Climate Change Hits Home: A Review of The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue

Mike Tidwell, climate activist and founder of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, posits that, if you were to throw a dart at a spinning globe, no matter where the dart punctured the surface of the globe, that actual spot on the Earth would have an ominous tale to tell of the effects of climate change.

Tidwell has chosen a single year, 2023, and the small block on which he lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, from which to sound the alarm over the damage being done by our sharply warming planet.  His book, The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue:  A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street (2025), tells how climate change has come to his own block.  It’s an eminently readable volume, but, to be blunt, it scared the shit out of me.

This account came into being when Tidwell realized the giant oaks on his block and in his town were in crisis.  These trees, which had survived for decades or, sometimes, for a century or more, were dying in staggering numbers.  The loss of giant oaks in a single suburban block cannot be missed, because they leave such a massive empty space at eye level and in the overhead canopy.  That is not the only impact.  He writes, “Oaks are the miracle trees of both urban and rural forests.”  (p. 128) They are crucial to the entire local ecosystem, hosting and supporting a wide range of insect and bird life.  And it wasn’t just the oaks in peril.  During the period from 2019 to 2022, Takoma Park, a town of just 2.1 square miles with about 18,000 residents, lost 1,200 trees, the largest portion of them oaks.  A study from 2022 reported the loss of a startling 45 acres of the town’s tree canopy.

The causes for this still ongoing season of death are myriad, but ultimately mostly tied to the increasingly weird and changing weather patterns that have taken hold as the worldwide climate warms.  Rising temperatures change weather patterns, fostering prolonged droughts and storms whose flooding downpours are fed by the ever greater amounts of moisture held in the warming atmosphere.  Seasons are marked by atypical temperatures throwing trees’ internal cycles out of sync with damaging consequences.  The deluges of rainfall saturate the ground fostering the spread of insects and fungus, which attack the already stressed trees.  Takoma Park experienced all of this.  A recipe for a local, national, and global ecological disaster.

The stakes associated with the death of trees are high.  By sequestering a significant portion of the carbon dioxide we’ve poured into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, trees have helped mitigate some of the worst effects on the climate of that greenhouse gas.  Though the loss of trees reduces their important contribution to the planet’s health, what particularly worries Ning Zeng, one of Tidwell’s neighbors, is the prospect that the carbon dioxide contained in those myriad felled trees will be released back into the atmosphere.  Zeng, a professor of climate science at the University of Maryland, wants to bury as many of them under conditions that will preserve them for centuries.  Tidwell recounts in some detail the time-consuming challenges Zeng faces as he works to arrange for the burial of 5,000 tons of dead trees.

I would characterize it as a noble response to the crisis, but a drop in the bucket.  For instance, at the time Zeng worked to remove 5,000 tons from a site in Baltimore, there were many thousands of tons of dead trees still there poised to release their carbon dioxide.

Tidwell documents the broad scope of climate change-induced blows that his block and his town has endured, a tale told well with vignettes of neighbors, experts, and local politicians who are engaged in trying to respond to the damage being done.  The efforts range from trying to divert rainfall from low lying areas, from streets and basements, to planting trees that have evolved to thrive in a wet environment, to installing solar panels on roofs now exposed to the sun due to the loss of canopy cover, to promoting electric vehicles, and so on.

It’s quite clear to him that more, much more is needed on an unprecedented scale and that it must have a potential impact that dwarfs what’s been done so far.  Clean energy isn’t enough to reverse the damage.  Geoengineering on a vast scale may well be needed.  He describes many of the proposed methods being explored to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  But he is clearly attracted to seriously researching a different approach:  solar radiation modification, that is, seeding the atmosphere with aerosols (particulate emissions) to reflect sunlight away from the planet.  It’s a bold approach that may hold great potential to addressing the immediate crisis, but also may bring serious, negative outcomes.  At this stage, we just don’t know.

He is influenced by The Open Letter Regarding Research on Reflecting Sunlight to Reduce the Risks of Climate Change, issued in early 2023 and signed by more than 110 of the world’s leading climate scientists.  The letter posits that reducing greenhouse gases at this stage is too late to address the planet’s current and future warming.  Instead, it is urgent that we explore quickly whether and how to put aerosols into the atmosphere.

It’s a sobering thought that solar radiation modification is the “hope” in the book’s title.

Why Do Wrens Build Dummy Nests? It's Complicated

I find much to like about house wrens, including their scientific name: Troglodytes aedon.  It’s very appropriate for this vigorous singer and cavity nester. Troglodyte is from the Greek for “hole or cave dweller,” while aedon, also Greek in origin means “nightingale.”  But, to be honest, it’s a challenge to love this contradictory animal.

