Stumped by Nature

Welcome to this issue of Stumped by Nature, where we notice nature lurking just beyond our screens, curate a list of outside-y events in Austin, and build community with other folks in the thick of the startup ecosystem.

In this week’s issue:

👨 Nature’s father figures

🌤️ Upcoming outdoors events

Let’s dig in!

-Nicole

PS. ATX Outsiders is our community who meet IRL outside each month. Join us!

Upcoming events I’m hosting:

NATURE SPOTLIGHT

I had a simple goal for this week: feature a couple of nature-inhabitants who were worthy of a #1 Dad mug.

The good news: you can hit top fatherhood quartiles with bare minimum effort—there’s a very low bar in the nature world.

The better news: there are some legit partnerships that would make Esther Perel and the Gottmans and the couples’ therapists of the world quite proud.

This week, we’re celebrating the longest days of the year trying to find examples of healthy masculinity.

Mourning Doves

You might know them from their svelte frames, with long, pointed tails, and their distinctive who-who-who-whos.

Mourning doves are monogamous. They mate for life, or, if Texas’s Number- One-State-for-Dove-Hunting status intervenes, find a replacement monogamous life partner.

When it comes to parenting, mourning doves have unlocked a couple superpower: both males and females have the bird-equivalent to functional nipples.

Shared incubating, shared crop-milk production, and a day shift/night shift parenting system makes for a very prolific breeding rhythm. This is top tier healthy masculinity.

Dating advice: even if you can’t lactate, which would be the real prize, try seducing a potential mate with an approximation of a mourning dove call. I've tried this exactly once, a couple years ago, and it had a 100% success rate for a happy, finite relationship. Some people cannot resist bird calls. Singles, try it and report back. Partnered: maybe your lover needs your bird noises.

Insects, as a whole: eliminated from Dad of the Year consideration

It’s an abundant world—surely there are healthy examples of male insects. Surely Claude’s take that males are “genuinely just mating vehicles” was an outlier. We’re going to hold off on thinking too deeply about the evolutionary benefit of this avoidant/abrupt/fatal discard.

I mentioned this research dilemma at ATX Writing Club over the weekend, and one writer dropped this gem:

Papa Roach

Abrupt end of conversation to research:

Most roaches fit the insect stereotype narrative: for cockroaches, that includes a “nuptial gift,” which, instead of a big diamond, is a sweet, fatty secretion that is delivered when the male scoots backward toward the female, raises his wings, and exposes a fancy gland. The female mounts to feed on the secretion, and while she’s distracted with the snack, a hooked cockroach penis appears to transfer a sperm package during an up to 90 minute “coupling session.” I’m trying not to visualize this too much, but my mind is conjuring a trenchcoat in a back alley, maybe a windowless van marked with CANDY, and a stark full moon. Then baby cockroaches, with a papa roach who has exited the chat.

If we’re looking for more of a daddy roach, we can look to wood-feeding cockroach, which form long-term monogamous pairs and regurgitate food to their offspring together from their decaying-log-homes. The caveat here: they practice “mutual sexual cannibalism,” where the male and female chew off each other’s wings after mating to ensure fidelity and focus on parenting. And they’re not native to Austin.

Perhaps not the best example of healthy dynamics, but we can agree Papa Roach is a lovely band name on many levels.

Side note: did you know around Valentine’s Day, you can name a cockroach after your ex and have it fed to a zoo animal?

Side, side note: if your need for dating-processing is less nature-based, local creatives Jenny Gurvich and Janeen Ritson just released this line of greeting cards.

At this point in my search for healthy masculinity, things were looking bleak.

Enter:

Texas Toe Biters

It only takes one to redeem all of insect-kind. This Giant Water Bug gives us 1. a set of potential nightmares if we look into its infamously excruciating bite, in freshwater ponds and lakes 2. a nature-supplied peek into premium foot content.

It also serves as an example of men fully owning the parenting role, stepping up as solo father figures. This one doesn’t play well for the females: she glues up to 100 eggs directly onto the male’s back, then ditches him for someone with less baggage. The egg-bound male spends the next 1-3 weeks in the water, unable to fly, unable to mate, fanning the eggs to stave off fungus, even if the eggs turn out to be from another male.

Doesn’t Toe Biting deserve a healthy partnership?

For true partnership, we’ll have to leave the insects behind. Devoted fatherhood is one thing, but building a life together is another.

Beavers

Elusive creatures, beavers are native to Central Texas and putting in the work in our Colorado waterways. Among the 3-5% of mammals that are socially monogamous and mate for life, beavers form tight-knit family colonies. Sharing duties is key to their ecosystem engineering—their family units help stabilize water availability across seasons, with waterflow control and new wetlands. These wetlands are A Big Deal: they reduce erosion, improve water quality, recharge groundwater, and create habitats for lots of other little nature buddies. Imagine the things we can do when we build together.

Nature doesn’t seem particularly attached to one kind of relationship model. Different arrangements solve different problems, and any dynamic we’re in is some evolutionary spin of the wheel, whether it’s gnawing off your lover’s wings or building out wetlands together.

I hope yours has plenty of beaver with the least amount of mourning.

UPCOMING EVENTS

🗓️ June 19: Hiking Through History: 300 million years of the same trail

🗓️ June 19: Sunset Swifts: watch the birds set

🗓️ June 19: Pitch and Run: All paces welcome

🗓️ June 20: Floral Arrangements with Native Plants: get your hands on some stems

🗓️ June 20: The Board Walks: 5 miles of walking and talking

🗓️ June 20: Pride on the Trail: a moment for sweaty inclusivity

🗓️ June 20: Heart of Texas Orchid Society Workshop: How to be less orchid-murderous

🗓️ June 21: Reverse Brain Rot: Join me and 80+(!) other Austinites for Barton Springs reading and writing time

🗓️ June 21: Father's Day at Zilker Botanical Gardens: dads love botany

🗓️ June 21: Yoga in the Forest: chance of being pelted by pecans

🗓️ June 21: Plant Bingo: When's the last time you played Bingo!?

🗓️ June 23: Early Birds in the Garden: morning hike, morning plants, morning birds

🗓️ June 24: Wednesday Plant Workdays: weed, water, fertilize along Butler Trail

🗓️ June 24: An Evening for Malin: pour one out for our troll buddy

🗓️ June 25: Austin Ruck Club: Barton Springs after is sounding really appealing

🗓️ June 26: Arty Party: Shells!: with ample opportunity for tongue-twisters and other plays on words

🗓️ June 30: Austin Reading Club: I’m hosting this! Bring the book you’re reading. Actually read it. I’ll keep you in line.

🗓️ July 19: Reverse Brain Rot #2: It'll be toasty.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Hummingbirds grow quite rapidly.

Ever leave a tube of store-bought biscuits out on the counter?

Fun fact: hummingbird parenting style provides a watchful eye at a distance, so children get the autonomy to explore and make mistakes.

By parenting, I mean mom-only. Happy Father’s Day to hummingbird moms.

That’s all for this week! 

In the meantime, I hope any partnerships you have are evolved well beyond the typical insect dynamic.

-Nicole

OPTIONAL SIDE QUESTS

🪵 Would my perspective be useful to a project you’re working on? Email me to get on my waiting list.

🪵 Are you looking for a community of people in the startup ecosystem who go outside together? I’ve got you.

🪵 Are you sitting on a misogi-esque story? Spill.

🪵 I also write essay(s): this one is about witnessing a bison harvest.

🪵 Is this newsletter not your vibe? Forward it to your enemies to make them suffer too.

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