Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Sounds like Winter ----------

It's still Fall down here - blue skys - leaves leaving - crispy mornings - halcyon days............. Ahhhhhh

We've both gotten the regular flu and the H1N1 flu shots ------- everyone get them both as soon as you can.

Sorry to hear you had both flus! I had something back in the spring, with the last outbreak. Have a tickle in my throat, so I'm thinking it's my sinuses acting up. Didn't go out today. Looks and feels like snow! Very ugly outside. Glad to hear good weather is still in your neighborhood. Be well!

Had a lovely sewing machine once, never could figure how the thing worked, so I gave the machine to a friend. I've an antique foot peddal kind that i used with no probs. Go figure.

Good earthturn, Beth. Things may all look better tomorrow.

Freezing here as well, Teeny. Today was a tad warmer after the storm, but not by much. Stay warm and i hope you're feeling well soon.

Dan, should we get the flu and the shot? (grin)

Not a joke, the flu is a bear. Friends both got their flu shot, then got sick with the flu. I've never had a flu shot, and i don't believe i'll be getting one now. Hope you and Pattie are feeling well soon as well.



http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Clicked!

the sewing machine has been cleaned and oiled and is running like a gem again

phew!

Good morning wildclickers. Going to click and prowl for interesting articles.

We have been ignoring our sewer systems and our waterways are suffering the consequences.

November 23, 2009
As Sewers Fill, Waste Poisons Waterways
By CHARLES DUHIGG

It was drizzling lightly in late October when the midnight shift started at the Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant, where much of Brooklyn’s sewage is treated.

A few miles away, people were walking home without umbrellas from late dinners. But at Owls Head, a swimming pool’s worth of sewage and wastewater was soon rushing in every second. Warning horns began to blare. A little after 1 a.m., with a harder rain falling, Owls Head reached its capacity and workers started shutting the intake gates.

That caused a rising tide throughout Brooklyn’s sewers, and untreated feces and industrial waste started spilling from emergency relief valves into the Upper New York Bay and Gowanus Canal.

“It happens anytime you get a hard rainfall,” said Bob Connaughton, one the plant’s engineers. “Sometimes all it takes is 20 minutes of rain, and you’ve got overflows across Brooklyn.”

One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. During the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to make sure that what goes into toilets, industrial drains and street grates would not endanger human health.

But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways.

In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems " including those in major cities " have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency.

But fewer than one in five sewage systems that broke the law were ever fined or otherwise sanctioned by state or federal regulators, the Times analysis shows.

It is not clear whether the sewage systems that have not reported such dumping are doing any better, because data on overflows and spillage are often incomplete.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. That has contributed to sewage backups into more than 400,000 basements and spills into thousands of streets, according to data collected by state and federal officials. Sometimes, waste has overflowed just upstream from drinking water intake points or near public beaches.

There is no national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as 20 million people each year become ill from drinking water containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread by untreated waste.

A 2007 study published in the journal Pediatrics, focusing on one Milwaukee hospital, indicated that the number of children suffering from serious diarrhea rose whenever local sewers overflowed. Another study, published in 2008 in the Archives of Environmental and Occupational Health, estimated that as many as four million people become sick each year in California from swimming in waters containing the kind of pollution often linked to untreated sewage.

Around New York City, samples collected at dozens of beaches or piers have detected the types of bacteria and other pollutants tied to sewage overflows. Though the city’s drinking water comes from upstate reservoirs, environmentalists say untreated excrement and other waste in the city’s waterways pose serious health risks.

A Deluge of Sewage

“After the storm, the sewage flowed down the street faster than we could move out of the way and filled my house with over a foot of muck,” said Laura Serrano, whose Bay Shore, N.Y., home was damaged in 2005 by a sewer overflow.

Ms. Serrano, who says she contracted viral meningitis because of exposure to the sewage, has filed suit against Suffolk County, which operates the sewer system. The county’s lawyer disputes responsibility for the damage and injuries.

“I had to move out, and no one will buy my house because the sewage was absorbed into the walls,” Ms. Serrano said. “I can still smell it sometimes.”

When a sewage system overflows or a treatment plant dumps untreated waste, it is often breaking the law. Today, sewage systems are the nation’s most frequent violators of the Clean Water Act. More than a third of all sewer systems " including those in San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Philadelphia, San Jose and San Francisco " have violated environmental laws since 2006, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.

Thousands of other sewage systems operated by smaller cities, colleges, mobile home parks and companies have also broken the law. But few of the violators are ever punished.

