Wordpecker 15: Beaver Atlas

Meet the marms

OnlyMarms | Beaver Management Officer | Dickovers | Feather Atlas | Watts Towers | Jerry’s Map

Photo by christie greene on Unsplash

This Week in Phraseology

Hello there! Are you enjoying this wildfire smoke diarrhea lettuce Jimothy Wicker summer?

“Wicker, you ask? What do you mean?”

If you haven’t seen the trailer for the upcoming Wicker movie (tagline: A hard man is good to find), do that immediately so you can enjoy the memes flying around. I stand by my assertion that I will see anything Olivia Colman stars in, especially if it involves Alexander Skarsgård being weird AF. Now you know the references!

Not IKEA rolling out a brilliant social post to go with the film:

OK enough memes, we have some new words and phrases to enjoy. This week, we have rodent gigs, annoying tech, expansive art projects, and more.

Let’s get to it!

1. OnlyMarms

For nearly 65 years, the National Science Foundation has funded the study of marmots in the Rocky Mountains. As the Trump-Vance administration has slashed billions of dollars in science funding over the last year, the grant to study marmots was terminated. News flash: Marmots are woke! Budget cuts finally came for the furries!

In response, scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL)—which you may know from their annual Fat Marmot Week event—got even more creative. UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein hatched the idea for an OnlyFans account, but for marmots. I mean, why not? We live in the Jimothy era, where anything is possible through small mammals.

And that’s how we arrived at OnlyMarms, an OnlyFans account but for science. Run by grad student Emily Ranky, OnlyMarms offers “unfiltered yellow-bellied content from the Rockies” and pics of marmots with cute names like Staple, Pawprint, and Cabinet. The account is free to view and accepts donations; so far, they’ve raised around $6K!

If you’d like to directly support RMBL marmot research, make a donation here:

To keep tabs on this short-sighted gutting of scientific research on largely ideological grounds, follow and support Unbreaking.org. They have a medical research funding timeline tracking the administration’s actions and the pushback against them, in the hope that we can restore what’s being destroyed. (Disclosure: I’m a copy editor at Unbreaking, which is an all-volunteer project.)

2. Beaver management officer

We are on a small mammal kick here at Wordpecker! A brief break from covering birds—but don’t worry, I’ll get back to them in a bit. We love a weird job here, and this one is no exception. If you’re still 12 years old inside like me, this one’s for you.

Wild beavers have been extinct in Scotland for 400 years, until the first wild-born kits arrived there this year as part of a rewilding project between the government and a nonprofit, known as the National Beaver Strategy (lol).

This BBC piece quotes beaver management officer Tobias Leask on the project:

“These beaver kits symbolise a wildlife success story four centuries in the making, and how nature can recover when we give it a chance.

“Seeing them for the first time is something I’ll never forget. It was one of those rare moments when you realise you’re witnessing history.”

I sincerely hope Mr. Leask has Beaver Management Officer in his LinkedIn profile headline.

3. Dickovers

I’m just nerdy enough to regularly read Cory Doctorow, author of the excellent book Enshittification, but not quiiiite nerdy enough to follow tech blogger/podcaster John Gruber. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, congratulations, you’re a cool, normal human.

Anyway, reading Doctorow is how I discovered Dickovers, a term coined this year by Gruber. What is a dickover? Get ready for a good hate-read, because I promise you already know what they are:

dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.

This is a good word! I hope it catches on and I hope Gruber writes a bestselling book about dickovers like Doctorow did about enshittification.

With most tech experiences curdling and turning sour these days, one thing I can say is that this is a prime era for tech optimists to step in—a la Mamdani in NYC for good government—and start making GOOD user experiences and a GOOD, non-exploitative search engine (I switched to StartPage and never looked back). I recommend reading this entry from Cory Doctorow about how to block dickovers. Fly! Be free!

4. Feather Atlas

At Wordpecker, we’ll never pivot to video but we WILL pivot to birds! Artist Anna Brones recently wrote about a federal feather atlas and I had to know more.

Turns out the Feather Atlas is a charmingly dated US Fish and Wildlife Service portal where, after about 20 clicks or so, you can view images of feathers archived in their database. Here are some scans of tail feathers from an Anna’s Hummingbird!!!

If you find a random bird feather you can try to ID it through the Feather Atlas, too. Science is cool! So are archives!

5. Watts Towers

While reading about the fascinating life and evocative work of artist Betye Saar in her obituary, I learned that she found inspiration for her assemblage art in the work of Simon Rodia. An Italian immigrant who came to the US in 1921, Rodia spent decades working on the Watts Towers mosaic sculptures in the L.A. neighborhood where Saar was born. Today the Watts Towers Art Center exists to educate and preserve the art and culture of the towers themselves and the neighborhood that has sustained them for decades.

Watts Towers image by Megan Westerby via Creative Commons license

It’s worth noting that Betye Saar, who was probably best known for her “found object” assemblages depicting Aunt Jemima armed with guns and grenades, made and exhibited her work for her entire adult life until her passing at age 99. In this era of mass technological theft and devaluing of art, it’s so important to remember to keep creating no matter what. The world needs artists and writers and the world needs our art. Keep going. Keep making.

6. Jerry’s Map

This entry pairs well with the Watts Towers project, because it’s a one-of-a-kind creation decades in the making. In the early 1960s, while bored at his job, Jerry Gretzinger started making a physical map of an imaginary city. He worked on the map for 20 years and stored it in the attic until his son discovered it, inspiring Jerry to revisit the project.

Today, “The Map” is a two-dimensional world comprised of over 4,000 individual panels made with “acrylic, marker, colored pencil, ink, collage, and inkjet print on heavy paper” that can be assembled into a circle guided by the cardinal directions. To create the map, Gretzinger started using a customized deck of cards as a random-number generator to dictate what to work on next, along with a list of guiding principles for how the work progresses.

Watch Gretzinger work on a map section using his card deck:

You really have to see the assembled images to get an idea of the scope and wonder of this project. Gretzinger blogged about the map for years, and today there’s an active subreddit called Jerry Mapping devoted to mapmaking in this style. What a great example of making art because you have to. Thanks to Wordpecker reader Tonya for sending this one in!

Bonus Nugget

Someone made a billboard for a fake LLM chatbot and is answering the queries it gets himself. Mad I didn’t think of this; it’s totally a spite art project I’d love to do:

That’s it for this week. Remember to keep making it weird, and stay furiously curious!