Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Earthly Dream Is Realized in the Rain Forest
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
The beauty here is not necessarily for everyone. Pounded by up to 170 inches of precipitation each year, these grand old woods are wetter and grayer and gloomier than most. Then again, not every summer traveler seeks sunshine.

“I want to understand Earth,” said Ruth Lotter, interrupted while focusing her camera on one particularly large and dexterous root supporting a big spruce tree.

Make that the “Big Spruce Tree,” the one noted like so on maps and signs here in Olympic National Park: 270 feet tall, at least 500 years old. Several miles south, signs point out a “Big Cedar Tree.”

The mix of mystical and trivial makes Ms. Lotter giggle, and she giggles well. She is 49 and Austrian and she likes the road. She fell in love with the California Redwoods 15 years ago and is certain she was transformed by a trip to study stromatolites — ancient rock structures that form in shallow water — in Australia two years ago. She also had a remarkable moment near here this summer. She was at Cape Flattery, the northwestern-most point in the contiguous United States, and she had been worrying about being sad. Then she decided to stop worrying.

“I realized, ‘When I’m sad, be sad.’ And in that moment, I was happy.”

That got her giggling again.

It was raining as she spoke. “It’s funny that it’s raining in the rain forest,” she said. A moment later, a new carload arrived at the big spruce tree and a woman in the group began reciting its statistics. “You can’t look up at it,” the woman said. “You’ll get wet.”

Ms. Lotter said she had dabbled in shamanistic travels, maybe a little witchcraft now and then. “Dream journeys,” she calls them. But she keeps circling back to the physical world.

“The real thing is the real thing,” she said. “The more I understand Earth, the more I’m impressed.” WILLIAM YARDLEY

sumac, That must have been a momentuous occasion --- most of times when I'm sad I just think of the thing that caused my sadness....................... Then, I say, " F' them if they can't take a joke."

Here is a giggle for you --- Seattle, WA is known for it's rain fall --- New York City has more rainfall per year than Seattle!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

True!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love ya all ------ keep those clicks aclicking___________

Saved another tree today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

uly 29, 2011
Removing Barriers to Salmon Migration
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Beginning late this summer, one of the most promising and pure acts of environmental restoration the region and the nation have ever seen will get under way here, experts say, in the form of the largest dam removal project in American history.

It will demolish two massive hydroelectric dams, one of them 210 feet high, that block the otherwise pristine flow of the Elwha River, nearly all of which is within the boundaries of this remote national park.

For a century, since the first dam was built in 1912 to supply power for the town of Port Angeles and later a lumber mill, salmon have been trying, futilely, to follow their genetic GPS upstream on the Elwha. Instead, five miles south of where they enter the river from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, they hit a concrete wall.

“They pool at the bottom and go in circles,” said LaTrisha Suggs, the assistant director of river restoration for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. “They swim up, they swim down, they swim up, they swim down.”

Biologists say that will change once the dams are fully removed, sometime in 2014, and that a migrating salmon population that has declined to about 3,000 fish will steadily begin replenishing itself from a small stock carefully perpetuated in rearing channels since the 1970s to preserve their lineage as “transitional species.”

These Chinook — one of six salmon species, all of which exist in the Elwha — are distinct from salmon that enter Puget Sound and those that spawn in rivers off the Pacific Ocean. Models show that up to 392,000 fish will fill 70 miles of habitat now blocked by the dams, matching the predam peak. Chinook here once grew as big as 100 pounds, and experts say they should reach that size again.

“Because of the habitat we have,” said Brian Winter, the park’s project manager for the restoration project, “we expect success.”

It will have taken a long time and a lot of money to achieve. The first President George Bush signed off on the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act after it was passed by Congress in 1992, and momentum had been building for more than a decade before that. The total cost, $350 million, includes paying for new power sources and water treatment plants in the area as well as fish hatcheries and extensive revegetation projects.

The restoration of the Elwha comes as dams, often facing expiring operating licenses, are to be removed from several prominent rivers, including the White Salmon in Washington and the Penobscot in Maine. Four dams are scheduled to be removed in the Klamath River in southern Oregon in 2020.

Many conservationists see this as momentum for more ambitious goals, most notably their push to breach four dams on the Lower Snake River in eastern Washington that provide electricity, water and a channel for barge traffic between the ocean and the powerful agricultural interests inland. Their hopes increased when President Obama recently nominated Rebecca Wodder, the former president of American Rivers, which has pushed for dam removal on the Snake and elsewhere, to become assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks. The nomination, which has yet to be confirmed, is widely opposed by dam supporters.

