Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

January 17, 2011

Conspiracies Don’t Kill Birds. People, However, Do.

By LESLIE KAUFMAN
At the beginning of this month when about 5,000 red-winged blackbirds fell from the sky in one night in Arkansas, biologists were called on to put a damper on public speculation about pesticides and secret military tests by reminding everyone how many birds there are and how many die. They often do so as a result of human activity, but in far more mundane and dispiriting ways than conspiracy buffs might imagine.

“Five billion birds die in the U.S. every year,” said Melanie Driscoll, a biologist and director of bird conservation for the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi Flyway for the National Audubon Society.

That means that on average, 13.7 million birds die in this country every day. This number, while large, needs to be put into context. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that a minimum of 10 billion birds breed in the United States every year and that as many as 20 billion may be in the country during the fall migratory season.

Even without humans, tens of millions of birds would be lost each year to natural predators and natural accidents — millions of fledglings die during their first attempts at flight. But according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, people have severely complicated the task of survival. Although mortality rates are difficult to calculate for certain, using modeling and other methods like extrapolation from local research findings, the government has come up with estimates of how many birds die from various causes in the United States.

Some of the biggest death traps are surprising. Almost everyone has an experience with a pet proudly bringing home a songbird in its jaws. Nationally, domestic and feral cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year, according to the government. One study done in Wisconsin found that domestic rural cats alone (thus excluding a large number of suburban and urban cats) killed roughly 39 million birds a year.

Pesticides kill 72 million birds directly, but an unknown and probably larger number ingest the poisons and die later unseen. Orphaned chicks also go uncounted.

And then there is flying into objects, which is most likely what killed the birds in Arkansas. The government estimates that strikes against building windows alone account for anywhere from 97 million to nearly 976 million bird deaths a year. Cars kill another 60 million or so. High-tension transmission and power distribution lines are also deadly obstacles. Extrapolating from European studies, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimates 174 million birds die each year by flying into these wires. None of these numbers take into account the largest killer of birds in America: loss of habitat to development.

All of this explains why about a quarter of the 836 species of birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act are in serious decline. For a third of the other birds there is not enough information to be sure about the health of their populations.

Of course, poisons and electric wires are not as exciting to think about as secret government plots, but Ms. Driscoll says it is time we pay attention to them anyway.

“It is the story that the press and the public have largely missed, and it is important, and timely, given the current concern,” she said. “And it is what gets those of us who work in bird conservation motivated every day to try to deal with human-induced changes to our habitats, our landscape and our very climate.”

Hi Stradee, great thing you didn't try the roof thingy. You may have gotten buried in your work. joke!

Good to see you are getting along ok in the weather. Next month should be the worst - then - another year --------- they are passing so fast I can't believe it.

Keep dropping by. And, thanks for the tree you saved today.

sumac, yes that one interested me! Thanks, I had not heard about it. Really nice article. I'm going to Google it and see if there is an image available.

Great clicking all good Wildclickers............

Hope this works - if not I'll try again later.

Tilling is very difficult work even when the soil is sandy...but rock and clay, girl
you are braver than I.

Dercorative rock covers most of the property, and when the leafs drop, they stay till spring. By then, they've dried, smothered most if not all the weeds...then picked up and distributed to hedges, trees, shrubs, and small plantings.

There is quite a nice area for a garden, but with deer and critters who forage most of the year, i've given to planting herbs in movable pots. Enclosing the garden area is a project that will wait till the inside of the house is spruced and painted.

I've decided to let the pine needles stay where they've landed until the threat of snow is gone. They keep the driveways from freezing during bitter cold storms.

Dan, you're quite welcome. If i received alerts from a2k...hello hamsters! Checking e mail is the only way to find where i'm supposed to be on line. Will try and check in daily though.

Wow, you said it Stradee........ Rocks and ""RED"" clay around here also. Bad news for shovelers....... Can't tell you all everything I shovel.......Grin

I did notice something in the New York 1770 map article -- Brooklyn isn't mapped well. It was there at the time but not to the extent it grew to later. In fact, the Brooklyn Bridge was built - finished about 1888 - to connect the largest city in the USA to it's neighbor. The largest city at the time being Brooklyn.. Believe it or not. Also, at the time it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge was the tallest man-made structure in the North American Continent. Believe it or not.

Thanks for the clicks all.............

January 17, 2011

Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!

By NICHOLAS WADE
Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.

Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.

He bought Chaser as a puppy in 2004 from a local breeder and started to train her for four to five hours a day. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She was taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten.

