mm1--a fish, a song, & an article
i apologize if the formatting here is messed up... i'm not entirely sure how to work tinyletter yet & the preview feature doesn't seem to work.
if you'd rather, you can read it at the archives on my website!
a fish
as of right now, i've lived my whole life in one town in Wisconsin. assuming all goes well, that is changing imminently--this weekend, i'm heading west. i'm moving into a dorm in Fairbanks on the thirteenth of August & i likely won't come back to Wisconsin for a while. this, beyond the obvious immense personal upheaval, presents a slightly less obvious point of turbulence: my local fish fauna will be completely different...!
the Fall 2022 edition of NANFA's American Currents (subscribe! it's worth it!) lists 159 extent species of fish in Wisconsin. the Alaska Department of Fish & Game's freshwater fish inventory lists 58, with a paltry thirty-one listed as resident! & past just numbers, the species makeup is totally different... my area of Wisconsin is mostly dominated by members of Leuciscidae, Catostomidae, Percidae, & Centrarchidae (respectively the minnows, suckers, perch, & sunfish). Alaska has only a single representative from the first three of these--the lake chub, the longnose sucker, & the introduced yellow perch--& no sunfish at all! Alaska's most prominent fish seem to be the salmonids, along with a few familar faces such as the northern pike & burbot.
this feels weird. my whole interest in fish has naturally been oriented around Wisconsin's native species. that's just due to proximity, not any kind of directed preference, but still! i'm enamored with my local fish, & i'm about to move three thousand miles away from them. i know living there i'll develop the same relationship with Alaska's species but i'm sad to leave behind the ones i know. i'm gonna miss them!
the central mudminnow
the central mudminnow is a small fish native to most of central North America. the genus Umbra is the sole member of the family Umbridae in the order Esociformes, closely related to the pike & pickerels. they're a very hardy fish, capable of breathing atmospheric oxygen & surviving being frozen solid. they can often be found in sloughs, marshes, & beaver ponds that would otherwise be devoid of fish life--very often i've thrown a minnow trap into a stagnant pond with little expectations & received a pile of mudminnows for my trouble. there's no other fish so inextricably connected to my personal conception of Wisconsin. the mudminnow is a concrete ambassador for the vast swaths of public wetland & forest in the northern part of the state, land that is indescribably important to me. beyond that, they serve as animate insignia for everything i love about my life in Wisconsin--the rural seclusion, the quiet beauty, the unworried pace of life. beyond that, i just think they're really cute...
a song
track two from Ken Clinger & Tom Burris's The Story of Chester Bovine, a short radio drama-style album released in 1989. sounds like if Laurie Anderson was in the children's entertainment business...
an article
How Does a Cowbird Learn To Be a Cowbird?
a fascinating article on how brood parasites avoid imprinting on their host species & a good jumping-off point to read about brood parasites as a whole.
thank you for reading! i apologize if my writing is somewhat aimless, this is the first project i've worked on for a long time & i haven't entirely worked out where i want to go with it...