Naturalist John James Audubon, clearly captivated by it, described the house wren as a “sweet little bird” that was “sprightly, active, vigilant, and courageous.”  In contrast, essayist Margaret Renkl pronounced it “a tiny, feathered terrorist,” wreaking havoc on the nests, eggs, and nestlings of other song birds in her Tennessee yard.  In fact, it’s both:  perky in general and vicious in its relationships with other birds.  (See the reference section at the end for links to cited sources.)

The illustration of the house wren that Audubon included in The Birds of America is quite revealing:

He showed the birds nesting in a hat.  There’s no cavity too outlandish for the house wren when it comes time to build nests and, furthermore, the nest-building impulse leads the little bird to construct multiple nests during the breeding season, many of which go unused.  The purpose of these non-breeding nests, often called “dummy nests,” has eluded researchers for a long time and, as I explore below, we’ve yet to fashion an accepted explanation for the behavior.

The issue of dummy nests is quite real for me.  I have been monitoring a group of seven bird boxes built according to specifications appropriate for bluebirds, but used by a variety of song birds.  My particular array of boxes lies in a wooded section of my community which means that bluebirds are unlikely to be residents:  this immediate setting just isn’t their kind of territory.  Instead, so far this season, the boxes have been occupied variously by Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, and house wrens.  The first two species have used boxes at one end of the wooded stretch I patrol while the last, the wrens, have been active mostly at the other end of this trail.

The pictures below show house wren eggs recently laid in one of the boxes and a parent perched on top of that box.

House wrens build a distinctive nest of a wide variety of materials, typically starting with a base of twigs.  In addition to the one box where eggs have been laid and brooding is underway, I have found two other boxes with solely the telltale first layer of twigs of a wren nest:  dummy nests, I’ve concluded.  One is shown below - this is a view with the side of the bird box swung open.  This nest has never been used.

And therein lies a key question:  why?  Why would male house wrens (it is apparently the males that do this) expend the energy to build nests that won’t be used for propagating the species?

My first introduction to the explanations advanced for this behavior was in the rather dated but still useful A Field Guide to the Birds’ Nests (1975).  Of wren nest building in its breeding territory, it states:  “Male arrives first, establishes territory, builds dummy nests of twigs in all or most of available nest sites.  Female may or may not accept prechosen site; may or may not accept male’s incomplete twig nest.”

As I read some of the literature on the subject, I was quite pleased to come across a recent review of the research by Elise Isabella Macqueen and Graeme Douglas Ruxton.  The authors consider all of the peer-reviewed literature on this avian behavior (for all species, not just wrens) and posit that it proffers four “non-exclusive mechanisms” to explain this phenomenon.  They review the evidence for these explanations and discuss the logical “plausibility” of each. 

First, though, it’s useful to briefly discuss three explanations that, according to Macqueen and Ruxton, prior authors had suggested for this behavior:  (1) the birds were practicing their nest-building skills, (2) they were expending “excess sexual energy prior to pairing,” or (3) they were establishing territory (the one promoted by the field guide quoted above).

They summarily dispose of all three of these explanations, characterizing them as “now widely accepted to be implausible.”  Of the first (getting in practice), the authors note that the dummy nests usually are poorly fashioned compared to the nests actually used and that the activity is not confined to young males.  With regard to letting off steam, they said that males in many species continue the activity even after breeding.  Finally, when it comes to marking territory, Macqueen and Ruxton assert that this would be a singularly inefficient way to do that compared to singing and displays.

According to the authors, the four explanations that are currently advanced to explain this nest building activity posit that the dummy nests:

(1) mislead predators or parasite species ("predation avoidance hypothesis")

(2) sexually signal that the builder is a high quality male ("sexual selection - signalling [sic] hypothesis")

(3) offer shelter ("fledgling shelter hypothesis"), and/or

(4) defend against other species taking over an occupied nest ("nest usurpation defence [sic] hypothesis").

The authors are often quite critical of the evidence advanced in support of any of these hypotheses, outlining how the methods used to test them might have been improved.  The paucity of conclusive evidence for any one, despite a fairly substantial amount of research effort devoted to this cause, is striking, though perhaps to be expected given the observational and experimental challenges of working in the field with birds.  Macqueen and Ruxton deconstruct the underlying logic of each of the current hypotheses, devoting more attention to the first two, while skating quickly over the last two.

Here then are brief summaries of their analysis of each hypothesis, with a focus on what they say about the inherent logic behind them.

Predation Avoidance  The underlying assumption for this hypothesis is that predators (other birds or other animals) will give up a search in a particular area for an occupied nest if they encounter several empty nests.  Macqueen and Ruxton suggest this hypothesis could be tested experimentally but find little evidence in the research of such testing.

That said, the authors write, "We are doubtful of its logical plausibility."  It is, they assert, "an unlikely functional explanation for building multiple nests."  They question the central assumption that a predator would abandon a search which, past experience might suggest to it, could yield a rich reward.  Though for some ground dwelling predators the costs of continuing a heretofore fruitless search might be relatively high, for birds looking for prey they might not be.  More telling, the authors assert that the search conducted by predators wouldn't be random among all local nests, but would be guided by key signals like smell and noises.

