October 30, 2016

Smoked Links with Seal Meat

This is "good" smoke, coming from a fire-line burnout
on the Junkins Fire three days ago.
I am still catching up after the evacuation, the firefighting, the meetings, and the general nervousness of having Chinook and Skycrane helicopters thumping over the house hour after hour.  So here are some quick nature-blogging links.

¶ Talk about going against the narrative an Inuit filmmaker creates a pro-seal hunt video.
Alethea Arnaquq-Baril: I'm Inuit, so I grew up in the Arctic. I grew up hunting and eating seal meat with my family, and as an Inuk, you just grow up hearing people complain [about] and criticize seal hunters. It's just kind of always been an issue for me, and I knew that when I became a filmmaker that I was eventually going to have to cover this issue. 
¶  When trekking poles became popular a few years ago, I had a sort of snobbish reaction. "Who needs two poles?" I thought. "They turn you into a beast of burden. Maybe if you are carrying a very heavy pack on rocky ground . . . "

Other people put a positive spin on "beast," saying that the poles make them feel like a sure-footed quadruped.

I am all for sparing your knees on long downhill trails, but I hate to have two hands occupied with poles. When I broke one of my old bamboo x-c ski poles a few years back, I cut them both down to walking-stick length and added rubber tips. But usually I carry only one, because the other hands needs to be free for a tool, a leashed dog, or whatever.

But here is Randy Newberg, one of the few makers of hunting videos that I can stand to watch, making the case for them — with a video too.
“You can laugh at me all you want,” says Newberg. ” But there’s a reason why this 51-year-old, gray haired fart, who drives a desk for a living a good portion of the year, can go and hunt the mountains: trekking poles.”
Another video: Put a camera on bears in Yellowstone and let them wander — and see what happens when they encounters wolves.

October 22, 2016

Linkage into the Wild


Other linkage:

¶ Alaska writer Craig Medred proposes some cures for "bus madness," in other words, the pilgrims and wannabes who turn the abandoned bus where Chris "Supertramp" McCandless died into a destination — and who often have to be rescued at public expense.

A sample:
Ransom the Bus: Americans, or at least some of them, seem to think there’s something mythical, mystical, magic, marvelous, mad or some other m-word about visiting a bus where some poor, foolish young man sadly starved to death. Let them pay to keep their shrine out there. Put out a press release warning that the cash-strapped state of Alaska cannot afford further rescues, and unless people contribute $500,000 this year to save the bus it will be blown up as public nuisance. Let America start a GoFundTheBus campaign.
¶ A new cultural history of the Great Plains for that mythical creature, the general reader: Great Plains Indians by historical geographer David Wishart. It's part of a new series from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, "Discover the Great Plains."


A retrospective of setter and pointer dogs in advertising art. That is not two different appreviations for "Colorado," but rather Delta County and the town of Cedaredge.

October 18, 2016

Take These Links with 100% Agave Tequila

¶ Without bats, no tequila? There is some motivation for conservation!
Aside from consuming loads of crop-destroying insects, bats are plant pollinators, and Medellín's prized lesser long-nosed bat pollinates the cactuslike blue agave plant, the single plant species from which Mexican tequila is produced.
Habitat destruction has been especially harmful to the lesser long-nosed bat, first listed as a threatened species in Mexico in 1994. By 2008 it was well on its way to recovery, thanks largely to Medellín, a tireless advocate who's been dubbed the "Bat Man of Mexico" for his work with bats. (Medellín, a Rolex Laureate and National Geographic grantee, has also worked to help a variety of other plant and animal species.
 ¶ A study showing that bear spray works better than bullets for stopping bear attacks.  Yes, there are exceptions. Some bears don't read the rule book. But we are talking about statistics here, not about individual bears.

Link to a video on fire in California forests, set by Indians (and some early Anglo settlers too!) until the Forest Service put a stop to "light burning," as it was called a century ago. Now the term is "cultural burning.

¶ Silly tourists and professional nature-fakers: the ugly side of wildlife photography.
In 2009, the image of a “jumping wolf” by photographer José Luis Rodriguez won for him the prestigious wildlife photographer of the year award conferred by the British Natural History Museum. It was later discovered that the wolf was trained for the shoot. Rodriguez was disqualified.

