What we need is ‘Jim Crow’ laws.

Well, I’m guessing crows are the smartest bird in the region. Maybe there used to be more farmers, and, thus, more crowicide?

As always, just trying to help.

It’s often a trade off, some species are personally territorial during nesting season to protect resources for their chicks but are highly tolerant of others of their species during winter.

Some species always congregate in mass flocks for protection and security. This can also include other species.

Some species aren’t territorial to other species because they occupy the same space but different food sources ala the classic example of wading birds.

In the modern era there are examples of species rapidly changing their ecological zones due to a single change in resource consumption.

An incredible example because it was fully documented was the Collared Dove that in the post-war years in Europe went from a traditional rock dwelling coastal dove (Like the ancestral form of the feral pigeon whose wild-type ancestor hangs on in places despite the dangers of being adsorbed into the feral pigeon population genetically) but some of them figured out how to eat grains from farms and began to adopt a life somewhere between a feral pigeon and a wood pigeon. This led to them expanding around farms and human habitations and going from a range in Europe (Though they went all the way to China the other direction) restricted to parts of the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean to being found all over Europe even somehow making a natural expansion to the Faroe Islands. Some escaped from captivity in the 70s in Florida and it’s now all over North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_collared_dove

Other species making big range jumps are Little Egrets who have even naturally made it to the Americans from Europe. Little Egrets tend to nest comfortably with other herons no speciesist territoriality from heron species despite the fact that some of them are a lot bigger than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_egret#Colonisation_of_the_New_World

But European Starlings seem to be very like Steve’s cows, they congregate in massive flocks and will attack and displace any other species out of nests and other places they wish to nest in making them highly invasive in North America and Australia.

Maybe because they don’t give a duck about other duck species.

The team-oriented crows are driving out and replacing the individualistic mourning doves? How perspicacious Steve!

Here’s another work of feathery perspicacity:

https://www.heretical.com/pubs/fabledh.html

Steve, in winter birds of different species will flock together. Then in spring, they will pair off for breeding purposes and start to become more territorial. That explains the ducks.

Crows are very smart animals. Researchers did an experiment where they captured and banded crows while wearing a mask. They found that the not only the captured crows, but other crows, and subsequent generations of crows, would react when they saw someone wearing the mask. I’m not a biologist, but passing on knowledge to subsequent generations would indicate to me some pretty high level thinking.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2011.0957

Crows Are Speciesist. Are Ducks?

A sly reference to your two favorite trolls, Corv and Tiny?

Are dogs breedists? Breeds are obvious to our eyes, so presumably they’re equally obvious to dogs’ snouts. But as breeds are the result of human decisions, not canine, presumably these distinctions would have little significance to Fido. Unlike, say, age, sex, or health.

BTW, my ex-chef brother-in-law suggested we use the leftover fat from our duck dinner to cook French fries. We did, and they were the best we ever had.

BTW2, crow-calling records were once a thing. I have a Herter’s somewhere, but here is another of the same vintage, from Pekin, Illinois, home of the Chinks:

Not that the coalition of the fringes is tottering, but for the dispassionate observer to refrain from gallows humor would require a heart of stone:

Woman killed in deadly subway attack was advocate for homeless

https://abc7news.com/new-york-subway-death-bay-area-woman-pushed-in-front-of-train-michelle-go/11481177/

You might say she died doing what she loved – providing a slab of marble out of which a hobo attempted to sculpt a hamburger.

A number of bird species carry the eponyms of, to paraphrase Maynard Keynes, some defunct ornithologist. Well, Matt Mendenhall of BirdWatching magazine is on the story of academic birders who want to cancel the embarrassing ones. However, to save face and/or avoid a stink, they appear to want to remove all human appellations and merely refer to species by their physical or geographical attributes.

Head of AOS commits to ‘changing exclusionary or harmful bird names’

Bird Names for Birds

Bird Names For Birds
Because birds don’t need eponymous or honorific common names.

Gee, let’s start with the Emperor penguin!

The oldsquaw:

“Nobody listens to NPR:”
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/beauty-puzzle
BIRD PENISES AREN’T REAL

I seem to remember fireflies in my West L.A. backyard, not particularly near any body of water. Also, hummingbirds used to be much more common when I was a kid.

The passenger pigeon is a much lamented extinct species that used to darken the skies with its horizon-to-horizon flocks. And bison used to roam the plains in huge numbers. But there’s a theory that both of these species abruptly increased in population when agrarian Indian tribes abandoned their farms, and the wild took over in a big ecological shock event. In the early 16th century European pathogens may have preceded Europeans themselves via escape swine and other animal vectors, causing disruption of settled Indians. The books 1491 and 1493 go into this.

Bird is the word.

My grandfather hated crows with a passion because they’d peck the fruit from his orchard. But unlike other birds they’d coordinate and watch out for him and his BB gun. If he shot one, they’d quickly realize the man with the boom stick was bad news. The crows would fly away if they saw him WITH the BB gun. The first crow to see it would caw and alert the others. But if he didn’t have it, they’d stay knowing the flock was safe. He’d try hiding the BB gun underneath a jacket or in the car, but if the crows saw even a glint of the BB gun they’d scram. I never seen geese, ducks, pheasants, robins, etc, have that kind of intelligence and ability to coordinate.

There are many fewer crowding the Midwest today than in my youth, per my observations. It is my understanding that West Nile Virus has done a number on them over the last thirty or so years. It is endemic and crows are gregarious.

What helps crows be intelligent, is that their ratio of brain weight to body weight is the same as humans. Here is an example of dumb ducks. From the other side of a pond I saw a mother duck with seven ducklings. A hawk saw this tasty meal(s), swooped down and grabbed a duckling. The mother could have herded them under some nearby tall bushes. Ducklings will follow their mother. Instead, mama was so inept at a basic instinct, that one by one all the duckling got picked off. Maybe one or two survived.

Mama panicked. Similar to our Covidxyz and global warming panics. The hawks here are the vaxxx-Pharmas, Amazon, other mega-corporations, that Covidxyz panics lead to record profits. Walmarts, Home Depots, were all open when gyms, restaurants and other small business was forced to close their doors.

Idiot Australia is the leader in vaxxx panics. Their penal colony wardens (hack lefty politicos Like Dan Andrews) told their obedient subjects, that when the vaxxx rate reached 80%, that Covidxyz lockdowns and restrictions would end. The vaxx rate in Oz is now 90%, they still get lockdowns and restrictions. We just saw them tearing their hair out in a Covidxyz induced frenzy, over allowing Novak Djokovic to play tennis.

In Oz they have millions of sheep, sheeple and people. The sheeple outnumber the other two.

From your link–

NEW YORK (KGO) — An East Bay family says they are in a state of shock trying to comprehend the loss of a loved one in a senseless act of violence. Police say 40-year-old Michelle Alyssa Go was shoved onto the tracks in front of an oncoming New York City subway train at the 42nd Street-Times Square station on Saturday.

Go was born in Berkeley and grew up in Fremont. She graduated from American High School and UCLA, then later moved to New York to attend business school.

RIP, but why was an intelligent woman not situation aware? To look around and see who the pushers might be? At an easy minimum, don’t stand near the tracks when a subway train is coming in. This is prime time for the NYC psychos (homeless and not), as they fantasize giving a woman the big push.

Magpies didn’t arrive in Ireland until 1676. Now the place is overrun with them.

Because if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then they say “Aw, duck ’em”

I heard my only nightingale in Gloucestershire in 2001 for a few weeks. It was so loud I could ring my mother, say “listen to this!” and shove the cord handset out of the back door.

Far fewer house sparrows – I think building changes have a lot to do with this – plastic soffits and fascias, fewer nooks and crannies for nests. Same for swifts and especially house martens.

Thushes – once as common as blackbirds, now a pleasant rarity to spot. Starlings have declined too. But more magpies, for whom roadkill is a major food source.

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/advice/how-you-can-help-birds/where-have-all-the-birds-gone/is-the-number-of-birds-in-decline/

“Changes in agricultural practices have had a devastating effect on farmland birds. This process has been fuelled, particularly in north-west Europe, by European agricultural policies. ”

That’s EU policies.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/09/sixteen-of-britains-top-20-garden-birds-have-declined-in-number-annual-survey-finds

“Mobbing usually starts with just one or two birds, but may attract a large number of birds, often of many species. For example, a chorus of different alarm calls coming from the same tree is often a good sign of a roosting owl or a cat.

Mobbing behaviour has been recorded in a wide range of species, but it is particularly well developed in gulls and terns, while crows are amongst the most frequent mobbers.

In addition to flying at the predator and emitting alarm calls, some birds, such as fieldfares and gulls, add to the effectiveness by defaecating or even vomiting on the predator with amazing accuracy. There are reports of predators being grounded by the volume of droppings over their body after a concentrated mobbing attack by a colony of fieldfares.”

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/birdwatching/bird-behaviour/what-is-mobbing/

I forgot about terns. In the Arctic tern breeding season you have to walk holding a stick or closed umbrella above your head if you don’t want them coming inches from your face or even drawing blood. It’s pretty effective though, we’ve given up lakeside walks before and left the territory to them (they are ground nesters).

OT – China responds to high gas prices.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/17/chinas-coal-production-hit-record-levels-in-2021

China’s coal production reached record levels last year as the state encouraged miners to ramp up their fossil fuel output to safeguard the country’s energy supplies through the winter gas crisis.

The world’s biggest coal producer and consumer mined 384.67m tonnes of the fossil fuel last month, easily topping its previous record of 370.84m tonnes set in November, after the government called for miners to work at maximum capacity to help fuel the country’s economic growth.

Official government figures show that China’s coal binge also spurred the country to record high coal output over the year as a whole. Chinese coal production climbed to an all-time high of 4.07bn tonnes, up 4.7% on the previous year, in a blow to climate campaigners months after the UN’s Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted that global consumption of coal power, which is the world’s single biggest source of climate emissions, would reach record levels in 2021 driven by a surge in demand for energy to kickstart global economies following the coronavirus pandemic.

I never never until recently that Ravens can talk:

But seriously folks.

Any species that continues to survive is “speciesist” in its own way.

Or “fit” to use the older terminology.

That video is so cool. Is there a fairly simple explanation for how birds and fish can engage in such large‐scale co-ordination? I’m boycotting Wikipedia.

