Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
I used to run a field course for second-year university students at Saint-Auban in the foothills of the French Alps. My favourite bit of the course was when we would drive out at dusk into a deserted valley (seen in the picture below, taken from a nearby peak) and observe the local animals as they emerged from the forest. We would regularly see lowland hare, fox, roe deer and, if we were very lucky, wild boar.
In the parts of the valley that are dominated by heathland, out of sight on the photo, we would encounter the eerie nightjar. Often, the first sight of this amazing bird would generally be the gleam of its red eye, reflected in the car headlights. For reasons that I don’t think anyone understands, nightjars tend to sit in the middle of the road, playing chicken with any oncoming car. Maybe they are warming themselves on the tarmac, and as a nocturnal/crepuscular bird they are blinded by the headlights and just sit tight until the last possible moment.
The male nightjar will perch on a branch – often in a pine tree – and sing, a bizarre churring sound that, once heard, is never forgotten. Why they sing like this is not clear, but it carries long distances and also spreads in all directions – it is often very difficult to localise. This would be advantageous both for attracting a mate and for territorial purposes – the latter seems particularly important in nightjars.
I presume the structure of the song is related to the geography of the heathland where they live, with lower wavelengths travelling further and not being absorbed by dense woodland. There may also be an element to the song which encodes the male’s fitness in some way.
In Asian nightjars, the song seems to be a defining feature of the species and is a reliable way of differentiating otherwise similar species, as shown in this 2008 article, which includes the identification of a new species, partly on the basis of its song. It turns out that you can reliably identify individual birds on the basis of their song.
This French video shows you what the song is like. In French, the nightjar is l’engoulevent (the wind-swallower). You’ll notice that it carries on singing for ages – it seems to be able to do this by singing as it is inhaling as well as when it exhales.
Now this site’s favourite cryptic bird has received the ultimate accolade – it has been featured on BBC Radio 4’s excellent series, Tweet of the Day, which we have mentioned here before. This is a 2-minute daily radio slot featuring birds from the UK, with their song and some brief details about their ecology. I can’t embed the programme, so you’ll have to click on this link to listen on the BBC site (a screenshot is below).
Go ahead – you’ll learn some stuff, and the sound will transport you to warm summer nights in France, and the sounds and smells of the mountains.
Professor Ceiling Cat is poarly today, recovering from a dreadful cold that was probably acquired when traveling (thanks, Canada!). That, and the lack of substantive material on religion, politics or other weighty matters that could engage me, means that you’ll have to do with persiflage. Anyway, it’s a holiday in the U.S. (Memorial Day), and nobody is reading websites here.
When I was thinking of something in which readers could participate, what immediately came to mind was my favorite topic: noms. And that conjured up thoughts of the best meals I’ve had the fortune to consume.
Some famous gourmet, whose name I can’t recall, allegedly said on his deathbed, “There have been kings who haven’t eaten as well as I.” Perhaps I can say the same thing. Although I’ve suffered my share of vicissitudes, I’ve been lucky enough to have been born with a big appetite and an adventurous palate, and to have had both the financial resources and travel opportunities to encounter many fine noms.
I also like to make “best-of” lists, and thought about the best meals I’ve ever had. They fall into two classes: meals cooked at home, and meals consumed in a restaurant.
The former is easy: it was my 40th birthday dinner, which I cooked myself with the help of a Ph.D student at the U of C, John Willis (he’s now a fancy professor of biology at Duke, and has always been a superb cook). I don’t have the menu at hand, but there were about a dozen courses, each accompanied by a different fine wine from my collection. It began with a fino sherry, olives, and almonds, an entire side of smoked Scottish salmon, then foie gras (brought from France) with a fine Sauternes (Chateau Climens), and progressed through fish courses, meat courses (chicken with 40 cloves of garlic and then a tenderloin of beef with Roquefort sauce, the former served with a 1982 Bordeaux, the latter with a 1982 Hermitage), to cheese and then homemade desserts.
The meal started at 6 pm and finished at 2 a.m. There were about ten guests, and every one of them, too full to move and drunk as well, spent the night at my place, some sleeping on the floor. Nobody was either sober or mobile enough to go home. It was a fine affair, and some day I’ll publish the menu.
And there’s no doubt about the best restaurant meal I’ve had. It was when I was in France on a Guggenheim-supported sabbatical year in 1989. Because I had extra money thanks to the Googs, I spent almost all of it on meals in restaurants, mostly in Paris where I lived. That was money well spent, and it was how I learned to eat. I began with the cheap student places, and then, as the year wore on and my money didn’t diminish so much, worked my way up to higher-class restaurants, finishing with a few Michelin three-star joints. I learned how to order, what wines were good values, and how to convert a dinner into an entire evening of entertainment.
