Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Very interesting article sumac - I had known that starlings are really vicious birds, but didn't know they were imported............ Our ancestors must have been crazy. The "Ice Plants" on the W. Coast were imported --- "Tumble Weeds" in the Western Movies were imported. And, --- """"Kudzu"""" Oooooh Myyyy Goooood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe you can come up with a list of bad ideas that are living with us today..........

Thanks sumac for clicking and all other cleeeeekers who don't post. Great going !!!!!!!!!!

Got my clicking done and am out this afternoon to pull up some winter weeds.

February 13, 2011

The Risk to Bristol Bay

Last year, the Obama administration permanently banned oil drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, America’s richest salmon fishery and the heart of a $2.2 billion regional fishing industry. One huge threat to this extraordinary ecosystem remains: a proposed gold and copper operation known as the Pebble Mine. If built, it would affect a huge area of clear-running headwater streams and wetlands that feed the bay.

Responding to urgent requests from nine native tribes that depend on the headwaters for subsistence, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has now announced that it will assess the risks to the bay from mining and commercial projects in general.

This is very good news. The agency obviously cannot prejudge the study’s outcome, but its announcement pointedly called attention to Bristol Bay’s “extraordinary importance” as a salmon fishery and source of food and income for local residents. It also called attention to its obligation under the federal Clean Water Act to block any project that would have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on water quality and wildlife.

Anglo American, the London-based multinational powerhouse behind the project, says it can extract the minerals safely. But historically the mining industry has done a sloppy job of protecting the environment. Mining residues, like sulfide-laced rock, are toxic. No matter how hard the company tries to sequester them — it proposes to build a 740-foot-high dam to contain the waste — an earthquake or other disturbance can jar them loose.

The people of Alaska came close to blocking the project themselves in a 2008 referendum. Three former governors, including two Republicans, and Senator Ted Stevens spoke out against the mine. Industry, however, spent $12 million on advertising about the mine’s economic benefits; that, plus a last-minute pro-mining push by Gov. Sarah Palin and her administration, turned the tide in industry’s favor.

The E.P.A. is right to do this study. We are certain it will find that the mine presents unacceptable risks and should not be allowed to proceed.

FEBRUARY 13, 2011, 5:00 PM
Race, Sex and the Trials of a Young Explorer

By RICHARD CONNIFF
Specimens looks at how species discovery has transformed our lives.

Tags:

Evolution, Natural History, Race, racism, species

Stories of the Gorilla Country, 1895The explorer Paul Du Chaillu depicted his African adventures in books, but critics accused him of exaggerating.
In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon. He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa. The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year. The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.

But the more common way to deal with our resemblance to monkeys and apes then was to fob it off onto other ethnic groups — typically black people, or sometimes the Irish. A few white scientists even purported to find physiological evidence, in the configuration of the skull, for classifying other races as separate species, not quite as far removed as Caucasians from our primate cousins. This undercurrent of scientific racism would play out to devastating effect in Du Chaillu’s own life.

When Du Chaillu arrived in London for the 1861 publication of his book, “Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa,” he became the most celebrated figure of the season, and then, overnight, the most notorious. He was, by all accounts, a charismatic presence, about 30 years old, with a thick moustache, a prominent brow, and bright, flashing eyes. He also had a gift for colorful lectures about hunting fierce animals and befriending cannibals.

But scientists were soon ripping him to bits in the British press, saying that he exaggerated his own adventures and gave too little credit to other explorers, including some he plagiarized. Many of these complaints seem to have been valid. In particular, Du Chaillu’s depiction of the gorilla as a ferocious monster — “some hellish dream creature” — grossly distorted the image of these generally placid animals. (His stories were still around decades later serving as raw material for the Hollywood legend of King Kong.)

Suspicions about an explorer’s origins in the heyday of scientific racism.
The ferocity of the attack on Du Chaillu that spring and summer of 1861 went well beyond ordinary academic bickering. Each week for more than a month, John E. Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, sent a lengthy letter to The Athenaeum magazine denouncing Du Chaillu. Other critics eagerly piled on. Newly professional scientists may simply have wanted to distance themselves from the taint of amateurism. That seems to have been one reason Gray made a minor career out of disparaging field naturalists. Darwin, who rarely spoke ill of anyone, would later call him an “old malignant fool” for it. The attack on Du Chaillu was also a way for Gray to undercut his rival (and boss) at the British Museum, the anatomist Richard Owen, one of Du Chaillu’s sponsors in London.