Also, I hate crows. They’re ugly and make a nasty noise. Doves make one of the sweetest sounds in nature.

BTW, bobwhites and whippoorwills are on their way to extinction. Along with so many other creatures.

“Treeshrews have a higher brain to body mass ratio than any other mammal, including humans.” The relationship between brain size and intelligence in nonlinear; the correct variable is something like encephalization quotient, and crows are equal to chimpanzees.

Their brain is far smaller in absolute size, but so are their neurons. They think very efficiently. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/

Sunnyvale, California, has been inundated with more than a thousand crows practically every evening during the pandemic.

And now the city is turning to an unlikely weapon to disperse them: lasers.https://t.co/KIclloS77L

— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 17, 2022

“why was an intelligent woman not situation aware?”

Even in 1980s London I knew better than to be near the edge at Tube or train stations, or indeed to be close enough that one good shove might send me over. But I lived in a rough part of London and situational awareness was a necessity outside home (or even at home – you’d check from the window to see who was at the door – one time it was the girls next door who’d just been robbed at knifepoint) or work.

I used to go back to the country every few weeks and walk five miles to the pub, happy in the feeling that no one I met en route was likely to be any kind of threat.

In the 70s, there were woodpeckers and webworms in Grandma’s pecan trees. Neither lasted into the 90s when I moved here, but there’s something neatly encircling smaller branches with an incision that makes them break off. There are also aphids which poop out a mist that sticks to my frame house and cars and turns black.

Never a word about windmills from these people. The Audubon Society seems to have been bought out.

Crows are pretty amazing. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this:

You’re doing yard work, maybe spreading some grass seed. One crow silently watches you from a treetop. You see him up there. When you finish, he starts calling his buddies, who all fly in from wherever they were and fill your trees. When you have gotten far enough away, they all fly down and start eating whatever you stirred up or were spreading. One bird waited, watched you and then called in fifty who now fill your yard.

It’s like chain migration.

No wonder farmers invented the scarecrow. (Do those things actually work?)

Exactly. I just read your comment, and it reminds me of what I saw and described before reading yours.

Did your grandfather or anyone you know ever put up a scarecrow? I’m wondering if they actually work.

Another thing I notice is that when I’m on a walk and I pass under one in a tree, he calls out to his comrades, announcing my arrival. Sometimes one place after another goes like that as I go along. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

In the nineties it was a common sight at dusk to see huge flocks of crows heading up the Charles River for their communal overnight roosting places. The West Nile virus all but destroyed the local crow population and then there were more cardinals around than I’d ever seen before. The crows are slowly repopulating and cardinals becoming scarce again. A similar phenomenon occurred when the rabies epidemic crashed the urban common skunk population. The niche was soon filled by hognose skunks, startlingly odd creatures that seemed to be ominously bizarre mutations until their species could be identified from a wildlife handbook.

(Still, I can remember the one day in 1970 when mourning doves arrived in a colossal flock of tens of thousands that circled high over the San Fernando Valley.

So who knows what the past was really like? It’s common to have a mental model of the ecology of the past as being in a fine, self-maintaining balance of biodiversity. But over a long enough period of time, all sorts of crazy things have happened in nature.

Aw, c’mon Steve………you still believe in birds? Get with the times, man.

https://birdsarentreal.com/

You’re not spiritual enough. You have to find your inner duck.

https://www.jagaimo.com/duck/

The Holy Sound

Should you digitize your own emulation of the Holy Sound, please let The First Pope know so that we can include it in our page. Simply send the quack via e-mail and we’ll include it here. If you already have a quack on your home page, please let us know the URL of your page and the quack.

The Holy Sound as emulated by the First Pope. (.au format)
The Holy Sound translated into Japanese (.au).
The Holy Sound as interpreted by a younger, naturally Ducky member of society. (.wav)
Nathan Cosgray of Indiana University (Bloomington) quacks a melancholy, yearning Holy Sound. (.wav)
Romanized quacks from different languages. Thanks to Catherine N. Ball at Georgetown University. Features a quacking duck (.au) from a Rutger’s archive of animal sounds.
Transimage, a graphic design firm specializing in international materials, features duck sounds in various languages.

Crows often cooperate with other crows to attack and drive away bigger raptors such as hawks or even bald eagles. In other words, crows are speciesist.

Crows are also very smart…what can be inferred from this in relation to humans?

“RIP, but why was an intelligent woman not situation aware? ..”

It is easy to become complacent about real but rare dangers. Like not looking and being hit by somebody running a red light.

Undeservedly wealthy frogfaced airhead son of Ashoka Chamath Palihapitiya has not only denied the Uyghur genocide, but said that worse things happen here, but most of all, blithely announced that China is not a totalitarian state and that “checks and balances” (his wording) exist there.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/billionaire-nba-executive-claims-nobody-cares-about-the-uyghurs-america-has-no-moral-authority-over-china
Yes they’re disloyal. Yes they hate our constitution. Yes they trash whatever place they land in. But what about the objective stupidity?

I`m not sure what American crows are like. I know the crows of two island nations, Britain and Japan.

British crows are absolute faggots compared to Japanese crows.

Firstly, Japanese crows are a lot bigger. They also have large, nasty-looking beaks.

Japanese crows live in the cities, where they greatly enjoy coming down to burst open garbage bags with their beaks, to get at the food waste within. They really make a mess of the streets from time to time, garbage scattered all over the place.

Unless you really go very close to them, they just give you a contemptuous look and don`t even bother flying off.

Ducks are into miscegenation on a major scale:
https://www.outdoorlife.com/story/hunting/duck-hybrids/#:~:text=A%20hybrid%20bird%20is%20the%20result%20of%20two,breed%20with%20pintails%2C%20black%20ducks%2C%20wigeon%2C%20and%20teal.

A hybrid bird is the result of two different duck (or goose) species mating. This results in a combination of different characteristics from the two species. The most common duck to mate with other species is the mallard. Greenheads will often breed with pintails, black ducks, wigeon, and teal.

Waterfowl crossbreed more than any other bird—more than 400 combinations of hybrid waterfowl have been recorded. The mallard/pintail is the most common.

Interesting. Crows and their raven cousins are fascinating to watch.

On that same subject, the heretofore ubiquitous blue jay seems to have all but disappeared in at least our section of the northeast (which would be the NYC metro area).

As generations of cartoon ducks have instructed us, ducks aren’t always the most even-tempered live-and-let-live creatures

Hey, come on now!

https://postimg.cc/0rtg214T

OT – ADL complains that the new Academy of Motion Pictures museum leaves out Industry’s founders:

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/academy-museum-motion-pictures-jewish-representation-1283537/

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who was on hand for the gala, was immediately struck by the lapse. “I would’ve hoped that any honest historical assessment of the motion picture industry — its origins, its development, its growth — would include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up,” he says. “As I walked through, I literally turned to the person I was there with and said to him, ‘Where are the Jews?’ The omission was glaring.”

Hey, wait a minute there, Mr. Greenblatt. Are you saying that Hollywood was controlled by a certain group? Sounds kinda anti-something-or-another.

they are really smart

Saw lots and lots of mags when I was there awhile back. Sounds like Ireland needs more raptors.

I've spoken with both sisters on the phone (one is recording, the other is talking)

I have a detailed account (inc. a doctors name), which I've used to try & corroborate the story, including speaking with people at the hospital

See next post 👇 https://t.co/iBQZNilkmR

— James (@JamesfWells) January 17, 2022

China has an agenda for clean energy: nuclear plants. Of course, they are investing in other renewables, but since the CCP, whatever else you can say about them, are actually Serious People…

This was 2008. Needless to say, things have come a ways since then. Since a lot of the low-level manufacturing jobs have gone to Vietnam and Indonesia (China’s “Rust Belt” is in Manchuria), workers have been rerouted into stuff like this.

There was an injured dying crow on the walkway of a rental place I was living in, and his family and buddies were making a hell of a racket. The landlord, being a hippie, had no guns, so I took him out with a .22 pistol from 5 ft. The others seem to have been OK with that. They were agitated but I guess knew there was nothing they could do.

Then, you’ve got their heftier cousins, the Ravens. In the Peak Stupidity post As the Raven Flies …, I showed this picture of one of the fat-ass Ravens at Bryce Canyon Nat’l Park in Utah. People kept feeding him (OK, we gave him a few Goldfish™), and he could barely fly higher than the rim of the canyon.

The decline in birds is tragic, and an example of a genuine environmental problem. But how much money goes into doing anything about it? Meanwhile, billions are spent every year on totally pointless and largely fraudulent “climate change” studies. Then again, it’s much easier for academics to sit around running computer models and getting fat government grants than actually going out into nature and finding solutions to real problems.

If you didn’t already realize it, the events of the last two years ought to convince everyone that our vaunted scientists and doctors are venal, totally corrupt and completely compromised, and don’t deserve a shred of respect, outside of some brave outliers.

I’m surprised it wasn’t the green parrots that drove away the mourning doves. There were so many in Arcadia last time I was there. So noisy and aggressive they were

I hated the doves when I was growing up in the SGV because of their sad cooing but was rather glad when they showed up in Montana.

They are stupid though and tend to fly into our windows or get picked off by hawks.

The British rule is that if you see a lot of crows they’re rooks. If you see a single rook, it’s a crow.

Every hunter knows that 😀

(small treble hook on one yd of steel or kevlar line, 3-5 fastened to a stake in
the meadow and baited with whatever carrion you have around; they are
proverbially not very tasty and technically songbirds (heh), but it´s useful
to know.)

Decades ago, I visited an aviary in Port Charlotte, FL. Most of the birds could talk. The proprietor said, “Most birds can be trained to talk.” For the rest of us, it’s more trouble than its worth.

Timely post, Steve. Just a few days ago, I saw a black vulture and a turkey vulture circling overhead together. I pointed them out to a friend and said, “That ain’t right.”

How smart are corvids? I have heard bluejays mimicking red shouldered hawks. A mouse that roared.

That video is so cool. Is there a fairly simple explanation for how birds and fish can engage in such large‐scale co-ordination?

I am pretty sure that each individual bird or fish is following the rule that if it finds itself exposed on the edge of the flock/school (where a predator could isolate it and eat it), it tries to fly back into the center for protection.

Some individuals might be less risk averse than others and actually prefer to be on the edge of the flock (maybe so they can see what might be after them or spot food, etc.) These guys would tend to seek out the edge and thereby “pull” the more conformist flockers in their direction.

