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One of these things is not like the others

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Over at the Winter Garden theater on Broadway, the house was full for a one-night-only performance of Julius Caesar, a benefit intended to raise money to purchase a statue of William Shakespeare to be placed in Central Park. The play’s cast featured the three thespian sons of the legendary Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth: Junius Jr., Edwin, and John Wilkes, on stage together for the first (and only) time. The Great Booth Benefit was the hot ticket of the season; orchestra seats, normally less than a dollar, went for five.

The crowd of 2,000 roared when the brothers made their entrance in the first act. The audience may not have noticed the distant sound of fire-engine bells at the start of act two, but soon enough the din was overwhelming. Someone saw firefighters outside the theater’s windows, near the Lafarge House next door. A man in the dress circle registered his assumption out loud. ��The theater is on fire!” he shouted. He was wrong, but it was enough for alarm to spread through the house. Theatergoers abruptly stood, scanning their surroundings for flames and a path to the nearest exit. Edwin Booth stepped to the front of the stage to calm the audience, assuring them in his trademark low tone, “There is no danger.”

The performance resumed, and the New York Herald’s reviewer later dubbed it an example of the “high standard of our public entertainments”—no other theater scene, the reviewer said, could purport to offer “three tragedians, or even one, comparable to any one of the Booths.” Still, a lot more had transpired outside the theater than the audience at the Winter Garden suspected: While the Booth brothers played out Caesar’s untimely end on stage, Confederate arsonists were attempting to burn New York City to the ground.

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Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. The town was founded by her father, Judge Michael Cochran. Elizabeth had fourteen siblings. Her father had ten children from his first marriage and five children from his second marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Jane Kennedy.

Michael Cochran’s rise from mill worker to mill owner to judge meant his family lived very comfortably. Unfortunately, he died when Elizabeth was only six years old and his fortune was divided among his many children, leaving Elizabeth’s mother and her children with a small fraction of the wealth they once enjoyed. Elizabeth’s mother soon remarried, but quickly divorced her second husband because of abuse, and relocated the family to Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth knew that she would need to support herself financially. At the age of 15, she enrolled in the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and an added an “e” to her last name to sound more distinguished. Her plan was to graduate and find a position as a teacher. However, after only a year and a half, Elizabeth ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition. She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boarding house.

In 1885, Elizabeth read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that argued a woman’s place was in the home, “to be a helpmate to a man.” She strongly disagreed with this opinion and sent an angry letter to the editor anonymously signed “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

The newspaper’s editor, George A. Madden, was so impressed with the letter that he published a note asking the “Lonely Orphan Girl” to reveal her name. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Shortly after her first article was published, Elizabeth changed her pseudonym from “Lonely Orphan Girl” to “Nellie Bly,” after a popular song.

Elizabeth positioned herself as an investigative reporter. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours. Her honest reporting about the horrors of workers’ lives attracted negative attention from local factory owners. Elizabeth’s boss did not want to anger Pittsburgh’s elite and quickly reassigned her as a society columnist.

To escape writing about women’s issues on the society page, Elizabeth volunteered to travel to Mexico. She lived there as an international correspondent for the Dispatch for six months. When she returned, she was again assigned to the society page and promptly quit in protest.

Elizabeth hoped the massive newspaper industry of New York City would be more open-minded to a female journalist and left Pittsburgh. Although several newspapers turned down her application because she was a woman, she was eventually given the opportunity to write for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

In her first act of “stunt” journalism for the World, Elizabeth pretended to be mentally ill and arranged to be a patient at New York’s insane asylum for the poor, Blackwell’s Island. For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients.

Elizabeth’s report about Blackwell’s Island earned her a permanent position as an investigative journalist for the World. She published her articles in a book titled 10 Days in A Mad House. In it, she explained that New York City invested more money into care for the mentally ill after her articles were published. She was satisfied to know that her work led to change.

Activist journalists like Elizabeth—commonly known as muckrakers—were an important part of reform movements. Elizabeth’s investigations brought attention to inequalities and often motivated others to take action. She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. She also interviewed influential and controversial figures, including Emma Goldman in 1893.

The most famous of Elizabeth’s stunts was her successful seventy-two-day trip around the world in 1889, for which she had two goals. First, she wanted to beat the record set in the popular fictional world tour from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Second, she wanted to prove that women were capable of traveling just as well as—if not better than—men. Elizabeth traveled light, taking only the dress she wore, a cape, and a small traveler’s bag. She challenged the stereotypical assumption that women could not travel without many suitcases, outfit changes, and vanity items. Her world tour made her a celebrity. After her return, she toured the country as a lecturer. Her image was used on everything from playing cards to board games. She recounted her adventures in her final book, Around the World in 72 Days.

In 1895, Elizabeth retired from writing and married Robert Livingston Seaman. Robert was a millionaire who owned the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company. When Robert died in 1904, Elizabeth briefly took over as president of his companies.

In 1911, she returned to journalism as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. She covered a number of national news stories, including the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth often referred to suffrage in her articles, arguing that women were as capable as men in all things. During World War I, she traveled to Europe as the first woman to report from the trenches on the front line.

Although Elizabeth never regained the level of stardom she experienced after her trip around the world, she continued to use her writing to shed light on issues of the day. She died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922.

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Montparnasse, the tower and the arc

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Cookies n cream bambi

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Fun activity

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Sunset Frog (Spicospina flammocaerulea), family Myobtrachidae, found in a small area in southwestern Western Australia

ENDANGERED.

