Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Good morning wildclickers. Crisp fall day here in the Carolinas with an overnight low of about 47.

2010 Tied for Warmest on Record So Far

LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com
Mon Oct 18, 11:55 am ET

This year has been a steamy one so far, with the first nine months tied for the warmest on record with the same period in 1998, according to a new report looking at combined land and ocean surface temperatures.
The global average land surface temperature for January-September was the second warmest on record, behind 2007; and the global ocean surface temperature for that stint was also the second warmest on record, behind 1998.
The report was put out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climate Data Center and includes records going back to 1880.
Here are some of the highlights:
For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 58.67 degrees Fahrenheit (14.75 degrees Celsius) tied with 1998 as the warmest January-September period on record. That record is 1.17 degrees F (0.65 degrees C) above the 20th century average.
The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for September 2010 tied with 1998 as the eighth warmest month on record at 59.9 degrees F (15.5 degrees C).
The September 2010 global land surface temperature was the ninth warmest September on record.
Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the world's land areas this year. The most prominent warmth was in western Alaska, most of the contiguous United States, eastern Canada, Greenland, the Middle East, eastern and central Europe, western and far eastern Russia and northeastern Asia.
Cooler-than-average regions included much of Australia, western Canada, parts of the northern United States, parts of western and central Europe, and central Russia.
Arctic sea ice reached its annual minimum on Sept. 19, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The 2010 average extent of 1.89 million square miles (4.90 million square kilometers) was the third lowest September sea ice extent on record (30.4 percent below average).
Antarctic sea ice reached its annual maximum in September, and marked the third largest sea ice extent on record (2.3 percent above average), behind 2006 (largest) and 2007 (second largest).

Plays Well with Others

Gilbert Chin
"If you were in Rome, live in the Roman way" is an aphorism adopted by many a visitor to a strange land. Nonverbal behavioral mimicry of a person by another individual often goes unnoticed by either, yet is generally thought to promote togetherness and affiliation and has been found to enhance positive feelings such as liking and trust. Leander et al. describe a series of experiments aimed at assessing how potent this influence might be. They show that Asian-American and African-American students performed better and worse, respectively, on a math test after having been the target of unobtrusive mimicry during a getting-to-know-you conversation, whereas there were no differential gaps for people of the same ethnicities whose gestures and movements had not been mirrored. A similar pattern of stereotype-consistent performance could be induced in men versus women by mimicry; furthermore, the positive and negative increments in math test scores were larger in men and women who thought that these stereotypes reflected societal beliefs, regardless of whether the people personally endorsed those views. An intriguing point raised by these findings is that the affective benefit of fitting in with others might motivate conformist behaviors.
J. Exp. Soc. Psychol. 46, 10.1016/j.jesp.2010.09.002 (2010).

I certainly agree with that, sumac. When in Korea one of the first things I got was a briefing about local customs and what NOT to do.

Good articles - both.

ctober 18, 2010

Killer of Aspen Slows, but Worries About a Beloved Tree Remain

By KIRK JOHNSON

GUNNISON, Colo. — Aspen trees, with their quivering, delicate foliage and the warm glow of color they spread across the high country of the Rocky Mountains this time of year, have an emotional appeal that their stolid, prickly evergreen cousins do not.

So tree lovers and scientists alike felt the impact when the aspen in the West started dying around 2004 — withering away in a broad band from here in southwest Colorado through the mountains of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico and into Wyoming.

“There’s definitely something powerful about these trees,” said James Worrall, a forest pathologist for the United States Forest Service, gazing at a brilliant yellow swath of healthy aspen in a stand in the mountains here, about four hours southeast of Denver.

“It’s partly, I think, an emotional impression,” he said. “Partly a very real impression that the aspen is very important in our forests — hydrologically, biologically, to wildlife, every kind of way you can imagine.”

The good news is that the phenomenon known as sudden aspen decline, or SAD, appears to have stabilized, Dr. Worrall and other researchers say. Individual trees are still dying, since the process can take years to unfold, but many stands of trees are holding their ground against any new onset.