The E.P.A., in a statement, said that officials agreed that overflows posed a “significant environmental and human health problem, and significantly reducing or eliminating such overflows has been a priority for E.P.A. enforcement since the mid-1990s.”

In the last year, E.P.A. settlements with sewer systems in Hampton Roads, Va., and the east San Francisco Bay have led to more than $200 million spent on new systems to reduce pollution, the agency said. In October, the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said she was overhauling how the Clean Water Act is enforced.

But widespread problems still remain.

“The E.P.A. would rather look the other way than crack down on cities, since punishing municipalities can cause political problems,” said Craig Michaels of Riverkeeper, an environmental advocacy group. “But without enforcement and fines, this problem will never end.”

Plant operators and regulators, for their part, say that fines would simply divert money from stretched budgets and that they are doing the best they can with aging systems and overwhelmed pipes.

New York, for example, was one of the first major cities to build a large sewer system, starting construction in 1849. Many of those pipes " constructed of hand-laid brick and ceramic tiles " are still used. Today, the city’s 7,400 miles of sewer pipes operate almost entirely by gravity, unlike in other cities that use large pumps.

New York City’s 14 wastewater treatment plants, which handle 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day, have been flooded with thousands of pickles (after a factory dumped its stock), vast flows of discarded chicken heads and large pieces of lumber.

When a toilet flushes in the West Village in Manhattan, the waste runs north six miles through gradually descending pipes to a plant at 137th Street, where it is mixed with so-called biological digesters that consume dangerous pathogens. The wastewater is then mixed with chlorine and sent into the Hudson River.

Fragile System

But New York’s system " like those in hundreds of others cities " combines rainwater runoff with sewage. Over the last three decades, as thousands of acres of trees, bushes and other vegetation in New York have been paved over, the land’s ability to absorb rain has declined significantly. When treatment plants are swamped, the excess spills from 490 overflow pipes throughout the city’s five boroughs.

When the sky is clear, Owls Head can handle the sewage from more than 750,000 people. But the balance is so delicate that Mr. Connaughton and his colleagues must be constantly ready for rain.

They choose cable television packages for their homes based on which company offers the best local weather forecasts. They know meteorologists by the sound of their voices. When the leaves begin to fall each autumn, clogging sewer grates and pipes, Mr. Connaughton sometimes has trouble sleeping.

“I went to Hawaii with my wife, and the whole time I was flipping to the Weather Channel, seeing if it was raining in New York,” he said.

New York’s sewage system overflows essentially every other time it rains.

Reducing such overflows is a priority, city officials say. But eradicating the problem would cost billions.

Officials have spent approximately $35 billion over three decades improving the quality of the waters surrounding the city and have improved systems to capture and store rainwater and sewage, bringing down the frequency and volume of overflows, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection wrote in a statement.

“Water quality in New York City has improved dramatically in the last century, and particularly in the last two decades,” officials wrote.

Several years ago, city officials estimated that it would cost at least $58 billion to prevent all overflows. “Even an expenditure of that magnitude would not result in every part of a river or bay surrounding the city achieving water quality that is suitable for swimming,” the department wrote. “It would, however, increase the average N.Y.C. water and sewer bill by 80 percent.”

The E.P.A., concerned about the risks of overflowing sewers, issued a national framework in 1994 to control overflows, including making sure that pipes are designed so they do not easily become plugged by debris and warning the public when overflows occur. In 2000, Congress amended the Clean Water Act to crack down on overflows.

But in hundreds of places, sewer systems remain out of compliance with that framework or the Clean Water Act, which regulates most pollution discharges to waterways. And the burdens on sewer systems are growing as cities become larger and, in some areas, rainstorms become more frequent and fierce.

New York’s system, for instance, was designed to accommodate a so-called five-year storm " a rainfall so extreme that it is expected to occur, on average, only twice a decade. But in 2007 alone, the city experienced three 25-year storms, according to city officials " storms so strong they would be expected only four times each century.

“When you get five inches of rain in 30 minutes, it’s like Thanksgiving Day traffic on a two-lane bridge in the sewer pipes,” said James Roberts, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection.

Government’s Response

To combat these shifts, some cities are encouraging sewer-friendly development. New York, for instance, has instituted zoning laws requiring new parking lots to include landscaped areas to absorb rainwater, established a tax credit for roofs with absorbent vegetation and begun to use millions of dollars for environmentally friendly infrastructure projects.

