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This week, I talked to wildlife experts about my most pressing springtime animal questions. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The narcissists who endanger America An acute attack of Trumpism in Tennessee Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychiatry.  

Making Themselves Known

When spring rolls around each year, my brain launches into a frantic running commentary. What is that bird doing? I wonder to myself as I walk around. This deer looks like Bambi. Why is that small rabbit all alone? Oh, no, his mother must be dead—like Bambi’s! Should I bring him inside and raise him as my own?

I am not the only one with questions. This is the busiest time of the year for wildlife rescuers and rehabilitators, whose job involves fielding inquiries from concerned citizens like myself. After a long winter, animals are suddenly making themselves known: coming out of hibernation and brumation, emerging from their hidey-holes. They’re having babies and crisscrossing roads and falling out of trees during wind storms. And we humans are encountering them in their various states of vulnerability.

So this week, I drove out to City Wildlife, a wildlife-rehabilitation center in Washington, D.C., to ask experts about the kinds of advice they find themselves doling out every spring. At the office, in the northwest part of the city, a flightless pigeon named Sally greeted me with a tilt of his head from his cage at the door. Four box turtles injured in lawn-equipment accidents were recovering in big plastic tubs. In a back room, volunteers were bottle-feeding baby squirrels, which was so cute I thought I might pass out.

At City Wildlife, I interviewed the experts Jen Mattioli and Jim Monsma—and then, for some regional diversity, I called the wildlife-rehabilitation specialist Tim Jasinski at the Lake Erie Nature & Science Center, in Ohio. Below, I’ve summarized the questions that both centers most often receive, and their best advice.

Some top-line notes: Baby animals are rarely abandoned by their parents; if you see them alone, it’s very likely that their parents are coming back. Touching a baby isn’t usually advisable, but your scent isn’t going to stop a baby’s mother from taking care of it either. When in doubt, call your local wildlife center. And for the love of God, keep your cats inside.

What do I do with this baby squirrel I found?

It’s baby-squirrel season! Other offices might have March Madness pools, but at City Wildlife, employees take bets on what day the first baby squirrels will arrive. The drop-offs began in earnest last week, with 18 babies brought to the center after severe storms knocked over their nests. The most common reasons for orphaned squirrels? Heavy winds and springtime tree-cutting.

The expert advice: If you find a baby squirrel sitting quietly on his own, he probably hasn’t been abandoned. Leave him where he is or, if you can reach his leafy nest, put him back inside it. His mother will probably return for him. You can identify an orphaned or abandoned baby squirrel by how desperate he’s acting: If he approaches you eagerly or climbs up your leg, he’s probably starving. Put him in a shoebox with air holes and bring him to your local wildlife rehabber for care.

Are these bunnies abandoned?

Eastern cottontails, the most common rabbits in North America, build their nests in shallow dugouts and line them with grass and fur. The thing to know about rabbits is that they are extremely chill parents: The mother leaves her babies alone for most of the day, returning only in the mornings and evenings to feed them. So the babies aren’t alone—they’re just alone right now.

The expert advice: Leave the nest of babies where it is. If your dog needs to walk in the yard, cover the nest temporarily with a laundry basket to protect the babies, then remove it when the dog goes back inside. If the mother is dead—maybe your dog or cat got to her—then call your local wildlife rehabber for next steps.

Can I bring this tiny deer inside?!

Don’t! Like rabbits, mother deer leave their baby alone for most of the day, returning only in the evenings to feed them.

The expert advice: If you find a baby deer in your yard or in the woods, leave him alone. Yes, it will be hard, because he’s so cute. But his mother will be back. If a fawn seems injured or is approaching people, call your local wildlife specialist for instructions.

Does this scruffy-looking bird need help?

Baby birds can be confusing. It helps to know the difference between nestlings and fledglings. Nestlings are naked and skinny, like a Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. Sometimes you’ll find nestlings in the spring that have fallen from their nests or were kicked out by parasitic birds. Fledglings are flightless but have feathers—the fuzzy, windswept version of their adult parents.

The expert advice: If you find a nestling on the ground that is still alive, call a local rehabber for advice; sometimes it can be re-nested. A fledgling, by contrast, will be okay by herself. She might look pretty helpless hopping along a sidewalk or yard. But don’t worry: Her mother is somewhere nearby. If the fledgling is near a busy road, it’s okay to move her to a bush nearby.

A key way to protect these vulnerable baby birds? Keep your cat inside. Cats—although adorable!—are backyard super-predators that kill fledglings and migratory birds. According to a 2013 study, cats may kill billions of birds each year in the United States alone.

