Category Archives: Nature

Floods

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The weather system that dumped all that water on the Mid-Atlantic states didn’t make it to Rochester. I got an inch of rain here the day before yesterday, and that’s about the extent of it.

The Southern Tier, where I grew up, did get hit, however.

My dad says he’s has over 11 inches of rain this month.

He also just told me that the Chenango River reached the steps of the old bank in Downtown Oxford. That’s higher than it got during Hurricane Agnes in 1972–considered the major flooding event, in Upstate New York, in recent memory.

Until now.

Birdie birdie in the . . . plumbing aisle

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You’ve probably noticed them: birds flying around in malls, or airports, or “big box” stores, like Home Depot or Walmart.

Here’s an interesting article about this phenomenon in the Baltimore Sun (registration required).

Turns out these stores are idea habitat. No predators. Plenty of niches for nesting. Spilt grass or bird seed makes for easy forage, and for water there’s always a puddle around (or, I suppose, a working model of one of the ubiquitous fountains these stores sell for peoples’ gardens).

The stores’ doors don’t post a problem — the birds just figure out how to get through when we humans open them: they “hover near store entrances waiting for shoppers to trip the [motion detection] sensors.”

Most of the birds I’ve seen are English sparrows, but other birds that commonly make their homes in these stores are starlings, pigeons, house finches and mourning doves. And then there are the unusual ones. The article mentions occasional sightings of crows and owls, and a red-tailed hawk that “took up residence inside a North Carolina Home Depot store” and became a regional phenom — people would come to the store just to see it.

Not everyone is thrilled about them. Food stores can’t tolerate them (the droppings pose a potential health hazard) and some people just aren’t . . . nature types.

Phil Miller of Perry Hall is a sales representative for a company that makes lighting products carried by Home Depot. His job takes him to hundreds of locations.

“It’s a pain in the neck,” he says of store birds, which leave droppings on high-stacked inventory boxes that he has to move around. Miller was recently in a Delaware Home Depot that had caught the fancy of a mockingbird, a breed notorious for its mimicking ability.

“That thing was going for hours and hours,” he says. “You couldn’t even hear the radio. It made every sound possible.”

Sorry, but my sympathy is with the bird ;-)

The aliens have landed????

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No joke!

As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well, aliens. In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples — water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louisâ’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001 — contain microbes from outer space.

They don’t have any DNA, but they seem to reproduce. Wild stuff. Click to read the full article, written by Jebediah Reed in Popular Science.

The golden fallacy

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I know that some people who follow “dangerous wild animals” stories are committed animal rights activists who think it’s principled to oppose killing these animals, even when they’ve threatened humans.

It seems to me the basis for this is the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you believe animals deserve to be treated humanely — human-ly– you are are extending the Golden Rule to animals, right? Seems like a reasonable thing to do. I do it myself. I’ve been involved in two dog training books (one, Outwitting Dogs, that I co-wrote, new one, 101 Dog Training Tips, I did solo) that advocate rewards-based training. I’d like to see every dog owner embrace this approach because I don’t think we’re doing right by our dogs when we train them by frightening or hurting them.

But let’s apply this principle to a scenario in which a mountain lion is stalking people. Golden Rule. Put yourself in the lion’s paws. His habitat has been invaded by humans. All he’s doing is responding according to his nature.

But the Golden Rule has two clauses. Look at part 2: “as you’d have them do unto you.”

Part 2 assumes that you naturally look out for your own self-interest. It assumes you value yourself and are willing to protect yourself from harm.

To put it bluntly: the Golden Rule requires as its basis a healthy foundation of pure self-interest.

Take away self-interest, and the Golden Rule is de facto perverted.

It becomes a kind of one-way suicide pact: kill me first, so that I don’t have to kill you. Do harm to me because that absolves me of the consequences of doing harm to you.

In purely practical terms, when we assume this stance, we give full rein to predators — human as well as animal. That’s not an application of the Golden Rule.

Okay, so is that a bad thing (says the animal rights activist)? Is suicide, in the context of environmental principles, somehow redemptive? Is Shaffer Warner a better man because he doesn’t want authorities to kill the lion that’s stalking him and his family?

I guess there are people who would answer yes. I don’t see how it’s clear thinking, though. I don’t see how it shows respect for life . . .

Poor widdle puddy tat? No!

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Okay, this is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Glenn Reynolds has been adding links to his post about human/wild animal contact. One of them is this horrifying article in the Denver Post about a mountain lion that is stalking a family in Evergreen, Col.

