Birds are OK, I guess

After all, one of the virtues of bird is that they can be used to motivate research into insects. That’s nice. We couldn’t possibly get the general public interested in arthropods when there are charismatic warm-blooded flying things to save.

Juncos are known as seed-eating birds. They spend their days rummaging through the undergrowth searching for fallen seeds. At feeders, they prefer smaller grains, like millet. But seeds don’t provide the protein juncos, or any songbirds, need to grow a new set of feathers while they molt. And the protein this baby junco needs to molt its blotchy juvenile feathers and to grow sleek stone-gray feathers on top and white ones below would come only from bugs. In fact, 90 percent of the more than 10,700 known bird species rely on insects for food during at least part of their life cycle. Even the most dedicated seed-eating songbirds must eat insects and other arthropods, that many-legged group of creatures that includes spiders and millipedes, to produce eggs, to grow new feathers and to feed their young. Without insects, in other words, they wouldn’t survive.

So, yes, we should care about the health of insects because they are bird food, and birds are dependent on insects for protein. That’s why we should care about this next terrifying statistic.

Unfortunately, insects are disappearing at a rate of about 1 to 2 percent a year. And the decline is not limited to just one species nor just one group of insects. The data suggests that the decline is widespread, even global. These findings have been confirmed in hundreds of rigorous, peer-reviewed studies, says David L. Wagner, a University of Connecticut entomologist and the lead scientist of a program known as the Status of Insects, which coordinates pertinent research on insect populations from around the world. “The weight of the evidence is clear,” Wagner says. “I feel like it would stand up in a court of law.”

That 1 to 2 percent is a mean. I think from what I’ve seen here, in this rural agricultural region, is that it is much higher — the population of visible, obvious insects is less than half of what it was when I moved here 25 years ago. Less dense clouds of insects clustered around street lights. Car grills that are no longer choked with splattered bugs. Fewer reports of clouds of mayflies rising off lakes.

I think it’s scary without even considering bird populations. We’re wiping out a key component of the food web here. Do we have to wait for birds to drop out of the sky or bird song to fade from the dawn symphony before we will care?

Besides, as we all know, insects are spider food. Getting the public to care about spiders is probably an even harder sell.

You may want to avoid produce from Texas

I wonder what RFK Jr and the MAHA gang think of this:

This topic is all coming to a head right now because the great state of Texas has just passed legislation that allows recycled fracking wastewater to be used to irrigate crops in the Lone Star state. According to WFAA News in Texas, proponents argue the recycled water could supplement the state’s supply of fresh water and incentify the oil and gas industries to clean up their messes. Critics say it could contaminate the very land Texans depend on for food and survival.

Yum. Mystery chemicals, greasy surfactants, petrochemical contaminants, all the stuff we love to find in our salads. And that’s not all!

Farmers in Johnson County, Texas, are already fighting toxic sewage-based fertilizer biosolids. They are outraged by the new legislation that approves using wastewater from fracking to irrigate crops despite the fact that it contains many of the same carcinogenic chemicals found in those fertilizers,

“There was another bill that was put forth that would allow fracking water to be land applied. They’re going to… treat it and then it’s gonna be safe for land application,” Dana Ames, who lives in Johnson County, told WFAA News. “Contaminated with all kinds of chemicals from oil and gas fracking. We don’t even know all the chemicals because they’re proprietary.”

Mystery chemicals and sewage based fertilizer biosolids? Squeeee! Fortunately, they’re deporting all of their immigrant farm workers, so I think a lot of them will be rotting on the ground. Or not rotting, if this cocktail of toxic slime has miraculous preservative powers.

But don’t worry, the Texas Agriculture Commissioner is quick to reassure us that it’s been purified.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller believes the concept has potential if done right. “Well, we need water. We don’t really care what the source is as long as it’s good, clean water that we can grow crops with. Fracking water would be fine,” he said. He added that first all harmful substances like heavy metals would need to be removed. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality would be responsible for regulating the process. “As long as this water meets those strict guidelines, I don’t have a problem with it,” Miller added.

Miller said technological advancements are bringing the state closer to being able to fully clean and reuse produced water. “I don’t know that we’re all the way there yet, but with the technology and AI and everything that we’ve got available to us now, we’re in the technology age, so it’s certainly doable and it’s, you know, probably doable pretty quick, I would think.”