October 17, 2016

Moviemakers Come to Florence and Make an Odd Decision

A Florence school band marches past the real Rialto theatre in a parade scene from "Our Souls at Night."
Evidently the fictional Holt school district cannot afford uniforms.
The movie trailers, lights and reflectors, and the crew members with handheld radios have now left little Florence, Colorado, which for a couple of weeks became the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, the setting of Kent Haruf's novel Our Souls at Night, soon to be a Netflix movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. (Some scenes were filmed in Cañon City and the West Side of Colorado Springs.)

For that time, it was big news.  A local blogger wrote about a resident meeting Redford in the alley behind her home and how Florence's business district full of antiques-and-collectibles shops made life easier for set dressers.
Florence, being the antiques capital of Colorado, has dozens of stores full of things at good prices for the movie sets and props. Some of the crew members, most of them from other states, were also doing browsing and shopping for their own homes.

Until I witnessed it up close, I never realized how Florence is the perfect town for a crew to come in and purchase so many things for the movie, all on foot and within a few block radius. And since Florence is a small town, most shop workers know what is in their own stores as well as neighboring stores and can help crew members find the item that will set the mood for a scene.

The day I saw Mr. Redford from afar many times, working hard, I texted a friend and said,"Another boring day at work, watching Robert Redford so many times that I've lost count."
Businesses around town sported fake signage: an insurance agency became the Holt National Bank — fitting, since its building started life as a bank a century or more ago — while a Main Street pizza restaurant became the Holt Drug Store. The empty lobby of a historic hotel was reconfigured into a cafe.

The "Rialto" move theatre created for the movie.
One movie-set decision did seem odd to me. Florence's Main Street includes the Rialto Theatre, built in 1923, which has been undergoing a slow, painstaking restoration, paid for mostly by community members. The original marquee and entry are in place. A perfect set, right?

Instead, they turned a former bar (now a gallery) into a smaller, bleaker, fake Rialto. Maybe someone just fell in love with those moderne glass bricks.

October 16, 2016

A Café without Pretension

A customer (not me) wonders why the cafe is closed when its posted hours say otherwise.
I picked up a "travel mug" ( or "auto mug" if you prefer) at the local cafe here in [Small Town], North Dakota, today. It carries the inscription, " [Blank] Cafe: Where Great Food & Great Friends Meet.'

It might be more honest to say, "Where average food and the people you can't avoid seeing every day in the town's only cafe meet."

For this place, a corporate account with Sysco would be a step up. The idea of chefs working themselves into madness is as remote as Alpha Centauri.

Self-service coffee? At the [Blank] Cafe, it's "self-made coffee." As in there are coffee pots sitting empty over there —  fill one with water, put coffee and a filter in the machine, and hit the On button. You're not too special to make your own coffee that you are paying for, are you?

Part of it is just that eastern North Dakota Scandinavian thing: You don't want to act like you are too special. It's hard to tell the truck driver from the farmer who is actually worth several million dollars — until the farmer goes on an expensive vacation, or you watch who is buying what at the auction house.

October 09, 2016

Touch Not the Coon Bot a Glove


Raccoon #1 finally leaves the carrier.
The wind was blowing 40 mph, it looked like the Aryan Brotherhood was setting up a campsite on the road coming in, and the two raccoons would not come out of their carrier.

So there is no video of excited animals returning to the wild with this post. It's like they were saying, "We're basically nocturnal, and we don't know where we are, and we've been jostled in this box for a hour, and we don't want to come out. And what happened to our buddies?"

Even in hot weather they would sleep in a heap.
Our friends the wildlife rehabilitators had ended up with twenty orphaned young raccoons this year, through various circumstances.

By late September they were passing them out like late-season zucchini to game wardens and other people who could re-locate them.

M. and I agreed to take two to a state wildlife area in an adjacent county. It is surrounded by dry piñon-juniper forest, but through it runs a stream with an extensive riparian area of big cottonwoods and underbrush. There are raccoons there already, most likely, but maybe two more could find territories of their own.