A sudden severe drought and heat wave early in the decade set off the decline, according to a paper co-authored by Dr. Worrall this year in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. Wetter, cooler seasons since then — more to the aspen’s liking — have halted SAD’s spread. Other evidence supports the weather as the cause. Although the aspen is the most widely distributed tree species in North America, the die-off struck mostly in the Southwest, where the drought beginning in 2002 was most severe. And lower elevations were affected more than upper ones, which tend to be cooler and wetter.

“It was a really large stressor to the trees, and that made them more susceptible to other things — there’s pretty good comfort among scientists that that was what was going on,” said Dan Binkley, a professor of forest ecology at Colorado State University, who was not involved in Dr. Worrall’s paper.

The new research delivers some bad news as well. It has shown how profoundly vulnerable aspen are to environmental events outside their niche. In keeping with their delicate image, they do not like sudden weather shifts.

And the 2002 drought was a doozy. The winter was dry, with snowpack about half the long-term average in much of the aspen heartland here in Colorado. Early heat then melted what snow there was weeks ahead of average, and June arrived with searing temperatures about six degrees above average, which fried the already weakened trees.

Long-term climate projections, Dr. Worrall and other scientists say, all point to more curveballs ahead — wider, more severe fluctuations and variations of hot, dry, wet and cold.

Gerald Rehfeldt and others at the forest service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho, using three climate models and carbon-dioxide projections, concluded that stable aspen climate could be lost in at least two-thirds of the tree’s habitat area in Colorado and southern Wyoming alone by 2060.

“It’s the extremes of variation that gets the aspen — not the average,” Dr. Worrall said.

The aspen is, of course, not the only tree affected by changes in weather and climate. But different species respond in different ways. Millions of lodgepole pines have also died in the West in recent years, killed by beetles that are natural predators and control agents for the trees — but which have gone out of control, many ecologists say, because the cold winters that once kept beetle populations in check have not been happening the way they used to. In other words, lodgepoles have always been killed by beetles; climate patterns simply tilted the relationship out of whack.

In contrast, aspen die-off of the magnitude and pace seen in the last few years had never been recorded, Dr. Worrall and others said. The weakened trees became vulnerable to a fungus and a tiny beetle that had in the past mostly fed on dead or dying aspen and had not posed a serious threat.

Because aspen are relatively short-lived by tree standards — 100 years is long in the tooth, 300 is Methuselah — tree ring studies that might show how the species fared in some of the devastating droughts in the past 1,000 years or so in the West are hard to come by.

But the West’s perennial anxiety over water makes the research into that question — the aspen’s response to drought — more crucial than ever.

Colorado has more aspen than any other state in the West, and it is also the fountainhead for major river systems that tens of millions of people depend on, including the Rio Grande, the Colorado and the Arkansas. Water generated in Colorado’s high mountains travels through 17 states and Mexico.

Aspen stands, acting like sponges or underground reservoirs, hold much of those headwaters in place, growing where things are wettest and coolest, and adding greatly to the water storage capacity of the mountains.

Aspen stands are also centers of biodiversity in a forest. Many insects and plants have evolved in conjunction with trees, which provide shelter for elk and other animals in the most severe winter weather.

But there is hope for the species — and perhaps an indicator that it has dealt with setbacks before and recovered — in the peculiar properties and strengths of its reproductive system.

Aspen, unlike evergreens, do not usually grow from seeds, but rather by vegetative reproduction, sending up suckers from a mother tree. (Aspen seeds — tiny and nutrient-poor — can become established only under unusual conditions.) For a tree solely dependent on seed reproduction, recovery from an event like SAD would be a much slower road.

In perhaps the oddest twist of all, aspen are in some places colonizing areas of the Rockies where they did not exist in recent years, filling in spaces with their quick-shot sucker system that were once home to hardier-looking lodgepoles, killed off by beetle attack.

October 18, 2010

Hickory Rain

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

It’s well before light, and I’m listening to the rain, watching every now and then the flicker of headlights coming down the hill. I no longer have custody of Ethel the border terrier, so I’m up early on my own.

She was itemized in a divorce settlement and now lives in Iowa, where I know she’s happy. I hope she misses me, but not nearly as much as I miss her.