I note that he’s not saying that heavy metals are removed — they would need to be removed. And some other Texas commissioner, of environmental quality (I bet that commission is well funded and active!) would be responsible. But he doesn’t know that “we’re all the there yet,” but sure what with AI and all that, he thinks it is doable. He’s a moron.

You might be entertained by his campaign ad for Agriculture Commissioner, in which he brags about being a Christian, a cattleman (he runs a nursery business that grows decorative shrubs), and he supports the second amendment, all irrelevant to the job. At the end he mentions that Ted Nugent is his campaign treasurer. Yeah, that Ted Nugent. He’s also notorious for his embrace of every right-wing conspiracy theory (except those involving Big Oil) and corruption.

But he does own a big cowboy hat.

Texans will, apparently, elect anyone with a big enough hat, even if they’re planning to poison everyone.

Making the whole world ring like a bell

And it tolled for 9 days!

Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start of a 9-day-long, global 10.88-millihertz (92-second) monochromatic very-long-period (VLP) seismic signal, originating from East Greenland. In this study, we demonstrate how this event started with a glacial thinning–induced rock-ice avalanche of 25 × 106 cubic meters plunging into Dickson Fjord, triggering a 200-meter-high tsunami. Simulations show that the tsunami stabilized into a 7-meter-high long-duration seiche with a frequency (11.45 millihertz) and slow amplitude decay that were nearly identical to the seismic signal. An oscillating, fjord-transverse single force with a maximum amplitude of 5 × 1011 newtons reproduced the seismic amplitudes and their radiation pattern relative to the fjord, demonstrating how a seiche directly caused the 9-day-long seismic signal. Our findings highlight how climate change is causing cascading, hazardous feedbacks between the cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere.

Shorter summary: a glacier in Greenland collapsed catastrophically in a fjord, setting the water sloshing back and forth with enough force that seismologists all around the world could detect the clock-like movement.

Better summary: Someone who knows the geology explains the event and all the terms on Bluesky.

The thinning ice sheets in Greenland led to oscillating waves, 100 meters tall, bouncing between the rock walls of a fjord. Fortunately, no one was there to witness it. Or if they were, they didn’t survive it.

Recreational boating not recommended here. Surfing is right out.

Isn’t it exciting, just waiting for another unexpected side effect of our slow destruction of the planet? As if the predictable disasters aren’t enough!

Let’s chop the Endangered Species Act to bits, shall we?

Uh-oh. The lawyers have been deployed. They’re trying to parse the wording of the Endangered Species Act to legalize habitat destruction, narrowing its meaning to apply only to the direct killing of organisms, but killing the environment? That does not apply.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA) prohibits the “take” of endangered species. (1) Under the ESA, “[t]he term `take’ means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”  (2) This makes sense in light of the well-established, centuries-old understanding of “take” as meaning to kill or capture a wild animal. (3) Regulations previously promulgated by FWS expanded the ESA’s reach in ways that do not reflect the best reading of the statute, to prohibit actions that impair the habitat of protected species: “Harm in the definition of `take’ in the Act means an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”  (4) NMFS’ definition is materially identical: “Harm in the definition of `take’ in the Act means an act which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering.”  (5)

Then follows many paragraphs of Latin and reiteration of case law, but the intent is clear: the law simply says you can’t “take” wildlife, but we have laws that also say you can’t “harm” wildlife. Those all need to be reinterpreted, because “take” means literally kill individual animals, and that’s the only definition they’re going to use.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) (collectively referred to as the Services or we) are proposing to rescind the regulatory definition of “harm” in our Endangered Species Act (ESA or the Act) regulations. The existing regulatory definition of “harm,” which includes habitat modification, runs contrary to the best meaning of the statutory term “take.” We are undertaking this change to adhere to the single, best meaning of the ESA.

Habitat modification shall not be policed anymore. You want to extract oil from a watershed? Go right ahead, poisoning the communities downstream is fine, since you’re not using a shotgun to kill the ducks and fish. Oops, you ‘accidentally’ dumped phosphates into the streams in Tennessee, and all the snail darters died? As long as you didn’t “take” the fish, you’re cool. Environmental law doesn’t apply to the environment, but only to individual animals that live in that environment you want to wreck.

Don’t worry! Our government is accepting comments on the changes to the interpretation of existing legislation. Go ahead, tell them that this is ridiculous, enabling habitat destruction is far more lethal than literally killing individual animals.

