Ve haf vays of knowing who vas pooping und vhere!

A German town wants DNA samples from all local dogs so it can fine owners when their pets foul public spaces.

"We have to do something," added the mayor. "The stink is really awful at times." The baroque eastern city of Dresden contemplated introducing a simple genetic test for the 12,000 dogs registered in it a few years ago but dropped the idea on the grounds of costs and bureaucracy.

Y'think?

Blog Stew with Bread Crumbs

¶ A gateway page to bird poems.

¶ If you feed ducks, you feed rats.

¶ The American Museum of Fly Fishing invites Dick Cheney (!!) as a guest speaker, and Ted Williams has a little fun with the announcement.

Siskin Slackers

Back from the Pueblo PetsMart store, where I spent $30 on black-oil sunflower seeds and $35 on Niger thistle seeds. Add sales tax and you have $70 ... on worthless, layabout birds.

I think that I am feeding every pine siskin in the northeast corner of the county named for the famous cavalry tactician.

Ought to be a tax-deductible charitable contribution, don't you think?

I have read that the original purpose of feeding wild birds near the house was to lure them in for the purpose of turning them into pies. If I were a Sicilian, junco-and-siskin pie would be on the menu.

(grumble grumble)

"Zombies Ahead"

Apparently they are moving up from Texas, like Eurasian collared doves.

Via Tam.

The St. Vrain Cemetery

The St. Vrain Cemetery on the Huerfano River in Pueblo County. Click to enlarge.

As long as I am posting historic cemetery pictures, here are some graves of the Autobees / Autobee family, descended from Charles Autobees, one of the Missouri-born mountain men-traders-ranchers who tried to put down roots in the country between present-day Pueblo, Colorado, and Taos, New Mexico.

"Autobee" is carved on the large cross, as well as on the reddish stone beside it.

Charles Autobee is included in this biographical list.

Charles spoke fluent Navajo, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, and Spanish.

Or at least maybe he could say a few things in all of them.

Tough, stubborn, and adaptable (languages!), he hung on to his ranch on the Huerfano when many of his neighbors fled back to the Taos and Mora areas after the 1854 Fort Pueblo Massacre.

The cemetery, still in use, is today wedged between a gravel county road and an irrigated field--that is a center-pivot irrigation sprinkler arcing across the photo behind the graves. It would be on or near Autobee's ranch of the 1850s.

The definitive history of this area during the fur-trade era remains Janet Lecompte's Pueblo, Hardscrabble, Greenhorn: Society on the High Plains, 1832-1856.

A High Plains Graveyard

Monday's hawk-watching-and-exploration drive produced no good bird pictures, but for a dose of prairie melancholy, here is the little graveyard at Doyle, southeast of Pueblo on the Huerfano River.
(Note: the first link goes to a page that lists the cemetery as being in Huerfano County, which is incorrect. It is in Pueblo County.)

That is Pike's Peak in the distance.

Doggie Bushcraft II -- Making a Pig of Yourself

Last week someone must have shot a feral pig, of which more below.

Maybe after he (?) butchered it, he decided to make a gift to the scavengers of the head, guts, and hide.

Only instead of taking them way up on the national forest, he dumped them on an uninhabited stretch of county road about a mile from my house.

OK idea, poor execution.

Five days ago, M. took Shelby the ninja-collie on a walk up that same road, spotted the pig's head, and turned around. Too late: Shelby had the scent.

This morning Shelby disappeared. First I drove the Forest Service road up to her favorite old elk ribcage, but she was not there. Hmmm, I thought, better check the pig.

And there she was on the bank beside the road, happily chewing the hide. I drove up, she came over wagging her tail ("The car service is here."), and I loaded her into the Jeep Liberty. Doggie bushcraft strikes again.

Because it was a warm day, we decided to go look at hawks on the prairie. We saw a kestrel, numerous red-tails, and a couple of harriers, although I expected to see more hawks perched in the old cottonwood trees along the East Huerfano Road than I did.

Somewhere between Pueblo Reservoir and home, she quietly barfed about a double handful of pig parts into the back of the Liberty, managing to hit corners of M.'s daypack and the spotting-scope case. Later she brought up more on the front porch. Then she went to bed.

Eyes bigger than stomach? That saying was written for a dog.

The feral-I-assume pig's hide was solid black. I remember driving to work in about 2000, nearing the south entrance to the Pueblo Reservoir State Wildlife Area, and seeing a large black dog standing beside Colorado 96. But when I flashed by at 60 mph, I realized that it was not a dog but a pig. Do they tend to be black?

I was told back then by a Division of Wildlife employee that there are some feral pigs in the area, but apparently not many. These draft regulations (PDF) show them as being legal game all year around.

Other scavengers have removed this pig's gut pile in the last two days, but I think that I should drive up there in the old CJ-5 (no carpeting), remove the head and hide, and put them ... somewhere, so that Shelby will not keep going back.

Update: I did "disappear" the pig's head and hide on Tuesday the 20th. The gut pile was already gone.

The Former Kress Store in Downtown Pueblo

An architectural detail from the old S.H. Kress & Co. building in Pueblo, Colorado. "The Kress chain was known for the fine architecture of the stores," says Wikipedia. You can see more at this Art Deco tribute site, as well as examples of Kress stores in other cities.

This detail is the "ram of plenty," as far as I can tell.

I am not a huge Deco fan, but I do think that the style ages better than 1960s Brutalism.

News from the Recycling Front

Pushing some faux-green conspicuous consumption, Thursday's Denver Post "Room" section announced the Mode Premium All-In-One Recycling Center.

It reminds you when pick-up day is coming. The cheaper model is only $180.

But when it breaks, M. asks, can it be recycled too?

