For years I felt bad about that horse.

Outside of Olema. Point Reyes, CA. October 2005.

Mendocino’s a pretty spot. Here, for example, are some nicely situated homes.

But there isn’t any shortage of pretty spots north of San Francisco. Less than a quarter mile from those houses, we ran into the Pacific Ocean.

Those are brown pelicans flying past. They plunge bill-first into the water at 40 miles an hour.

Mark is a great cook, and like some cooks, he’s happy to procure the ingredients himself. The fisherman’s lament (one lament, anyway), is that he never gets out as much as he wants. And the same goes for crabbing.

Mark used a regular fishing rod, and he lent me an extra one. He tied wire cages to the lines, and we crammed pieces of half-frozen squid into the cages, which we secured with thick rubber bands. Along the perimeter of each cage were about a half dozen loops of blue line. With a quick flick of the fishing rod and some luck, the loops close around a crab claw or leg as it pulls the squid from the wire cage. Then reel in.

Mark caught two crabs worth keeping. I caught one. Here’s one of them, which Mark cooked later that morning in its shell with nothing but boiling water and served unadorned. Good eating.

They come from the Fertile Crescent, their domestication coincides with the rise of agriculture, and they can be divided into four geo-genetic groups: Europe, Mediterranean, East Africa, Asia. (Why not West Africa? How did they get specific on that, especially in comparison to Asia?) The Persian is apparently not Persian; the Japanese bobtail probably isn’t Japanese. Also, cat breeds aren’t so terribly inbred as certain dog breeds.

In India last January, I saw plenty of dogs, but no cats (or none that I recall). Some rats, which makes me wonder what happened to the cat rung in the animal hierarchy. In China, a few cats, mostly pets. Here in San Francisco, I rarely see cats on the street, though the SPCA is overflowing with them.

I don’t come from cat people, but my girlfriend is one, so I live with a cat (pictured here). My girlfriend’s expert guess is that Mosaic is some blend of calico and tortoiseshell. Which seems reasonable enough. We got her at the SPCA, origins unknown.

Mr. Foster, Mr. Simons, this one’s for you.

Vocalise. Sergei Rachmaninoff.

[Photo: Wookie-like cow on the outskirts of Colby, KS]

And then Heather Smith writes in Slate about why maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised or so worried. Because the honeybee that we’ve come to think we know and love is already long gone. Smith notes, “The only honeybees left—i.e., the ones that started disappearing in October—had become the cows of the insect world: virtually extinct in the wild, hopped up on antibiotics, and more likely to reproduce via artificial insemination than by their own recognizance.”

Illustration from Slate by Robert Neubecker.

What makes the deal itself unique is that so many parties that are often considered traditional adversaries were able to work together and forge a compromise. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed a pretty good article, which blends information from the AP and the NY Times article (which is very good):

“It’s like a revolution,” said Merran Smith, director of the British Columbia Coastal Program of Forest Ethics, an environmental group. “It’s a new way of thinking about how you do forestry. It’s about approaching business with a conservation motive upfront, instead of an industrial approach to the forest.

And what is unique to the forest itself is its astounding ecological diversity. According to Clifford Krauss in the Times:

Because 15 feet of rain can fall in a year, the Great Bear has never suffered a major forest fire. That has allowed some of the tallest and oldest trees on earth to thrive, including cedars more than a thousand years old.An estimated 20 percent of the world’s remaining wild salmon swim through the forest’s fjords, including coho and sockeye, whose spawning grounds were threatened by erosion caused by past logging. Largely intact because of its remoteness, the forest contains an abundance of wolverines, bats, peregrine falcons, marbled murrelet sea birds and coastal tailed frogs.

The ecological richness is immediately apparent to the few people who visit. Within minutes of a recent helicopter visit to Princess Royal Island, in the heart of the rain forest, a group of visitors saw a pack of six gray and black wolves, a seal and numerous bald eagles and swans.

“Look at the forest move,” said Marven Robinson, 36, a Gitga’at guide, as eagles glided through the moist air and the wolf pack played hide-and-seek with the visitors along a channel of diaphanous water. “As long as there is a spirit bear, we’re going the right way.”

The spirit bear Robinson refers to, and pictured here (by Marni Grossman), is also called the Kermode or ghost bear. Found only in this region, these white bears are actually relatively rare black bears expressing a recessive gene.

The Times also mentions that “a deluge of postcards and demonstrations by groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace at shareholders meetings and retail outlets pressed American, Japanese and European hardware chains to shun products from the area.” That certainly helped bring the loggers to the table. The Planet, which I occasionally write for, pitched in during the final push to help the Sierra Club of/du Canada convince B.C. Premier Gordon Browne to see the agreement through to completion. Looks like it worked.

There is, of course, talk of oil drilling offshore of the forest.

Plus, “Su Lin exploring” is my most interesting photo, according to Flickr. I’m not sure how Flickr measures interestingness, and they aren’t really telling. It’s a mystery, reminiscent of Google’s page ranking system.

But Su Lin was so interesting that she made it onto Flickr’s Interestingness Calendar on February 2 as the third most interesting photo uploaded onto Flickr that day.

It’s been a real horserace, but as of 11:30 a.m. PST, Su Lin is now my most popular picture by 38 views. Which is actually quite substantial.

(She’s also the most favorited, most commented upon, and most “interesting.” What will it take to overtake her?—ed.)

Sure, I could take a decent San Francisco picture,

or one of some people on the street,

or careless boaters with a tangled anchor,

or flying octopi.

But I woke up this Thursday morning to find that 25 people viewed the photo of a baby panda I uploaded the night before, and I didn’t even have to do anything to get them there. They just showed up. (As of this writing, it’s up to 111.)

I’m no Flickr celebrity like Thomas Hawk (whom Fleshbot and the NY Times have mentioned), so I consider myself lucky when 5 or 6 people look at a photo after I’ve told them about it or shared it on groups.

But one has to admit that Su Lin is cute, and fun to watch.

Maybe she’ll overtake Will Smith (king at 246 views as of this writing) in the top spot of Most Viewed Photo. Click on her picture to help. Could be good.