Philadelphia has announced it will spend $1.6 billion over 20 years to build rain gardens and sidewalks of porous pavement and to plant thousands of trees.

But unless cities require private developers to build in ways that minimize runoff, the volume of rain flowing into sewers is likely to grow, environmentalists say.

The only real solution, say many lawmakers and water advocates, is extensive new spending on sewer systems largely ignored for decades. As much as $400 billion in extra spending is needed over the next decade to fix the nation’s sewer infrastructure, according to estimates by the E.P.A. and the Government Accountability Office.

Legislation under consideration on Capitol Hill contains millions in water infrastructure grants, and the stimulus bill passed this year set aside $6 billion to improve sewers and other water systems.

But that money is only a small fraction of what is needed, officials say. And over the last two decades, federal money for such programs has fallen by 70 percent, according to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which estimates that a quarter of the state’s sewage and wastewater treatment plants are “using outmoded, inadequate technology.”

“The public has no clue how important these sewage plants are,” said Mr. Connaughton of the Brooklyn site. “Waterborne disease was the scourge of mankind for centuries. These plants stopped that. We’re doing everything we can to clean as much sewage as possible, but sometimes, that isn’t enough.”

Nuclear power regains support
TOOL AGAINST CLIMATE CHANGE
Even green groups see it as 'part of the answer'

By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

LONDON -- Nuclear power -- long considered environmentally hazardous -- is emerging as perhaps the world's most unlikely weapon against climate change, with the backing of even some green activists who once campaigned against it.

It has been 13 years since the last new nuclear power plant opened in the United States. But around the world, nations under pressure to reduce the production of climate-warming gases are turning to low-emission nuclear energy as never before. The Obama administration and leading Democrats, in an effort to win greater support for climate change legislation, are eyeing federal tax incentives and loan guarantees to fund a new crop of nuclear power plants across the United States that could eventually help drive down carbon emissions.

From China to Brazil, 53 plants are now under construction worldwide, with Poland, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia seeking to build their first reactors, according to global watchdog groups and industry associations. The number of plants being built is double the total of just five years ago.

Rather than deride the emphasis on nuclear power, some environmentalists are embracing it. Stephen Tindale typifies the shift.

When a brigade of Greenpeace activists stormed a nuclear power plant on the shores of the North Sea a few years ago, scrawling "danger" on its reactor, Tindale was their commander. Then head of the group's British office, he remembers, he stood outside the plant just east of London telling TV crews all the reasons "why nuclear power was evil."

The construction of nuclear plants was banned in Britain for years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in what was then the Soviet Union. But now the British are weighing the idea of new nuclear plants as part of the battle against climate change, and Tindale is among several environmentalists who are backing the plan.

"It really is a question about the greater evil -- nuclear waste or climate change," Tindale said. "But there is no contest anymore. Climate change is the bigger threat, and nuclear is part of the answer."

A number of roadblocks may yet stall nuclear's comeback -- in particular, its expense. Two next-generation plants under construction in Finland and France are billions of dollars over budget and seriously behind schedule, raising longer-term questions about the feasibility of new plants without major government support. Costs may be so high that energy companies find financing hard to secure even with government backing.

But experts also point to a host of improvements in nuclear technology since the Chernobyl accident and the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979. Most notable is an 80 percent drop in industrial accidents at the world's 436 nuclear plants since the late 1980s, according to the World Association of Nuclear Operators.
A 'pragmatic' approach

So far at least, the start of what many are calling "a new nuclear age" is unfolding with only muted opposition -- nothing like the protests and plant invasions that helped define the green movement in the United States and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s.

As opposition recedes, even nations that had long vowed never to build another nuclear plant -- such as Sweden, Belgium and Italy -- have recently done an about-face as they see the benefits of a nearly zero-emission energy overriding the dangers of radioactive waste disposal and nuclear proliferation.

In the United States, leading environmental groups have backed climate change bills moving through Congress that envision new American nuclear plants. An Environmental Protection Agency analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House, for instance, shows nuclear energy generation more than doubling in the United States by 2050 if the legislation is made law. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing applications for 22 new nuclear plants from coast to coast.

To be sure, many green groups remain opposed to nuclear energy, and some, such as Greenpeace, have refused to back U.S. climate change legislation. Groups that support the bills, such as the Sierra Club, say they are doing so because the legislation would also usher in the increased use of renewable energies like wind and solar as well as billions of dollars in investment for new technologies. They do not say they think nuclear energy is the solution in and of itself.