They won’t care. They’ve got lawyers who are willing to warp the law to enable more short-term profiteering and more long-term annihilation of the landscape. It’s America the Beautiful, don’t you know?

Visited by an alien

I got a new toy! It’s a $30 trail cam that will probably cost $300 once the tariffs take effect, but I got it because I was curious about what has been going on in my back yard. There is a burrow under my deck, and every year we’re surprised by who takes up residence. Groundhogs are common, but one year we had a skunk under there.

I set the camera up to point directly at the hole, but you can’t see the burrow itself because of all the grass in the way. As expected, I knew there’d be squirrels and maybe rabbits hopping around, although the rabbits are currently in their shy phase, hiding with their litters of kits somewhere. We did spot a squirrel in the early evening (time stamp is correct, but I failed to set the date on the camera.)

All was quiet for most of the night, but then around 3AM something was popping it’s head up, multiple times, like they were repeatedly trying to figure out what that thing outside their front door was.

I’m not sure what that is. Maybe a skunk? Maybe an alien. I’d rather it were an alien visitor, because if it is a skunk I’ll need to set up a trap (a humane one, of course!) and relocate it later this summer.

Hmmm, I suppose if it is a small alien, I could also trap it. What kind of bait should I use? I think the last time we had a skunk, they were partial to cantaloupe.

Earth Day (or is it Air Day?)

I get excited when I find a couple of delicate strands of silk*, but then Mary has to come along and gloat about all the birds she saw just yesterday:

American Crow, American Goldfinch, American Robin, Black-capped Chickadee, Blue Jay, Brown-headed Cowbird, Canada Goose, Cedar Waxwing, Chipping Sparrow, Collared Dove, Common Grackle, Common Pheasant, Common Starling, Downy Woodpecker, Eastern Phoebe, Great-tailed Grackle, Hairy Woodpecker, Hermit Thrush, House Finch, House Sparrow, Mallard, Mourning Dove, Northern Cardinal, Northern Flicker, Northern House Wren, Purple Finch, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Red-tailed Hawk, Red-winged Blackbird, Rock Dove, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Song Sparrow, White-breasted Nuthatch, White-throated Sparrow, Wood Duck, Yellow-rumped Warbler.

It’s no fair! She has set up this grand array of birdfeeders to draw in the local species.

There is ONE bird in all of that alluring food this morning.

Also unfair: stupid vertebrates. It takes a little longer for invertebrates to warm up. Give ’em time, they’ll outnumber the birds soon enough…probably already. They’re just not a bunch of show-offs.

Happy Earth Day!

* I’m also seeing silk in the compost bin, but the compost hasn’t thawed out yet. Soon!

MAHA by turning the country into a toxic wasteland

RFK jr is a distraction. His role is to make a lot of noise, undermine confidence in modern medicine, and pretend to be doing great things for Americans, even as he is promoting placebos and useless treatments. But why, you might ask? Who profits from that, besides the supplement industry? Watch the man capering on the stage with his brain worm, while the oil industry disembowels all environmental protections.

Here’s a short summary of what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin did just last week, via the New York Times—and it’s really just the tip of the iceberg:

In a barrage of pronouncements on Wednesday, the Trump administration said it would repeal dozens of the nation’s most significant environmental regulations, including limits on pollution from tailpipes and smokestacks, protections for wetlands, and the legal basis that allows it to regulate the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet. …

Mr. Zeldin said the E.P.A. would unwind [31] protections against air and water pollution. It would overturn limits on soot from smokestacks that have been linked to respiratory problems in humans and premature deaths as well as restrictions on emissions of mercury, a neurotoxin. It would get rid of the “good neighbor rule” that requires states to address their own pollution when it’s carried by winds into neighboring states. And it would eliminate enforcement efforts that prioritize the protection of poor and minority communities.

In addition, Zeldin said the mission of the EPA would fundamentally change. No longer would the agency’s purpose be “to protect human health and the environment,” as its been since Richard Nixon established the EPA in 1970. Instead, Zeldin said the EPA’s purpose would be to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”

Where’s the protection in the Environmental Protection Agency’s name going to go? Maybe we should change that word to Profiteering. Zeldin, by the way, is a Republican lawyer and climate change denier with no qualifications in environmental science, whose sole attribute is unflagging loyalty to Donald Jargogle Trump.

