Retracing a pioneer wolf

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, wolves, hiking, conservation, agriculture

This meeting never took place, as much as it was ardently desired by Adam Weymouth. In his book Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness, Adam relates getting a moment's glimpse through binoculars of a wolf briefly emerging from the forest and then vanishing again. A thousand-mile trek along the trail of a wolf, culminating in a few seconds at most.

In this mini-memoir of a thousand-mile walk parallel to the path of a wolf named Slavc ten years earlier, he notes a few times that he was sure a wolf or wolves observed him, but he never saw them; just this one time, weeks after journey's end, accompanying a wildlife photographer who tells of a dozen pre-dawn stakeouts needed just to see a wolf once, and perhaps to catch a quick photo.

A note on the wolf's name. In the Slovene language, the letter V is pronounced as an F, like in German, and a final C is pronounced "ts". Further, S is softened to "sh" and the vowel A is somewhere between an A sound and a U sound. Therefore, phonetically, Slavc is pronounced "shlufts", almost like the name of Tufts (a University). The wolf is named for Slavnik ("shlufnik") Mountain, near the place he was born just north of the Slovenia-Croatia border.

Slavc's journey was well documented because he was captured and collared at about the age of one year, a few months before he left his pack to travel north and northeast across Slovenia into Austria, looping through Austria into northeast Italy, and finally settling into his own territory northwest of Verona in or near Lessinia Regional Park. He had met and paired with a female wolf who was soon given the name Juliet—you may recall that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was placed in Verona.

The wolf spent about four months on this journey. Adam's retracing was perhaps a little shorter in duration, but not all at once. As he explains in an introductory note, having two young children at the time, he went for a few weeks at a time over the space of a couple of years, after the COVID-19 pandemic had run its course. The book is written as though it were the memoir of a single long hike, so as to focus on the story of the landscapes through which Slavc had traveled and the people Adam met along the way.

This is also a story of love and hate. The people living in the hinterlands of Slovenia, Austria and Italy are mostly herders or ranchers, and they hate wolves. EU laws protecting the wolves are flouted at various levels. Others love the wolves, but it must be admitted that these are mostly city dwellers, who don't have to cope with burying the half-eaten corpse of a horse or cow…or a pasture littered with several from an overnight feeding frenzy by a wolf pack. Some folks, probably not many, neither love nor hate wolves, but accept them as a historic part of the landscape. Yet trouble can come when such a phlegmatic farm family takes measures to protect their livestock by getting dogs or building fences. The rabid anti-wolf brigades criticize them as "giving in" to the pro-wolf faction, and may even vandalize their efforts. Between the wolves and the fanatics, and the shifting climate, it is getting less and less possible to make a living in some areas, and farms are being abandoned. Yet there are those who love the pastoral life, as hard as it may be. At least a few that Adam met are younger, energetic enough to persevere, and bring hope that the countryside will not be abandoned.

Slavc was the first wolf in decades to establish a territory in northeastern Italy. Wolf families are increasing throughout Alpine Europe. Various numbers were given, but I think it sufficient to note that the total number of wolves inhabiting the three countries through which Adam walked is less than 2,000. That's about the size of the small mining institute where I went to graduate school. In all of Europe, there are a bit more than 20,000, while in North America, somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000. I am not sure what conclusion to draw from that.

One summer I walked more than a thousand miles, not on long journeys but in loops through field areas, studying the geology. I love mountain country and I love hiking, but I am not all that fond of tent living. I appreciate Adam's experiences, and his comparisons of the various landscapes he passed through and the many people he connected with. Clearly, he is more sociable than I am. This is a wonderful book.

Is half the country enough?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, land use, agriculture, prairies, restoration, conservation

About 45% of the land area of the "lower 48" is devoted to agriculture. That is about 900 million acres, or 1.4 million square miles. Roughly one third of that was originally prairie, tallgrass, shortgrass, and mixed prairie ecosystems. Most has been converted to agricultural use. Prior to the arrival of the plow, the prairie encompassed

• Tallgrass prairie, 140 million acres, or 220,000 sq mi. All but 1% has been plowed and sowed with crops.
• Mixed-grass prairie, 140 million acres, or 220,000 sq mi. About one-quarter remains unplowed.
• Shortgrass prairie, 250 million acres, or 390,000 sq mi. About one-fifth remains unplowed.

Taken together, prairie grassland once encompassed 530 million acres, but now more than 440 million acres are devoted to agriculture, making up nearly half the total agricultural land in the US. Surveys of the remaining grasslands show that they are ecologically rich, with dozens of species of grass and hundreds of other plant species, hundreds of bird and mammal and other animal species (and of course tons of insects!), and rich soils that have accumulated over ten to twenty thousand years during the current Interglacial period.

Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty, chronicles the history of these grasslands that formerly covered one quarter of the contiguous US. Their characteristics are governed by rainfall. The western edge of the shortgrass prairie laps up against the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and this semiarid prairie is in the deepest part of the mountains' rain shadow. The eastern half of four states, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, plus the Texas panhandle, host shortgrass prairie.