One more thing: Bird migration is happening right now in the eastern United States, and people are encountering adult birds that have been stunned or killed by flying into windows. Glass kills as many as 1 billion birds every year in America, and experts have tips on how to make your windows bird-friendly. If you come across a concussed bird, call your local wildlife center.

For humans, spring is all pink blossoms and green grass and rainy days. But spring is a particularly vulnerable season in an animal’s early life. The more we know, the more we can help them out.

Related:

The future of conservation is basically Shazam for wildlife. America’s most misunderstood marsupial

Today’s News

In a private ceremony late last night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy. A forthcoming state-supreme-court ruling on Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, which was passed last year, will determine if the new ban takes effect. The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified U.S. documents was officially charged in Boston federal court with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. Travel resumed at the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport after monumental rains and flooding forced the travel hub to shut down Wednesday.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung rounds up books that ponder the empty promise of good intentions.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Amy Sussman / Getty; Frazer Harrison / Getty.

How Taylor Swift Infiltrated Dude Rock

By Spencer Kornhaber

The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.

In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A single judge shouldn’t have this kind of national power. Seltzer is torture. The mirror test is broken.

Culture Break

Georges De Keerle / Getty

Read. Two new books argue that America urgently needs to reevaluate its child-welfare system.

And these seven celebrities published actually great memoirs.

Watch. Netflix’s Beef brings TV viewers the antiheroine (played by Ali Wong) they’ve been missing.

P.S.

This week, one of my favorite reads was this profile of Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star at the center of Donald Trump’s indictment. You’ve probably read about the alleged hush-money payments by now and the contours of the Manhattan district attorney’s case. But this story, by Olivia Nuzzi, offers a really human look at what it’s like to be Daniels in this turbulent moment.

— Elaine

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Last Friday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered an end to the sale of mifepristone, a drug approved by the FDA 23 years ago that’s used to induce abortions, anywhere in the United States. He’s just a single judge in a small courthouse in Amarillo, Texas. Does he really have the power to dictate national policy about drug safety? If so, should he have that power?

The answer to the first question is complicated—more on that in a moment—but the answer to the second is easy. Of course he shouldn’t.

[Mary Ziegler: The Texas abortion-pill ruling signals pro-lifers’ next push]

When I ask new law students what courts are for, I’m likely to hear that they’re for “holding government accountable” or “protecting our constitutional rights.” That’s a common lay understanding: We’ve grown accustomed to judges taking center stage in national debates over abortion, health care, immigration, and other headline-grabbing issues.

But the traditional role of the courts is not to superintend what the government does. It’s to resolve disputes between the parties who appear before them. By offering a neutral, state-sanctioned forum, courts reduce the risk that angry people will take matters into their own hands. That’s a crucial but limited role. Judges aren’t supposed to adjudicate abstract political disputes or to rule on the rights of parties who aren’t involved in a given case.

Over time, however, some federal judges have become comfortable with a more sweeping vision of their role. Especially in the past decade, as the partisan divide has hardened, judges on both sides have grown more willing to wade into divisive policy disputes and to extend their rulings not just to the parties before them, but across the whole country.

The resulting “nationwide injunctions” are pernicious, as the Notre Dame law professor Sam Bray and I argued five years ago in this magazine. For starters, they purport to settle a legal question for the entire country, even if cases presenting the same question are pending before other judges who might have disagreed. That cuts off the ability of smart judges to contribute to an ongoing legal debate.

Nationwide injunctions also create procedural train wrecks. The government usually has no choice but to race to an appeals court or, failing that, the U.S. Supreme Court, to get the injunction lifted. These rushed appeals don’t have the benefit of full, careful briefing and argument. That’s exactly what happened in the mifepristone case: The government scurried to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to ask it to pause the lower court’s decision, which the court did in part late Wednesday evening.

Finally, and of perhaps greatest concern, nationwide injunctions supercharge the incentives for ideologically motivated plaintiffs to hunt for like-minded judges to hear their cases, knowing they can win big if they can just find the right judge. That’s why the plaintiffs in the mifepristone case filed suit in Amarillo. They knew their case would be assigned to Judge Kacsmaryk, who in his short time on the bench had shown himself to be a reliable partisan warrior. It’s also why many of the highest-profile challenges to Trump-administration policies were filed in California, with its relatively high concentration of liberal judges.

The ideological pattern of nationwide injunctions is as predictable as it is striking. During the Biden administration, nationwide injunctions have been issued against its mask mandate on public transportation, its vaccine mandate for health-care workers, its extension of stimulus relief to Black farmers, its effort to set a price on the social cost of carbon, and its termination of former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy. Every one of these injunctions came from a judge appointed by a Republican president.