Yet even advocates for larger dam removals acknowledge that they can draw only limited comparisons between the remote Elwha and dams like those on the Snake. The two dams on the Elwha, the Glines Canyon Dam and the Elwha River Dam, provided enough power on average for about 14,000 homes and allowed for no fish passage. The dams on the Snake can power a city the size of Seattle and have elaborate systems for fish passage, though a federal judge has repeatedly found them inadequate.

Even as it is planning to ambitiously promote the Elwha restoration, the Obama administration opposes removing the dams on the Snake, as did administrations before it. The judge, James A. Redden of the Federal District Court for the District of Oregon, is expected to rule soon on a government plan to improve protections for salmon in the Snake and Columbia Rivers.

Here on the Olympic Peninsula, the National Park Service has helped lead a branding effort that includes posters and stickers saying “Elwha River Restoration; Natural Wonders Never Cease.” Local museums are collecting equipment from the powerhouse, which stopped producing power in June. A festival is planned in Port Angeles around the start of the removal in September. The public will be able to watch the dam removal from platforms during the next three years.

“Our Plan A is to use hydraulic hammers,” said Brian Krohmer, the project manager for the contractor overseeing the removal, Barnard Construction. “Plan B is explosives.”

The dams will be lowered slowly from top to bottom — “kind of like eating a corncob, just going back and forth,” Mr. Krohmer said — to regulate the downstream flow of sediment accumulated behind them so it does the least damage to the river and the people below.

While experts say the habitat surrounding the river is pristine except for the dams, removing them has required extensive new plumbing elsewhere. The Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, which has lived at the mouth of the river for thousands of years and has opposed the dams since they were built, is being connected to the sewer system next door in Port Angeles for the first time because of evidence that its septic system could be damaged by rising groundwater.

The reservation will also be protected by a levee that has been raised, widened and fortified with rocks as large as four feet across because the sediment flowing downstream will raise the level of the freed Elwha. The tribe wants all of this, but after a century of living with a tamed river and adapting as development increased on the peninsula, there is also concern.

“What worries me is that the river’s going to be unpredictable after they take the dams out,” said Ron Boulstrom, 46, a lifelong resident of the reservation and a commercial fisherman. “Four more years and I’ll have my house paid off, and I’m making a nice new garage. Hopefully, the river won’t take me out.”

Then again, according to tribal lore, the tribe’s creation site was flooded by the dams. And there are the Chinook, also called king salmon, remembered in stories told from generation to generation, but now too depleted to fish.

“Back in the day, we had this whole place, the hills, the mountains,” Mr. Boulstrom said. “I’d like to catch another king out of the Elwha in my lifetime.”

July 29, 2011
Twilight of the Glaciers
By STEPHEN P. NASH
AN hour or so up ahead, at the higher elevations along the trail that leads over Siyeh Pass, huckleberries were ripening. Even a dawdling day hiker like me knows that huckleberries can quickly mean grizzlies in Glacier National Park. I indulged a nervous tic and patted around for the loud red aerosol can on my belt, whose label reads Counter Assault. It’s effective as a bear repellent, but even more reliable at making an urbanite feel faintly ridiculous.

I was in northwest Montana for the hikes and the huckleberries, but most of all to experience the namesake glaciers, which, I had recently learned, might be around for only another decade or so. Given that a century and a half ago there were 150 and now there are 25, the trip makes me an enlistee in the practice known by a somewhat prickly term: last-chance tourism.

For now, though, there are still glaciers to be seen. The park’s skein of well-maintained trails traverses every section of its million-plus acres and can accommodate any level of ability, from backpackers to the sheets-and-coverlets crowd. Even visitors who prefer to commune with nature through a car window can be awed by the views of the Jackson and Blackfoot Glaciers from Going-to-the-Sun Road, the often car-choked highway that more or less bisects the park west to east.

And for those who want to get closer, some serious legwork over steep terrain can put you right next to both the Grinnell and Sperry Glaciers, respectively a day and an overnight’s hike away. There are other glaciers to be glimpsed in the distance during a hike, but they can’t be reached by trails. These are excursions that require ice ax, ropes or crampons: the well-sequestered Pumpelly Glacier, for example, at 8,420 feet, and its close neighbor, the Pumpkin Glacier.

Other glaciers are nearer a trail, but still display their remote and frigid glory at some distance, and in a way the craggy surroundings make them even more vivid. I chose the Siyeh Pass Trail because it affords a prolonged, spectacular view of the Sexton Glacier from below.

Alpine glaciers like Sexton don’t look like peaks or cubes. A couple of miles into the hike, as the trail opened into a valley, it came into view: a massive, ragged smear of snow-laden ice, perched just under the sawtooth granite skyline.

