Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

sumac, Ouched!!!!!!

But, you're right...............

Stradee, thanks for all the great stuff..................Love Ya............

gOOD CLICKING ALL YOU WILDCLICKERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Good Saturday morning, all wildclickers. Went down into the upper 30's last night and the furnace is on to take the chill out of the air. Have clicked and will look for an interesting article or two.

Good Sunday Wildclickers!

Giants are going to the Series!!!!!!!!!!

Niners tied with the Panthers...4th quarter

Raining torrents for the Sierras...warm and cozy indoors...

I'm luvin this day

woot

Send the torrents of rain here, Stradee.

Niners lost...they were ahead and then they lost...sigh

Raiders kicking butt in Denver 31-6

Maybe the Niners can beat Denver in England next week. hope

Sending rain...dancing and chanting

hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Interesting misty/foggy day here. Raining occasionally.

Had a nice evening at a Hafla yesterday after dinner with new friends.

We took the dogsters to the Beach for a sashay this afternoon. Nice once I put Set's windbreaker over my polar fleece AND my puffy vest. I was a bit of a vision, but I was comfy and we had a great walk.

Click!

Sounds as if it was a cold day as well. Good to see you, ehBeth. Got in around 6 clicks today before I was stopped.

Wow, how cool are you?? Really a cool person..............

Hello all good Wildclickers!!!!!!!!!!!

Thanks for making a tree asmiling again today.......

Good morning wildclickers. Will try that multiple voting again this morning.

Good afternoon all ~

Brrr, so cold today...rain & snow tomorrow (double chill)

Out and about now...stay warm wildclickers

October 25, 2010

How the King Cobra Maintains Its Reign

By SEAN B. CARROLL

I can remember the first time I saw one, at the St. Louis Zoo, and the feeling that certain death was just on the other side of the glass. I could not get over the snake’s size — this one was about 12 feet long. I was used to looking at giant snakes in zoos (I always made a beeline for the reptile house), but pythons did not seem so scary to me because they rarely moved. This sleek, agile and very alert snake was a king cobra, the largest venomous snake in the world and an icon to all snake enthusiasts, including this writer.

The king cobra’s venom is not, ounce for ounce (or milligram for milligram, as the professionals would measure it), the most potent. Among land snakes, that honor appears to belong to the inland taipan of Australia. But what the king cobra lacks in potency, it makes up for in volume. Its half-inch fangs deliver a huge dose, up to seven milliliters of venom, or about one-quarter of a whiskey shot glass. The lethality of venom depends on a combination of its potency, the volume delivered and the size of the victim. A king cobra bite can kill a human in 15 minutes and a full-grown elephant in a few hours.

What makes these cobras kings is not just their size, or their deadliness — after all, they don’t eat humans or elephants — it is that they eat other snakes. Even deadly snakes like kraits or other cobras are prey. These snakes bite when attacked, of course, which raises the question: How does the king cobra maintain such an apparently high-risk lifestyle?

Krait and cobra venoms, including that of the king cobra, act very quickly by crippling the nervous system. Among the arsenal of weapons in the snakes’ venom is one especially potent neurotoxin that works by binding to receptors on muscle cells. The toxin blocks the ability of acetylcholine, one of the body’s chemical neurotransmitters, to control muscle contraction. The blocking of these receptors causes paralysis, respiratory failure and death.

But the king cobra is not fazed by bites from its victims. Biochemists have carefully mapped exactly how neurotoxins block the acetylcholine receptor of many species, and they have discovered that the toxins do not bind to the cobra’s receptor. Mutations have altered the snake’s receptor in such a way that, because the toxin cannot bind to the receptor, the acetylcholine function is undisturbed. The king cobra can subdue its dinner without suffering from any venomous counterattack.

This large snake, resistant to the very potent venoms of its prey, would appear then to be impervious. But we all know the story of the mongoose, if not from wildlife programs then from Rudyard Kipling’s tale “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.” How does the mongoose defeat the king cobra?

The mongoose’s quick reflexes help it dodge the cobra’s defensive bite, and its powerful jaws can dispatch a snake in one blow. But there are also genetic grounds for the mongoose’s courage. Sometimes an attacking mongoose is bitten, but it has another line of defense against the venom — its acetylcholine receptor has also evolved so that the cobra neurotoxin cannot bind to it. A set of changes in the mongoose’s receptor makes it resemble the cobra’s own resistant receptor.