Likewise, nationwide injunctions were issued against the Trump administration for its travel bans, its public-charge rule, its exemptions from the contraception mandate, its changes to asylum policy, its abortion-related rules under Title X, and its elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Every one of these injunctions came from a judge appointed by a Democratic president.

This is a dismaying picture, and is all but guaranteed to breed cynicism about the courts. Still, nationwide injunctions have their defenders. Arguments in their favor were especially appealing to liberal lawyers during the Trump administration. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, patience may be wearing thin. If you look closely, a bipartisan consensus may slowly be emerging that nationwide injunctions are inappropriate.

Judge Kacsmaryk clearly didn’t get the memo. Now, in fairness, he didn’t say he was entering a nationwide injunction. Instead, he said he was wiping the FDA’s approval of mifepristone from the books under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a bedrock 1946 statute allowing for court review of actions taken by federal agencies. No FDA approval, no mifepristone. (Actually, the judge said something stranger than that: He said he was postponing the effective date of mifepristone’s approval, even though the approval took effect 23 years ago. That’s bananas—the whole opinion, to be honest, is bananas—but for our purposes, it’s a distinction without a difference.)

[Patrick T. Brown: I’m pro-life. I worry that the abortion-pill ruling could backfire.]

Invoking the APA allowed the judge to rest his decision not on his discretionary power to issue injunctions, but on a supposedly clear legal command from Congress. That’s a growing trend in the lower courts. As nationwide injunctions get a bad odor, “universal vacatur” under the APA is taking its place. The APA says that courts shall “set aside” an agency’s unlawful action. The action is just gone, so it’s okay to prevent the government from relying on it. Hence, a nationwide injunction.

Just two weeks ago, for example, a different Texas judge used the APA to enter a “universal remedy” against agency rules requiring health insurers to cover certain preventive services free of charge under the Affordable Care Act. According to the judge, he had no choice in the matter.

Is that really what the “set aside” language means? Turns out that’s a lively topic of debate. Some judges on the D.C. Circuit, the influential appeals court in Washington, D.C., have concluded, without much analysis, that nationwide injunctions should typically accompany orders to “set aside” an agency action. At oral argument in a case last month, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that he agreed: “With those of us who were on the D.C. Circuit, you know, five times before breakfast, that’s what you do in an APA case.” (Jonathan Adler at Case Western Law School has a good explanation for why the D.C. Circuit came to think this way.)

A narrower interpretation is available, however, and it’s a sounder one. According to the 1947 Attorney General’s Manual on the APA, the law was just “a general restatement of the principles of judicial review embodied in many statutes and judicial decisions.” One of those principles is that injunctions should be as narrow as possible while still providing complete relief to the injured party. Against that backdrop, it’d be odd to read words (i.e., set aside) that don’t mention injunctions as authorizing injunctions that are broader than necessary.

Recent work by John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, reinforces the point. When the APA was adopted, Harrison argues, Congress commonly used the words set aside to tell courts to ignore an unlawful action—to treat it as a nullity—in the case at hand. But that’s it. The APA didn’t confer the power to go further and enjoin or annul the action.

Say an employer, for example, files a lawsuit over an agency decision requiring businesses to cover certain preventive care for their workers, like in the other Texas case I mentioned. Under this narrower interpretation of the APA, the judge would ignore the agency decision—would set it aside—once it was found to be unlawful. Presto: The employer would no longer be subject to the obligation.

The underlying agency decision, however, would remain intact. No one except that employer’s workers would lose coverage. The agency that lost in court would then have to decide what to do in future cases. Maybe it would throw in the towel and let all employers off the hook. Maybe it would double down and fight in other courts. But that’s up to the agency, not the courts.

This debate over the APA hasn’t been conclusively resolved, and it may not be anytime soon. But the legal complexity shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a very simple point: It’s wildly improper in a democracy for a single judge to determine the rights of Americans everywhere. As I was reading Judge Kacsmaryk’s opinion, I couldn’t stop thinking of the satirist Alexandra Petri’s take on whether he might take the drug off the shelves:

Yes! This is a real possibility, because our legal system is working just the way it ought to work! In an ideal society, your rights and ability to access medicine and direct the course of your own life are guaranteed and unalterable—unless a Trump-appointed judge named Matt decides to say, “Nah.”

It doesn’t have to be like this. Judges such as Matt have assumed powers they were never given and that they ought not to have. The Supreme Court shouldn’t allow this, and should take its chance, whether in the mifepristone case or in another instance soon, to end nationwide injunctions.