@danon5,
The earth yes, humans i worry about!
A history lesson in a few paragraphs works for me.
Today cleaned the shed, dragged out Sweets saddle, cleaned with glycerine soap then a bowl of olive oil(applied with a paint brush)...and i cannot believe how nice the leather looks and feels! Even the leather straps (that felt like cardboard) turned out good! Nice memories also.
Hung a wind sock with Autumn bright colors of leafs and streamers from the porch, then thought 'dang, looks like an elf with no head'! So now it lives on the maple tree and is catching the wind beautifully. Luv Fall colors!
Have a good evening all ~
@sumac,
Good article sue! Whole Foods color codes fish packaging so shoppers know where the fish are from...wild caught (abundant) wild caught (overfished) or raised in a fish farm. Good idea, however, the overfished varieties won't be here much longer.
China sending Krill boats? Great. A perfect excuse for the Japanese to keep hunting whales in the Southern Ocean. They're next 'scientific' excuse will be "China's taking all the whale food"!
tired
Arctic sea ice shrinks to third lowest area on record
1 hr 49 mins ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Arctic sea ice melted over the summer to cover the third smallest area on record, US researchers said Wednesday, warning global warming could leave the region ice free in the month of September 2030.
At the end of the spring and summer "melt season" in the Arctic, sea ice covered 4.76 million square kilometers (1.84 million square miles), the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center said in an annual report.
"This is only the third time in the satellite record that ice extent has fallen below five million square kilometers (1.93 million square miles), and all those occurrences have been within the past four years," the report said.
Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC, warned the Arctic ice cover was shrinking year-round, with more ice melting in the spring and summer months and less ice forming in the fall and winter.
"The Arctic, like the globe as a whole, is warming up and warming up quickly, and we're starting to see the sea ice respond to that. Really, in all months, the sea ice cover is shrinking -- there's an overall downward trend," Serreze told AFP.
"The extent of Arctic ice is dropping at something like 11 percent per decade -- very quickly, in other words.
"Our thinking is that by 2030 or so, if you went out to the Arctic on the first of September, you probably won't see any ice at all. It will look like a blue ocean," he said.
The record low for Arctic sea ice extent was in 2007, when at the end of the spring and summer "melt season", ice covered just 4.13 million square kilometers (1.595
@sumac,
That's scary about the ice melt. It's getting faster and faster. I have been noticing the Winter temps in Fairbanks, AK since I lived there for almost three years. It used to the cold in Winter, now, it barely freezes.
Here is a funny for you gals.
The next time someone asks you a dumb question wouldn't you like to respond like this?
Yesterday I was at my local Wal-Mart buying a large bag of Purina dog chow for my loyal pet, Biscuit, the Wonder Dog and was in the checkout line when woman behind me asked if I had a dog. What did she think I had: an elephant? So, since I'm retired and have little to do, on impulse I told her that no, I didn't have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again. I added that I probably shouldn't, because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I'd lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Purina nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.)
Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stepped off a curb to sniff an Irish Setter's ass and a car hit us both. I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard. Wal-Mart won't let me shop there anymore.
Better watch what you ask older or retired people. They have all the time in the world to think of crazy things to say.
@danon5,
Hey Wildclickers,
if you know about good trees for planting in the Portland, Oregon can you come over here and help out Boomerang
http://able2know.org/topic/161342-1
Thanks
@ehBeth,
Don't even have to go there --- lived in Gig Harbor, WA for almost twenty years......
Alder............ That's the tree of choice. It, to me, is the best smoker in the whole tree kingdom. There are four great smokers : hickory, apple, cherry and alder. To me, Alder is by far the best smoker of all the biggies..........
And, fresh, green and straight off the tree is the best of all.
Ahhhhhh, I can smell it now. And the taste!!!!!!!!!!
@danon5,
no no no
we need you to go and give boomer the advice on her thread
HOT linked this thread but if someone else picks that thread up someday in the future, it would be most useful to have the answer over by the question
September 16, 2010
In Search of the Grizzly (if Any Are Left)
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
PASAYTEN WILDERNESS, Wash. — Past the asters and aspen and subalpine fir, past the quick, cold creeks and the huckleberry hillsides, the bear hunter stopped and cocked his tweezers.