Without her, the rhythms of the day ahead are different. Somehow there’s more time for the horses, which is perhaps why Nell the mustang let me catch her when the farrier was here. At first she shied away, to keep up appearances. When the other horses had been trimmed she presented herself to my arms, and it was a much more beautiful day after that.

I have new chickens — layers eight weeks old. When they were living under lights in the mudroom as chicks, I made a practice of picking them up, those that would let me. And now when I enter the poultry yard, I feel like a one-man midway at the chicken fair, birds standing in line waiting to be picked up.

No good can come of lifting chickens. I can almost hear my dad thinking that, though he is gone now, too. And yet the birds churr and cluck, and I leave the yard happy.

The chicken house my dad and I built soon after 9/11 has begun to sink on one end, thanks to the woodchucks. That gave me an excuse to buy a bottle jack, which I’ll slip under the sill and, with it, jack the house back to level. The place will feel more trim, and it will keep water from running out of the chicken waterers, which will matter once the freeze begins.

It’s hard to explain where happiness comes from when so much has been lost and misplaced and set aside. But come it does. This is one of those mornings when I think I have a farm just to surround me while I work. The chickens will be darting in and out of the rain, the fall of hickory nuts will continue, and the horses will stand around an upended hay bale in the shed on the hill, looking as though they’ve got a game of three-handed pinochle going.

October 18, 2010

In Kansas, Climate Skeptics Embrace Cleaner Energy

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

SALINA, Kan. — Residents of this deeply conservative city do not put much stock in scientific predictions of climate change.

“Don’t mention global warming,” warned Nancy Jackson, chairwoman of the Climate and Energy Project, a small nonprofit group that aims to get people to rein in the fossil fuel emissions that contribute to climate change. “And don’t mention Al Gore. People out here just hate him.”

Saving energy, though, is another matter.

Last Halloween, schoolchildren here searched for “vampire” electric loads, or appliances that sap energy even when they seem to be off. Energy-efficient LED lights twinkled on the town’s Christmas tree. On Valentine’s Day, local restaurants left their dining room lights off and served meals by candlelight.

The fever for reducing dependence on fossil fuels has spread beyond this city of red-brick Eisenhower-era buildings to other towns on the Kansas plains. A Lutheran church in nearby Lindsborg was inspired to install geothermal heating. The principal of Mount Hope’s elementary school dressed up as an energy bandit at a student assembly on home-energy conservation. Hutchinson won a contract to become home to a $50 million wind turbine factory.

Town managers attribute the new resolve mostly to a yearlong competition sponsored by the Climate and Energy Project, which set out to extricate energy issues from the charged arena of climate politics.

Attempts by the Obama administration to regulate greenhouse gases are highly unpopular here because of opposition to large-scale government intervention. Some are skeptical that humans might fundamentally alter a world that was created by God.

If the heartland is to seriously reduce its dependence on coal and oil, Ms. Jackson and others decided, the issues must be separated. So the project ran an experiment to see if by focusing on thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity, it could rally residents of six Kansas towns to take meaningful steps to conserve energy and consider renewable fuels.

Think of it as a green variation on “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Ms. Jackson suggested, referring to the 2004 book by Thomas Frank that contended that Republicans had come to dominate the state’s elections by exploiting social values.

The project’s strategy seems to have worked. In the course of the program, which ended last spring, energy use in the towns declined as much as 5 percent relative to other areas — a giant step in the world of energy conservation, where a program that yields a 1.5 percent decline is considered successful.

The towns were featured as a case study on changing behavior by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And the Climate and Energy Project just received a grant from the Kansas Energy Office to coordinate a competition among 16 Kansas cities to cut energy use in 2011.

The energy experiment started as a kitchen-table challenge three years ago.

Over dinner, Wes Jackson, the president of the Land Institute, which promotes environmentally sustainable agriculture, complained to Ms. Jackson, his daughter-in-law, that even though many local farmers would suffer from climate change, few believed that it was happening or were willing to take steps to avoid it.