Further east, a little more rainfall allows medium-height and some taller grasses to grow. This mixed-grass prairie makes up most of the area of North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, plus the middle of Oklahoma and Texas. Tallgrass prairie is supported by the more temperate rainfall amounts in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, northern Arkansas, eastern Kansas, and a little bit of eastern Oklahoma. The eastern extent of the prairie abutted the deciduous forests of the Midwest, which are now mostly stripped of trees and used to grow corn and soybeans.

The book's three parts cover, with some overlap, the prehistory of the prairie, the progress of its subjugation to agricultural use, and the progress of efforts to conserve and restore portions. The third part includes 40% of the book, and is clearly the authors' aim.

Rather than repeat details that are better stated by the authors, I'll just display the bottom line: Prairie soils are biologically rich, conferring great ecosystem services. These include sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide, absorbing rainwater runoff which reduces acute flooding, and quickly taking up excess nitrogen from over-fertilization of nearby agricultural fields rather than permitting it to flow into streams and eventually the Mississippi River and the northern Gulf of America. These points are being made in courtrooms throughout the central US, arguing not only that remaining prairie should be preserved and conserved, but that portions of agricultural fields in this area amounting to several percent should be reverted to native grasses to reduce the damaging effects of pervasive monocropping.

Existing primordial prairie is also a treasure to be enjoyed. The image above is like views I've seen in a few grasslands we've visited. In the early 1980's whenever my wife and I went to visit a rancher we knew in central South Dakota, there is a spot along I-90, about seven miles before reaching Wasta, on the plateau above Boxelder Creek and the Cheyenne River, where we always stopped to get out of the car and stretch our legs. In all directions, the only sign of human life was the highway itself, and, of course, us and our car (I note on current satellite images that there are a number of billboards and a new shelter belt in the area now. Sigh.).

Other efforts are discussed, such as researching the best cover crops to preserve soil from erosion after harvest, and finding the "knee" in the relationship between fertilization and crop yields to better select appropriate levels of nitrogen application—I find it amazing that this is still so little known.

In keeping with the importance of the subject, the book is big and packed with information and gripping stories. It is well written and it rewards close reading. Enjoyable.

Too few of the little things

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, insects, invertebrates, conservation, rewilding, polemics

I have read that there are about 1/4 to 1/3 fewer insects on the Earth than there were half a century ago. For some insect groups, the remaining amount must be much lower. I remember driving cross-country in the 1960's, when we needed to wipe or clean the windshield of the car, and the grill, at the end of the day, and sometimes at midday also. That doesn't happen much anymore.

It's harder to collect butterflies than it was when I was a kid. I grew up in several places across the country. Whether in California, Utah, or Ohio, during the warmer months there were always several different kinds of butterflies in view. I just had to pick which one(s) I might like to add to my collection. 

Once, at age eleven, I picked up a praying mantis that was on a tree, where we were taking a walk in the forest. It was more than five inches long. It fought back a little—those spikes on the front legs can draw blood! But when it was warmed by my hand it settled down. I wondered if I could make a pet of it, so I tied kite string to it, just a bit loosely in the middle of the thorax where it wouldn't slip off. I tied the other end to my bedpost that night. In the middle of the night I awoke. Hearing a small noise I sat up, and nearly jumped out of my skin when the mantis flew right into my face. With wings and clawed "arms" outspread, it looked the size of a dinner plate! When I regained my composure, I untied it and let it out my window. Whew!

Children have a natural affinity for insects and small animals, if their parents and others don't drive it out of them. That affinity is the first emotion Vicki Hird draws upon in her book Rebugging the Planet: The Remarkable Things That Insects (and Other Invertebrates) Do – And Why We Need to Love Them More. While insects are the main "stars" of the book, the author expands the common term "bug" to include earthworms, garden snails, and other small, invertebrate animals.

Perhaps you know that most almonds are grown in California's central valley. Did you also know that keeping that almond crop pollinated every spring requires the services of most (some say 80-90%) of the honeybees in the U.S.? Millions of beehives and billions of bees are trucked to and from California every year. That by itself may have a lot to do with "colony collapse disorder", which leads to ever-increasing losses of honeybees across the country.

For several years I participated in the Great Sunflower Project, growing a certain species of sunflower each spring and counting how many native bees, and what kinds, would visit a particular plant during a daily 15- or 30-minute viewing session. Near the end of the season, when most of the flowers had ripening seeds, I had the added bonus of seeing goldfinches come for the seeds; I seldom see goldfinches otherwise. This endeavor is important because, if our honeybees fail, native bees must take up the slack! Fortunately, most sweat bees and mason bees and bumblebees are even more diligent pollinators than honeybees. There just aren't as many of them. One of the suggestions in Rebugging has to do with making homes for mason bees and other native bees, to increase their numbers in our gardens. In our case, we grow garlic chives, which has white flowers that draw bumble bees and at least 15-20 other species of bees (and hoverflies and certain wasps) for 2/3 of each summer.

