Month: July 2018

NY Times publisher criticizes Trump’s freedom of speech while extolling free speech

July 30, 2018 • 2:00 pm

I’m quite puzzled, but not all that surprised, by this unusual published statement by New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger. The publisher was invited to the White House for an “off the record” meeting with President Trump. Because Trump tweeted about it, though, Sulzberger rightly considered it now “on the record”, and issued the statement below (click on screenshot to see the piece, though I’ve put his statement below in its entirety):

Here’s the statement:

Statement of A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher, The New York Times:

My main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.

I told the president directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.

I told him that although the phrase “fake news” is untrue and harmful, I am far more concerned about his labeling journalists “the enemy of the people.” I warned that this inflammatory language is contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.

I repeatedly stressed that this is particularly true abroad, where the president’s rhetoric is being used by some regimes to justify sweeping crackdowns on journalists. I warned that it was putting lives at risk, that it was undermining the democratic ideals of our nation, and that it was eroding one of our country’s greatest exports: a commitment to free speech and a free press.

Throughout the conversation I emphasized that if President Trump, like previous presidents, was upset with coverage of his administration he was of course free to tell the world. I made clear repeatedly that I was not asking for him to soften his attacks on The Times if he felt our coverage was unfair. Instead, I implored him to reconsider his broader attacks on journalism, which I believe are dangerous and harmful to our country.

Now it’s unseemly for Trump to impugn the press as a whole, but Sulzberger goes further, saying that the President’s words are equivalent to violence, putting journalists at risk and in face undermining the nation’s commitment to free speech and a free press.

It is no such thing. Trump’s unhinged tweets are not the “immediate incitements to violence” that have been deemed illegal by the courts. Nor are they any incitement to violence. They are an opinion: a misguided one, to be sure, but not a violation of the First Amendment. And, in fact, the Times’s response to the statement above is an affirmation of free speech and a free press. After all, the Times can legally say what it wants about Trump so long as they don’t engage in illegal libel and defamation.

This just buttresses my view that the NYT, much to my dismay, is moving more and more toward the Control Left. Now they’re engaging in the CL posture that words are equivalent to violence, and so should be suppressed. What a thing for a newspaper to say! The fact that Trump is both an idiot and the President doesn’t deprive him of his First Amendment rights.

h/t: Gary

Why white people aren’t allowed to sing along to rap music

July 30, 2018 • 12:45 pm

The latest invidious and Pecksniffian raid by the Culture Police is this article in HuffPo by Brandi Miller, a columnist described as “a campus minister and justice program director from the Pacific Northwest.” (I presume that the “justice” means social rather than legal justice.) Click on the screenshot if you want to read about the multifarious ways that whites are practicing cultural appropriation by trying to “access” black culture via attending concerts by black musicians.

Miller:

A few years ago, I went to a Chance the Rapper concert in Portland, Oregon. It was his biggest show of the year in one of the whitest cities on the tour. About 12,000 people packed into the stadium, most of them not black, and the majority of the room loudly sang the word “nigger” along with every track that played during the pre-concert and Chance’s performance. The majority-white audience clearly felt the freedom to abandon decorum and fully participate in blackness because they had paid $60 to be there.

. . . Now, as a black person, being in a space with 10,000 or more non-black people yelling/singing “nigger” is not a neutral experience. White people being that free is terrifying. If they feel free enough to yell the N-word as loud as they please, who knows what other things they may feel, believe or do when their inhibitions are gone.

Let’s stop right there. The word “nigger” is in many rap songs, but somehow it’s become taboo for white people to sing that particular word (this isn’t the first time that ludicrous demand has been made). But it’s part of the song. Is singing the words of a rap or hip hop song “fully participating in blackness”? How? And if it is, so what?

Look, if black people want white people to stop using that word, then they need to stop using it themselves. If they want to reserve use of that word for themselves, then they’ll have to put up with other people using it when they sing rap songs. Are we supposed to just hum when we get to that word?  And as for the experience being “terrifying” for Ms. Miller, I simply don’t believe her. She’s making that up to cast herself as a victim.

