Tossed out this bit of shameless self-promotion on insta last week and figured I’d post here too: my own shit makes great holiday gifts! Twenty-five buckaroos gets you a signed and personalized copy of either of my books; DM for details. Help me afford a haircut and a razor!

Will add that, though the study below deals specifically with megafauna’s role in regulating earth’s systems, biologists have told much the same story about the loss of diadromous fish, critical transporters of nutrients whose movements and populations modernity has thrown terribly out of whack.

Nearly a quarter-century ago, Dick Cheney personally meddled in a govt report finding that Klamath Basin fish actually need, y’know, water—an act that led directly to the catastrophic salmon die-off in 2002 and thus paved dam removal’s way. Now Dick’s dead and the Klamath lives. Makes ya think.

Former site of the JC Boyle reservoir, submerged and algae-clotted for decades, now flowing free and unfettered — and aswirl with new piscine life in the foreground, finding its jubilant way.

The rare week when you may not actually need a timeline cleanse… but here ya go anyway.

These are “salmon in the Bardo,” a wonderful phrase coined by the brilliant naturalist Rob Rich — already gripped by death, yet compelled onward by the relentless spawning imperative.

Fall chinook in the throes of preprogrammed senescence or thousand-dollar captive koi?

Hundreds of salmon currently stacked up in skinny Spencer Creek, a groundwater-fed tributary to the Klamath. These guys are ragged with decay but determined to fulfill the spawning imperative, zombies who outlived Halloween. Resilience embodied.

I’m not crying you’re crying

Grateful to spend two days on the Klamath watching chinook, liberated by dam removal, return to streams from which they’d been precluded since the Titanic sank. Fish are everywhere, in numbers that stagger the mind & locations that biologists figured would take years to repopulate. Too beautiful.