But as I was researching my book “The Species Seekers,” I kept coming across hints of an uglier motive for the attack on Du Chaillu, based on race. A merchant in Gabon made the cryptic assertion that he possessed “from reliable sources, information the most exact as to [Du Chaillu’s] antecedents.” Others whispered, as The New York Times reported, that “the suspicion of negro sympathies hangs around him in many ways.” Du Chaillu presented himself as a white man, born in Louisiana, and an almost compulsive awareness of race runs through his book: “’You are the first white man that settled among us, and we love you,’” a village chieftain declares at one point. “To which all the people answered, ‘Yes, we love him! He is our white man, and we have no other white man.’ ”

Stories of the Gorilla Country, 1895 Paul Du Chaillu
But the truth seems to be that his mother was a woman of mixed race, possibly a slave, on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, where his father had been a merchant and slaveholder. Concealing this background, the historian Henry H. Bucher Jr. has written, was “an understandable choice during the heyday of scientific racism.” In fact, Du Chaillu’s expedition to Gabon had been sponsored by the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, then the center of scientific racism. (Samuel G. Morton kept a vast collection of skulls there, “the American Golgotha,” for the purpose of racial comparisons.) The “mysterious and rapid” end to Du Chaillu’s close association with the Academy in 1860 may have resulted, says Bucher, from “a committee member’s discovery of his maternal ancestry.”

A letter sent to an English friend in the thick of the Du Chaillu controversy supports this theory. George Ord, an officer of the academy, wrote that some of his learned colleagues had taken note when Du Chaillu was in Philadelphia of “the conformation of his head, and his features” and detected “evidence of a spurious origin.” Ord added: “If it be a fact that he is a mongrel, or a mustee, as the mixed races are termed in the West Indies, then we may account for his wondrous narratives; for I have observed that it is a characteristic of the negro race, and their admixtures, to be affected to habits of romance.”

In England, the mathematician Augustus de Morgan echoed these feelings. He found the running battle over Du Chaillu so entertaining that he sent a congratulatory note to his friend William Hepworth Dixon, editor of The Athenaeum, calling “this Gorilla matter … a godsend” for a journal that had begun to seem stodgy. Then, without stating the racial gossip outright, he drove the point home with a joke based on the old urban legend of a brewer who serves up an unusually good batch of beer, only to find a dead body at the bottom of the vat. But in this case, the body belonged to a black man. That’s the secret for lively reading, De Morgan concluded: “A negro in the vat every time!”

Though it’s only conjecture, sex may also have played a role in the savaging Du Chaillu endured in England. He was an enthusiastic socializer, whose address books in later life were full of notes about “calls to make” “notes to send,” and new acquaintances, both male (“lawyer good fellow”) and female (“of medium height with dark chestnut hair … an exquisite figure … graceful”). A friend later passed the word “sub rosa” to an acquaintance that Du Chaillu was “rather too fond of women.”

Related More From Specimens
Read previous contributions to this series.

Curiously, the same issues of The Athenaeum in which the attack on Du Chaillu was playing out also featured a running plagiarism fight about a stage melodrama called “The Octoroon.” It told the story of a dazzling New Orleans beauty “educated in every refinement and luxury” who was “almost a perfect white, her mother being a quadroon.” In all three contesting versions of this tale, an “underhanded Yankee overseer” seeks to possess the heroine on the slave market. And in each case, a dashing sea captain foils the nefarious plot and carries the beauty off to freedom. Audiences apparently felt comfortable taking the heroine’s side because she was seven-eighths white. But what if the sexes had been reversed, with a white woman falling for a mixed-race man — a man like Du Chaillu, say?

Readers needed only to turn the pages of The Athenaeum to find out.

Du Chaillu did not collapse in the face of this attack. Instead, he returned to Gabon to defend his work. The new expedition was a nightmare, but he brought back one particular set of specimens that pleased him. On his previous trip, he had tentatively proposed a new genus of giant river otter, Potamogale, based on the tattered skin of an animal he had shot. Gray had sneeringly classified it as a rodent instead, with the derisive name Mythomys. But it turned out that the field naturalist, not the museum curator, had come closer to the truth. After much throat-clearing on Gray’s behalf, a professor at Edinburgh University concluded, “Mr. Du Chaillu’s name of Potamogale stands: it has thus precedence over Gray’s name of Mythomys; and the laws of natural-history nomenclature compel us to accept it.”

For a flawed explorer vilified at least partly on account of another classification — his race — it was a vindication.
Richard Conniff’s work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and on National Public Radio. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.” He blogs at strangebehaviors.com. Twitter: @RichardConniff.

Thanks for the valentine, Stradee. Did my clicking and going outside this afternoon to cut back some roses.

And a very Happy VD day to you too............

Oooooops.............. Not what I intended........... hehehehe......!!