"Our base is as opposed to nuclear as ever," said David Hamilton, director of the Global Warming and Energy Program for the Sierra Club in Washington. "You have to recognize that nuclear is only one small part of this."

But Steve Cochran, director of the National Climate Campaign at the Environmental Defense Fund -- a group that opposed new nuclear plants in the United States as recently as 2005 -- also described a new and evolving "pragmatic" approach coming from environmental camps. "I guess you could call it 'grudging acceptance,' " he said.

"If we are really serious about dealing with climate change, we are going to have to be willing to look at a range of options and not just rule things off the table," he said. "We may not like it, but that's the way it is."

That position, observers say, marks a significant departure. "Because of global warming, most of the big groups have become less active on their nuclear campaign, and almost all of us are taking another look at our internal policies," said Mike Childs, head of climate change issues for Friends of the Earth in Britain. "We've decided not to officially endorse it, in part because we feel the nuclear lobby is already strong enough. But we are also no longer focusing our energies on opposing it."

Some leading environmental figures, including former vice president Al Gore, remain skeptical of nuclear's promise, largely because of the high cost of building plants and the threat of proliferation, illustrated by Iran's recent attempts to blur the lines between energy production and a weapons program. Other countries seeking to build their first nuclear plants would probably purchase fuel from secure market sources in Europe and the United States, rather than enrich their own. And experts remain cautious about the prospect of seeing so much nuclear fuel in global circulation.

"I'm assuming the waste and safety problems get resolved, but cost and proliferation still loom as very serious problems" with nuclear energy, Gore told The Washington Post's editorial board this month. "I am not anti-nuclear, but the costs of the present generation of reactors is nearly prohibitive."
Meeting tough goals

Yet for nations such as Britain -- home of the world's first commercial nuclear plant -- a return to nuclear is seen as essential to the goal of meeting aggressive targets for reducing carbon emissions.

As reserves of natural gas from the North Sea dwindle, Britain also is betting on nuclear to help maintain a measure of energy independence.

After years of resisting new plants after the Chernobyl meltdown, the government did an initial about-face in 2007, calling for a list of possible sites for reactors. This month, British officials announced plans to fast-track construction of 10 plants. They will also push for more wind and solar energy, but those technologies are still seen by many to have limitations because of problems with transmission and scale, while "clean coal" plants are years from commercial viability.

As may happen in the United States, the plants in Britain are expected to go up in communities with existing nuclear complexes where support for them is already high.

Tindale, 46, publicly switched his position less than a year after leaving his job as head of Greenpeace here. But his opinion began to change earlier, he said. Rather than being vilified by environmentalists, his public shift has sparked a thoughtful debate here among opponents, supporters and those on the fence.

"Like many of us, I began to slowly realize we don't have the luxury anymore of excluding nuclear energy," he said. "We need all the help we can get."

Hi everyone -------- I have only one flu, the one in the fireplace......hahehehe

I think everybody should get the shots.

Stradee, I have three of the old tredle sewing machines - oldest one belonged to my greatgrandmother.

Stopping now to rest my leg from the ole toe/heel toe/heel trick......

My cousin has my grandmothers old Singer and it's a beauty. Now more for decorating, but at the time they were the only game in town. My grandmother worked for Levi Stauss in SF - sewed all of her own clothes too.

Now don't go hurtin' yurself, dan. (grin)

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Evolutionary failures? Read on.

November 24, 2009, 9:30 pm
An Evolve-By Date
By OLIVIA JUDSON

Olivia JudsonOlivia Judson on the influence of science and biology on modern life.
Tags:

'origin of species', Charles Darwin, evolution

Yesterday, Tuesday, Nov. 24, was The Big Day: it was exactly 150 years since Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” was first published. In this book, Darwin described how evolution by natural selection works " and presented a huge body of evidence, drawn from every field of biology then known, that evolution can account for the patterns we see in nature.

I’ve written before about what an important book it was and why it mattered so much, so I won’t do that again now. Instead, I want to mark the occasion by looking at the limits of evolutionary potential.

To see what I mean by this, consider the following paradox. Whenever we do evolution experiments in the laboratory or on the farm, we can cause pronounced and rapid change in the traits we are interested in " we can evolve bigger horses, smaller dogs, cows that make more milk, viruses that thrive at higher temperatures and so on. In the laboratory, in other words, evolution has huge potential. But if it has that much potential " how come organisms keep going extinct in nature? In other words, why does evolution keep failing?

