Happy Holidays!

However you are spending this end of the year season, I hope the last few days of 2024 bring you joy, laughter, love, and peace.

“What’s a doctor doing at Google?”

One of the minor social benefits of being married to an ICU doctor is that it is really easy to explain to people what my husband does. But since my husband started at Google it’s been a bit trickier. “What’s a doctor doing at Google?”

image shows a black and white bird with yellow eyes clinging to a grey tree. The tree is barkless, and its surface is dotted with acorns embedded into it in holes that are placed in a series of slightly slanted, but mostly vertical lines.

Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?

Sometimes when you go out and into nature, nature does something so interesting that you want to stop and watch it for a while. Case in point: while on a hike last week, my husband and I came across a colony of acorn woodpeckers stashing nuts for the winter. After watching for awhile, we found ourselves wondering: “Do acorn woodpeckers kill the trees they use to store nuts?”

Where did the day go?

Happy Holidays, y’all! Thank you for spending another year reading Caterpickles.

It’s hot

Like really hot. Stay safe out there, folks.

A young girl highfives a museum worker in a t-Rex costume

Update to a Past Caterpickle: “Did dinosaurs have belly buttons?”

News broke this week of particular interest to us here at Caterpickles Central because it touches on a 10-year-old question of ours: Did dinosaurs have belly buttons? Y’all, I think we may finally have our answer.

Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway?: Part 2

A Jonathan Swift poem? Norse mythology? A mistranslation from the Greek? Shoddy thatched roof craftsmanship? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway? (Part 2 of our 2-post investigation)

Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway?

Thatched roofs? Unsavory Elizabethan street sanitation practices? A 1652 Richard Brome play? Where does the phrase “raining cats and dogs” come from anyway?

worker using a broom to push fish to the side of the road

Update to a Past Caterpickles: “Why does it rain fish in Honduras?”

While I was busy not blogging this month, it came to my attention that this blog is ten years old. Goodness. I thought it would be fun to mark its decade-aversary by revisiting a question post from the early days of the blog to see how well my answer has held up. Spoiler alert: Not well.

Sam the Eagle and Jean Pierre Napoleon in a still from Muppets Most Wanted. I picked this photo because they have their index fingers against their face like they are thinking hard about something puzzling.

Sam the Eagle: Bald Eagle, Harpy Eagle, or Shoebill Stork?

I grew up watching the Muppets. For years I wandered through life, filled with the happy conviction that I knew everything I needed to know about Sam the Eagle. This happy state continued until I saw a video of the African shoebill stork on Twitter. It bore a disconcerting resemblance to old Sam. To make matters worse, while researching shoebills, I discovered that some think that the harpy eagle is actually the model for Sam the Eagle. There’s only one thing to do when your world has been rocked by this sort of question: compare and contrast.