Die, tamarisk, die!

Coyote Gulch links to a hopeful piece of news: a biological control for the invasive, wildlife-habitat-destroying tamarisk may just be working. (Newspaper link may expire.)

From the Rocky Mountain News:

Releases in 2001 at four sites, two in Nevada and two in Utah, have matured and beetles are defoliating hundreds of acres of tamarisk. . . . beetles released in 2004 near Moab, Utah, are taking hold.

The tamarisk, a tree native to Eurasia, has crowded out native species such as willows and cottonwoods and sucked up vast amounts of water in the West.

Labor-intensive efforts to eradicate tamarisk cost $1,500 to $3,000 per acre. The tamarisk leaf beetles may be able to do the job for less than $10 per acre, according to U.S. Bureau of Land Management spokeswoman Mel Lloyd.

Are you cool enough to buy our stuff?

Jed Baer blogged on being treated as invisible in a Colorado gun shop, and Wadcutter took up the topic too. But it's not just gun shops that can be this way--although I had a similar experience last Friday. (I won't name the establishment because I will be surprised if it is there this time next year.)

Is it the outdoor business in general: fly shops, bike shops, mountaineering shops?

You walk through the door, and the clerk's look says, "Are you cool enough to be shopping here? Do I recognize you from Outside or Fly Fisherman magazine?"

There are exceptions, of course. I nominate Absolute Bikes of Salida, Colorado, as a shop that is chock-full of bike geekiness, yet its staff seems attentive to every tourist who wanders in, not just to Lance Armstrong-wannabees.

So your choice is to try to get on the "known customer" list or to go to some big-box store where the selection is just the lowest common denominator, and the sales clerks (if you can find one) were working in consumer electronics or women's wear last week.

Baer says it:

At no time did anyone think to utter those 4 little words which are so noticeably lacking in the retail business these days: "May I help you?" Guy #2 was obviously too busy to bother with something so unimportant to the retail trade as helping a customer, or even being courteous. . . . I've worked retail. I know what it's like. Never, ever, during that time, did I fail to greet a customer, no matter how busy I was.

And you wonder why people are slow to take up these activities.

10-Bird Meme, No. 5: Broad-tailed hummingbird

The noise of summer.

It's wartime now on our front porch. Rufous hummingbirds, migrating south, have arrived in the breeding territory of "our" broad-tailed hummers. Try typing while a lilliputian version of The Dawn Patrol is being reenacted inches above your head.

Photo: Male broad-tailed hummingbird. Credit: Hummingbirds.net. 


The annual struggle for control of vital airspace around the sugar-water feeder is event number four of the season.

First, in late April, season of snow and mud, comes one lone male broad-tailed hummingbird. You're outside thinking about all the storm-broken branches that need to be gathered, when you hear his rattling buzz (or "trilling whistle"). What do they eat before a single flower has bloomed and summer insects are not yet in the air? Tree sap?

Memory? The average lifespan in the wild is 1.6 years.

Then come the females, whom the males entice with thrilling U-shaped display flights. Then there are juvenals at the feeder in mid-summer, and then the war.

War ends with the departure of the rufous hummers, but the broad-tails linger, the population slowly dwindling until the last female disappears around the autumn equinox. And then summer truly is over.

When you take down the feeder to refill it, the hummers continue to fight over empty space. There is nothing there, but it's worth expending calories to defend it. Make your own parallel with human behavior.

Denver's dumbest criminal

"Wadcutter's" car was stolen. Then it was recovered. And then he plays amateur detective, and the fun begins.

I know that this link is off-topic for this blog, but it's a glimpse into the lifestyle of petty criminality.

Another Reason to Hate Disney

Yesterday M. was baby-sitting a little neighbor girl, whose mother is recovering from surgery. Little Sarah brought over a Winne-the-Pooh book, the colorized, dumbed-down Disney version that must have A.A. Milne spinning in his grave.

M. was reading it to her, and when she came to a page with the Australian children's song "Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree," she even pulled up the tune from the recesses of her memory.

Only in this book it was not a "gum tree" (eucalyptus, etc.) It was "oak tree." That's wrong on so many levels. Oaks are not native to Australia, but you can easily imagine that some Disney editor figured that "gum tree" would be confusing to American children. Perhaps they would imagine a tree whose leaves were sticks of chewing gum.

So they changed it, rather than taking an opportunity for education about another part of the world. Let's keep the world brightly colored, simple, and un-challenging. It's the Disney way.

Feral girl raised by dogs??