Sexual Selection/Signaling  According to Macqueen and Ruxton, at its heart, this hypothesis assumes that the building of multiple nests signals to potential mates that here is an individual with superior genes who has the physiological resources to build several nests, or that only an individual with a highly desirable territory, offering much available nesting material, could do this.

The difficulties for testing this hypothesis are substantial.  Close scrutiny of the behavior of individual birds is required.  Interestingly, the authors find that all the studies advancing this hypothesis, based on the relationship between the breeding success of males and the number of dummy nests they built, involved species that were polygynous, that is the males having more than one mate.  (House wrens can be polygynous.)  Such animals would, as a matter of course, build more than one nest.  Perhaps, they speculate, through natural selection this behavior has become "exaggerated."

The authors conclude that the signaling hypothesis is "logically plausible."  But they suggest that alternative signals - singing or courtship feeding - could have potentially greater potential payoff requiring less investment.  Singing is a signal that reaches a broader audience and area than does an array of dummy nests.  More than multiple nests, courtship feeding is an immediate and direct indication of an attribute critical to successful breeding.

They write:

This suggests that building multiple nests would be an inefficient mode of signalling.  However, if non-breeding nests do act as signals, this inefficiency could explain why it is seen in so few species.

I suggest that some other kind of signaling might be going on, a possibility looking back to the territorial explanation that the authors say has been dismissed.  The wren might be making effective use of its thuggish reputation to warn other birds, perhaps other wrens included, that they better not encroach on its territory.  I came across this idea in the discussion of dummy wren nests in Sialis, the nice website devoted to bluebirds that Bet Zimmerman Smith maintains.  She "guesses" that non-wren species might recognize the dummy nest as the work of the aggressive house wren and decide it would be better to nest elsewhere.

Fledgling Shelter  This third of the current hypotheses is given short shrift by the authors.  Though non-breeding nests might at some point serve as shelter, they are built early in the breeding season, well before there are fledglings needing shelter.  In fact, given how poorly many of them are made, they are likely to be in serious disarray by the time fledglings might want to make use of them.  (This doesn't apply to bird boxes that might provide shelter regardless of the state of any nest inside.)

Nest Usurpation  The authors spend little time with this hypothesis which is advanced by only a single study.  This hypothesis contends that dummy nests might be part of defending against other bird species taking over a nest or might serve as quick replacements when a nest is overtaken.  One logical limitation to this hypothesis is that backup nests are useful only if the usurpation occurs during the female's egg-laying period.  Otherwise, the couple, whose nest is taken over, will have no immediate need for a backup nest.  The female will need time to become biologically ready to conceive and lay eggs again, time that would allow for building a new nest.

Two takeaways from the Macqueen and Ruxton literature review:  we don’t have conclusive evidence explaining why birds build dummy nest, and all current hypotheses, to one degree or another, have logical limitations.

The authors do characterize the hypotheses as “non-exclusive” which means that aspects of more than one might be at work.  As a result, it may not be a matter of accepting one and rejecting the others, but understanding that the behavior is complex, not easily explained, and the result of selection working through multiple avenues.  That would, I think, compound the difficulty of fashioning an appropriate research methodology to prove any explanation that is advanced.

Yes, this is complicated.

References

John James Audubon, The Birds of America:  From Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories, 1841.

Hal H. Harrison, A Field Guide to the Birds’ Nests:  United States East of the Mississippi River, Petersen Field Guides, 1975.

Elise Isabella Macqueen and Graeme Douglas Ruxton, The Adaptive Function of Construction of Multiple Non-Breeding Nests in Birds, IBIS, Volume 165, 2023.

Margaret Renkl, The Questions Started With the Wren, The New York Times, July 7, 2025.

Bet Zimmerman Smith, Dummy and Abandoned Nests - Why Wasn't It Used?, Sialis.

The Surprising Story of Life on Earth

The inexorable movement of Earth’s tectonic plates, repeatedly creating massive continents and then tearing them apart, is an underlying plotline to the story of life on this planet.  Since the first appearance of life, a mere 100 million years after the birth of the planet 4.6 billion years ago, the influence of continental creation and destruction on the environment and, thus, on the fortunes of life has been profound.

In his relatively recent book, paleontologist Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature, tells that part of the story well, but goes much further, painting with broad brush strokes a narrative of how life has evolved and survived, amid repeated extinction events.  The narrative he penned is informed and insightful, marked by humor and a steady stream of surprises.  This is a book that moves easily and quickly through the billions of years it covers.  Not for nothing did Gee title it:  A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth:  4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters (published in 2021).