Border collies are working dogs. They have a reputation for smartness, and they are highly motivated. They are bred to herd sheep indefatigably all day long. Absent that task, they must be given something else to do or they go stir crazy.

Chaser proved to be a diligent student. Unlike human children, she seems to love her drills and tests and is always asking for more. “She still demands four to five hours a day,” Dr. Pilley said. “I’m 82, and I have to go to bed to get away from her.”

One of Dr. Pilley’s goals was to see if he could teach Chaser a larger vocabulary than Rico acquired. But that vocabulary is based on physical objects that must be given a name the dog can recognize. Dr. Pilley found himself visiting Salvation Army stores and buying up sackfuls of used children’s toys to serve as vocabulary items.

It was hard to remember all the names Chaser had to learn, so he wrote the name on each toy with indelible marker. In three years, Chaser’s vocabulary included 800 cloth animals, 116 balls, 26 Frisbees and a medley of plastic items.

Children pick up about 10 new words a day until, by the time they leave high school, they know around 60,000 words. Chaser learned words more slowly but faced a harder task: Each sound was new and she had nothing to relate it to, whereas children learn words in a context that makes them easier to remember. For example, knives, forks and spoons are found together.

Dr. Pilley does not know how large a vocabulary Chaser could have mastered. When she reached 1,000 items, he grew tired of teaching words and moved to more interesting topics like grammar.

One of the questions raised by the Rico study was that of what was going through the dog’s mind when he was asked to fetch something. Did he think of his toys as items labeled fetch-ball, fetch-Frisbee, fetch-doll, or did he understand the word “fetch” separately from its object, as people do?

Dr. Pilley addressed the question by teaching Chaser three different actions: pawing, nosing and taking an object. She was then presented with three of her toys and correctly pawed, nosed or fetched each one depending on the command given to her. “That experiment demonstrates conclusively that Chaser understood that the verb had a meaning,” Dr. Pilley said.

The 1,022 words in Chaser’s vocabulary are all proper nouns. Dr. Pilley also found that Chaser could be trained to recognize categories, in other words common nouns. She correctly follows the command “Fetch a Frisbee” or “Fetch a ball.” She can also learn by exclusion, as children do. If she is asked to fetch a new toy with a word she does not know, she will pick it out from ones that are familiar.

Haunting almost every interaction between people and animals is the ghost of Clever Hans, a German horse that in the early 1900s would tap out answers to arithmetic problems with his hoof. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Hans would get the answer right only if the questioner also knew the answer. He then showed that the horse could detect minute movements of the questioner’s head and body. Since viewers would tense as Hans approached the right number of taps, and relax when he reached it, the horse knew exactly when to stop.

People project their expectations onto animals, particularly dogs, and can easily convince themselves the animal is achieving some humanlike feat when in fact it is simply reading cues unconsciously given by its master. Even though researchers are well aware of this pitfall, interpreting animal behavior is particularly tricky. In the current issue of Animal Behaviour, a leading journal, two previous experiments with dogs have been found wanting.

In one report, researchers say they failed to confirm an experiment showing that dogs would yawn contagiously when people yawn. Another report knocks down an earlier finding that dogs can distinguish between rational and irrational acts.

The danger of Clever Hans effects may be particularly acute with border collies because they are bred for the ability to pay close attention to the shepherd. Dogs that ignore their master or the sheep do not become parents, a fierce selective pressure on the breed’s behavior. “Watch a collie work with a sheepherder and you will come away amazed how small a gesture the person can do to communicate with his dog,” said Alexandra Horowitz, a dog behavior expert at Barnard College and author of “Inside of a Dog.”

Juliane Kaminski, a member of the research team that tested Rico, was well aware of the Clever Hans effect. So she arranged for the dog to be given instructions in one room and to select toys from another, making it impossible for the experimenter to give Rico unwitting cues. Dr. Kaminski works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Dr. Pilley took the same precaution in testing Chaser. He submitted an article describing his experiments to Science, but the journal rejected it. Dr. Pilley said that the journal’s advisers had made valid criticisms, which he proceeded to address. He and his co-author, Alliston K. Reid of Wofford College, then submitted a revised article to Behavioural Processes. Dr. Horowitz, who was one of Science’s advisers in the review of Dr. Pilley’s report, said of the new article that “the experimental design looks pretty good.” Dr. Kaminski, too, regards the experiment as properly done. “I think the methodology the authors use here is absolutely sufficient to control for Clever Hans,” she said.