The mongoose’s evolutionary adaptation is not unique. Other small, humble creatures have evolved ways to endure what for most animals would be lethal snakebites, and some of these resistant animals turn the tables to conquer and consume their venomous foes.

Sea snakes generally possess very toxic venoms. While the snakes rarely bite humans in the water, fishermen are struck occasionally when sifting through their trawls and have died from the bites of some species. The potent venom is not meant for large animals like ourselves, of course. Sea snakes prey on small marine animals, and the powerful toxins in the venom quickly immobilize the prey before it can swim off. Eels are some of the favorite foods of the banded sea krait. Some eels, however, have been observed to be remarkably resistant to the sea krait’s venom.

Harold Heatwole and Judy Powell of North Carolina State University showed that undulated moray eels and liver-colored moray eels found in the waters around New Guinea can tolerate several hundred times the venom dose that kills spotted moray eels from the Bahamas.

The biologists’ explanation for the great disparity in the sensitivity of eel species is that sea snakes are not found in the Atlantic Ocean, so there has been no selective pressure on eels there, whereas in the Pacific, where sea snakes are abundant, selection has been so intense that some eel species have evolved resistance.

A similar situation has evolved among California ground squirrels with respect to the venom of northern Pacific rattlesnakes. This species and most other rattlesnakes kill their prey with a battery of toxins that is different from those of sea snakes and cobras. Rattlesnake venom toxins work by breaking down tissues and causing internal bleeding.

A good-size rattlesnake can deliver a hefty dose of venom that is sufficient to kill a human if the bite is left untreated. But ground squirrels in some parts of California, despite being one hundredth the size of humans, exhibit fairly mild effects from the venom. This resistance is not the result of altered receptors, but comes from the ability of proteins in their blood serum to neutralize the effects of venom.

But squirrels of the same species from Alaska, where the rattlesnakes are absent, exhibit much greater sensitivity to the venom, and their serum is much less effective at neutralizing the venom. These observations suggest that in some areas where the rattlesnakes are abundant, local squirrel populations have evolved a degree of resistance.

One family of completely harmless snakes, the kingsnake, has also evolved serum that neutralizes rattlesnake venom and uses that ability to greater advantage than ground squirrels do. Kingsnakes are a group of beautiful constrictors found in many parts of the United States. As their name indicates, kingsnakes eat other snakes — they do not hesitate to attack, kill and consume rattlesnakes.

These stories of evolution are a bit like Shakespearean dramas, where the one best able to carry out or to thwart poisonous schemes winds up becoming king. Snakes in general, let alone cobras, will never be much loved by humans, but these animals are so extraordinary, this enthusiast cannot resist one sentimental thought: Long live the kings.

October 25, 2010

Serving Up Feathered Bait to Attract Ecosystem Data

By SANDRA J. BLAKESLEE

CAPILLA PEAK OBSERVATORY, N.M. — Mandy Weston stood on a ridge in the Manzano mountains, 9,000 feet above the Rio Grande Valley, grasping the talons of a juvenile northern harrier in her right hand.

“These are the supermodels of the raptor world,” she said admiringly. “Tall and thin.” She playfully rotated the bird’s body to reveal that its head remained in a fixed position, like that of an owl.

Ms. Weston is the public liaison for a five-person crew that is spending 10 weeks on this mountain observing and banding hawks as they migrate from North America down into Mexico and points south. This is the first northern harrier of the migration season, and the team is ecstatic.

This year, 131 biologists and amateur enthusiasts have permits to trap and band the golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, ospreys, kestrels, peregrine falcons and other birds of prey migrating to their winter habitats, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

Ms. Weston’s team is working under the auspices of HawkWatch International, a conservation and education nonprofit group based in Salt Lake City that focuses on birds of prey as indicators of ecosystem health. Each autumn, it counts hawks at 10 sites in Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas. Birds are captured and banded at five of the sites.

Over the last 30 years, HawkWatch has counted an estimated 20 million hawks and banded 125,000 of them, an essential task in understanding and protecting the birds. They were first to identify three flyways in the American West that follow a pattern similar to flyways in the East where migrating hawks navigate along coastlines and mountain ridges featuring strong thermal updrafts.

Hawks today face many threats, said Allen Fish, director of the Golden Gate Raptor Observatory on the Marin headlands north of San Francisco, which makes the need to count and band them more important than ever. For example, American kestrels are in sharp decline, while there is a potential decrease in golden eagles.

