Charismatic Megafauna

My father sends a picture:

We don't get this in our neighborhood. Deer, owls, turkeys, quail, raccoons, squirrels, hawks, et cetera. But no moose. Not for at least a century.

Comments

[Douglas Knight]

I think there's an error in this entry.
Here's the picture:
http://delong.typepad.com/images/20060925_moose.jpg

[Gene O'Grady]

And please don't try to introduce moose. Someone in the twenties had the bright idea that moose would enjoy the central Oregon coast, and the story was not a happy one.

Curious -- are there eagles in your neighborhood? Presume there are coyotes which you also omitted.

[andres]

Moose are charismatic? Not the word I would apply, even for talking moose like Bullwinkle. Natasha, on the other hand, now there was a gorgeous low voice. Oh well.

And if you were further northwest, Brad, you might have to rub paws with the occasional cougar. There's real feline charisma for you.

[ned]

Don't need to be northwest. There are cougers here in Lamorinda. On the other hand, were there EVER moose here?

[s]

Oh man, you guys can have some of our Canuckastani moose. We've got too many of 'em, and they're a menace on the highways!

[lise]

Remo Williams is a vicious troll who can only try to destroy what others create.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=5079&u=30112%7C5%7C...

Northern Cardinal in a Snowbank
New York City--Central Park, The Oven.

Marvelous Moose, as well :)

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=4775&u=563|18|...

Scarlet Tanager Eating a Crabapple
New York City--Central Park, Andrew Hasswell Green Bench.

Remember to look for migrating birds.

[a different chris]

> who can only try to destroy what others create.

I have noticed that one major characteristic of our opponents is the almost complete absence of a sense of beauty and wonder.

I think some of it is genetic, but much of it is cultural. It's not "manly" to go ohhh and ahhhhh over something fuzzy and cute, to just wonder at nature's bounty.

And that I think is a small part of why there is a gender gap between Repubs and Dems. Women are less afraid to say "There's enough food on the table, a fire in the hearth, so shut off the f'ing bulldozer already, there is nothing you can build that can replace what you will destroy."

We men always have to prove something. Damn if I know what, which is very frustrating because the most data I have on that particular tendency comes from my own behavior. And I can't map it to anything rational.

But at least I'm not proud of it.

[anne]

Brad DeLong:

"We don't get this in our neighborhood. Deer, owls, turkeys, quail, raccoons, squirrels, hawks, et cetera. But no moose. Not for at least a century."

But, think what we yet have and hold what we have. That is the point of every bird we find about us.

Nice, Chris.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=5222&offset_finder=1&u=29168

Eastern Screech-owl Fledlging Reacting to Blue Jays
New York City--Central Park, North Woods.

Yes; we all should have owls.

[TommyG]

a different chris says, "there is nothing you can build that can replace what you will destroy"

This is a fundamental problem I have with nearly all economic discussions, including those on this blog. There are things in this world, Chris nails it when he refers to "nature's bounty", that no amount of economic growth can create or improve. In fact, the eternal goal of "growth" can only destroy forever some of those things, such as open space, that only nature's bounty can provide. Our planet will reach a limit on the number of people it can support, it is a mathematical and physical certainty. What will a steady-state economic system look like? Why can't we plan for it now rather than later?

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=3240&exhibition=6

Angry Tree Swallow
Jamaica Bay NWR West Pond, New York.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=1683&u=32|5|...

Blue Jay Eating Snow
New York City--Central Park, The Ravine.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F20B12F83F5D0C778EDDA00894DA404482

September 24, 2002

A Wild, Fearsome World Under Each Fallen Leaf
By JAMES GORMAN

Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino university research professor and honorary curator in entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, winner of two Pulitzer prizes and scientific honors too numerous to recount, is on his hands and knees, pawing in the leaf litter near Walden Pond.

He eases into a half-sitting, half-reclining position and holds out a handful of humus and dirt. ''This,'' he says, ''is wilderness.''

Just a dozen yards from the site of Thoreau's cabin Dr. Wilson is delving into the ground with a sense of purpose and pleasure that would instantly make any 10-year-old join him. His smile suggests that at age 73, with a troublesome right knee, he still finds the forest floor as much to his liking as a professor's desk.

These woods are not wild; indeed they were not wild in Thoreau's day. Today, the beach and trails of Walden Pond State Reservation draw about 500,000 visitors a year. Few of them hunt ants, however. Underfoot and under the leaf litter there is a world as wild as it was before human beings came to this part of North America.