Going through the book, one learns that pollination is not the only "service" provided by insects. Another has to do with rot. You may know that fungi work at breaking down fallen plant matter, from tree trunks to leaf litter. Fewer know that fungi are just one part of the "cleanup crew", which includes insects, slugs and snails, and earthworms. Some years ago I learned why, in pre-Colonial America, the natives ("Indians") were so famed for moving silently through the forest. There were no earthworms in North America before the 1600's, when some arrived in soil brought with plants from Europe. The forests before about 1650 were deep with leaf litter, which was only slowly decomposed by fungi and native snails and beetle grubs. Modern forests are almost litter-free because of European earthworms. The soil in my garden has one or two dozen per shovelful of dirt.

Another "service" is that insects in particular are "served up" to birds and mice and other small animals. A Little Brown Bat, for example, eats 1/4 to half its body weight in insects each night. Some portion of those will be mosquitos, though the bats prefer moths and "meatier" flies when they can get them. I've observed on farms that chickens will run down grasshoppers and crickets, which are big, fatty and calorie-rich.

Much of the book is advice about "rebugging" here, there and everywhere. So much so that it has a preachy tone that grows more and more intense. That's unfortunate, because nobody responds well to nagging. The last chapter or two are so exhortation-dense that I could hardly stand to read them. I remember reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, the quintessential environmental polemic. It was so very influential because it exposed the huge problems with pesticide use without adopting a nagging tone. Vicki Hird is tilting at the "windmill" of the big pesticide companies and Agribusiness. So was Rachel Carson. Ms Hird will have better success if someone with Carson's sensibility helps her produce a major rewrite of  Rebugging.

We are not dolphins and they are not us

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, cetaceans, dolphins, toothed whales, conservation, mythology

The direction of Susan Casey's life changed one day during a swim in Honolua Bay. She found herself amidst a pod of spinner dolphins, and their interactions with her over the next ten minutes convinced her that they were much more than "smart sea creatures". She felt a kinship. For many people, similar feelings of kinship motivate much of the "swim with dolphins" industry, although a great many folks do it mainly because it is "in". Perhaps this, too, shall pass (One can only hope!).

For Ms Casey, she found herself embarking on a series of projects, in a more-or-less picaresque way, to learn more about these small, toothed whales and even to get involved in their conservation and preservation. The result is Voices in the Sea: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins.

Taking the events of the book out of order, we find that the earliest representations of dolphins, in Minoan frescoes and on pottery, has a worshipful air. From that day until this, various numbers of people have considered dolphins to be gods, or wise aliens, our hidden ancestors. The New Age movement abounds in "dolphin theology". But this is a rare, bright thread through the morass of human-dolphin interaction.

Dolphins and porpoises (the latter comprise seven or eight species of smaller toothed whales with shorter beaks or even rounded snouts; not nearly as "smiley" as the familiar Bottlenose Dolphin) are depicted as admirably peaceable, and perhaps they are. The largest dolphins, Orcas, or Killer Whales, have never been known to harm a human in the wild. The handful of cases in which an orca hurt or killed a person all occurred in "sea parks" such as Sea World, and the perpetrators are generally considered by experts to be insane from chronic mistreatment. Historical and modern stories abound of dolphins helping humans, sometimes even defending them from sharks. It appears that these creatures in general recognize their kinship with humans.

From the human side, darkness abounds. Those who consider us as descended from dolphins must consider most of us their evil twins. Tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of dolphins of all kinds are killed by humans every year. Certain places Ms Casey visited, such as Taiji Cove in Japan and a couple of villages in the Solomon Islands, specialize in capturing and killing dolphins for meat and other products. Sometimes they also capture the "prettiest" ones alive and sell them to "dolphin parks". Such parks continue to proliferate; these days all the new ones are outside the US in areas of new luxury such as the UAE. The trade needs to go on steadily to meet the demand, mostly because the average time a captive dolphin lives is about three years, and most expire in the first year. A few hardy ones may live much longer, but none approaches the 50-to-100-year life span of a wild dolphin.

I have thought a great deal about the intelligence of dolphins. They have huge brains, with Encephalization Quotients of about 4, compared to 7 or so for humans. But I calculated elsewhere that if you discount the layer of blubber, which can account for a quarter of a dolphin's weight, the EQ of a Bottlenose Dolphin is at least 6. However, sheer brain volume, even on an allometric scale such as EQ, is but part of the story.

About 6% of the human brain's cortex is devoted to decoding vision. Vision is a very efficient sense. The primary receptor is a pair of thin cellular films, our retinas, each of which would flatten out to cover about 2/3 of a business card. The rest of the non-brain ocular apparatus is a pair of "cameras", AKA our eyes, and the attached muscles and nerves. Another percent goes to hearing, and smaller proportions to our other senses. So we have about 90% of our cerebral cortex available for other functions. Dolphin brains have much larger auditory areas, presumably because of their echolocation skill. The areas of the brain devoted to their sonic senses are about 20 - 40 times as large as the entire human auditory cortex and related areas. That means about one-third of a dolphin brain is used for sonic decoding. It seems logical, then, that the "effective EQ" of a dolphin is much less than the simple calculation would imply, perhaps closer to 3. That puts a dolphin just above the top of the range for chimpanzees.