My audio track, meanwhile, was the cascading water of Baring Creek, which runs parallel to much of the trail. Descending from the glacier, it charges over a series of red-rock ledges and then makes its way down into the azure St. Mary Lake far below.

As the trail continued, the bottom edge of Sexton became visible — a violent crumble, broken loose by gravity and temperature. Glaciers are forceful, slow-flowing rivers of ice. With binoculars, I could see Sexton’s thickness and true magnitude. The perspective also offers, if you’re up for it, a rather stunning view into the future. As I pushed ahead, a graying volunteer ranger approached me at a nimble gait. No bears sighted, he reported. (O.K.!) He was a veteran of decades here, it turned out. We craned our necks up at the still-formidable Sexton, and he said that it had once looked far larger to him. I read later that it has, in fact, lost at least 30 percent of its surface area since the mid-’60s.

There are several measures of what qualifies as a glacier. One generally accepted rule of thumb is that they are a minimum of 25 acres in size. The most recent report has Sexton at 68.

I moved on, ascending the switchbacks that pull the Siyeh trail up toward the 8,000-foot pass. I was well above tree line by now, and only a few peaks away from the Canadian border. Not far off, out on the moraines, a quartet of mountain goats appeared, munching and then settling.

A good idea. I was tired, too. According to Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage,” which follows the cross-country trek of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Lewis was able to bushwhack 30 miles in a day. I was going to do 11, and without the whacking. (The Lewis and Clark expedition came within sight of these mountains in 1806.)

As I rested I heard women’s voices come from up the trail, sounding like an exuberant traveling book group. They seemed delighted to find a sprawled, worn-out guy to greet in passing. “How do you like it? This is our backyard!” the leader announced, adding that they were from Kalispell, Mont., just southwest of the park. I responded in superlatives, and asked whether folks here talk much about what’s happening with the glaciers.

There was a pause and the temperature seemed to decline a degree or two. “God will take care of everything we need,” one said.

“I don’t think man has anything to do with that,” her friend put in.

(A bartender at one of the lodges, not-authorized-to-speak-publicly-on-the-matter, confided that not all locals share these views.)

After a bit, they warmed enough to point out some huckleberry bushes nearby. (This is a popular shrub around here, and not just for bears; after a few days in the area, I can attest to the virtues of locally marketed huckleberry beer, jam, pie, syrup, Riesling, lip balm, French toast, soda, cobbler, lemonade, ice cream, daiquiris, tea and milkshakes.)

Retracing my steps back down to the trailhead, I was alone again — not a wise practice, according to park brochures. Lewis recounted that one grizzly, already shot four times through the lungs, charged and dispersed a six-man hunting party while its stalwarts were still firing. Still, over the past hundred years, and despite tens of millions of visitors, only 10 fatal grizzly attacks have been recorded here. They do, however, take up a fair portion of mind space.

The Siyeh Pass Trail can either be an extended loop or a somewhat shorter out and back of about 11 miles — the option I chose. As I headed back down into the valley it wasn’t much of a stretch to think of the looming Sexton as alive. The pressure of the glaciers’ weight causes the ice to flow forward over the landscape; colder temperatures allow for a buildup of ice, which speeds up the flow. Heat — a warmer day, season or era — is the competing force, and the glaciers ebb. That movement is a defining feature, part of what makes glaciers distinct from your more prosaic all-year patches of snow.

The day before, I had spoken with Daniel Fagre, who coordinates climate change and glacial geology studies here for the United States Geological Survey. He is a 20-year veteran of research at the park. The retreat of the glaciers began around 1850, he said, as part of a slow, natural climatic variation, but the disappearing act has accelerated during the last hundred years. Until recently, his research projected that, as global warming hit its stride, the park’s glaciers would all be gone by the year 2030. Now he thinks it may be as soon as 2020.

Outsize snows this past winter, which kept many park roads and trails closed well into July, could briefly forestall the meltdown, but the longer warming trend is inexorable, he said.

No reprieve? “No, I think we are continuing on that path,” he said.

The science is preliminary, but it’s clear that this loss will be more than aesthetic for the park’s ecosystem, he said. Those glacial reservoirs provide a steady supply of cool meltwater through hot summers and dry spells, helping to sustain a constellation of plants and animals, some rare — big-horned sheep, elk and mountain goats among them.

Passing again under the glacier as daylight faded, the trail neared its end. Those prospective losses weighed heavily — nostalgia, of a sort, laced with dread.