The lion has perched outside their 7-year-old son’s bedroom window, looking in at the boy. It has jumped onto the top of their van. It walks around on their roof. They’ve seen it hanging out in trees on the edge of their lawn. It’s killed their cat right in front of them.

The mountain lion with a black snout had her pet in its jaws in an instant. Carrie picked up firewood and threw it at the lion.

“I whacked him dead center in the head,” she said.

The animal disappeared with Indigo in its mouth.

Since then, the lion has returned “nearly every night.”

A week after the first encounter, Carrie and Shaffer were smoking outside when they heard the lion screech.

Carrie made it inside the front door first. The lion crossed a 60-foot dirt road in a few seconds. Carrie Warner slammed the door just as her husband got through. The lion’s head was caught in the door. She slammed the door on its head again and it backed out.

This is horrifying.

But look at the last paragraph in the article:

The Warners don’t want the animal killed. Shaffer Warner said he wishes the animal to be tranquilized and relocated.

They don’t want it killed.

This boggles my mind. It’s a dangerous animal. It’s stalking human beings. It’s lost its fear of people.

A little boy — someone’s son — is in danger. And dad puts Love of Nature first.

An abstraction trumps the fundamental instinct to protect one’s child.

The man literally cannot see the mountain lion. He sees a cartoon character, a Misunderstood Misfit, a poor widdle puddy tat.

It boggles my mind.

(My previous post on problem wildlife and how we’re Bambi-izing nature — was linked by Instapundit — is here.)

Animal rights

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No, not the kind you’re thinking.

What I’m talking about is animals’ right to be viewed as animals.

The subject is near & dear to my heart, and it’s on my mind today because it was touched upon in the Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal.

The article, “Wild Kingdom,” by James Sterba (subscription required), gives an overview of the current state of human-wildlife relations in the Orlando area, but the situation there is hardly atypical. As a culture, we’re hemorrhaging the savvy we once had about wild creatures — and no, being able to recite facts we’ve gleaned from books or documentaries doesn’t count. On the contrary, learning about wildlife from books and documentaries, instead of through first-hand experience, is one of the problems.

We’re Bambi-izing nature. We view animals as little humans and interpret their actions through the lenses of human ethics and personality — which, perversely enough, turns out to be an act of supreme selfishness.

It leads to situations like the one Sterba relates in his article, where people toss bread to non-native Muscovy ducks that have set up camp on Lake Lilly, a suburban park, but “hate” the otters that show up to feed on them.

“We hate the otters,” said a retiree named Florence, who wouldn’t give her last name. She and her husband, Don, walk around the lake for exercise. “We gave names to every duck. Now, half are dead.” Asked if they named the otters, she said, “Yes, but you couldn’t print those names.”

Now the town where the park is located has hired a company to trap and remove the otters.

I’m not against removing, even euthanizing problem wildlife. But what’s happening is that people often create the problem. Another example from the article: people feed Florida Black Bears. This teaches the bears to look for people for hand-outs, so that even if you relocate them, they just come back. And once a bear has been documented as bothering people three times, it’s killed.

Even when animals don’t need to be euthanized, relocating them may be a death sentence anyway. The article quotes from the Florida wildlife commission Web site as follows:

“It’s rare that relocated animals have a good chance of survival, and moving them may even effect the survival of animals in their new ‘home.’ ” Relocated animals are already stressed from their ordeals, often can’t find food and shelter in their new environments, fight with and can spread disease to local critters already there, it says.

So what’s the answer?

Let’s start with what the answer is not — and that’s overreacting to so-called “sprawl.” People blame it for the increased contact between people and wildlife, but it’s only partly the cause–something you’d know if you grew up in the rural Northeast, like I did, where it’s pretty obvious that land once cleared for farming has now regrown as forest.

While sprawl is moving out, the forests in which many species once flourished is moving in, covering over millions of acres of abandoned farmland that once served as a buffer.

When I was a kid, the “woods” behind my parents’ house still showed obvious traces of having been farmland: the tumbled stone walls, the piles of rocks from where someone once cleared the land to plow, the predominance of trees like ash which are characteristic of first-growth forest, and of wild apples, suggesting there had been an orchard in the vicinity at one time.

Today, it’s almost unrecognizable, thicker, shadier; the apples have pretty much died out, the rock piles are disappearing under accumulating leaf litter. It’s begun to look like a real forest rather than scrub land.

