Published on 23 October 2025

I recently had the immense joy of visiting Burnt Fen. No, I’m not talking about this website.

The name in Burnt Fen has a rather long history. In high school, I was eager to break away from the yoke of Christian evangelicalism that I grew up under. One of the logical reasons I used to nurture budding atheism was the argument that ex nihilo nihil fit. This phrase has normally been used to justify the continued existence of all matter, and by creationists to point to the idea of God – nothing comes out of nothing, so all of this world must have come out of something. I’ve never understood that. God must have come out of something, too, if the logic is applied. For me, the argument was just as useful for showing that the existence of the world isn’t in itself a proof of God having created it. There’s no way to know, one way or the other, what caused it.

I was perusing The Strand, a bookstore in New York, when I found a hardcover copy of W.B. Yeats’ plays. On the inside cover, a Richard L. Fenn had written their name. I felt connected to that name, not least because it was so similar to mine. Fenn is an acrostic for ex nihilo nihil fit. And, since as long as I can remember, I have always loved swamps, bogs, vernal pools, and wetlands in general. I’ve always wanted to be near them, to find salamanders and turtles and life in them. Fenn seemed as good a name as any for a pseudonym. I tried it on for a while, mostly written underneath really bad poems.

In college, I started a webcomic. I wanted to write something like Buttercup Festival, a comic I continue to love (and David Troupes, the author, has a Patreon you should all support). I needed a url and a name. I thought of fenn.co.uk, but that was taken. Reading my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary with a magnifying lens, I found that fenne was an old variant spelling for fen, and that couk (from co.uk) was a variant spelling of coke, a byproduct of smelting. I thought that sounded pretty cool. Fenne.co.uk. I figured I would call the comic Dragon Ash to be more acceptable.

The problem is that there was already a Japanese band called Dragon Ash. They’re still going. I didn’t really understand copyright law very well, so I went back to the drawing board. I learned that Burnt Fen was a place in England which had been a large fen, and where Hereward the Wake, a real-life precursor to Robin Hood, had marauded from. I added a pretentious name for wandering on the end, and called my comic The Burnt Fen Maunderings.

The comic was not good. Some of the strips were alright.

It didn’t matter much. I ended up buying burntfen.co.uk, and eventually just burntfen.com. Years later, I needed a name for an LLC to show I was more respectable than I was, so I founded Burnt Fen Creative LLC, and set up gmail on the domain. I’ve been using burntfen.com and Burnt Fen Creative ever since.

Every few years something happens that reminds me that Burnt Fen is still a place. I was overjoyed to learn at some point that https://www.burntfen.co.uk/ had been rebought, and was now used for an alpaca farm from Norfolk. That’s the best!

This September, I travelled to see my friend Stephen Kyle in Ely, near Cambridge. I had planned a few days at his house to get over jetlag before I attended RSECon in Warwick. We luckily had a day or two to hang out before he left me alone for the weekend to convalesce. Besides dragging him around all of the RSPB sites in the land to find rare birds, we had one outing that was absolutely essential - a trip to Burnt Fen.

Burnt Fen used to be a part of the fenlands - a vast area of England that was both covered in water half the year and exceptionally productive in terms of waterfowl, eels, and human life. It was an excellent example of a well-run, community-driven commons, where people worked together collectively to manage nature and their own livelihoods without excess for thousands of years. This only changed when wealthy landowners ignored the people’s needs, drained the swamps, and sent militia to deal with any dissenting opinions.

Burnt Fen itself is fairly unexceptional; it’s a sign on the road, mainly. The area is now mostly plowed fields, as this is England’s breadbasket. But even a sign is worth photographing. I doubt that anyone has ever travelled from New Zealand to see Burnt Fen itself - although the author of Imperial Mud, James Boyce, a Tasmanian, comes very close. (It’s an great and very readable book, and has a surprising amount in common with open source and the defense of the commons. It even mentions Ostrom!).

So, almost twenty years after I first bought the domain, I finally have been to the actual Burnt Fen. Here’s a photo. Thanks Steve.

Published on 22 October 2025

The PGSA is a student association for PhD, Masters, and other postgrad students at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. The goals of the association are to further advocacy for those groups - which have pretty different needs than undergrads or staff - and to organize events and prizes.