As more giant wind farms are erected, an increasing number of hawks are slashed and killed by turbine blades. Oil and gas exploration is fragmenting many hawk habitats. Urban-suburban growth, pesticides, herbicides, electricity lines and climate change are other stressors, he said.

The only way to understand what is happening to hawks is to collect data over many decades, banding as many birds as can be captured, said James Dawson, a hawk biologist with 30 years of field experience and curator of wildlife at the High Desert Museum in Bend, Ore.

Hawks, eagles and other birds of prey are tricky to catch, however. The term “eagle-eyed” did not come out of nowhere. Mechanical lures that appear overwhelmingly realistic to human eyes are unconvincing to hawk eyes, Mr. Fish said. His organization spent 17 years trying to perfect such lures but suspended the effort when researchers realized how easily hawks see the deception.

Hawks see 8 to 10 times better than we humans, Mr. Fish said. They have four foveas (the part of the eye that sees detail) instead of our two, the ability to detect reflected ultraviolet light and greatly accelerated speed of visual processing. When a hawk dives at a mechanical lure, he said, it pulls up 30 to 50 feet before the target as if to say, “there’s something wrong here.”

The only way to catch hawks is to use live birds as lures, Mr. Fish said. It’s the only method trappers use. So when the juvenile harrier approached the Manzano mountains last week, two trappers concealed in a blind 50 yards below the lookout had their lures and nets ready.

The live pigeons, doves and starlings that are used to attract hawks are outfitted in full body suits made of leather or Kevlar for protection. With only their heads, wings and feet exposed, the birds stand near the traps or are tossed up to 20 feet in the air, their feet securely attached to fishing lines manipulated from the blind.

At the Manzano site, three kinds of nets were arrayed on a spacious apron of ground in front of the blind. A mist net, made of nylon with a large mesh and multiple compartments to catch birds that fly into it, was suspended, like a volleyball net, between two poles.

A dho-gaza net, with a smaller nylon mesh, was also affixed to two poles, but set to collapse when a hawk flew into it. A remotely triggered bow net, a hooplike device with a spring mechanism, lay on the ground.

Ms. Weston described what happened next (HawkWatch would not allow a reporter to observe the trappers working): When a hawk that her colleague Tim Hanks had identified flew overhead and spotted a pigeon waddling on the ground, the trappers pulled on the line attached to the pigeon to jiggle it, hoping it would pass for a small mammal, the favored prey of harriers.

When the hawk struck, Ms. Weston said, it entangled itself in the mist net before it could reach the pigeon. In the standard routine for all trapped birds, it was measured, weighed, checked for fat deposits under its wing and inspected for parasites. The harrier was healthy, Ms. Weston said, displaying the bird.

The trappers had fixed a metal band to the harrier’s leg, assigning it an identity should it be recaptured elsewhere or found dead. Ms. Weston let it go amid a flurry of powerful wing beats.

During this fall season, Aug. 27 to Nov. 5, the hawk team has been observing between 30 and 200 hawks a day, capturing and banding about 10 percent of the migrants. The most common species have been sharp-shinned hawks, Cooper’s hawks, red-tailed hawks, American kestrels, golden eagles, northern harriers and Swainson’s hawks.

The pigeon, unharmed, was soon able to take the rest of the day off. Like other lure birds, it has an enviable schedule, to limit job stress: 60 to 90 minutes every other day.

Oh, sumac you reminded me of my visit to the Bangok, Thailand snake zoo....... The big ones are scary.........

I also hate it about the hawks and the wind machines.

Thanks

Happy clicking all....Just came back from the mailbox and a tree smiled at me.

October 25, 2010

Navajos Hope to Shift From Coal to Wind and Sun

By MIREYA NAVARRO

BLUE GAP, Ariz. — For decades, coal has been an economic lifeline for the Navajos, even as mining and power plant emissions dulled the blue skies and sullied the waters of their sprawling reservation.

But today there are stirrings of rebellion. Seeking to reverse years of environmental degradation and return to their traditional values, many Navajos are calling for a future built instead on solar farms, ecotourism and microbusinesses.

“At some point we have to wean ourselves,” Earl Tulley, a Navajo housing official, said of coal as he sat on the dirt floor of his family’s hogan, a traditional circular dwelling.

