The title to this post is a line from one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s best known poems, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The poem is best known in the United States from the early Walt Disney cartoon, Fantasia, when Mickey Mouse, as the sorcerer’s apprentice, has a magic spell get out of control. The title is part of a couplet in Goethe’s poem that translates, “The spirits that I summoned / I now cannot rid myself of again.”

Goethe’s poem and the dozens of other, similar cautionary tales come to mind because Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based startup biotechnology company has produced genetically modified poplars and is planting them in the wild on a large scale, uncontrolled experiment. Living Carbon’s idea is to create trees that go twice as fast as normal, unmodified trees, in the name of carbon capture…

One of the benefits of moving from Fairbanks, Alaska to Boise, Idaho is the much greater variety of winter avifauna. There are other benefits, to be sure, but a Christmas Bird Count in Boise will turn up a hundred or more species; in Fairbanks, in a really good year, there might be 25.

In celebration of that, and WC’s gradually improving mobility, here’s a selection of birds WC has photographed in the first six weeks of 2023, with some notes on the photos.

This species is usually hunting in South America right now. But this bird didn’t get the memo and is spending at least a chunk of the winter enjoying the foraging opportunities in South Boise. And he seems to be prospering. So far as is known, this species is rarely in the Intermountain West at all.