Early on, he writes, “Perhaps the most amazing thing about life – apart from its very existence – is how quickly it began.”  (p. 5)  It strikes me that an ineluctable drive to exist undergirds life’s almost immediate appearance on the new planet, and that this also helps to explain why the history of life is the history of responses to change.  It’s a call and response pattern whereby life survives repeated episodes of devastation, episodes that Gee often ties to the creation of massive continents (e.g., creation of Pangea completed during the Permian) and to the breakup of those massive continents (e.g., breakup of Pangea beginning at the tail end of Triassic), all having profound effects on climate and habitable areas.

Evolution is part and parcel of this ebb and flow pattern.  Gee’s account offers up many examples of evolutionary change sparking still more change, all in the service of survival.  His narrative of the Cambrian is one of predator and prey engaged in a dance whereby new methods of attack spark new methods of defense which in turn . . . .   For instance, in the Cambrian, descendants of Saccorhytus (a very early enigmatic animal) chose not to build armor, but, instead, to evolve a means of escape though a “swishing tail.”  (p. 31)  This notochord would evolve into the spinal cord.  With the evolution of a spine came a cascade of changes, allowing animals to become more complex and bigger.  “All vertebrates are visible to the naked eye.”  (p. 36)  Of course, evolution doesn’t let a useful invention go to waste, and many vertebrates did evolve armor.

As I mentioned, Gee’s account is full of surprises.  One of the most startling, to me, was that of the import of the anus.  Who knew that the evolution of the anus in the Precambrian would have such far reaching effects?  He describes how plankton had simply let wastes flow everywhere out of their bodies, feeding oxygen-consumers in the water column.  But, once a discrete anus emerged “in some species of otherwise undistinguished worms,” the result was “a revolution in the biosphere.”  (p. 18)  In his telling, poop in concentrated packets was expelled from the anus and settled to the ocean floor, drawing the oxygen-consumers to the bottom, with the result that “the seas, once turbid and stagnant, became clearer and still richer in oxygen – enough to enable the evolution of larger life forms.”  (p. 18)

But, wait, that’s not all.  The anus in time lead to orientation to animals with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other, it became “a distinct direction of travel.”  And this led, eventually, to an arms race as animals began eating one another.  Yes, there is a leap there, but Gee is such a gifted writer that the reader, well, this reader, is happy to make that jump with him.

His is a very rich account of life on Earth, and it’s also idiosyncratic, each of its 12 chapters is centered on one or a few developments that, in Gee’s eye, are central to the broad portion of life’s history under review.  For instance, chapter 7, titled “Dinosaurs in Flight,” principally about the Jurassic and Cretaceous, is a wonderful exposition of the avian nature of dinosaurs. 

Flight, according to Gee, was in the works for dinosaurs from their beginning.

Dinosaurs and their immediate relatives spent millions of years accumulating everything needed for flight:  feathers, a fast-running metabolism, efficient air cooling to keep it under control, a lightweight frame, and a singular devotion to egg laying.  (p. 99)

Clearly, not all dinosaurs flew or kept flying once they did fly.  Flying is demanding of an animal’s physiological resources.  Notes Gee, it’s “an expensive habit . . . . so, it is not surprising that many flyers gave it up when the opportunity arose."  (p. 105)

Or consider that his chapter on mammals (succeeded by chapters that consider primates and then hominins).  Gee has embraced the view of mammals that I’ve expressed in this blog before (in the post titled Mammals All The Way Down, November 29, 2021) – they weren’t just biding their time in shadow of the dinosaurs, they were actively evolving.  Gee begins this chapter by discussing the evolutionary changes that equipped mammals with a hearing ability more sensitive than anything that had existed previously in vertebrates.  The physiological changes required to achieve this new level of hearing are, in Gee’s skilled telling, a product of complex evolutionary change repurposing bones.  Though mammals during the reign of the dinosaurs may have been away from center stage and, certainly, not the main act, they were evolving with gusto.  He stresses, “They were a venturesome bunch and not to be kept down.”  (p. 121)

After several chapters tracing the evolution of primates into hominins into humans, Gee ends with a final chapter (The Past of the Future) that leaves no doubt that ours is just a brief moment in the history of life on this planet and that we humans are fated to suffer the eventual fate of all life on the planet – extinction.  He writes:

Within the next few thousand years, Homo sapiens will have vanished. The cause will be, in part, the repayment of an extinction debt, long overdue. The patch of habitat occupied by humanity is nothing less than the entire Earth, and human beings have been making it progressively less habitable.  (p. 188)

He speculates on how the planet will change in the future and how life will be affected.  I was particularly taken by the humorous footnote he inserted covering the whole of this sobering exposition:

I should say that from this point onward, most of what I say is conjecture, or what scientist call making stuff up.  As someone once said, prediction is very hard, especially about the future.  (p. 268, footnote 17, note number appears on p. 189)

Bottomline, Gee posits that humanity won’t survive and all evidence of our existence, relative to the billions of years life existed on Earth will be negligible.  But, despite that lack of enduring legacy, or, actually, because of it, Gee counsels us that it’s important “to preserve what we have, to make our mayfly existence as comfortable as possible, for ourselves and our fellow species."  (p. 207)

This is an engaging, witty, and informative read.  I do have one quibble:  I think plants get short shrift in Gee’s telling of the story of life.  They’re not ignored, but the drama in his account has mostly to do with the trials, tribulations, successes and failures of animals.

