role in the story from context, so I didn’t have to page back to be fully reminded.

Science fiction and fantasy have some overlap – hence the term SFF – and Revenge of the Phantom Press lives in that overlap.  There’s another term that gets bandied around for fantasy with a contemporary milieu: “magical realism.”  That’s where things are moving in the direction of the literary or surreal.  As a writer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to feel out these lines, and to me at least, it’s largely about explanation.  Does this setting have rules – or does it strongly communicate the feeling there are rules – behind the supernatural events taking place?

RotPP does, and so there’s no question that it’s straightforwardly genre fiction – not literary.  But as a reader who is drawn to the literary, my eye is open for it, and there were a few moments that got surprisingly close.  If you ignore the explanatory elements, just dig the scenery, the first scene in “Little Bolingbrook” can hit like that.

As a contemporary SFF story that emphasizes action and adventure, RotPP is very well-executed.  People love writing these kinds of stories, but there are a lot of pitfalls, and Brinkman deftly maneuvers around the lot of them.  I didn’t get hung up on exposition, I didn’t see any plot holes, no dangling plotlines, no pointless cul-de-sacs.  Set-ups had payoffs, plot devices worked as intended.  Pacing was tight.  You’re never far from an exciting scene, but you’re not overwhelmed by too many without breathing space between.  You could see the movie of this on the pages, but it also doesn’t feel like a failed screenwriter’s consolation project.  The medium of prose is used well.

The most important part of all this is emotional core.  Did the emotional scenes hit the way they were supposed to?  The climax of action coincides with a climax of emotion in the story – which is more than I can say for my own entrant to the genre – and while it definitely had the potential to feel pat and obvious, it actually worked for me.  Later, when the relationship arc of the main characters was complete, I was again able to feel what Brinkman wanted me to feel.

I don’t know why I’m in such a creative writing teacher mode on this review, just completely patronizing, so it’s time to get down to brass tacks.  Worth it or not?  Worth it.  Good stuff, surely the cream of self-publishing.  I recently read a Dean Koontz novel – Midnight – which had a similar action-adventure feel, and gives a good metric for comparison.  Koontz was better with the kind of description that makes a vivid impression (sorry William) but Brinkman’s plot construction was superior, and his story didn’t end with the hero smashing his son’s record collection, so also superior values.

This isn’t the kind of story I’d normally go out of my way for, favoring horror and surrealism.  I ended up reading it because William is my bloggy compatriot on Freethoughtblogs.com.  Even so, I feel he did great work.  I give it four out of five stars.  Check it out if you like action-adventure scifi-fantasy in a contemporary setting, no bullshit.

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