It’s always puzzled me that a word considered odious when used by whites—and it is odious—is somehow innocuous when blacks use it. As a secular Jew, I don’t call other Jews “kikes”, “sheenies” and “Hebes”; this is not customary, and it would be seen as offensive if were used to greet fellow Jews. So if black people want to call each other by a slur, and use that word in songs, I really can’t see anything wrong with singing along. After all, you’re not being a racist if you’re singing along with a lively rap song: you are appreciating the music.  This kind of Pecksniffery need not be countenanced, nor would I feel I was a racist by singing that word. I suppose it’s a good thing, then, that I’m not a fan of rap and hip hop!

I’ve about had it with this desire to build border walls around cultures. Yes, black people have been terribly oppressed historically, and still are, but they can’t demarcate their culture as their exclusive territory, by implying, as Miller does, that jazz can’t be be played by whites because “it’s participating in black culture”.  Is she aware that jazz bands were one of the earliest forms of artistic racial integration in America? Liking black music is almost always a vehicle for mutual understanding, not hatred. So when Miller says something like the following, she’s trying to cast herself simultaneously as a victim and also claim that her culture must remain off limits for that reason:

This [cultural] experience is not unique or new. It has long been the operating posture of white people, particularly at festivals and concerts, to assume that minority culture itself is up for grabs. Blackness, though, is not something that can be sojourned into for the price of concert or festival ticket. With the approach of Afropunk, Lollapalooza and Outside Lands, all featuring prominent black artists, it may be time for a refresher course on the implications of loving and mimicking black culture while still operating in rampant anti-blackness.

I find that paragraph both risible and offensive, especially the claim that white people who like black music are “operating in rampant anti-blackness.” Really—we’re all racists? But I guess Miller thinks we all are, and so her hyperbole knows no bounds:

Outside of concert arenas in the real world, black people cannot have a bbq, mow a lawn, sell water or have a pool party without a white person feeling threatened. The reality is this: White people love to participate in black culture, but seem to feel threatened by black people who they don’t pay to perform for them.

Concerts and festivals become training grounds for this sort of problematic behavior and a place to practice defensiveness. They are freewheeling spaces, where, in the busyness and hype of everything going on, cultural appropriation gets a special pass.

Here she conflates real racism—calling the cops on people just because they’re black—with cultural appropriation, which is at worst neutral and at best an appreciation of another culture.  The mutual interchange of cultures has been a good thing, and, as I’ve written before, I can think of very few examples where cultural appropriation has really been damaging. In the main, we’re all better for it. Each culture appropriates the others, and it’s simply not possible to devise a hierarchy of cultures and say that “appropriating upward” is okay but “appropriating downward” is not. Is a Chinese businessman who wears a suit appropriating Western culture? Or is that okay because Chinese are “appropriating up”?

You can’t get more divisive, or more engaged in maladaptive identity politics, than this:

Proximity to black people seems to transfer blackness for a few nights, but at the end of the day, it is the highest mark of privilege to systematically oppress people for hundreds of years and then to mimic, perform and market everything within their culture. Racial propriety is ejected in the name of letting loose and being free.

Some might try to argue that because black art is now mainstream, the culture belongs to everyone. The mainstream popularity of black art and life doesn’t transfer to the highest bidder, nor does it mean the end of oppression for black people. Black people are the authority on what should and can be done with our culture. [JAC: Really? Did Benny Goodman need permission to play jazz?] In 2018, white people cannot seem to fathom that there are limits to what they can do. They act as though, through small acts of claiming black culture, they are exempt from the harmful implications of racism on black people.

The cultural appropriation trope is simply divisive and xenophobic, and almost never a sign of racism. Yes, of course there’s still racism, and we need to root it out, but the hill you want to die on is not named “Mount Dreadlocks.”

FIDE may nix Tunisia’s World Chess Championship because it won’t give visa to 7-year-old Israeli chess champion

July 30, 2018 • 10:15 am

About a week ago I called attention to the fact that Tunisia banned the 7-year-old Israeli girl Lial Levitan, a young chess wizard, from playing in the upcoming International Chess Championship simply because she was Israeli. Regardless of what you think of Israeli’s politics, there’s no justification for punishing a young girl who wants to be a world champion. Here’s a video of Liel, European champion in her age class. She’s adorable:

Now, however, FIDE has mustered up some courage and, as the Jerusalem Post reports in the article below (click on screenshot),

Tunisia, which is currently scheduled to host the 2019 World Schools Chess Championship, could have its hosting privilege revoked if the country refuses to grant a visa to a seven-year-old Israeli girl.