What’s more, we’re also inadvertently creating habitat with our homes and landscaping:

. . . much modern sprawl is built, unconsciously, to be wildlife-friendly — what wildlife biologists call “enhanced habitat,” with more food, shelter, water, hiding places and protection from predators than exist in the wild . . .

In the wild, home is a hole in a dead tree. In Orlando, the dead tree has been cut into lumber and used to build a house with easy access to the attic — a veritable McMansion for raccoons, squirrels and roof rats. Ubiquitous air-conditioners all have drip pans — a ready source of water. New suburban landscapes tend to have more critter-friendly “edges” — patches of trees, shrubbery, lawns, fences, roadsides — than can be found in many wild settings.

My neighborhood is a perfect example: lots of handy cover for critters to move about, plenty of spots to hide and build dens. Consequently, we have not only birds and squirrels, but also rabbits, skunks, possums, fox, deer, and coyote. It’s practically the identical mix of native North American fauna that the colonists found when they first settled this part of the world — all that’s missing is bear and mountain lions, and they’re closer than most people realize.

So what’s the answer?

I wish I knew. I honestly don’t see how we can make intelligent, well-reasoned decisions about managing our native wildlife when a growing majority of Americans, to paraphrase the article, now treat their pets like children and wild animals like pets.

Animals feel emotions, they are fascinating, they have complex brains, they enrich our experience. But particularly as regards wild animals, they live in a parallel world, not a human one — a parallel world that happens to occupy, more and more, the same physical space as the human one.

We need to learn to share that space in a way that’s fair to the animals.

But most of all, we need to stop projecting our own unmet emotional needs on these creatures. We need to accept that their experience is so fundamentally foreign to ours that, truly, we cannot begin to fathom it. We need to understand that it is precisely this foreignness that makes them so fascinating, and stop trying to turn them into toothless teddy bears, and Tom and Jerry funny-antics-nobody-ever-gets-eaten, and existentially-aware Wilburs, and talking Bambis still missing Mother. That’s not what animals are. It’s just not.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. Thanks for stopping by, and thank you Prof. Reynolds for the link!

Update: Even worse: people being stalked by a mountain lion …

War on chemistry

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This seems an awful shame: a variety of government agencies are using a variety of pretexts (including the War on Terror, anti-drug laws, and even regulations governing the use of fireworks) to crack down on companies that offer DIY home chemistry kits.

Steve Silberman has the story covered in Wired.

I can understand the impulse to ban these things. But I think we’ve crossed the line from reasonable caution to cut-off-our-noses paranoia.

I mean for crying out loud — we can’t even allow chemistry experiments in school any more?

The chemophobia that’s put a damper on home science has also invaded America’s classrooms, where hands-on labs are being replaced by liability-proof teacher demonstrations with the explicit message Don’t try this at home. A guide for teachers of grades 7 through 12 issued by the American Chemical Society in 2001 makes the prospect of an hour in the lab seem fraught with peril: “Every chemical, without exception, is hazardous. Did you know that oxygen is poisonous if inhaled at a concentration a bit greater than its natural concentration in the air?” More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?”

“A lot of schools don’t have chemistry labs anymore,”  explains CEF educational coordinator Laurel Brent. “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.” 

“Big long names”???? You must be kidding me.

You know, my kid is bright, I’ll hand you that. But if she tests bright, I can guarantee you one reason is that the adults in her family NEVER talk down to her — we NEVER “kidify” our explanations of things, or dumb down our vocabulary.

When we’re looking at insects, for example, I don’t just do “oh, look at the fly. Oh, look at the beetle.” We catch it. We pull out the field guide. We do genus and species. We read about why a bug is a bug, why a Painted Lady is a brush-footed butterfly.

And she is a little sponge — she picks it up, quickly, and retains it. For two reasons: because I provide her the information, and because I’m obviously enthusiastic about it, which is infectious.

Meanwhile, at school — and ours is a good school, comparatively — the curriculum doesn’t bother providing this level of information. And I take issue with that.

I mean, life cycle of a butterfly is well and good, but if you repeat that the scientific name of a Painted Lady butterfly is Vanessa cardui, kids will learn it. Maybe not all the kids, but some of them will — and what’s more, I’m convinced it has a snowball effect. It’s like opening a door and showing a kid just how much information is out there. They naturally increase their capacity to learn, based on a sampling of just how much there is to learn.