Moveable Fossil Feasts

There are sites I consider moveable fossil feasts.  This is not in a Christian liturgical sense where the timing of a religious observation shifts from year to year.  Though a moveable fossil feast may, on occasion, exhibit some temporal impermanence, these feasts are much more about changing the locations of fossils.  Nothing divine about them, but, as a result of taking fossils from one site to another, likely more accessible, site, moveable fossil feasts offer collectors wonderful opportunities.

This terminology is mine alone.  I’ve never heard anyone refer to these sites in this fashion.  To be clear, I do not apply this term to places like the shoreline of the western Chesapeake Bay where fossils move as they erode from the Calvert Cliffs.  That process is natural.  In contrast, moveable fossil feast are human-made.  And, as such, the rewards they offer to fossil collectors are usually, but not always, a happy byproduct of the relocation of fossil-bearing sediment undertaken for some other purpose, such a beach replenishment.

This post offers brief descriptions of a few of the moveable fossil feasts with which I have some personal connection, either directly or indirectly, and one that I do not.  At the conclusion, I briefly highlight these sites' singular virtue and the challenging issues they raise.

North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina - A friend, sadly recently deceased, spent several weeks in different years vacationing with his wife at North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.  They walked the beach a couple of times a day, outings timed with low tide.  As they went, they collected fossils – teeth, bones, shells – objects the waves had exposed on the beach.  A small sample from one year is pictured below.

These finds were often a stratigraphic and chronologic hodgepodge, a nightmare for identification.  Some came from the Pleistocene and Pliocene epochs (between 5 million to 11 thousand years ago), more from the Miocene period (23 to 5 million years ago) or the Cretaceous (143 to 66 million years ago).  Among the finds over the years were pieces of fossil turtle shells, ancient horse teeth, shark teeth, pieces of fossil sand dollars, and ammonite fragments.

My friend surmised this mixture resulted from efforts to replenish the beach, presumably with material dredged from offshore sedimentary layers from different time periods.  A competing or, perhaps, complementary explanation is that erosion of offshore sedimentary layers is the agent responsible for the fossils and their diversity.

C&D Canal (Reedy Point, Delaware) – I collected here twice many years ago.  It is a site created by the dumping of material dredged by Army Corps of Engineers in 1980 as it deepened the Chesapeake and Delaware (C&D) Canal.  The fossil-rich material hauled to, and deposited at, this site came from the Mt. Laurel Formation, dating from the Late Cretaceous. 

Here is a view of the location on one visit more than 15 years ago.

What was practiced here was mostly surface collecting, practitioners wandering through the overgrown and exposed landscape, eyes focused on the ground.  It was actually very easy hunting, though it took some time before the objectives of the searching came into view.  Most abundant (and obvious) were the orangey, long, pointed belemnites, the calcitic skeletal remains from the tails of the Cretaceous squid, Belemnitella americana.  Oyster shells (Exogyra) were also common.  Pictured below are some of these fossils.  An amateur’s rather old guide to the fossils from the Canal is suggestive of what could be found.

Is this site still there, still accessible?  I don’t know.  One source stated some four years ago, that the Army Corps of Engineers was planning to do more dredging and pile the dredged material on this site.  Unfortunately, this “new” material was slated to come from a formation lacking fossils.  Another source simply says it’s closed.  Such is the fate of, at least, this moveable fossil feast.  

Aurora Fossil Museum, Aurora, North Carolina – Located near the Lee Creek Mine, a phosphate surface mine that, when it was open to collectors, yielded stunningly beautiful fossils, particularly those from the megashark Otodus megalodon.  The various Lee Creek fossils come mostly came from the Pungo River (Lower Miocene) and the Yorktown (Early Pliocene) formations.  Not unexpectedly, the areas where we could collect, when we permitted into the open pit mine, were not pristine, not as they were originally laid down, but, rather, we needed to figure out which formations might have contributed to the areas in which we were collecting.  For me, at least, that was not always clear.

Now, I don’t consider the mine itself to have been a moveable fossil feast because collectors went to where the fossils originated, albeit in strata that were highly disturbed by the mining process.