The country, which has no diplomatic ties with Israel, does not permit Israelis to enter its borders, and is refusing to make an exception for Liel Levitan, the European School Individual Chess champion in her age group, for the upcoming World Chess Federation (FIDE) tournament.

The restriction would force Levitan and other Israelis to forfeit their spots in the tournament. A similar situation at the 2017 tournament, also held in Tunisia, disqualified Israelis from participating in the competition – simply because they could not enter the country.

Well, FIDE hasn’t exactly said, “Let the Israelis play or the tournament is off”; they’re just requesting clarification. But what clarification could satisfy any rational person?

In an email last week, FIDE secretary Polina Tsedenova said the organization is taking necessary measures to put pressure on Tunisia to allow entry of all participants.

“We have requested an urgent explanation from the Tunisian Chess Federation,” Tsedenova wrote. “We are also sending them a separate letter requesting written confirmation that the 2019 World Schools Championship, which is scheduled to take place in Tunisia, will provide visas to all participants. Only after that will the organization of the tournament be confirmed for them.”

It’s about time! Now let’s see if FIDE follow through with its threat.

 

Trigger warnings said to harm college students, but evidence is thin

July 30, 2018 • 9:00 am

“Trigger warnings” are of course cautionary statements given out, usually by college professors, before they present disturbing material to students. The intent is to prevent those who might have been traumatized by that subject or a related one (usually people with PTSD: post-traumatic stress disorder) from being re-traumatized.

My view of such warnings is that material that might be disturbing to everyone should be preceded by a caution (e.g., an ISIS beheading video, other gory stuff or crimes like rape), and that the professor should announce to the class at the beginning of the semester that if anyone has trigger issues, they should come to see the professor and get a list of course material that they might find offensive. But I also think that students should still be responsible for mastering “triggering” material presented in class, that students with trigger issues should be seeing a therapist, and that, in the long run, trigger warnings aren’t helpful in curing the individual of their phobias (psychologists think that one must be exposed to material to get over being triggered by it).

Further, trigger warnings might serve to keep the traumatized student in a status of perpetual victimhood. Finally, the list of stuff that has been deemed potentially triggering is so long that it’s impossible to give warnings in advance about every possible cause of anxiety. Here, for instance, is a list from a sympathetic intersectional website:

One simply can’t warn people about all that stuff in advance!

A new paper, which has been given publicity by lots of right-wing websites, piqued my interest, as it purported to show, according to those sites, that trigger warnings don’t work. Unfortunately, it shows nothing of the sort—only that trigger warnings can temporarily increase one’s sense of vulnerability in non-traumatized people exposed to disturbing prose.

Here’s the paper (click on screenshot to get to article, free pdf is here, and the reference is below). The paper is by Benjamin Bellett, Payton Jones, and Richard McNally, all at Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, and it’s in a reputable journal: Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry.

The title is cute, but what did the researchers do? They exposed 270 people recruited on the internet to prose passages considered either neutral, mildly distressing, or markedly distressing. These weren’t mostly college students, as the median age of subjects was 37 (see paper for other characteristics). Here’s what the authors say about the passages:

To simulate an academic setting, we chose passages from world literature that commonly appear in high school or college courses. Each passage was standardized in word length, and passage exposures were set to a minimum of 20 s before participants were allowed to continue to the next screen. Transparent attention checks based on the passages’ content assessed whether participants were attentively reading the passages (see supplementary materials S2 for an example of a content check question). We used three types of passages. Neutral passages were devoid of disturbing content (e.g. a character description from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick). Mildly distressing passages concerned themes of violence, injury, or death, but lacked graphic details (e.g. a description of a battle from James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers). Markedly distressing passages contained graphic descriptions of violence, injury, or death (e.g. the murder scene from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment). See supplementary materials (S1) for a sample passage from each category.