After the "ghost rider" story--the young woman riding her motorcycle at speed through the dead zone around Chernobyl--turned out to be largely faked, I mistrust news stories from Ukraine involving odd young women.

In this case, it's a woman raised by dogs. Judge for yourself.

La Leyenda Negra Meets Cocolitzli

In the years following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, the native population dropped precipitously. Historians have assigned the cause to Eurasian diseases, mainly smallpox, combined with Spanish brutality.

Now a Mexican epidemiologist, studying chronicles and tree rings, thinks that the killer was actually a New World hemorrhaghic fever.

Cortés and his soldiers defeated, enslaved, and murdered the Aztecs, but now it seems that cocolitzli, a disease brought about by a native virus, is what really finished them off. Today the Aztec kingdom exists only in museums and ruins, but the virus could still be out there. As Mexico enters into yet another period of severe drought, could the killer reemerge?

Oh boy, a Mesoamerican Ebola virus. And we thought hantavirus was serious.

10-Bird Meme, No. 4: Mexican spotted owl

Mexican spotted owls (National Park Service)

In 19th-century Irish slang, "the gentleman who paid the rent" was the tenant farmer's pig, a source of meat or cash.

 In one 20th-century southern Colorado household--ours--the gentleman who paid the rent was Strix occidentalis lucida, the "Mexican" race of the spotted owl. 

Our owling started on Earth Day, 1990. M. and I wandered past a little line of booths and tables set up in the Canon City Wal-Mart parking lot, stopping to talk with Cindy Rivera, then-district ranger for the Forest Service. She was recruiting volunteers, and one need was for people to conduct an owl census. 

We said we would try it. Training was non-existent, but some local birders made us a tape of spotted owl calls. (After a year of carrying a tape recorder and speaker on the trail, we learned to make our own vocal calls.) 

Then M. broke a toe while walking our irrigation ditch. Finally, in August, she was ready to go. Where should we go? At first, out of ignorance, we were searching up too high in the forest, but then I thought of a deep canyon that I had looked into while hunting. 

We found a pair of owls there--and they was half of the spotted owls located in Colorado in 1990. Suddenly we were experts--or if not experts, at least respected. 

he next spring, the local BLM office awarded us a small no-bid contract. After that, we did have to bid--against hungry grad students and professional wildlifers both. Forget your legendary $600 toilet seats--the taxpayers got their money's worth on owling contracts.

 After four years of night-time hiking, calling, and filling out owl-census forms in triplicate, we were underbid in 1995 by about a penny an acre. For a little while, we felt terrible, deprived of our summertime vocation. But it was a rainy spring--which someone else got to endure--and my mother developed a fatal illness.

All in all, it was just as well that we did not have a census protocol to fulfill. Beside, the big owl-census push, fueled by a lawsuit against the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, was winding down. 

And we were no longer financially strapped part-time academics. We had more income now, and we had moved into a house not many miles from our first successful owling location. 

We called it, naturally, "Owl House." The gentleman had not merely paid the rent, he had helped with the mortgage too.

10-Bird Meme, No. 3: Raven

I was elk-hunting when I came to a place where someone else had cleaned a downed elk. White snow, red blood, black ravens.

Instantly, I was back in the visual world of the sagas that I read as a 15-year-old: Beowulf, The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel, all that heroic slaughtering.

Letan him behindan hræ bryttian
sulwigpadan þone sweartan hræfn

They left behind them, to enjoy the corpses,
the dark coated one, the dark horny-beaked raven

The Battle of Brunanburh, c. 937 CE

Ravens carry so much mythological baggage that it is no wonder that they sometimes seem to walk with shoulders hunched.

Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory) perch on the shoulders of Odin. The illustration is from The Age of Fable by Thomas Bulfinch (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Company, 1894).

"Can a raven miss anything? Can it keep a secret?" asks Bernd Heinrich rhetorically in Ravens in Winter. Sometimes scavengers, sometimes killers.

And if you have any acquaintance with Pacific Northwest culture, you know Raven's status there.

Contemporary European and American Paganism is full of people with "Raven" in their self-given names. One writer hits the trifecta. (Try it yourself.)

Icelandic bands use raven imagery, not surprising, considering the sagas.

When I was 12 or so, before I knew much about either sagas or Paganism, I designed my own heraldic raven insignia. Dad was amused, and whenever we were in the mountains and saw some of them, he would say, "Look, there are your birds."

OK. Ravens. They have been done and overdone. Now when I am driving down to Pueblo and I see a pair of them (usually eating road-killed jackrabbit), I wave and I say, "Hello, cousins." They need to eat, those sweartan hræfn.