Rural America is going to be drowning in floods of swine effluent and rotting poultry, while breathing coal smoke and clouds of pesticides. Hey, nothing megadoses of Vitamin A and lots of ivermectin can’t cure, right?

Support real wolves, not genetic abuse

Many years ago, we took our young daughter to Wolf Haven, a sanctuary near Olympia, Washington. She loved it. She got called up to the stage to do a wolf call, and she nailed it — the entire place was echoing with wolf howls as the animals responded. They are spectacularly beautiful — and fierce — animals.

Bad news today, though: wolves are not thriving in Washington.

Washington’s overall wolf population in 2024 decreased by at least 9.44% and the number of successful breeding pairs declined by 25%, according to figures released today by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Today’s report indicates that at the end of 2024, the state had 230 wolves in 43 packs, 18 of which had successful breeding pairs. This marks a decrease from the end of 2023, when the state had 254 wolves in 42 packs, 24 of which had successful breeding pairs.

In case you’re wondering what is causing the decline…it’s people. You probably already guessed it. People suck.

Today’s report shows that at least 37 wolves died in 2024, 31 of which were human-caused. Of all 37 reported deaths, five were killed for livestock conflicts — four by the department and one by a livestock owner. Nineteen died from Tribal hunting by the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, which retain tribal treaty rights for hunting on their reservation and on ceded lands, and by the Spokane Tribe.

Two died of natural causes (one was killed by a cougar and the other was killed by other wolves), one died from ingesting plastic, which perforated its intestine, two died from capture-related trauma while the department was capturing wolves to collar them, and one was shot in an alleged self-defense and likely died, though its body was never found and no charges were filed.

In addition, there were seven known illegal killings, which remain under investigation. Scientific research has shown that that for every illegally slain wolf that’s found, another one to two wolves have been killed and remain undiscovered.

I think it’s ironic that today, the media are all fired up about three fake “dire wolves” ginned up by pointless and expensive genetic manipulation, when what we ought to be caring about is maintaining a natural population.

I made a small donation to Wolf Haven. I’m not a billionaire, I don’t have a coven of silicon valley tech bros following my every move, but I am a biologist who feels some shame about those capitalist mad scientists at Colossal who need their priorities straightened out.

Are you telling me that Billy Bob Thornton is lying to me?

I started watching this new cable series, Landman, mainly because it has Billy Bob Thornton in it. I think he’s a good actor, even if he has fallen into the rut of playing bad, cynical characters…which is what he does in this show. It’s about rough, tough, oilmen doing the difficult, dangerous, and lucrative job of drilling for oil in Texas, and it really plays up the idea that manly men are all obnoxious and arrogant because they need to be in order to keep the oil flowing.

I was not particularly enjoying it. It’s a kind of self-serving genre, the whole assholes being assholes because it makes them great at getting shit done thing. I kept at it just because Billy Bob is so entertaining at doing that thing. But then I got to the third episode, where Billy Bob is entertainingly raging at a liberal lawyer woman (of course — no man in this show would be so wimpy) about the futility of wind turbines.

Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this sh¡t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fսck¡ng thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fսck¡ng hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fսck¡ng thing. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. It’s the thing that’s gonna kill us all… as a species. No, the thing that’s gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fսck¡ng things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place.

Wait a minute…I’m at a green university that has been putting up turbines. We’ve got a pair of them pumping out 10 million kWh of electricity. We’ve got photovoltaic panels all over campus. We’ve got a biomass gasification facility. We’re officially carbon neutral right now — how could that be, if the installation of these features was so expensive that we’d never be able to offset their carbon footprint?

That stopped me cold. If Billy Bob delivered that rant to my face, I wouldn’t be able to answer it. I don’t have the details to counter any of his points, because I don’t have the background. I have been told that each of our wind turbines is an expensive capital investment, but that they pay for themselves in about a year of operation, which kind of undercuts Billy Bob’s claim. I also live in a region where people are putting them fucking things all over the goddamn place. Who am I going to believe, the scientists and engineers who are providing the energy to run my workplace, or a fictional character in a fictional television show that valorizes the oil industry?

So I stopped watching and went looking for verifiable information, because, you know, university administrators and bureaucrats do have a history of lying to us. Maybe Billy Bob is right. He sure does have a lot of passion on this point, and we all know that angry ranting is correlated with truth. Then I found this video.

