Warbler Politics: How Birds Made Two Presidents

Prothonotary warbler.  This post is mostly recycled from 2007.

The latest news out of Texas this campaign season (June 2016) is that the the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has denied a petition to delist the golden-cheeked warbler, a 5-inch, black-and-white bird with a bright yellow face.

This news comes to my door as large number of warblers arrive from the south, delayed a few days perhaps by the rain and cold we have had in the last month.

The weather seems to change every day now, with cold and warm fronts crashing into each other, and the resulting squalls bringing flocks of small birds north on the winds.

The warblers are returning to Virginia in droves. They are more visible now than they will be later on when the foliage will obscure them high up in the trees. You have to look carefully among the mixed flocks of returning chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches to find the warblers, but they are there.

Warblers are very important birds, as they are the primary insect eaters in North America's woods. The bad news is that most warblers are in rapid decline over vast portions of the U.S. due to forest fragmentation which is occuring both in the U.S. and overseas where "our" warblers spend the winter. I have written a bit about that in the past.

Something I have not written about before is how warblers have shaped presidential politics. In fact, it is not too much to say that "warbler controversies" have led directly to two presidents being elected to office.

The first president to have his early career shaped by a warbler was Richard Nixon.

Back in 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a senior editor at Time magazine, and a former Communist spy turned government informer, accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the communists in the mid-1930s.

Chambers was not exactly a credible witness; he had very little documentation to back up his charges and he admitted at the Hiss trial that he had repeatedly committed perjury on other occasions. Inititially it was not clear he had even met Hiss, much less knew him well.

Chambers claimed he did know Hiss, and backed it up by noting that Hiss was a bird-watcher who was very proud that he had seen a prothonotary warbler near Glenn Echo Park just outside of Washington, D.C.

In cross examination of Hiss before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), a young Congressman by the name of Richard Nixon asked a seemingly innocent question: "What hobbies, if any, do you have, Mr. Hiss?"

Hiss answered that his hobbies were "tennis and amateur ornithology." Congressman John McDowell then jumped in an asked Hiss whether he had ever seen a prothonotary warbler?

Hiss walked right into the trap, responding that he had -- "right here on the Potomac."

Slam -- the trap had been tripped. Committee members were now convinced it was Hiss who was lying, not Chambers. After a series of trials, Hiss was sentenced to prison for 5 years based on very sketchy (and still controversial) evidence.

As for Nixon, he managed to use the Hiss affair to propel himself from the U.S. House of Representatives into the Senate, and from the Senate into the Vice Presidency under President Dwight Eisenhower.

The rest, as they say, is history.

The saga was was not quite over, however. In 1952, not quite content to let his 15 minutes of fame pass him by, Whittaker Chambers published his autobiography, which was entitled Witness. Ronald Reagan later credited this book with transforming him from a New Deal Democrat into a conservative Republican.

While shilling for General Electric in the 1950s and early 60s, Reagan made frequent references to Whittaker Chambers in his speeches, and on March 26, 1984 -- 23 years after Chambers had died -- Reagan posthumously gave Whittaker Chambers the nation's highest honor, the Medal of Freedom.

Probably no one has ever deserved it less.



Golden-cheeked warbler.


Another President propelled into office on the wings of a warbler was George W. Bush.

In June of 1994, a memo from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service was leaked. The memo outlined a tentative plan to declare hundreds of thousands of acres across 33 counties in Texas hill country as being "critical habitat" for the endangered Golden-cheeked Warbler.

It was feared that, if implemented, "the plan" would have made it virtually impossible to bulldoze Ashe Juniper off of the surrounding hills -- a necessity if those hills were to be turned into nice new housing developments with grass lawns and underground sprinkler systems.

Massive opposition to the informal Fish & Wildlife Service proposal sprang up overnight, with school auditoriums quickly filled to capacity by ranchers, developers, and property owners who were led to believe that the draft proposal was soon going to be made into law overnight, and that it would impact almost all private property.

In fact, the proposal was a mere internal memo within the agency (no rules or regulations had been written or circulated, and no draft Environmental Impact Statement had been initiated), and the designation of critical habitat directly affected only actions that were to be federally funded or authorized, not privately-held lands.

George W. Bush was not a stickler for the facts (then or now) and he jumped on the wave of misinformation circulating through Texas in order to fan the flames of discontent. Positioning himself as a champion of the property rights movement, Bush hammered on the "federal land grab" even after Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt had disavowed the leaked memo and Texas Governor Ann Richards also voiced her strong opposition.

Richards, of course, was too late. Bush campaign operatives -- including Karl Rove -- had already framed the issue and associated Ann Richards with it -- never mind the facts, or her true position.

Texas being Texas, and modern political discourse being what it is, people believed the Bush Campaign's spin.

In the end, due in no small part to the warbler controversy, George W. Bush was elected Governor of Texas, which he later used as a stepping-stone to the White House.

And the rest, as they say, is history, written in debt, blood, and destruction
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Coffee, Birds & the World Bank

American Redstart


It is pathetic, but true, that there are 391 Starbuck's coffee houses within an hour's drive from my house (50 miles). Amazingly, all of them seem to have a line of customers at all hours of the day. Could Americans be any more addicted to $4 coffees?

I told you it was pathetic, and as soon as they serve me my coffee, I promise you I'm going to leave.

As I wait for my coffee, I read the paper. Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank and one of the architects of the war in Iraq, looks like he may lose his job for promoting his girlfriend to a World Bank job that pays better than Condoleeza Rice's.

The shocking part is not that there are scoundrels in Washington, or waste and corruption at the World Bank, but that Paul Wolfowitz has a girlfriend. Of course he had to pay her, but it's still amazing. Apparently, the human soul knows no limits to depravity.

Coffee and the World Bank.

There is a connection there, and I recall the linkage as I watch the pigeons rearrange themselves on the telephone wire in front of the Safeway food store across the street.

Legend has it that the coffee plant was first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat herder who found his charges a little too animated after eating beans from a local bush. The coffee plant (and the drink) eventually made its way to Yemen and the Arab world via the Sudanese slaves that were forced to paddle boats across the Red Sea to the Arabian Peninsula.

With alcohol banned, coffee quickly became the "drug of choice" in the Arab world. While an alcohol-besotted Europe struggled in a drunken haze through the Dark Ages, the Arab world became caffeinated and invigorated. Soon after they started the first coffee houses in the world, Arabs began creating grand libraries, universities, new mathematical equations, and amazingly complex architectural designs. Such is the power of coffee.