The above is but one illustration that a dolphin's world is radically different from ours. It also gives me a more satisfactory feeling about the seeming naiveté of dolphins. Just think, if they really were as smart as we are, and could communicate as effectively as we can, or as effectively as many people think they do, and further if they thought more like we think, could the slaughter continue? Maybe at some one time, a pod could be driven into Taiji Cove, taken captive and slaughtered there. There would be no second time. They would station lookouts and avoid entering the cove, or even counterattack and drag a bunch of the people to the depths to expire there. Instead, they behave in ways no human group would behave, and are thus "tricked" and caught and slaughtered year after year.

I don't have much stomach for going on. There are 36 or 37 species of dolphins and 7 or 8 of porpoises. Given the size of the oceans, that corresponds well to the 4 species of great apes and 17 species of lesser apes (Gibbons). Dolphins are not the "people of the sea", they are more analogous to oceanic Chimps and Orangutans. Think of Chimps with sonar…or radar.

But this doesn't make it moral to exploit them, or to wantonly cast them aside. Morality is not measured by whether you kill your enemies, but by how you treat the helpless. Every scripture of every religion demonstrates that we usually choose immorality or amorality over morality in nearly everything, and at best just "paper over our image" with a garnishing of philanthropy. Sometimes. Most folks forego the philanthropy part, except to toss a quarter into a Salvation Army bucket sometime during Christmas Week, or a similar token gesture in other cultures.

It is no surprise then, that dolphins and their kin remain a part of the Sixth Extinction that the human race is carrying out.

Brains of the sea, or dogs of the sea?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, animals, whales, conservation

Diana Reiss is passionate about dolphins (AKA porpoises), and about toothed whales generally, and her passion makes it all the more enjoyable to read The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives. From time to time I have followed research on these small whales. Living in the Philadelphia area, the beaches that I can reach most easily are in southern New Jersey and Delaware. On many beach visits I have observed pods of porpoises passing by.

In the book, Dr. Reiss consistently uses the term Dolphin for these small toothed whales. I tend to prefer the term Porpoise, which is never applied to a fish, and I avoid Dolphin because of confusion with the dolphin fish, or mahi-mahi. However, the expected common name of the most familiar small whale is Bottlenose Dolphin, so I can go along with the author for the sake of this review.

Her premise is simple. The bulk of the book demonstrates that dolphins are unusually intelligent and that they share many characteristics that were once thought to be unique to humans, such as creating tools and toys, empathy and sympathy, and a theory of mind, even deception. Consider tools. How can a creature with no hands make a tool? It isn't easy, but it is possible. In areas with a coral bottom, rooting around in the bottom debris for fish that hide by self-burial is painful for a dolphin. Most of the dolphins in such an area get around this by breaking off a hollow sponge, and pushing the end of the snout (called the "rostrum") inside. They root around with the sponge, and when a fish flushes, quickly discard the sponge to snatch up the fish.

Then there are toys. Like all animals smarter than the average lizard (and maybe some of the lizards), dolphins play, even as adults. They play with the sponges when they've finished "fishing" with them, they play with shells and with floating debris, and they have been observed playing with bubble rings they blow with careful blasts from their blowholes.

They don't just make rings and watch them. They make multiple rings and manipulate them to merge or to pass through, a smaller through a larger. They drop a bit of fish or other debris into a ring, and the vortex will support it for a while.

In early experiments into creating a common language, Dr. Reiss built a simple keyboard with shapes the animals could easily discern, and created the association between one of the three keys and a bit of food, another with a toy, and the third with a rub or pat. The dolphins quickly learned, first, to come appropriately for one of these three things, and later to push the buttons to request one of them.

During training, when a dolphin acted inappropriately, such as by splashing, the trainer (usually the author) would give it a timeout by withdrawing or turning her back for a moment. After some days or weeks of training, she happened to offer a piece of food that one dolphin didn't like. The dolphin swam a short distance away then lifted half out of the water and looked at her; it gave her a timeout! Parents, if you use timeout with your kids, at what age will a kid who gets angry with you tell you that you need a timeout?

Then there is theory of mind. This is the researcher's term for a sense of self, and it is studied using a mirror. Your pet dog always thinks the image it sees in a mirror is a different dog. Dogs never recognize themselves. Great apes do recognize themselves, perhaps after several exposures to the mirror. Monkeys never do, but elephants and some birds do. So do dolphins and some larger whales.

This is first seen by a change of behavior. An animal (including very young humans) that thinks the image is a fellow being will first respond socially, perhaps by playing alongside, offering a toy, or trying to communicate. Once self-recognition occurs, things are quite different. Then it is a matter of turning this way and that, examining body parts not usually seen, and pirouetting while observing, "Boy, I look fine!" But scientists are reluctant to take this evidence as a sense of self. More is needed.

The Mark Test was devised to prove that chimps know they are looking at themselves. While playing with a chimp, or even under anesthesia, a mark is made, often on the forehead, using a harmless dye. When a marked chimp who is accustomed to mirrors sees his or her marked face, the response is immediate: touching the mark and even trying to rub it off.