No, the moveable fossil feasts, for me, are the spoil piles of material hauled from the mine and deposited outside the Aurora Fossil Museum in Aurora, North Carolina.  Purportedly, this material consists of tailings from the Pungo River formation which, even if true, does not locate these fossils within the various units that make up this formation. 

When I was last there – some 15 years ago – this was the view toward the spoil pile where I hunted a couple of times, once when a trip to the mine was cancelled at the very last minute and once after a successful hunt at the mine.

The museum has evolved greatly since then and, among other changes, now has two pits of material from the mine.

The finds were small, though relatively abundant; searching on one’s knees was rewarded.  Here is a sampling of what turned up on one of my hunts through the spoil piles.

This moveable fossil feast is wonderfully accessible, located in a small town with parking just a short stroll away.  It’s all rather domestic as attested to by the cat who oversaw my activities.  (The cat may have had other intentions for the sand of the fossil pit.)

Bradenton Beach, Florida – The same friend who enjoyed the moveable fossil feast at North Myrtle Beach was vacationing one year at Bradenton Beach when he came upon this scene in a parking lot serving the beach.

Never inclined to ignore the possibility that fossils might be had, he explored these huge mounds of gray, phosphatic sand and discovered a true wealth of shells, most in fantastic condition.  He spent much of his vacation climbing up and down this sandy landscape, gathering shells.

These were, indeed, fossil shells because he learned that the sand had been hauled to this location from an area quarry which he concluded was the SMR Mine in Sarasota, making these fossils Pliocene, about 3.6 to 3.0 million years old.  Here are three beautiful specimens I obtained from him.

Though this moveable fossil feast was extremely accessible (in a parking lot, of all places), my friend searched these sandy hills quite feverishly because all of this material was slated shortly to be crushed to pave the parking lot.

Rotterdam Harbor, The Netherlands – This last moveable fossil feast, international in nature, was featured in Nina Siegal’s article titled On the Hunt for Mammoths which appeared on November 17, 2025 in the online version of The New York Times (print edition ran the article on November 19, 2025).  

This feast has features reflected in some of the descriptions I’ve already provided of such sites, but there is a remarkable attribute that sets this one apart, prompting me to think – “The Dutch know how to do this.”

In the article, Siegal describes how people are hunting for fossils along at the Maasvlakte 2 beach, on the harbor shoreline in Rotterdam, benefitting from a beach reclamation project – no, more like a beach construction project.  This beach is wholly constructed of sediment dredged from the sea floor of the North Sea, sediment roughly 2.5 million to 11,700 years old.  This sediment comes from what once was a steppe where megafauna animals lived.  As a result, the material used to build the beach contains the fossil remains of many land animals, such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and giant horses.  Sprinkled among these are fossils from invertebrates including sharks.

Now, here’s where it gets truly amazing.  What sets this moveable fossil feast apart from the others I’ve described so far is the incredibly well organized scientific support for the amateur fossil collectors who scour the beach.  In The Netherlands, these fossil hunters are permitted to keep their finds, but they are also encouraged to register them with the online Oervondschecker (“Primal Find Checker”), initiated by the Port of Rotterdam Authority and now maintained by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center.  (The default language on the site is Dutch, so having a browser translate the text is useful for some of us.)  As the website states:  “Every notification will be reviewed within a few days by an expert.  A find gets a provisional determination and an (estimated) time determination.”  Marvelous.

How does Naturalis do that?  Each collector seeking to register a find is asked to submit pictures of it with the precise GPS location of where it was found (ah, the wonders of the smart phone) or, at a minimum, they are advised to use the app to locate the find on its associated map of the beach.  As the Naturalis Biodiversity Center explains on the website, the dredging operations were “accurately tracked,” including the depths at which the sand was “sucked up” during each trip.  Data on the geologic origins of the individual layers of sand at the seabed in the North Sea feed into the Naturalis calculations.  Further, where the dredged sand was deposited on the beach was also meticulously followed.  As a result, the general provenience of a find can be determined and used to estimate its age.  That is truly amazing.

In conclusion, my descriptions of these few moveable fossil feasts suggest a cardinal virtue as well as a couple of sins associated with them.  The single most important positive attribute of these sites is that, as a result of human intervention, fossil-rich sediment has been moved from one location to another, a place that is typically much more accessible and convenient for collecting.  Fossil hunting at them can be easy – e.g., going through the Aurora Fossil Museum fossil pits or walking the beach at the Rotterdam Harbor.

On the other side of the ledger, these sites have certain downsides.  Having separated sediment from their original location, the makers of these sites (with the important exception of the Rotterdam Harbor beach) sever the ties between the fossils and the geological strata where they were originally found.  Identification and age determination can be difficult, and sometimes, though not always, impossible – the finds on North Myrtle Beach, for example, are a challenge.  Another key negative attribute is that they can be transient, sometimes offering only a limited opening for collecting - the material in the Bradenton Beach parking lot is a striking case in point.