Coffee houses hit Europe around 1600, and there they had the same effect they had in the Arab world -- a spectacular growth in intellectual clarity and output. From the enlightened coffee houses of London grew the first newspaper divisions (business, style, overseas news, etc.), the first organized scientific associations, and Lloyds of London -- the first international insurance cartel.

Coffee consumption took off like a rocket in Great Britain, and in 1796, when the British took over Sri Lanka (Ceylon) from the Dutch, the new settlers began clearing land for coffee plantations.

By the 1860s, Sri Lanka was the largest coffee producer in the world.

In 1869, however, a lethal fungus known as coffee rust had shown up on the island causing premature defoliation of the coffee plants, and dramatically reducing berry yield.

By 1879, the rust fungus had spread across the island and into Indian plantations as well, with the result being a collapse of coffee production across the region.

Unable to grow coffee in the face of a devastating rust fungus epidemic, Ceylonese and Indian plantation owners began to rip out their coffee plants in order to grow tea.

Within a few decades, tea consumption in the U.K. had surpassed coffee consumption, and it has remained so to this day.

While tea is the national drink of Great Britain, coffee remains the national drink of the United States, where we consume vast quantities of it. In fact, though coffee is the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), the U.S. consumes one-quarter of the world's coffee beans.

Coffee came to the New World via the French, who introduced it into the Caribbean in the mid 1700s, and the Spanish, who brought coffee plants to Latin America a few decades later.

By the mid 1800s, coffee plantations had been planted in Central and South America, and these coffee plantations were greatly expanded after coffee rust decimated production in Sri Lanka and India.

Coffee plantations in Central and South America were diverse operations that grew, rather naturally, out of the multi-storied small-patch gardening operations that had been successfully employed by the native Indians for several thousand years before Columbus.

These small patch gardens were created by removing large trees with little agricultural value, but leaving those that might yield a nut harvest, good wood, seasonal fruits, or which had the lucky property of fixing nitrogen in the soil.

Under these large forest tree were planted shorter citrus and cacao trees, and between these were planted bananas. Underneath and between the bananas were planted coffee bushes and vegetable crops for local food consumption.

Multi-storied "shade coffee" plantations were miracles of production. When coffee prices fell (as they often did), other crops provided sustenance and cash, ensuring that the locals could always eat and pay for things made elsewhere.

Because multiple types of plants were found on shade-grown coffee plots, multiple types of insects and birds were present. The result was not only less overall insect predation on any one crop, but less erosion and slower evaporation as both rain and sunlight filtered through multiple vegetative layers.

Shade-grown coffee plantations were particularly rich in bird life -- especially neo-tropical migrant song birds such as redstarts, Tenessee warblers, Baltimore Orioles, yellow-throated and solitary vireos, wood thrushes, catbirds, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Nashville Warblers, and oven-birds.

All told, more than 150 bird species are known to winter or live year-round in shade coffee plantations, making them the most bird-intensive agricultural areas in the world.

Shade coffee production thrived.  

But something wicked this way drifted. The coffee rust fungus that had been seen in Sri Lanka 100 years earlier, was discovered in Brazil and Nicaragua. This discovery caused a panic, not only in the coffee industry, but also among the economic and political elite that run such major banking and development policy shops as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The fear was that coffee rust would soon sweep through Central and South America. If that happened, not only would the coffee crop be destroyed, but so too would the economic base of entire countries and many millions of people. If that happened, not only would we not have coffee in New York, Paris and Vienna, but billions of dollars of foreign loans would go unpaid.

Something had to be done.

What was done was massive, mechanical, and swift. Under orders from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the large cartels that control much of the world's coffee market, coffee plantations in Central and South America were systematically ripped from the ground and replanted.

The idea here was a simple one: by growing coffee in direct sun, rather than in the shade, coffee plants could be made safe from the coffee rust fungus. The prescription for salvation was destruction, and entire mountain sides were plowed clear of their multistory canopies and the detritus burned. In their place was planted dense hedgerows of a dwarf variety of coffee that could withstand direct tropical sunlight.

With the loss of a diversified shade forest cover, bird populations that had once thrived in the rich overstory of coffee plantations plummeted. At the same time, with the absence of trees to provide vegetative nutrients to the soil and hold back erosion, the fertilizer needs of coffee plantations skyrocketed. Mono-cropped sun coffee plantations proved far more susceptible to insect infestations than shade plantations, so insecticide inputs also increased. The open sunny soil between coffee plants proved susceptible to weed infestations, so herbicide use also increased. Finally, though the new coffee plants produced a great number of beans, the plants themselves were not as hardy as the old shade-grown varieties, and an additional expense had to be factored into the equation -- the cost of periodically replanting large numbers of exhausted plants.

Ironically, all of the devastation and destruction was not needed. It turns out that due to the peculiarities of Latin America's climate and the timing of rain, humidity and mountain temperature, coffee leaf rust has not been able to proliferate in either Central or South America.

Adding insult to injury, it turns out that the new dwarf varieties of sun-grown coffee are not less susceptible to coffee leaf rust than the older varieties. When a fungus outbreak does occur, as it sometimes does, it is generally localized and easily treatable with a copper-based fungicide.

Sadly, however, the damage to the once-vibrant shade coffee plantations cannot be rapidly undone. Forests that took decades to grow were razed to the ground in hours, and will now take decades to grow back.

The good news is that some people are re-thinking coffee production in Central and South America, and in time shade-grown coffee may yet make a partial come back.

If so, the folks spearheading the charge will be the aging hippies and eco-freaks that once wore tie-dyed T-shirts and earthshoes. Now older, these folks frequent businesses like Starbucks and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, edit newspapers and magazines, start movements, run foundations, and are otherwise a social force to be reckoned with.

For this set, buying coffee has become a political act. From their perspective, if you are not buying shade-grown, organic, free trade coffee, then you are simply giving the "big wink" to American song bird destruction and the poisoning of the soil, people and economies of Latin America.

They have a point, and it's such a good and strong point that companies like Starbucks are working to change their business practices as a consequence.

Working with Conservation International, Starbucks has created a set of Coffee and Farmer Equity practices (CAFE for short ) to guide the growing and purchase of coffee.

