nature
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Your cat is an ecological disaster
Cats kill birds. lots of birds. From the New Yorker article “And how many birds does a bird-killing cat kill in one year? (Perhaps three dozen.) Each of these multipliers had a range of uncertainty, so the model needed to be run repeatedly. The number it generated most often was 2.4 billion birds a year. Read more
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Good news for windmill operators
Good news from a long-term experiment in Norway: painting a single blade of a power-generating windmill may reduce fatal birdstrikes by as much as 70%. This is certainly an experiment that bears replication, especially at facilities that (1) keep careful records of birdstrikes and (2) care enough to make the effort. It’s pretty sad that Read more
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It’s about time…
…that somebody, Trout Unlimited in this case, called an auto manufacturer on those ceaseless TV ads of off-road vehicles crashing through forest, field, and stream, tearing up everything in sight. After a week or so of seeing that crap on the tube, I’m surprised there’s an intact meadow, stream, or game trail left anywhere in Read more
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Pandas
I just learned about the Chinese craze for pandas from Albinotronix, a new blogfollower, whose blog, The Curious Guy, is even more wide-ranging than mine. I was particularly struck by his pithy summary of panda evolutionary foolishness: Take a moment to think about this magnificent species For no reason they decided to turn herbivores For Read more
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The Feds are not your friends
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Jennifer Percy describes Fear of the Federal Government in the Ranchlands of Oregon. Try though she might, her east coast acculturation won’t let her quite get into the heads of the folks in towns where she spent her childhood. They visited Yellowstone Nation Park and saw, they said, Read more
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Do You Spell FAIL with Green Letters?
More and more of all this hippy-dippy green energy bullshit we’re saddled with is turning out to be a collection of Really Bad Ideas: corn likker for yer car is destroying more land and polluting more water than all the frackers in Christendom, and starving folks in Latin America solar power arrays and wind turbines Read more
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Oh noes! It’s ‘sposed to go the other way!
Paleoclimatologists working in Lapland have some new and interesting findings: Professor Dr. Jan Esper’s group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time Read more
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Maybe y’all should listen to those old squares
Mom’s First Law of Floods: Where water has been before, water will be again. Lots of Japanese ignored that law, but the folks of Aneyoshi followed it scrupulously. Too bad most folks don’t stop to read the writing on the wall–or on those corny old stone markers, either… Update (9 April). Masanobu Shishikura didn’t need Read more
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Birds, bats, and wind farms
Surprise, surprise! Just like in California, flying critters in Texas get whacked by wind turbines. The problem seems to be most worrisome along the Gulf. The wind farm developers are studying the problem–and installing safeguards, but they’re getting nothing but grief from conservationists, who want the developers to make their data public. Those who opposed Read more
The Random Texan 