Great clicking all - a tree outside said so to me today as I walked out to get the mail................

Asmiling trees are a good thing.

Hi all --------- Let's give a tree a chance today.

Happy clicking!!!

Hi Danon. Looks like Stradee is having some snow.

How long has this thread been going on? Since it is basically just you and me, should we contact Stradee and ehBeth about ending it?

Hi sumac, thanks for staying in there - uh, here - with me. Yes, this thread is getting long - however, I am going to keep clicking until someone else starts a new thread. Then I'll continue to click to keep trees asmiling for as long as I'm alive.

Happy clicking everyone who clicks but doesn't post on this site........ It's like Gilda Radner said, "Well, that's very different - Never mind."

Keep those clicks coming folks............!

OK, we'll stick to it.

All clicked and no interesting articles.

I'll click to that ------------- !

another tree asmiling !!!

Fewer big fish in the sea, says study

42 mins ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Fewer big, predatory fish are swimming in the world's oceans because of overfishing by humans, leaving smaller fish to thrive and double in force over the past 100 years, scientists said Friday.
Big fish, such as cod, tuna, and groupers have declined worldwide by two-thirds while the number of anchovies, sardines and capelin has surged in their absence, said University of British Columbia researchers.
"Overfishing has absolutely had a 'when cats are away, the mice will play' effect on our oceans," said Villy Christensen, a professor in the UBC Fisheries Centre who presented the research findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington.
"By removing the large, predatory species from the ocean, small forage fish have been left to thrive."
The researchers also found that more than half (54 percent) of the decline in the predatory fish population has taken place over the last 40 years.
Christensen and his team examined more than 200 global marine ecosystem models and extracted more than 68,000 estimates of fish biomass from 1880 to 2007 for the study.
While the number of small fish is on the rise, the little swimmers are also being increasingly sought after for use as fishmeal in human-run fisheries, Christensen said.
"Currently, forage fish are turned into fishmeal and fish oil and used as feeds for the aquaculture industry, which is in turn becoming increasingly reliant on this feed source," he said.
"If the fishing-down-the-food-web trend continues, our oceans may one day become a 'farm' to produce feeds for the aquaculture industry. Goodbye, wild ocean!"

February 18, 2011

A Homecoming for Bighorn Sheep in Colorado

By KIRK JOHNSON
SEDALIA, Colo. — The mechanics were simple. A trailer latch popped, a gate swung open and three wild bighorn sheep — two females, presumably pregnant, and a year-old lamb, definitely frisky — trotted up the rocky slope of Thunder Butte under a pale afternoon sun.

It is the back story of the animals’ release this week by wildlife biologists here in the mountains southwest of Denver that can stagger the mind with its complications of coincidence, historical accident, devastation and hope.

A truck breakdown on a highway in February 1946 played a role, believe it or not, as did the biggest Colorado wildfire in memory, the Hayman, in June 2002. The fire roared through the cliffs in the Pike National Forest with flames hundreds of feet high, scouring the land of trees across 138,000 acres.

Human intervention, from the mining boom in the late 1800s, when timber was cut by the trainload for fuel and construction, through the bighorn reintroduction program in the Hayman burn area by the Colorado Division of Wildlife, begun last year, completed the circle of natural and wild that brought the bighorns home. They were last seen in this area in the mid-1960s.

However the pieces fit, biologists and land managers say a bighorn homecoming to the Hayman is a powerful reaffirmation of hope in the West for a creature that has long symbolized the ideals of sure-footed survival in the high lonesome aeries where they evolved and still persist. Sheep restoration began here last year with the first 12 animals and continued with 12 more this month.

“We’re back,” Janet George, a senior biologist at the Colorado Division of Wildlife, said as the animals peered around at their new home (their eyesight is excellent, which is why they stake out rocky perches, the better to spot approaching predators). “This was historically bighorn range, and then it couldn’t sustain a sheep herd any more,” Ms. George said. “And now nine years after the fire, it can again.”

But back to that truck accident. In early 1946, state wildlife managers were hauling 14 bighorns near Colorado Springs, intending to start a herd of transplants near Pikes Peak. When the truck broke down, the animals were instead released right where they were. The 14 pioneers — 10 ewes, 2 rams and 2 lambs — drifted north and established vibrant herd from which the Hayman group was drawn for release.

The accidental but successful herd created the gene pool, and the Hayman fire restored a habitat of treeless rock that bighorns love, and where they seek shelter from predators who cannot match them in cliff-side clambering.

Their agility is partly due to unique hooves that have evolved specifically for climbing rocks, with a hard outer wall and a soft inner wall for traction. Combined with iron-lunged endurance, they can even sometimes evade mountain lions, which are fierce and fast but quickly winded.

