Running Commentary 2/24/2025

Derek Edwards -

Hello,

I finally managed to see some snow buntings this past week. I've been watching for them all winter, without success until last Wednesday, when I saw some from a great distance; I was able to ID them based on their wings. I'd still like to see them closer sometime, but for now I can add them to my life list. I also saw some horned larks along with them, getting a much better look at these. They'll be the Bird of the Week this time.

Anyway...

Watching...

Watson

I'm still watching Elementary off-and-on; I'm not through it yet. But I did see that some of the creators of that Sherlock Holmes adaptation have kicked off another one for CBS. This time it follows Dr. James Watson (portrayed here by Morris Chestnut) returning to practicing medicine after Sherlock Holmes apparently dies after falling from Reichenbach Falls while fighting the sinister Professor Moriarty. I say "apparently" because in the original stories and almost certainly here, eventually, we learned that Holmes had faked his death at Reichenbach. But anyway, how's the show so far, based on the first two episodes? Here are my notes:

  • This show is very, very similar to House, MD, so much so I worry the creators of that show might have a copyright case here.
    • Both draw from Sherlock Holmes lore
    • Both are about a somewhat rogue doctor who works to diagnose patients with mysterious, obscure ailments.
    • Both doctors suffer from lasting injuries that they are medicating on their own in unwise ways
    • Both doctors have assembled a team of other, young doctors who they've recruited for unorthodox reasons. One has a pronounced accent. Another was chosen for their apparent dishonesty.
    • Both doctors are antagonistic but also romantically involved with the woman who runs their hospital.
    • House starred a Brit as an American; Watson stars an American as a Brit (I think; if Chestnut's doing a British accent he's inconsistent).
  • That said, I think if this show can go on long enough to find its own identity, it could be pretty good. The second episode was a sort of blend of medical mystery and criminal mystery; this could be a solid path forward for the show.
  • I suspect we'll find out that Moriarty is the one funding Watson, not Sherlock. Shinwell is working for him, perhaps under duress, but we only have Shinwell’s word that Sherlock was a) rich, secretly and b) funding Watson’s work. Moriarty actually would be rich enough to pull this off.

Reading...

Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty

  • This book is a murder mystery centered around Mallory Viridian. She is an interesting, sort of meta take on the literary detective: she is aware that most people do not witness multiple unrelated murders (as Holmes-esque detectives tend to) and has decided that she must be somehow cursed. So, when aliens make contact with Earth, she sneaks away to Station Eternity, the nearest trading port, hoping that if she gets away from people, the murders will stop.
  • The world of Station Eternity operates on a certain rule: species bond with other species, or with each other; humans are the outliers in living as true individuals. Station Eternity is thus wary of allowing humans onboard. There are only three of them: an officially designated Earth ambassador, and two unsanctioned refugees: Mallory and Xan Morgan, the lead suspect in the last murder she had witnessed.
  • The station, as a setting, is not realized all that well. I struggled to grasp the scale of it; how large it is, how many people are there, how many live there vs. just pass through, is left very fuzzy. There are six non-human species mentioned, none of whom are characterized as particularly alien, other than the Sundry.
  • As a mystery, this book wasn’t particularly tight, and Mallory isn’t really much of a detective here. She’s observant and has the skills to solve crimes by examining the crime scene (where she usually is already present) but for all the murders she supposedly solved in the past, we don’t see her solve much here. The instigating deaths (which only happen about a third of the way into the book) weren’t quite a murder, anyway; they seem to have been a tragic accident. I honestly lost track of what Mallory was doing for most of the second half of the book.
  • The conflict among the Gneiss seemed tangential to the rest of the book; it had nothing to do with the attack on the human shuttle, other than Ren’s death leading to both, and really only served as an element of chaos disrupting Mallory’s investigation.
  • This is the first of what’s now at least three books about Mallory Viridian, called “The Midsolar Murders” in a nod to Anthony Horowitz. Unless I hear that future installments have put in some real mystery, I doubt I’ll be eager to read them. I didn’t hate this book, but I don’t think I could honestly recommend it to anyone; there’s both better sci-fi and better mystery books out there.
  • This and the other books in the series have nice covers.