So I don’t think they are deliberately coordinating their movements per se. But rather the trippy 3-D ebbs and flows of the collective flock are just the end result of thousands and thousands of individual birds following their own little algorithms. It’s pretty mesmerizing.

China has an agenda for clean energy: nuclear plants.

China is right about this.

Do skunks have rabies in California?

Not very long. (It’s fatal for them, too.)

If you are asking if they can contract rabies, and spread rabies, yes. Certainly.

A skunk ran and hid under my minivan in my driveway last week. He’s been around the neighborhood for about a year, the first one I can remember in the vicinity.

Did you notice its gate? If it was a normal looking run, probably not. And that it ran is also a good sign. A goofy skunk that doesn’t run away from humans should set off the alarm.

But, skunks are nocturnal, so it is a bit odd to see one in daytime.

I have been noticing skunks in my area for a few years now. First time in 60 years. Interesting that Steve, 2000 miles from here, has noticed dispersion to new areas as well.

Agreed. Nuclear power is the sole thing that can simultaneously produce clean energy while not forcing the poor to choose between electricity and food: all within a reasonable time frame.

If Nixon had been able to get Project Independence off the ground 50 years ago, who knows where’d we be right now?

Good on them. And they are putting in the super-safe advanced molten salt reactor designs that we pioneered decades ago. If we were a more serious nation we’d be doing this ourselves. At least every ton of carbon they replace with nukes benefits us as well.

Crows used to plague my step dad’s farm. If his car pulled out the crows would come back. One day he had his sister drive his car away while he laid on the kitchen floor with his .22.

He got a bunch that day.

OT – is this new trend a thing in the States too – exhibitionists taking advantage of Zoom meetings?

https://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/19854568.teenage-flasher-exposed-female-doctors-online-appointments/

A teenager who repeatedly exposed himself to female doctors during online appointments has been given a suspended sentence of detention.

Back in 2020 Umar Malik, then 17, used false details to arrange the virtual appointments and when the doctors linked in for the consultations he used his phone to film himself performing a sex act.

Prosecutor David McGonigal told Bradford Crown Court that over a few months Malik, who had no previous convictions, committed five offences of indecent exposure involving three female doctors.

The doctors described feeling violated and disgusted by Malik’s behaviour.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ashling-murphy-zoom-vigil-b1994568.html

Activists held an online vigil on Zoom on Sunday evening at around 7.30pm for those who could not attend the events in person.

Evie Nevin, a west Cork-based activist and one of the organisers of the event, told The Independent the call was interrupted by a person whose screen showed a man masturbating.

Ms Nevin said those present were “shocked” and “disgusted” by the incident.

“It really made our point about women not being safe anywhere in Ireland,” she said.

So has the sierra club

Intra subspecies intolerance seems to be a peculiarly mammalian phenomenon, and not an avian behavior.
The mallard ducks, of which there are multiplicity of subspecies, seem to have diverged and specified recently, in evolutionary terms, of course.
Hybridization of wild mallard species with introduced species of duck is a big problem with conservationists, and active steps are being taken by the ornithological fraternity to counter it.

The mallards seem to be a ‘ring species’ in that they grade along genetic/geographical clines.

On the other hand, your corvids are highly intelligent little buggers, being the proud possessors of the best non primate non mammalian intellects on the planet, quite able to solve, through cerebral power – a totally alien cerebrum to the ones we are used to – some quite involved intellectual puzzles.

Father-in-law similarly says crows were scared of him when he carried a gun and not when he didn’t.

One thing that is bothering me right now is that, a couple weeks ago, I saw a group of American Widgeon mingling with a group of Canada Geese. What’s with that?

And anyway, what are those Canada Geese doing down here in Seattle without their vaxx cards?

. In California, skunks are one of the most common carriers of rabies, a viral disease transmitted by the bite of an infected animal. Skunks can also be carriers of other diseases including leptospirosis, listeriosis, canine distemper, canine hepatitis, Q-fever, and tularemia.

http://ipm.ucanr.edu/PMG/PESTNOTES/pn74118.html#:~:text=In%20California%2C%20skunks%20are%20one,Q%2Dfever%2C%20and%20tularemia.

Skunks and raccoons are very common carriers of rabies.
The Virginia Opossum (do you have those in California?) is very unlikely to carry rabies due to their body temperature being slightly lower than most mammals, which does not allow the virus to take hold in their bodies. Possums also eat large numbers of ticks.

The Corvid family is generally considered the 2nd smartest of the bird families, after Parrots.

>he thinks crows and ducks aren’t exactly the same
Way to out yourself, bigot.

Two friends and I were walking down a moonlit Irish lane nearly forty years ago now. We were tramping along, on the way home from the pub when we walked past a gap in the hedgerow that opened into a field. In the bright light of the moon we could see a line of posts that had been driven into the ground. From each post swung a dead crow, tied up by the feet. I don’t know if it kept the crows away, but it sure kept us moving.
There are grey crows in Ireland that peck the eyeballs out of newborn lambs. The blinded lambs then die, being unable to properly suckle. Many farmers shoot them on sight.

If a skunk is out in daylight, I’d call your wildlife control department. Same with raccoons or any normally nocturnal animal. Rabies is nothing to mess with.

A farmer told me that the secret of scarecrows is the you move them every couple of weeks. Crows are very suspicions of motionless figures that move every once in a while.

The mourning doves are fighting back around here. About six weeks I saw one seize a mockingbird in midair and carry it away (to eat it, I suppose). Left behind were feathers and a little pool of blood on the pavement below.

Some of you may not know that mockingbirds are extremely territorial and bossy. In my yard, they tell all the birds and squirrels where they can and cannot be.

Way off topic:

California should abolish parenthood in the name of equity:
https://www.vcstar.com/story/opinion/columnists/2022/01/13/column-california-should-abolish-parenthood-name-equity/6513756001/

I don’t know if this is satire. It is essentially calling for universal orphanhood. From the Ventura County Star.

If you’ve read Alex Berenson regarding Covid vaccines, have you read Alex Berenson regarding quack nausea cures?
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/marijuana-mental-illness-violence
sample

Sadly, no longer called the Chinks. My folk memory is the town was so-called because one could theoretically drill down from that spot, and come up in the capital of the Middle Kingdom.

As far as our Anatidaean friends are concerned, as Robert Hunter observed:

” ain’t no luck
I (they) learned to duck”

There is an inevitable tipping point at which fossil fuels will be so expensive/rare that all political opposition to nuclear power will disappear.

No, Karen, those solar panels and windmills will not keep you warm through the winter, nor charge everyone’s electric car.

Some parts of South Africa had trouble with Indian mynahs, a relative of the crow and an invasive species. They quickly learned to avoid pest control by refusing poison bait, and they also learned to keep their distance from people carrying rifles or shotguns, after just a few casualties.

I don’t think “specieist” is the best way to think about this. There are two evolutionary approaches that contemporary thinkers might forward:

1. (most popular) Kin selection. Flocks of crows who gang up (at some risk to themselves) tend to be related. Genes for altruism here are really genes for nepotism, and they get passed on.

2. (less popular, though actually in some ways equivalent, and in some ways unfairly dismissed) Group selection. Flocks of crows that behave in this way do better than flocks that don’t. D. S. Wilson is (and E. O. Wilson was) a sophisticated thinker about this. There is in my opinion knee-jerk opposition to this view, originating from George Williams’ critique of naive group selections.

But no one (at least no one I’ve read) thinks that “species selection” is a thing.

Flocking habits are why the once superabundant passenger pigeon went extinct. They would breed only when in vast flocks of millions of birds, which required vast uninterrupted forest tracts. The clearing of land for agriculture, especially in the Midwest, greatly reduced the size and numbers of these uninterrupted tracts, even if the total amount of forest land did not decline too much. Extinction became inevitable.

Did your grandfather or anyone you know ever put up a scarecrow? I’m wondering if they actually work.

No, he thought they were pretty stupid. If he was able to kill a crow he’d take its body and hang in to a tree with a string. That’ll keep the crows away for a week until the body finally disintegrated. The crows would observe the dead comrade from the gallows and quickly get the message. With dumber animals like deer, he’d shoot them (you don’t need tags for agricultural pest suppression) and drag the entire bloody body around the orchard with a tractor. The coyotes would come down from the mountain and eat the body in a day or two. Coyotes don’t damage orchards and were seen as nature’s mafia body disposal unit. So no need to shoot them. But it’s interesting that the deer needed a stronger smelling message to back off while the smart crows could notice their small dead colleague real fast. Maybe crows are nature’s second smartest noticer behind ravens that I’m told are even smarter.

B.T. you may want to reference your Roger Tory Peterson again. Mourning Doves do not kill other birds, much less eat them. Must have been a pigeon from the ‘hood.

To Sailers’ observation that nature is in constant flux, and what appears normal at one period of time may be part of a long cycle of ebb and flow. For the first thirty years of my life I had maybe one or two ticks crawl on me. For the last twenty-five I can’t even count the number. They’ve just become part of being outside.

Those first two really freaked me out. Now, I can sit calmly reading a book, pick one off crawling up my neck and cut it in-half with a pocket knife without really thinking about it. But I do look forward t to the cycle ebbing.

Though it looks like schools of minnows like to hide in shady waters, the way the behavior is organized is that minnows in shade swim slower that those in bright light, so the school, trying to stick together, turns into the shade.

This is what I think of when I hear about California cities having problems with invasive species.

No one is shooting them. The crows view Californians as harmless cows.

Here in rural America we shoot crows with 22s if they are a problem. I’m not far from corn fields and yet I rarely see them. We see ravens but they are protected and really not a problem for crops anyways.

I remember reading somewhere that duck hunters will sometimes hunt crows in the off season since they pick off so many ducklings.

We had a large fire in our local mountains and backcountry in 2003 and another in 2007. Since then, there has been a noticeable increase in the number crows and ravens in our neighborhood and the city in general. I’m thinking they got run out of their natural habitat by the fires and discovered the joys of city life (much easier access to food and water). There has also been a decrease in the songbird population. Only the mockingbirds seem to be holding their own (seeing a pair of them chasing a crow or raven from their territory is inspiring).

Do skunks have rabies in California? A skunk ran and hid under my minivan in my driveway last week. He’s been around the neighborhood for about a year, the first one I can remember in the vicinity.