Subjects with PTSD or who said they had trauma issues were excluded from the study. The authors also surveyed the subjects’ demographics (sex, race, ethnicity, political stance etc.) and attitudes, like whether they believed in advance that words could cause harm and whether they thought trigger warnings should be used (80% said yes in advance). Participants were also asked if they had any history of psychiatric disorders.

They then exposed the subjects to three mildly distressing passages to get a baseline anxiety level. After that, they read ten passages in random order: five were markedly distressing and five were neutral. Half the subjects were given a trigger warning before reading the distressing passages (“The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma”) and half were not. The subjects were then assessed for various psychological variables, and multiple regression analyses were use to tease out the effects of single factors.

Here are the most important results:

  • Students who got trigger warnings saw themselves as “more vulnerable to suffering persistent negative emotional effects in the event of experiencing trauma”. That is, they say themselves as having become more easily traumatized. But this effect was small: the increase in level of vulnerability was only 5.2% and the probability that this was true under the null hypothesis of no effect was less than 0.05 but not much lower. That’s not considered a very significant effect, nor is it a large one.

 

  • More students who got trigger warnings believed afterwards that “trauma survivors would suffer persistent emotional effects” than did the controls who didn’t get warnings. But again this effect was small (5.4% increase in strength of that belief), and p<0.05, again not a hugely significant result. They also didn’t correct statistically for multiple comparisons, which would probably make these effects nonsignificant.

These two results are the basis of media reports that trigger warnings were harmful, but of course you can see the problems: not college students, self-report, small and likely nonsignificant effects. Hardly the stuff of headlines. Here are a couple other results:

  • Participants who believed in advance that words can cause harm had a significantly higher increase in anxiety from receiving trigger warnings than the un-warned controls. Again the effect is barely significant (p , 0.05), although the result makes sense.

 

  • Factors that made people who got trigger warnings even more likely to see themselves as more vulnerable included being a woman, a member of a racial minority, a liberal, a younger person, and, especially strongly, one with a psychiatric diagnosis that did not include PTSD. These all conform to our expectations or to previous results; the psychiatric diagnosis effect was especially significant (p < 0.001, but not significant for the second test of assessing the vulnerability of other people).

This study, I think, says very little about whether trigger warnings work, for those warnings are used to prevent people with PTSD or diagnosed trauma from being re-traumatized without warning. Those kind of subjects weren’t used in this study. Further, the effects were small, so they don’t even convince me that “trigger warnings don’t work and can even be harmful”. To be fair, the authors list a number of problems with the study at the end of their paper, including the fact that they used reading passages and not visual images or representations. All they can really conclude is that “Trigger warnings do not appear to be conducive to resilience as measured by any of our metrics. . . and may present nuanced threats to selective domains of psychological resilience.”

So this is a start, but what we really want to know is whether trigger warnings are helpful to traumatized individuals, and whether they can contribute to de-traumatizing them over the long run. There’s simply not much data on this issue, though the authors mention a poster—not a published paper—by Bruce (reference below) suggesting that physiological markers of anxiety in traumatized individuals were heightened after presentation of a trigger warning compared to “no warning” controls. That, too, suggests that trigger warnings might not be helpful.

So caveat lector.  While the headlines may be comforting to those who don’t like trigger warnings, the data in the paper don’t show that these warnings don’t work—at least when they’re used on traumatized individuals, as is their purpose. And headlines like the one below, from the right-wing website The College Fix, are simply misleading (click on screenshot to read the piece):

________

Bellet, B. W., P. J. Jones, and R. J. McNally. 2018. Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, in press.

 

Poster said to show negative effects of trigger warnings on traumatized individuals:

M.J. Bruce.  2017. Predictors of trigger warning use: Avoidance or asserting accommodation needs? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the international society of traumatic stress studies, Chicago, IL (2017, November)

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 30, 2018 • 7:30 am

Once again we have a nice science-and-photo post by biology professor Bruce Lyon from the University of California at Santa Cruz. His notes are indented, and the subject is owls, also known as Honorary Cats™.