How can an animal with no hands pass the Mark Test? Dolphins marked with waterproof dye react with clear surprise when they see it. In a few cases, a dolphin went to the side or bottom of the pool and rubbed the mark off against it, then returned to see that it was gone. Mission accomplished!

Just how intelligent are dolphins? This is still a very hard question. We can't yet communicate with them beyond the three or four keys on the keyboard the author used. We aren't ready to discuss whale philosophy or even ask how they structure their social groups. Many, many observed behaviors between dolphins indicate that they can communicate complex ideas, but we don't understand their whistled language…yes, I consider that they have genuine language.

A side note: once at Cape Henlopen, Delaware, a beach near Lewes, a pod of porpoises came by. I put my head underwater to listen to them. I could hear the clicks, creaks and rattles of their echolocation (sonar) as they used it to locate fish and obstacles. I could also hear whistles, swooping sounds and quite a variety of other noises they were making. It sure sounded like communication to me, particularly when similar sounds were made in different "voices", presumably by different animals.

So far the only "word" that Dr. Reiss has been able to clearly decode is the distress call made by a hurt dolphin. It is a descending glissando that sounds like the whistle of a bottle rocket. I find this ironic; dogs, cats and parrots at the very least have shown the ability to learn to understand dozens, even up to 200, human words. We've spent billions to learn three or four words of Dolphin. It would not surprise me if we one day find out that there are many dolphin languages, just as there are about 10,000 human languages.

Absent asking them, how do we determine how brainy they are? The Encephalization Quotient (EQ) is one estimate. A logarithmic formula is used to calculate how heavy the brain of any animal "ought" to be for its body mass. The ratio of actual brain to theoretical brain is the EQ. The human EQ ranges from 6.5 to nearly 8. Even a clinical imbecile with an IQ of 40 and a low EQ can learn to speak and converse. The datum for EQ is the house cat. Dogs, cats and horses all have an EQ near 1. Elephants, some birds, large whales and most monkeys come in near 2. Orcas and Chimps range to 3.5. Dolphins, and porpoises generally, have EQ's that range from 4.5 to 6. If dolphins had hands, would they show themselves brighter than chimpanzees? Probably.

Now we come to the crux of the book. We have established that dolphins are self aware and intelligent, and probably communicate with languages. How are we to treat them? Considering the history of contact between members of "advanced" and "primitive" civilizations, the prospect is not hopeful. Indeed, although we now do our best to buy only "dolphin safe" tuna, there are still places, such as Taiji, Japan, where pods of dolphins are herded into a bay and slaughtered like sheep. Or, I should say, worse than sheep, because we take care these days to kill a sheep quickly and humanely. The residents of Taiji and other places just go after them with knives and gaffs, and frequently eviscerate them before they have died. I refrained from adding a picture, because all the ones I found were simply too disturbing.

Dr. Reiss is passionate about ending the dolphin slaughter. If we can end, or nearly end, the slaughter of harp seals (with an EQ of 0.8), why not the second-most intelligent creature we know about?

Secondly, she is passionate about ending captivity for "performing" dolphins. In the US, at least, no wild-caught dolphins have been introduced to aquariums for about twenty years. Captive breeding ensures sufficient supply. The author thinks the number of captive whales ought to be allowed to reduce by attrition (as they die off, of age or disease), until none remain.

How, then, shall we continue doing research with dolphins? There are two facilities I know about where wild dolphins are encouraged to interact with researchers, yet spend most of their time going their own way. Research proceeds more slowly this way, but the dolphins are free collaborators, so the research results ought to be more robust and meaningful.

What is happening in captivity? It is little thought of, but what happens if a captive dolphin is, shall we say, refractory? Maybe a little too aggressive with "trainers", perhaps less cooperative. Such an animal is either released or euthanized. So we are selecting for tolerance and even affection for humans among our aquarium dolphins. Let us recall the fox studies in Russia. The researcher there selected for just one characteristic: tolerance for humans. Over just six generations, the foxes became a lot like dogs. Their ears got soft, their tails curled, and they began to bark and play more. Now it is a couple of dozen generations, and the Russian foxes are just dogs with pointy noses. We are producing dolphin dogs. They are to a wild dolphin as a dog is to a wolf. Possibly able to survive in a feral state, but much better adapted to life with human companions.

For this reason, I reckon the research we do on captive dolphins is being skewed as they become water dogs. Like it or not, we will soon need to conduct research in more open environments, collaborating with wild dolphins, to get any meaningful results at all. And I suspect that one of the first things we will learn about dolphin language is that each oceanic region will have its own language, or perhaps several. Language studies performed at Monterrey Bay may be completely meaningless when compared to work done in South Africa or in Spain.

If someone from a distant star system is watching us, what do they think of the way we treat the other brainy creatures around us? We have nearly extincted the Chimps. Killing off the dolphins would be harder, but we are certainly capable of doing so. I think if any animal can pass the mirror self-recognition test, it ought to be banned from the menu. There are plenty of dumber animals out there to eat, both on land and in the sea and air. Remember the old show titled "To Serve Man", where the handbook turned out to be a cookbook? If someone ever arms the whales, watch out!

