My friend who took me to Kings Mountain? I took her to Andy’s Orchard today. It was only fair.

Meantime, how is it that never in my life did anyone tell me that young zebras are brown with black stripes? This picture a few days ago made me do a double take and eventually sent me looking for more.

There’s an extinct type called a quagga that, after sequencing its DNA from a museum specimen and finding out how closely related it was to a particular subgroup, researchers are trying to bring back through breeding and luck. They’ve got a small herd going that looks pretty close.

The stripes cool the animal against the heat. Quaggas were the southernmost type, living in cooler temps. They protect against biting flies. There were fewer of those flies there. And thus of stripes.

People were still talking in the 1800s about trying to domesticate that most gentle of zebras when they found out they couldn’t. They wouldn’t breed in zoos. They’d been hunted by colonizers. Animals that are less afraid are easier to catch.

There weren’t any left.

And now, or close to it at least, there are beginning to be some again.

On a side note, I kept trying to figure out why the name made me think of clams. The answer is, there’s a Ukrainian quagga mussel whose fading stripes are such that it was actually named after that zebra.

How on earth did I ever hear of a type of mussel in a river in Ukraine. Oh. That’s the invasive one they’re fighting in the Great Lakes.

Rabbit hole, I tell you. But fun to learn a little bit more about the world.