Cascarones, meteors, and other Easter eggs No. 193

Some Field Notes from the month leading to Easter, with objects from space, whalesong memories, a UFO over the Enron building, a Sunday morning stroll along the Ship Channel, omens of change, and wildflowers in bloom: fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/cascarones...

Urban Nests YouTube video by Texas Parks and Wildlife

Wonderful @texasparkswildlife.bsky.social video from my neighbor Texas Parks & Wildlife photographer Susan Griswold about the remarkable urban heron rookery down our street behind an old muffler shop where you could also get your taxes done: youtu.be/6d14fRpcOic?...

Large tortoiseshell butterfly confirmed no longer extinct in UK Early spring sightings show colourful insect is a resident species for first time in decades, says conservation charity

A little good news.

The birds and the bees and the Bronson bots No. 192

Field Notes
/ Chris Brown @christopherbrown.bsky.social goes for a walk in Austin & observes fresh signs, like Thoreau who wrote “It will never become quite familiar to you.”
(if Thoreau had also become a genial family man, lawyer, & gonzo science fiction writer)

open.substack.com/pub/edgeland...

The lack of visible consequences for the mayor was among the most truthful parts of the story 😬

There *is* so much in it!
And he missed out the must-see 'AI-generated images of rewilding produced by LLM powered chatbots'

Floral installation with dead tree from Philadelphia Flower Show

How did you know?

Here’s another one of the trippy floral installations:

Great piece! I wonder if I’m not the only one who immediately pictured you giving your talk at the horticultural society flanked by a half dozen guys in army fatigues slouching on lawn chairs.

A pair of ducks float on Viaduct Pond, trees and a small stand of flowering gorse lean over their reflections, and beyond Viaduct Bridge more trees recede into mist.

Hampstead Heath, 08:00

The birds and the bees and the Bronson bots No. 192

Haunted walks through springtime landscapes, techno-optimist manifestos, killer robots, and Pixar provocations of animal uprisings, in this week's Field Notes: fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/the-birds-...

White blossoms of wild onion

And wild onion taste better

Spiderwort flower with purple petals and yellow stamen

Spiderwort are cooler imo

Jack Russell Terrier seated in a patch of bluebonnet flowers

Mandatory bluebonnets are here photo op

The cover of Random Acts Of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, held up in a bookstore.

At Foyles in London picking up a birthday present for a friend.

They’re here too—we used to have a colony in half-buried old tire in our yard, and I witnessed them chase a contractor a block down our street when he messed with their nest

Honeybee at freshly bloomed pink blossoms of redbud tree

It’s here

Deep in the Heart

Makeshift memorial of flowers and stuffies

And makeshift memorial outside Buford’s, with a smattering of folks standing around paying their respects and a bunch of TV news types looking like they’re wrapping up to move on the next one:

Sidewalk outside crime scene marked with numerous orange spray paint dots

Sidewalk out front

Bar employee plaster bullethole from giant wall mural of Bronson lookalike cowboy with mustache and bandolero aiming a revolver

Dude plastering a presumed bullethole just now under the watchful gaze of this AI Bronson that has always creeped me out, on the front of the Kung Fu Saloon next door to Buford’s, site of this weekend’s horrific mass shooting in Austin. *Seen walking back to the office from a late lunch .

Y’all, please nominate—it’s so very helpful to everyone: the authors, the jury, the foundation, and to readers

Ursula K. Le Guin — Nominate a Book for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

It's time! Nominations are now open for the 2026 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, which will be given to a work of imaginative fiction, published in 2025, that reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work.

Animal bones in a field

In the shadow of the antenna, a field of bones across from the shuttered elementary school. Saw a maybe-jaguarundi stalking here late last summer—like the osprey, one of the species of predators that have moved into this urbanized region as they found it affords better hunting than we might assume:

Osprey atop old radio transmission antenna

*Phone zoom of the osprey, still too far to easily id

Radio tower in an otherwise empty lot

This morning’s walk through the open lot around the 1922 AM radio antenna 10
minutes from downtown revealed 13 species of wild birds in the surrounding trees, and an osprey chilling at the very top of the tower:

Honored to make this week's list in my favorite weekly newsletter, Perfect Sentences, and in such excellent company. You should subscribe if you don't already 👇

For anyone who doubts these processes -- or humanity's power to alter our planet -- consider this dispatch from the poles: Human-caused warming has already melted so much ice in Greenland and Antarctica that Earth's rotation has slowed and its axis has shifted, slightly altering the length of the day and disrupting the precision of satellite tracking, global positioning systems and timekeeping.

oh my god

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/o...

Southlands / Edgelands Field notes from a post-industrial menagerie

My piece on the weird wildness of the petrochemical Texas coast, for the inaugural issue of @boyceupholt.bsky.social’s amazing new print magazine Southlands, is now up for online reading on this side of the paywall (with a bunch of photos to boot): southlandsmag.com/southlands-e...

Thanks, Derryl!

That first sentence!