Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

That's a good thing. The "W" removed most EPA rules within the first three months in office. Oh well, I'm glad to have lived through some of the best years in earths history - at least to this date. We may get lucky and do something right in the future.

Going to fly up to NY tomorrow for the reunion so won't be online until I return next week. Hope everyone here has good days.

Have a safe and happy trip.......................

Thanks to all clickers who saved a tree today.

More trees asmiling..................

Have a nice weekend alllllllllllllllllllllll you good and great clickers for saving trees today.

50th high school reunion was a blast and I am back to clicking.

June 27, 2011
Greatest Threat to Caribou Herd in Canada Isn’t From Wolves
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Humans are a much bigger problem than wolves for a caribou herd in the oil sands area of Alberta, Canada, scientists reported last week in Frontiers in Ecology.

Studies of scat of moose, caribou and wolves in the area showed that caribou accounted for only 10 percent of the animals consumed by wolves. Eighty percent of the wolves’ diet was deer, with moose making up the remainder. Wolves’ preference for deer, the researchers conclude, draws them away from the areas where caribou thrive.

But the oil sands contain the second largest reserve of petroleum in the world, and so they face a heavy human presence as they are developed. And by looking at hormone levels in caribou scat, the scientists found that when humans were most active in an area, caribou nutrition was poorest and psychological stress highest. When oil crews left, the animals relaxed and nutrition improved.

The scientists reported that removing wolves, favored by government and industry, could do serious damage to the ecosystem, and fails to help preserve the caribou. (The study was paid for by Statoil Canada, an energy company with oil leases in the area.)

Other researchers have concluded that if development trends continue, within 30 years the caribou herd on the east side of the Athabasca River will be no more.

The Alberta Caribou Committee, a government and industry group, views removing wolves as

geez louise, I really need to come by and post more!

I can NOT keep up with the reading these days. clicking yes!

Yes, do come by more often, ehBeth. Danon and I are holding up the fort but it is hard without good conversation.

Mining and the Canyon
The Obama administration has extended for six months a 2009 moratorium on new uranium mining claims on one million acres around the Grand Canyon. This is good news; even better is the promise from Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, that he will soon recommend a 20-year ban on new claims in the region. That is the maximum allowed under the 1872 mining law.

With uranium prices rising, the number of mining claims have jumped sharply over the last few years. There have been about 3,500 claims in the Grand Canyon-area alone. If developed, they would generate toxic wastes that would threaten the Colorado River — the source of drinking water for roughly 27 million people — the aquifer and the Grand Canyon ecosystem in general.

Mr. Salazar said he could not cancel valid existing claims, but there is likely to be little actual mining. The decision to “withdraw” the land from future claims creates new regulatory hurdles for existing claimants, who must demonstrate, among other things, that they had discovered actual mineral deposits before the 2009 moratorium. Only a handful have been able to do so.

There have been the usual complaints from mining lobbyists and their Congressional allies. Representative Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, has threatened to use the interior appropriations bill to block Mr. Salazar’s plan. The moratorium will have little effect on the country’s uranium supply, most of which comes from Wyoming and New Mexico.

It will protect a treasured national park and the drinking water for millions of people.

Hi sumac, glad to hear your reunion was a success. My last one a few years ago I looked around and asked myself, "Who are all these old people and why are they trying to talk to me?"

Keep those clicks going - make a tree smile each day.

Plan Issued to Save Northern Spotted Owl
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
SEATTLE — It has been two decades since the fate of a bashful bird that most people had never seen came to symbolize the bitter divide over whether to save or saw down the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Yet it was not until Thursday that the federal government offered its final plan to prevent the bird, the northern spotted owl, from going extinct.

After repeated revisions, constant court fights and shifting science, the Fish and Wildlife Service presented a plan that addresses a range of threats to the owl, including some that few imagined when it was listed as a threatened species in 1990.

The newer threats include climate change and the arrival of a formidable feathered competitor, the barred owl, in the soaring old-growth evergreens of Washington, Oregon and California where spotted owls nest and hunt.

One experiment included in the plan: shooting hundreds of barred owls to see whether that helps spotted owls recover.

Even after all these years since the spotted owl became the cause célèbre of the environmental movement, it is far from clear that the plan is a solution. Advocates on both sides say it will inevitably be challenged, and both sides have expressed frustration with the Obama administration on the issue.

Some contentious points have still not been addressed, including precisely mapping the so-called critical habitat to be protected. And some experts say that while two decades of protections for the owl have helped preserve forest ecosystems, they are less certain that the bird itself can still be saved.

