The birds and the bees and the Bronson bots

No. 192

They’re here

Springtime arrived in earnest this week. We saw our first bats of the season fly through last Friday evening, and over the weekend as February turned to March the first flowers appeared around our yard. This year the trees bloomed before the spiderwort: Mexican buckeye, mountain laurel, and the hot pink blossoms of the redbuds, including the volunteer pictured above that I found the honeybees tending Monday evening. The warm sun brought a bunch of red admiral butterflies doing mating dances on our back patio while the cedar waxwings were still hanging out in the tall hackberries eating last year’s fruit, and by Friday the yard was full of monarchs working their way north.

Last Sunday morning I took our puppy for a long walk down the side streets of our post-industrial neighborhood. The sky was overcast, and the general mood induced by the newsfeed was dark, with Saturday morning’s attack on Iran followed by the local horror show of a mass shooting overnight at one of the downtown bars popular with college kids and recent grads. Putting the phone away and stepping out to get a little unstuck in time at first light, on streets that felt abandoned, seemed like a healthy antidote for the dog walker as well as the dog.

I don’t know exactly what it is that attracts me to monoliths of infrastructure as places to experience nature—something about the way they reveal the ruins of the future at the edges of our reality. The radio antenna pictured above is a hundred years old and change, the first one they built in Austin. The signal is long dead, but you wouldn’t know that from the signs warning you of the invisible waves of deadly energy. And because of the way the antenna embodies an intangible right to the broadcast spectrum, the few acres it occupies remain undeveloped. It’s less feral now than when I first stumbled upon it in 2010, as they have taken to clearing out the foliage since Covid in order to deter long-term campers and avoid freaking out the occupants of the new office building next door. But it still provides a weird little pocket of refuge, especially in the trees that line the lot lines on three sides.

Sunday morning as Fifi showed me the scent trails that wound around the antenna, we could hear more than a dozen different species of songbirds in the foliage, including a couple of new lifers for me. We also heard a red-shouldered hawk nearby, and spotted an osprey perched atop the tower. The ospreys seem to be mating right now, as evidenced by the one I saw later in the week trying to scare off every other avian inhabitant of the river, hovering and shrieking around the heron rookery, then flushing a pair of caracara from the cottonwoods and hazing the male halfway to the toll road.

Pressed into the field at the base of the antenna below the osprey’s gaze, we found bones. A femur, forelegs, a ball joint, half a fanged mandible. I wondered what predators came around here big enough to kill a mammal that size, which seemed too big a prey for a feral cat to have taken. Coyotes seemed more likely, or perhaps the jaguarundi-looking creature I glimpsed on the other side of that lot last summer.

Looking back up at the tower, I thought about the news that had been carried over the airwaves from there over the remainder of the century that followed its construction in 1922. News of the Crash and news of the Wars, before the arrival of FM consigned it to soft rock oldies. I’ve gotten to thinking that news from afar is better when it gets to you slower, and as an experiment in proving my point I’ve been trying to get most of my news with a cheapo print subscription to the Financial Times that comes by snail mail 2-7 days after the date on the masthead, usually out of chronological order. It achieves the desired distancing effect, but has not yet weaned me off the breaking news alerts on my phone.

After the walk we drove en famille to pick up my mom to take her out for breakfast. The walk had flushed the news of the active shooter event from my mind, until we got downtown and had to detour around the blocked streets and the looming sense of dread. That’s when I realized that the mass shooting had taken place three blocks from my mom’s apartment, and two blocks from my law office, at a bar we often passed on our way to pick her up. I remembered the scene I had glimpsed and mostly ignored on Super Bowl Sunday, two stories of open decks packed with ecstatic young revelers getting their college town Dionysus on. The memory made the scene described in the dribbling-out details of the horror easier to imagine.

I remarked to Agustina how I guessed they would soon tell us it was linked to terrorism, laying pipe for the coming state of exception. And of course they did just that at the mid-day press conference, as the phone feed revealed seemingly implausible stories of the shooter wearing a “Property of Allah” hoodie, one of those details designed to reveal character that would be too obvious and implausible to use in a work of fiction. Later in the week the security cam videos were released and revealed the evident truth of the story.

Monday as I finished up my salad bar lunch at the Whole Foods flagship store around the corner, I got another news update about the shooting. I decided to walk by the site on my way back to the office. The crime scene investigation had been completed, and things looked mostly back to normal as I crossed the bridge over Shoal Creek. But you could still feel the event in the air. Then I started to notice more tangible signs, weirdly similar to animal tracks in the encrypted stories they tell of what happened before you got there.

The first thing I noticed was a faded black stain on the sidewalk, like the shadow of a spilled drink. Then I noticed some grains of a beige sawdust-like material sprinkled around it, like the one the janitors would use to clean up the mess after some kid puked in class in grade school. Other signs of what definitely were spilled drinks were all over, especially along the curb—tossed plastic cups, empty airplane-size wine bottles, broken brown fragments of Bud Light. Walking on, I noticed the constellation of orange dots freshly painted on the sidewalk, perhaps where spent casings had been retrieved.

