Which hurts worse: Calvin Smith’s lies, or being flayed alive? » « A few hours later…

I haven’t seen this in a while

Maybe the monarchs are coming back — we spotted a roosting mass of them across the street. Can you count them all?

Also, on a branch just above them, there was a Cooper’s Hawk standing guard.

Which hurts worse: Calvin Smith’s lies, or being flayed alive? » « A few hours later…

Comments

  3. crocswsocks says

    Eleven!

    Yeah, I’ve noticed that same phenomenon with birds. Used to see enormous flocks of little birds, then one day I saw such a flock and realized I hadn’t seen a big flock in I don’t know how long. I guess birds and butterflies can’t eat money either

  5. Kevin Karplus says

    We used to get enormous clusters of monarchs in the winter in a couple of eucalyptus groves a few miles from where I live. The counts (estimates really) were over 100,000 in the 1990s, but have been down to about 2.5k–10k in recent years. We do see more single monarchs in the summer than we used to, but here they only cluster in cool weather in the winter.
    https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=541

  6. StevoR says

    @ ^ Kevin Karplus & #3. crocswsocks

    Yeah, I’ve noticed that same phenomenon with birds. Used to see enormous flocks of little birds, then one day I saw such a flock and realized I hadn’t seen a big flock in I don’t know how long. I guess birds and butterflies can’t eat money either.

    There’s a name for that phenomenon – Shifting Baseline Syndrome & saw a good meme on fb illustrating that concept a month or three ago.

    He describes the way that radically depleted fisheries were evaluated by experts who used the state of the fishery at the start of their careers as the baseline, rather than the fishery in its untouched natural state. Areas that swarmed with a particular species hundreds of years ago, may have experienced long term decline, but it is the level of decades previously that is considered the appropriate reference point for current populations. In this way large declines in ecosystems or species over long periods of time were, and are, masked. There is a loss of perception of change that occurs when each generation redefines what is “natural”.

    …(Snip)…

    ..The concept was further refined and applied to the ecology of kelp forests by Paul Dayton and others from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They used a slightly different version of the term in their paper, “Sliding baselines, ghosts, and reduced expectations in kelp forest communities”. [5] Both terms refer to a shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.

    Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline (Italics orginal.)

    We don’t realise how depauperate our modern environments have become because we’re so used to seeing the catastrophic human impacts that we have grown up with and become more and more used to seeing and living in, acclimatised to, not realising what’s already been lost.

  8. seachange says

    I looked this accipiter up. Cooper’s hawks eat birds (and mammals), and are known to survive the winter (which you sure have a lot of) by hanging around suburban bird feeders. So she is likely protecting the monarchs from being eaten by your trophy wife’s flying spiders. By having some lunch herself.

  9. Kevin Karplus says

    My “No Kings” sign has one side that has a picture of a monarch butterfly with the words “the only monarch we need”.

  10. magistramarla says

    We’re seeing the same here in CA. Pacific Grove has a Monarch Sanctuary, where the butterflies are famous for spending the winter. Their numbers have been dropping by the year. BTW, hawks do hunt in the trees above the clusters of Monarchs, thus providing some natural protection. There are some gorgeous red-tailed hawks who live in the PG Sanctuary.
    I think that the TX crazies have destroyed the Butterfly Sanctuary on the border in order to “build that wall”.
    It will be amazing if the Monarchs are able to survive.

  11. wanderingelf says

    If some of the estimates I’ve seen are correct, there are now approximately half as many wild animals in toto on Earth as there were when I was born. That depresses the hell out of me.

Leave a Reply