The spotted owl is declining by an average of 3 percent per year across its range. While some populations in Southern Oregon and Northern California are more stable, some of the steepest rates of decline are here in Washington. Some study areas in the Olympic and Cascade ranges show annual declines as high as 9 percent.

“I’ve certainly become much less confident as the years have gone by,” said Eric Forsman, a research biologist with the United States Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore., whose work in the 1970s first drew attention to the owl. “If you’d asked me in 1975, ‘Can we fix this problem?’, I’d have said, ‘Oh yeah, this problem will go away.’ ”

The listing of the spotted owl as a threatened species led to a virtual ban on logging in many older federal forests, inspiring angry lawsuits and threats of violence by rural loggers against owl advocates, who often came from urban areas.

“We were trained not to tell people in the local towns that we were surveying spotted owls,” said Paula Swedeen, a government owl surveyor in the early 1990s who now works for a nonprofit group that develops incentives for private forest owners to retain and restore owl habitat.

Yet over time, the public passion and the owl both faded.

Even as unemployment in some timber counties routinely rises into double digits, there are no longer presidential Timber Conferences, like the one Bill Clinton held in Oregon in 1993 seeking middle ground between conservation and protecting rural economies. Many factors contribute to rural declines, but logging restrictions played a role.

“Nothing against the bird, but it’s wreaked a lot of havoc in the Pacific Northwest for the past 20 years,” said Ray Wilkeson, president of the Oregon Forest Industries Council, which represents loggers, sawmills and others in the industry. “A lot of human suffering has resulted from this. Now there’s new threats to the owl that may be beyond anybody’s ability to control.”

The barred owl, a bigger, more adaptable bird with a broader diet than the flying squirrels and the wood rats that spotted owls prefer, has expanded its range westward in the past century, and it is now a more common resident than spotted owls in many Northwest forests. Sometimes barred owls even kill male spotted owls and mate with females.

“The barred owl is the most imminent challenge,” said Paul Henson, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s team leader for the recovery plan. “We believe there is a very good chance of recovering the spotted owl in the long term if we can manage the barred owl issue in the short term.”

Others are less sure. While some early experiments showed success, Dr. Forsman, the Forest Service biologist, questions whether barred owls could be managed on a broad scale, if it came to that.

“You would have to shoot barred owls forever to do that,” he said, “and I don’t think that’s likely to happen.”

The plan’s supporters say it provides for studies that may reveal ways to manage forests to create space for both birds.

Although the plan does not map critical habitat — the mapping process is more than a year away from completion, a fact that frustrates conservationists — it proposes expanding protections for owls beyond areas currently set aside. The existing areas were outlined by the Northwest Forest Plan, which was approved a year after President Clinton’s Timber Conference, revised under President George W. Bush to allow more logging and reinstated by the Obama administration.

The American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said the plan would impose “massive new restrictions on both federal and private lands.”

But supporters say it will provide more wood for mills by increasing forest thinning and restoration work to battle threats like disease and fire that could increase with climate change. The plan would provide timber companies incentives to create potential spotted owl habitat. Officials from the Forest Service and from the Bureau of Land Management, which oversee logging on federal land, expressed support for the plan.

“Thinning opportunity, that’s what’s always offered up to us as an alleged middle ground,” said Mr. Wilkeson of the Oregon Forest Industries Council. “But it’s pretty limited.”

While timber advocates question protections for a bird that some say may be bound for extinction, conservationists say that it is too soon to give up on the spotted owl, and that the fight to save it has served broader benefits of the forest, from cleaner water and air to habitat for hundreds of other species, including endangered salmon.

“The spotted owl is the icon,” Dr. Forsman said, “but there are a lot of other players in terms of species and protecting biodiversity in these forests.”

he plumage of birds ranges from the sublime to the (what some might consider) gaudy. Certainly, birds seem to possess a stunning range of colors in their plumage, with the most striking ones often relating to mate choice and social signaling. These colors probably evolved in response to the capabilities of the avian visual system (avian "color space").
Stoddard and Prum determined the range of colors (the color gamut) of 965 plumage samples from a wide range of bird species and showed that they occupied a mere 26 to 30% of the available avian color space. Pigment-based colors (often diet-derived) occupied 6.9% of color space (26.7% of the color gamut), whereas structure-based colors (for example, iridescent barbules) occupied 17.9% of color space (and almost 70% of the color gamut): It is in these latter colors that bird plumage diverges most from plant colors. Over evolutionary time, structural colors have dramatically extended the range of plumage coloration mechanisms available to birds. Still, plumage colors only occupy hue "continents" and "archipelagos" in color space between unoccupied regions, with, for example, few purple and fully saturated green colors. Indeed, bird plumages do not include many of the hues available to flowers, likely because certain colors may be either difficult to create or selectively undesirable.
Behav. Ecol. 22, 10.1093/beheco/arr088 (2011).