This year, Starbucks is supposed to purchase 60 percent of its coffee from suppliers who successfully implement the CAFE guidelines.

The end of this story is not yet written, but it may yet be good news, albeit good news that remains at least 10 or 15 years off due to slow nature of the turn around, and the slow regrowth of shade coffee plantations.

That said, if consumers continue to demand and purchase shade grown coffee grown in Mexico and Central America, we may yet see a turn around in neotropical songbird decline in the United States.

If so, that would certainly make a $4 coffee worth the price.
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                                                 This is a repost from 2007. .

Nature's Viet Cong

In Natural Acts: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, author David Quammen writes about one of the world's most despised insects:

"...the mosquito is taking a bad rap. It has been victimized, I submit to you, by a strong case of anthropocentric bias. In fact, the little sucker can be viewed, with only a small bit of squinting, as one of the great ecological heroes of planet Earth. If you consider rainforest preservation. The chief point of blame, with mosquitoes, happens also to be the chief point of merit: They make tropical rainforests, for humans, virtually uninhabitable

So as Europe was being stripped of its virgin woods, and India and China, and the North American heartland, the tropical rainforests largely escaped, lasting into the late twentieth century—with some chance, at least, that they may endure a bit longer. Thanks to what? To a concatenation of accidental and deterministic factors, no doubt, among which should be included this: 10 million generations of jungle-loving, disease-bearing, bloodsucking mosquitoes—the Culicidae, nature’s Vietcong.

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The Missing Birds of Rock Creek Park

OvenBird

This was written in 2003 for a major environmental organization.

The decline of neotropical migrant song birds in the U.S. was first noticed by birders in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park, a small federally-protected enclave nestled along a stream bed in Washington, D.C., just 15 miles from Fairfax County.

Breeding Bird Surveys from 1947 through the 1970s, revealed that the yellow-billed cuckoo and yellow-throated vireo -- as well as the northern parula, black-and-white warbler, Kentucky warbler, and hooded warbler -- were disappearing. Six other migrant song birds -- Eastern wood-pewees, Acadian flycatchers, wood thrushes, red-eyed vireos, ovenbirds, and scarlet tanagers -- had declined by more than 50 percent.

What was going on?


Evidence from Overseas

Domestic forest destruction was ruled out, as Rock Creek Park had suffered no substantial encroachment in decades.

An analysis of radar images, done in the early 1980s, however, showed only half as many birds were flying to the U.S. from Mexico's Yucatan as had been migrating just 20 years earlier. Clearly, some part of what was happening to "our" birds was happening overseas. Experts theorized that much of the song bird decline, now being documented across the U.S., was due to forest destruction in Central and South America.

In fact, forest destruction in Central America was proceeding at a very rapid pace, driven in no small part by truly sobering rates of human population growth. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77% of the original forest cover still existed as recently as 1977. By 1980, however, that number had fallen to 42% and by 1989 just 29 percent of the original forest cover was gone. Scientists now believe as little as 10% of the forest may be left by 2025.


Evidence from the U.S.

By the late 1990s, however, scientists began to realize that forest destruction in Central and South America did not tell all of the story. Analysis of migrant song bird populations at the national level showed that birds loss was not evenly distributed across the U.S.

While most migrant song birds are experiencing clear negative trends east of the Mississippi River, and along the thin coastal strip of the West Coast, neotropical migrants seem to be doing fairly well on large tracts of forested land in the West.

An overlay of neotropical migrant song bird decline and a map of federally protected lands, showed a fascinating pattern: migrant song birds were not in general decline in our national parks, our national forests, or on lands managed by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management. Migrant song birds were in general decline in the east and in the Midwest, however, where changing agricultural practices and increasing levels of forest fragmentation seemed to be having a real impact.

Scientists looking for clues to song bird loss in Rock Creek Park began to look at the forested areas immediately surrounding the suburbs of Washington, DC, and what they found was pretty startling. Between 1980 and 1995, Fairfax County saw 69 percent of its forests converted to homes and businesses.

While scientists had been puzzling over bird loss in Rock Creek Park, just 15 miles away, Fairfax County's forests had been vanishing under asphalt at an astonishing rate.

Scientists now recognize that these once-vibrant suburban forests were probably the principal "home" of many of the birds that had once been seen in Rock Creek Park. Rock Creek had merely served as way-station between larger forest blocks that once ringed the Washington, DC area.

As new roads and light rail systems continue to be built in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, more and more forests are falling to farms and more and more farms are falling to freeways and subdivisions.

Once large blocks of unbroken forest are being shattered into increasingly smaller fragments, allowing such meso-predators as crows, jays, raccoons, possums, feral cats and fox to prey on once-secure migrant song bird nests. In addition, increasingly fragmented forests have enabled the brown-headed cow bird to colonize areas they once would have found unattractive.

Cowbirds nest at the edge of forests and feed in farms fields and pastures. Though native to North America, the brown-headed cowbird was once confined to the forest edges of Midwestern prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States.

The brown-headed cowbird is a parasitic nester, which is to say it builds no nests of its own, but instead lays its eggs in the nests of other birds -- most frequently in the open, cup-shaped nests of neotropical migrants. A single cowbird may lay as many as 80 eggs in a breeding season - one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because cowbird chicks hatch earlier, and are much larger than the offspring of migrant songbirds, they are able to out compete songbird chicks for food, and often simply push them out of the nest altogether.

In the end, a single cowbird may prevent 20 to 30 warblers, finches and vireos from raising their young. If the bird species has a short nesting period, it may not be able to hatch out a second brood that year, in which case that species may fall off rapidly in that area over a relatively short period of time.


Yellow-throated Vireo


More Trouble Ahead?

While a great deal of population-driven environmental damage has already occurred in the suburbs of Virginia, more population growth lies ahead. Fairfax County's population continues to grow rapidly, most of it driven by a combination of internal domestic migration (military and government families coming to support a burgeoning government and high-tech corridor) and international migration.

Fairfax County may be a demographic "canary in a coal mine" signaling where the rest of America may be headed in terms of land use patterns and population growth. With U.S. population growing by more than 3 million people a year, and suburban sprawl gobbling up more than 500,000 acres of forest and farmland every year, the pace of habitat fragmentation is likely to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

Under the Census Bureau's middle-series projection, which assumes that current U.S. immigration and fertility levels will stay about the same, the population of the U.S. will increase by 120 million people over the course of the next 50 years. About 63 percent of this future population growth will be due to immigrants and the children of immigrants that have not yet arrived in the U.S. -- the remaining 37 percent of population growth will be driven by demographic momentum as current U.S. residents move to complete their families.

