The 24/7 live streaming camera, which made headlines in the Richmond Times-Dispatch after the resident eagles hatched two chicks this Monday,  was set up to help researchers understand how the region's bald eagles interact with each other. Unbeknownst to the couple, all-too-appropriately named "James" and "Virginia", they are now being obsessively watched by at least one Richmonder as they raise their young. To answer your three questions above, (1) bald eagles typically eat carrion or, more commonly, fish for dinner. Lunch and breakfast, too. And for this particular couple, the James River makes grocery shopping easy with an ample supply of small-mouth bass to dive-bomb. (2) Mom and Dad take no role whatsoever in solving the sibling disputes, a characteristic of Haliaeetus leucocephalus that makes fratricide common among the species, especially when the elder sibling is female and thereby naturally larger in size. Like many other types of birds (3), the divorce rate is zero among bald eagles--that is, they mate for life. So I guess if you can apply human statistics, they're likely to leave us with a happy, emotionally-stable generation to fill the nest when they're gone.

This old timer was just meant to pick away between train cars in overalls and a conductor's cap. Totally in his element.

National Geographic's Photo of the Day for November 13 is a shot of a massive tulip farm in Tasmania (click for map). For a moment I thought I had figured out where we get our tulips, but a wonderfully informative webpage by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (click for page) says otherwise: in 1992, Tasmania only devoted 250 acres to flowers, most of which were roses, carnations and chrysanthemums, and, besides, 75% of all those flowers were sold directly to Tasmanian markets. The notion that Tasmania is not the world's tulip supplier is backed up by another claiming that, believe it or not, the Dutch take care of 88% of global tulip production. That's 4,300,000,000 tulips planted over 25,000 acres! Do they even have that much room in the Netherlands guess that brilliant Tasmanian tulip farm in the photo may really be one-of-a-kind!

Who knew that flow chart we learned in grade school was worth $508 billion? That's the worth of the globe's H20 market (that is, all the water resources on the planet). For perspective, that's the annual budget of the U.S. Department of Defense. It's broken down to the following: 

• $59 billion is bottled water
• $28 billion is industry
• $10 billion is agricultural irrigation
• $396 billion is private and personal utilities

My sprinkler seems to be running fine, but apparently there's reason to be worried. According to Fortune Magazine, there's a dangerous global shortage of potable water on the horizon. The article identified three reasons, the first of which is industry. Not only does U.S. industry rack up nearly 90% of U.S. national water consumption, but we are letting them pollute and poison lakes, rivers, and oceans.  The second reason is a never-before-seen global population that is drinks a lot and supports those reckless industries. The third reason is extreme weather due to climate change, anthropogenic or not. For example, from China to the United States, our winters are getting colder, our summers are getting hotter, and sudden flooding seems to increasingly punctuate long months without rain.

So what can we do? I'm not quite sure, but take a hard look at the following figures: it takes 31 gallons of water to make a single pounds of steel (that's like a three minute shower), 71 gallons for a cup of coffee (a ten minute shower), 160 gallons for a loaf of bread (a twenty minute shower), 407 gallons for a pound of rice (a 60-minute shower), 467 gallons for a pound of chicken (another 60-minute + shower), 1,857 gallons for a pound of beef (a 4 1/2 hour shower), and a whopping 2,906 (that's running your shower for nearly 7 hours). How much does it all cost? Well, a 15-minute shower costs about a nickel for Indians, a dime for the Chinese, and about two quarters for Americans...shampoo not included. That same shower costs one cent in Buenos Aires, $1.50 in Paris, and three bucks in Coppenhagen.

I hope those shower-figures helped illustrate the exorbitant amount of water we demand for our lifestyle...and I hope you're frightened by the fact that there's 5 billion people who are sweating away, at this very moment, for that very same standard of life.

Will I change my sacred shower routine? Probably not. Will we all suffer somewhere down the road? Certainty yes. Let's hope the Carlsbad Desalination Project works.


Sources: Colombia University, Fortune Magazine, EPA.gov.

Last night I saw a segment of 60 Minutes about a kid from California who has been breaking ground in the "free solo" scene of rock climbing. His name is Alex Honnold, and he is known for climbing up 2,000-foot walls of granite without any ropes or harnesses. That means the cost of error is instant death. "There's nothing but him, the wall, and the wind." Watching this clip made me sick to the stomach. See for yourself. Last time it was the Northwest face of Half-Down, a 2,000-foot face in Yosemite National Park. Now it's Sentinel on the face of El Capitan, also in Yosemite.

I'm sorry but there's just no way this cat is still alive in the wild.

Here's another segment from one of NPR's Tiny Desk concerts. On the left is Gillian Welch, and on the right is Dave Rawlings, together whom recently released a great album titled Time (The Revelator).

Want to get away into the land of elves and pixies? Me, too! According to European folklore, circles of fruiting mushroom bodies serve as gateways to far-away magical kingdoms. Other myths say the circles, known as "Fairy Rings," mark the spot where a fairy, pixie, or elf suddenly appears. Still others say they are how elves stake out their current midnight dancing zone. Sorry to burst your imaginative bubble, but fairy rings can be explained away with a scientific story. It's a long one, so to speak, for mushrooms are arguably the largest living organism. That's because each little mushroom is just the fruit of a larger organism that pokes out of the soil after a rainstorm. Comprising the Fungus Family and numbering upwards of 10,000+, these organisms hide in the soil and make up a huge network of threadlike root vines called myceli. Like any vine, they stretch outwards from one fixed point with a million arms, each with fruit on the fingers. Those fruiting outskirts make the appearance of a circle, or ring.