“Here,” said Bill Gaines, a wildlife biologist for the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, “is the mother lode.”
Caught on a prong of barbed wire that he had strung weeks earlier in these remote mountains was a tantalizing clue: strands of light brown bear hair.
“Oh, look at that, look at that root right there,” he said. “That’s really good.”
It will be months before DNA tests tell the full story: did those hairs belong to a black bear, a relatively common resident here, or were they snagged from the far more elusive grizzly? The last confirmed sighting of a grizzly in the North Cascades was in 1996.
Now Mr. Gaines is leading the most ambitious effort ever to document whether grizzlies still exist here — a century after fur trappers and ranchers killed them off by the hundreds — at a time when tension is high in the West over the fate of wild predators like gray wolves. While many people want the grizzlies, an endangered species, to make a comeback here, others worry that more bears will mean more conflict.
“Grizzlies are a threat to livestock and to humans,” said John Stuhlmiller, the director of government relations at the Washington State Farm Bureau. “People might think they’re neat and they might want to go see them in the zoo, but in the wild they’re not a friendly, cuddly creature.”
People whose livelihoods are not threatened by predators do not get it, Mr. Stuhlmiller said. “If my 401(k) was being raided by grizzly bears, I would think differently,” he said.
For nearly 30 years the federal government has had a program to help restore the grizzly bear population in Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming. It has made a difference in places like Yellowstone National Park and the Continental Divide region of Montana, but not in the North Cascades, one of six designated recovery zones. Instead, this area has been locked in a virtual standstill as political winds shift over the preservation of large predators.
Grizzlies were named a protected species in 1975. Under protection, their population tripled in parts of the Rockies and by 2007, they were removed from the list. But last September, a federal judge in Montana ordered grizzlies back on, citing threats that included changes to their habitat caused by climate change.
In the North Cascades, wildlife officials agreed 13 years ago to conduct a formal environmental review to determine the best way to ensure recovery, including augmenting the population with bears from elsewhere. But the money needed for the review, $1 million to $2 million, has never been allocated by the perpetually strapped agency that oversees the effort, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
Now experts say only a handful of grizzlies may remain in the North Cascades, likely crossing back and forth over the border with Canada.
“If these bears are to have a future,” said Joe Scott, the international program director for Conservation Northwest, “the United States and British Columbia governments must do their job — boost Cascades bears with a small number of young animals from areas where grizzly bears are more numerous.”
Federal wildlife officials say politics and budget limitations force difficult questions.
Chris Servheen, the grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, who has worked on the program since its inception in 1981, said the anger among ranchers and some state governments over wolf reintroduction, and the issue’s constant churn through federal courts, had bred mistrust in wildlife agencies that has hurt the prospects for bear recovery in some areas, at least in the near term.
“We don’t really have people jumping up and down to put grizzlies anywhere at this point, people in the Congress that is,” said Mr. Servheen, who is based in Montana.
There is even disagreement over whether it matters if grizzlies roam these mountains, given the species’ relative health elsewhere and the plight of more endangered species.
“Is it so critical to the future of grizzly bears as a world species if the North Cascades fades away?” said Doug Zimmer, a spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “Just asking that makes my teeth hurt.”
Yet small steps are being taken. If the study in the North Cascades proves that grizzlies still live in the area, advocates for recovery will probably face less political opposition. This is because they would be augmenting the historic population, not trying to rebuild the population from scratch when there were no bears at all.
Either way, Mr. Gaines, who wrote his doctoral thesis on black bears, wants to know that he has tried as hard as he can to learn what is out here, he said.
This summer and early fall, with money from a $90,000 federal grant, Mr. Gaines has hired horse teams and a temporary six-member research crew to trek deep in the wilderness, far from where most people hike. The crew has set up about 90 corrals, surrounding pungent bear bait of fish guts and road kill with barbed wire designed to snare bear hair as animals make their way to and from the stew. Every two weeks the crews collect bear hair and memory cards from digital infrared cameras mounted at the corrals.