Radar days

"Radar days" are a summer phenomenon, when I spot clouds over the ridge to the west and load the Web page for Pueblo weather radar to see if any thunderstorms are developing and if they might rain here. (Please, pretty please.)

This week, it's been more like "Oh gawd, there's more." Or perhaps, "Here is the rain that you had on backorder."

My informal total for the week is 3.2 inches (8.1 cm), which is not much in some places but an awful lot for mountains to absorb, unless it comes as snow. Some areas have had more--roads are washed out and new ponds have appeared.

I took the photo of one of our rainwater tanks filling a week ago. They have been overflowing ever since. It is technically illegal under Colorado's complex water law to catch ("divert") rainwater, I am told, although I have never heard of anyone being prosecuted. After all, it will go onto the vegetable garden in its mini-drainage of orgin. No inter-gully transfers here.

The plumbeous vireo nest that I photographed on the 4th was empty on the 8th. Did the nestlings fledge that fast or did a predator get them? Quick research says that vireos need something like 12 days from hatching to fledging, but I do not know when these birds hatched. The female adult was still in the area.

Today, a 60-percent chance of heavy rain, and then some drier days.

World's oldest crow

An injured crow cared for by wildlife rehabilitators lived to be 59 years old.

It takes a book to raise a boy

Two British brothers, Conn and Hal Iggulden, have a bestseller on their hands with The Dangerous Book for Boys.

A quote from an online review:

In celebrating old-fashioned boyhood and providing a blueprint on how to reclaim it, The Dangerous Book is revolutionary. It discards decades of social engineering that approaches children as being psychologically gender neutral. The book implicitly rebukes school texts that strip out gender references. Instead, it says 'boys will be boys'; they always have been, they always will be, and that's a good thing.

Thus The Dangerous Book achieves social revolution without preaching or politics; it does so in the name of fun.

The sort of fun promoted has also raised eyebrows. In a society that is preoccupied with safety, The Dangerous Book promotes activities in which boys are likely to get scuffed. This is a book for tree-climbers who occasionally pause to decipher enemy code or erupt into wood-wielding pirate fights.

There is a poignant quote from a father who (gasp!) actually let his kid use a pocket knife. That safety issue!

Via The Geek with a .45.

Mason Gulch Fire, one year later

I was in my CSU-Pueblo office when M. called, a little bit on edge. She had seen a procession of Forest Service, sheriff's department, and TV news vehicles heading up the road past our house toward the national forest. What could have happened? A spectacular homicide in Babcock Hole?

"I'm going to walk up there and find out," she said. "I'll call you."

It turned out to be a "media event" to mark the first anniversary of last year's fire.

Mason Gulch was an intense fire because thick layers of gamble oak and fallen trees fueled the blaze, raising up 200-foot walls of flames, said [Mike] Smith [of the San Carlos Ranger District]. About 70 percent of the acres that burned in the Mason Gulch Fire were thoroughly destroyed, not leaving a single living tree behind. That is an usually high level of destruction for a wildfire, Smith said.

"We'll be taking pine cones from this area to plant our own seedlings," he explained. "That will take a couple of years before we can plant them."

....

Smith said Forest Service crews are also on the lookout for non-native weeds and plants, such as Canadian thistle and leafy spurge. Crews using pack mules in the hard terrain spray the weeds to keep them from spreading into the burned land.

Ah, a landscape of Gambel oak and cheatgrass. We really need to find a control for cheatgrass. I see it oozing in more and more. How did something like that evolve when its nutritional value for animals is so slow, except for a very short time in the spring?

UPDATE, JULY 7: Neither the Pueblo Chieftain nor the Canon City Daily Record employ reporters who can spell "Gambel." The Daily Record even referred to "gamble oak grass."

The Forest Service needs to provide better handouts for the news media: "This is a tree [photo]." "This is grass [photo]."

The man who took Michael Pollan hunting

Angelo Garro is now known as the man who took Michael Pollan hunting when Pollan was writing The Omnivore's Dilemma, but he also manages to live as a sort of urban peasant.

Via What's in Rebecca's Pocket.

Kids who stay indoors

This story cannot be repeated too often.

I am not a parent, but I keep my eyes open, and I do not think that the problem is the Web and television. After all, we have television, at least, when I was a kid.

More blame needs to be placed on the "safety" issue, I think.

"Parents are very busy, and outside play takes a lot of supervision," says Mary Rivkin, associate professor of education at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "We're also afraid about being outside because of strangers, the sun, and insects. Inside seems much safer."