It is a life and a niche in the high rocky places, where — crucially — humans usually do not build ranches or mansions, that has allowed the bighorns’ numbers to hold strong along the spine of the Rockies from Colorado through Wyoming, Montana and into Alberta, Canada, each of which has bighorn populations estimated at 7,000 animals or more.

But the Hayman burn site is as much a character in this saga as the animals, and the healing from its giant scar has been slow. On June 8, 2002, a United States Forest Service employee named Terry Barton said that she burned a letter from her estranged husband at a campground, and that the fire spread. Ms. Barton ultimately pleaded guilty to arson and spent six years in prison.

Hayman was also calamitous for Denver’s water system, which has spent millions of dollars rebuilding and cleaning a reservoir in the burn area that became clogged with sediment from eroding soils that were no longer held in place by grasses and trees.

Ms. George, the state biologist, said it would take decades before Thunder Butte became reforested. That is very good news for the sheep, which have survived in part by avoiding forests, where predators like lions can drop from above.

But that is also assuming that the historical cycle of rebirth and growth repeat in the same way. With climate change and planetary warming in the decades to come, Ms. George said, the next-generation forest here might be very different from the one that was erased by Hayman.

Meanwhile, as the three new residents disappeared up into the rocks, another biologist with the Division of Wildlife, Heather Halbritter, was tracking the nine sheep released earlier this month from that same post-1946 group, using the radio-beacon collars they had been fitted with.

“They’re in those rocks, up along the ridgeline,” she said, waving the tracking device and pointing in the very direction the newcomers were going. A herd reunion might be in the offing.

Then the two ewes and their tag-along lamb stopped on a cliff. As if posing for a picture, or assessing the strangely beautiful moonscape of the Hayman, they stood in silhouette.

“That’s what sheep do,” Ms. George said. “They climb out on a rock and look.”

Couple of interesting articles up above. Did my clicking for the day. Nice pretty day with a high of about 67. Got to 78 yesterday.

Yes, interesting -------- Earlier I posted a true story about a lady hiking with her dog.. The dog chased a sheep up a steep hill side - the sheep got stuck and the dog got stuck behind the sheep. The lady went up trying to save her dog and got stuck. All three had to be rescued.

You just can't make up stuff like that.

n a dusty, ancient burial site in northern Jordan, archaeologists have made a startling discovery: a fox buried alongside human remains.

It seems some 16,000 years ago, several millennia before any animals were domesticated, humans may have been making an early attempt to keep pets. Red foxes, to be precise.

It's a surprising find, Cambridge researcher Lisa Maher tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "When we were first excavating the site, we thought it might have been a dog," she says. It wasn't until her team analyzed the animal's remains that it realized it was a fox.

That the fox was a pet is only one of several possibilities, however. It may instead have had totemic or spiritual significance to the culture. But Maher's team compared the burial site to sites from 4,000 years later, when domesticated dogs did accompany human burials. The similarities suggest "that it probably was a more emotional relationship of one particular fox to one particular person," she says.

Those similarities are also significant because they highlight a continuity in mortuary practices through time, Maher adds. "We're seeing these things, these similarities in mortuary practices and relationships to humans and animals in a much greater time depth than we had previously."

If the fox were indeed a pet, it would be a pretty big deal. "It's certainly a big deal for prehistoric archeology," Maher says, "but it's also a big deal for how we understand human-animal relationships today and in the past."

I hadn't known about the fox - but other animals buried with humans were pretty common. One of the oldest known burial sites that suggest some connection with human emotions is a Neanderthal site approx 40,000 years old that contains flowers in the gravesite. Most human animals at that time were just left were they fell - like animals today.
And, talk about getting around!! In Ireland a body was found very well preserved in peat moss. The man's hair was decorated and had oils and perfumes that came from S. France!!! That was approx 4500 BC....... Incredible how people moved around and traded..........
Even right here in NE TX due to the local terrain there was a natural crossroads of sorts along the Red River at the point where Ok, AR, LA and TX come together. Many different types and colors of flint objects have been found - most that are NOT native to this area. I found black obsidian and pink flint and much more (during the 50's before it was illegal).

In Japan, a victory for the whales

Justin McCurry [2]February 21, 2011 06:14
Activists rejoice as Japan recalls a fleet of whaling ships weeks before the annual hunt was meant to end.
Japan recalls a fleet of whaling ships weeks before the hunt was meant to end.
Justin McCurry
TOKYO, Japan — Several years after they began pursuing whalers through the perilous waters of the Antarctic, environmental activists had cause for celebration last week with Japan’s decision to recall its fleet, weeks before its annual hunt was due to end.