Bird of the Week

People have long envied birds for their ability to fly. So many difficulties in travel—climbing over mountains, crossing rivers, navigating dense forests—would disappear if only we could take to the air. We thought further might be the key, as in the story of Daedalus and Icarus. Then we found our own way into the sky, when the Montgolfier brothers invented the balloon, which lifted them up from the ground the way fish can lift themselves up toward the surface of the water. Airplanes, and then helicopters, soon followed. These fly using the same general physical principles as do birds, though the particulars are fairly different; no one flies aboard a flapping machine. And, of course, human flight hasn't brought quite the full freedom of movement for us as birds' brings to them. A bird can just take off; human flight has rules, lots of them, which means that most of it happens in and out of airports, like the one where I first saw today's bird, the horned lark.

There are nearly one hundred species of larks in the world, of which the horned lark is the only one found in the Western Hemisphere. Larks are open-country birds, found in fields and especially on barren plains. They seem to prefer living on bare dirt more than anything else; in Europe the horned lark is sometimes called the shore lark in reference to its presence on sand dunes and beaches, but they're also found in deserts, high mountain plains, large prairies, and tundra. As for human-shaped habitats, horned larks are also often found in recently plowed farm fields and in recently-closed mines (where they are the first bird to return after mining activity has ceased). And they're also big fans of airfields, which have enabled them to stake a claim on previously forested land.

These birds have a complicated relationship with humans. On the one hand, they are often reliant on open-ground songbird habitat. Personally, I make a point of looking for birds around my local airport, and I've been able to find such birds as rough-winged swallows, eastern meadowlarks, and savannah sparrows that I've never seen anywhere else in my local area—and that's not to mention all the starlings, doves, and raptors that also live in and around the airfield. But airports don't usually want to be home to so many birds. Famously, a flock of geese was enough to bring down a commercial flight piloted by Chesley Sullenberger, whose skill brought the plane into a water landing, protecting his passengers, and brought him fame and eventually a portrayal by Tom Hanks in film. But bird strikes aren't exactly uncommon, and can easily lead to the deaths of fliers, and so airports must do all they can to keep flocks away from their runways.3 But that can be hard to do, especially in the case of horned larks. The airport in Portland, Oregon is home to a particular subspecies, known as the streaked horned lark. This subspecies is endangered, and the airport authority has had to adopt special conservation measures, mainly establishing a barren island in the Columbia River as a lark preserve and counting on birds to move from the airfield to live there instead.4,5

I found some larks in a mixed flock with snow buntings, which were the birds I was actually monitoring the airfield for. Michigan is home to horned larks year-round, but we have more in the winter, when Canadian larks come down out of the tundra. The fact that these larks were hanging out with snow buntings makes me think they were Canadian, but I'm not sure.

To science, the horned lark is Eremophila alpestris, a name which refers to two of its preferred habitat types: the genus name means "desert loving" while the species name means "of high mountains"; Linnaeus originally named the bird Alauda alpestris, or "high mountain lark" because it was the only lark found at high elevations. Alauda is the Latin name for a lark, though the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder claimed the name came from the Celtic for "great songstress."6

  1. Whitmore, R.C. (1980). Reclaimed surface mines as avian habitat islands in the eastern forest. American Birds. 34: 13-14. https://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/nab/v034n01/p00013-p00014.pdf
  2. Cadman, M. D. (2007). Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Ontario, 2001-2005. Bird Studies Canada. p. 386
  3. US Code of Federal Regulations, Title 14 Chapter I Subchapter G Part 139 Subpart D § 139.337 "Wildlife Hazard Management". Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Transportation. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/part-139/section-139.337
  4. “Streaked Horned Larks: Conservation Challenges and Opportunity – Port Currents – Port of Portland,” (2016) https://portcurrents.portofportland.online/streaked-horned-larks-conservation-challenges-and-opportunity/.
  5. Bird Alliance of Oregon. “Streaked Horned Lark,” June 12, 2024. https://birdallianceoregon.org/our-work/protect/habitat-and-wildlife/grasslands/streaked-horned-lark-3/.
  6. Jobling, J. A. (editor). The Key to Scientific Names in Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman et al. editors), Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca.

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