90ways - Science

The House Wren weighs about fifteen grams, which is a tough break for him. They vary from reddish to grey-brown with a dark brown bill. The House Wren is so nondescript, as birds go, that it barely registers an image on film. The bird ranges throughout North America; after it has finished ranging, it lives there. The House Wren doesn't often migrate, due to the fact that it is usually where it wants to be.The wren is a songbird and a troglodyte, although not very good at being either.

What it IS good at is destroying the nests, eggs, and fledglings of other species of bird that nest nearby... especially if the nest is in a place coveted by the House Wren. And, a wren will live in anything with a concavity, provided there are no obvious teeth. The bird will tear up a nest, piece by piece, break the eggs, kill the young, and send bogus change of address forms to the post office. It isn't so much that the wren is destroying the competition as it is that he is a prick.

The House Wren has suffered some displacement from the European House Sparrow, who is just as contentious and a little larger. Despite this, the House Wren has not developed any empathy.

The House Wren is often confused with the winter wren... with hilarious results.

The Rocky Mountains of Colorado are particularly striking after spending 16 hours traversing an unshifting and endless scape of farmland at a near-constant, cruise-controlled speed. The trip from Chicago to Denver brainwashes the mind of geologic variation, making the peaks seem almost unreal at first. After a 1000 mile trek from sea level to the mile high city, it takes only 60 miles to gain another mile in elevation and arrive at Loveland Pass, straddling the continental divide at nearly 12000 feet. There is snow here; people are hiking up a ridge with snowboards behind their backs, ready to slide down. We can see the plains back to the east, extending on indefinitely.

In Basin and Range, John McPhee muses that looking at road cuts -- the sediment layers exposed by blasting a hill to make room for a highway -- is like taking a glance back in time. Interstate 70 descends through the mountains along the Colorado River, down in elevation and in time amidst a beautiful gorge. Naked aspen forests transition to deep red rock and low shrub bush. Eroding sandstone transitions into steep, square granite walls of ancient rock, finally depositing us in the high plains of western Colorado. Along the way we pass uplifts, the confluence of two tectonic plates which thrust up the earth, creating vertical sedimentary layers out of horizontal ones. Later in the day we will further drop into a basin that was once a massive body of water, now just evaporated and brackish remains called the Great Salt Lake.

The whole trip through the massive upheaval which is the Rockies takes a matter of hours in a well equipped car. Driving seems the ideal way for this journey, fitting the rise and fall into one rapid chunk, somehow exposing the whole story at once, like reading a page of statistics in a single glance. Flying is too fast and high, with a bird's eye flattening no better than a 2D map. Walking is too slow, more appropriate for putting across the shear mass of a mountain and the energy needed to fight gravity in an upward climb. The interstate system is a complex symbol conjuring many successes and failures of the American Way, but I-70 succeeds here in helping to describe what it means to be a mountain range.