Mr. Tulley, who is running for vice president of the Navajo Nation in the Nov. 2 election, represents a growing movement among Navajos that embraces environmental healing and greater reliance on the sun and wind, abundant resources on a 17 million-acre reservation spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“We need to look at the bigger picture of sustainable development,” said Mr. Tulley, the first environmentalist to run on a Navajo presidential ticket.

With nearly 300,000 members, the Navajo Nation is the country’s largest tribe, according to Census Bureau estimates, and it has the biggest reservation. Coal mines and coal-fired power plants on the reservation and on lands shared with the Hopi provide about 1,500 jobs and more than a third of the tribe’s annual operating budget, the largest source of revenue after government grants and taxes.

At the grass-roots level, the internal movement advocating a retreat from coal is both a reaction to the environmental damage and the health consequences of mining — water loss and contamination, smog and soot pollution — and a reconsideration of centuries-old tenets.

In Navajo culture, some spiritual guides say, digging up the earth to retrieve resources like coal and uranium (which the reservation also produced until health issues led to a ban in 2005) is tantamount to cutting skin and represents a betrayal of a duty to protect the land.

“As medicine people, we don’t extract resources,” said Anthony Lee Sr., president of the Diné Hataalii Association, a group of about 100 healers known as medicine men and women.

But the shift is also prompted by economic realities. Tribal leaders say the Navajo Nation’s income from coal has dwindled 15 percent to 20 percent in recent years as federal and state pollution regulations have imposed costly restrictions and lessened the demand for mining.

Two coal mines on the reservation have shut down in the last five years. One of them, the Black Mesa mine, ceased operations because the owners of the power plant it fed in Laughlin, Nev., chose to close the plant in 2005 rather than spend $1.2 billion on retrofitting it to meet pollution controls required by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Early this month, the E.P.A. signaled that it would require an Arizona utility to install $717 million in emission controls at another site on the reservation, the Four Corners Power Plant in New Mexico, describing it as the highest emitter of nitrous oxide of any power plant in the nation. It is also weighing costly new rules for the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona.

And states that rely on Navajo coal, like California, are increasingly imposing greenhouse gas emissions standards and requiring renewable energy purchases, banning or restricting the use of coal for electricity.

So even as they seek higher royalties and new markets for their vast coal reserves, tribal officials say they are working to draft the tribe’s first comprehensive energy policy and are gradually turning to casinos, renewable energy projects and other sources for income.

This year the tribal government approved a wind farm to be built west of Flagstaff, Ariz., to power up to 20,000 homes in the region. Last year, the tribal legislative council also created a Navajo Green Economy Commission to promote environmentally friendly jobs and businesses.

“We need to create our own businesses and control our destiny,” said Ben Shelly, the Navajo Nation vice president, who is now running for president against Lynda Lovejoy, a state senator in New Mexico and Mr. Tulley’s running mate.

That message is gaining traction among Navajos who have reaped few benefits from coal or who feel that their health has suffered because of it.

Curtis Yazzie, 43, for example, lives in northeastern Arizona without running water or electricity in a log cabin just a stone’s throw from the Kayenta mine.

Tribal officials, who say some families live so remotely that it would cost too much to run power lines to their homes, have begun bringing hybrid solar and wind power to some of the estimated 18,000 homes on the reservation without electricity. But Mr. Yazzie says that air and water pollution, not electricity, are his first concerns.

“Quite a few of my relatives have made a good living working for the coal mine, but a lot of them are beginning to have health problems,” he said. “I don’t know how it’s going to affect me.”

One of those relatives is Daniel Benally, 73, who says he lives with shortness of breath after working for the Black Mesa mine in the same area for 35 years as a heavy equipment operator. Coal provided for his family, including 15 children from two marriages, but he said he now believed that the job was not worth the health and environmental problems.

“There’s no equity between benefit and damage,” he said in Navajo through a translator.

About 600 mine, pipeline and power plant jobs were affected when the Mohave Generating Station in Nevada and Peabody’s Black Mesa mine shut down.

But that also meant that Peabody stopped drawing water from the local aquifer for the coal slurry carried by an underground pipeline to the power plant — a victory for Navajo and national environmental groups active in the area, like the Sierra Club.

Studies have shown serious declines in the water levels of the Navajo aquifer after decades of massive pumping for coal slurry operations. And the E.P.A. has singled out the Four Corners Power Plant and the Navajo Generating Station as two of the largest air polluters in the country, affecting visibility in 27 of the area’s “most pristine and precious natural areas,” including the Grand Canyon.

