“I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests. It will be laid out in a manner secure against the possums and the vultures just as we make our chickens secure; and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un–fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.” In Memory of Bill Hamilton Obituary: William Donald Hamilton (1936-2000) (Nature 404: 828, 2000). Robert Trivers W. D. Hamilton was one of the greatest evolutionary theorists since Darwin. Certainly, where social theory based on natural sel...
Writing about nature, particularly birdlife, in Greytown, New Zealand. With apologies to Aldo Leopold. rooks, corvus frugeligus