HOME DEPOT-an unplanned zoo

Wow, that's fascinating. (no immediate relevant story)

our local RONA (canada's home depot) store has quite a few birds housed in the skylights . i've seen them zoom in and out through the huge automatic doors .

had an unsual experience some years ago in the north of holland . stayed overnight in an old hotel . breakfast was served in a huge glassed in verandah - birds flew quite frequently in and out to enjoy the breakfast remains - nobody had any objection - least the birds .
hbg

I cant understand why the cedar shake ahs been used in areas like the desert Southwest, or in the California Valleys where it doesnt rain for maybe 6 months a year. (Out there, the laws for development are so screwed up its like nobody had their heads on strait)
1They keep their aquaducts as open streams for hundreds of miles and lose more than half their water to evaporation)

2They pile houses so close together and use flammable materials

3Theyve allowed building on dangerous slopes .

Nowonder the California economy has always been based upon "rebuilding", and not just from earthquakes But thats another thread

Im sitting in our "florida room" that used to be our back porch. We are watching 12 deer just meandering about our back pasture and there are no sheep with them. I wish the hell I could like deer meat, Id nail one of them bastards

About three weeks ago, I discovered a bird in my living room. It hid from me so well, I concluded it had got outside again. Two days later, I saw it again. The first thing I did was open the front door and get to the other end of the room. The bird left and was not seen again. I am guessing it came through the doggie door.

I don't care for the taste of wild game. Perhaps you have to grow up with it to appreciate it.

Ive had farm raised deer in a fine restaurant. It still tasted like **** to me.

When we go to MAine, we always eat at a place called the WACO DINER, which has outside seating even in gale force winds (no kidding). You always have to guard your food or it can get like an Afred Hitchcock movie with seagulls all over the place. SO the restaurant started putting up these Italian bottled water umbrellas. They lasted about 2 weeks (Here I bring the two together). The umbrellas, in order to keep the gulls away, were kept open and each one blew out into the bay and were retrieved by passing lobster boats , the crews of which, operate under strict laws of marine salvage, mainly (finders keepers)

as a young college student living on the GI bill In hunted deer just to eat, after graduation and a decent income I continued hunting but only elk which I enjoy eating. I no longer hunt.

edgar wrote :



i certainly didn't grow up with game meat - in hamburg we ate a lot of fish .
a friend of ours had a hunting camp north of here - plenty of deer (though you do have to get a license - usually for one deer only , i believe) .
mrs h figured out how to make a great roast from deer meat .
three points seem to be important :
1) it has to be well hung in cold temperature - no problem in eastern ontario ,
2)CAREFULLY trim off ALL fat ,
3)marinate in red wine or buttermilk for 24 hours .

there'll be no "gamy" taste and the meat will be fork tender .
unfortunately , no more deer meat . kurt got alzheimer's and now lives in a home in the city , but still misses living by the lake .
such is life !
hbg

Big, fat black crows survive (no, blossom!) in many an Oz schoolyard. Living off discarded bits of kids' lunches. Sometimes they get so noisy (aaaark!! aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark!) they can drown out the lessons going on in classrooms after lunch. They are incredible. Fearing absolutely nothing!

There was a society in New York at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries which decided that a sound ecological principle would be to introduce into North America every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. They tried and failed with the starling thirteen times. They did try a fourteenth time, though, and succeeded. The starling almost eliminated many native species with which it competed. At one point, so many starlings congregated in the state of Georgia, millions if i recall correctly, that they were dying in their thousands from starvation and the wildfire spread of parasites and diseases among them. The trees in which they roosted were destroyed, and the feces and the corpses presented a genuine public health threat.

Ironically, one native species with whom they had previously competed effectively survived and staged a comeback, thanks to the automobile. The red wing blackbird had been driven to the edge of extinction because it was having trouble competing with starlings for nesting locales. They weren't in competition for food, necessarily, as starlings tended to congregate around humans, while nesting in the countryside. The red wing blackbird was able to stage a comeback because they began nesting in the bushes in the median strips and the little "islands" of scrub brush within clover-leaf interchanges in the interstate highway system. Better adapted to North American conditions, the red wing also survived because it is sufficiently well adapted to survive in Canada, where starlings remain rare.

I once did lots of work for a community of townhouses. They had a nice swimming pool. They also had four enormous trees growing at poolside. Eventually, birds by the hundreds began nesting there. One could stand nearby and watch as a steady rain of poop hit the water. We tried false owls and a number of other futile schemes, but the birds were staying put, no matter what. The one thing that at last did work: They had the trees taken down. I didn't see that they needed them anyhow, as the buildings kept the area shady pretty much all day long.

I believe raptors have become quite common in urban areas. As someone else has already said, hawks are all over the place. When we lived on the 19th floor of a 25-story high-rise in Boston, a peregrine falcon was a frequent visitor, sitting on the railing of the little balcony, surveying the street below for any sign of rat, mouse or skunk. (Yes, saw a skunk one time, late evening, crossing the little decorative flower bed in the driveway in front of the building. This, mind you, is in the middle of Boston, just two blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts.)