One of the higher-class places, however—and the site of the best meal I’ve ever had—was not in Paris but in Roanne, a tiny village about 90 km outside of Lyon. (I also went to Lyon to eat, for it is a great dining town.) From Lyon you take a rickety train for an hour to Roanne, which consists of a few houses, the train station, and a great temple of gastronomy, the three-star Mason Troisgros. (Wikipedia gives an overview and history.)
The Troisgros now seems to be largely a fancy-food place—not nouvelle, with those ridiculously tiny portions—but a place that serves gussied-up plates with fancy sauces rimming the plate, and so on. But back then it was simply a place to get dressed-up local cuisine, served generously. And it was famous. The Gault-Millaut guide once named it “the best restaurant in the world.” At that time I’d have to concur, although of course I haven’t tried all the world’s restaurants!
My then-girlfriend and I arrived in Roanne at about noon for lunch. Seated at the table, we decided to go whole hog and order the menu degustation, a multi-course “best-of” menu featuring the restaurant’s most renowned dishes. Exclusive of wine, it was 600 francs per person—about $100 at the time. I accompanied the meal with the excellent house Beaujolais, served in pewter pitchers.
I can’t remember all of the dishes, except there were many, and they kept on coming. There were gratis dishes, too—stuff not on the menu. There was a plate of local crayfish (they’re big on local ingredients), and their famous salmon with sorrel: lovely fresh salmon in a cream sauce with slightly wilted sorrel: an ethereal dish. Everything was fantastic.
The Troisgros’ salmon with sorrel
The lunch went on and on, and the sun sank lower. But then it was time for cheese. Two men in tandem appeared from the kitchen carrying a six-foot-long basket, with one end on each man’s shoulder. In that basket was a huge selection of the finest cheeses I’ve ever had, many of them local, including aged Comté (the world’s best cheese) and the small, runny discs of ripe Saint-Marcellin, the best cheese of the area.
This being France, we could of course have as many types of cheese as we wanted. What a dilemma given that we knew dessert was to follow, and there were at least three dozen types of cheese! But somehow back then my stomach had a limitless capacity, and I managed to acquit myself well with les fromages.
A more recent picture of the Troisgros “cheese board”. It was bigger when I had it, and was in a basket, not on a board. But still, LOOK AT THIS!
Dessert was next—three courses of dessert. And each “course” consisted of a large trolley, a chariot, loaded with dozens of choices and wheeled to our table. One contained sorbets and glaces, one tartes and gateaux, and I can’t even remember what was in the other. From each chariot you could choose as many desserts as you wanted, and the server would give you a scoop or a slice. This largesse, or generosity, was, I found, characteristic of the best French restaurants.
All I remember is that I ate from all three trolleys, even though I had no room in my stomach. And then, before the bill came, we got a generous plate of homemade chocolates and cookies.
Somehow we stumbled to the 6 pm train back to Lyon—the last train of the day. Both of us could barely walk, and when we went into our compartment we immediately laid down. My girlfriend literallly passed out from overeating, and I was not in much better shape. We somehow made it back to our hotel in Lyon. Curiously, the next day we were hungry again.
I know some will decry this gourmandizing, or the sheer volume of our intake. But it’s always been my philosophy that if you like good food, you like lots of good food, and a great restaurant will provide both. At any rate, the Troisgros gave me the best meal I’ve ever had in a restaurant. I’ll never go back, though, for fear of spoiling those memories from 1989.
*****
The whole point of this post is to ask readers to weigh in as well. What is the best meal you’ve ever had—in either a private home or a restaurant—and what did it consist of? (Don’t forget the wines if you had any and remember them.)
The first few photos, showing the babies of spring, were contributed by reader Ed Kroc, who took them in Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
A typical mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) family, always a happy spring sight.
A mother wood duck (Aix sponsa) and her many chicks. Wood duck clutches are usually quite big; this one mother had 15 chicks of her own!
JAC: That, of course, means a huge mortality rate if the population size is stable 🙁
And some resident Canada geese (Branta canadensis)., with Ed’s backstory:
During the second week of April, a mother goose commandeered a gull’s nest across the street from my apartment, laying a clutch of five eggs while the gull pair were out fishing. After a month of incubation, the five goslings hatched early on a Saturday morning.
Unfortunately, since the nesting site was located so high (ideal for gulls, not so much for geese), the goslings were in immediate trouble. Geese chicks need access to water. Since parent geese cannot regurgitate food for their young to eat, the first thing the parents do is lead them into calm water to start eating plants and insects on their own.