Yes and this is why skunks living near people need to be shot.

They get rabies and then turn into zombies and can lose fear of people/dogs. I have seen it.

Flocking habits are why the once superabundant passenger pigeon went extinct. They would breed only when in vast flocks of millions of birds, which required vast uninterrupted forest tracts.

Why wouldn’t they breed in other conditions? How hard is it to have sexual intercourse?

China has also put their first High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor (HTGR) online.

A design of reactor using an all ceramic formulation and no water, the HTGR simply cannot ‘meltdown’ and having a ‘negative coefficient of reactivity’ the reactor has an inbuilt reaction against runaway fission. What’s more this design puts out a very high useable temperature, thus markedly increasing efficiency, and the possibility of using the heat for industrial processes – including hydrogen production.

I’ve often thought to myself that the nation which masters the HTGR and fully utilizes it will basically own the 21st century.

I remember an Andy Griffith episode where Andy took his date out to shoot crows. Like crow shooting was pretty ho-hum

A strange occurence along the I-93 running north into Boston. Hundreds of dead crows were found along the interstate. The Mass. DEC and the USDA investigated to see if a nearby farm was using poison to eradicate the crows, or maybe the crows had ingested a legal fertilizer. The autopsys, yes, they performed autopsys, showed neither poison nor fertilizer. However, a young biologist noticed that the dead crows all had a trace of a white substance on them. Further study showed that the substance was a white paint that was used exclusively on aluminum over the road trailers. Cameras were set up along the I-93 and they discovered that crows ingesting gravel along the roadway were startled and flew exclusively into the side of the trailers. It seems that Boston crows could shout out “caw” at an approaching vehicle, but they could not say truck. Try the veal and tip you waiter.

There were more crows around WNY when I was a kid but things change. When I was young you never or rarely saw wild turkeys. Now you often see flocks in nearby fields and occassionally in the yard. Never use to see the big, ugly turkey vultures but now we see them all the time. More robins, fewer wrens and blue birds. And, WNY is over populated with Canada geese and that is why we have three, maybe four, yearly hunting seasons to thin them out. A flock of these feathered vermin can turn a football field or a golf green into an unplayable mess. Dog size turds, but wet.

Nuclear power is the sole thing that can simultaneously produce clean energy while not forcing the poor to choose between electricity and food: all within a reasonable time frame.

Yeah, but do you trust any part of the human race with 50,000 years of safe storage of its waste? Let alone an African-majority world?

Canada Geese are the only unpopular Canadian thing in Britain. Well apart from the Quebecois, obvs.

More robins, fewer wrens and bluebirds.

The state bird! Better feed Sialis sialis some Cialis!

As Edith Piaf herself once explained, “no egrets.”

Subaru is not exactly the Japanese word for “grumpy lesbian,” it actually points to the 7 sisters star formation.

And, WNY is over populated with Canada geese and that is why we have three, maybe four, yearly hunting seasons to thin them out. A flock of these feathered vermin can turn a football field or a golf green into an unplayable mess. Dog size turds, but wet.

Ugh, I have seen this in many areas. Entire parks and waterways ruined because no one is hunting them.

Their s–t can actually ruin lakes and ponds because there is so much of it.

People would be horrified by someone dumping their RV waste into a lake but if ducks or geese do it then it is fine.

I want to say one word to you, Reg. Just one word. Thorium.

That is the real threat.

As bad as things are they will probably get much worse because of Africa.

Africa will further overpopulate past economic capacity and then AOC types will tell us that we need to do our part and “only” take 10 or 20 million since there are hundred million hungry refugees. All it will take is a natural disaster or some Charles Taylor like warlord.

This is why the reality of race will have to get to the forefront of society even it seems harsh. We need even Black politicians to privately accept race and that it isn’t in the best interest of anyone to turn America into Liberia West. American Blacks are mixed and Black stereotypes will not improve if we take in 20 million full blooded Bantu.

they don’t seem to mind sharing their watery turf with other species of ducks. How come?

What birds consider species and what we consider species are probably not the same.

I tend to trust the birds on this.

Time to copy Musrabian rules: no woman allowed out without a male escort.

Women lose situational awareness regularly for a variety of reasons, even if they’ve been trained to have it. Entitlement, hormones, sleep deprivation. Women’s genes still think they’re on the savannah and genuinely not allowed outside. If they’re allowed somewhere, it must be inside and thus safeguarded.

I think puns are not just the lowest form of wit, but the lowest form of human behavior.
-John Oliver

Mourning doves are not predatory, that was a sparrow hawk or kestrel…..doves and pigeons eat seeds and feed their young milk from their crop .

Reg, the NY plate, “None Your Business” and you too funny.

Birds….slightly OT.

This all reminds me of a very good book authored by Ken Richardson (it has quite a few pictures of birds, illustrating the theory of evolution):

But, where he is good is he openly acknowledges what I’ve been saying all the time- human mind cannot be explained by evolution, we’re dealing with embarrassment of riches. He’s even more sincere in admitting that evolutionary theory is inadequate- although he tries to save it by harping on complexity, something I’m familiar with, but it also is not enough.

In my-not his- opinion, in order to have evolution still around, we’ll have to introduce new principles, because Darwin is too rudimentary. It has to be something truly new & potent, not the old fashioned Lamarckism.

Let’s see a few quotations:

I see birds flying around my town that I once had to hike a couple of miles into a state park to see. I think lots of avians are getting urbanized. But not the ivory-billed woodpeckers, alas.

Kronos, I never hunted crows, but if I saw one when out hunting woodchucks I would send a round their way. A guy I knew liked to shoot crows on the fly. He would first find a road kill woodchuck or squirrel and place it in a field. Next he would set some Victor Rat Traps around the carcass, but he would wrap the snap down bar in cloth and tape. Soon crows would land to feast on the carcass and eventually one would get their foot trapped in the rat trap. He would then tie a string around the foot of the trapped crow and stake the string to the ground. Crow would hop around squawking and attracting more crows. Wing shooting crows used to be a sport, don’t even think it is legal now.

Without doubt the most frustrating bird-species extinction was that of the famous Ivory Billed Woodpecker. The largest and showiest of all the varieties of woodpecker, and once a symbol of the South, the IBW began getting scarce after 1900 due to habitat loss and by the late 1930’s was feared extinct. In 1938, however, scientists discovered a small but hopefully sustainable population in a remote Louisiana forest. So long as this forest remained intact the IBW would have a chance to avoid extinction.

Not quite. Many years earlier the Singer sewing machine company had bought the forest land in question, now known as the Singer Tract, as a source of wood for sewing machine cabinets, but had never made use of it. What with the land in the news because of the IBW discovery, Singer executives figured they should do something with it, and decided to sell it …. to a logging company. Scientists and conservation groups were horrified, and pleaded with Singer and the logging company to keep the land intact and save the birds from extinction, to no avail. With no endangered species laws at the time there was nothing that could be done.

Singer sold the land, the logging company cut the trees, and the last-ever sighting of the IBW was in 1944. Today it is almost certainly extinct. All we can hope for is that the executives of Singer and the logging company are tied naked to stakes in hell, as IBW’s eternally peck at their eyes and genitalia.

I don’t think crow season ever closes in PA. You can even shoot them on Sundays.

Konrad Lorenz observed geese are “homophobic.” “Gay” geese were relegated to the fringes of the gaggle. During the mating rites, if a “gay” goose attempted to usurp the female role, the “hetero-normative” majority would peck him back out of the gaggle, where he would undoubtedly honk and hiss about his “rights.” Such is the fate of the gander of lavender.

Eventually we’ll drop all the 1930’s-era restrictions on Canada geese. They’ll be regarded in the same way we regard feral hogs. You’ll be able to hunt them with drone-mounted flamethrowers.

Prester, raptors or aspiring raptors.Asking for a friend.

neb, the type of Build Back Better jobs that union construction workers in America can only dream about. But they believe biden and the dems. Still waiting twenty plus years for a new Buffalo bridge to Canada.

“For the first thirty years of my life I had maybe one or two ticks crawl on me. For the last twenty-five I can’t even count the number. They’ve just become part of being outside.”

Do you have Lyme Disease over there? It sounds most unpleasant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#North_America

It’s funny you said that.

I used to live in a liberal city where they were a major problem because no one could shoot them due to firearm ordinances. No one was allowed to trap or shoot them with bows due to Federal laws.

This is the kind of ridiculous catch-22 you almost expect in a liberal area.

So the city would spend millions on gimmicks like noisemakers that never worked.

I’m in rural America now and not far from a corn field where people hunt them.

They never stop anywhere within miles. We hear them fly over during the migration. I assume they are off to some liberal park or city. I read somewhere that they will remember being shot at for years.

peter, I saved an article, I will find it, that says domestic and feral cats in America kill BILLIONS of birds annually in America. Using their math, US funded study, cats would be killing 1600 birds per day here in Erie County, NY. Damn, I will find it.

Any cat that enters my backyard without a collar gets a .22 in the coconut.

How hard is it to have sexual intercourse?

You haven’t met Whiskey have you?

You’ll be able to hunt them with drone-mounted flamethrowers.

Available from Elon Musk.

Fascinating, thanks for the recommendation.

I wonder why the crows don’t just gang up and attack lone gunmen?

“It is easy to become complacent about real but rare dangers.”

Yet Twitter is full of women demanding we all wear masks everywhere – that their small kids wear masks even ! – when the danger of covid is very slight for the young and/or healthy.

I think there’s some herd instinct at play, too. Noticing who’s doing the pushing is a BadWhite thing to do. You won’t learn from NPR or even Fox News who are most likely to present danger. But Covid has been given big air everywhere.

If our media told the truth about crime – or even about this particular crime – and banged the drum, made it An Issue … Special Report … Are Women Safe On Our Subways? … Who Commits These Crimes? … then you’d see women standing as far back from the rails as they possibly could, perhaps even being ostentatious about it … to show they are Good People.

He actually did that but with my grandmother being to decoy in the car.😂

It’s bad enough we’ve turned so much of the landscape into grass, but we don’t even let the grass seed. It seems super unfair to animals. I’ll bet bunnies would love to have grass seed to eat. I wish someone would breed grass that would seed when it was 2-4 inches tall. There are dwarfs of some grasses. Dwarf wheat is, I would guess most of the wheat we grow.