There is a river which runs through the center of metropolitan Toronto, the Don River. At one time, the Don Valley separated Toronto from East York and the eastern suburbs; now, they have been amalgamated. Many small streams feed the Don River, and the ravines formed by those streams, along with the valley of the Don provide habitats for opossums, raccoons, skunks, even the occasional coyote. Raccoons have become a common, ubiquitous nuisance, knocking over peoples' garbage cans and holing up in sheds in backyards. We have had the privilege of hosting a skunk in the neighborhood recently. There are quite a few species which have benefited from the presence of man.

The skunks of the M.mephitis clan seem to be distributing into several subspecies populations from Canada MAritimes down to the Southern Appalachians. The skunks up north ahev become accustomed to living in house foundations and dock pilings etc. The skunks, by becoming so adapted to close "village life" have almost become reluctant to spray as a territory marker and weve often walked into small groups of skunks that'd just look up , as if to say, YO, whats Up?, and then continue their incessant snuffling of the ground..Now the skunks at and south of SOuthern NY, seem to be another subspecies. They are larger, but with more eastern "civet cat " tail appearance. These guys are more ex-urbanites and prefer dens that are of animal origin.
As the vets around will testify, skunk deodorizer sales is a sizable part of their business in our area, when pets, like the adventure seeking house dog, will cause a skunk to unleash his clip of sprays and smells.

The real "Easterncivet cat" (the spotted skunk and not a real civet cat) is more weasel than skunk .Its smaller and meaner. These bastids will , when they see someone, go out of their ay to attack and spray . And their brand of thiol is much more potent than the striped skunks.
These guys are waay more reclusive though. What weve got going for us is to try to stay away from knowingly traverse their speacial areas.

Id rather a striped skunk near me, they can actually be kind of cute and , in MAine once I was entertained one evening by feeding chicken bones to this little striped skunk whod run over to me, take a chicken bone, and then make the trip to his den to stash his snack and then come back for more. When I was done, the skunk came close and smelled my fingers , gave me a "I guess thats all boss" then disappeared into his den, always taking the same beaten path.
Id often toyed with the idea of getting a pet skunk , they have a cool way to waddle around and they appear very intelligent.


HAMBURGER-Ive had deer meat done exactly as youve said and , my dislike of deer meat is more its texture than its gamey taste. Its always sub-mealy even when done up in the best traditions. Its always been a matter of "killing" that texture and I cringe at how many times peiople will give me the'You just didnt have it made right" , then I d politely have to take a sampling and gag in private. ACtually it does make me gag, so I dont think Im gonna be able to get past that.

ANother story of adaptation involves a mine cleanup my guys did about 20 years ago. It was an early 20th century zinc mine and smelter in Eastern Pa. The site was located in a large fold belt of the front hills of the Blue Ridge and the old mine had smelted zinc from the mid 1800's to the early 20th century. The smelting operations left bazillions of tons of zinc oxide dust all over the surrounding mountains. Zinc Oxide is a super bacteriostat. SO the hills, no longer able to process dead leaves and trees, just became a sterile dead zone. Trees require nutrient exchange and this bacteriostatic action had renered the soil a lifeless collectio n of duff. We actually took dead trees and did sequential ring analyses and could see the three critical years where the forests died. This entire area was moonscape of red and yellowish bedrock hills and looked vaguely like the badlands of the dakotas.

Well, we did a study to mass load the area with seqwage sludge in order to override the remnant bacteriostat effects and to kick start the soil bacteria into getting back to work decomposing the floor of the old "mummy" forest.

We contracted wits sveral cities including Philadelphia to bring thousands of truckloads of sludge. We had a soil mixer where we added coal fines to adsorb the toxic metals and then spread the sludge in plots of 100 acres by 2 ft deep (200 acre feet per section). It took about a month to do one section and the study was tuned to monitor the composting and reclamation effects. One of the most surprising events was the rehabitation of the mountain.
1WHen we deposited the seage sludge, there was a huge component of undigested seeds that came with the sludge. The biggest percentages were TOMATOES. Wed set up a large 3 to 500 acre tomato field that was producing nice tomatoes the first year. Our ecologists were going nuts because the tomatoes had drawn in several species of mouse and rat that were native to the area. In 2 years the rodent population exploded as generation 2 of the tomato fields were growing.
With the exploded rodent population, this area, already an important hawk flyway(HAwk Mountain Pa is 40 miles to the west of this site on the same ridgeline). The kestrels and merlins simultaneously set up major housekeeping and this condition lasted for several years until the tomato garden began to be succeeded by small birches and sumacs (all part of the Appalachian succession seuence). The project was a success and the whole mountain was scheduled for reclamation . The same process of "Tomato seres" were initiated in the next sevral reclamation areas.

We can set up a site conition and , good or bad, our actions can have sometimes beneficial consequences in the ecosystem.

Went back up to the Home Depot this PM to get some blades. I was walking around the plumbing dept and LO !!, here were several birdies (purple house finches I believe) who were building nests in large sections of PVC pipe. (Good thing the building supply market is depressed or theese birdies would be homeless)