The question matters as never before. We humans are busily changing the environment for most of the beings on the planet, and often, we are doing so very fast. To know what effect this will have, we badly need to know how readily different creatures can evolve to deal with changes to their environment. For if we’re not careful, many groups will soon be faced with an evolve-by date: if they don’t evolve rapidly enough to survive in this changing world, they will vanish.

The basis of evolutionary potential is clear enough in principle. Whether a population can evolve to cope with new circumstances depends on how much underlying genetic variation there is: do any
Charles Robert DarwinAssociated Press Charles Robert Darwin

individuals in the population have the genes to cope, even barely, with the new environment, or not? If not, everybody dies, and it’s game over. If yes, evolution may come to the rescue, improving, as time goes by, the ability of individuals to cope in the new environment. What determines the extent of the underlying genetic variation? Factors such as how big the population is (bigger populations usually contain more genetic variation) and how often mutations occur.

Let me give an example of how this works. Imagine you have a population of algae that have been living for generations in a comfy freshwater pool. Now suppose there’s a ghastly accident and, all of a sudden, the pool becomes super-salty. Whether the algae will be able to survive depends on whether any individuals already have any capacity to survive and reproduce in salty water. If none of them do, they all die, and the population goes extinct. But if some do, then the survivors will reproduce, and over time, beneficial mutations will accumulate such that the algae get better and better at living in a high-salt environment.

This isn’t just hypothetical: many experiments have taken organisms, be they algae, fungi or bacteria, from an environment to which they are well-adapted to one where they are not, and watched what happens. The result is reliable: at first, they tend not to cope that well (measured, as usual in evolution, by their ability to survive and reproduce). However, as long as the environment doesn’t change again, their coping ability rapidly improves: within a few tens of generations, beneficial mutations appear and spread, and the organisms evolve to become much better at handling their new circumstances.

But here’s the thing. A big drawback of experiments of this type is that the initial change the organisms experience is not that severe " it is not, in fact, so severe that no one can cope, and the population goes extinct. The reason is simple: if the population immediately goes extinct, you have no experiment (at least, not one you can publish). Which means that we have the illusion that evolution is more powerful than it is: we keep studying evolutionary rescues, not evolutionary failures.

Moreover " and this also has a bearing on the matter " where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair. Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one " which they can’t consume at all " is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.

To me, all this is a bit sobering. If most organisms have to wait 31,000 generations to evolve a useful new trait " they will probably go extinct first. Worse, many natural populations are shrinking fast, further reducing their evolutionary potential. In short, we can expect that " if the environment continues to change as rapidly as it is at the moment " many creatures will fail to meet their evolve-by dates.

November 25, 2009
Editorial Notebook
At Año Nuevo Point
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Something about a sea otter looks so insouciant. Drifting on its back, bobbing up and down in the waves, it looks over at the humans standing on the rocks as if to exaggerate its ease in the water, its complacent, buoyant virtuosity. There is not merely one sea otter here on the north side of the point at Año Nuevo State Park, a couple of dozen miles north of Santa Cruz, Calif. There are perhaps 20 in sight, parents and young.

Where we stand, the sand is mottled with dark brown scraps of fur, as if the sky had been raining swatches. This is the accumulated debris left behind by the catastrophic molting of several thousand elephant seals, which begin coming ashore in December to give birth, to mate, to bask and to shed all of their fur and a layer of their skin before slipping into the sea again. The main contingent of elephant seals has not yet arrived, only a lone female " so much handsomer than her suitors. She lies well up the beach, under a scrub of shade, soft and gray. She turns her head to look at us a few yards away, her moist black eyes almost beseeching.

Both the sea otter and the northern elephant seal came through severe bottlenecks in the past century. These are the survivors of tiny, relict populations after being hunted nearly to extinction for their blubber and their fur. And, in a sense, Año Nuevo has come through several bottlenecks, too. Like so many of California’s state parks, it narrowly averted being closed during the ongoing state budget crisis.

But the real bottleneck in the first half of the 20th century was simply lack of protection. Before California created this refuge for elephant seals in 1958, Año Nuevo was a deeply puzzling place. The low, rocky point was a place of unbelievably rich intertidal life, yet it was overburdened by development plans and surrounded by farms growing row-crops heavy on pesticide " brussels sprouts mostly.

Setting aside the park’s 4,000 acres was a start. But it has taken another 50 years to begin to protect the landscape in which Año Nuevo Point is set. What you see there now is a steadily developing patchwork of protections, the remarkable result of private efforts, state and municipal programs, reclamation trade-offs, and the gradual substitution of small organic farms for the old toxic monocultures. The protections are by no means complete. But it’s hard to imagine a more vivid demonstration of the value of coastal protection and the ways in which it can be done.