Baby geese have been known to jump from heights of 40 feet from their nest to the ground below to follow their parents to water. Of course, this usually happens in a marshy area, where the ground is soft and wet and, most notably, not made of concrete. The geese across the street managed to jump down two storeys from their nest to the main roof area, but from there the family was trapped. A large ledge surrounds the roof (probably about a foot high) and made it impossible for the goslings to get over the edge. Even if they could have mounted the ledge, it’s unlikely they would have survived the fall four storeys down to the pavement at street level.
I had worried about this day for a month, debating with myself what action should be taken, if any. After a final round of semi-frantic indecision, my partner and I informed some residents of the building across the way about the situation, and after some phone calls to a wildlife service, the goslings and their mother were packed up and driven a few blocks west to Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park (the father found them later).
The family is doing fine now, and in fact paired up with another goose family of five chicks that hatched just a few days earlier. You can see some of these adoptive cousins in the photo (they are slightly larger). The two mothers and fathers, and the ten chicks, are now safely together and doing well in Stanley Park.
How can such a cute little fluffball grow up into a nasty and agressive honker?
BTW, I have helped produce another brood of baby squirrels, which are feeding on my windowsill.
Finally, from Stephen Barnard in Idaho,a gadwall (Anas streptera):
Hili: You see, Cyrus, this is called coexistence. Cyrus: But I’m tied on a leash!
Hili: Exactly, when you stay quietly where you are without a leash, it will be cohabitation.
In Polish:
Hili: Widzisz, Cyrus, to się nazywa koegzystencja. Cyrus: Ale ja jestem uwiązany na smyczy! Hili: No właśnie, jak będziesz tam stał spokojnie bez smyczy, to to będzie kohabitacja.
I’m not sure exactly where this is (the accents and the word “Centre” makes me think Canada), but it appears to show that swallows have learned how to open doors by setting off motion detectors. I can’t see any other interpretation. If that’s true, then it must have started by accident, with a swallow managing to connect its earlier position with its observation that a door opened.
Here’s a half-hour discussion of secularism, its highlight a conversation between Maryam Namazie and Anthony Grayling. The interview is bookended by her conversation with Fariborz Pooya, and Bahram Soroush, who I assume are her colleagues on one or another of the anti-Islamic committees in which she’s active.
The interview with Grayling begins at 3:15 and lasts until 22:16. There’s nothing radically new here, but it’s good to see an discussion of humanism by such an eloquent philosopher (I swear, the man speaks in complete paragraphs, with never an “um” or dropped word). It’s also useful to hear how secularism differs from atheism, Grayling’s take on whether Islam can even be compatible with secularism (6:50), and why Grayling thinks that today’s visible religious fervor is really a sign of religion’s decline.
It’s also great to hear ex-Muslims articulately dismantling their faith. Sadly, the video was part of a campaign to raise money for Namazie’s Bread and Roses video project, which appears to have ended without coming near its goal. Kudos to Namazie, who is not a keyboard warrior who thinks that the way to advance secularism is to diss other nonbelievers, but someone who really does make the world a better place.
This popped into my Tw*tter feed – sorry, can’t remember who from. Parent throws baby in air, catches baby’s imagination. But who’s that at the apogee? Ceiling Cat or her nemesis, Basement Cat?
On a more serious point, when the first astronauts went into space, they were regularly asked if they saw the face of God…
It keeps happening over and over again. Six people, including several students at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), were killed by a deranged, 22-year-old student from another school, Elliott Rodger,Thirteen people were injured as well, and apparently Rodger killed himself as the cops closed in.
One of those killed was Christopher Martinez, a 20-year-old student at UCSB who was inside a deli. His father, Richard Martinez, gave this angry and moving speech at a press conference yesterday.
Yes, Rodger had serious problems, but serious problems for someone like him become deep tragedies for others when guns are readily available. It’s time to stop the madness, and quash the power of the nefarious National Rifle Association, which simply sees these deaths as a byproduct of our ineluctable right to own guns. The Second Amendment should either be construed as the right to own guns in a militia, or it should be overturned. That won’t happen, of course, for, when it comes to guns, Americans have lost their senses.
Can you hear the heartbreak in Mr. Martinez’s voice and not think that the NRA’s position, and the general American penchant for guns, is deeply dysfunctional? It is unbelievable but true that if many Americans had their way, the situation would be worse—all the way up to our right to own fully automatic weapons and portable missile launchers. Will that stop the slaughter of innocent people? I haven’t heard the NRA offer a solution.
The U.S. has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world: 88 guns per 100 people (that’s scary!). And no, we don’t have the highest rate of gun-induced homicide in the world—there are other social factors affecting these statistics—but it’s way up there.
Imagine if we had the same strict gun-ownership policies as England, where the rate of homicide by firearms is only 2% that of the U.S., and there are only 6.2 firearms per 100 people.
If you’re going to weigh in below on the side of the NRA, then please give me your solution to the problem of these recurrent killings.
