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The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s flipped on, it stays on for a surprisingly long time unless a kill is made.
during an epidemic of car break-ins at Yosemite campgrounds. Between 2001 and 2007, eleven hundred automobiles were broken into by bears.
Another concerning consequence of plentiful food is that reproduction rates rise. Black bear sows have a reproductive option called delayed implantation. Fertilized eggs become clusters of cells, called blastocysts, that loiter in the uterus over the summer. Whether they implant in it come fall—and how many of them do so—depends on the mother’s health and how well she’s been eating.
Why is there a logging road in a national forest? Because national forests began as—and to some extent remain—managed tree farms for the nation. They were set aside in part, to quote the Organic Administration Act of 1897, “to furnish a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of citizens of the United States.” (And free grazing space for their cattle. The only animals I’ve seen in the woods so far this morning have been cows.)
The Coulter pine drops a cone as heavy as a bowling ball.
Bark is of course the tree’s skin. It protects the flesh, and it is—again, like our skin—both an entry point for infection and a part of the immune system. Conifer bark secretes resin (aka pitch), a thick, sticky goo that seals wounds, traps bark beetles, kills pathogens.
A conk is the tip of the iceberg, rot-wise. The symptoms of fungal infestations are often hidden until the disease is well-entrenched. By the time conks show up on the outside of a tree, the inside is far rotten.
In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by a speck of ricin shot into his thigh with a pneumatic spy umbrella as he stood at a crowded London bus stop.
Jamaah Ansharud Daulah
poisonous garden plants. I was taken aback to note that nine of the 112 plants in Category 1 (Major Toxicity: “may cause serious illness or death”) were currently, or had recently been, growing in our yard: oleander, lantana, night-blooming jasmine, lobelia, rhododendron, azalea, toyon, pittosporum, and hellebore. Another, the houseplant croton, was growing in an orange ceramic pot in my office.
Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word came to mean what it means to us now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing. Mighty tracts of wilderness were protected from agricultural and other development to ensure there would always be places and things to hunt and fish.
he had an epiphany regarding the animals whose numbers the agency had for so long fought to reduce: “Mother Nature adjusts.” Robinson had landed on the phenomenon of compensatory reproduction. Destroy a chunk of a population, and now there’s more food for the ones who remain.
As long as cars aren’t moving faster than a natural predator would, a prey animal will usually get out of the way in time, even if the driver doesn’t brake. The hunted maintain what’s called a spatial margin of safety. They’re able to visually intuit the distance between themselves and a predator, and they have an uncanny sense of exactly how close they can let that predator come before they need to take off. Flight initiation distance, or FID, as that closest point is called, shrinks and lengthens according to circumstances. If animals or birds are feeding on something nutrient-rich and
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Judging speed requires an ability to perceive and interpret “looming”—how quickly an object appears to be growing in size as it comes at you. Looming is harder to detect and visually process when the object is traveling quickly. The “looming-sensitive neurons,” as some pigeon researcher went ahead and named them, are overwhelmed.
Peregrines dive at their prey going 200 mph. They, not cheetahs, are the fastest animals on earth. When a falcon arrives at its target, it does what it has come for swiftly and efficiently. “Direct stomp, clean kill,” it says in my notes. And yes, they will take on a full-grown gull. The downside of all that pursuing prowess is that falcons do not excel at the leisurely glide. Hawks and eagles and other “long wings,” as Nico calls them, have the surface area needed to coast and ride thermals, hunting as they go.
I showed off my new vocabulary word: kronism, the eating of one’s offspring.
“Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems,
you find the expressions Sister Water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” “Would Saint Francis include Brother Rat?” Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird Who Devours 2 Percent of the North Dakota Sunflower Crop? Father Carlo says yes, yes he would. “He includes even death.”¶
Otherwise Predator Free 2050 is actually Predator Free Except for the Housecats That Decimate Endangered Bird Populations and the Dogs That Kill Adult Kiwis Unless You Give Them “Kiwi-Aversion Training” 2050.
For centuries, people have killed trespassing wildlife—or brought in someone to do it for them—without compunction and with scant thought to whether it’s done humanely. We have detailed protocols for the ethical treatment and humane “euthanizing” of laboratory rats and mice, but no formal standards exist for the rodents or raccoons in our homes and yards. We leave the details to the exterminators and the “wildlife control operators,” the latter a profession that got rolling when the bottom dropped out of the fur market and trappers realized they could make better money getting squirrels out of
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