Thanks sumac, as always interesting articles.

One day an old man was sitting on a bench in the mall when a teen with spiked hair came over and sat down beside him. The boy's hair was yellow, green. orange and purple, and he had black makeup around his eyes. The old man just stared at him. finall, the boy said, "what's the matter old man? Haven't you ever done anything wild in your life?'
The old man replied waggishly, "Actually I was just recalling the time in the service I got drunk and fell madly in love with a parrot while on leave. I was wondering if you could be my son."

This the tree section, right? Today I saw a log in a glass case in a museum of all places - it's supposed to be part of a tree that was there at Valley Forge. Don't trees live for centuries anyway? Why is this log special, and how do we know it was around at the time? Expert advice needed here
http://www.sonsoftherevolution.org/PatriotJuly-2011.pdf

http://www.sonsoftherevolution.org/PatriotJuly-2011.pdf

Back on line again...dsl probs since fri...was on the telephone more in the past two days than the past year!!!! ATT did a great job (probably since they were tired of seeing my phone number on their screens) Seems the cable needed fixen' to accomodate folks...then an upgrade of equipment. However, today they were able to resume the signal to my house...and i didn't have to wait till Wednesday. whew Was having fb withdrawals.

High Seas, Dan, and sue, always nice seeing your postings.

Regarding the museum log...did they not count rings of the tree? Or did the poor birch succumb from all the carnage? Anyhooo, interesting what people find and display in museums. Who whould have thought a branch would survive for that many years...although who knows how long a birch tree lives? Mr Silver Birch tried to die numerous times, and after tlc and a bit of 'don't you dare' (nagging and pointing) the tree managed to survive and is looking very happy and healthy. Enviornment has much to do with birch longevity.

High Seas, from your friend in the mountains who hasn't seen a museum since 1997, thanks for sharing, and i hope you have a marvelous 4th. The same to Dan, sue and all the wildcklickers.

Happy EarthTurn all!

We got the dogs through last night's fireworks events. As a reward we all went to the b.e.a.c.h. for a nice adventure this morning. Gorgeous down by the lake and a nice cool breeze that we desperately needed.

Hugs to the WildClickers

Wow!! What a surprise.......... Hi HS, Stradee and ehBeth.

HS, I have doubts about the actual spot where the tree came from. Valley Forge was a cold winter spot and the soldiers would have used every piece of wood to warm themselves with. I suspect wagons were sent out daily to bring in more wood from around the countryside. It could be a piece left over. But no one could know exactly where it was originally from. Almost all the soldiers were living in log cabins - it may be a left over from one of those.

During WWII and after, people in Vienna, Austria were cutting the entire forest named the Vienna Woods. They were also burning their furniture to keep warm. I was married to a lady from Vienna for 17yrs and heard these stories from the people who lived through it.

July 2, 2011
The Lonely Polar Bear
By DIANE ACKERMAN
MY heart goes out to Gus, the famously neurotic polar bear in the Central Park Zoo, who used to swim endless laps around his pool. He’d dive to the bottom in a froth of bubbles, surge across and then surface like a bear obsessed. He’d backstroke to the other side, and with great paws splashing, dive down to the bottom and circle around again. Some wags called him the “bipolar bear,” but most zoo-goers sensed that he felt bored, pent-up, out of his element and depressed.

A high-profile animal psychologist, called in by zoo officials, began treating Gus in 1994 with toys, games, more challenging mealtimes and a better designed habitat. Soon Gus seemed like his old self again, lounging and playing with his longtime companion, Ida.

But when Ida died recently from liver disease at the age of 25, Gus grew listless, slouching around his habitat and swimming little, obviously confused and greatly disturbed by her disappearance.

In the wild, male polar bears tend to be loners, who wander long distances through sketchy weather and over shape-shifting ice, with drifting pack ice as home. They go with the floe. But for 24 years, Ida was a pal with whom Gus cavorted and related to in countless ursine ways.

Strangers when they met, they nonetheless had much in common, including sheer tonnage. Surrounded by jabbering monkeys (us), they alone fathomed one another right down to their inner seasons, including the annual lethargy of “walking hibernation,” when polar bears chill out and become less animated, but don’t sleep the months away like other bears. Gus’s array of highly evolved gestures, sounds, skills and moods found its match in Ida.