MORE pleasantly, the park celebrates nostalgia of a different sort — from the Art Deco typography on the official signage to the fleet of low-slung, roll-top tour buses known as “red jammers,” which date from the ’30s. These ply the roads between robber-baron-era hotels, offering full- and half-day tours to various sections of the park ($30 and up).

There’s a wealth of accommodations along the eastern and western boundaries of the park, especially in the towns of East Glacier Park and West Glacier. Despite their names, these towns, with populations of only a few hundred each, are more like distant cousins than identical twins. West Glacier, half an hour from the Kalispell airport, is generally newer, and sprawls.

East Glacier Park, two and a half hours north of the Great Falls, Mont., airport, is a charming, tumbleweedy throwback with a string of weathered eateries and motor-court lodgings that are only slightly post-World War II. There’s also the Backpacker’s Inn, a combination hostel and super-cheap motel with a mostly youthful clientele who like the clean, spare single rooms for $30 a night. I’ve stayed in each of these places a time or two, but this night — after a fiery, pepper-laden dinner of enchiladas pasillas at Serrano’s Mexican restaurant among a crowd of other glacier-gawkers and local ranchers — I opted for the Mountain Pine Motel. It has endured, with appearance and ambience intact, since 1947. The owners are descendants of the pioneer Sherburne family that helped settle the park area in the 1890s.

Nearby is the century-old Glacier Park Lodge, a grandly creaky log cabin writ very large. There are three such concessioner-run legacy hotels at the park, erected by the Great Northern Railroad to lure tourism. My favorite is the Many Glacier Hotel, a darkly comical but generally comfortable old wooden monstrosity with a Swiss theme (the bellhops wear lederhosen). Its broad verandas face a transfixing view of a horizon of pinnacles that surround Swiftcurrent Lake — one of 131 named lakes in the park (631 others are as yet unnamed; feel free to follow my example and name a few after your friends).

When my wonderful clawfoot tub leaked onto the occupants of the room below, the two repair-crew guys who showed up grinned and shrugged after some futile work: that’s kind of the way this place is, they said. The only other available room was infested with bats, and smelled like it, I was told. It was a great stay, just the same. Half of the hotel is being renovated all this season and is closed, along with one of the dining rooms.

The Many Glacier Hotel is also the start of one of the park’s most popular hikes, to Grinnell Glacier. The 8- or 10-mile hike is strenuous, though less so than the Siyeh Pass Trail, and the payoff is that you can get within a stone’s toss of the glacier itself, the surface area of which is more than twice Sexton’s.

I embarked with a ranger-guided group on Chief Two Guns — a trim 45-footer, built locally and hauled up here somehow 50 years ago — for a quick trip over Swiftcurrent Lake. Then a short walk to another boat, the even older Morning Eagle, across Lake Josephine to the trailhead. The boats moved past a shifting panorama of jagged rock faces, slender waterfalls, and high above, the destination glacier. The trail is often crowded, but that scarcely registers in these surroundings. Hikers stop to catch a breath and find it taken again by the view out over the string of lakes, far below, fed by Grinnell’s meltwater. Connected by cascades, each lake is a deeper blue than the one above.

After three hours of steady ascent and a final quarter-mile of hard climbing, the trail ends at the foot of the glacier and an iceberg-studded, expanding lake. The lake does not appear on old maps, according to the ranger. It is a byproduct of the fact that Grinnell’s surface is 40 percent smaller than a half-century ago.

Above the lake, the glacier is a wide, tilted skirt of ice whose hem you can almost touch, brilliant under the sun even when it’s dirty with wind-blown grit by the end of the season. It seems immense, too big to disappear, and nearly crowds everything else from consciousness. The ranger said that until a few seasons back you could walk out onto the lower edge of it, which is too thin now to bear human weight safely.

Seaweed-like stromatolite fossils embossed in the cracked rocks along the trail supply a Precambrian perspective of perhaps a couple of billion years. But it is the view out over this lake of meltwater that grabs the imagination far more urgently.

A question hangs up there with the remnant glacier, which may soon be converted to a few patches of ice: what comes next?

Great and very thoughtfull article, sumac........... Thanks for the memories.

I lived in Fairbanks, Alaska for 2.5 yrs - back in the very early '70's - when it was really cold during the winter months. Now it apparently hardly reaches freezing temps.

A friend told me that he and another guy were fishing when one morning they were sitting around the campfire and the other guy got a strange stare with big eyes. My friend looked around and saw a huge grizzly bear coming towards them. He pulled out his 357 Magnum pistol and emptied it at the bear - at first the bear didn't stop - then, finally, fell at his feet.

Same thing with people - during the Vietnam thingy I saw people do the same thing - with all the adrenaline pumping, they still come shooting even though they are dead. Really strange stuff.

