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As I've mentioned, Trish and I recently returned from and fun adventure up north (Superior National Forest in Minnesota and the UP of Michigan). One of our favorite animals in the north woods is the common loon. These fish-eating predators are often seen floating in the lakes and diving under to catch fish. They can stay underwater for a surprisingly long time. Underwater, they dart around like torpedoes, using their huge webbed feet to propel them. They are fast enough to catch fish, but they also eat crayfish. The call of the loon is hauntingly beautiful... a long, drawn-out, lonely sounding howl. Loons often do this at night, then you'll hear another loon, perhaps floating on another lake in the distance, return the call. It's almost like they're lonely, and they just want to make sure other loons know they are there. I took this loon photo from the porch of our rustic cabin. After a week of paddling (and hiking) in Minnesota, we drove over to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit some good friends. We were lucky to be there at the time of the monarch butterfly migration. Monarchs heading south from Canada must fly nonstop across vast Lake Michigan, which could be as much as 280 miles over open water if the butterflies head straight south. Anyway, many monarchs fly to the tip of a certain peninsula, and they pause there to rest and to consume as much nectar as they can before taking off across the massive lake. We drove to the point to see them and were not disappointed. Thousands of monarchs had gathered there, getting themselves psyched up for hopping over the pond.   
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Trish and recently returned from a week in the north woods of northern Minnesota (for canoeing). I have many stories to share, but today I'll start with a hike we took in Superior National Forest in Minnesota between our paddling adventures. We pulled over at the trailhead of the Magnetic Rock Trail. The trail is only three miles, and was supposed to be an easy hike. Well, it wasn't quite as easy as we imagined, and three miles can seem like a long distance when you are stepping over countless boulders and bushwhacking around fallen trees. So it ended up taking more than three hours. The destination was an odd sixty-foot-high rock that glaciers had deposited in this vertical position instead of flat on the ground. And the rock is magnetic. We took compasses with us, and when we held them up near the rock's surface, the needles went wacky. How does such a magnetic rock form? Some rocks contain minerals that contain iron and act like tiny magnets. A LONG time ago, these minerals began to form as the lava (or magma) cooled. While the molten rocks had not yet solidified, the magnetic minerals floating in it became aligned to the Earth's magnetic field. Then, as the rocks solidified, these aligned minerals became locked in place. This can also happen with sedimentary rocks, but instead of floating in molten rock, the tiny minerals are deposited at the bottom of a body of water, and while they are still loose, they become aligned to the earth's magnetic field. Eventually, these sedimentary layers solidify into magnetic rock. Rock on! As we hiked back to our vehicle, we noticed two ruffed grouse (grouses?) feeding on plants beside the trail. I only had my phone for a camera, so I crept closer. And then closer. And even closer. For whatever reason, these birds seemed totally unafraid of us. Finally, I held my phone about two feet away from one to take this photo. Ruffed grouse don't live in Missouri, so this close encounter was rather exciting to me (it doesn't take much to excite me). Ruffed grouse are perhaps best known for the "drumming" behavior of males. Male grouse are aggressively territorial, and to proclaim their ownership of a section of forest, they stand on a log or rock (which is usually about twelve inches off the ground) and beat their wings really fast. So fast, in fact, that the motion creates a vacuum with each beat (as lightning does when it creates thunder). This makes a series of surprisingly loud drumming sounds.   A couple of really cool moths showed up at our house recently. Trish spotted this first creature feeding on the nectar of our marigolds. From a distance, the way it hovers and darts left and right makes it look very much like a hummingbird. In fact, one of its names is hummingbird moth. Officially, its common name is the snowberry clearwing sphinx moth. The caterpillars of snowberry clearwings are herbivores, feeding on leaves. The adults, though, feed exclusively on flower nectar, which makes them important pollinators. As they feed on flowers, pollen attaches to their body, and then they carry that pollen to other flowers. This second one—an impressive luna moth—landed on our screen door. Luna moths have a completely different life cycle compared to clearwing sphinx moths. As adults, sphinx moths feed on nectar, living for a few weeks to a few months. Adult luna moths, by contrast, do not eat at all. Wait—what? They don't eat? It's true. Adult luna moths don't even have a mouth or digestive system. They rely on stored energy from when they were leaf-eating caterpillars. After they emerge from the cocoon as adults, they have only one goal in life... to find a mate and reproduce. They live only a few days to a week. At about midnight, the females release a pheromone that the males can detect from a great distance, and that's how they manage to hook up before they die.   