Why did the conversation have to be about climate change? Ms. Jackson countered. If the goal was to persuade people to reduce their use of fossil fuels, why not identify issues that motivated them instead of getting stuck on something that did not?

Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is “solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer,” a poll conducted in the fall of 2009 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed — far fewer than in other regions of the country.

The Jacksons already knew firsthand that such skepticism was not just broad, but also deep. Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped some Kansans define themselves.

Nevertheless, Ms. Jackson felt so strongly that this opposition could be overcome that she left a job as development director at the University of Kansas in Lawrence to start the Climate and Energy Project with a one-time grant from the Land Institute. (The project is now independent.)

At the outset she commissioned focus groups of independents and Republicans around Wichita and Kansas City to get a sense of where they stood. Many participants suggested that global warming could be explained mostly by natural earth cycles, and a vocal minority even asserted that it was a cynical hoax perpetrated by climate scientists who were greedy for grants.

Yet Ms. Jackson found plenty of openings. Many lamented the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. Some articulated an amorphous desire, often based in religious values, to protect the earth. Some even spoke of changes in the natural world — birds arriving weeks earlier in the spring than they had before — leading her to wonder whether, deep down, they might suspect that climate change was afoot.

Ms. Jackson settled on a three-pronged strategy. Invoking the notion of thrift, she set out to persuade towns to compete with one another to become more energy-efficient. She worked with civic leaders to embrace green jobs as a way of shoring up or rescuing their communities. And she spoke with local ministers about “creation care,” the obligation of Christians to act as stewards of the world that God gave them, even creating a sermon bank with talking points they could download.

Relatively little was said about climate.

“I don’t recall us being recruited under a climate change label at all,” said Stacy Huff, an executive for the Coronado Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, which was enlisted to help the project. Mr. Huff describes himself as “somewhat skeptical” about global warming.

Mr. Huff said the project workers emphasized conservation for future generations when they recruited his group. The message resonated, and the scouts went door to door in low-income neighborhoods to deliver and install weatherization kits.

“It is in our DNA to leave a place better than we found it,” he said.

Elliot Lahn, a community development planner for Merriam, a city that reduced its energy use by 5 percent, said that when public meetings were held on the six-town competition to save energy, some residents offered their view that global warming was a hoax.

But they were very eager to hear about saving money, Mr. Lahn said. “That’s what really motivated them.”

Jerry Clasen, a grain farmer in Reno County, south of Salina, said he largely discounted global warming. “I believe we are going through a cycle and it is not a big deal,” he said. But his ears pricked up when project workers came to town to talk about harnessing wind power. “There is no sense in our dependency on foreign oil,” he said, “especially since we have got this resource here.”

Mr. Clasen helped organize a group of local leaders to lobby the electronics and energy giant Siemens to build a wind turbine factory in the area. When the company signed a deal in 2009 promising to create as many as 400 local jobs, it stirred a wave of excitement about the future of wind power.

Now, farmers expect to lease some of their land for turbines and rely on wind power as a stable source of income, he said, and land prices are rising as result.

“Whether or not the earth is getting warmer,” he said, “it feels good to be part of something that works for Kansas and for the nation.”

sumac, that Kansas one sounds like the county in TX where I live. Everyone absolutely KNOWS the answer to all the worlds problems. And, they have NEVER been outside the county lines............. Lord help us.

Thanks for all the interesting articles.........

Ahh, I get to respond to my own post -----
Dan, You're right on...................

Thanks for the clicks everyone.

Good morning wildclickers. All clicked and on the prowl for good articles. I think therre is another good one out there about Tea Party people and climate change.

October 20, 2010

Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith

By JOHN M. BRODER

JASPER, Ind. — At a candidate forum here last week, Representative Baron P. Hill, a threatened Democratic incumbent in a largely conservative southern Indiana district, was endeavoring to explain his unpopular vote for the House cap-and-trade energy bill.

It will create jobs in Indiana, reduce foreign oil imports and address global warming, Mr. Hill said at a debate with Todd Young, a novice Republican candidate who is supported by an array of Indiana Tea Party groups and is a climate change skeptic.

“Climate change is real, and man is causing it,” Mr. Hill said, echoing most climate scientists. “That is indisputable. And we have to do something about it.”