Dr. Wilson is playing guide to this micro-wilderness -- full of ants, mites, millipedes and springtails in a miniature forest of fungal threads and plant detritus in order to make a point about the value of little creatures and small spaces. If he wrote bumper stickers, rather than books, his next might be ''Save the Microfauna'' or ''Sweat the Small Stuff.''

He begins his most recent book, ''The Future of Life,'' with a ''Dear Henry'' letter, talking to Thoreau about the state of the world and the Walden Pond woods.

''Untrammeled nature exists in the dirt and rotting vegetation beneath our shoes,'' he writes. ''The wilderness of ordinary vision may have vanished -- wolf, puma and wolverine no longer exist in the tamed forests of Massachusetts. But another, even more ancient wilderness lives on.''

In their world, centipedes are predators as fearsome as saber-toothed tigers, ants more numerous than the ungulates of African plains. And, in contrast to the vast preserves required by the world's most revered megafauna -- grizzlies and elephants, jaguars and condors -- maintaining biodiversity among the little creatures, shockingly rich in unexplored behavior and biochemistry, can be done on the cheap, in relatively tiny patches, as small as a few acres, around the world.

Dr. Wilson is by no means turning from the grand plans for conservation. Indeed, he has suggested that 50 percent of the globe ought to be reserved for nonhuman nature. But he is a realist, and, as he describes himself, ''a lover of little things.''

He has been turning over logs and rocks looking into the world of insects and other tiny creatures since he was a boy in Alabama and Florida. And he has not stopped. During the walk, he talks enthusiastically about a coming field trip to the Dominican Republic to investigate ants there, and about the publication this fall of a book-length monograph on the genus Pheidole describing all 625 species of ants, including 341 new to science.

Researchers tend to share a kind of acquisitive passion to see, touch, grasp the world. Nothing passes without comment. As he strolled along the shore of Walden Pond, on the way to the woods, Dr. Wilson spotted a butterfly and interrupted his discussion of the sizes of reserves needed for mammals, reptiles and amphibians, complete with references and citations to scientific studies.

When the butterfly landed on the beach, Dr. Wilson stopped, leaning forward like a heron on the hunt, and peered at it. ''It's hard to identify,'' he said. ''It's a very beat-up little butterfly,'' probably the variety called a question mark, because of the design on its wings.

Having reached the woods and having begun to talk about what lay under the surface of the forest floor, he held the crumbled leaf litter and humus in his hand as if he were savoring what lovers of certain wines call the ''goût de terroir,'' or taste of the soil, a certain earthy specificity that the wine owes to the ground, not the grape.

''When I go on a field trip,'' he said, ''providing you can get me up to the edge of a natural environment, I usually don't go more than a hundred yards or so in, because when I settle down immediately I start finding interesting stuff.''

''This ground,'' he said, ''we see it as two-dimensional because we're gigantic, like Godzilla. When you just go a few centimeters down, then you're in a three-dimensional world where the conditions change dramatically almost millimeter by millimeter. In one square foot of this litter you're looking at into the tens of thousands of small creatures that you can still spot with your naked eye.'' ...

[dilbert dogbert]

The prof lives in wild country. With some short travels luck and patient observation he might see mountain lions, bobcats, elk and antelope. They are all residents of the California Coast Ranges. He might even see feral pigs and black bear.
Nature has some restorative powers left both big and small.

Speaking of restorative powers, I drove Skyline behind Oakland and noticed that the burn zone is slowly returning to the pre burn condition. How do these people afford insurance? Or, why do insurance companies insure these homes?

[Insurance companies are insane? Or these people are rich? I'm not sure how anybody living in a eucalyptus grove can get insurance...

No elk. No antelope. Two mountain lion sightings in our blackberries in ten years (lots more mountain lions over the hill, where the retirement community is). But within an hour we've seen everything except the feral pig.

And right now we have a serious infestation of wild turkeys in the blackberry patch...]

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/science/26skun.html?ex=1316923200&en=5e18e0cbb18e4093&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

September 26, 2006

Beyond Black and White: Stalking the Skunks of Martha's Vineyard
By CORNELIA DEAN

EDGARTOWN, Mass. — A full moon, big and orange, is setting behind the barrier beach along Katama Bay, and the sun is little more than pink streaks lightening the eastern sky when Luanne Johnson's 1989 Ford Ranger rattles into a small parking lot at the Wasque Reservation on Chappaquiddick, the east end of Martha's Vineyard.

It is 5:30 a.m., time to find some skunks.

