Today's morning thought

As I said on Twitter: "I suspect Sam Beckett leaped into this timeline, looked around, said "forget this, I can't fix it" and leaped into some other time-stream."

What's going on in the news right now is very confusing.

The good news for me is that I don't have to understand or even care about what's going on with Smollett, Avenatti, et al. Or even more-locally: what's going on with the so-called Joe Exotic.

but man, did the going get weird lately. I hope all the weird people are enjoying being pro. (And I guess if "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" may mean I'm not as weird as I thought I was, given that I've not been offered any money to keep being weird - which would seem to be the definition of going pro here.)

Instead, what I care more about is seeing things out in nature. I taught the first field lab of the spring yesterday. Driving in to the site we saw a roadrunner. I think I was more excited by it than the students were, but then again, I grew up in a part of the world where "Roadrunner" was a character in a Chuck Jones cartoon. (Roadrunners are related to cuckoos. I don't know if they are nest parasites; I kind of doubt it. They look like skinny drab chickens, though. They do rarely fly, preferring to run, which also seems to render them more chicken-like).

Also, the butterflies were starting to come out. I was wondering if they were newly-emerged adults or adults that had overwintered (as far as I know, monarchs are the only species that migrates, and while I saw one or two monarchs, it seems the bulk of their migration isn't happening yet). The most common species I saw were Goatweed Leafwings. They're pretty common here because we have a lot of the food plant for the juveniles (goatweed, or Croton). I may also have glimpsed an American Snout in passing, but didn't get a good look at it.

I like watching butterflies. In some ways, it's akin to birdwatching, but to me, it feels more accessible: for one thing, butterflies tend to fly closer to the ground. And they're often less skittish than birds are. (There was some kind of little warbler working its way through the tree tops, but it moved too fast and was too far away for me to be able to identify it). Some butterflies are tough to tell apart (the skippers, and I have trouble with some of the sulphurs) but many of them are pretty distinctive and so they're easy to learn - all of the swallowtails, which are big and showy, for example. And the goatweed leafwing - a lot of the books say "oh they're hard to see because they're cryptically colored when they close their wings" but they also have  bright-orange inner-wings, so when they're flying (or resting and slowly opening and closing their wings, which I think they do as a way to warm up - using their muscles) they're easy enough to spot.

I didn't see any Gulf Fritillaries (which are one of my favorite species) but maybe they're not out yet.