Bad times.

The best time is today - we saved another tree.................. And it's asmiling.

Glad you liked the article. Haven't found any yet today but did do my clicking.

Ok, standing by - er, sitting by to see what you find.


OK - EVERYONE READY??

HAPPY B'dAY AKT?????

Yes, happy birthday to all.


August 1, 2011
Call of the Thylacine: Protect the Wild
By SEAN B. CARROLL
KAKADU NATIONAL PARK, Australia — Eleven thousand miles from my home in Wisconsin, this national park is one of my favorite places on the planet — a vast area of wetlands, woodlands and rock formations that is home to a fantastic array of wildlife.

Kakadu (pronounced KACK-a-doo), one of Unesco’s World Heritage sites, has almost 300 bird species (more than a third of Australia’s birds), more than 60 mammals and more than 120 reptiles, including large saltwater crocodiles, monitor lizards and, oh yes, lots of snakes, the object of one of my earliest boyhood fascinations.

In addition to seeing some of its dangerous residents — from a respectful distance — I am hoping to rediscover the image of a magnificent marsupial, the thylacine, that I first saw on a visit more than 20 years ago. The image is still etched in my memory — not because I saw it in the flesh, but because it was painted on a rock.

You see, the species went extinct on the Australian mainland about 3,000 years ago. The rock painting, at one of more than 5,000 art sites in Kakadu, must have been made by an Aborigine hunter-gatherer about that time, preserving for posterity the image of an animal now long gone from Kakadu.

And what a creature it was. Weighing about 60 pounds and bearing powerful jaws, the thylacine had a doglike skull, was about the height and shape of a Doberman, and had tigerlike stripes on its back that may have helped conceal it in the bush from its prey. Recent studies of thylacine skeletons suggest that it was a solitary ambush predator like a tiger, and not a pack hunter like a wolf.

Even after extinction on the mainland, thousands of thylacines were still roaming the island of Tasmania when European settlers arrived in the 19th century.

The fate of the Tasmanian thylacines is all too familiar. Despite scant evidence of any real threat to livestock, the settlers placed bounties on thylacines and their pups, and hunted their natural prey. In just 130 years, the combined pressures led to the disappearance of the thylacine in the wild. The last thylacine died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936.

I want to find that Kakadu thylacine again. To help me, I have spotters: my sons, Chris, a filmmaker; Patrick, an aspiring screenwriter; and Will, a music student. They will film the journey and what we see along the way.

The drive from Darwin to Kakadu is one of my favorite stretches of road anywhere. Besides passing through such colorfully named hamlets as Humpty Doo, it offers great wildlife spotting as we enter the wetlands of this tropical region.

This part of the Northern Territory can receive many feet of rain in the monsoon season, from December to March, filling rivers, billabongs and great floodplains that nourish vast bird and fish populations. In some spots the water appears to be boiling with small fish, which are feasted upon by egrets, jabirus and hawks. In trees nearby, 30 or more sulfur-crested cockatoos are raising a ruckus.

After entering the park, we cross our first big river. On the east bank we see two large saltwater crocodiles sunning themselves. The river is named the South Alligator because that’s what an early an explorer thought these creatures were. Big mistake. The crocs are larger and much more dangerous than American alligators. Every body of water in Kakadu is lined with warning signs, and some who have ignored them have paid with their lives.

With a cloudless sky, temperatures in the high 80s and low humidity, the landscape seems unusually green for the dry season. I am told that the wet season lasted later than usual this year. That should bode well for wildlife.

Many of Kakadu’s mammal and reptile residents are nocturnal, so some of the best action unfolds after dark. Sure enough, as dusk falls my headlights pick up the reflection of a snake on the road. Approaching very carefully, I can see from its spotted pattern and head that it is a young Children’s python, about 30 inches long.

While Australia is notorious for its many species of venomous snakes, this is not one of them. The 20 species of pythons can get much bigger than this little guy; on previous visits I have seen pythons pushing 10 feet.

Still, I am thrilled. This is a big part of what we came for.

A hike the next day to the Nourlangie art site does not turn up any thylacines, but park rangers calmly point out a small snake curled up near one beautifully painted rock face. They seem reluctant to identify it. No wonder. I recognize the striped camouflage of the death adder — a name that would not inspire comfort among other onlookers.

The second night, we see another small Children’s python, a few very small legless lizards — and, to my dismay, cane toads by the dozens.

This species is not native to Australia. It was brought to Queensland in 1935 to control a pest called the cane beetle. Not only was the measure an abject failure, the introduction of this prolific and hardy invasive species has been an ecological catastrophe.