The learning of words by Rico and Chaser may have some bearing on how children acquire language, because children could be building on the same neural mechanisms. Dr. Pilley and Dr. Reid conclude that their experiments “provide clear evidence that Chaser acquired referential understanding of nouns, an ability normally attributed to children.”

But the experiment’s relevance to language is likely to be a matter of dispute. Chaser learns to link sounds to objects by brute repetition, which is not how children learn words. And she learns her words as proper nouns, which are specific labels for things, rather than as abstract concepts like the common nouns picked up by children. Dr. Kaminski said she would not go as far as saying that Chaser’s accomplishments are a step toward language. They show that the dog can combine words for different actions with words for objects. A step toward syntax, she said, would be to show that changing the order of words alters the meaning that Chaser ascribes to them.

Dr. Pilley says he is working on just that point. “We’re trying to teach some elementary grammar to our dog,” he said. “How far we’ll be able to go we don’t know, but we think we are on the frontier.”

His goal is to develop methods that will help increase communication between people and dogs. “We are interested in teaching Chaser a receptive, rudimentary language,” he said.

A Nova episode on animal intelligence, in which Chaser stars, will be broadcast on Feb. 9.

As with other animals for which prodigious feats of cognition have been reported, like Alex the gray parrot or Kanzi the bonobo, it is hard to place Chaser’s and Rico’s abilities in context. If their achievements are within the general capacity of their species, why have many other instances not been reported? If, on the other hand, their achievements are unique, then either the researchers have lucked out in finding an Einstein of the species, or there could be something wrong with the experiments like a Clever Hans effect.

Dr. Pilley said that most border collies, with special training, “could be pretty close to where Chaser is.” When he told Chaser’s dog breeder of the experiment, “he wasn’t surprised about the dog’s ability, just that I had had the patience to teach her,” Dr. Pilley said.

Dr. Horowitz agreed: “It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention that is lavished on them,” she said.

Thanks sumac......... Looking forward to 9 Feb. Should be an interesting NOVA.

Great clicking all Wildclickers who still click. AND, to ALL Rainforest clickers who click to make a tree smile.

About businesses reviewing regulations to tell Obama about the ones that they don't like, the following from an article in today's NYT:

"“Even if you find a rule you don’t like, and they probably will, then they’re going to have to go through rule-making and then it’s going to take a year or two or longer,” Mr. Litan added. “And then somebody will sue them; if it’s not another industry it will be a consumer interest group or a Republican interest group.”

He recalled that one of Ronald Reagan’s first acts as president was to win repeal of a requirement for auto airbags that car-makers had fought. The insurance industry sued, arguing that the bags would save lives and medical costs, and ultimately won in the Supreme Court."

Let's see if I still have this copy in my mouse. I selected it just because, and it is well written too.

January 18, 2011

Riders in the Mist

It has been an atmospheric 24 hours in New York City. The subway trains have been running fine. But when they tunneled into their stations on Tuesday, they seemed to be carrying their own fog with them.

The windows were misted over — impossible to say how crowded a car was until you stepped aboard. Then the reason for the mist became apparent. Nearly everyone had gone to work dressed like a woolly mammoth, ready for an arctic chill, but it was raining outside.

We huddled next to each other and vaporized together, the moisture rising from our garments and clouding the windows. All that was missing was a low-hanging brume in the cars themselves.

On a section of track under repair, the work lights glowed with a violet corona, refracted by the window fog. Passengers wiped the windows with their gloves to see out, and those of us wearing glasses wore them on the ends of our noses because they had fogged up as soon as we stepped aboard. All the bespectacled riders seemed to be gazing quizzically, donnishly around them, as if looking up from more serious work.

The day outside was just as misty. Cars left calligraphic tire marks in the slush on rooftop parking lots. The rain changed its mind to snow and sleet and back and forth again. The city’s buildings — high and low — shed their accumulated snow, large clumps of which came plummeting down among the regular flakes like a Galilean experiment.

This sort of rain and fog would be biting in April, but in mid-January it felt almost warm.

After the ivory crackdown, the action in Gabon continues -

On Wednesday we carried with the Gabonese authorities what is probably the biggest apes related arrest we know of in Africa – 13 ape heads, 32 ape hands, five ape dealers behind bars.

After Conservation Justice and the AALF project planned a second wave of arrests, the team comprised of the forces of law and order and "Ministère des Eaux et Forêts" (MINEF) arrested the five wildlife dealers on the 13th in Libreville. They have confiscated 13 great apes heads (one for gorilla and 12 from Chimpanzees), 32 great apes hands (2 from Gorilla 30 from chimpanzees), as well as 12 leopard skins, a part of a lion skin, and 5 elephant tails.