A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Skepticism and outright denial of global warming are among the articles of faith of the Tea Party movement, here in Indiana and across the country. For some, it is a matter of religious conviction; for others, it is driven by distrust of those they call the elites. And for others still, efforts to address climate change are seen as a conspiracy to impose world government and a sweeping redistribution of wealth. But all are wary of the Obama administration’s plans to regulate carbon dioxide, a ubiquitous gas, which will require the expansion of government authority into nearly every corner of the economy.

“This so-called climate science is just ridiculous,” said Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. “I think it’s all cyclical.”

“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”

Whatever the party composition of the next Congress, cap and trade is likely dead for the foreseeable future. If dozens of new Republican climate skeptics are swept into Congress, the prospects for assertive federal action to control global warming gases, including regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, will grow dimmer than they already are.

Those who support the Tea Party movement are considerably more dubious about the existence and effects of global warming than the American public at large, according to a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted this month. The survey found that only 14 percent of Tea Party supporters said that global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now, while 49 percent of the rest of the public believes that it is. More than half of Tea Party supporters said that global warming would have no serious effect at any time in the future, while only 15 percent of other Americans share that view, the poll found.

And 8 percent of Tea Party adherents volunteered that they did not believe global warming exists at all, while only 1 percent of other respondents agreed.

Those views in general align with those of the fossil fuel industries, which have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it.

They have created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science, and generated scores of economic analyses that purport to show that policies to reduce emissions of climate-altering gases will have a devastating effect on jobs and the overall economy.

Their views are spread by a number of widely followed conservative opinion leaders, including Mr. Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, George Will and Sarah Palin, who oppose government programs to address climate change and who question the credibility and motives of the scientists who have raised alarms about it.

Groups that help support Tea Party candidates include climate change skepticism in their core message. Americans for Prosperity, a group founded and largely financed by oil industry interests, has sponsored what it calls a Regulation Reality Tour to stir up opposition to climate change legislation and federal regulation of carbon emissions. Its Tea Party talking points describe a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions as “the largest excise tax in history.”

FreedomWorks, another group supported by the oil industry, helps organize Tea Party rallies and distributes fliers urging opposition to federal climate policy, which it calls a “power grab.”

“Any effort to make electricity and fuel more expensive or to cap or regulate CO2 will only exacerbate an already critical situation and cause tremendous economic damage,” FreedomWorks says on its Web site.

The oil, coal and utility industries have collectively spent $500 million just since the beginning of 2009 to lobby against legislation to address climate change and to defeat candidates, like Mr. Hill, who support it, according to a new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a left-leaning advocacy group in Washington.

Their message appears to have fallen on receptive ears. Of the 20 Republican Senate candidates in contested races, 19 question the science of global warming and oppose any comprehensive legislation to deal with it, according to a National Journal survey.

The only exception is Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican Senate nominee in Illinois, who was one of only eight Republicans to vote for the House cap-and-trade bill sponsored by Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, both Democrats. (One of the other Republican “yes” votes was cast by Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware, who blames that vote in part for his primary election defeat by Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate and a global warming skeptic.)

A large majority of Tea Party-supported House candidates also doubt global warming science and oppose energy legislation designed to address it.

Mr. Young, the Indiana Republican nominee trying to unseat Mr. Hill for the Ninth Congressional District seat, strongly opposes cap and trade and other unilateral measures to combat global warming. He says he is uncertain what is causing the observed heating of the planet, adding that it could be caused by sunspots or the normal cycles of nature.

“The science is not settled,” he said in an interview in his headquarters in Bloomington, Ind. And he said that given the scientific uncertainty, it was not wise to make major changes in the nation’s energy economy to reduce carbon emissions.

A third candidate in the Indiana Congressional race, Greg Knott, a libertarian, said he accepted the scientific consensus on climate change but opposed a nationwide cap-and-trade system as the answer.

Lisa Deaton, a small-business owner in Columbus, Ind., who started We the People Indiana, a Tea Party affiliate, is supporting Mr. Young in part because of his stand against climate change legislation.

