social animals are weird The Tsawwassen heronry is in full swing and the picture on the index page is from a trip out there this week. Actually, the numbers are probably down as there were more nests last year. Bird numbers are way down all over - for all species. It is possible that avian flu killed large numbers of birds in the last few years. But when I talk to people over at Reifel they just shake their heads. "It's habitat destruction, plain and simple." Humans continue to fill up wetlands, pave over forests and grasslands, put up dangerous obstacles for migrating birds to navigate, and destroy food sources including but not limited to insects. Habitat destruction is relentless and cumulative, but it is probable that we have crossed some threshold where low numbers cause lower numbers. But I wanted to talk about social animals. This is an inherited behaviour (instinct) resulting from millennia of evolution, but the incredible diversity of social behaviours is simply amazing and hard to explain. Even within a group of birds - say, geese - you will have Canada geese that hang out in groups of around 50 and snow geese that hang out in groups of several thousand. The social behaviour of great blue herons is fascinating and anyone visiting the rookery should spend an hour or so to marvel at the complex rules. A male heron flies off and finds a stick. He comes back to the nest and presents the stick to his mate, and she places it on the nest. Above the colony, a single pair of bald eagles lay claim to the territory and, in doing so, actually decreases the predation on heron nests. hockey and politics The olympics are over, but not the hangover. I'm not happy with the aftermath of the USA men's hockey victory. I know, I know. These are hockey players, not politicians. They were put in a difficult position by Trump when they were well into their "celebrations." He's promising them a special plane to visit the White House and Congress. They're laughing and celebrating and say yes. But why the men's hockey team and not the women (who got their gold several days earlier)? Why not the skiers or the skaters? Why not US athletes who lost? I am sure that many of the hockey players are Republicans and fans of the president. So their support of Trump is fine, in my mind. I have more of an issue with players who didn't actually mean to support Trump but sort of shrugged and said, "It doesn't matter." And maybe I wouldn't always feel that it does matter what athletes say, but we live in a time where people are dying and killing because of the deep division in American politics. In this context, it is naive for athletes to believe that their actions don't have meaning. privilege, the freemasonry and beyond The Jeffery Epstein story shows no signs of losing it's grip on political discourse in the USA or the world. For a long time, I didn't understand this. It's not that there weren't real casualties. It's just that Trump is already a convicted felon for sexual assault, a philanderer with multiple trophy wives, and a tried and true misogynist with a long history of belittling women. What was the Epstein story going to add? In recent weeks it's become clear: the Epstein scandal is about money, not sex. Jeffery Epstein had formed an "old boys club" that included royalty, presidents, academics and corporate titans. The problem with the UK branch of the club (Mandelson and Andrew, for example) is that they were providing illegal financial advantages. I should have figured this out earlier. Europeans are less shocked by sex - I think they're used to sexual scandals. If this story continues to roll out as I envision, Trump will never be found to have committed a crime while he belonged to Epstein's club. He was simply creating an advantage for himself, and in this respect he is not much different than any of the old boys' clubs of the past or present - clubs like the Free Masons or the Eton/Oxford graduates. Is networking wrong? Is Linked-In evil? No, it's the way it's always been done in white male dominant societies. It does short circuit the whole notion of merit, and I think Trump will not like this aspect of the story. In societies with a high degree of wealth inequality, the rich like to promote a myth that wealth is the result of merit - not that your daddy knew someone who knew someone.