When I looked up from there, I saw one of the dudes who works in the bar next door patching a bullethole on the front wall of his Kung Fu Saloon, while their AI cowboy Bronson mural that has always creeped me out let the world know what the bots think will make you want to come in for a couple of beers.

At lunch I had been reading about Elon Musk’s recent remarks to the team on his vision of “sustainable abundance” (recently updated to “amazing abundance,” evidently because “sustainable” has acquired negative connotations) and Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” As the week went on, I watched the drama unfold as the founder-CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic played out their prisoner’s developer’s dilemma game of who would allow their LLM to be used by the Pentagon to power autonomous weapons. Then on Friday I read how Musk’s brain-computer interface company start-up, Neuralink, is building its new headquarters not far from our home. And how last weekend’s shooter had allegedly been a Tesla employee until recently. The paranoid science fiction stories practically write themselves.

On Thursday my not-so-paranoid science fiction writer friend Bruce Sterling sent me a link to an interesting new study from Oxford’s Leverhulme Center for Nature Recovery about AI visions of ecological rewilding, and the ways they tend to show what they think we want to see, with lots of cute mammals in depopulated landscapes and a total absence of rotting carcasses, dead vegetation, or human infrastructure—“the aestheticisation of hope through sanitized nature narratives.”

I also found Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” which is really a kind of manifesto for the emancipation of machine intelligence from any constraints other than those chosen by its owners. The manifesto mentions nature five times, the takeaway of which is distilled in this quote:

“We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

Friday morning after I dropped our daughter off at school, I went to grab a quick breakfast and answer some emails at the coffee shop around the corner, in an old strip mall by the highway. Out the window I noticed the evening primrose had begun to bloom in the median below the double decks of I-35. Primrose is one of those resilient native wildflowers that somehow persist in the zones formerly dominated by the prairie ecologies we have largely erased from this region through plow and pavement—after we took the land with the power of the gun. I wondered if anyone is putting the bots to work figuring out how to reconcile their mandate to maximize human abundance with the accelerating destruction of other life our myopic hubris has caused. Or if they’re worried the AIs we barely control now will eventually use the autonomous weapons we give to realize a greener version of John Connor’s future.

Friday evening after school we took the kid to a screening of the new Pixar movie, Hoppers. It’s about a girl trying to save the wetland her park ranger grandma stewarded from the construction of a new elevated highway. It’s also about the repurposing of our advanced technologies in service of the protection of nature, as the girl learns how to install her own consciousness into a robotic beaver that she uses to incite a revolution of all the animals, now crowded together into their last multi-species redoubt. In the end they and the humans all figure out how to get along, and even the development-addicted evil mayor becomes a steward of the wild. It was pretty great as kids movies go, but they probably won’t let Claude and GPT watch it. I like to think some of the kids who watch it will grow up to program a better future than we seem to have managed, but I fear that will come after the lightning teaches us who’s the real boss.

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Extra Credit

Thanks to the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society for flying me up to speak at the Philadelphia Flower Show, and to the great crowd of folks who came over in the rain to hear my talk and hit me up with some of the best questions I’ve gotten giving talks about A Natural History of Empty Lots came out, including an excellent provocation from landscape architect Hans Hesselein of Philadelphia’s Apiary Studio about how we can reconcile rewilding and human inclusion. I’d never been to one of these big flower shows (other than Chelsea, which my parents dragged me to on vacation when I was in sixth grade), and it was pretty trippy to see the psychedelic floral installations.

Friday was the 136th anniversary of the introduction of 30 pairs of European starlings into New York’s Central Park by the American Acclimitization Society. There are around 200 million here now, outcompeting the natives, including the ones who nest in the billboards near our home.

The Romans had their version of daylight savings time, but their approach was to lengthen and shorten their hours, all year long—summer hours up to 75 minutes long and winter as short as 45.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots is real, and has been doing the work for a decade now. (Roll over, Isaac Asimov.)

When I got back from Philadelphia Wednesday, my copy of Washington, D.C. photographer Stephen Voss’ photo book about the landscape and eerie energy of Silicon Valley, The Haunting of Verdant Valley, was waiting for me. Powerful stuff, and a great companion to Malcolm Harris’ excellent Palo Alto, which I started reading last week.

Today is International Women’s Day and March is Women’s History Month, the theme of which for 2026 is rights, justice and action for all women and girls.

For some new women’s history with a regional natural history focus, I’m excited to check out Jennifer Bristol’s new book Wild Women for Good, a profile of a century and a half of women in conservation in Texas, out from Texas A&M University Press.

If you’re in Austin and up for it, the evolving impromptu memorial outside Buford’s on West Sixth is a deeply moving way to pay respects to the victims. The bar reopened this weekend.

Have a safe week.