Putin's rare Siberian tiger goes missing
By LIYA KHABAROVA, Associated Press Writer Liya Khabarova, Associated Press Writer 1 min ago

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia " A rare Siberian tiger fitted by Vladimir Putin with a radio-tracking collar has vanished, a Russian environmentalist said Wednesday, dramatizing the plight of a species some conservationists fear may be approaching extinction.

Russia's prime minister drew worldwide publicity in 2008 when he shot the five-year-old female tiger with a tranquilizer gun and helped place a transmitter around her neck. That allowed visitors to his Web site to follow the animal's prowlings through Russia's wild Far East. A video of the episode is on YouTube.

But the satellite tracking device has been silent since mid-September, which could be due to battery failure, a broken collar or poachers, Vladimir Krever of the World Wildlife Fund said Wednesday.

Tigers are rapidly disappearing from the far-eastern regions of Russian due to poaching and the loss of habitat, conservationists say.

Their number may have declined by 40 per cent since 1997, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a report released Tuesday, although another major conservation group, the World Wildlife Fund, disputed the figure.

The New-York based Wildlife Conservation Society said only 56 tigers have been spotted in an area of 9,000 square miles (24,000 square kilometers) " about one-sixth of their known habitat in Russia. Based on that, the group estimates the total number remaining in the wild at 300.

A similar estimate in 2005 put the number left in Siberia at 500, a huge increase over the less than 30 that were thought to remain in the 1940s. But the Wildlife Conservation Society said the latest count still shows the animals could face extinction.

"The sobering results are a wake-up call that current conservation efforts are not going far enough to protect Siberian tigers," Dr. Dale Miquelle of the group's Russian Far East Program said in a statement.

The society recommends a greater effort to preserve the tiger's habitat, stronger legal protections and a crackdown on poachers who hunt the animals for hides and bones prized in traditional Chinese medicine.

Krever, of the World Wildlife Fund, disputed the Wildlife Conservation Society report.

"It is absolutely incorrect," Krever told The Associated Press. "There's possibly been a decrease in the last two years, but definitely not 40 per cent."

Krever said deep snow in the last two years limited the tigers' ability to roam, making it harder to count them. His group agreed, however, that the tigers face a loss of habitat.

Sergei Aramilev, of Russia's World Wildlife Fund, said Chinese poachers have begun attaching explosives covered with animal fat to tree branches. When tigers and endangered Amur leopards swallow the bait, he said, it explodes in their mouths.

The World Wildlife Fund's Russian branch has estimated that 30 to 50 Amur tigers are killed every year.

Illegal deforestation in Russia's Far East and corruption among poorly paid park rangers may also be contributing to the tigers' decline, said Sergei Berezniuk of the Fenix Fund, an environmental group in the Pacific coast city of Vladivostok.

Earlier this month, Russian officials and environmentalists said they would hold a "tiger summit" in Vladivostok next September to coordinate multinational efforts to protect tiger populations.

The goal of the program, which could involve as many as 13 countries, would be to double the number of tigers globally to 6,500 by 2022. The total now is believed to be 3,200, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

Weighing up to 600 pounds (272 kilograms), Siberian tigers " also known as Ussuri, Amur or Manchurian tigers " prey on wild boars, deer and bears.

They once roamed most of Eurasia from the Black Sea to Central Asia, but now are limited to the forests of Russia's Far East and the Chinese province of Manchuria. In China the killing of a Siberian tiger is punishable by death.

____

Clicked yesterday and just clicked for today. Happy Thanksgiving to ALL!

Hi all, here is an interesting fact based story about the history of Thanksgiving. Enjoy.............!

The Pilgrims' Real First Thanksgiving
By Pete Skirbunt
Special to American Forces Press Service

FORT LEE, Va., Nov. 22, 1999 " Harvest festivals are as old as civilization itself, but our Thanksgiving is much more than an annual festival. It is a national day of expressing thanks, according to every individual's personal beliefs.

There were many "thanksgivings" in the early days of American colonization, when life and travel were so difficult that people were always giving thanks for safe journeys, favorable weather and good crops. Spanish colonists held such feasts in Texas in the 1500s, as did English colonists in Virginia from the 1600s.

