Americans Are an Eastern Forest People

From Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comeback Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds by Jim Sterba:

Where do most people in the United States live? The answer is... counterintuitive: They live in the woods. We are essentially forest dwellers.

....[I]f you draw a line around the largest forested region in the contiguous United States — the one that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Plains — you will have drawn a line around nearly two-thirds of America’s forests (excluding Alaska’s) and two-thirds of the U.S. population...

If you got in an airplane and flew from Albany to Boston during the day... you could look down and see almost nothing but trees from one downtown to the other. Fly the same route at night, and you see lots of lights — lights of people living in a huge forest.

In the eastern United States over two and a half centuries, European settlers cleared away more than 250 million acres of forest. By the 1950s, depending on the region, nearly half to more than two-thirds of the landscape was reforested, and in the last half century, states in the Northeast and Midwest have added more than 11 million acres of forest. 

In the most heavily populated region of the United States, the urban corridor that runs from Norfolk, Virginia, to Portland, Maine, with eight of the ten most densely populated states, forest cover varied from a low of 30.6 percent in Delaware to a high of 63.2 percent in Massachusetts. The corridor runs straight through Connecticut, the fourth most densely populated state, and one that is more than 60 percent forested. Three out of four residents live in or near land under enough trees to be called forestland if they weren’t there.

John C. Gordon, the former dean of the Yale School of Forestry in New Haven, made a similar observation in speeches. “If you looked down at Connecticut from on high in the summer, what you’d see was mostly unbroken forest,” he said. “If you did the same thing in late fall after the leaves have fallen from those trees, what you’d see was stockbrokers."

Canada Geese with Martin

Canadian Geese flew straight over my head as I visited the new Martin Luther King memorial yesterday.

Across the reflecting pool the Jefferson Memorial was just waking up.

 

Dog in a Log

Marley faking an intrepid look. He wasn't too sure about getting inside a hollow log, but nothing bad happened and he relaxed after a minute or so.

Falls Church Farmers Market

End of the season means lots of tomatoes, peppers, root crops, and late flowers. Apple season just starting!

Public Lands Day

This is public lands day!  This was taken today at Great Falls (Virginia side) just a few miles from my house.

Not What It Looks Like

I came home and found Marley carrying around a skinned out dog toy that the wife bought.  A dog toy. Had a receipt and everything. Not what it looks like. Still, alarming.

This Makes Me Hungry

From Damn Cool Pictures comes this recipe:

Kiviak is a traditional wintertime Inuit food from Greenland that is made of auks preserved in the hollowed-out body of a seal. Around 500 auks are put into the seal skin intact, including beaks, feet and feathers, before as much air as possible is removed from the seal skin, which is then sewn up and sealed with grease, with a large rock placed on top to keep the air content low. Over the course of seven months, the birds ferment, and are then eaten during the Greenlandic winter, particularly on birthdays and weddings. |

 

Video horror here.
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Dog Abuser Eaten by the Abused

A little irony comes with this story:

A Kentucky woman previously convicted of animal cruelty is believed to have been eaten by her dozens of hybrid wolf-dogs after she died.

The remains of 67-year-old Patricia Ritz were discovered in her Fordsville home by deputies after neighbors reported they hadn't seen her in more than a week, NBC News reported. 

Authorities who searched the home found only a human skull and jawbone, which they believe to be Ritz's... Investigators believe Ritz died from an illness and her pets, left without food after her death, consumed her for survival.

Ritz has animal cruelty convictions dating back to 1986...

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Marley in the Morning

 

Marley and I play ball in the front yard in the morning.  Then he spends the day with my lovely wife, and then I throw ball for him in the living room at night. Tough life!  

This dog is all legs, and he can actually use his front paws to toss the ball in the air and catch it when he is on his back.

When we first got him out of rescue two weeks ago, his tail was clamped firmly between his legs. The rest of him seemed friendly, but the tail showed fear and anxiety.  I see a lot of clamped tails with whippets and other sight hounds, but I wondered if that tail would come up in time, and it sure has, wagging like a little white metronome.  Wonderful!

From: Terrierman's Daily Dose To order the book. web site.

Single Species Obsessives

From Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comeback Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds by Jim Sterba:

   
American communities are full of what writer Paul Theroux calls “single species obsessives.” I call them species partisans — people who choose a particular group or flock, or even individual animals, to defend. Each species has a constituency, be they geese, deer, bears, turkeys, beavers, coyotes, cats, or

endangered plovers. Many people, of course, want to save all species. But often, advocates for one creature square off against the saviors of another. Feral cat defenders, for example, belittle arguments of bird defenders who assert that cats are an alien scourge on the landscape killing native songbirds just to exercise their killing skills. Strange alliances form. Bird lovers side with hunters and trappers on the need for lethal control of cats, foxes, and other bird predators. Deer lovers and bow hunters join hands to keep out sharpshooters. Trappers align with local governments and lobby statehouses to reinstate outlawed traps to limit mounting damage by beavers.

Dark, a Spark, Then Dark Again

If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59 pm — just 1 second.

Dark, a spark, then dark again.

Boom

People see the world in frames, many of them faulty.  If facts do not fit the frame, they reject the facts.

Slept Like a Log

 

A rather extraordinary little bivouac.

Three Show Off Dogs

Getting three dogs to line up for a shot like this is pretty great all by itself. 

Ghost in the Grass

The last thing a turkey or rabbit does not see.

Last of the Keys

I actually leave the Keys tomorrow; the airport picture is from arrival. The strip club sign is simply comical. Who would eat pizza, a sub, or anything else in such an establishment? No, I did not go in.