The regional E.P.A. director, Jared Blumenfeld, said the plants were the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 emitters of nitrogen oxides, which form fine particulates resulting in cases of asthma attacks, bronchitis, heart attacks and premature deaths.

Environmentalists are now advocating for a more diversified Navajo economy and trying to push power plants to invest in wind and solar projects.

“It’s a new day for the Navajo people,” said Lori Goodman, an official with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, a group founded 22 years ago by Mr. Tulley. “We can’t be trashing the land anymore.”

Both presidential candidates in the Navajo election have made the pursuit of cleaner energy a campaign theme, but significant hurdles remain, including that Indian tribes, as sovereign entities, are not eligible for tax credits that help finance renewable energy projects elsewhere.

And replacing coal revenue would not be easy. The mining jobs that remain, which pay union wages, are still precious on a reservation where unemployment is estimated at 50 percent to 60 percent.

“Mining on Black Mesa,” Peabody officials said in a statement, “has generated $12 billion in direct and implied economic benefits over the past 40 years, created thousands of jobs, sent thousands of students to college and restored lands to a condition that is as much as 20 times more productive than native range.”

They added, “Renewables won’t come close to matching the scale of these benefits.”

But many Navajos see the waning of coal as inevitable and are already looking ahead. Some residents and communities are joining together or pairing with outside companies to pursue small-scale renewable energy projects on their own.

Wahleah Johns, a member of the new Navajo Green Economy Commission, is studying the feasibility of a small solar project on reclaimed mining lands with two associates. In the meantime, she uses solar panels as a consciousness-raising tool.

“How can we utilize reclamation lands?” she said to Mr. Yazzie during a recent visit as they held their young daughters in his living room. “Maybe we can use them for solar panels to generate electricity for Los Angeles, to transform something that’s been devastating for our land and water into something that can generate revenue for your family, for your kids.”

Mr. Yazzie, who lives with his wife, three children and two brothers, said he liked the idea. “Once Peabody takes all the coal out, it’ll be gone,” he said. “Solar would be long-term. Solar and wind, we don’t have a problem with. It’s pretty windy out here.”

I think I have found a glitch in the care2 system. I alternate clicking between rainforest and wolves and just keep the alternation of clicking going until I get bored with it. Do it quickly.

ctober 27, 2010

Remember Renewable Energy?

Global warming, energy independence and good 21st-century jobs are three compelling reasons why Washington must do a lot more to promote renewable energy. Congress seemed to get it in 2005 when it directed the Interior Department to approve enough wind, solar and other projects on public land to produce 10,000 megawatts by 2015 — enough to heat, cool and light five million homes. Not much has happened since.

The George W. Bush administration was fixated on oil and gas exploration. The Obama administration was slow to get going. Until a little over three weeks ago, the Interior Department had approved more than 73,000 oil and gas leases since 2005, but only one offshore wind energy project and not a single solar project.

Things are beginning to turn around. In recent weeks, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has approved six large-scale solar power projects on public land — five in California, one in Nevada — that together will provide enough power for as many as two million homes.

He also gave final approval to the country’s first commercial offshore wind farm, off the coast of Massachusetts. And a group of companies including Google announced plans to build an underwater transmission system to carry wind-generated power from public lands on the Atlantic Coast to Eastern cities.

All this is very good news. But this country had already fallen far behind Europe and China, which are investing heavily in the industries that manufacture wind turbines and solar panels. Three things need to happen, quickly, if there is any hope of catching up:

GENEROUS SUBSIDIES Renewable energy projects will require significant federal help until they can compete with cheaper and dirtier fuels like coal, oil and natural gas. Congress has provided a variety of tax credits and loan guarantees, but the support has been erratic. When the production tax credit expired at the end of 2003, development of newly installed wind capacity fell from 1,687 megawatts to less than 400 the following year.

Investors will remain cautious until Congress commits to multiyear programs of support. Most immediately, it needs to extend a grant program for new wind and solar projects that was part of the 2009 stimulus package. Grants worth more than $2 billion have since jump-started hundreds of projects, creating thousands of jobs.

FASTER APPROVALS It took three to five years of complex negotiations before the Interior Department signed off on the new solar projects. The Cape Wind project off Massachusetts had to run a gantlet of state and federal agencies and needed nine years to get a final permit.