All the rough and tumble of wet fur and snouts, the weightiness and float, the nubby nonskid (think spa-slipper) feet, and exquisite sense of smell, provided a sensory oasis that polar bears in the wild not only respond to but pursue with a fervor we humans might call passionate longing. Small matter if “passionate” and “longing” are only an unconscious hormonal tugging in the cells. It drives polar bears and other animals with a fierce impetuosity equal to our own.

Gus probably misses Ida’s familiar scent, since polar bears are wizards of smell who will march over ice ridges for 40 miles to reach prey they’ve whiffed, can tell which way a human went 14 hours before, and follow a breeding female simply by sniffing her tracks.

Many animals have singular personalities, preferences and idiosyncrasies. When they play together, they reveal different aspects of their temperaments, just as we do with friends and loved ones. So when Ida died, Gus not only lost his old mate, he lost those parts of himself that related to irretrievable parts of her. Could a new friend, welcome and distracting as one might be, fully replace the longtime bond he had with Ida?

We may never find out. The zoo is not likely to provide Gus with a new sidekick or mate. Wild polar bears are protected, so zoos must buy, barter or finagle bears from other zoos, where, because they’re not plentiful breeders, they’re prized and scarce. Also, at 25, Gus is elderly by bear standards. A lucky polar bear might live to 30 in captivity. So even if the zoo provides him with a new companion, she in turn could soon become the bereaved.

It shouldn’t surprise us that zoo visitors commiserate with Gus, because humans have always admired polar bears. To the Greenlanders, they’re revered as Masters of Helping Spirits; to the Lapps, they’re Old Men in Fur Coats. To New Yorkers, they’re a vision of the wild among us, emissaries from an Arctic realm most of us will never visit, a reminder of nature’s sublime strangeness and beauty.

People speak of Gus’s grief as if it were anomalous. But what if it’s just part of a large suite of ancient urges and instincts we share with hordes of other animals?

A 2005 study of elephant grief, reported in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, confirmed what experts have long sworn, that elephants pay homage to their fallen, visiting the remains of even long-dead relatives, and gently turning over the bleached bones with trunk or foot. Biologists tell of gorillas banging their chests with yowls of anguish during a wake for a fallen friend, of sea lions wailing when their babies have been mutilated by killer whales, of grief-stricken monkey mothers carrying dead infants around for days, of geese singing both halves of a duet when their partners have died.

We share many of our motives, feelings and instincts with other animals — fear, curiosity, sexual desire, hunger, social contact, defensiveness, hoarding and saving behaviors, status seeking, dominance, attachment and protectiveness, appeasement and submissive behaviors, family loyalty, depression, duplicity — to name just a few.

 

ONE summer, with the late, wonderful entomologist Thomas Eisner, I taught a course called “Love, Truth and Beauty” at Cornell. Tom taught it from the insect perspective, I from the human, but both were essentially the same. Insects give the equivalent of engagement rings, check a suitor’s bank balance, can be femme fatales, etc. What we call a “dinner date” other animals regard as “courtship feeding.” One person’s quest for knowledge is another animal’s exploratory curiosity. We leave home longing to be footloose and free; another animal may depart in search of resources, stimuli or a mate.

I’m not suggesting other animals share our mental fantasia. Alas, evolution doesn’t allow one species to travel fully into the mind of another. We see differently, hear differently, taste differently. Yet, to our credit, humans do try to understand the ways of lonely polar bears. We are deeply compassionate beasts. True, humans also wage wars and prey on one another, but most people can, and often do, feature the best of their animal nature while rising above the worst. We witness Gus’s grief and taste our own memories of love, loss and loneliness. Our wild heart goes out to him.

Something deep inside us remembers being accompanied by other animals. Even indoors, we surround ourselves with pet companions who help bridge the apparent no-man’s-land between us and Nature, between our ape-hood and civilization. However, a dog on a leash is not really tamed by its owner. It’s a two-way tether. The owner also extends through the leash that part of his personality which is pure dog, the part which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, mate and wet the ground in joy. Feeling compassion for other animals, whether it’s Fido or Gus, helps us tune in to the animal parts of ourselves that we know and love, bearish at times as we may seem.

Thanks to you and Stradee for confirming what I thought about the Valley Forge birch tree in the glass case - of course, it may be it really came from there in Revolutionary days and all those centuries later we just misplaced its paperwork! A very happy July 4th celebration to all of you, tree experts or not:)