A follow-up to an earlier article on the economics of recycling: Apparently some glass recycles well.

Faux-Green Symbolism at the Inauguration

A New York Times article illustrates why it sometimes is hard to have warm feeling about national environmental organizations. Does it really matter if the carpet is recycled?

I suppose the influence must be exerted in the halls of power, but sheesh, Bo Derek, spokeswoman for the environment? She did hang with Tarzan, it's true.

Blog Stew with Truffles (I Wish)

¶ I wonder if they would like to try this fungal experiment in the Wet Mountains.

¶ Bark beetles keep killing pine trees.

¶ More discussion of aggressive urban coyotes. The comments are typically sarcastic.

Fifties Nostalgia in Pueblo

¶ The 1950s are alive at this Pueblo barbershop.

There's a young Elvis Presley, holding a stand-up microphone. You can almost hear him singing "(You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog;" Johnny Cash, freshly arrested, posing for his mug shot; several photos of Frank Sinatra, including his own mug shot; an old poster, announcing a Negro League Baseball game; Bettie Page cheesecake photos; Carl Perkins; a concert poster announcing an appearance by the Big Bopper, Richie Valens, Buddy Holly and Dion; Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Wanda Jackson, Eddie Cochrane, James Dean and other luminaries of an age that some thought passed by, but not so here at Classics.

Coincidentally, I remember that the first time I heard Don McLean's "American Pie," about the deaths of Buddy Holly, et al., I was driving into downtown Pueblo on 4th Street in my mother's Ford Falcon.

I have to say that that city does Fifties-early Sixties nostalgia well. Puebloans have never let go of that era.

Park Service "Challenged" by Conceal-Carry Law

Yellowstone National Park officials are "challenged" by the new federal regs allowing concealed-carry permit holders to do so in national parks, subject to the surrounding state's law.

Sebastian helps with a definition of "federal facility," straight out of the U.S. Code.

Yes, Yellowstone National Park does include bits of Idaho and Montana, although by far most of it is in Wyoming.

Permit holders will "have to do a lot of research," warns a former NPS employee, with the obvious implication that they are incapable of doing so.

One Web site is all you need. There, wasn't that easy?

These Park Service types remind me of the Teen Talk Barbie of 1994 that squawked "Math is hard!" when you pushed a button.

The Bird-Killing Library Wing

Tomorrow I will stop by the Colorado State University-Pueblo library to return some books.

The long-hoped-for renovation is finally underway, and this weekend more offices and the circulation and reference services will move to their temporary home in the student center.

Even the library dean herself admits that the building (as with the rest of the 1960s campus) is pure "Brutalism," and not too much can be done about that. Unlike her, I don't think the style is retro-cool.

My former office, in the attached academic wing, has been or will soon be gutted along with the rest of that floor. Good riddance.

The "wing," built about 1965, had deteriorated into the campus slum. Administrators walked its halls only in pairs. The windows were last washed in 1965. Curtains hung in tatters. The classroom that I usually used was finally re-painted after 40 years when I organized a small painting party of friends and adjunct instructors and paid them in pizza.

The architects, Caudill Rowlett Scott of Houston, had wasted no money on soils engineers. Built with inadequate foundations on expansive soils, all the 1960s campus buildings bucked and heaved in slow motion, opening cracks in the floors and walls. (I filled a couple myself with spray foam insulation to keep the whistling winds out.)

They were hard to heat and cool, wasting energy all year around. No doubt the architects were given awards by their peers in the competition for ugly Modernist buildings.

And the library building killed birds.

I used to frequently find dead house finches, sparrows, etc. by the outside door leading to the staircase to my floor.

The building design included a glass panel that served as an inadequate windbreak beside that door. I think that birds flying past the building did not always see it sticking out in front of them.

So one day I slapped up a falcon-shaped sticker that came with an Audubon Society mailing, and I like to think that the number of avian deaths decreased. The raptor's silhouette is supposed to scare other birds away.

For several years, I considered that falcon sticker to be my legacy, but it probably will not survive the renovation.

The West wind will continue sweeping across Baculite Mesa and past the stained concrete and stucco, Le Corbusier's ugly stepchildren.

Colorado Division of Wildlife Seeks Volunteers

The Colorado Division of Wildlife is seeking volunteers for the upcoming seasons.

"Rapid development and habitat loss have increased the challenges to Colorado's wildlife and the DOW is fortunate to have a dedicated group of people willing to get up early on cold mornings or work late nights to help the DOW in multiple ways," said Jena Sanchez, a Volunteer Coordinator from Colorado Springs.

"Volunteer efforts make a huge impact on helping wildlife. The value of their donated time is over a million dollars a year. Volunteers help accomplish important work that might not get done otherwise," she said.

Sanchez conceded that not all of the jobs volunteers assist with are glamorous, but they all have a positive impact for wildlife. "Counting bighorn sheep and mountain goats sounds neat. But it means getting up before dawn to climb mountains in sometimes less than ideal weather. It can be a grueling experience, but by and large every volunteer who does it comes away with a sense of personal gratification that they are making a difference."

Sanchez said the agency tries to match people with tasks they are comfortable with. Not everyone wants to get wet spawning fish, get dirty planting trees, or work with youngsters teaching hunting safety and outdoor ethics. Some volunteers do light office duty, work in customer service centers, serve as campground hosts, or staff information booths at wildlife festivals and trade shows.

New volunteer orientation meetings will be held on the following dates and locations:

Denver, Jan. 21
Pueblo, Jan. 21.
Colorado Springs, Jan. 22.
Fort Collins, Jan. 28
Grand Junction, Feb. 17

To learn more about these or other opportunities to get involved, contact the DOW volunteer coordinators.