Yesterday, the PGSA had a general meeting to discuss constitutional changes. First, we voted on letting the committee in principle change parts of the constitution related to quorum for executive members, designating a Māori ex officio seat to the general student assocation at the university, VUWSA, and for removing advocacy as one of our main goals and instead delegating that to VUWSA. In return, VUWSA has promised to give us funding for a full staff member - 30 hours a week for advocacy, 15 hours for admin - so that the society can function. Currently, the society has been allocated a skeleton budget by the university. None of the executive positions are paid or given honorariums, and there’s no funds for even a part-time executive assistant.

We voted on the constitutional changes: they all passed. And then we voted new members in. We now have a new president, the fourth or fifth in a year, a new VP, and a few new executive members.

The coming year is going to be difficult for PGSA. Without funds to do a ton of events, it’ll struggle to justify itself for more funding to the university. With advocacy delegated to another organization - itself a competitor for university funding, which comes from a finite pool that officers must put in bids for - it’ll be difficult to justify funding the PGSA for advocacy in the future. And without remuneration for officers, all of the work will be volunteer, by people who already do not have a ton of time (postgrads).

I think it’s possible for things to get better, through assiduous effort, keeping VUWSA accountable on the advocacy front, and through working with the university to get access to the 5,000 postgrads at the university. Part of every postgrad tuition goes to the university with the express purpose of funding VUWSA. I think it’s a shame that more students don’t know this, and I think that the university should work with PGSA to help ensure that our rights are met as part of that.

Of course, for things to get better, there needs to be a strong executive committee. I wish I could say “Good luck to them!”, but it would seem oddly self-serving, because I threw my own hat in the ring to help.

So, here we go. I’ve added a new page to the homepage about my involvement.

If you’re a postgrad at VUW, reach out whenever. If you’re a member of a student association elsewhere, I’d probably like to pick your brain on how to help keep the plane flying.

Published on 21 October 2025

I keep a list of all of my publications in a few places - on my CV, on ORCID, on Google Scholar, and on this site. When I have the opportunity to include a bib file in those lists, I try to. In order to do that, I keep a folder of all of my bib files. I use LaTeX, I find bibtex a useful format for storing citations, and I want to make it easier for everyone else to cite my publications.

I’ve been using cat to automatically make a giant list of all of the bibfiles for a while. But this wasn’t really great. What I wanted was a script that formatted all of the entries, and which checked the DOIs.

A few months ago I used an LLM to automatically generate a Python script to check DOIs and to concatenate the files easily. That worked well. Today, I extended it to check multiple DOI registries (not all DOIs are registered everywhere) for validation, and to use bibtex-tidy to automatically format each of the entries. I’m happy with the result; each individual file is more readable now. For example, this file:

@article{Littauer2025ZootaxaPycnocraspedum,
  author        = {Richard Littauer},
  year          = {2025},
  title         = {
    On the correct spelling of \textit{{Pycnocraspedum} rowleyense} {Schwarzhans, Psomadakis \&
    Nielsen}, 2025 ({Ophidiidae})
  },
  journal       = {Zootaxa},
  volume        = {5692},
  number        = {1},
  pages         = {200--200},
  doi           = {10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12},
  url           = {https://doi.org/10.11646/zootaxa.5692.1.12}
}

It just looks better.

That script is here. I hope its useful to someone else.

How do you keep your publications in order? Do you?

Published on 19 October 2025

In early September, I published a new paper on ornithological nomenclature.

Littauer, R. (2025). Nomenclatural corrections for gender of species-group names for two Solomon Island birds. Emu - Austral Ornithology, 125(3), 261–263. https://doi.org/10.1080/01584197.2025.2551298

This was the first paper that I have published that corrected the name of recognized, extant species names. Earlier in the year, I fixed some issues with the name for the subspecies of Kelp Gull that may be in New Zealand, although the name Larus dominicanus antipodum is not widely accepted yet, as we’re waiting on more study of the genetic differentiation of the species. I also published a correction of the spelling for the extinct bird, Archaespheniscus lopdelli. Both of those papers were published in Notornis, the main journal for New Zealand birds, and you can find them here: https://www.burntfen.com/projects/publications/.

This paper was along the same lines. I had been mindfully scouring changes in endings from AviList, a new global taxonomy of bird names that is joining together three or four previously separate taxonomies, when I came upon the name Ceyx gentiana. Gentiana is a Latin name for a plant, but some authors had corrected it to agree in gender with Ceyx (masculine) and made it gentianus. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, which governs how scientific names are formed, says this should only be done for adjectives. So, it really ought to be gentiana. It seemed like a reasonable mistake to make, and one that could be easily fixed.