The coons were getting big and rowdy. Our rehabilitator friends are a married couple, retired. She put on her welder's gloves and attempted to pull one coon out of the pile in the back of the Dogloo
 
Angry snarls erupted. She jerked her hands back.

"Get the noose pole," she told her husband. He fetched it, I held the carrier, and we soon had the day's two snarling release coons boxed to go.

"If they have a bad experience with humans, that's a good thing," she said philosophically.


At the end of a long gravel road, M. and I neared the bridge over that creek that I had mentally envisioned as a release area. But there was a newish vehicle parked there — angler? hiker?

Hmmm. Trash bags full of . . . stuff all over the place. Three well-fed pit bulls. Two young guys, one shirtless—not scraggly looking, but buff with crew cuts, not waving but giving us cold stares.

They seemed too clean-cut (in a hard-edged way) to be homeless campers defying the "No Overnight Camping" signs. It is the wrong time of year to be planting a "pirate" marijuana grow, and if they were harvesting such, why make a big production of it? Meth cooks? Everything I could think of was negative.

I kept driving, down to the parking lot half a mile further on. It was not as a great a release site, but there were clumps of willows along a flowing irrigation ditch, and if the coons followed the water upstream, they would be by the creek. No one else was there.

We put out some puppy chow and husked ears of corn, then opened the carrier door. No action. It took a gentle prodding to get them out, whereupon they ignored the food (for now) and slunk into the willows.

I put the carrier into the Jeep, started back down the access road — and there was a dead tree fallen across it. Did I mention the high winds, a bora, in fact?

My mental inventory of tools on board turned up only a hatchet, but M. hopped out and discovered that the branches were dry and rotten. We snapped off enough that we could drive between the tree and the barbed-wire pasture fence.

And then out past the two buff guys with the pitbulls, still giving us the hairy eyeball, and down to the nearest town for a restorative pint at the brewpub.

I tried calling the district wildlife manager (game warden) who I thought had that area in his territory, just to give him a heads-up, but the call went to voice mail. (It's typical of Colorado Parks and Wildlife that you have to dig and dig to find out which DWM has exactly what district and what the boundaries area. )

So I sent him an email later. No response. You would think that he or the wildlife tech who manages the irrigation might like to know that he had Aryan Brotherhood-clones hanging around the place, but see paragraph above.

The post title comes from the saying, "Touch not the cat bot a glove," in other words, "Touch not the [Eurasian wildcat] without a glove." It's supposed to be the motto of several Scottish clans, in the same spirit as "Don't tread on me."

October 07, 2016

The Southwestern Monsoon and the Vocabulary of Weather

 (Click for full-screen view)

First, via writer Peter Grant's blog, here is the Southwestern monsoon (chiefly in the Phoenix area), in video composite form.

The creator,  Mike Olbinsk, mentions in his commentary how glad he was to get shots of a haboob, otherwise known as a helluva dust storm.

TV weather people love to roll out new terms for weather phenomena. In the pre-video era, we got through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s with the simple term dust storm.

Likewise, monsoon has lost its quotation marks and become normal speech.

Now I hear the weather-nerds using bora for a strong downslope wind, like the one that hit last Monday and kicked the Beulah Hill Fire up to more than 5,000 acres in one afternoon.

A little Bulgarian to flavor your weather forecast. Will it catch on?

October 03, 2016

The Earth Is Trying to Kill You, Cabela's Is Sold, Trees Talk

¶ "Landslides in the United States cause approximately $3.5 billion (year 2001 dollars) in damage, and kill between 25 and 50 people annually." I think we need a cartoon character: Rocky Bear. "Only You Can Prevent Landslides." Sort of.

¶ Outdoor retailing empires merge: Bass Pro Shops is buying Cabela's.
The deal marks a dramatic expansion of the outdoor retailing empire controlled by Bass Pro Shops CEO Johnny Morris, who founded the company in 1972. The billionaire will lead the newly combined entity as CEO and will retain majority ownership.
Foresters ponder how trees talk to each other:
The main reason humans cannot perceive how clever and complex they are is because we exist in such short time scales by comparison. There's a tree in Sweden for instance, a spruce, that is more than 9,500 years old. That's 115 times longer than the average human lifespan.