One hundred and twenty million people is a very large population to add to the U.S. over the course of the next 50 years. To put this number into perspective, this is a population equal to the current populations of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana combined.

In addition to sprawl directly driven by population growth, the U.S. can expect to see increased forest fragmentation due to more and more folks moving farther and farther out into the countryside, abetted by high-speed internet hookups, satellite television, and light rail systems feeding into an ever-expanding network of four, six and eight lane highways.

As Canadian real estate agent Ozzie Jurock noted in an article for The Vancouver Sun (June 30, 2001),

"People throughout North America are on the move. Population growth in smaller towns is exploding. Californians move to Oregon and Arizona, New Yorkers joke at the rain but moved to Washington. The ski resorts and lakes are teeming with 'former' city slickers clutching cash and the hope for the elusive 'better quality of life."

Even as population growth continues apace in the U.S., the population of Central America continues to grow. Over the course of the next 50 years, Central America and Mexico combined are expected to add 90 million people to their populations -- a 65% percent increase in population.


Why the Fairfax Bird Loss Story is Important

Bird population data are such a robust metric of general environmental health that in the United Kingdom they are used as an official indicator of environmental sustainability.

A broad decline in many wild bird populations in the Western Hemisphere may be an indication that a broad decline in environmental quality is occurring across much of the region.

In the case of neotropical song birds, population-driven habitat decline along the entire migration flyway -- including the United States -- has had a serious impact on U.S. song bird numbers. The decline of songbird species in the U.S. is a powerful reminder that population pressures beyond our borders really do "come home to roost" and that reducing the rates of population growth at home, and abroad, is a real and serious "back yard" environmental issue.

Ironically, even as many bird populations are in decline, the number of Americans interested in birds is on the rise. The National Survey on Recreation and the Environment found that over 71 million Americans are recreational birders, up 250 percent from 1982, making birding the fastest-growing outdoor activity in the U.S.


Black and White Warbler
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Bird Species Decline in the U.S

In large parts of the U.S., over half of our songbird species are in decline. Scientists say habitat destruction is largely to blame.

Across the United States, more than 250 species of neotropical migratory birds fly south for the winter.

Beginning in the early 1970s, scientists began to notice that many species seemed to be in decline

What was going on?

Scientists have concluded that the decline of neotropical migratory song birds in the United States is closely linked to four issues closely linked to human population growth and habitat destruction:

• Tropical Forest Destruction
  The population of Latin America and the Caribbean has doubled in the last 35 years, and with it has come unprecedented destruction of tropical rainforests. As populations have exploded, more landless peasants have colonized forest areas and cleared vegetation, with slash-and-burn cycles becoming progressively shorter. At the same time, logging over wide areas and the rapid expansion of commercial farming has accelerated the disappearance of forests and fueled the rapid destruction of once-lush bird habitat. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77 percent of the land was covered in dense forest in 1960. By 1990, that number had fallen to just 29 percent.
  
  
• Pesticide Use Overseas
  Neotropical migratory birds are being killed by the heavy use of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, which are used to boost crop productivity to feed increasing numbers of people in the developing world. In some cases, birds are poisoned outright by chemical application, or by consuming grain and insects that have been sprayed. In other cases, the pesticides accumulate and concentrate within the birds, resulting in deformed chicks or eggshells that are so thin they break before hatching.
  
  
• Suburban Sprawl and Forest Fragmentation
  As the population of the United States has grown from 76 million in 1900 to over 280 million today, cities and suburbs have sprawled outward. Fairfax, Virginia, for example, a suburb of Washington, D.C., saw 69 percent of its forest converted to homes and businesses between 1980 and 1995. As human populations have risen, and forests have fallen, primary predators such as wolves, bobcats, and cougars have been wiped out, while the ecological niche of meso-predators such as feral cats, raccoons, possums and foxes has expanded. The result has been massive predation of Neotropical songbirds, which tend to nest in the open and near the ground rather than in tree cavities or higher up in the forest canopy.
  
  With forest fragmentation has come an invasion of native and non-native birds that compete with deep-forest species for food and nesting sites. One example is the brown-headed cowbird. Cowbirds were once confined to the forest edges of mid-western prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States. A single cowbird may lay as many as 20 eggs in a breeding season - one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because Neotropical migrants tend to build open cup-shaped nests, and raise only a single brood a year, they are particularly susceptible to cowbird parasitism.
  
  
• Intensive U.S. Farming Practices
  As American farmers make increasingly intensive use of their lands, bird populations suffer. Post-to-post cultivation has wiped out edge-row thickets where many songbirds used to nest, while many farmers now cut hay three times a year where they used to cut just once. The result is that hedgerow and ground-nesting birds like the northern bobwhite, the eastern meadowlark, the vesper sparrow, and the grasshopper sparrow are in rapid decline.
  
  

Court Upholds Roadless Rules

The roadless forest protection act rule has been upheld by the courts, which is news to my ears as I spent several years working full time on that bit of legislation, which is the largest lands protection initiative of my generation. John Burgman at the Outdoor Life blog notes:

For the origin of the rule, one must go back to the Clinton administration. In 2001, a ban was declared on timber harvests, road construction and road development in millions of acres of national forest to protect fragile wilderness habitat and to keep the forests remote and pristine for recreational use. The state of Wyoming and other groups protested the ban, saying it violated the 1964 Wilderness Act and hindered the mining and development of coal and other natural resources.
The Federal court didn't buy Wyoming's protests.

“Wyoming failed to demonstrate that the Forest Service’s promulgation of the Roadless Rule violated the Wilderness Act, NEPA, MUSYA, or NFMA,” the panel of judges wrote in their decision.

The original Clinton iteration was protested by the Bush administration following Clinton's final presidential term. This paved the way for individual states like Wyoming and other groups to follow suit. The debate eventually found its way to the high courts.

Had the ruling been overturned, 50 million acres of wilderness across the country would have been opened to various logging and road development projects, undoubtedly impacting animal species of all types.

“Today’s decision is among the most significant conservation victories in several decades. It reinforces the roadless rule as the cornerstone of protection for our national forests and preserves these landscapes for generations to come,” said Jane Danowitz, director of the Pew Environment Group’s public lands program.