“They’re trying to use global warming against the people,” Ms. Deaton said. “It takes way our liberty.”

“Being a strong Christian,” she added, “I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”

God help us from true believers.

World's longest cat — Stewie — measures 4 feet

Wed Oct 20, 3:27 pm ET

RENO, Nev. –
The world's longest cat measures more than 4 feet, stealing the record from another Maine Coon. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that 5-year-old Stewie was certified as the new Guinness World Record holder after measuring 48 1/2 inches from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail bone. That's a little more than 4 feet long.
The record was previously held by another Maine Coon that measured 48 inches.
Stewie's owners, Robin Hendrickson and Erik Brandsness, say they decided to try for the record after hearing countless people say they were amazed by Stewie's length.
Hendrickson said Maine Coons are known as "the gentle giants" of the cat world.
Click image to see other Guinness world records

October 20, 2010

Tiles, Farms and the Dead Zone

Every year, usually beginning in late spring, an oxygen-depleted dead zone forms in the Gulf of Mexico at the Mississippi River’s mouth, killing off fish, shrimp and other marine life. By the time cooler weather restores life to the zone, the fishing industry has sustained substantial losses.

Scientists have long known that the dead zone — this year it covered 7,000 square miles — is created largely by nitrate washed downstream from fertilized fields as far north as Minnesota. A study in the Journal of Environmental Quality by scientists from Cornell University and the University of Illinois has now conclusively identified the largest source of that nitrate: tiled farm fields.

For as long as farmers have been farming in the Midwest, they have been laying drainage tile — often perforated plastic tubes installed 2 feet to 4 feet below the surface — to drain wetlands and create arable fields in places that would normally hold standing water. The problem is that the system also sluices away nitrogen fertilizer, which eventually flows through tributaries into the Mississippi and ends in the Gulf of Mexico.

Mark David, a University of Illinois researcher, observed that “farmers are not to blame.” We agree. Tiling is as old as Midwestern farming. What’s needed now is more research and direct incentives from the Agriculture Department to find ways to mitigate this problem.

These include: restoring wetlands, where possible; growing cover crops to absorb water in the spring, when runoff is heaviest; different methods of applying fertilizer; and even methods of treating the runoff before it reaches creeks and rivers. Sacrificing life in the gulf for corn in the fields is a trade-off that has to stop.

Arn't Maine Coons just to adorable?

They are the sweetest cats. When i worked at the shelter, somehow a Maine Coon was trapped by someones a-hole neighbor. Probably a senior who couldn't get to a shelter to search for her baby...happened way to often, imo.

Anyhooo, the Maine had a virus that made him wobbly. Two other cats that were also with him in the hospital section (where i worked) walked on either side of the Maine to give him balance. Wonderful animals. A vet who saw the Maine decided to adopt him and take him home. One of the luckier cats.

The shelter is now 'no kill'...and after seeing countless ferals destroyed, the new policy will certainly curtail people trapping animals just because they can.

I no longer work or volunteer at the shelter.

clicked

Oh, my goodness, when I lived in FL (Tampa) I had a male cat who would daily go around the neighborhood and spray his really wild scent everywhere.... Well, instead of killing him -- I trapped him one day and after a lot of bleeding I lofted him into the trunk of my car. Then, I drove him about 50 miles away and opened the trunk and the cat never appeared around our houses again.

Oh, well.............

Dan, that wasn't a bad thing you did. Feral cats are just that...feral. I'd luv to give them all good homes. Ferals will also pick a person to live with. Yep...Bootsie brought me her and five babies and after spay/neuter and plenty of love, the babies were adopted to loving homes. Bootsie and Bella were adopted by me.

I can't tell you how many ferals spent days at my house...resting, eating, gaining strength, then moving on. I'm laughing because for years it was horses and dogs...who knew about cats? Well, the universe must know what its doing because i was so fortunate to have met, loved, and cared for the herd.

Amanda celebrated her 20th birthday in September, and my Bella was 14 in June. Missing the rest, but thanking God for my blessings.

Beautiful artwork, ehBeth.

It would have been a whole lot easier and kinder just to have had him neutered.