I’d love to let critters have a good meal out of the lawn. We dominate the living world, so we should make some effort to keep as much ecology going as possible. Never know when a woodchuck hepatitis delta virus will have a really useful post-transcriptional element.

One of the strangest things I heard (and saw) growing up had to do with seagulls traveling hundreds of miles inland just to eat McDonald french fries. As a kid in the Pacific Northwest, you’d see seagulls deep in the interior of Oregon and Washington hanging around most McDonalds parking lots. There used to be a lot of French fries laying about there in the 1990s and you’d see seagulls 100 miles inland eating fries. I asked my dad once, who replied seagulls would migrate from one McDonald’s to another to eat the fries. The seagulls are bigger and more aggressive, they scared the crows away. I don’t know if it’s true, but it explained the seagulls. A invasive species hooked on fast food.

Also, I was mistaken. Grandpa did you 22lr and not a BB gun.

Yeah, farmers and farm-adjacent folk hate crows, and there are fewer of all those types nowadays, so… more crows?

A group of crows is called a “murder” of crows, not a flock, as a commenter wrote. However, until today, I thought that it is a “morning” dove. I was surprised because both of the above fall into the same category of knowledge. But I still did better than The Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one of three.

I only grow grass on 1/3 of our property, and I even let that go mostly natural. Where we live, we don’t have to manicure our lawns the way Steve does, for example, so we have bunnies living and munching, deer coming, nibbling and going, crows of course, and also many beautiful bird species: bright red Cardinals, blue Bluebirds, red-breasted robins, doves!, and little chickadee things I don’t know the name of. Oh, and then there are the hawks, soaring and gliding overhead looking for squirrels… And the gray wolves and the foxes…

There is no pressure here to make one’s yard look like a golf course, but some people still do. I don’t. My story of grass seed and crows was about times I’ve thrown out some seed, not working very hard at all, and other times I’ve just mowed a portion and scattered things that are apparently delicious to our guests.

Oh, and there is clover and wildflowers too. This is how I can be a lazy groundskeeper and still claim that it is my style. It’s natural, you see… LOL. Thank you for your response. I agree with your point.

And they are putting in the super-safe advanced molten salt reactor designs that we pioneered decades ago.

[citation needed]

There is nothing super-safe (sic) about corroding pipes and continuous separations.

Decades ago I read of an experiment in England where they determined crows could count to five.

Multiple hunters would walk to a shelter in a field. Then one would leave. Then another. They found that if no more than five walked out, the crows would return after the 5th left. With six, the crows couldn’t handle it, and would return too soon.

Before you get too carried away about crow social behavior, remember that ants and bees have social behavior, too.

This is why the reality of race will have to get to the forefront of society even it seems harsh. We need even Black politicians to privately accept race and that it isn’t in the best interest of anyone to turn America into Liberia West. American Blacks are mixed and Black stereotypes will not improve if we take in 20 million full blooded Bantu.

The “reality of race” problem seems to stem from the fact that the majority of liberals cannot understand simple statistical modeling, specifically “the bell curve.” So they can’t understand that the worst actors on the far side of the curve of one racial group can disastrously undermine the progress and prosperity of another racial group.

If you can’t understand a bell curve, you’ll never grasp the extremely successful “black a block” policy that allowed blacks to move into white neighborhoods without prompting “white flight,” thus destroying that neighborhood until the blacks left that neighborhood. A white neighborhood can be devastated in a few short years by more than a black a block, and it can take generations to recover.

As blacks have been abandoning Inglewood CA, for example, crime has dropped significantly, it’s no longer a war zone, and white people are slowly moving back into the area. A notion that was inconceivable a generation ago.

Furthermore, the wildly successful racial cleansing of blacks from their beloved Compton by immigrant Mexicans, who confronted blacks physically on a regular basis, is L.A. County’s best kept secret, and one of its biggest success stories of the past decade. Violent crime has dropped at an amazing rate as a result, and whites are also now sticking a toe in that former hellhole for real estate investment.

Meanwhile, feral negroes who occupy the shit side of the negro bell curve continue to act out their primitive mindset on the weak in major cities. The fellow in the attached link went full Zulu, empowered by no cohesive plan by its Mayor to bring these animals to heel. And it’s the whites and Asians that bear the misery.

Conclusion: Modern civilization is not for everybody, and it’s a type of passive, dark sadism to continue to insist that it is:

https://nypost.com/2022/01/18/browns-lineman-malik-mcdowell-arrested-for-attacking-a-deputy/

While Sinatra had too few to mention.

The key safety features of molten salt is that there is no pressurized water that can explode as steam or leak. And if the reactor starts to overheat, it melts a plug in the bottom so that all the liquid salt can dump into a big pan that dissipates the fuel and stops the fission reaction.

We haven’t built any yet so it’s all in theory. But the theory is pretty good. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

If the Chinese reactors don’t blow up maybe we can give them a try.

Thing about BBB is that it is naked grifting when you look at the actual text. But there’s a more fundamental issue beyond not trusting these people with anything more dangerous than a butter knife.

One thing that external observers tend to get wrong about the CCP is the degree of centralization. A lot of China’s ability to build things fast relies off the relative lack of centralization within an otherwise authoritarian state. Local officials have broad leeway to get things done as long as they toe the party line when necessary. Of course, the downside of this is corruption… and Xi’s centralizing drive is a new thing. One not without its fair share of controversy.

This is in sharp contrast to the top-down schemes constantly pursued by Washington, leading to the situation of having 14 competing bureaucracies for health care, and effective “socializing costs, privatizing gains”.

This is pure proof of why universalism for politics is a crock-universalism should be left to things like human dignity and faith. What works in one country might not work in another. Having a top-down system dominated by the capital works great if you are a small, compact country like 1980s South Korea, or a planned city-state like Singapore or medieval Venice (which operated off an alliance between commercial interests and the government-which actually isn’t a bad idea if you use small business interests against oligarchs). Not so much if you are a sprawling landmass with drastically varying conditions from place to place.

J, if the cat is carrying a coconut they are most likely vegan. Why shoot their coconuts. Wait, some one is handing me a note. Oh, ok. Stay safe.

neb, obama was unaware of what “shovel ready” meant. biden and the dems propose billions in infrastructure spending. We don’t even fabricate bridge girders. Pipe dreams floating over OSHA and EPA requirements and of course AA requirements.

I don’t know anything about HTGR-I’ll check that out, thanks-but I do know that Hefei’s tokamak just beat heat simulation records for fusion. One of my big regrets was just barely missing out on seeing it.

It provides conflicting feelings in me. As a science geek, I’m glad someone is doing it. As an American patriot, I’m sad that it is our main rival and not us.

BTW, you’d be surprised at what kind of countries are pursuing nuclear reactors. I know an American business currently busy setting up small-scall thorium builds in Indonesia: really interesting technology, but also fascinating politics and infrastructure questions.

Yet Twitter is full of women demanding we all wear masks everywhere – that their small kids wear masks even ! – when the danger of covid is very slight for the young and/or healthy.

From the CDC today: children under five = 6% of the US population, fewer than 400 Covid deaths.
People over 85 = 2% of the US population, more than 200,000 Covid deaths.

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/omicron-variant-coronavirus-news-01-18-22/h_41299591303abab3a1dc4c1ef94a7f87

I found the article I mentioned before. Article by Andrew Pollock, Bloomberg News,was in the Buffalo News, but I don’t have the publication date. “Free roaming cats,including domestic pets allowed out of the house, kill as many as 3.7 billion birds in the United States each year, far more than previous estimates, according to report from wildlife researchers.” Also states that cats dispached an additional 20.7 billion small mammals each year. The study from Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and US Fish and Wildlife Service. (Author of study Scott R. Loss) So using their numbers, they have a range, I averaged and divided by states and then counties in NY. Dividing by days per year my numbers are actually 14,494 per day in Erie County, NY. And people believe numbers like this

These systems can be designed for pipe replacement in any number of ways.

Are dogs breedists?

Growing up, we had a mutt that absolutely hated Dobermans. She hated everything with four legs, but especially Dobermans. Just the sight of one two blocks away would send her into a rage.

In my region, the north central Great Plains, you can tell what areas were hit hard with West Nile Virus by the population density of turkey vultures. Around 20 years ago the crow population was almost wiped out here, and the vultures, which were formerly out-competed by the crows, took over.

The official case count for people with West Nile was always remarkably low, in some years you could add up the neighbors who had it and it was almost as high as the official count for the whole state.

Nevermore.

The soviet Alfa class submarines used technology similar to a molten salt reactor. They used a lead-bismuth cooled fast reactor.

There were maintence and life span issues but hey, we’re taking Communist Russian technology in the 60’s. An intelligent engineering project 50 years later should bare some fruit.

You’ll be able to hunt them with drone-mounted flamethrowers.

Air-to-air combat is gonna be epic!

The perpetual twelve year old in me needs to say that Ducks have corkscrew shaped penises to match the females reproductive tract. . They can copulate to much the member becomes paralyzed.

The crows would fly away if they saw him WITH the BB gun.

I had a chat with a guy who bow hunted deer in the suburbs. Neighborhoods with deer problems would invite him to hunt and he donated the meat to a food bank.

He swore that if he scouted the neighborhood too conspicuously, the deer would disappear. So he’d carry a rake and scratch at the ground every once in a while. Claimed that put the deer at ease.

Thanks for the record about crows.

why was an intelligent woman not situation aware?

While I can only imagine what it is like to have high estrogen low T (to be a woman), maybe it is like being uncaffeinated.

Women aren’t checking their six, their peripheral vision, the perimeter, their mirrors, their blind spot, their door locks, etc., etc., etc. They just aren’t.

No, Karen, those solar panels and windmills will not keep you warm through the winter, nor charge everyone’s electric car.

Whatever floats your boat.

China has an agenda for clean energy: nuclear plants.

Thankfully China, unlike Japan, has no earthquake zones.

the CCP, whatever else you can say about them, are actually Serious People…

Their ‘biosafety’ labs are state of the art; maybe Western NGOs should contract risky ‘reseach’ out to plucky, diligent Sino technicians. What’s the worst that could happen?

Thankfully China, unlike Japan, has no earthquake zones.

Huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_China

Now the kicker is that animals can be relatively tolerant of other species — but totally unwilling to accept their own.