Imagine what the killed apes leopards, lions and elephants of this seizure represent, and now imagine that the dealers confessed they have been carrying their specialized trade for several years.

Putting these dealers behind bars probably has a direct impact on the lives of hundreds of chimps and gorillas. I hope this landmark arrest operation and the photos attached will serve all of us in proving the importance of law enforcement projects (AALF, PALF, RALF and LAGA) for the survival of great apes. The problem is not specific to Gabon and such specialized dealers exist throughout West and Central Africa, though Gabon shows it is possible to stop them. Help us establish law enforcement in other countries as DRC and Nigeria .

As for the previous ivory crackdown, despite many corruption attempts, the ivory dealers are still in jail, proving the judicial authorities regard the new wildlife cases with high importance. We hope they will do the same for this new important case. The dealers are in cell right now and will be transferred to the public prosecutor at the tribunal on Monday 17th. We will do our best and hope the ape dealers will be kept in prison.

It seems very important to send congratulations to authorities for this success. Indeed, after the ivory crackdown and the great letters you sent for it, it is necessary the authorities will feel now the same importance with the great apes cases. Please help us encourage the Gabonese Government in this wildlife law enforcement revolution, spend 10 minutes in writing a brief congratulation letter to:

Ministre des Eaux et Forêts : Fax : 00241 77 86 45 ; E-mail du secrétariat : [email protected]
Directeur Général des Eaux et Forêts, Monsieur Kouma Zaou (mail: [email protected] ; Tél : 00241 07 94 30 27 et 00241 06 71 09 70).

Sincerely,

Luc Mathot
Conservation Justice
www.conservation-justice.org

Howdy dan and sue....

So late tonight! Reading the article about humans attempting to understand animals and wondered if humans understand that animals understand because nobody told them they couldn't.

Every word, every gesture, every emotion...animals are tuned in.

So dearhearts, i gotta go nynite now...tomorrow's a super busy day, and of course Mz Bella is still outside waiting for me to shut off the computer and office light. Who is trained?

January 19, 2011

Cousins Under the Skin

We continue to learn more about our ancestral past. With every, mostly fragmentary, addition to the physical evidence, the picture changes. The mysteries, and the fascination, seem only to keep growing.

A case in point is the recent discovery at Denisova Cave, in Siberia, of a finger bone, 50,000 years old. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, based in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted the entire genome from the finger bone and found that it belongs to a previously unknown hominid they have called Denisovans.

Researchers will need more skeletal samples before they can say what the Denisovans looked like. But they are believed to have emerged from Africa at roughly the same time as Neanderthals — 500,000 years ago — and settled much farther east. The scientists reached this conclusion by comparing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with the genomes of modern humans.

In Nature last month, they reported that as much as 4.8 percent of Denisovan DNA turned up in the DNA of people living in Papua New Guinea and the nearby island of Bougainville. Given the distance between Siberia and Papua New Guinea, there’s every possibility the Denisovans were as successful and wide ranging as Neanderthals, who settled in Europe and the Near East.

The story that needs updating in our minds isn’t just the existence of another hominid. It’s the fact that humans overlapped and interbred with both Neanderthals and with Denisovans. We carry the traces of these cousins in our genes. What is still unanswered is why we humans survived and prospered, while the Neanderthals and Denisovans disappeared. After all, Neanderthals and Denisovans had already prospered for 200,000 or 300,000 years by the time they faded away.

Russia court confiscates 3 tonnes of mammoth tusks

2 hrs 24 mins ago

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – Russian authorities have confiscated three tonnes of mammoth tusks from a criminal gang which tried to smuggle them out of the country.
The court office of the northern city of St. Petersburg said on Thursday that it had confiscated some 64 full and 14 reconstructed tusks, but would not say when.
A small group of criminals has been involved in smuggling tusks and bones from the extinct beasts across Russia's borders since 2004, the court said in a press release.
The court said that the tusks come from a species of mammoth that once inhabited the Siberian Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia. The tusks have survived thousands of years in the permafrost that covers vast part of the region.
(Reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Writing by Lidia Kelly)

Stradee, thanks. I know what you mean about being trained. Both our puppies are constantly trying new things to train us. Unfortunately for us, it mostly works in favor of the puppies.

sumac, very interesting article. I am always astounded by what is being uncovered each day. With the advent of the computer we are now getting things done so much more quickly in the fields of science. Amazing.