It includes references! It turns out that data defeats ranting, no matter how well acted.

(Sorry, I just copy-pasted from the video description, and YouTube butchers URLs.)

[1] Life cycle analysis of the embodied carbon emissions from 14 wind turbines with rated powers between 50Kw and 3.4Mw (2016)
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/ws/portalfile…

[2] Life cycle energy and carbon footprint of offshore wind energy. Comparison with onshore counterpart (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

[3] Life-cycle green-house gas emissions of onshore and offshore wind turbines (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…

[4] Life Cycle Analysis of Wind Turbine (2012) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…

[5] Orders of Magnitude – Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_…)

[6] The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression
The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog

[7] ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant’s support for carbon tax a PR ploy
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…

[8]Bonou, A., Laurent, A., & Olsen, S. I. (2016). Life cycle assessment of onshore and offshore wind energy-from theory to application. Applied Energy, 180, 327–337.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.apenergy…

[9] Weinzettel, J., Reenaas, M., Solli, C., & Hertwich, E. G. (2009). Life cycle assessment of a floating offshore wind turbine. Renewable Energy, 34(3), 742–747.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.renene.2…

[10] GCC – Potential Climate Change report
https://s3.documentcloud.org/document…

[11] Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air – How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/…

Basically, scientists have done life-cycle analysis of wind turbines, measure all the energy and CO2 produced to build one of those damned things, and weighed it against the total energy produced over their lifetime, and also compared CO2 produced by a wind turbine against the CO2 produced for an equivalent amount of energy produced by burning coal and oil, and guess what? Billy Bob lied to us all. Wind turbines pay for themselves in less than a year, and oil-burning plants produce 60 times more CO2 than an equivalent bank of wind turbines.

I’m not resuming the series. I was already put off by the gross sexism of the show, but learning that it’s propaganda for Big Oil killed it for me.

I also learned that this show is made by the same people who made another popular series called Yellowstone that I’ve never watched and never will. What I saw of it is that it’s about heroic ranchers in the mountain west, and I’ve known ranchers — they tend to be horrible ignorant people with an extreme sense of entitlement — and I know that the regions full of ranchers tend to be regressive, bigoted, unpleasant strongholds of far-right political movements. Think Idaho. So I’ll pass on that one, too.

I bet it’s easy to get funding for those kinds of shows, though.

Plastic shall rule over all!

I wasted more time than you know pursuing that city park proposal which was less a proposal and more a fait accompli. I had prepared a brief statement which I did not present and would have been inappropriate if I had — this city council meeting was more about where they should implement their expanded park proposal, not how. One of the things I wish the many, many people who spoke at that meeting had learned was to be brief and on point, and I wasn’t going to bring up an issue that was not under consideration.

I had my own petty concerns.

I’m going to speak for the bugs, as unpopular as they usually are.

If you get down on your hands and knees with a handlens in the park and look carefully in the grass, you’ll find a flourishing population of springtails and ants and isopods and beetles, all tending to the soil and bothering no humans at all. The soil is alive, and the biological elements are working to maintain it to our benefit — new grass is always pushing up and the detritovores are actively cleaning up any dead material. The natural surface is a familiar and safe substrate for children, too, with dirt and grass providing a comfortable cushion for play.

Landscape Structures Inc. intends to replace that living surface with dead asphalt and dead poured-in-place synthetic rubber sheets. I had to look up this stuff: it’s called EPDM (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer), made from processed recycled plastics and rubber. It’s mostly safe — you can read the material safety data sheet . There is a very small cancer hazard which can be regarded as negligible, since the polymer is so stable that the dangerous compounds are unlikely to be released. It is however toxic to aquatic organisms, since water runoff can carry the material into the groundwater. So maybe not as stable as we’d like to imagine?

I don’t think toxicity is a serious concern. I’m more concerned that we’d be replacing a living surface with dead , sterile plastic that will gradually decay, and need regular maintenance and eventual replacement. In the world we’d be making with this playground, falling leaves and twigs are a damaging contaminant rather than an aspect of a healthy environment.

Do we need to pave over more of the park? Don’t we have enough plastic in our environment?

As it turns out, that was all totally irrelevant anyway, since the city had already signed contracts with Landscape Structures, Inc.

The theme of this park is supposed to be a celebration of agriculture. Perhaps our farmers will start raising a rich crop of ethylene propylene diene monomer? It’s the future, you know.