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| Young Bucks This Morning, Mt. Tamalpais |
I left the trail cameras alone for about a month and was surprised to find not a single coyote or bobcat on any of the frames. The animals that showed up the most were deer, fox, squirrel, and most surprisingly, varied thrush.
I just finished reading Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, by Carl Zimmer. It was the first I'd heard of aerobiologists, scientists who study the microorganisms that live everywhere from the air around us, to up in the clouds, to high in the stratosphere. It was interesting to read a history of medicine from before the time microscopes came along, to the recent Covid-19 pandemic in which medical professionals refused to accept that the virus could travel as an aerosol, rather than as large droplets that would fall to the ground after traveling only a few feet.
"The conflict between Group 36 [who published Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 by Inhalation of Respiratory Aerosol in the Skagit Valley Chorale Superspreading Event] and WHO echoed William Firth Wells's struggles eight decades earlier. Wells had looked at diseases with an engineer's eye, using physics and statistics to track movements of pathogens inside droplets. He discovered that none of that mattered much to doctors, who put more stock in epidemiology. . . . In an August 2020 commentary, John Conly and his colleagues at the WHO Infection Prevention and Control Research and Development Expert Group for COVID-19 dismissed the Group 36 studies as 'opinion pieces' rather than rigorous science. They declared that 'SARS-CoV-2 is not spread by the airborne route to any significant extent.'"
Eventually the medical experts came around to the fact that it can indeed spread much farther than previously assumed. The interesting thing for me was how general acceptance of new scientific paradigms often comes very slowly, and often after careers have been destroyed by closed-minded authorities.
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| Another Beautiful Day on the Mountain |
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| A gray fox leaves a little scent mark on a rock. |
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| This fox checks out the scent but doesn't add one of its own. |
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| Foxtail |
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| A skunk came through on two occasions. |
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| A fox reinvigorates its scent-mark on the rock. |
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| This was the only jackrabbit to pass through. |
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| A fox is wary of the trail camera. |
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| I was surprised to see a couple of wild turkey toms displaying in the woods, with no one around to admire them. Just getting warmed up, maybe. |
Tam Cam Clips
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