Discovered by science in 1994.

Only found in isolated permanently moist peat swamps, in high rainfall areas.

photographs by Andrea Ruggeri

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Red Avadavat aka Red Munia aka Strawberry Finch (Amandava amandava), male, family Estrildidae, order Passeriformes, India

photograph by Arulanandham Palanisamy

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Plaque en hommage à : René Cassin

Type : Lieu de résidence

Adresse : 36 quai de Béthune, 75004 Paris, France

Date de pose : Inconnue

Texte : Ici vécut de 1952 à 1974 René Cassin, 1887-1976, Prix Nobel de la Paix en 1968

Quelques précisions : René Cassin (1887-1976) est un homme politique français. Mutilé pendant la Première Guerre mondiale, il reçoit malgré sa réformation la Croix de Guerre 1914-1918 et fonde l'Union fédérale des associations françaises de mutilés, réformés, anciens combattants, leurs veuves, orphelins et ascendants. Son expertise juridique le conduit à exercer comme responsable de la politique judiciaire de la France libre sous l'autorité du Général de Gaulle. Farouche opposant au régime de Vichy et du maréchal Pétain, il exercera après la Libération de nombreuses fonctions officielles, notamment en tant que délégué de la France au Conseil de l'Europe et membre, puis vice-président, puis président, de la Cour européenne des Droits de l'Homme. Il reçoit pour son action le prix Nobel de la paix et le prix des droits de l'Homme des Nations Unies en 1968. En 1987, au centenaire de sa naissance, sa dépouille est transférée au Panthéon. Cette plaque commémorative est apposée en-dessous d'une autre dédiée à Marie Curie, qui vécut dans le même immeuble une vingtaine d'années avant Cassin. Une autre plaque commémorative en son honneur peut par ailleurs être trouvée à Paris, sur le boulevard Saint-Michel.

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On April 19th, 1987, a bird known as Adult Condor 9 was captured in the Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge, near Bakersfield, California. After decades ravaged by the threats of lead-poisoning and pesticide exposure, and intense debate over the ethics of captivity, it had been determined that captive breeding was the final hope to save a species. As his designation might suggest, AC-9 was the nine condor to be captured for the new program; he was also the last.

As the biology team transported the seven-year-old male to the safety of the San Diego Wild America Park, his species, the California Condor, North America's largest bird, became extinct in its native range. It was Easter Sunday—a fitting day for the start of a resurrection.

At the time of AC-9's capture, the total world population of California condors constituted just twenty-seven birds. The majority of them represented ongoing conservation attempts: immature birds, taken from the wild as nestlings and eggs to be captive-reared in safety, with the intention of re-release into the wild. Now, efforts turned fully towards the hope of captive breeding.

Captive breeding is never a sure-fire bet, especially for sensitive, slow-reproducing species like the condor. Animals can and do go extinct even when all individuals are successfully shielded from peril and provided with ideal breeding conditions. Persistence in captivity is not the solution to habitat destruction and extirpation—but it can buy valuable time for a species that needs it.

Thankfully, for the California condor, it paid off.

The birds defied expectations, with an egg successfully hatched at the San Diego Zoo the very next year. Unlike many other birds of prey, which may produce clutches of up to 5 hatchlings, the California condor raises a single chick per breeding season, providing care for the first full year of its life, and, as a consequence, often not nesting at all in the year following the birth of a chick. This, combined with the bird's slow maturation (taking six to eight years to start breeding), presented a significant challenge. However, biologists were able to exploit another quirk of the bird's breeding cycle: its ability to double-clutch.

Raising a single offspring per year is a massive risk in a world full of threats, and the California condor's biology has provided it with a back-up plan: in years when a chick or egg has been lost, condors will often re-nest with a second egg. To take advantage of this tendency, eggs were selectively removed from birds in the captive breeding program, which would then lay a replacement, greatly increasing their reproduction rate.

And what of the eggs that were taken? The tendency of hatchlings to imprint is well-known, and the intention from the very beginning was for the birds to one day return to the wild—an impossibility for animals acclimated to humans. And so, puppets were made in the realistic likeness of adult condors, and used by members of the conservation team to feed and nurture the young birds, mitigating the risk of imprintation on the wrong species.

By 1992, the captive population had more than doubled, to 64 birds. That year, after an absence of five years, the first two captive-bred condors were released into their ancestral home. Many other releases followed, including the return of AC-9 himself in 2002. Thanks to the efforts of zoos and conservationists, as of 2024 there are 561 living California condors, over half of which fly free in the wilds of the American West.

The fight to save the California condor is far from over. The species is still listed as critically endangered. Lead poisoning (from ingesting shot/bullets from abandoned carcasses) remains the primary source of mortality for the species, with tagged birds tested and treated whenever possible. Baby condors are fed bone chips by their parents, likely as a calcium supplement—but, to a condor, bits of bone and bits of plastic can be indistinguishable, and dead nestlings have been found with stomachs full of trash.

There's hope, though. There are things we can change, things we can counteract and stop from happening in the future. It was a human hand that created this problem, and it will take a human hand to fix it. Hope is only gone when the last animal breathes its last breath—and the California condor is still here.

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This painting is titled Puppet Rearing (California Condor), and is part of my series Conservation Pieces, which focuses on the efforts and techniques used to save critically endangered birds from extinction. It is traditional gouache, on 22x30" paper.

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Art by  KK Zhang

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Art by Leah Gardner

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