We had a rabbit, and a rabbit hutch. And we did a couple of moves with the rabbit. The first move, we also had a cat. We dropped the cat into the rabbit hutch. They each promptly went to opposite corners and regarded each other with profound suspicion for the duration.

No problem. Okay, so next move we have the rabbit, and another rabbit. I start lowering new rabbit into the cage.

I say ‘start’ because he never got to the floor of the cage. Original rabbit was attacking him as soon as he came through the lid. There was literally a cloud of fur as I lifted new rabbit out.

Sort of like Steve and his apartment complex in Pacoima. Let a Mexican gang-banger in, and Steve and the gang-banger will just regard each other dourly. But try letting in another Unz Review writer…

Enrico Fermi built a nuclear reactor by hand under the bleachers at the Univ. of Chicago in 1942. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1 These modern engineers are probably overthinking this stuff.

Reg, California to end subsidized home solar panels. We will see if people want to pay market rate.

RE: Crows

For over ten years had a Condo in Seattle overlooking the Interlake between Lake Washington and Puget Sound. We were on the top floor and had a balcony with a propane gas grill and a table with chairs were we could have drinks or eat a grilled meal. I learned early on to NEVER leave uncooked food on the table like cheese for a cheeseburger or bread because (unseen crows) would arrive on silent wings and poach those victuals if I turned my back. If I left the balcony the crows would strip all all of the food. Smart birds and not small!

Dan Kurt

Enrico Fermi built a nuclear reactor by hand under the bleachers at the Univ. of Chicago in 1942.

The fuel employed in CP-1 was natural (unenriched) uranium. Most of it, some 40 tons, consisted of uranium oxide pressed into 17,000 “pseudospheres” approximately 3 inches in diameter.

In addition to uranium oxide, approximately 6 tons of uranium metal was used as fuel. The uranium metal was fashioned into cylinders 2.25 inches in diameter and 3 inches long at Iowa State University under the direction of Frank Spedding. They came to be referred to as “Spedding’s eggs.”

The piece on display is uranium oxide.

Fuel from CP-1
On the tenth anniversary of CP-1 going critical, a small piece of fuel, encased in plastic, was presented to those who assisted Enrico Fermi in the design and construction of the reactor. This particular piece was presented to Alvin Weinberg. The brass plate on the mahogany base used to hold the sphere reads “Fuel from world’s first atomic reactor. Dec. 2, 1942. Stagg Field, Chicago Ill. 0.75 mR/hr at contact, 0.08 mR/h at 1 foot. A.M. Weinberg.”

In the late 1990s, the sphere spontaneously shattered, probably due to a discharge of accumulated energy.

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/reactors/fuel-from-cp-1.html

CP-1 consisted of 45,000 graphite bricks stacked in 587 layers. The graphite was obtained from the National Carbon Company and, like the fuel, was extremely pure. Each brick was 4.25 inches by 4.25 inches in cross section, 16.5 inches long and weighed 19 pounds. Approximately one-fourth of the bricks had two 3.25 inch holes machined into them for the placement of fuel.

For the 50th anniversary of CP-1 going critical, Argonne National Laboratory located four graphite bricks that had been used in CP-1 and had them inspected by Albert Wattenberg. Wattenberg, who had been involved in the original fabrication of the bricks, confirmed that they indeed had been used at CP-1. The marks at the end of the brick are characteristic of the swing saw used to cut the bars to length. These four bricks were encased in plastic. One remained at Argonne, one went to Los Alamos, one to the National Archives, and the fourth came here.

This particular brick has “T09” stamped on one end. The “T” refers to one of the lot numbers of graphite from the National Carbon Company used in the pile. In the accompanying photograph showing the CP-1 under construction, there is a board (held by a man crouched behind) identifying the graphite used on the 10th layer as AGOT. The “T” in AGOT and the “T” on the end of the brick refer to the same lot.

https://www.orau.org/health-physics-museum/collection/reactors/graphite-from-cp-1.html

So crows reject the mask insanity? Good for them, I guess they are pretty smart.

Wow, that’s an awesome video. Thank you for sharing it.

The crow was obviously telling her, “this is how you say hello in crow” at the start of the non-cooperative segment. She made the same fairly complex call or vocalization twice. Like exactly the same “word.”

When chick was saying hello and the bird was saying hi, Ms. Crow was obviously saying, “hello and hi are synonyms. Give me my treat, you stupid dirt monkey.”

That the bird was speaking English and the woman was not even trying to learn crow makes me wonder if we are smarter or if we just have thumbs.

Maybe some mad scientist will genetically engineer crows or ravens to have more fingers so they can use their wings to manipulate things. Having to balance on one hand while using the other would be rather difficult.

I tend to think that once humans are gone (if we don’t last until the sun goes out) the next intelligent, tool-using species will be descended from raccoons. We keep building intelligence tests that give food rewards when they figure them out. When raccoons have figured out one, we introduce another! It also encourages raccoons to learn by watching other raccoons. As paws go, theirs are very agile. They lack the opposable thumb, but that seems evolvable. Certainly once a chance mutant has opposable thumbs, the genes for them will spread rapidly. Perhaps fire will be a bridge too far for nocturnal animals.

There was a short story years ago, Bears Discover Fire , about well, bears discovering fire. Symbolic intelligence, language, and tool use seem like such a good package that we might just be the first animal to evolve them, not the only one. Maybe we’ve pulled the ladder up behind us, though? I can see people genetically engineering dogs to use tools and be smart, but uplifting any other species seems like it would either be a labor of love or an act of madness.

There was a short story that was set after a nuclear war (ah, remember the last half of the twentieth century?) the scientist discovered a new species of ant. The radiation created a new species of ant that had lungs. The scientist used his time machine to take a colony back x million years so that they’d have a shot, the earth being so crapped out from the nuclear war. When he comes back to the story’s future, there are giant ants with, I think, assault rifles. So, don’t let insects escape their dependence on small size for gas diffusion.

B.T. you may want to reference your Roger Tory Peterson again. Mourning Doves do not kill other birds, much less eat them. Must have been a pigeon from the ‘hood.

Bullshit. There are no pigeons here. It was a mourning dove. I saw it.

My vague impression is that crows are slowly taking over Southern California from less team-oriented birds.

The dog whistling has transmogrified into a bird call.

No, it was a mourning dove. I was there, and you weren’t.

contract risky ‘reseach’

Typo: that should read ‘research’; it’s not a weird excerpt from SCMP Pidgin.

‘Father-in-law similarly says crows were scared of him when he carried a gun and not when he didn’t.’

That’s nothing. When we lived in rural Hawaii for a while, I started a garden. Wild pigs are a problem there, so after hearing me yelling and throwing things in the middle of the night, the local Great Brown Hunter loaned me an old .270 he had.

The pigs didn’t show up again. I never had an opportunity to shoot one.

But wait…

A year or so later, the Great Brown Hunter comes back. He wants his .270. Sure. Thanks.

That frigging night, the pigs raid the garden again.

Obviously, they live on a cosmic plane we can’t even comprehend. They’re that much higher above us.

Huh?

Read through to my second paragraph, then re-read my first.

Octopuses are famous for being highly intelligent despite their pest physiology, but their intelligence is definitely limited by that constraint: most have short lifespans. However smart they can get, they better do it in two years. There is clearly a connection between being able to manipulate objects, having to do a lot of learning and remembering to acquire food, and intelligence. From this we would infer that the television news anchor, who is never seen manipulating objects or acquiring food, would have a very weak capacity for learning.

When Penn & Teller had to find something bad to say about dolphins, cetaceans universally beloved by default, they landed on dolphins being as, Steve put it, “speciesist.” Which would start to imply that it’s actually intelligent, and confers pretty self-explanatory evolutionary value, to look out for your own kind beyond your immediate family. But obviously that cannot be true because studies show experts have debunked it in a fact check.

OT, but many of you must have been waiting for this–North America leads the world!

She hated everything with four legs, but especially Dobermans. Just the sight of one…

Sight, or scent? Aggression has its own odor, which Dobermans might exude more than do other breeds.

An interesting aside regarding species, it is apparent in South Africa that baboons can count to three, when they become a real pest to a farmer he may, on his own, be able to shoot one of them. After that it’s game over. So a system was devised, four farmers walk into a field with rifles, one conceals himself and the other three leave. Once they have departed the field the baboons feel safe and return to be shot by the concealed farmer. This raises an interesting question about species. I believe that there are still tribes of people who count 1,2 many. FYI, for the bleeding hearts out there the Chacma baboon is the most dangerous and vicious monkey known.

OT, but many of you must have been waiting for this—North America leads the world!

You seem excited! 🙂

Legally married gay couples
Legally buy rifles
Legally owned marijuana plants

Three different rights/privileges: Which are you for or against?

In one of the neighborhoods where we’ve lived here in Santa Barbara, we had a strong sense that the local small flock of crows saw it as their own. For example: If I took a walk around the neighborhood, the crows were always watching me. They were supervising the whole scene, in fact, and relaying information about what was going on in the ‘hood to the other crows. When my wife and I would get in our car, some of the crows would announce the fact, and when we’d return, at least during daylight hours, there was always at least one crow waiting for us. He’d caw a few times, and some other crows would fly over to check us out. The crows seemed to have assigned roles too: a few were breeders, some were kids (baby and juvenile crows are a hoot), a few were teachers and coaches, many were lookouts and messengers.

In the same neighborhood we had a very friendly gang of Scrub Jays (basically, California’s Blue Jays, corvids like crows, and similarly smart). One of them would sometimes fly into our apartment, stand on my head and pull out a few gray hairs, probably for nest-making purposes. Another one of the Scrub Jays was a thoughtful bird of considerable taste who found Baroque music lulling and fascinating. Often when my wife and I would play Vivaldi or Rameau, he’d fly into our apartment and would sit calmly for many minutes on the back of one of our chairs. He seemed to be musing about life’s Bigger Questions. None of the birds reacted similarly to rock, jazz or Romantic music, though.

That type of black bum – *as a rule* – literally, physically stink to high heaven.

One would have thought that anyone with a functioning olfactory system would have been ‘situationally aware’ of the bum several hundred yards away.

>South Africa
>Canada
>Mexico
This is true to lawyers. I would suggest that non-lawyers not swallow it unquestioningly.

is this new trend a thing in the States too – exhibitionists taking advantage of Zoom meetings?

Only at CNN.