Sunflowers fading

kw: nature, wildlife, conservation

My sunflower plants are done for the year. In a summer of recording bee activity for The Great Sunflower Project, I learned a few things:

• At this latitude, don't bother planting seeds until late May. The first plant didn't come up until June.
• It takes another month for the first flower to appear.
• On a robust plant (I had one very robust plant and two much smaller ones), a new flower will bloom every 3-4 days.
• Only the latest 2-3 flowers have any pollen.
• Don't expect to see honeybees; they concentrate on nectar-bearing blooms, and sunflowers have no nectar. (The GSP is all about native pollen-gathering bees)
• Goldfinches love half-ripe sunflower seeds. They picked the flower heads almost completely bare within a couple of weeks of each one getting seed development.
• There are five common species of native bee in this area: two sizes of bumble bee, 30mm long and 25mm long; a green-thorax-black+yellow-abdomen mason bee of the genus Osmia, 20mm long; a small green bee, 15mm long; and a bee colored like a honey bee but about 18mm long (honey bees are 25mm long).

During just over 60 days that my plants bloomed, I made more than 40 observations of bees, plus a few days when no bees landed on the flowers. The mason bees were most frequently seen, followed by the smaller bumble bee. I had a variety of other blooming plants that came and went in that time. The chives brought the most bees; they have plenty of nectar, though the flowers are very small. They were the only place I saw honey bees. The most common nectar-gathering bee, however, was a tiny black bee, 9mm long or less.

I am looking forward to next Summer.

Fate of two dozen young

kw: wildlife, conservation

I didn't see a single bluebird all Summer, but some of my colleagues did. This year two colleagues and I, as part of a wildlife conservation project at our workplace, monitored six bluebird boxes on a weekly basis beginning in late April. The season was slow getting started, but eventually all six boxes produced young birds, though one clutch all died.

Three nest boxes hosted Tree Swallows, lovely blue-and-white birds. Two nests produced, respectively, four and three young that successfully fledged (the three had a fourth sibling that died), while a third nest produced two chicks that died, almost fully fledged, when temperatures here passed 100°F (nearly 40°C).

Three boxes hosted Carolina Wrens, and we counted, 3, 4, and 5, though the nest with three was set up a month later than the other two. No wren chicks died. On today's run, we found that last nest empty, so all the boxes are empty and have been cleaned out in anticipation of the next season.

That's the tally: 19 live chicks and three dead ones.

Planet-saving profiteers

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, organic agriculture, business, conservation

Let's see, the typical grain megafarmer's drill: plow the heck out of a field, add pre-emergent herbicide, let that degrade, add fertilizer and sow (maybe one operation, maybe two), spray for early pests, till for weeds the pre-emergent didn't prevent, spray for later pests, till some more, repeat a few more times, harvest, and haul to the grain elevator. Oh, and by the way, for some grains, make some attempt to wash off the pesticides, though this is risky because you have to dry the grain pretty quickly or it'll rot.

I must confess I don't know the procedures an farmer would use on a certified organic farm. And I understand that converting from "conventional" to organic takes a year or three and is costly. However, there is sufficient demand for certified organic foodstuffs that they command premium prices. This simple fact underlies the thesis of Stirring it Up: How to Make Money and Save the World by Gary Hirshberg, President and CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farm: organic and earth-saving businesses can make money, and frequently make more than their conventional competitors. Considering the number of field operations conventional farming requires, I find it surprising that organic farming doesn't cost less.

I came across this book indirectly. My son attended a seminar at Princeton at which Gary Hirshberg spoke. He got a copy of the book (signed by the author) and came home quite enamored of its message. It does resonate with something a friend said years ago, "I'd rather spend a bit more on safe foods now than pay it in medical bills later." If there were a way to quantify that assessment, we'd have some real ammunition to effect major changes in agricultural programs. Assuming, as I do, that this effect is real, it is a second way that ecological and conservative practices improve the bottom line.

Another focus of the book is climate change and the reduction of greenhouse gases. Stonyfield is mainly in the yogurt business. That means its product depends on cows, which are notorious producers of methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times as potent as carbon dioxide. Interestingly, field-fed cows apparently produce less methane than corn-fed cows in feedlots. But the largest ways businesses like Stonyfield are reducing their gaseous carbon production is by switching to alternative energy sources such as wind and solar. While they presently use "offsets" paid to wind generation companies as one large resource shifter, Stonyfield is working toward as much energy independence as physics and economics will allow.

Throughout the book, to make his points stick, the author introduces us to other companies that are making things better while making money, companies such as Timberland Shoes, Wal-Mart (becoming a leader in reducing total energy use), and Terracycle. This last is most intriguing. Their main products are made from waste, such as a plant food made from worm poop (their term); the worms are fed garbage. Worm poop "tea" won't burn your plants, even if you water with it (you don't need to).

For a concentrated source of organic foods and products, Organic Valley is a good place to begin. It is a bit harder to find a central source for sustainable products, as the range of products is quite a bit wider. The author doesn't mention one, and a bit of Googling finds the hits for "sustainable products" dominated by an educational enterprise.