Two days after it suspended whaling activities, citing harassment from the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd, Japan’s government ordered the fleet to return home Feb. 18 with its lowest ever catch.

While it insists the decision was made purely for safety reasons, there is speculation that this could be the last year Japan ventures south to conduct the “lethal research” it says is necessary to study whale populations ahead of a possible return to sustainable commercial whaling.

The International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986, but for the past 23 years Japan has used a clause in the moratorium that allows it to kill a certain number every year for research.

The meat — a delicacy often eaten raw, deep-fried or in a hotpot — is sold on the domestic market, but poor demand at home could mean the heavily subsidized industry’s days are numbered. The whaling program costs Japan as much as $60 million a year, with 85 percent of funding coming from sales of meat from the research hunts.

Japan’s agriculture minister, Michihiko Kano, told a news conference: "It has become difficult to secure the fleet's safety. We have no choice but to cut short our research. It's regrettable that such obstructions have taken place. We will have to find ways to prevent this kind of harassment.”

Kano was unable to say if the hunt would resume next season; only that the ministry would “examine” the issue before deciding.

Sea Shepherd’s founder, Paul Watson, described the withdrawal of the fleet’s four ships and 180 crewmembers as a “very happy day for people everywhere who love whales and our oceans.”

He said the move was the culmination of an aggressive international campaign that began seven years ago.

“I have a crew of 88 very happy people from 23 nations, including Japan, and they are absolutely thrilled that the whalers are heading home and the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary is indeed a real sanctuary,” he said from the Steve Irwin, one of three Sea Shepherd boats in the Antarctic.

“This a great victory for the whales.”

Sea Shepherd claimed it had pursued the Nisshin Maru for more than 3,200 kilometers this winter, and prevented the fleet from killing any whales since Feb. 9. The group estimated the fleet had caught only 30-100 minke whales, while Japanese officials said the catch was about 170, still only about one-fifth the intended quota this year of 945.

The ministry could not say when the fleet would return. It left Japan on Dec. 2, arriving in the whaling grounds at the end of last year, and was supposed to have stayed there until mid-March before arriving home in April.

Sea Shepherd has been involved in a series of skirmishes with whalers in the Southern Ocean in recent years. Its tactics include targeting the decks of whaling vessels with butyric acid and distracting crews with infrared beams and flares.

The Japanese government describes the group as a terrorist organization and has shown a willingness to pursue its members through the courts. Last summer, Peter Bethune, a Sea Shepherd activist from New Zealand, was given a two-year suspended prison sentence after he climbed aboard a whaling ship, the Shonan Maru 2, to protest the sinking of his high-tech powerboat, the Ady Gil, after a collision with the Japanese vessel.

But there may be more to Japan’s surprise decision to recall the fleet than concern for the whaling fleet’s safety. The hunts have soured relations with Australia, a major trading partner with whom Tokyo hopes to conclude a new free trade agreement.

Last year, Australia filed a complaint against Japan at the international court of justice in The Hague in an attempt to put a permanent end to its expeditions to the Southern Ocean. A decision is expected in 2013 at the earliest.

"I'm glad this season is over and Australia doesn't believe there should ever be another whaling season again," Australia’s environment minister, Tony Burke, said in a statement Friday.

While many Japanese bristle at what they regard as Western interference in a culinary tradition stretching back centuries, domestic demand for whale meat has plummeted since its heyday as a much-needed source of protein in the postwar years.

Despite special promotions and programs to serve the dish as part of school lunches, the Japanese eat the equivalent of only four slices of sashimi a year, according to one estimate. As of December, industrial freezers across the country housed 5,093 tons of whale meat, according to the fisheries agency.

While Sea Shepherd has engaged in whale wars on the high seas, Greenpeace has attempted to shift public opinion by exposing waste and criminality in the whaling industry.

Last September, Greenpeace Japan members Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki each received a one-year suspended sentence after they intercepted a parcel of whale meat they said had been stolen by crewmembers who intended to sell it on the black market.

Sato, who is now the group’s executive director, said last week’s announcement should be followed by a permanent end to whaling. “The historic announcement confirms what we all know: that Japan’s whaling serves no purpose whatsoever and that the fleet has no business in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary,” he said.

“All the whaling program has produced is a stockpile of thousands of tons of frozen whale meat, the waste of billions of Japanese taxpayers’ yen, and a culture of corruption and scandal.

“An early return of the whaling fleet is not enough. Japan’s whaling ships should never leave port again.”

Mon, 2011-02-21 06:14