It may feel and sometimes even still look like winter out there, but spring is on the march (so to speak). This is perhaps most evident after dark. Join me and some other folks for a night-time ramble through the March woods and wetlands of Central Pennsylvania. We’ll listen to a woodcock, a saw-whet owl, some creature whose identity I’m not certain of, spring peepers, and herpetologist Jim Julian from Penn State Altoona. Julian, an expert on seaonal wetlands ecology, leads the annual Vernal Pool Tour of the Scotia Barrens, sponsored by the Clearwater Conservancy. We all squish about looking for wood frogs and spotted salmanders on a cold and rainy night.

Note by the way that Woodrat podcast episodes can now be embedded on other websites and forums. Grab the code right below the player.

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Photo credits, l-r: Norman Walsh (CC BY-NC), Dave Darney/USFWS, Tom Tetzner/USFWS. Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).

CommonDreams.org: “‘So This is America’: Veteran Ray McGovern Bloodied and Arrested At Clinton Speech”
Apparently wearing a peace t-shirt and turning your back on the Secretary of State is considered provocative behavior. Even if she happens to be talking about the rights of peaceful protesters.

Heraclitean Fire: Read the World challenge
Harry Rutherford is a blogger’s blogger — someone who seems able to say something insightful on nearly any topic, from art to birding to football, and never gets stuck in any particular groove. His Read the World challenge is an on-going series of book reviews in which he attempts to read at least one book from every country in the world.

Haiku News
This is not news about haiku, but news in haiku — and good haiku, not the folk kind. Their motto is “the personal is the political is the poetical.” I’d like to see more poetry zines responding to the news in this way. Such as…

Verse Wisconsin: Poems About WI Protests
An on-going collection (scroll up for the call for submissions) proving that the news isn’t always what it seems. For example:

The state of Wisecrack is facing an immediate deficit of $137 milquetoasts for the current fishmonger year which ends July 1. In addition, bill collectors are waiting to collect over $225 milquetoasts for a prior raid of the Patriarchy Compensation Funeral.

Al Jazeera: “Women of the Revolution”
Three Egyptian woman talk about their experiences during the revolt.

Moving Poems forum: “Electric Literature’s single-sentence animations: videopoems for fiction”
Electric Literature magazine’s video series proves that, at least where film adaptations are concerned, sufficiently artful prose is indistinguishable from poetry.

The Observer: “What does the Arab world do when its water runs out?”
Conserve?

Part 2 – Part 3

If you care about freedom, in Egypt or anywhere else, or use social networks, watch this. (FOSDEM=Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting.) Eben Moglen is head of the Software Freedom Law Center. In this address (part 3), he announces the formation of a new foundation to create a truly decentralized, tyranny-proof internet. Awesome.

Phoenicia Publishing’s February sale on qarrtsiluni print editions
Now through the end of the month, receive $2.00 off on our four print anthologies, including the new “Words of Power.” Details on website.