Asked whether the search so far has yielded firm evidence, he noted that black bears and grizzlies can be surprisingly easy to confuse. He said that he would not draw conclusions until the DNA tests come back but that the crews were searching in areas considered to be ideal grizzly habitat.
“We’re looking in the right places,” he said.
@ehBeth,
Fabulous tribute, Beth!!
Many Happy Returns, Dan ~
@sumac,
My goodness all........ Thanks for the memories --- and I have a LOT of them........
Actually, I don't have birthdays anymore - Big Grin!!!!!
However, my body is feeling the age --- 68 years.
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you...............all..........!
September 17, 2010
Thousands of Trees Killed by New York Tornadoes
By N. R. KLEINFIELD and ELISSA GOOTMAN
As National Weather Service officials declared Friday that two tornadoes had indeed swept into New York City on Thursday, some tree-lined streets in Brooklyn and Queens looked - at least from the air - like Lego masterpieces that angry children had done their best to sweep aside.
Some were more than a century old but still sturdy and doing their jobs. Many others were young and willowy, just getting going. Some of them were inscrutable; no one truly knew them or how they got there. But others felt like old friends. They were wonderful for their blissful shade, to climb, to simply stare at and admire.
They were the most visible evidence of the fleeting but brutal storm that barged through New York City on Thursday evening: the ravaged trees.
There was a beloved scarlet oak that had stood forever in a farm family’s cemetery in Queens. There was a Callery pear that parrots preferred on a street in Brooklyn. Trees that had stories to them that were now prematurely finished.
The tragedy of the storm, which meteorologists said Friday included two tornadoes, was Aline Levakis, 30, from Mechanicsburg, Pa., the sole person to die, when a tree, as it happened, hit her car on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens.
Buildings and houses were severely damaged, thousands of customers lost electricity and many commuters were inconvenienced.
But destroyed were thousands of trees — trees torn out of sidewalks, others flung 30 or 40 feet through the air, still others shorn of branches, cracked in two.
On Friday, as the city plowed ahead in the painstaking process of cleaning up the wreckage and repairing damage, it was still too early to tabulate a reliable tree death count.
The city has over 100 species and more than five million trees, some as old as 250. Clearly the loss was great.
Adrian Benepe, the city’s parks commissioner, estimated that as many as 2,000 of the 650,000 street trees had been killed or else so crippled that they would have to be cut down.
Mr. Benepe said hundreds of the two million trees in the parks were killed or damaged beyond hope. Hundreds more lost limbs.
Storms periodically batter the city’s trees. A freak storm in August of last year toppled about 500 trees in Central Park.
The storm on Thursday left Manhattan and the Bronx virtually unscathed but was merciless in the other boroughs.
“It’s hard to compare to previous storms,” Mr. Benepe said, “but given the brevity of the storm, the extent of the damage seems unparalleled.”
As workers began carving up the trees and trucking them away, they found decimated oaks, Norway maples, catalpas, and more and more.
Mr. Benepe said the older, larger trees, like the maples, oaks and London planes that were planted along city streets, suffered worst. They have a lot of leaf surface that catches the wind, and they are inflexible.
Many Callery pears, with their showy white blossoms, also went. Although smaller, they are weak-wooded.
The storm wiped out a dozen or so willow trees lining Willow Lake and Meadow Lake in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Some of them fell into the lakes.
On the blocks around Juniper Valley Park in Middle Village, Queens, hundreds of elderly elms, oaks and maples succumbed. Youngsters — 7 to 10 years old — were yanked out like matchsticks and whipped through the area.
Robert Holden, president of the Juniper Park Civic Association, walked around the bruised neighborhood on Friday snapping pictures of fallen timber.
One majestic tree, regarded as the neighborhood’s treasure, was an immense scarlet oak in the Pullis Farm Cemetery, an early American farm family burial ground. It was believed to be more than 110 years old. It was a beauty, just about perfectly symmetrical.