Life's great mysteries - Would it be better to have a PAUSE button or a REWIND button for your life?9/9/2025 It occurs to me that some of the mysteries I contemplate get a little weird. But hey... I'm a sci-fi author, so weird is the way I roll. When you were a kid, didn’t you wish you could have a PAUSE or a REWIND button? A PAUSE button would stop everything around you (except it wouldn’t stop you). A REWIND button would let you go back in time and do something over that you messed up. Which one you choose might say a lot about who you are. Let’s consider these one at a time. A PAUSE button would allow you to pause when things get frantic, or just before doing something important, so you could contemplate it carefully or perhaps “phone a friend” for advice. Or, if you suddenly found yourself in a dangerous situation, you could pause and remove yourself from the danger, such as when you suddenly realize a car is about to run into you. Hmm… but I guess it wouldn’t help much if you slipped and were already falling. However, one could argue that access to a PAUSE button would lead to people becoming careless, which would result in getting themselves into more bad situations, perhaps even deadly ones in which a PAUSE button would not save them. A REWIND button might allow you to correct mistakes, in hopes of achieving a different outcome. Or perhaps some people would use it to relive happy or thrilling moments. If you could use your REWIND button repeatedly, it might allow you to try things over and over until you figure it out (this reminds me of two movies: Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise). However, one could again argue that a REWIND button would cause a person to become apathetic, eventually not caring much about his or her actions. After all, if you can have a redo to fix every mistake you make, you might stop being careful. Also, there is a risk that, in the process of reliving something, you might change something else that causes a cascading effect and makes your future even worse. Okay, I’ve talked myself out of both of these. I’ve decided I don’t want either one! Why? Because life’s risks and potential dangers are what keeps us on our toes, and they make life exciting. But I still wonder what other people might choose. I dug into this question enough to realize that no psychologists have ever done a serious, large-scale study or survey to see what most people would choose. Well, now I want to know why no one has done a large survey on such an important question! Possible answers: First, this question is abstract, not easy to answer. So, researchers probably assume many people surveyed would simply not answer it, leading to what is called non-response bias, making the results unreliable. Second, large-scale surveys usually are designed to provide insights tied to product or policy improvements. A question like this is interesting, but it doesn’t really offer practical outcomes for businesses or institutions, making it a lower priority. Bummer. My conclusion (pure speculation, or course)? If you’re a PAUSE person, you’re more focused on the present, on caution, and on savoring the moment. If you’re a REWIND person, you’re more focused on nostalgia, regrets, and a desire to fix past mistakes. There you go... something to think about as you start your day today!  Lately, I've been working hard to prepare two of my series for audiobook narration—Bridgers and Diffusion. Savage, one of my favorite novels, is done and published. It's a fun listen (Audible, Amazon, or Apple Books). Samuel, the main character of Savage, encounters some very unusual bandicoots. No, not like Crash Bandicoot, the video game character, but these bandicoots are strange in a Stan-C-Smith-science-fiction kind of way. Bandicoots are, of course, real animals. Some of them look kind of like rats, but they could hardly be more different. This photo is a long-nosed bandicoot. Rats are rodents, which are placental mammals (more closely related to humans than to bandicoots). Bandicoots are marsupials (more closely related to kangaroos than to rats). Marsupials are unique among mammals in that their young develop mostly outside of the female's body instead of in a uterus inside the female's body. They are born VERY small, then they crawl to a pouch on the mother's abdomen, where they attach to a nipple and grow by feeding on mother's milk. Eventually, they get so big they can no longer stay in the pouch. Bandicoots hop like rabbits when they run. They also have a high-pitched, bird-like call they use to locate each other. Baby bandicoots are born after a very short gestation period—only 11 days (one of the shortest pregnancies of all mammals). Like with other marsupials, when they are born, they are tiny and they move out of the uterus and to the mother's pouch. Bandicoots normally stand on all fours, and the mother's pouch is open facing the rear, to prevent dirt from entering the pouch as the mother digs for food. And... male bandicoots have a "bifurcated" penis, with two ends. Why? Because the females have two vaginas. Actually, this is true of many marsupials... they have two vaginas, and two uteruses (uteri?). This allows marsupials to have several young (or litters of young) that are at different stages of development. For example, a kangaroo female can have a developing fetus in one uterus, a baby that is already born but is developing in her pouch, and another baby that is out of the pouch but is still young enough to be dependent. Pretty cool, huh?  Photo Credit: - Long-nosed bandicoot - JJ Harrison, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Two things I love about this time of the year in Missouri. First, the white-tailed deer fawns still have their spots (barely), but they are getting big enough that we occasionally see them out and about on their own. Remember, when fawns are small, they are much safer when they are alone, lying still in the vegetation of the forest floor, than when they are with their mother. The more hours per day the mother leaves them alone, the more likely the little fawns will survive. It's much more dangerous to be with the mother. Why? Because the mother is more visible, and more likely to draw the attention of predators. Which draws attention to the fawn. Most fawns taken by predators are those that are up and moving around, following their mother. But now that fawns are large enough to outrun a coyote, it is safe for them to be with their mother (or even moving around on their own), and we see them more often. This fawn came into our driveway recently. The second thing I love this time of the year is the soothing calls of mourning doves. For some reason, these haunting calls make me think of summers when I was a kid, staying in bed late on Saturday mornings and listening to the doves through the screens of the bedroom's open windows. It was a simpler time, so I try to rekindle those feelings whenever I hear them now. It seems we always have a few pairs of these birds near our house. Mourning doves are normally monogamous, mating for life (or until something happens to one of them).   Photo Credits: White-tailed deer fawn and mourning dove - Stan C. Smith |
Stan's Cogitations
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December 2025
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