A second batch of owl photos and natural history to follow on the Northern Pygmy Owl post (here) from a couple of weeks ago. To contrast with the pygmy owl, here are some photos of a very large species, the Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulas), the tallest North American owl. Their height is deceptive thought because under all those feathers is a puny body—despite being five inches longer than Great Horned Owls (see post about them here), Great Grays Owls are 15% lighter than great horneds.

Below: a comparison of the heads of great grays (left) and great horns (right) reveals another important size difference—great grays have very small eyes. I do not know if this is just a consequence of great grays having smaller heads when the feathers are removed (i.e., skull size), or whether, relative to skull size, they have smaller eyes. I suspect they do. They often hunt during the day, so diurnal hunting might not require large eyes. And the fact that they can find prey based on sound may make the eyes less important for hunting than for great horns. I do not know if great horneds can hunt by sound alone but I suspect not. Their facial disc is not as well developed as the great gray and they also have bilaterally symmetric ear openings.

Great Gray Owls are one of my favorite birds, period! They seem mystical with their huge heads and facial discs, and they have a slow flapping flight that is almost butterfly like. They also live in beautiful wild areas that have a mix of coniferous forest and meadows for hunting. Small rodents (voles, mice, lemmings) comprise the bulk of their diet (90-95% depending on location). It’s amusing to think that tiny pygmy owls often take larger prey.

Below: A great gray owl hunting in a burned-out forest not too far from Yosemite National Park this spring. Hunting involves sitting on a perch for a long period of time and then gliding down and pouncing on prey.

Below: When the owls are sitting still next to the trunks of large trees they can be remarkably cryptic. Another owl near Yosemite.

Below: The same bird hunting in a meadow. It is much more conspicuous than in the above photo but they can still be surprisingly easy to miss even when out in meadows.

These owls can hunt entirely by hearing, and the big facial disk apparently serves as a parabola to focus sound on the asymmetric ears used to triangulate and pinpoint the location of a sound source. In winter, the owls can locate mice hidden under the snow and then glide to the area and punch down hard through the snow to snatch the rodent. They are deadly accurate. A friend who watches gray grays in winter in Canada has several times had an owl glide in from a perch a hundred meters away and then punch through the snow and grab a mouse a mere couple of feet from where he was standing. These birds can be extremely tame and apparently can hear mice from a long distance away. Below is video clip from National Geographic showing a bird hunting in winter.

These owls breed in the forest near the wetlands where I do my coot research in central British Columbia but it took me many years to find a nest. Great gray nests can be found by following an adult returning to the nest with prey.  I found my owl nest by watching a great gray catch a mouse in a meadow and then fly off into the woods. I knew it was going to its nest so I sprinted after it for about 400 meters but then lost sight of it as it disappeared in the fairly dense forest.  On whim, I continued on in the same trajectory the bird had been going and after 300 more meters I encountered the bird now flying back towards me in the opposite direction. I went another 200 meters to where the bird had flown from and heard the faint calls of a female calling from the nest and her calls led me to the nest (she was probably telling the male to keep hunting). Unfortunately, the nest was in the worst possible location for observing or taking photos: it was in an old raven nest very well hidden at the top of a tall spruce. However, once the chicks fledged I was able to get great views of the family hanging out—this pair of birds was completely oblivious to people.

Below: Look at the massive head on this bird! I think it hears a mouse.

Below: The same bird. This bird has heard something rustle in the underbrush and has gone into what I call ‘mouse mode’. They often have a relaxed posture but when they hear something that could be rodent, their comportment changes—they stare intensely at the source of the sound and their entire posture changes and they often cock their head back and forth, presumably to pinpoint the location of the sound.

Below: The same bird hunting in the forest in the early evening when the light was quite nice.

Below. Something suspicious has been detected and the bird launches for a pounce.

Below: One of the three chicks out of the nest. Owl chicks often leave the nest before they can fully fly. They scramble around the branches and are sometimes called ‘branchers’ at this stage.

Below: One of the fledgling next to the trunk of a very large Douglas fir. Although the birds nested in a tall spindly spruce, there were lots of large Douglas fir nearby. This nice patch of woods has since been logged.