CE-Yo Hirshberg is an optimist, and closes his book with an account of what he hopes to see in just twenty years, if the ideas he and his friends are promoting become widespread. One item he glosses over is population. No matter how much we promote organic, eco-friendly, sustainable businesses in the West, we are still faced with a 9-billion-person planet forty years down the road. Food use has already begun to outstrip food supply in just the last two or three years, and that's with 6.5 billion to feed. Unless we learn to double the efficiency of food production, there will never be nine billion, because starvation will increase dramatically.

I am very favorable to the ideas found in Stirring it Up. To them we need to add a genuine motivation for people to stop having so many kids (widespread, free education can go a long way here. Educated people have smaller families). I just hope they can spread far enough, fast enough to rescue civilization before food wars and water wars sweep the planet nearly clean of human life. My son is my optimistic vote for the future of humanity. But I tremble for what he is likely to see before he is my age.

His life really is for the birds

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, birding, bird watching, conservation

During the years I studied Geology as an undergraduate, I had a travel friend, a fellow-student who did most of the driving on our many field trips. He always carried two sets of binoculars, because it was a sure thing that any drive we took, we'd be stopping at least a time or two to watch birds. We always planned an extra hour or so for any drive we took. While I enjoy watching birds, particularly with a knowledgeable companion, I was never hooked by the birding bug.

Luke Dempsey got hooked, and hooked hard, the first time a friend induced him to actually look at what a little bird was doing. It was a Common Yellowthroat, one of the warblers, and once he looked at it, really looked, it was love at first sight. Dempsey reports the event in the opening pages of A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All. He goes on to note, he was in love, "But I didn't really want this kind of love."

His premonition was correct, but futile. Though he doesn't come right out and say it, the flow of events he records made it clear that birding had a lot to do with the failure of his marriage. In the wake of that failure, with a bit more time on his hands, he gradually embarked on a quest to see many, most...perhaps all the birds that inhabit, pass through, or touch some corner of the United States. He's halfway there.

[Image and its larger original Copyright Fotosearch.] I wonder what might have been, had his wife become a bird watcher also. He graciously fails to reveal hardly anything about her. I imagine someone a bit like my son: it isn't hard to get him to peer through the binoculars at a bird for, say, ten seconds, whereupon he looks you in the eye saying, "Cool. Now what?"

He does the same when induced to look through my telescope at craters on the Moon, the rings of Saturn, or the Whirlpool Galaxy. Once he's seen it, he doesn't "need" to see it again...ever. Oh, well, he has turned into a much better poet than I am, and has a number of other virtues that I find quizzical, to say the least. We're even.

But we were talking about this author, and his travel and birding companions Don and Donna. In the Acknowledgments section I found that they are "mostly a product of [his] fevered imagination." There is another couple, Dave and Deb, with whom he also seems to have traveled. The "Don and Donna Graffiti" of the book are composite characters, with a large dollop of said imagination.

I rarely quote a jacket blurb, but I have to now. This is probably the product of Amy King, the designer: "3 obsessive friends, / 8 states, / 1 foreign country, / 129 towns, / 34 national parks, / 6 long-suffering rental cars, one rather alluring OnStar navigator, / 17 bed-and-breakfasts, too many alarming motel rooms, 1 real-life ark, / and more than 400 species of birds..."

It took me a while to get used to the author's style, a mixture of understated British humor (he hails from England) and over-the-top Stateside comedy. Learning curve aside, we read of the travails of compiling, in about three years, the life list of a solid beginner, with nearly 450 entries. This is a bit less than half the birds one might see in North America.

But he is not, he says a few times, a "lister"; he feels charged "with witnessing them all over again, while we can." It is one thing to see, at least once, an Elegant Trogon or Kirtland's Warbler. It is quite another to see a Yellowthroat, Robin, Chickadee or Blue Jay, over and over again and sustain one's relish at their lives and actions, the sheer alertness most birds continually convey. After all, though God may feed the sparrows, the sparrows do have to work at it themselves, for nearly every waking minute. It is not God but Human expansion that makes it harder and harder to gather a long life list of bird species. The book has a strong conservationist tone, and a bit of well-needed exhortation.

Listing, Birding, Bird Watching, or just the occasional stroll with binoculars in hand (to take them in descending order of fanaticism), all have their satisfactions. Choosing to travel about the country for birding's sake is as good an excuse as any. I'd like to see 34 national parks, for any reason!

The most-caught fish, but nobody eats it

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, oceanography, conservation

A poor metaphor: the primary herbivore of all the world's grasslands, prairies, and steppes is a gerbil-size creature we'll call a "wabbit". They weigh no more than a pound. There are no ungulates (deer, elk, antelope, sheep or goats), no horses, zebras, gnus, giraffes, eland, cattle, or large grazing animals of any kind. Just wabbits, eating grass, all grass, any grass. Larger herbivores such as swine are found only in forested land.

And the grass the wabbits are eating is super-grass, grass on steroids, grass with an attitude that makes crabgrass whine in a corner. Left to itself, it responds to spring rains by growing a couple inches daily, falling over once it gets a couple feet high (less than two weeks), the longer blades dying and decaying even as new growth pushes through, making an oxygen-poor stench that leaves the air nearly unbreathable.