“When you touched the tree, you felt like you were touching a part of the 19th century,” Mr. Holden said.
The storm tore it down, ending its long life in a blink.
“This hit me the hardest,” Mr. Holden said. “Some people said can we pick it up and put it back? But you can’t.”
In All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village stood another cherished tree, a towering live oak thought to be 180 years old. It was about 90 feet tall. After the storm, all that remained was the bottom 12 feet.
“It was a cool-looking tree,” said Daniel C. Austin Jr., the cemetery’s vice president. “It had these beautiful arms. Every time we drove by it, we used to talk about it.”
Grief was palpable in Forest Hills Gardens, a private nest of Tudor and Georgian homes in Queens that is one of the city’s greenest neighborhoods, home to hundreds of trees.
It was only recently that the residents’ association planted 70 more — maples, oaks and London planes. These newcomers, so much life left in them, bore the brunt of the storm.
Edward and Vera Ward, who live just outside the enclave, stroll through the neighborhood every day, drawn by the serenity and welcoming shade of the tall trees.
On Friday, Mr. Ward, 58, was snapping pictures of men sawing a supine tree into bits.
“It’s like a part of me is gone,” he said, and his eyes welled up.
An elderly man was mourning a maple tree that he had planted outside his house on Dartmouth Street when he was a teenager. It grew as he grew. It was one more that the storm took.
In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a Callery pear tree stands across the street from the house of Nick Lerman, 27, a Brooklyn College student. Almost two-thirds of its canopy had been ripped off.
“I’m looking at maybe 37 percent of a tree,” Mr. Lerman said. “Now it kind of looks like a bald guy with half a tonsure.”
He said parrots shuttled back and forth from the tree to the one across from it. He said he hoped that the tree would live, that the parrots would still have it.
Reuben Slater had his own tree-loss story. He is 13 and lives in Park Slope. When he walks to school, he passes a massive ash tree with a trunk that gives way to branches that form a V. When he was younger, he thought of it as the tree of life.
The storm carved off half the V. The tree is expected to survive, but to no longer resemble its old self. That saddens Reuben. He sees a tree “with a broken arm.”
He snatched a small branch off the ground. He said he would keep it in his room. “I’m going to name it Pablo,” he said. “I’ve always loved that name.”
Fernanda Santos and Rebecca White contributed reporting.
September 17, 2010
Dark Comes
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
I don’t go looking for the places of deep comfort on this farm. They call out to me. Why does the mounded hay in the horses’ run-in shed look so inviting? Why does the chicken house — warm and tight and brightly lit — feel like a place where I could just settle in? I climb the ladder to the hayloft and the barn cat watches me warily from his redoubt in the hay bales. I feel like getting my sleeping bag and joining him.
Night comes, but the fog comes first, dragging the last light with it across the hilltops. The leaves have started to fall — just ones and twos, but already scorched into autumn colors. It is still too warm for the woodstove, the kind of evening that feels like summer in mourning, though without any real sadness. On a night like this, “grieving” sounds like the noise the wind would make if it got into the attic.
Real autumn is a long way off yet, no matter what the pumpkins say. The sight of them at the farm stands seems to jerk me forward, and I am not ready. I want to consume the particulars of the day ahead of me, one by one.
I was away from the farm for two days this week, and it sprang ahead without me. The bees, uproarious around the hive-mouth when I left, are nowhere to be seen in the dusk, though I know they’ll be out again in the morning.
That hive is another place of comfort. I don’t know whether their labor feels like labor or whether necessity is joy to them. I never see the bees coming and going without wondering what so much kinship means. I loved the education Merlin gave the young King Arthur in T. H. White’s “The Once and Future King,” turning him into creature after creature. I teach myself the same way every day I’m at the farm.
VERLYN KLINKENBORG
@sumac,
Neat sumac, that was a surprise to me about the two tornadoes in NYC...........
All clicked.
All clicked and good Sunday morning wildclickers.
