Bird diversity in business and industrial areas

In short order we had seventeen new study sites, including business centers, multifamily housing units, and additional forest reserves. Don [Norman] began to survey these sites using the same point count techniques my students and I used in nearby residential and reserve areas.

. . . When Don finished the summer's work, he reported rather sheepishly that a keen birder could expect to see equal numbers of species in forests of the Cascade Mountains and in Seattle's industrial heart. Though not as rich as residential subirdia, the three forests surveyed yielded an average of twenty-nine species, whereas the twelve business sites averaged thirty-one species. In fact, one-third of the business sites equaled or exceeded the diversity Don observed in the richest forest reserve.

John M. Marzluff, Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2014), p. 98

Beaumont is flaaaaaat

On the surface, Beaumont is flat and—geographically, at least—about as interesting as a parking lot. The first settlers of record, in 1824, were named Noah and Nancy Tevis, and their settlement was called Tevis Bluff. The name must have been either a joke or a reference to a gambling strategy, because the elevation in Beaumont ranges from a few inches above sea level to a whopping twenty-two feet. Texans brag about how big everything out there is, but I have to say, no self-respecting Tennessean would even think of using the word "bluff" to describe a landscape you could scarcely stub your toe on.

Dr. Bill Bass & Jon Jefferson, Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 214

Shaped by Seattle

I live in the Puget Sound region—a land of clouds, salmon, Orca whales, congested traffic, and double-leaved bascule bridges. Like many Seattleites, I grumble at the excessive sunshine in mid-July. I like foghorns and ducks and snow-capped mountains. Rainy Seattle with its cafés and bookstores is a perfect reading-and-writing city; and I am happy here, happy as a coot bobbing on Green Lake. My place, the Pacific Northwest, affects who I am.

Priscilla Long, “Genome Tome,” American Scholar, vol. 74, no. 3, Summer 2005, p. 36