Mr. Salazar has reorganized the old Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore wind projects in addition to oil and gas development, to make it more responsive, and directed the department to identify promising sites and develop a swifter regulatory process. The bureaucracy now has to deliver.

TRANSMISSION Updating and expanding the electrical grid to accommodate new sources of energy will be the biggest challenge, and will require partnerships among states, federal authorities, the utilities and private investors. The Google project could be crucial to delivering wind power to Eastern cities, but major investments will also be needed in the West and Southwest. President Obama recently declared that no industry has greater potential to create jobs than clean energy. He is right. But it is never going to happen unless the administration and Congress do a lot more to push it ahead.

OCTOBER 27, 2010, 8:30 PM

Goat vs. Man

By TIMOTHY EGAN

OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — You come to this pork chop of land in the Far West, even with the first lashing storm of the season, on the off-chance of seeing something as nimble as a 300-pound, snow-white mountain goat in all its bewhiskered hauteur.

You don’t expect to find a full murder investigation, rangers with rifles and warning signs, hikers trembling and looking anxiously around the corner of every trail. For the first time in the 72-year history of one of the nation’s most beloved national parks, a wild animal has fatally assaulted a human. The goat is a killer.

It happened earlier this month, when a veteran hiker from nearby Port Angeles, Bob Boardman, ran into an aggressive mountain goat on a popular trail in this park, the scenic centerpiece of a peninsula the size of Massachusetts. The goat pursued the hiker, using its two pointed horns to gore Boardman in the thigh.

In the last minutes of his life, Boardman tried to warn others of the danger, witnesses said. Those same people tried to help the badly wounded man, throwing rocks at the animal. But after ripping open Boardman’s thigh, the four-foot-high ram stood over the 63-year-old hiker, refusing to allow others to reach him. As people watched helplessly, Boardman bled to death in the high Olympics.

A few days later, park rangers found the blood-stained animal and shot it dead. Boardman’s death was not some violent encounter at the high end of the food chain; goats are herbivores. A likely explanation was meanness — a bad, possibly rabid goat.

Last month, a bear mauled a friend of mine, John Chelminiak, who was walking his dog near his summer home at Lake Wenatchee, two hours from Seattle. He lost an eye, and is lucky to be alive. And a few days ago, a 19-year-old college student, a body surfer, was killed by a shark in Southern California.

We expect bears and great white sharks to be predatory toward humans. But goats, well, their record is not exactly homicidal, and we’ve anthropomorphized them into cuddly toys with superb climbing skills.

The tragedy in the Olympics says something about what happens when people try to fine-tune the wild. The natural balance is broken.

My hiking friends have noticed the same thing. Not long ago I awoke to the clomping sound of heavy hooves to find our camp in the Cascade Mountains surrounded by goats. There were a half-dozen of them, including kids. To see goats this close was a great thrill. I reached for my camera, thinking this would be but a fleeting moment.

In years past, the closest I’d been able to get to a mountain goat, on most occasions, was about 500 yards. The pictures showed a tiny white blur. Only once, climbing to a narrow rock summit, did I come face to face with one, a big-chested billy with the sharpest of horns. He blinked first, and backed away.

Timothy Egan Eyes in the sky: One of the mountain goats that roamed around our camp site in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness of the Cascade Mountains in Washington state.
In this latest encounter, I shot several close-up pictures, with the glacier-topped peaks of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness as a perfect background. My heart raced: what a find! But then the goats hung around, through breakfast and then some. They licked the bushes for salt from our sweat and urine. They nudged at the packs. They came close to enough to scare us. And when we tried to shoo them, they would not leave.

Later that day, after topping a summit, we hiked into a field of furry white animals — about 20 goats in all. They gave us the what-are-you-looking-at stare, not the least bit afraid. There was something altogether strange, and not right about this sighting.

Goats are not native to Olympic National Park, nor to most of the Cascades. It’s as if somebody brought Himalayan snow leopards to live in the park, because — wouldn’t that be cool! They were introduced in the Olympics before it was a park, about 80 years ago, to give hunters a new trophy animal to chase. Over time, now that you’re not allowed to hunt them within the boundaries of the park, they’ve grown to a population of about 300, and become a real problem, tearing up the grass and wildflowers of fragile high meadows, and now menacing hikers. The goat that killed Boardman was well-known for its aggression, blocking trails and tailing hikers.