The thanksgiving we commemorate every November, however, was the one held by the Pilgrims of Plymouth, Mass., in 1621. Although it definitely wasn't the "first" thanksgiving in the New World, it holds a special place in American tradition because of its association with the ideals of religious freedom, self-reliance and the mutual friendship of settlers and natives.

The Pilgrims -- a name not actually applied to them until 170 years later -- were 102 people who sailed from England on the ship Mayflower in September 1620. Of these, only 35 were actually seeking religious freedom. They were "Separatists" from the Church of England. The others, called "Strangers," simply wanted to leave England for a variety of reasons and start life over in America.

For 12 years, the Separatists had lived in Holland, where the Dutch tolerated religious differences. But these Englishmen didn't want to desert their heritage, customs or language. They decided to go to America -- to Virginia, specifically. Establishing a colony there would allow them to remain English. If they went elsewhere, to Dutch colonies, for instance, they would have had to renounce their English citizenship.

King James I, eager to be rid of them, gave them permission to establish a colony, so long as they remained loyal and didn't cause him trouble. The Virginia Company of London agreed to let them settle in "Virginia," which at that time extended north to modern New Jersey. Merchants calling themselves "Adventurers" agreed to finance the expedition in return for seven years of shared profits from whatever the colonists were able to produce and send back.

In August 1620, the first Separatists sailed with 67 "Strangers" on the Mayflower and a second ship, the Speedwell. After the Speedwell twice sprang leaks and forced returns to port, everyone crammed aboard the 90-foot-long Mayflower and left the Speedwell behind.

Aboard ship, the voyagers ate bread, biscuits, pudding, cheese, crackers, and dried meats and fruits. Instead of water, they brought barrels of beer -- a standard practice in the days before refrigeration, because beer remained potable longer than water.

The 3,000-mile voyage took 66 days, meaning the ship averaged 2 miles per hour. On the way, one baby was born, and his parents named him "Oceanus." Two people died, and the ship nearly sank in a storm.

They finally arrived, badly off course, at Cape Cod in November. This was a problem. The season and location made planting impossible, and winter hunting would be difficult. Since their agreement with the Adventurers specified they would settle "in Virginia," they ordered the captain to head south. The wind was contrary and the coast was dangerous, however, so they turned back and found safe harbor at Cape Cod.

It was then the Strangers announced that because they hadn't been delivered to Virginia, they weren't bound by the contract and would take orders from no one! In fact, the Separatists feared all their agreements with the company, the Strangers and King James were completely useless. But they knew if there was division, there was little hope in anyone surviving.

Before going ashore, the travelers drew up the "Mayflower Compact." One of the most significant documents in U.S. history, the statement was the first by any settlers that they intended to abide by the will of the majority. The 41 adult males who signed the document agreed they and their families would obey laws set up for the general good. They also set the precedent that only adult males would have a voice in government -- a precedent followed until 1920, exactly 300 years in the future.

In December, a scouting party went ashore, and tradition says they first set foot upon the stone known today as "Plymouth Rock." This may or may not be true, but the rock is so large that they probably at least used it as a landmark when rowing ashore.

The men in this first group ashore feared a possible confrontation with unfriendly Indians, but soon they discovered the local Indians were all dead of smallpox. They took this as divine providence and assumed God had cleared their way by killing off the natives.

They established their colony with little but faith and courage and named it "Plymouth" in honor of their final port of departure. The Mayflower remained offshore, but most of its provisions were needed for its crew's return voyage. Meanwhile, the settlers couldn't plant crops, and they didn't have enough supplies to last until spring. They'd lived in cities while in Holland, so they didn't know how to fish or hunt. In their first month they caught exactly one fish and shot no game at all. For awhile, it seemed they'd go down in history as the world's most inept hunters and fishermen.

They suffered from cold, starvation and disease, and half of them were dead by spring. The survivors were in danger of suffering the same fate without much delay. But everything changed in the spring, when a lone Indian walked into the settlement and said, in English:

"Welcome, English. I am Samoset. Do you have beer?"

The Pilgrims were astonished. Of all the places in America they could have come ashore, they'd been found by a friendly Indian who somehow spoke their language -- and knew about beer. Once again, they were sure this was a sign of God's personal intervention.

Samoset explained he'd learned English -- and the fact that ships routinely carried beer -- from having had contact with English fishing vessels. Unfortunately, one of the vessels had apparently also brought smallpox, which wiped out some of the local tribes. Samoset had survived.