Except for the wabbits. They eat it down to a nice, comfortable inch high. And their droppings are dry and powdery, nourishing the grass. Lots of wabbits mean short grass, clean yards, and fresh air.

Your "lawn", should you choose to cultivate one, presents a rather busy scene. A typical American front yard, 20x80 feet, is usually host to about thirty wabbits, munching away as they lollop here and there. It is all rather bucolic and peaceful. Except for the predators. Something has to eat the wabbits, because they multiply like, well, wabbits. Every dog, cat, wolf, crow, hawk, coyote, ferret, eagle, skunk, puma, raccoon and badger just loves the taste of wabbit. So every week or so there is a feeding frenzy as a half-dozen predators swoops into your yard, scattering wabbits everywhere as they manage to eat about a third of them.

Why not live on wabbit stew? As it happens, wabbits taste awful and the meat stinks; at its best it cooks up like leather, and it is drippily, slimily oily. Your housecat eats wabbit at every opportunity...but you can't stand the thought of eating one yourself.

Then it is found that ground-up wabbit is a great fertilizer on farmland, the oil is a great lubricant, and lightly-oiled "wabbit meal" is great for fattening up domestic hogs and other (non-herbivorous) meat animals, which do taste good.

Let a century pass. Wabbits are supporting a large industrial enterprise. Truck-mounted cannon-fired nets can snap up every wabbit on an acre of land in an hour's time. Smaller versions harvest your yard, with your permission, monthly.

Funny thing, though, you have had to buy a lawn mower. Didn't need one before. And you have to mow three or four times weekly, or your heavy-duty 12hp mulching mower clogs and stalls. Yards left unmown begin to stink up the neighborhood. Where you had thirty wabbits, now you have three, or five on a good day.

Your housecat seldom makes a catch any more. You have to buy cat food, made from wabbit meal. The wild predators you used to enjoy seeing seldom appear.

I could go on, but now let us circle back behind the metaphor.

This little fish, no more than a foot long, is the Gulf Menhaden, the most populous fish on the planet, and the object of the largest catches. Its nearly-extinct Atlantic cousin (which once outnumbered it 5:1) is still taken at a rate of 100,000 tons yearly.

Just like the "wabbit", the menhaden is practically inedible to humans. It is nourishing enough, but most people have to just about starve before they'll try one. It is the only fish which can be caught without any regulated "cap", by the "Menhaden reduction" industry, composed primarily of one company, Omega Protein.

As described by H. Bruce Franklin in The Most Important Fish in the Sea, Atlantic Menhaden were the fish the natives taught the 17^th Century colonists to use to fertilize corn. They were so abundant prior to the 1800s that you could catch them with a basket. John Smith and his men tried catching them with frying pans, and caught a few. They soon learned better methods.

But it was their predators that really drew people's attention. Bluefish, weakfish, bass, tuna, led a huge and varied host of predatory fish to "harvest" menhaden almost continually. Menhaden won't take a hook, but bait a hook with a menhaden, or half of one, and almost any ocean fish will strike, and fast. In the analogy above, we'd be eating the dogs, cats, wolves, puma, etc. Just think, that can of tuna, were it from a land animal, would be a can of lion or tiger meat.

Menhaden are the animal at the bottom of the ocean's primary food chain. They eat planktonic algae (phytoplankton), where most other filter feeders such as cod or herring eat protozoa and other tiny animals (zooplankton). Zooplankton also eat phytoplankton, but are a minor competitor to the menhaden. Every Atlantic fish that can, eats menhaden; those that can't, eat the ones that eat menhaden.

Menhaden have been captured for use as fertilizer, industrial oil, and fish meal for two hundred years or more. Where they once seemed to literally fill the near-shore ocean from Maine to Florida, and throughout the Gulf of Mexico, now about one percent remain...and they still support the largest fishery on the planet, in terms of tonnage.

But their lack is keenly felt. Occasional algal blooms and oxygen-starved "dead zones" have always occurred. But now they are a yearly phenomenon. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico now grows larger than Connecticut, every year. Imagine if the grass in your yard, if allowed to grow, poisoned your neighborhood: birds fell from the sky, your cat suffocated in the yard, and you had to flee to the desert for some fresh air...suppose this happened for a month or two every year.

It is ironic that Omega Protein, though a monopoly, is fighting for survival. Not because of opposition, but because their base is shrinking, and every one of their "products" has better alternatives. Their market is shrinking as fast as the remaining menhaden stock. I wonder which will go to zero first...

Author Franklin works steadily, inexorably. In a feat of good history and good journalism, he shows how Atlantic fishing has progressed from Colonial times until today, the commercial and political climate that has led to a completely unregulated industry, and the glints of hope that this "vacuum cleaner of the Atlantic" might be allowed to regain some of its stature, to the greater good of us all. Imagine, for example, a Chesapeake Bay that again hosts oysters, crabs in numbers 20x of today, and large fish by the millions, in clear waters. All these depend on the filtering of a couple billion menhaden...which don't exist in sufficient numbers today.