Still, they are a wonderful phenomenon and taking advantage of them, no matter the challenges, is a delight.

A Baseball Roster: The-All Geology and Paleontology Team

This post has little to do with natural history.

Bluebirds have returned and are scoping out bird boxes.  Buds are brushing color onto trees.  Some days are actually warm.  Memories of a brutally cold winter have faded.  Clearly, it's time for baseball.  For this post, I was largely inspired by my recent discovery of an intimate and quirky publication imbued with all things baseball, the Elysian Fields Quarterly (EFQ).

The EFQ began life in 1981 as The Minneapolis Review of Baseball:  A Journal of Writing on Baseball (MRB), segued into the EFQ, and died in 2008.  For its owners and editors, it was (mostly?) a labor of love (apparently making money didn’t factor into it).  They worked to produce a journal that would be, according to Ken LaZebnik, who conceived of MRB:

a quasi-literary quarterly that would provide a forum for baseball fans everywhere, from any walk of life, to express their interest in and abiding affection for the National Pastime.

Macalester College holds a nearly complete run of both publications and a vast array of other associated material.  The LaZebnik quotation above is taken from the historical note in the Macalester College Archives guide to the Elysian Fields Quarterly/ Minneapolis Review of Baseball collection.  This quotation was originally posted on the EFQ website, a site which is no more. 

I am more familiar with the EFQ, though I think much of what I have to say about it also applies to MRB.  The EFQ embraced baseball, but, more importantly, it was devoted to publishing writing about baseball in all, or nearly all, possible forms:  history, fiction, essays, poetry, puzzles, interviews, book reviews, quizzes, statistical analyses, and so on.  Among the EFQ regular offerings was a column titled Rosters.  It's this last "literary" form that is the focus of this post.  (I would note that baseball-related photography and art were also part of the journal's reach.)

The Rosters column was a clever and playful deep dive into the names of major league baseball players.  The objective for this feature was finding enough players with names (mostly last names) that reflect some chosen theme and whose playing positions cover all of the positions needed to field a team.  For instance, the Fall 1994 EFQ issue included a roster compiled by Steven Lichtman of players whose names were appropriate for The All-Home and Hearth Team and whose positions filled out a roster.  His roster had, among other players, Alan Bannister at shortstop and Tommy John among the pitchers.  In addition to the roster by Lichtman, my copies of EFQ include rosters fashioned by Mikhail Horowitz.  The editors wrote the first Roster - The All-Fish Team - which appeared in the last issue of MRB.  It was accompanied by a call for rosters to be contributed by readers.

Inspired by their efforts, I have tried my hand at creating a roster for The-All Geology and Paleontology Team.  (None of the roster columns in my very small sample of EFQ issues or in any of the issues listed on eBay that I've looked at covers this same theme.)  The roster I filled out is very heavy on the geology side, barely touching paleontology.  To populate my roster, I first went through my print copy of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition, 2007, then, to fill a gap or two in the roster, I went to the online Baseball Reference, a great source of baseball statistics and history.  I used the Baseball Reference to create the player profiles given below.  Of note, I limited myself to players who took the field before 1940.  I also did not expand my roster to add additional "bench" players or add a manager.

I found this to be a sobering, even melancholic, enterprise.  For many of these players, their major league careers were starkly brief moments, their presence barely recorded in the game’s annals.  I suspect that, for at least some, the experience carried an outsized weight.  Thoughts and, perhaps, regret about what might have been?  Though I did not deliberately seek out obscure players, no one on my roster is a household name.

In my annotated roster below, I first list the position, the player filling it, and his birth and death years.  Below that, I record the player’s full name, describe the length of their career and which teams they played for, and conclude with mention of an item or two that struck me as, at least, somewhat memorable about their career.  The EFQ rosters were not annotated.  (A glossary explaining most of the baseball terms and statistics cited in my annotations can found on the Major LeagueBaseball website.)

Here, then, is my all-geology and paleontology team roster:

First Base: Les Rock (1912-1991)

Lester Henry Rock played in two games for the Chicago White Sox in 1936.  He came to bat just once in his career, entering his first game as a pinch hitter.  He grounded into a double play and a runner scored on the play.  Under the rules in place at the time, Rock was credited with a run batted in (RBI).  Only a few years later, a rule change would have deprived him of that RBI.

Second Base: Charlie Pick (1888-1954)

Charles Thomas Pick played in the major leagues from 1914 through 1920, for the Washington Nationals, Philadelphia Athletics, Chicago Cubs, and Boston Braves.  In his debut in the majors, he had three hits in his first three at-bats.  He holds the major league record for most times at bat in a game without a hit, 11.