This is the second roadless win in court.

You can read about the earlier win, and the more than 2 million public comments we delivered to the U.S. Forest Service, here.
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Willie Nelson's Guitar

Willie Nelson knows two things about great music: it isn't about the label on the guitar, and it doesn't require killing off endangered species, violating the Lacey Act, or winking at child labor.  

Someone tell Gibson Guitar which seems to think buying tropical hardwoods that are illegally obtained is a "never mind" and that they can hide behind the current economic malaise.  Forget it.  This company needs to clean up or get out.  Is it really that hard to source legal wood?  It isn't. 

As for Willie's guitar, "Trigger," is a Martin N-20 nylon-string acoustic he bought sight unseen in 1969.  Been doing the job ever since.
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My Old Man and the Forest

My father, who grew up dirt poor in the poorest town in Kentucky, and who never cut a corner in his life, had the uncommon good sense to marry my mother, who is as solid a person as you will ever meet, and together they built a pretty good life, traveling all over the world (living in Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and traveling everywhere else, from Machu Pichu to Peking, from Alaska to Japan).

And in the end, they give a square mile of Eastern old growth forest to the people of America. This is the gift that keeps giving. People come and go, but the mountains and forests will abide... if we will protect them. 

But talk it cheap.  What's needed are more donors to protect land the old-fashioned way:  by buying it and giving it back to the people for their enjoyment for generations to come.
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Group Sex and Porn

A repost from this blog from May 2007.

In mid-June horseshoe crabs start to roll up on to the beaches in the mid-Atlantic states. They continue to come on shore through July and a few can still be found in August.

The spawn of the horseshoe crab is the essential food of the Red Knot, which migrates from the Arctic to the tip of South American and back again every year -- one of the longest winged migrations in the world. And yet, without the horseshoe crab and its predilection for group sex -- sometimes a dozen males can be found shuffled up on top of a single female -- the Red Knot would not exist at all.

Group sex makes a lot of the animal world happen, from coral and salmon to penguins and ungulates such as deer, elk and buffalo.

What's going on here?

Well, it's not that the animals are just being kinky -- it's more essential than that. Mass spawnings, nestings, and calfing are one way that nature ensures that a lot of babies are born at once. A hundred cracked eggshells, a billion wriggling salmon roe, and two dozen elk calfs in a herd are all part of the same essential design -- to overwhelm predation with fecundity.

Group sex has another purpose within the animal kingdom as well -- a way of ensuring the characteristics of dominant males are passed forward. In many animal species, it is only the dominant male that mates with a "harem" of tag-along females.

For many creatures, this is the watch-spring of evolution -- the essential driver that results in gaudier peacocks and larger lions capable of predictably taking down more zebra and buffalo.

The thing that can give a species a competitive advantage, however, can also lead to its undoing. A classic example can be found in the life history of the Passenger Pigeon.

The Passenger Pigeon once existed in numbers that boggle the mind -- 5 to 6 billion birds with individual flocks commonly numbering in the millions, and some super aggregations stretching as long as 300 miles and estimated to have been populated by a billion birds.

A billion birds in a single flock! Yet today, not a single Passenger Pigeon exits. What happened?


The usual suspects are blamed: Deforestation, commercial market hunting abetted by the fact that Passenger Pigeons settled in enormous roosts where they could be netted, clubbed, poisoned, and shot by the scores of thousands. Even Newcastle's Disease may figure into the mix -- an avian disease that made its way to this hemisphere from Europe in the late 19th Century.

This answer is incomplete, however. A lot of birds were over-hunted in the 19th Century, and a lot of birds were negatively impacted by deforestation.

How was the Passenger Pigeon different from the others? How could it be that not a single Passenger Pigeon survives to this day?

The answer lies in a trait of the Passenger Pigeon that it shares (at a reduced level) with many other types of birds: a proclivity for group sex.

While pigeons and most other birds are capable of mating even if there are just a few birds present, many bird species do much better in social settings. Pigeon Cotes and Purple Martins houses, for example, reflect the fact that is is hard to get these birds to stay and breed if they cannot flock and nest together. In fact, some pigeon breeds are so hard to mate in pairs that breeders sometimes take to installing mirrors to fool the pigeons into thinking there are more of them in the roost than there really are. The same trick has recently been used on Mures in the wild.

This proclivity for gregariousness, which is present in most pigeon species, reached new heights with the Passenger Pigeon. The social structure of this bird was so highly tuned to the concept of group that the birds simply could not initiate courtship and reproduction unless many, many other birds were present. When large flocks were shattered, disrupted, and decimated by market hunters and deforestation, individual flock numbers fell below a critical threshold, and a population death spiral resulted. In the end, even though there were captive Passenger Pigeons in a few zoos and conservatories, they could not be made to mate and the species went extinct.

Today, of course, we know more about animals and we are willing to invest millions of dollars and decades of research into turning things around. And, of course, we are not averse to a little artifice.

In China, for example, the Chinese Tiger is being brought back from the brink of extinction with the help of Viagra -- a necessary thing since the only Chinese tigers still extent were, until very recently, a few ancient zoo animals that could no longer reliably "perform" any sexual function.

The good news is that Viagra worked, and today a few young Chinese tigers are in South Africa learning how to hunt on their own. Expect to see them trotted out just in time for the 2008 Olympics.

Pandas too have had their interventions, though in their case it was porn. It seems captive pandas showed little interest in sex. When two animals finally did get interested in each other, they often fumbled the job and coitus was never actually achieved.

Some bright perverted light at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Center had an idea, however: Showing them panda porn. Believe it or not, it worked. Now, when pandas reach sexual maturity, zookeepers show them panda sex videos as part of their initiation into the rites of being an adult panda.

The results speak for themselves -- a bumper crop of baby pandas.



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Darwin Turned a Barren Island into Paradise

Old Darwin is pictured, because he looks cooler than young Darwin.


It seems Charles Darwin was the first person to "terra form" anywhere in the Galaxy. As the BBC reports:

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

Yep, Charles Darwin had an entire arid, barren volcanic island planted in vegetation from Kew Gardens, and today large chunks of it are a lush tropical Eden. Amazing!

As the BBC reports:

Ascension was an arid island, buffeted by dry trade winds from southern Africa. Devoid of trees at the time of Darwin and Hooker's visits, the little rain that did fall quickly evaporated away.

