On eating and being eaten

The changing diet of polar bears, with a new emphasis on the eggs of snow geese:

David Iles, a graduate student at Utah State University, who has been working at La Pérouse Bay for several years, set out cameras to observe goose nests and caught the bears in the act. He now has 40 cameras set up over a stretch of tundra. They take photographs every two minutes and shoot a burst of 30 images when an animal walks in front of the camera.

In addition to capturing photographs of bears consuming eggs last season, the cameras caught cranes, wolves, eagles and foxes eating. “Everything seems to love eggs out here,” he said.

One goose or one nest may not seem like much. But polar bears are gluttons. Dr, Rockwell described one case in which a bear ate about 1,200 eggs — of eider ducks, in this case — in four days. He said Dr. Gormezano had calculated that a clutch of four eggs would amount to 825 calories, the equivalent of one and a half Big Macs. Three hundred four-egg clutches would be 247,500 calories, or about 10 percent of a bear’s yearly nutritional needs.

Closing tabs

Tiny books of the Bronte children: digital facsimiles here. These are so amazing (I think the link came via Becca?)....

Also:

The Lawn Road Flats chronicled (truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction!).

Jim Holt on the conundrum of personal identity.

Abandoned settlements of the far north. (Via Anna.)

Closing tabs

Have had a bit of a breather in Cayman for a few days, with some important pieces of work finished and much exercise, but am on another plane tomorrow to another country! Then home on Sunday. I am ready, really, for the semester to be over: five more weeks, but two of them only with Monday teaching rather than Monday-Wednesday...

Closing tabs:

Vanessa Veselka on a truck-stop killer and the life of teenage runaways.

Chickens have to live somewhere too!

Note-taking habits of prior ages.

9 political poems to read now that the election's over.

An alluring excerpt from Nancy Marie Brown's Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

Smallest man in the world dances with his cat.

Alos: my favorite local sports journalist Ron Shillingford profiles the Wednesday Night Run Club. (B.'s marathon relay team gets a mention!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jacqueline Carey's Dark Currents: Agent of Hel (not bad, but not up to the standard of her best - she's working in a genre that Seanan McGuire has more of a natural gift for!); Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot; Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.

Bleed

Via former student Gabriel, Nathan Thornburgh's excellent piece on Nordic larp.  This is the world of my novel (only in Morningside Heights)!

Nordic Birds

Peter Robins asks what proportion of Swedish remaindered books end up at Ikea.

(Hmmm, I do not think it is a silly question, although it has an attractive air of superficial frivolity - now, though, I have a yen for a more concrete answer!)

"Seal steak and biscuits and pemmican and chocolate"

At the Guardian, John Crace interviews Roland Huntsford on his histories of Nordic skiing and polar exploration. The flavor of bygone days:

How someone who was born in Cape Town in 1927 came to develop a Nordic mentality is a story in itself. Huntford's father was both a soldier and a farmer, while his mother was a Ukrainian exile who had escaped the Bolshevik revolution. Huntford came to London after the second world war to study physics at Imperial College, but lasted only two years before he was asked to leave - "not a high point in my education" - and he disappeared to the continent to do nothing gracefully. "I felt my mind had been deformed by science in the UK," he says. "Over here scientists seemed to have a tunnel vision, whereas the ones I met abroad had a wide range of interests and were happy to discuss Italian literature.

"To be honest, I was a drifter, and probably still am in some ways. I ended up in Florence where I hung out with the other would-be artists, fraudulent or otherwise, that gathered there. I don't know if I had a good time, but one would need to have had a heart of stone not to be affected by its atmosphere, its Renaissance painters and writers: to this day, Dante remains my favourite poet."

He moved back to London in the late 50s, found digs in Chelsea and met a Danish communist double agent who was to change his life. "He was obsessed with Ibsen," Huntford said, "and ordered me not to read him in translation. So I started to learn Norwegian and found the language came to me naturally." On the back of his newly acquired passion for Ibsen, Huntford moved to Scandinavia, spending time in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and though the provincialism sometimes got to him, he loved the landscape, the winter darkness and, most of all, the snow.