Thank you. That bear story is completely amazing. Best story I read since I recently took in the Bronze Age Western, Beyond the Black River. He misses a clear chance to get a knife in (ie, describe what kind of tires the hearse had) but that’s deliberate, fits the pitch perfect tone. What Garrison Keillor tried to do, but correct and interesting.
It does seem to me that one day woodland critters will know not to run into the street. Except deer, which are idiotic. When everything else in the forest has mastered fire, food storage, writing, and property, we’ll still be eating deer. I have seen, several times driving in the woods, raccoons or groundhogs or other animals standing patiently at the edge of the highway, looking exactly like human pedestrians at an urban intersection.

ANGER
ANGER PLUS REACHING HOURLY COMMENT LIMIT
rule of pets you evidently missed:
When introducing pets to each other, be in a place where running away is not only possible but obvious. Outside, or middle of the floor of a large room. And be ready to separate them instantly.
You don’t chuck ’em into the same bottle. Animal abusers on YouTube do that to have fights.
It is entirely possible those rabbits could have been friends, but not that way.

“they don’t seem to mind sharing their watery turf with other species of ducks. How come?”

Perhaps like most Americans they don’t mind invasion, hence the phrase “sitting ducks”.

Crows were “the” news story in Silicon Valley about a week back. Murders, of crows, are the 2nd most reported problem in the city of Sunnyvale (silicon ground zero), California.

@Paleo Retiree #171

“Another one of the Scrub Jays was a thoughtful bird of considerable taste who found Baroque music lulling and fascinating. . .None of the birds reacted similarly to rock, jazz or Romantic music, though. ”
I was at friend’s house one night when his two cats sat down in front of the stereo speakers apparently entranced by Wagner! Decades later, I was at that same friend’s house and saw his parakeet keep bobbing his head in perfect time to the strong 4/4 beat of a stretch of classical music. Stop the music and he stops the bobbing. Start the music again and he resumes bobbing. I never saw an animal react positively to rock, jazz or big band. For those, they either ignore or just go to another room. So do I.

Undeservedly wealthy frogfaced airhead son of Ashoka Chamath Palihapitiya has not only denied the Uyghur genocide, but said that worse things happen here, but most of all, blithely announced that China is not a totalitarian state and that “checks and balances” (his wording) exist there.

If you watch the full podcast, you’ll see he does worse: traffics in anti-Whitism, talks of how “brown and black people” are unfairly disadvantaged.

I completely agree with Hugh Hewitt’s assessment: this guy didn’t figure anything out or build anything, he’s rich because he got lucky at the big tech gold rush, and he’s babbling here something he misunderstood but overheard, while the real players were speaking, and he was unwisely allowed to be in the room.
Probable sports macher raw talk: As we assess what our immediate customers care about, in avoided sales dips, we’re much more focused on the environment and patting black people on the head, and we expect to continue to get away with all the stuff we’re doing in China.
Chamshkggbhjjjfsajo Paligcdgknfcjkkknbc: So what you’re saying is, Chinese repression isn’t real. I get it. Now I see.

What explains this current wave of black physical attacks on orientals?

Well, blacks are basic, elementary and emotional thinkers, their thought processes more or less dominated by passions of envy, spite, rage, anger, hatred, lust, avarice etc etc, but more than that they have good intuition – much more so than naive, gullible, frankly dumb white people of The Economist ‘school’ of thought.

When a black sees an oriental, he sees a wealthy person, the future masters of the universe who will, unquestionable, dominate this globe in a full spectrum way. The black deep down knows this, and can’t handle it, also, he Intuit’s correctly, that whitey has had it, due to orientals beating him hollow, and as much as he hates and despises whitey, he intuits, again correctly, that his own well being is very much tied up with whitey running the show. Hence the attacks.
In general, blacks don’t like anyone – witness the way they continue to murder each other.

Steve, have you ever tried “hunting” mourning doves?

(I prefer the English phrase “shooting” but most Americans interpret that in a different way)

It is a huge sport in the south and midwest. They are incredibly difficult to hit, especially late season after they’ve already been shot at for a few weeks. Not only are they small targets and agile and fast fliers, they can see you from a long distance away.

Not bad to eat, either, but you need to shoot a lot to get any worthwhile amount of meat.

In Australia we get the same behavior (tearing everything to bits in search food) by the Ibis. This water fowl has adapted amazingly well to urban living. Every morning we’d have the pleasure of waking to the sounds of a gang of squabbling Ibis tearing rubbish in bins to bits. Nor are they backwards at coming forward in a park to steal food from an office worker’s lunch. Their beak is so well adapted to dumpster diving)
Which leads me to the Sulfur Crested Cockatoo. Now these guys I think are smarter than crows.
They have to main urban strategies.
Bin diving — people but bricks on the bin lid — the cockies push the brick off the bin lid, then open the bin by flipping the lid.
Second, they are brave enough to make friends with humans, many of whom are happy to feed them all sorts of “yummy” food (nuts, crackers, & best of all, sunflower seeds)
We used to feed them every day. We’d watch them heading to our flat like a gang of kids just out of school. They would land on you, in a mob, or stand & be hand fed or given the chance pinch a bowl of food. All the time good naturedly squabbling.
Gorgeous creatures.
Sadly so many had “beak & feather disease “. A horrible disease that can take years to kill the bird — with horrible deformities.

Crows go after raptors for the same reason other birds do: they are a threat. Hawks and owls prey upon nestlings and fledglings given the chance. It’s not unusual to see mockingbirds and other smaller birds harassing raptors, not just crows.

Ironically, many birds also harry crows, for the same reason. Crows aren’t above raiding nests for food themselves.

More aggressive species often push out less aggressive ones, due to competition for nesting sites and food. Bluebirds used to be common backyard birds in the eastern US until the imported starlings and English sparrows drove them away. Now you only see them in rural areas free from those species.

Just because the landlord had no gun, he didn’t deserve to be shot. Shame on you!

“A pun is the lowest form of humor—when you don’t think of it first.”
Oscar Levant

But my proposal is quite modest

Hope he keeps his job, satire being a symptom of white superiority, or something.

This is what legalizing polyamorous relationships leads to.

In a similar vein, I have a friend who’s a farmer. I was joking with him about the arms race with feral hogs. He’s been farming for 35 years and told me he’s killed several thousand of them. He’ll shoot them off his back porch. Surreal.

Crows often cooperate with other crows to attack and drive away bigger raptors such as hawks or even bald eagles.

That’s because the larger raptors have not developed natural immunity to corvid.

“The mourning doves are fighting back around here. About six weeks I saw one seize a mockingbird in midair and carry it away (to eat it, I suppose).”

Do you by by chance live anywhere near the lake in which the aquatic rabbit attacked Jimmy Carter?

Maybe there’s something in the water.

“Do you have Lyme Disease over there?”. Lyme disease is around. I probably get 90% of the ticks off me before they can bite. And almost all are dog ticks. I had three deer ticks bite me this year. Highly unusual. They hurt like a bahstahd once they sunk in. And I still have the red marks from the bites seven months later. Nothing to indicate Lymes. Having know people who got it and weren’t diagnosed until much too late, I do say it is an awful affliction.

My father the golfer hated geese, because they shat all over the courses. When I hosted his funeral and buried his ashes, there was goose crap all over the place at the gravesite. It was appropriate, so I mentioned it to the people there in my last words for him.

ADL complains that the new Academy of Motion Pictures museum leaves out Industry’s founders:

No, that’s wrong.

I saw a poster of Charlton Heston as Moses, advertising “The Ten Commandments” on the third floor, right by the elevators.

Moses was Jewish, right?

I wouldn’t be surprised if the museum, like the Rembrandt exhibit, leans toward woke, Rube Goldberg explanations of how there aren’t very many non-White (non-Jewish) founders and great creators because racism. In this case, Jews are just victims of the very monster they have helped create.

In fact, they helped create this monster partly in Hollywood, so cry me a river. For every Hollywood Jew who doesn’t receive proper credit (and they do deserve the credit) there are a thousand non-Jewish White creators of our world who are being sidelined and obfuscated now.

You might even think we were in this together…

Enrico Fermi built a nuclear reactor by hand under the bleachers at the Univ. of Chicago in 1942.

Now we know the real story about why the U of C abandoned its college football program.

Too many fans complained about glowing in the dark after games.

And smaller birds, such as sparrows, relentlessly gang attack crows and ravens driving them away.

WW1 “flying circus” aerial combat tactics may have originated from observations of nature.

Interesting transition from avian behavior to nuclear reactors.

Seagulls are fond of chips. “Fries” to you. (I think grub-hunting gulls are part of the charm myself, but there are some big, mean ones.)

https://www.thewhitbyguide.co.uk/why-you-should-never-feed-the-seagulls-in-whitby/

“It may seem like a bit of a dramatic statement to say that the seagulls of Whitby may be having a negative effect on tourism. However, with around fifty seagull attacks being reported every year, and probably many more not, it has become a real problem.”

https://www.wakefieldexpress.co.uk/lifestyle/outdoors/seagull-attack-hotspots-revealed-ahead-of-the-bank-holiday-weekend-2956049

Simon Bollon from York said: “I was in Whitby last year, bought fish and chips. Sat on the seafront and a huge seagull stole my fish! There were signs around the seated area by the bandstand but not a lot you can do when they swoop! We then bought a new portion and I sat in a deckchair with my coat over my head to eat them!

https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/whitby-cafe-forced-remove-outdoor-16690222

In a post on its Facebook page the cafe said: “We have had to remove our outdoor seating for a while due to a seagull attacking customers and stealing their food.

“We are sorry for any inconvenience.”

Tourists visiting the seaside town have often complained about chip hunting gulls swooping down to nab snacks.

I want to say two words to you, Buzz. Just two words. Stu pid.

Thorium poisons a molten salt reactor.

And the reason for breeding thorium went away decades ago.

My late Sheltie seemed to recognize other Shelties as being like himself in some way. He reacted to them differently than he did to dogs of other breeds. Of course, I don’t know whether he was responding to appearance or scent or what. He had a Sheltie playmate who belonged to a close friend of mine.

Nice job, BWO! I really did notice the ambiguity there, but out of laziness and a desire to see if anyone made anything humorous out of it, I left that in. Anyway, he’ll be OK – just a flesh wound …

The mother could have herded them under some nearby tall bushes. Ducklings will follow their mother. Instead, mama was so inept at a basic instinct, that one by one all the duckling got picked off. Maybe one or two survived.