Thanks again all good clickers ----- keep it going.

Just arrived home a few hours ago after visiting with a dear friend who lives near Folsom. Dan, you would not believe the construction happening for Old Folsom! They've even placed a new parking garage (made of brick no less) that's ornate and doesn't resemble it's function at all! They've also uncovered and excavated a site where the old steam engines were turned...the original brick and mortar are still there along with the rail. Then they built a replica of what the site would have looked like during the day. Amazing

Stores, shops, restaurants, and the older buildings restored, when finished, the place will look awsome! It's quite beautfiful now even with construction still in progress. Crossing the old bridge is still a wonder for me...viewing the river...and imagining a much quieter and more serene town that once was.

Folsom Dam road was closed right after 9/11 but has now reopened allowing for a beautiful water view and leisurely drive.

At the top of Sierra College Parkway there are mini mansions being built. When i say 'mini' it's only because that's what the builders call them. Good God! Huge, sprawling properties with every sort of architecture immaginable, the homes overlook the Sacramento Valley and all of Folsom. Talk about diversity! Right across the Sierra Parkway Road, there are more modest newer tracts of homes. Brought their resales through the roof in a housing market that's caput. Whodda thunk it...

Had a marvelous day, and am trying to catch up on my FB stuff, take care of my very put off babies, and then nynite. The weather should hold for a few more days so Shirls' got a lot of work to take care of outdoors.

Sue, thanks again for the great articles. Always good seeing your posts.

Have a good evening.

Psychology:

I'm Free, You're Not

Gilbert Chin
A seemingly universal belief is that people consider that their capacity to act freely is greater than that of others. Pronin and Kugler supply a set of experiments in support of this proposition. Ivy League undergraduates reported that their own past (choice of college to attend and choice of field of concentration) and futures (place to live and profession) were less predictable than those of a roommate, and a similarly broader scope of futures was claimed by restaurant waiters for themselves in comparison to a co-worker. These asymmetries could not be explained simply as self-optimism, because the larger set of future scenarios comprised both positive and negative outcomes. Finally, and in contrast to the tendency to attribute one's own actions to situational influences and another's actions to dispositional traits, they found that where the undergraduates differed from their roommates was in the apportionment of causal motivations to intentions versus personality; that is, we see our actions as the product of changeable desires, and the sense that we could have acted otherwise had we so desired is what underpins our belief in free will.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 22469 (2010).

January 20, 2011

A Clear No for the Spruce Mine

If the Obama administration stays the course, the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision last week to revoke a permit for one of the nation’s biggest mountaintop-removal mining projects could be the beginning of the end of a mining practice that has caused huge environmental harm across Appalachia.

The decision is a tribute to the agency, which faced fierce political opposition and a victory for the West Virginians who worked long and hard to block the mine. It should also be a warning to the mining industry that the days of getting its way, no matter the cost, are over.

The Spruce No. 1 Mine, owned by Arch Coal, would have required dynamiting the tops off mountains over an area of 2,278 acres to reach subsurface coal seams. The resulting rubble, known as spoil, would then be dumped into the valleys and streams below — ruining, by the E.P.A.’s estimate, six miles of high-quality streams and causing “unacceptable” damage to the environment.

Thousands of miles of streams in Appalachia have already been poisoned in this manner in clear violation of the Clean Water Act.

The mine received a final permit from the Army Corps of Engineers in 2007. The E.P.A. has long had the power to veto such permits but has used it only once before. This decision provoked predictably outraged responses from industry and its political friends, including West Virginia’s two Democratic senators, John Rockefeller IV and Joe Manchin III, a former governor.

The Clinton and Bush administrations gave the industry much of what it wanted, but President Obama’s E.P.A. has raised the bar. First, it agreed to review existing permits, including the Spruce Mine; then it tightened standards for new permits by insisting on a more rigorous scientific analysis of a proposed mine’s downstream impact on fish and other aquatic life.

Arch Coal has vowed a court fight, which Mr. Manchin says he will support. A far better use of their energies would be to find a less destructive way to mine coal.

Off subject, but still very encouraging...the NIH is revising it's animal testing policies basically for primates. However, it's a good sign that people have vocalized and criticized the National Institute of Health for allowing ridiculous, repetitive testing of all animals.

We may see the day in my lifetime where animals will no longer be bred, gathered from 'shelters' and sold to labs, and also the ellimination of Class "B" dealers licensed by the NIH.

Technological innovations are so far advanced, the need to dissect, abuse, and harm animals using the 'human health' excuse will end and none to soon.