Soon, he introduced the Pilgrims to other Indians, including Squanto, the only living member of the Patuxet tribe. Squanto spoke even better English than Samoset and said he'd been shanghaied by an English ship and taken to England, where he found work in London as a "living curiosity" and one-man carnival side show. Eventually, other fishermen took him back home so he could show them the best fishing spots. Upon his return, he discovered smallpox had wiped out his tribe during his absence. Later the Wampanoags adopted him.

Now more than ever, the Pilgrims believed God had guided them to this place of friendly, English-speaking natives. According to their view, God let Squanto be kidnapped so he would miss the smallpox epidemic, learn English and arrive at Plymouth just in time to save them.

The Pilgrims also befriended the Wampanoag chieftain, Massasoit, and his personal ambassador, Hobomok. The tribe taught them to catch fish, lobsters and eels; to harvest clams and oysters; to plant corn and other vegetables; to fertilize by placing a small fish into the ground with each seedling; and to trap and hunt game.

The settlers eventually became good enough marksmen to provide fresh game. They also had a good autumn harvest, including 20 acres of corn.

Meanwhile the Mayflower returned to England, and two other ships arrived. The first brought no supplies, but did deliver more men and some mail, including a nasty letter from the Adventurers, complaining that they had sent no marketable products back with the Mayflower. The second brought more settlers and, fortunately, lots of provisions. This was a good reason to celebrate, so in October 1621 the settlement and 91 Indians held a thanksgiving feast.

This meal inspired much of our traditional holiday fare. The food included geese, corn bread, pudding, eels, lobsters, clam stew, oysters, corn, squash, potatoes, yams, cranberries, and pumpkin pies. The Indians contributed five deer, and the main course was venison. Turkey was a side dish, no doubt because the birds then weren't domesticated, but wild, wily and not easily hunted -- so few would have ended up on the table.

The settlers gave thanks to God and the Indians for helping them survive. The celebration lasted several days, during which there were sports, contests, entertainment and speeches of goodwill. Everyone agreed to make it an annual event, provided there was anything to be thankful for.

They signed a treaty and enjoyed harmony for 50 years. Unfortunately for the Wampanoags, arriving settlers brought European diseases that killed off the tribe by 1671.

Years after the first celebration, Massachusetts began observing Thanksgiving annually. Other Northeast colonies had harvest festivals, and by 1700 the holidays merged throughout New England.

In 1789, George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanks for the successful establishment of the Constitutional government. Ben Franklin, drawing on the tradition of the "Pilgrim Fathers" having eaten turkey, declared domesticated turkey should be the official entree. Franklin also lobbied to have the tough, smart wild turkey named the national symbol, but people didn't buy it -- probably because no one wanted a national bird that was regularly made into a meal.

As the nation grew, the Thanksgiving tradition spread westward from New England. Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a harvest thanksgiving during the Civil War. Many states adopted the practice after the war as a kind of national healing process. In 1941, Congress established the fourth Thursday of the month as the national Thanksgiving holiday.

Thanksgiving's traditional symbols include the cornucopia, the horn of plenty. Recent innovations, including a parade opening the Christmas shopping season and televised football games, now seem as traditional as the meal itself!

Still, Thanksgiving remains a day with religious and patriotic overtones, commemorated with special services by all faiths, with its main emphasis upon the gathering of family and friends. This is the essence of the way it began, and we've successfully preserved it for 378 years.

So, with all the modern distractions going on around you, I hope you can still find time to share with your family at least part of the story about the "first" Thanksgiving at Plymouth, and help them observe, if only for a few minutes, the spirit of the holiday as it was originally intended.

(Pete Skirbunt is the historian of the Defense Commissary Agency, Fort Lee, Va.)

Happy Thanksgiving Wildclickers

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Very Happy Thanksgiving to all our US folk

Sending you peace and love from across the pond


HAPPY THANKSGIVING ALL WILDCLICKERS





(have been flu'd for over 2 weeks so many apologies for not talking online, but like Alex, if you listen closely, you'll have heard me clickign)

Good to be back and especially to send you all well wishes on a day to give Thanks for our blessings. Love to all. xxxx

Honey, you've had a rough year!

Sending Thanksgiving Blessings to you and yours and wishes for a healthy New Year!

Teeny, sue, dan, alex and our Beth plus Iz and all the wildclickers - God Bless

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

Interesting article, Dan. Didn't know that they were trying to reach Virginia.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Beautiful! All clicked!

Thanks sumac ------- Happy Thanksgiving all.

Wishing you well, Izzzzzzzzzzzz (nod) Oh, I'm up - I'm ok........Just kidding, I like your compy name.