Egged on by Darwin, in 1847 Hooker advised the Royal Navy to set in motion an elaborate plan. With the help of Kew Gardens - where Hooker's father was director - shipments of trees were to be sent to Ascension.

The idea was breathtakingly simple. Trees would capture more rain, reduce evaporation and create rich, loamy soils. The "cinder" would become a garden.

So, beginning in 1850 and continuing year after year, ships started to come. Each deposited a motley assortment of plants from botanical gardens in Europe, South Africa and Argentina.

Soon, on the highest peak at 859m (2,817ft), great changes were afoot. By the late 1870s, eucalyptus, Norfolk Island pine, bamboo, and banana had all run riot.

This is what the view from Green Mountain, Ascension Island, looks like today.

Not all of Ascension is this scenic, of course; there are still massive lava and ash fields where nothing will grow, but terraforming is a process, not an event.

And Charles Darwin, believe it or not, was doing it first.

Of course, even here one can quibble. You see, Ascension once had a native flora, but it was wiped out by Portuguese goats, rabbits, sheep, rats and donkeys. When Darwin got there, however, barely a blade of grass was left. So technically Darwin was recreating Paradise, rather than creating it. But still.... pretty cool.

• Related Links:
  ** Darwin's Little Lesson on Inbreeding
  ** Maladaptive Pigeons at the Hand of Man
  ** Darwin Finches Tattoo
  ** An Unintended Lesson About Charles Darwin
  ** Thinking About Species Loss
  ** Missing the Story on Quaggas and Extinction
  ** Extinction of the Caribbean Monk Seal
  ** Darwin Drives a Hybrid Animal
  ** The Devolution of Dog and the Training of Man
  ** Kennel Club Dogs: Unnatural Selection for Defect
  ** Inbred Thinking
  ** Darwin Walks His Dog and Learns a Lot
  ** The Oldest and Most Important Debate
  ** Population Growth & the Limits of Accommodation
  ** Inbreeding and the Axis of Production
  ** Evolution of Darwinian Evolution Cartoons
  ** Kennel Club at the Crossroads
  ** The Kennel Club is Darwin's Nightmare T Shirt
  ** From Bassetts to Auschwitz in 50 Years
  ** Bulldogs: How Did We Come to Select for Defect?
  ** Dogs Made by the Hand of Man
  ** Hunting the Foreigners
  ** Inbreeding Fish to Death
  ** Science Remakes the Dog
  ** Charles (Darwin) in Charge
  ** Robert Bakewell's Apartment
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When Population Growth Comes Homes to Roost

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Today is Earthday, and it also happens to be that time of year when more than 250 species of neotropical migratory birds are now flying north to spend the Spring and Summer in North America.

Beginning in the early 1970s, scientists began to notice that many of these bird species seemed to be in decline

What was going on?

Scientists have concluded that the decline of neotropical migratory song birds in the United States is closely linked to four issues, which in turn are closely linked to human population growth and habitat destruction.

1. Tropical Forest Destruction
   The population of Latin America and the Caribbean has doubled in the last 35 years, and with it has come unprecedented destruction of tropical rainforests. As populations have exploded, more landless peasants have colonized forest areas and cleared vegetation, with slash-and-burn cycles becoming progressively shorter. At the same time, logging over wide areas, and the rapid expansion of commercial farming, has accelerated the disappearance of forests and fueled the rapid destruction of once-lush bird habitat. In the Peten region of Guatemala, for example, 77 percent of the land was covered in dense forest in 1960. By 1990, that number had fallen to just 29 percent.
   
   
2. Pesticide Use Overseas
   Neotropical migratory birds are being killed by the heavy use of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, which are used to boost crop productivity to feed increasing numbers of people in the developing world. In some cases, birds are poisoned outright by chemical application, or by consuming grain and insects that have been sprayed. In other cases, the pesticides accumulate and concentrate within the birds, resulting in deformed chicks or eggshells that are so thin they break before hatching.
   
   
3. Suburban Sprawl and Forest Fragmentation
   As the population of the United States has grown from 76 million in 1900 to over 300 million today, cities and suburbs have sprawled outward. Fairfax, Virginia, for example, a suburb of Washington, D.C., saw 69 percent of its forest converted to homes and businesses between 1980 and 1995. As human populations have risen, and forests have fallen, primary predators such as wolves, bobcats, and cougars have been wiped out, while the ecological niche of meso-predators such as raccoons, possums and foxes has expanded. The result has been massive predation of Neotropical songbirds, which tend to nest in the open and near the ground rather than in tree cavities or higher up in the forest canopy. Along with suburban sprawl has come fragmentation of once unbroken tracts of wild woods. America’s national forest system now contains over 383,000 miles of logging roads — a distance eight times longer than the interstate highway system. With forest fragmentation has come an invasion of native and non-native birds that compete with deep-forest species for food and nesting sites. One example is the brown-headed cowbird. Cowbirds were once confined to the forest edges of mid-western prairies where they fed in grasslands grazed by roaming bison. Today, however, because of widespread forest fragmentation, parasitic cowbirds can be found all across the United States. A single cowbird may lay as many as 20 eggs in a breeding season — one or two eggs per songbird nest. Because Neotropical migrants tend to build open cup-shaped nests, and raise only a single brood a year, they are particularly susceptible to cowbird parasitism.
   
   
4. Intensive U.S. Farming Practices
   As American farmers make increasingly intensive use of their lands, bird populations suffer. Post-to-post cultivation has wiped out hedgerow thickets where many songbirds used to nest, while many farmers now cut hay three times a year where they used to cut just once. The result is that hedgerow and ground-nesting birds like the northern bobwhite, the eastern meadowlark, the vesper sparrow, and the grasshopper sparrow are in rapid decline.
   
   

As bad as things are now, they are likely to get worse in the years ahead. The reason: massive immigration, both legal and illegal, which is expected to drive the population of the United States from 300 million to over 500 million by 2050.

This is a repost from April 2004 of a piece written in 2002.

Protecting Box Turtle Memories

A repost from July 2005

Very rarely the dogs and I will come across a box turtle as we hunt along hedgerow and field.

When I was a kid, box turtles were fairly common -- we would find them under the hedges and under the grape arbor at my grandparents place in Kansas -- or in the woods along the river closer to home here in Virginia.