From the back of the truck, Ms. Johnson retrieves a backpack, a tackle box and a four-foot stick with a plastic cap on one end, and sets off toward the beach, where last night she set 15 wire mesh traps, each one baited with fish-market scraps and peanut butter. The first two are empty but the third contains a skunk, perhaps 3 or 4 months old. Its tail is in the air, and it stomps its feet at her approach.

"It's letting me know it's upset," Ms. Johnson says softly as she approaches the trap. "It's doing all the skunk body gestures which say 'I am a dangerous animal, pay attention to me.' "

Ms. Johnson removes the plastic cap from the end of the stick, revealing a small syringe, and takes up a dose of sedative from a vial in the red tackle box. She feeds the "jab stick" through the trap's mesh and the needle finds its target. There is the unmistakable odor of skunk. And then the animal reels and collapses in a heap.

Ms. Johnson opens her pack to find a clipboard, a striped beach towel, rubber gloves and other gear. She slides the inert skunk, a male, into a cloth bag, hangs it from a portable scale and notes its weight — 0.725 kilograms, or about 26 ounces. Then she lays it on the towel, measures it (53 centimeters, or 21 inches, end to end) and notes whether it has the typical skunk stripe (yes, a short one) and the typical shock of white tail fur (not yet). His pelt is still too thin for the microchips she implants in older animals, so she clips an identifying tag into his ear.

By now the quick-acting sedative is wearing off and the skunk is beginning to wake up. Ms. Johnson coos to him as she strokes his fur and checks for ticks, which she tweezes off and stashes in a plastic tube for delivery to a scientist studying tick-borne diseases.

Then she lifts the groggy skunk by the nape of the neck and deposits him in the grass, where he staggers away.

This is Ms. Johnson's third year of skunking on Martha's Vineyard, where she tracks and traps the animals here and on Dogfish Bar, a beach in Aquinnah, the west end of the island. By next year, she hopes, the data she has collected will turn into a dissertation for Antioch University New England, where Ms. Johnson is a doctoral student in environmental studies. She jokes that she will title her project "Skunks on the Beach."

Among other things, she hopes to help settle an argument that erupts here every summer — nesting season for piping plovers and other endangered shorebirds, when stretches of beach are closed to four-wheel-drive vehicles. Opponents of the closing say the threat to the birds is not vehicles, but predators like skunks.

"Because skunks are an egg predator of the rare birds, we wanted to know more about them," Ms. Johnson says. "We don't know even simple questions like what kind of resources are they using on the landscape and how do people influence what they do."

Beaches like this one are a good place to study skunks because they are a good place for skunks to live. "Skunks are an edge species," Ms. Johnson says. "They like it in ecotones, places where two different kinds of habitat come together." With its salt marshes, sand plains, woods, dunes and patches of huckleberries, blueberries and poison ivy, this beach offers many edges and lots of the eggs, small rodents, berries and insects skunks like to eat.

"They love poison ivy," Ms. Johnson says, pointing to a set of tiny tracks headed into a patch....

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=5554&u=4|4|...

Three Newly Fledgled House Wrens Waiting to be Fed
New York City--Central Park, Maintenance Field.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6867&exhibition=7&u=96|0|...

Northern Parula
New York City--Central Park, Lower Lobe.

[Big Al]

I'm surprised you didn't give a recipe for moose meat.It's good eating.

[Jon Fernquest]

Back home in the affluent United States there are more wild animals than where I live in rural Chiangrai, Thailand. When I travel back to Portola Valley 5 minutes away from Stanford, deers greet you on the road walk up to the window of the house.

There are some exceptions like a scorpion that keeps scrambling back to our bathroom to bite our dogs. My mother-in-law says he likes our house that's why he keeps coming back. They finally carried him to the end of the road and permanently relocated him. It's also nice to hear the bells of grazing cattle and goats near your house, a reassuring sound.

[anne]

Jon Fernquest:

"There are some exceptions like a scorpion that keeps scrambling back to our bathroom to bite our dogs. My mother-in-law says he likes our house that's why he keeps coming back. They finally carried him to the end of the road and permanently relocated him. It's also nice to hear the bells of grazing cattle and goats near your house, a reassuring sound."

A lovely story; what a fine mother-in-law you have.

[anne]

Imagine having the awareness, the kindness to relocate a scorpian. There is what dear Edward Wilson would smile about. What a gem you are, Jon.

[anne]

http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=3892&u=11601%7C4%7C...

American Goldfinch About to Leap from Perch
New York City--Central Park, The Ramble.

Look for the birds of Thailand, Jon.