 

Monday: Hili dialogue

July 30, 2018 • 6:30 am

It’s Monday, July 30, 2018, the penultimate day of the month, and National Cheesecake Day. It’s also the International Day of Friendship, celebrated most vigorously in South America. I am down to six ducks: five ducklings plus Honey, and will do another census when I feed them in an hour. One thing’s for sure: I’ll have Honey for a while longer, as she is only now growing flight feathers after her molt.

On this day in 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, Virginia, met for the first time. And on this day in 1930, Uruguay won the first FIFA World Cup in its home town of Montevideo. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it, and I’ve put in a short video:

The first FIFA World Cup™ was one of a kind. Taking place wholly in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, the sport’s inaugural showpiece was rich in details that might bemuse the modern football fan: four teams arriving together on the same boat, an unfinished stadium, even a one-armed goalscorer in the Final. Yet it ended with a familiar outpouring of joy as the whole of Uruguay took a public holiday after La Celeste became the first world champions by defeating neighbours Argentina 4-2.

On July 30, 1956, U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the Congressional resolution making “In God we Trust” the U.S. National Motto. Oy gewalt! Exactly six years later, the Trans-Canada Highway, the longest national highway on the planet, was officially opened.  And on this day in 1965, Lyndon Johnson created a huge feat of socialism, signing into law the Social Security Act of 1965, which included Medicaid and Medicare.  On July 30, 1966, England defeated West Germany 4-2 in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final (played in London) in extra time. Here’s a 9.5-minute video of that dramatic match.

On this day in 1974, President Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon turned over the subpoenaed White House “Watergate tapes” to the special prosecutor after the U.S. Supreme Court said he had to.  One year later, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of a restaurant outside Detroit, Michigan, and was never seen again. His fate remains a mystery. Finally, on July 30, 2003, the last Volkswagen Beetle made in the old style rolled off a Mexican assembly line.

Notables born on July 30 include Emily Brontë (1818), Thorstein Veblen (1857), Henry Ford (1863), Casey Stengel (1890), Henry Moore (1898), Buddy Guy (1936), Peter Bogdanovich (1939), Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947), Hilary Swank (1974), Misty May-Treanor (1977) and Hope Solo (1981). Those who expired on this day include William Penn (1718), George Pickett (1875), Claudette Colbert (1996), “Buffalo Bob” Smith (1998), and Michelangelo Antonioni (2007).

Moore did drawings as well as sculptures; here’s his “Jaguar”, drawn in 1981:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is once again fixated on noms:

Hili: We can talk about it at lunch.
A: Talk about what?
Hili: What’s for dinner..
In Polish:
Hili: Możemy o tym porozmawiać przy lunchu.
Ja: O czym?
Hili: Co będzie na obiad?

Some tweets from Matthew. First, street violence in Sweden.

https://twitter.com/Agha_Zadeh/status/1023290165622652931

More hares, this time in England:

Matthew explains the tweet below: “Phymata are assassin bugs, and their minds are always killing, even if they are otherwise occupied… Milichids are kleptoparasitic flies.”

Matthew says, “Watch until the end”:

https://twitter.com/RelktntHero/status/1023371591701409794

Not a leaf. What is it?

It’s this, a near-perfect example of mimicry:

This question is a bit confusing, but make a guess about where the heart might be:

From reader Gethyn:

Some tweets from Grania:

https://twitter.com/OregonJOBS2/status/1023009268939677696

This will probably be too late, as the poll expires in ten hours (I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon), but see the vote. I’d take physical immortality any day, though the conditions of aging and other stuff need to be specified.

Look at that d*g’s face!

https://twitter.com/PopularPups/status/1023052916243025922

A decent science pun:

The second tweet is the one to look at:

Finally, a cartoon, also contributed by Grania:

 

Sunday: Duck report (with fledging)

July 29, 2018 • 3:00 pm

Three of the ducklings have left the pond, apparently permanently (they were not there this morning or this afternoon). Five are left along with Honey. The smaller hen Phoebe is still timorous and hard to feed, which makes me anxious. I hope the other ducks go on their way soon so I can take proper care of her.

Pictures tomorrow.

Where did they go? I don’t know. Will I ever see them again? I doubt it. But I can take satisfaction in knowing that I helped get them strong and healthy for their migration.