Now they are very rare.

The decline of box turtles is largely due to the tremendous rise of roads in the U.S., and the increasing habitat fragmentation these roads have produced.

A turtle's hard shell can withstand examination by a dog, but not the crushing load of a car.

Kids collect a lot of turtles as well. Invariably these animals die in salmonella-soaked aquariums, or else they escape from the confines of a backyard and are run over by a car.

Box turtles live longer than any other wild species in the United States -- 100 years or more is certainly in the cards.

The box turtle is not like the sea turtle or the snapping turtle -- this is an animal that lays only four or five eggs a year, and these eggs -- and whatever young actually hatch out -- must survive the onslaught of raccoon and possums, fox and dogs, disease and the ever-present gauntlet of cars and kids.

Turtles have a high degree of fidelity to relatively small areas, living out their long lives in a few dozen acres of woods. This little patch of woods will supply the box turtle with all the worms, insects, leaves, berries, mushrooms and slugs it needs to survive.

The trouble is that very few other turtle-ranges may overlap this little patch of woods. The result is that if even a single male or female box turtle is removed from a parcel of woods, that loss may effectively kill off all reproductive capacity of other turtles in the area.

Unfortunately, transporting a turtle to a new patch of woods generally dooms it. Turtles may not be brilliant animals, but they are dogged, and if moved to a new patch of woods they will spend years wandering about fruitlessly looking for their ancestral homes. The long-distance excursions these animals invariably take result in turtles crossing roads and being killed by oncoming traffic.

The bottom line: if you know of a child that has removed a box turtle from forest or farm, find out exactly where the turtle was collected, and release it back to the wild in the same location.

The precipitous decline of box turtles in the United States was finally recognized in the early 1990s, and in 1995 all U.S box turtles were formally protected from collection and trade under the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES).

CITES does not save turtles from cars or kids, however -- only education can do that. If you have kids or have access to a classroom of kids, please pass on the fact that box turtles are an endangered species and should NEVER be collected from the wild or transported out of the woods of their birth.

The box turtle is a tough animal, but a fragile species. For those of us who grew up playing in the woods, it is an icon of our youth -- a great treasure found rummaging through the leaves.

Like so much of what we treasure about this great country, however, it is on the verge of being destroyed by human population growth and the development that such population growth invariably engenders.

Some Old Logging Photos from Around the Nation

Spruce, Del Norte County, California, 1959


Oregon, 1896


Washington State, 1919


Mononghalela National Forest, West VA, 1939


Idaho, 1911


Massachusettes, Morse Pond, 1939


Minnesota, 1909


Georgia, big wheel skidder, 1903


Fir, Washington State, 1900


Sequoia stump near Fresno, California, 1910

Ted Stevens Found Guilty!

This is God's plan for Alaska.


What a wonderful thing to happen on Teddy Roosevelt's 150th birthday!

You see, it was Teddy Roosevelt who first moved to protect the Tongass National Forest almost 100 years ago.

In recent years, however, Senator Ted Stevens and Congressman Don Young have pocketed a lot of payola from timber companies that sought to cut down 400-year old trees for the cost of a McDonald's happy meal.

Once those trees are gone, they are gone forever.

Unbelievably, under the Tongass and Chugach National Forest timber deals, America was selling public timber to private contractors at a loss.

In fact, U.S. taxpayers have been subsidising a couple of hundred jobs a year at a cost of over $200,000 per job.

Clearly this thing made no sense.

But public resource extraction doesn't have to make sense if people are being paid off.

And when it comes to timber and oil and gas deals in Alaska, everyone is being paid off. Everyone.

Now things are finally beginning to unravel (and more is to come).

First Congressman Don Young was caught on the take.

Today Senator Ted Stevens has been found guilty on felony charges of taking and concealing tens of thousands of dollars in free home renovations and other gifts.

The jury convicted Stevens on all seven counts brought by federal prosecutors. Ted Stevens' career is over, and jail time may yet await.

Happy Birthday Teddy Roosevelt! You always hated scoundrels and looters, and Ted Stevens was both. I know you are up above, absolutely beaming!



This is the modern GOP's vision for Alaska.

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A Forest of Lies

George Steinmetz is beyond words, as only the very best nature photographers can be. So I will say no more other than to say check it out.

The picture above is an American clear cut, where they have left a thin strip of trees along the road so that folks driving through the countryside will think the woods are still there.

But they are not; it's all a lie. Again.

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Coffee and Provocation

Ellen DeGeneres' Problems Explained:
The news this morning is that TV host-comedienne Ellen DeGeneres adopted a dog from some crazy canine rescue called "Mutts and Moms." The dog did not work out for Ellen due to conflicts with her cats, but she placed it with her good friend and hairdresser whose family was delighted to have a second dog to play with their first. "Hold on," said the Mutts and Moms folks who also run a "canine boutique. " "We are the deciders of what a good home is," and we have very narrow definition of who qualifies. And a hairdresser with 11- and 12-year old daughters does not make the cut no matter what Ellen DeGeneres (a huge donor to animal causes) may say about the matter. And so they are yanking this small dog from its new home where it is well-loved. Whoa! Is someone power-tripping or what? Well yes, but it's actually a bit more than that. Gina Spadafori explains all in this delightful piece that was written several days before the Ellen blow up. This one is strongly recommended reading, and it's not just about dogs, is it? Read it, read it, read it!

Bully Good News I:
Remember Michael Vick's dogs? The good news is that 49 of the 50 dogs are going to be adopted out after temperament testing was done on them. Hmmm. Makes one really wonder about two things: 1) the notion that all pit bulls are dangerous (especially the ones that have been fought), and; 2) that no pit bull is dangerous. Nice to see common sense at work here, and in the end it is common sense that is always a benefit to the dogs. For the record, you might remember that Humane Society of the United States President Wayne Parcelle said "Officials from our organization have examined some of these dogs and, generally speaking, they are some of the most aggressively trained pit bulls in the country." HSUS advocated killing all of the dogs. In fact, no one from HSUS had even seen the dogs. Apparently at HSUS the standing policy is: Kill 'em all, sight unseen. Later HSUS sent out a direct mail letter saying they were raising money to "save" the dogs which, they said, were in their care. In fact, the HSUS never had anything to do with these dogs at all, and they were never in their care for one second. Which is why they are still alive. The FBI is reportedly investigating the Humane Society of the United States for their scam of a fundraising appeal.