The Park Service spent years trapping the animals, tranquilizing them with shots fired from helicopters and then airlifting them to the Cascades. But that only spread the problem around. Those goats that surrounded us were probably transplants. Rangers also tried to kill some of the goats, until they were blocked by animal rights groups.

With every passing year, the goats lost whatever fear they had of man. This was aggravated, of course, by knuckleheads who insist on feeding wild animals, which breaks down barriers.

But all of this was our handiwork. The goats were introduced to give humans something to hunt. A sport. A game. A chase. For almost 100 years, we never feared them. Now, they’ve stopped fearing us, and are even pursuing us. Playing God has its consequences.

OCTOBER 28, 2010, 8:32 AM

World Bank Pushes to Include Ecology in Accounting

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

This is certainly a novel, and hopeful, development. At the 10th conference of parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, in Nagoya, Japan, Robert B. Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, called for the planet’s biological patrimony, its “natural capital,” to be included on nations’ books when they do their accounting. Here’s a highlight:

The natural wealth of nations should be a capital asset valued in combination with its financial capital, manufactured capital and human capital…. National accounts need to reflect the vital carbon storage services that forests provide and the coastal protection values that come from coral reefs and mangroves.

I’ll believe it when I see it, given the bank’s incredibly slow shift within its own practices toward lending with the environment in mind. But this is one of several recent moves by the bank, including luring a topnotch energy analyst, Daniel Kammen, from the University of California, Berkeley, that could bode well for humans and the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. Here’s an excerpt from Zoellick’s prepared remarks:

First, you probably know of the World Bank Group as a development institution. So, you might wonder, why is the World Bank attending a conference on biodiversity?

Our answer is clear: successful conservation of our natural resources, our ecosystems, and our biodiversity is central to addressing all development challenges and to improving the lives of the poor.

Biological resources provide livelihoods, sustenance, medicines, trade, tourism, industry, and more. Forests, grasslands, lakes, oceans, deserts, and other natural ecosystems provide a range of natural services that people have often taken for granted, even though they are vital to human welfare.

I would add one more consideration: each of us – all of us – are stewards of other life on this planet. We should respect those lives.

As a practical matter, we need to demonstrate the connections among overcoming poverty, sustainable economic growth, and the preservation of the planet’s rich natural heritage.

There can be no effective preservation of that heritage unless it is done with and for the poor, who rely directly on natural resources for their livelihoods. Read the rest.

It’s a fine rhetorical start. But the announcement by the bank of a $10 million “Save Our Species” fund, with the United Nations Global Environmental Facility and International Union for Conservation of Nature, seems quite piddling in a world where money flows in the trillions. I’m reminded of the recent study showing just how cheap it would be to guarantee tigers a reasonable haven on a crowding planet. As a reminder of what’s out there, I’m closing the post with an unconventional video press release from the international conservation union — with no narration and point beyond showing some of the species needing a bit of elbow room:

October 28, 2010

Asia to Africa, or Vice Versa: New Clues to Primates’ Origins

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

The ancestors of humans and other primates like apes and monkeys may have originated in Asia, not Africa, a new study in the journal Nature reports.

There has long been debate about the matter, but a recent discovery of anthropoid fossils including two previously unidentified species and one known species provides new clues.

The fossils are about 38 million years old and were uncovered in a rock formation in southern Libya. The anthropoids were small, rodent-size creatures that looked similar to larger, modern-day primates, but weighed just 4 to 17 ounces.

“At least one of these anthropoids appears to be clearly related to the older Asian form described in Myanmar,” said Jean-Jacques Jaeger, a paleontologist at the University of Poitiers in France and the study’s lead author. “This indicates that there was migration from Asia.”

But there is another possibility: that the anthropoids originated in Africa and migrated to Asia, and that they have even older ancestors in Africa that have not yet been discovered.

There is no fossil evidence that substantiates this theory today, but more digging is required, Dr. Jaeger said.

“We have to do much more work and we need more information about the older layers in Africa, which we are trying to find in Libya now,” he said.

But if it is the case that the anthropoids originated in Asia and migrated, this movement was key to the proliferation of the subspecies.

“In Asia they may have gone extinct,” Dr. Jaeger said. “The conditions were more difficult, and if this migration didn’t occur, there would not be the rise in anthropoids in the present world.”