 

Shortstop: George Bone (1874-1918)

George Drummond Bone played for the Milwaukee Brewers in 1901.  He appeared in 12 games with a batting average of .302.  Baseball Reference gets into the roster game when it notes that "he is a cinch to make the 'All Body Part' team, along with players such as Dave Brain, Roy Face, and Harry Cheek."

 

Third Base: John Karst (1893-1976)

John Gottlieb Karst appeared in a single game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1915.  He was a fielding substitution for the starting third baseman and helped turn a double play.  He never came to bat.

 

A karst is a limestone landscape where water has created sinkholes, caverns, underground streams, among other features. ( John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Catcher:  Silver Flint (1855-1892)

Frank Sylvester Flint played in 1875 with the St. Louis Red Stockings, then spent a couple of years in the minor leagues, before returning to the major leagues in 1878 with the Indianapolis Blues.  From 1879 through 1889, he played for the Chicago White Stockings.  He briefly managed the White Stockings in 1879 while also playing.  During his career, he was the catcher for three no-hitters.  (A "no-hitter" - a term not defined in the MLB glossary - is a game in which one side fails to make a hit during the entire contest.)

 

Outfielder: Bill Clay (1874-1917)

Frederick C. Clay appeared in three games in 1902 for the Philadelphia Phillies, batting eight times with two hits and a run batted in.  In his debut, he had two hits in four at-bats.

 

Outfielder:  Jerry D’Arcy (1885-1924)

Jeremiah Joseph D’Arcy played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1911.  He had six at-bats over the course of two games, but failed to make a hit.  According to Baseball Reference, D’Arcy was “a player whose true identity long eluded researchers.”  A "Jerry Dorsey" reportedly played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for two games in 1911, but much of information on the man was contradictory or missing.  It wasn’t until 2013 that it was proven that Dorsey was, in fact, a person named Jerry D’Arcy.

 

In geology, a darcy is a unit of measure of the permeability of rock.  (John O.E. Clark and Stella Stiegeler, The Facts on File Dictionary of Earth Science, 2000.)

 

Outfielder:  George Stone (1876-1945)

George Robert Stone played in 1903 for the Boston Americans, and then from 1905 to 1910 with the St. Louis Browns.  Stone was a good hitter with a career batting average of .301.  In 1905, he led the American League in hits (187) and topped the major leagues in batting average in 1906 (.358).

 

Pitcher:  Shovel Hodge (1893-1967)

Clarence Clemet Hodge appeared in 75 games for the Chicago White Sox from 1920 through 1922.  Of the 20 games he started, he pitched complete games in 8.  Baseball Reference reports that he was called “Shovel” because, at one time, he was quite heavy and brought to mind a steam shovel.

 

Pitcher:  Bob Spade (1877-1924)

Robert Spade debuted in 1907 with the Cincinnati Reds at the age of 30 and played for them until 1910, when he was traded mid-season to the St. Louis Browns.  His career ended after 1910.  His most impressive season was 1908 when he had a record of 17 wins and 12 defeats.  That season, he started 28 games and pitched complete games in 22 of them.

 

Pitcher:  Reese Diggs (1915-1978)

Reese Wilson Diggs pitched for the Washington Nationals in 1934, appearing in four games.  That year, he was the youngest player in the American League.  He started three games and pitched complete games in two.

 

Pitcher:  Ray Miner (1897-1963)

Raymond Theodore Miner pitched one inning in one game for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1921.  It was not a good outing because he gave up two hits, walked three batters, and yielded four runs.  He has a statistically weird claim to fame, starting his career, ending it, and dying on the same month and day:  September 15.  Strangely enough, he’s not the only major league player to have achieved this distinction.  Lou Raymond made those three transitions on May 2.

Since I was attempting to emulate them, I thought it might be interesting to learn a bit about the two authors who composed rosters in the issues I own of the EFQ (one column by Lichtman and several by Horowitz).  When Steven Lichtman’s roster column appeared in the Fall 1994 issue, he was a newly minted lawyer.  He later earned a PhD in political science and is now an associate professor at Shippensburg State University.  Though he doesn’t list the EFQ roster column in his curriculum vitae (understandable in the scheme of things), I don’t think he abandoned baseball completely.  At one point in his wandering in the academic wilderness of two-year appointments, he taught at Dickinson College.  An article about his impending departure from the college appeared in the May 20, 2005, issue of the Dickinson student newspaper.  It quoted a student who said of Lichtman:  “He was equally willing to discuss John Stuart Mill's 'On Liberty' as that night's baseball game."  

Mikhail Horowitz was described in the EFQ as “the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978) and a contributor to many outré baseball anthologies.”  That doesn’t quite capture his multifaceted career as a poet, musician, writer, journalist, comedian, and satirist; baseball runs through his poetry and creative output.  A recent interview offers some insight.  (Howard Altarescu, Writers of the Catskills:  In Conversation With Mikhail Horowitz, TheOverlook, December 25, 2025.)

I think I’m in good company.