Bully Good News II:
The Washington Post reports that a judge has ruled that the Loudoun County, Virginia Animal Shelter cannot euthanize a dog based solely on its breed type. It's amazing that a court had to actually rule on this, since Virginia's Comprehensive Animal Laws specifically states that "No canine or canine crossbreed shall be found to be a dangerous dog or vicious dog solely because it is a particular breed." But never mind the law: the Loudoun County Shelter wants to kill all pit bulls, and they have been killing pit bulls and other dogs even when they have lots of empty cages at hand. The good news it that Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell put a hitch in their giddy-up when he stepped in and issued a nonbinding opinion that publicly funded shelters could not legally euthanize dogs based solely on their breed. Now a judge has said the same thing, while the Animal Rescue League of Tidewater has filed suit to force the Loudoun County shelter to allow adoption (and transfer) of pit bulls.

Virginia's Attorney General Rides Again:
Virginia Attorney General McDonnell is not just stepping in to combat craziness in Loudoun County (see above story), he is also trying to prevent craziness in Norfolk where the City Council, at the behest of PETA, has tried to make it illegal for pet owners to dock puppy dog tails and remove dew claws. Virginia's Attorney General correctly notes that in Virginia the owner of an animal or the owner's employee are exempt from state requirements that they be licensed by the Board of Veterinary Medicine -- a common sense policy in an agricultural state where farmers routinely dock sheep tails and turn bull calves into steers. For more on the general topic, see this previous post from this blog.

I Like Kate Middleton Already:
It seems that Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, has PETA's underwear in a knot. Her transgression (and I could not make this up) is that she shot a gun at a metal silhouette target. No matter: Kate Middleton looks pretty nice in camouflage and one has to laugh at the idea that the so-called "League Against Cruel Sports" would have the temerity to lecture anyone about deer management considering their own deer herd is starving to death and riddled with disease. Check out that footage!

Deer Management Works in Pennsylvania:
In Pennsylvania the push to shoot more does and allow more bucks to get bigger has had a tremendously positive impact on hunting in that state. The average Pennsylvania buck used to weigh just 100 pounds field-dressed, but deer processors are now complaining that hunters are bringing in such large animals they have to be quartered in order to carry them to the cooler. Meanwhile, the state rack size has jumped an average of more than 7 points. For more on this topic, see this older post from this blog.

Ban Pointy Knives!
"British Medical Experts Campaign for Long, Pointy Knife Control." No, I did not make this headline up. The original editorial in the British Medical Journal concludes "The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect." Right. Got it. And no, they are not kidding.

A Siegfried Line for Wildlife?
In Germany, the latest controversy is whether the 400-miles of broken rubble and pill box shelters which are the remains of the "Siegfried Line" of World War II, should be carted off to make it easier for farm machinery to move about and to avoid liability from children playing on the ruins. The push back comes from those who say the ruins are now wildlife habitat. But, as Sebastian Schön of Friends of the Earth International explains, "It's been hard for us to deal with this issue because in Germany you're immediately labeled as some kind of neo-Nazi if you say anything positive about the bunkers." And perhaps with cause: badger, fox, and feral cats hardly need concrete rubble piles to make their way in the landscape -- even in Germany.

First Ida Hurt Memorial Hunt:
Matt Mullenix reports that the First Annual Ida Hurt Memorial Hunt went off without a hitch, with two falconers, one whippet and a Harris hawk in attendance. Somewhere, on the edge of the wind, Ms. Ida is smiling.

Bigger than McDonalds:
A report from the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation says that America's 34 million hunters and anglers spent $76 billion last year on ammunition, land leases, fishing hooks, dogs, guns, and decoys. Some other stats:

• More people hunt and fish in the U.S. than watch the nightly newscasts of the three major networks - ABC, NBC, and CBS (34 million vs. 27 million).
• Spending by hunters is greater than the revenues of McDonalds ($23 billion vs. $20 billion).
• In 2007 hunters and shooters paid $233 million in Pittman-Robertson excise taxes for hunting and fishing land conservation.
• Eighty percent of sportsmen are "likely voters," and 8 in 10 hunters always vote in presidential elections. Approximately 20% of the entire population of major swing states hold either a hunting or fishing license, or both.

He's Kind to Animals:
Over in Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio has managed to combine the dog pound with the prison, to the benefit of both. Prior to Sheriff Joe taking it on, the County was spending approximately $18 million a year on stray animals. Now the Sheriff has the prisoners taking care of the animals which are housed in an older cell block that is no longer used. The result: the price for running the shelter has dropped to $3 million a year. A hat tip to Ann Kim for sending this one.

Getting Rich at the Dog Pound:
While doing a little background research on animal control in Maricopa County, Arizona (see story, above) I came across a 2001 article in the Phoenix New Times entitled Pet Peeves, in which Maricopa County, Arizona Humane Society Director Ken White is reported to have stubbornly refused, for more than a year, to sign off on to efforts to obtain a $10 million grant that would have ended the euthanasia of dogs and cats in Maricopa County, Arizona. What the hell? Curious, I looked up Ken White to see what he's doing now. It turns out he is President of the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA in San Mateo County, California where he makes ... wait for it ... $303,000 a year for killing dogs and cats. For those who have not yet read Nathan Winograd's excellent book Redemption (review and summary at link), the Peninsula Humane Society in San Mateo, California is the place that killed five cats and three dogs on television -- a public execution that was applauded by Ingrid Newkirk of PETA who said, "We're hoping that this sort of approach is going to catch on." Uhhhh, right. No need to even try to adopt out any of those dogs and cat, eh? Kill them all! A close reading of the Peninsula Humane Society web site finds that the shelter has a policy of killing all unweaned kittens and puppies, and also kills any dogs or cats it deems to have "behavior" problems. No numbers are given as to how many dogs and cats that actually is, but since the Humane Society and SPCA have, in the past, routinely said that 60 percent of all dogs and cats are "unadoptable," that could be a very high number indeed. What we know for sure is that the Peninsula Humane Society takes in only about 15,000 animals a year, according to their own web site. What that means is that Ken White's salary works out to his personally getting $200 for every dog and cat "handled" by the shelter. But wait, there's more. It seems Mr. White also lives rent-free in a $1.5 million house paid for by the Peninsula Humane Society/SPCA. Unbelievable. But true.