Throughout their life cycle the toads produce potent toxins that are fatal to most mammals, snakes and lizards. The toads have advanced across northern Australia at a rate of about 15 miles per year and reached Kakadu’s southern boundary in 2000-1.

When I visited six years ago, I saw nowhere near as many toads. And my worry is compounded when I fail to spot two species that were once common here: the large monitor lizard called the goanna and a small, spotted carnivorous marsupial, the quoll.

My fears are confirmed when I meet with Michelle Ibbett, an Australian mammal expert. Dr. Ibbett explains that Kakadu’s mammals have been severely stressed, not just by the arrival of the toads, but also by questionable fire-management practices.

While the aboriginal residents of Kakadu used patchwork burning to clear space and to reduce the risk of major fires, large parts of the park are now being burned deliberately and repeatedly without adequate consideration of the effects on wildlife. And because the goanna population has been decimated by toads, the many burrows they would normally dig are not available to serve as refuge for other species — snakes, lizards and mammals.

The scientific data are heartbreaking. A recent study by John Woinarski and colleagues at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory revealed a very recent, rapid and severe decline of native mammals in Kakadu. The biologists surveyed 25 species in more than 130 plots over 13 years. They observed that the number of species declined by 54 percent per plot, and the number of animals by 71 percent.

Moreover, plots with no mammals at all increased to 55 percent in 2009, from 13 percent in 1996. Of 19 native species recorded from multiple plots, 10 showed declines and none showed any increase. Several are on the road to extinction.

The scientists said the small-mammal populations of Kakadu were in “collapse,” and they placed the blame largely on cane toads and fire-control practices. In a large conservation reserve, such a collapse is nothing less than a catastrophe.

On our last full day in Kakadu, we hike around the sandstone formations of the Ubirr region and visit the art sites in northern end of the park. There, on the west face of a great gallery, about 30 feet off the ground, I finally spot that image of the thylacine I had first seen long ago, about 12 B.C. (before cane toads).

I now see the image on the rock not as a cultural relic but as a warning call. It was a few thousand years after that painting was made at Ubirr that a naturalist, David Fleay, entered the zoo enclosure in Hobart to film a male thylacine. He did not know that his 62-second black-and-white film would be the final, poignant record of the last thylacine to walk the planet.

But that thylacine made perhaps the most fitting gesture off camera, one that served as its own final commentary on the entire history of human-thylacine relations and on our failure to act in time to save the species. Mr. Fleay, operating the camera with his head under a black cloth, did not notice that the thylacine had sneaked up behind him. The carnivore then bit him squarely on the buttocks.

Kakadu was until very recently thought to be immune from the extinctions that have plagued much of Australia’s native fauna. That bite needs to be felt by many more buttocks — not just in Australia but across the globe, where invasive species, ineffective management and wishful thinking imperil the wild places and creatures that still remain.

sumac, here is a pic of the animal - however, it must be an earlier photo because there are two.

The weather is so hot here in TX that several of my plants are going extinct.

110 degrees today.

Great clicks all.

August 1, 2011
As We Seek Nature, We Wall It Out
By DIANE ACKERMAN
Graced by beautiful rings and ridges on their shells, diamondbacks look like a field of galaxies on the move. They inhabit neither freshwater nor sea, but the brackish slurry of coastal marshes. Mating in the spring, they need to lay their eggs on land, so in June and July they migrate to the sandy dunes of Jamaica Bay. The shortest route leads straight across the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport.

Never mess with a female ready to give birth. On June 29, more than 150 diamondback terrapins scuttled across Runway No. 4, delaying landings, halting takeoffs, foiling air traffic controllers, crippling timetables and snarling traffic for hours. Cold-blooded reptiles they may be, but they are also ardent and single-minded.

Don’t the plucky turtles notice the jets? Probably not as monsters. Even with polka-dot necks stretched out, diamondbacks don’t peer up very high. And unlike, say, lions, they don’t have eyes that dart after fast-moving prey. So the jets probably blur into background — more of a blowy weather system than a threat. But planes generate a lot of heat, and the turtles surely find the crossing stressful.

Mounted on the shoreline of Jamaica Bay and a federally protected park, indeed almost surrounded by water, J.F.K. occupies land where wildlife abounds, and it’s no surprise that planes have collided with gulls, hawks, swans, geese, and osprey. Or that every summer there’s another turtle stampede, sometimes creating two-hour delays.

People around the world became obsessed with the plight of the quixotic turtles, a drama biblical in its proportions (slow, sweater-necked Samsons vs. steely Goliaths). It defied reason that small reptiles would take on whirring leviathans whose gentlest tap may crush them and whose breath can blow them to kingdom come.