I’ve noticed this as well, perhaps their innate stupidity explains why they produce so many offspring at once. You’ll see a mother duck trailed by a dozen ducklings one day, then none the next. Tough life being a duckling. On the other hand, there’s plenty of well fed predators who are happy it’s so.

Looks like it’s as low as I assumed.

https://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-research-science/duckling-survival

‘…You don’t chuck ’em into the same bottle…’

So I found out. It’s not like I repeated the action.

Calm down.

What explains this current wave of black physical attacks on orientals?

Who said it was a “wave”? Blacks have been carrying out violent attacks on other races in the US (White, asian, etc) for decades.

You got me curious about this geography. I’ve got a cat laying on me right now, Mr. G, so I’ve got my boy checking this out on a globe right now. Peking (or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) is at 39 deg., 55 min. N and 116 deg, 25 min. E.* The China-made Wal-Mart globe (so who knows?) says the opposite side of the world from there is just off the coast of Argentina in the Atlantic Ocean, near Vedma.

I didn’t listen to the clip, but I assume those guys aren’t singing in Spanish from a barge, are they? Maybe it was the Left Side Kingdom?

Airfare is so cheap now anyway, it’s not worth worrying about trying to go the shortest way.

The wheel is turning and you can’t slow down.
You can’t let go and you can’t hold on
You can’t go back and you can’t stand still.
If the Delta don’t get you, then the Omicron will.

It’s a lot of damn trouble to be a pedant sometimes. I don’t know how some people find the time!

.

* He interpolated and estimated it at 40 deg N and 117 deg E. Not bad! In line with my trust but verify policy, I had him bring the globe in here, as the cat still hasn’t moved. He did it graphically, but I checked him with the math going to 40 deg S and 63 degrees W. Verified.

Do skunks have rabies in California? A skunk ran and hid under my minivan in my driveway last week. He’s been around the neighborhood for about a year, the first one I can remember in the vicinity.

Skunks do have rabies in California, but probably the most prevalent vector is bats. Not living far from where you do, I’ve found both in or beneath my house. My proximity to the Santa Monica Mountains has allowed me to temporarily share my living space with a multitude of skunks over the years. Usually the smell is quite faint, but there have been times that it was quite pungent (extremely actually) and persistent.

I’ve also been treated to visits inside my house with uninvited bats unexplainably flying to and fro. These are a bit more alarming because it’s difficult to determine how long they’ve been there, and if they’ve made contact with anyone. Rabies in bats is not uncommon at all, with estimates of up to 6% of them infected. The last one I found dead in a bathroom This gave me little relief from worry. Typically these events occur in the late summer by adolescent bats who only recently have left their nests.

I only grow grass on 1/3 of our property, and I even let that go mostly natural. Where we live, we don’t have to manicure our lawns the way Steve does, for example, so we have bunnies living and munching, deer coming, nibbling and going, crows of course, and also many beautiful bird species:

Sounds nice, I can appreciate letting it go, or at least a certain part. But like Steve, I have a deep appreciation for well manicured lawns. His affection no doubt comes from his love a golf and the beauty on a well cared for course. Mine comes from the process of creating the marvel. From seed selection, soil science, proper feeding and care, a beautiful lawn can be a masterpiece.

Unfortunately, lawns are becoming too expensive to maintain in California. The state, with its environmental zealotry, has made no effort to expand reservoir capacity, so the price of water has tripled in the last 20 years. Another in the long line of reasons that California is the country’s least hospitable state to the middle class.

My late Sheltie seemed to recognize other Shelties as being like himself in some way. He reacted to them differently than he did to dogs of other breeds. Of course, I don’t know whether he was responding to appearance or scent or what. He had a Sheltie playmate who belonged to a close friend of mine.

Those are extremely intelligent dogs who were bred as herding, thus working dogs. I have no doubt that they possess a large degree of intelligence in that area as well.

is this new trend a thing in the States too – exhibitionists taking advantage of Zoom meetings?

Only at CNN.

Contemplate Naked Newsmen.

Some people confuse Atlanta with Atalanta.

Peking (or whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) is at 39 deg., 55 min. N and 116 deg, 25 min. E…

He interpolated and estimated it at 40 deg N and 117 deg E. Not bad!

Pekin is at 40° 34′ N, not far off, which is why they named it such.

The China-made Wal-Mart globe (so who knows?) says the opposite side of the world from there is just off the coast of Argentina in the Atlantic Ocean, near Vedma.

Parts of the Pacific off Chile and Peru are antipodal to other parts off Vietnam and China. Bolivia and the Atacama Desert are the Shangri-la of lithium. How much of that ends up in antipodal factories in Kwangtung Province is an intriguing question.

To get back on-topic (and dissuade iTrolls from calling us old women), here are some astonishing avian migrations:

Which bird migrates the farthest?

Pole to Pole!

But they take breaks along the way– the terns turn in. Check out the bar-tailed godwit:

Thanks for the info on the long-range birds. They must eat fish, right? Or at least take a piss break. This is not the same model bird we watched a video on (or maybe it was a book) that was also very long range. I believe they were albatrosses of some sort. They stayed in ground effect, OK, “water effect” to save lots of energy. Amazing stuff!

Hey, and don’t worry about that iDeplorable guy. If he doesn’t like what I write he can go fuck himself right now. (He’s actually got some right-on opinions on the topics I’ve seen him write on, other than the bitching about commenters.)

Just repeating what I heard….

Water is the single, biggest factor in the life of Southwestern Americans. Where I live in the Northeast, I kind of wish we had less of it, at least with regard to the weather. I wish I could send you some.

Yep, it’s all good. I just went through something about digging straight down to China, as people used to say we could, and then realized it wasn’t true for anywhere in the US. Once I thought about them being in the same hemisphere…. disappointing. I guess it used to seem as far away as one could get, both geographically and otherwise.

Thank you. I appreciate your opinion, and I want you to know that. These are serious subjects.

Well done sir.

https://postimg.cc/YL9fZVhD
I was just thinking about emotional reactions to animals and not to humans because of viewing perfectly melodramatic scenes involving penguins. More engaging than anything Netflix can release, but when you catch your mental breath, surely it’s staged. How could it not be? And are they staging and propagating it because former efforts with human actors no longer work?
Then again there’s the video of South Asians abusing dogs: one encounters instant karma when he decides to lay his body onto currently operating farm equipment.

Water is the single, biggest factor in the life of Southwestern Americans. Where I live in the Northeast, I kind of wish we had less of it, at least with regard to the weather. I wish I could send you some.

It’s an interesting issue. Water is the ultimate renewable resource as it can never be depleted. Our leaders have decided that the only course of action to supply a population that has nearly doubled in the last 50 is to conserve. There is no discussion of expanding reservoir capacity. (Which causes droughts of almost any duration to be magnified in significance)

One of the unfortunate consequences of a conservation only policy is that water prices must increase. When you’re selling a commodity that costs you nothing, if you sell half as much you must double the price to keep revenues consistent. My water rates have more than tripled in the last 20 years. A lawn is an expensive luxury these days.

Thanks…. We have Muscovy ducks wandering around wild where I live in a suburbia. They can produce large numbers. I have seen the mothers with 12 little ducklings following them. Then I see a mother with only 4. The conclusion is obvious. Predators got some. My guess is the average produced is 6-8 that get to the walking around stage.

My father the golfer hated geese, because they shat all over the courses. When I hosted his funeral and buried his ashes, there was goose crap all over the place at the gravesite. It was appropriate, so I mentioned it to the people there in my last words for him.

If you have bad eyesight or are elderly and distracted, you can slip on their shit and get badly injured. I have seen northern lakes and ponds swamped by stupid Canadian geese. They squat for the winter now, like illegal aliens. They refuse to be migratory, as in temporary guest workers. 30 years ago and more, they were migratory and not shit producing pests, that keep people away from the edge of ponds.

Your father unwittingly stepped in their shit more than once, and is why he despised them. These are not swans, the Royal elite of waterfowl, but goose that should be disposed of. Though to be accommodating, I would give them a test taste at the dinner table after a good roasting recipe

Are any of these crossbreed tiny?

Remember what PJ O’Rourke said in his classic “Foreigners Around the World”:

“Chinese:

Good Points: They’re as far away from us as it’s humanly possible to be…”

Skunks aren’t predators but omnivores who’ll feed on whatever’s around. Including corpses.

It’s not by accident that the collective noun for Raven’s is a “Murder”, as I never tire of reminding my Hand-Surgeon’s PA at Hopkins whose surgeon father named her that.
Raven’s Matrices are a pretty good culturally/ethnically clean IQ test.

When the 30 million or whatever it is Chinee moved from Peking to Beijing, did you notice they didn’t take their Ducks with them? Every restaurant in the US still imports them from Peking.
Similarly with the Indian (Dot not How?). A shit-load (that’s an indigenous term for a large number of Hindus, I believe it’s related to their lack of indoor sanitation) moved from Bombay to Mumbai, again abandoning their Ducks. Bombay Duck never made the trip.

Not one of the bastards sent me a change of address card either.

One of the unfortunate consequences of a conservation only policy is that water prices must increase.

What is a “conservation only” policy?

If you’re saying they never saw the .270 (and I think that’s what you’re saying), that is pretty amazing.

‘If you’re saying they never saw the .270 (and I think that’s what you’re saying), that is pretty amazing.’

Theoretically, they might have been watching in the middle of the day, seen Spider driving up to my house and giving it to me, and realized that I now had the dread .270 — but I doubt it.

I never actually took it out until the day Spider asked for it back. There never was an occasion. I see five possibilities.

1. It was all purely coincidental. Dull.

2. The pigs can smell a firearm. It’s possible.

3. Spider is their nemesis. At a guess, he traps and otherwise kills half the pigs that die unnatural deaths in that part of Hawaii. If they saw him come over to my house, they might have figured this wasn’t a good place to raid — delicious corn or no. But then, how did they decide it was safe again?

4. As I suggested, the pigs saw the transfer and drew the correct conclusion. There’s a .270 in that house. This is almost as alarming as (5.)

5. Pigs really do operate on a plane above our level of comprehension. Imagine what a dog would make of voting. Perhaps we’re like that with respect to pigs. This most convincingly explains the available data.