But what are we doing, collectively, instead? We’re teaching kids to be passive. Worse yet, fearful.

Many students are ill at ease when faced with actual compounds and lab equipment for the first time at school. A study of “Chemistry anxiety”  in the Journal of Chemical Education concluded in 2000 that “the presence of this anxiety in our students could be a contributing factor in the overall poor performance of high school students in science.” (Commonly reported fears included “lighting the Bunsen burner,” and “getting chemicals on skin.”) Restrictions on hands-on chemical experience is “a problem that has been building for 10 or 15 years, driven by liability and safety concerns,” says John Moore, editor in chief of the JCE.

“The liability issues are a cop-out,” says Bassam Shakhashiri, the author of a four-volume guide to classroom chemistry who has taught for 36 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Kids are being robbed of the joy of discovering things for themselves.” Compared with students in previous generations, he says, undergraduates raised on hands-off science seem passive: “They want someone to do things for them. Even those who become chem majors and grad students are not as versatile in the lab, because their experiences in middle school and high school were so limited. This is a terrible shame. By working with real substances, you learn how to ask the right questions about the physical world, which is half the battle in science.” 

What this guy doesn’t perhaps realize is that it’s starting much, much younger than middle school. I had the pleasure of accompanying a field trip with my daughter’s 2nd grade class last week. They’re studying pond life. One of my responsibilities was to stand on the edge of a pond and help kids scoop mud from the bottom to find critters living in it.

I was astonished to find that some of the kids were bizarrely timid. Weirdly passive. They would sort of touch the strainer to the water and then, almost instantaneously, say “I can’t find anything.”

This floors me. You get a kid outside, out of the classroom, he’s got a chance to maybe catch a real life pollywog or something really awesome or creepy — and he doesn’t even have the most basic impulse to plunge a strainer into the water and DIG?

Argh. Argh.

So no wonder that by the time these kids get to middle school, they’ve progressed from passive to fearful — to being afraid not only of fire and chemicals on the skin but of “big long names.”

But such fear is not natural. It’s learned.

Shame on us, for condemning our children’s minds to darkness that way. Shame.

Peak perversion

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It’s become a cliche to assume that individuals who aspire to perform physically grueling feats somehow embody humankind’s highest ideals. So we rush to applaud people who reach Everest’s summit and hold them up as worthy of our admiration.

Yet, as recent news stories have suggested, people who climb Everest can be a nasty lot. Granted, we don’t know what really transpired up there on the day David Sharp died. There’s been speculation that some 40 people may have passed him, but who knows how many realized he was there or was in trouble. Another key qualifier: of the people who did see him, how many were descending? Climbers can’t carry extra oxygen on these trips, so trying to save him under those circumstances may well have led to additional deaths.

By way of analogy, suppose you and a companion are on a boat, and it capsizes. There are no life preservers. You are a fairly strong swimmer, although not trained in life saving techniques. Your companion, on the other hand, is a poor swimmer, and panics. Every time you try to approach him, he attempts to climb up on you, which pushes you underwater.

At what point do your companion’s actions, even if they are the actions of someone “not in his right mind,” essentially become homicidal?

That said, it seems that at least one party passed him while ascending (I’ll get to that in a minute). So it’s little surprise that people now suspect the “code of ethics” among so-called high-altitude mountaineers is laced with a big dose of “every man for himself.”

And while leaving other climbers to die is the most appalling example of this, it’s not the only one. In another moral compromise, Mt. Everest is also piled high with garbage. The logic is identical to that which dictates dying climbers be left behind: the conditions are so difficult, climbers can’t expend the energy needed to carry out spent oxygen containers, food packaging, or their own bodily waste. So it, too, is abandoned. Garbage now litters the summit and its approaches–as much as 100 tons of it. (I don’t know if that figure includes the 180 frozen bodies of climbers who have died on the slopes.)

Okay, so you have strewn garbage and people left to freeze. What, then, is important to the climbers? How about disrobing on the summit? To “set a record.”

In fact, setting records seems to be what it’s all about. One of the parties that passed the dying Sharp featured a double amputee. He summitted and returned to his New Zealand home to “cheering crowds.”

According to a number of media reports, Inglis’ party passed Sharp on the way up, not the way down. So although he claims Sharp couldn’t have been saved, the fact is if they’d aborted their ascent, they could have used the oxygen allotted for that ascent to keep Sharp alive while trying to get him down.

Instead, Inglis set a record.

Climbing Everest. The new definition of baseness.