Many people also felt a quiver of disquiet, of something elemental out of place. Supposedly, in our snug, walled-in cities, we’re keeping nature in check, growing docile plants, adopting pets and erecting a buffer of steel and cement. If wild turtles can find their way into suburbia, can larger animals be far behind, ones with fangs and teeth, whose red eyes pierce the night?

The answer is yes; it happens more often than one supposes. Chicago is home to hundreds of coyotes, which have been tracked near strip malls, in parks, and even in residential neighborhoods. Last year, New Jersey hosted a six-day black bear hunt. Moose regularly pay house calls in Alaska, stomping into yards and onto porches, looking for grub. Giant antlers and all, they can leap chain-link fences. On many a golf course in Florida, alligators create an extra water hazard, and lakeside settlers know to keep their Chihuahuas indoors. Mountain lions forage in Montana cities; cougars stalk joggers in California; elk stroll through housing tracts in Colorado. At least one Brooklyn woman found a 7-foot-long python in her toilet. We forget that the animal kingdom is a circle of neighbors who often drop by unannounced.

The myth of our sprawly, paved-over cities and towns is that we’ve driven native animals out and stolen their habitat. Not entirely true. We may drain the marshes, level forests and replace meadows with malls, exiling some animals. But, because we also need nature, we create a new ecology that happens to be very hospitable to wild animals. In some ways, it’s more inviting than wilderness. We install ponds, lawns, groves of edible trees. We leave garbage on the curb and design flowerbeds that are well-watered and well-fed, serving a smorgasbord of delicacies.

We can’t help ourselves; we evolved to feel part of nature’s web. So we erect walls to keep nature out and take pride in scrubbing dirt and dust from our homes. Then we fill our houses with bouquets of flowers, adopt pets and scent absolutely everything that touches our lives. We seat windows in our walls, install seasons (air-conditioning and heat) and fasten at least one noonday sun in every room to shower us with light. Confusing, isn’t it?

In my hometown upstate, we’re blessed by lots of wild animal visitors, from star-nosed moles and foxes to eagles, otters and skunks. White-tailed deer are so numerous that they qualify as residents. Each year, I line up behind a dozen cars on a busy highway as a caravan of Canada goose chicks waddles across in a single line between guardian geese, apparently unfazed by motorized honking.

Like the turtles at J.F.K., they remind us that, even with egos of steel and concrete plans, we’re easily humbled by nature in the shape of snowflakes, goslings or turtles — all able to stop traffic. They also remind us how conflicted we really are about nature.

Diane Ackerman, whose recent books are “One Hundred Names for Love” and “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” is a guest columnist.

110? I am incredulous. Does that mean that it is 90 when you get up?

The locals have obviously decided to let bygones be bygones, suggest you do the same Picture taken 2 weeks ago - USN destroyer anchored at Danang:
http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20110715/NEWS02/110719889

HS - please don't get me wrong. I love the country Vietnam and have nothing but respect for the people I met there. I think the whole nation is really beautiful and if able would love to go back and visit. Not for war reasons - but to see really pretty countryside. All the people I spoke with while over there were really nice and polite. I was drafted and thrown into something not nice. The world isn't great everywhere we go when in service to our country. My only reason for saying what I wrote is --- It's true and I compared it to one of sumacs articles. We are all animals and all die the same in our various ways. Sorry if it upset you.

Thanks for visiting and clicking.

Shell Gets Tentative Approval to Drill in Arctic
By JOHN M. BRODER and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
WASHINGTON — The Department of the Interior on Thursday granted Royal Dutch Shell conditional approval of its plan to begin drilling exploratory wells in the Arctic Ocean next summer, a strong sign that the Obama administration is easing a regulatory clampdown on offshore oil drilling that it imposed after last year’s deadly accident in the Gulf of Mexico.

The move confirms a willingness by President Obama to approve expanded domestic oil and gas exploration in response to high gasoline prices and continuing high levels of unemployment. It comes as the issuing of drilling permits in the gulf is quickening, including the granting on Thursday of a permit for a Shell floating drill rig for a 4,000-foot-deep well. That means that that all five of its rigs there will be back to work after a long drilling halt.

The decision to tentatively approve Shell’s plan to drill four exploratory wells in the Beaufort Sea off the North Slope of Alaska represents a major step in the company’s efforts to exploit the vast oil and gas resources under the Arctic Ocean, although some hurdles remain.

The company has spent nearly $4 billion and more than five years trying to win the right to drill in the frigid waters, against the opposition of many environmental advocates and of Alaska natives who depend on the sea for their livelihoods.

