Bay Area Bird Blog

This is starting to become a “dog bites man” story, so commonplace that it’s hardly worth mentioning. Except it just keeps getting worse and worse. The Klamath River, near the California-Oregon border, is almost completely dry, as an article in the SF Chronicle discusses. Partly, it’s just a dry year. But also, farmers use most of the Klamath’s water for crops. I’m all for crops — hey, I eat food every single day! — but I think that if you’re draining a river of literally all of its water, you’re going to far. It’s pretty amazing to see what the farmers up there think, though — you can do an online search and find plenty of…well, I would call them wackos, but I guess if you live up there it’s normal to you.

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I don’t know if this class covers birds specifically, but:
WildRescue will be teaching a “unique and comprehensive 8-hour class that explores the fundamentals of wildlife rescue and provides instruction numerous capture strategies for land and marine animals…” Be prepared to help out the next time there’s an oil spill, or an injured animal in your neighborhood. Classes are November 8 in Berkeley (at the Shorebird Park Nature Center) and December 6 in San Francisco (Crissy Field). Costs only $40 for 8 hours, call 831-869-6241.

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Interesting story in BBC News about a dolphin teaching other dolphins to “tail-walk” — thrash their tails so they can “stand” on water.  Apparently this has never before been seen in the wild. No Bay-Area or bird connection, but I think it’s interesting. 

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Sixteen years ago, some friends gave me a copy of Al Gore’s book, “Earth in the Balance.”   I don’t remember it very well, but I do remember Gore’s insistence that he was never going to vote for sugar subsidies again: the sugar industry, he said, was ruining the environment of the Everglades, treating its employees terribly, and just generally screwing up the whole state of Florida.  

So let’s all celebrate a very big deal: the state of Florida is about to buy out U.S. Sugar: for $1.75 Billion, the State gets 187,000 acres — almost 300 square miles — that will basically connect Lake Okeechobee to Everglades National Park.  This is way, way more than just land acquisition that will allow diverse plants to replace sugar cane (although it is that too), the real significance is the implications for water management.  An article in the International Herald Tribune says that if the deal goes through (likely but not definite) then:

The impact on the Everglades could be substantial. The natural flow of water would be restored, and the expanse would add about a million acre-feet of water storage. That amount of water could soak the southern Everglades during the dry season, protecting wildlife, preventing fires and allowing for a redrawing of the $8 billion Everglades restoration plan approved in 2000.

It sucks to reward a bad company with so much money — according to the article, “some former company executives have suggested that the state is overpaying, bailing out a company burdened with debt, a new sugar mill and a lawsuit by former employees who said they were bilked out of retirement money.”  But “the best” is the enemy of “the good”, and this is a very good deal.  The monetary cost is substantial, but the direct monetary savings will be substantial too (in reduced firefighting costs, fire damage, and flood damage, among several other items)…and the environmental benefits will be huge, allowing for the famous “river of grass” that used to define the Everglades, rather than the channels meandering among dry areas that has been the situation for past decades. 

Now, let’s (as a country) get to work on a corridor connecting Yellowstone to Glacier National Park and on up into Canada.  And let’s start buying up prairie, too, in huge, huge chunks.  If everybody in the country were willing to pay $2 per day — the cost of a cup of coffee, for a lot of people — we could do something of this magnitude twice a week, week after week after week.  

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Sometimes the nature news is really depressing, and this is one of those times. (Maybe the rest of my life will be one of those times).  This plot from the World Wildlife Federation attempts to classify the average “ecological footprint” for people living in various countries.  The idea here is that it takes a certain fraction of the earth’s area to provide the food that we eat, the water that we drink, provide the forests that purify the air that we breathe, etc., and these people have attempted to quantify it.  They express this in “hectares”; a hectare is 100 ares (I knew that would help) — a hectare is 10,000 square meters, or about 2.5 acres.  If you believe the figure, then even without ANY fossil fuel buring, and ANY depletion of fish and other marine resources, we (in the U.S.) would be using more than the earth can sustain; if you include these things, we’d be off the chart if they didn’t extend the chart so far.

OK, but DO you believe the figure.  I believe it, roughly speaking anyway.  The Zoological Society of London claims (as discussed in a BBC report) to have compiled data that show that “Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%” since 1970.  As far as ecological timescales go that is incredibly fast, more than 25% losses in less than 40 years.  But unfortunately, that’s a gradual change for people who see year-to-year differences: who would notice a decline of 0.5% from one year to the next?  After a while, wildlife concentrations that were once common become rare, but it happens gradually enough that people don’t notice.  Wildlife levels that were one considered “severely depleted” are accepted as the new norm, and another cycle of decline begins.  It’s depressing. 

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Political violence in Kenya over the past few month has, understandably, pretty much killed the Kenya tourism industry, even though (as far as I know) no tourists have been threatened.  A recent story discusses some of the problems the drop in tourism is causing for the wildlife in Kenya’s national parks: there’s no money to pay rangers who stop poaching, or to compensate ranchers for losses from predators. So there’s a lot more poaching, and some ranchers are starting to kill predators who kill their livestock. Some rangers have worked for months (literally) with no pay (literally), in the hope that they will eventually be paid. What can you do? Well, one thing is to visit Kenya! Seriously, check with a reputable travel company that does business there, confirm that it’s safe, and go! You’ll get great, personalized service, and you have a chance to visit the biggest concentrations of wildlife in the world without having to deal with the usual crowds of other visitors. But if that’s too much for you, you might want to consider sponsoring a ranger! The Mara Conservancy is collecting money to pay the rangers to continue their anti-poaching campaign through these hard times, through a “sponsor a ranger” program. The head of tourism and anti-animal-harassment for the Conservancy has a blog where you can make a donation.

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Rudy Guiliani may not — did not — have much going for him, but one thing he got right is that there is no need to build a fence along the entire southern border of the United States.  We can do everything we need with fences near cities and big towns, and “virtual fences” for the rest of it: observation towers, agents with night-vision glasses, that sort of thing.  It’s not like having an actual, physical fence helps with this, after all: people will just go over it, under it, or cut through it, unless it’s backed up by guards anyway.  So let’s skip the fence, everywhere we can.  Why is this in a nature blog?  Because fences are bad for animals that have to migrate, or roam over large territories, from desert tortoises to panthers.  Oh, and, incidentally, the Department of Homeland Security is contemplating building the fence so that a the Sabal Palm Audubon Center, a wildlife refuge in Texas, will be on the “wrong” (Mexico) side!  The New York Times has the story. 

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Two studies in the journal Science find that bats eat a lot more tropical bugs than birds do.

Williams-Guillen and colleagues studied bats at Finca Irlanda, a 740-acre (300-hectare) organic coffee plantation in Chiapas, Mexico.  [They] set up three types of enclosures — one that only excluded birds, one that only excluded bats at night, and nets that kept out birds and bats day and night. During the summer wet season, the coffee trees under the nets that kept the bats out had 84 percent more insects, spiders and other bugs than unprotected plants.  

I hope people do follow-up studies in different areas.  I’m pretty sure that in my backyard, birds eat a lot more bugs than bats do.  We do get visits by a couple bats, just about every night, but we also get regular visits by big flocks of bush tits, and daily visits by phoebes, woodpeckers, a brown creeper, vireos, and lots of towhees, and more. I have to think the birds eat more than the bats, by a very large margin, in my yard.

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