A single species name being fixed for grammatical agreement like this isn’t quite big enough for a paper. So I scoured Wikipedia for a list of all of the birds of the Solomon Islands, and I found three others that needed changing. Zosterops tetiparia is another one that was changed without justification, as tetiparia could be a noun – it’s the latinized name of an island. I originally in my draft had corrected the two other names - Zosterops tetiparia paradoxus and Myzomela melanocephala, but some of the reviewers for the journal disagreed with my treatment. The first one was pretty clearly an adjective, although I still think the jury is out on that. The second one is a single name that has been treated badly, in my opinion, but if I changed it, another 200+ names need to be changed in ornithology, and one of the reviewers pointed out quite rightly that this journal wasn’t the right place to do that. Another reviewer thanked me for making the change, and said I was quite right.

Not to be an obstinate dumbdumb or to join the middle of a nomenclature war, I just removed both names. Publishing is a group effort. I am grateful for the reviewing and editorial work, all of which is volunteer, in any event.

So, the other two names were published, and I added in a good deal of text for the non-taxonomic readers of the journal Emu explaining why it is important to change these names. The article APC fees were covered by my university, so it is free for anyone to read. As I wrote:

Changing names for grammatical agreement alone may seem annoying and unnecessary. However, they are part of a wider goal to let us follow a set protocol for names so that we can speak the same language when we talk about taxa. The Code is a monumental artefact of science. Following it closely enables its continued usage. Like all systems, some parts may seem byzantine and bureaucratic. This is the cost of having a protocol for such an unspecific, imperfect, malleable thing as language.

You can read the short communication here.

Now, if anyone wants to fund me to go to the Solomons to see these birds and report on how they like the names, I would be very happy to entertain the idea. Please contact me as soon as possible.

Published on 18 October 2025

There’s a wonderful Calvin and Hobbes strip – almost certainly my favourite – where Hobbes comes upon Calvin, hands down in the creek, and asks him what he is up to. Calvin responds that he is looking for frogs. “Why?,” Hobbes asks. “I must follow the inscrutable exhortations of my soul.” In the final panel, Calvin adds as an addendum: “My mandate also includes weird bugs.” Rarely have I felt so understood by a piece of art.

While reading the epic historical nautical fiction Aubrey/Maturin series written by Patrick O’Brian, most well known as the inspiration for the feature film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World featuring Russell Crowe, I came upon an interesting exchange in one of the middle books. Steven Maturin, the naturalist, doctor, and spy, walks into Capt. Jack Aubrey’s cabin waving a manuscript, exclaiming that the author of it had sailed the very waters that they were now traversing, but that he could not for the life of him figure out what bird he meant by “haglet”. I didn’t know what haglet meant, either. I looked it up.

And I was confused. I stumbled upon some rather dry essays of Melvilliana, which tried to identify the haglet which Melville wrote about in his poem, The Three Haglets, about a doomed ship whose sinking was preceded by three eerie birds flying over the boat. The authors of the essays had decided that the most likely bird was the Great Shearwater, or maybe just a generic shearwater. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Great Shearwaters were white. And the references they used were obscure, too.

So I wrote a response. It turned into a roughly 5,000 word essay, where I broke down all of the references to haglets that I could find across ornithological and nautical literature. I borrowed books from the Montpelier library. I searched through obscure online archives. I endured looking at Tristanian philately collections. And my essay showed that, out of all of the birds called haglets over the ages, it is most likely that the Sooty Shearwater was the bird that Melville might have had in mind. This was new to the literature.

So I submitted it to Leviathan: The Journal of Melville Studies. Astoundingly, it was accepted with revisions. Those made, it was printed. And, recently, published, as:

Littauer, Richard. “The Sooty Shearwater as Melville’s Inscrutable Haglet.” Leviathan 27.2 (2025): 90-101. https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2025.a970199

The article is not available for free – it is unfortunately under a paywall. However, an early draft of it is available here, and I am of course happy to email a copy to anyone who asks.

I am proud of this essay. Mostly, of the fact that I got to cite Patrick O’Brian in published writing. Also of my use of the word ‘inscrutable’, which, like all of my uses of that word, is a reference to Calvin. But also of the fact that I have published a literary essay in a literary journal. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a poet. Not knowing how, I enrolled in a college degree in English Literature. Somewhere along the way that dream changed, and I find myself now curiously in the Computer Science department.

And now I appear to have flown around the globe, and come back to the roost I started from. It feels good to know that that dream never really stopped flying.