Opponents say the harsh conditions there heighten the dangers of drilling and make cleaning up any potential spill vastly more complicated than in the comparatively benign waters of the gulf.

Administration officials cautioned that the company must win a number of secondary permits before it can begin punching holes in the seabed. The plan approved Thursday, considered the overarching one, contains detailed information on how the company would respond to any blowout and spill.

“We base our decisions regarding energy exploration and development in the Arctic on the best scientific information available,” said Michael R. Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which oversees offshore drilling. “We will closely review and monitor Shell’s proposed activities to ensure that any activities that take place under this plan will be conducted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner.”

Shell enthusiastically welcomed the decision. “We feel very good about it,” said Pete Slaiby, Shell’s vice president in Alaska. “It’s one of the road marks we wanted to see. It makes us very happy.”

But the announcement only partly smooths the rocky relations between the administration and the oil industry, with the president remaining committed to repealing $4 billion in annual oil company tax breaks. The administration has also been wary of encouraging the industry’s aggressive plans to drill in shale oil and gas fields across the country because of concerns about potential drinking water contamination.

“This strikes me as a shift back to the track that the administration was on prior to last year’s oil spill,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environment fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It seems the lesson that the administration took is that offshore drilling needs to be regulated better and done better, not that it shouldn’t be done at all.”

The plan is almost certain to face legal challenges.

“No drill bits are going to hit the Arctic seafloor until at least one and probably several courts have reviewed this plan,” said Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is already suing to stop drilling in the Chukchi Sea west of Alaska. “From the perspective of ocean drilling and climate, it’s hard to see a difference between this administration and the last one.”

Shell still needs to win approval of its drilling plan for the Chukchi Sea, which is west of the Beaufort Sea and more remote.

The company has proposed drilling four wells at a depth of approximately 160 feet of water about 20 miles from shore in the Beaufort Sea. The BP well that exploded in the gulf in April 2010 was at a depth of more than 5,000 feet and 40 miles from the Louisiana coast. The accident killed 11 workers and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf.

Energy experts and industry executives said the move on Thursday reflected a partial warming of relations between the oil industry and Obama administration since the BP disaster.

“I don’t know if I would call them friends yet, but I look at this as a step in the right direction,” said Craig T. Castille, operations manager for deepwater projects at Stone Energy, who added that the permit process in the Gulf of Mexico remained slower than the industry would like.

Shell has spent years trying to convince federal regulators and several courts that it can drill safely in the Arctic, and every year one hurdle or another has stood in its way.

Shell has already invested nearly $4 billion on its 10-year offshore leases and preparations for exploration in the forbidding Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Its current plan is to drill up to 10 exploratory wells in the two seas, potentially leading to production by the end of the decade.

Shell has been obliged over the years to tighten its spill response plan, especially since the BP accident at the Macondo well in the gulf. It is proposing to use two drill ships in the Arctic, each capable of drilling a relief well for the other; to put an extra set of shears on its blowout preventers; and to keep emergency capping systems near drill sites to capture any leaks.

The Alaskan Arctic may hold 27 billion barrels of oil, enough to fuel 25 million cars for 35 years. But environmentalists warn that a spill in the Arctic would be more catastrophic than the Gulf of Mexico accident was because the Alaskan waters are dark and inaccessible, and because they are vital breeding grounds for many aquatic species that are endangered or at risk.

Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Environment Group’s Arctic program, said that the region was the harshest area in the world in which to drill for oil, as well as a delicate habitat for a variety of sea mammals. The proposed well sites are subject to fierce winds and high seas in the fall and lie hundreds of miles from the nearest Coast Guard stations.

“Hard questions need to be asked about any oil company’s ability to mount a response to a major oil spill in hurricane-force winds, high seas, broken and shifting sea ice, subzero temperatures, and months of fog and darkness,” Ms. Heiman said in an e-mail from Alaska.

John M. Broder reported from Washington, and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

sumac, I've flown over that sea and it's really scary to see. One fall into that ice and it's all over for anyone.

Hoping it doesn't get the go ahead.

happy clicking all-------------

thank you for saving another tree today.............

AND YES, we have saved another tree today-----------

A tree asmiling per day is really good.!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks all for clicking

Hoping that you start to cool off, Danon. I think we may be finished with the 100 degree weather for a while. Every morning I look at the forecast and know that you are not much lower than Dallas.

Yes Maam, The temps will be under the hundreds about this coming weekend--- And then we will (hopefully) have lower temps for a few days...............

Every morning I go out in my front yard and water the plants --- AND trees................

So far so good they are alive..........................!

The trees said Thank You to me..............